FUTURE LIVING

Families used to produce and consume most of their own products; they were “prosumers.” The family home was a hive of activity and the mainstay of the economy. But the economic ties that traditionally bound families and generations together have, with the Industrial Revolution, slowly frayed to the breaking point. And so now the economy is reverting to being home-centered.

In the West and globally, most people do not work for big companies anyway, but for small firms. And most new business start-ups are owner-operated, family-run enterprises, with a surge in such business formations since 2000. Knowledge workers are quitting their outmoded office-tower cubicles. They are shifting to commute-free self employment and/or home-centered businesses, often over the Web.

Millions of families will become legally incorporated e-business partnerships. Many of these Web enterprises will make their members rich beyond imagination, underpinning the next economic boom and redefining economics itself. To achieve truly-independent financial freedom for themselves, their children and their grandchildren, futuristic families will use the Web to start an online family business. In turn, these “webpreneurs” will redefine capitalist ideals.

Home-based businesses drove the economy long before the first corporation and the Industrial Revolution came along. The first “manufactures” were hand-made by craftsmen at home. And in the textile era, where families often had a handloom in each cramped bedroom, they upgraded frequently to new and better machines. Sound familiar?

Those entrepreneurs generated huge increases in profits and ploughed them back into the family business to expand output and improve efficiency. They had no shareholders other than themselves and so did not worry about quarterly results or dividend payments. Most surplus cash was reinvested in their business, not spent. They built the business and became affluent.

Even before the textile era, almost everyone owned their own family business. They owned farms, ran a blacksmith or shoemaker’s shop, or had a small general store in the village.

These were all home-based businesses.

• The farming family lived smack in the middle of their farm.
• The smithy often lived behind his shop.
• The shopkeeper lived over the store.
• The weavers put their hand-looms in their bedrooms.

That compares with today’s home-based business: instead of living over the shop, you probably live under your office – in a spare bedroom or loft studio – and have an easy, 30-second commute, mug of fresh-brewed healthy Gano Mocha coffee in hand.

The network of today’s webpreneurs is partially in the real world and partially online. Their real-world infrastructure is comprised of copy and printing shops, office business supply stores, mail box centers, courier services, bookstores – and coffee shops.

It is a network infrastructure, not a centralized factory full of rows of machinery or an office tower full of rows of desks and cubicles.

Network marketing in particular has the potential to grow exponentially, according to “Metcalfe’s Law” of network expansion. A network grows inexorably because, as it expands, its value increases for all its members, thus attracting still more members and growing to the mutual benefit of everybody in the network.

In an overall sense, “prosumerism” will define what it means to be successful in the new future before us. And when you own and build a Web-based, “prosumer” driven e-business you will be successful and wealthy enough to give yourself and your family the ultimate Web Lifestyle.