As Amazon further shrinks the remote order-delivery cycle from a network of nearby distribution hubs and subhubs toward the same-day and instantaneous downloadable delivery of items, the remaining functions of local retail become both more constricted and more open. <sup>61</sup> On the one hand, ever greater supply chain compression may further transform retail space into purely experiential demonstration theaters, designed to motivate later online purchase, or may push to reprogram them all as publicly accessible storage facilities: a Tesla showroom or Home Depot, and not much in between. In time, 3D printing and other digital fabrication technologies may accelerate and overpower even this process, as your Kindle evolves from an e-book reader to an e-goods fabricator key and license library. Perhaps the Amazon model will lead away from today ’ s warehouse archipelagos dotting rural landscapes connected by cargo trucks and toward a denser network of print stations where furniture, electronics, appliances, clothes, and other products are fabricated on demand for pickup or shuttled to nearby residences (by drones, maybe — and maybe not). Perhaps the same network would also reverse the supply chain, providing deep recycling and upcycling of used goods. A network of Amazon printing stations might not only regurgitate commodities, but also reabsorb used matter as well, slurping up that universal commodity clay, and closing the open trash loop of mass consumption by shifting Users away from the redundant ownership of individual items and toward lighter subscription and service economies. The impacts of this gray-goo macroeconomics are unknown unknowns: all goods made free through object torrents, implosion of the demand base, empty factories in China, shipping ports turned into Museums of Cement, centrally planned provisioning, nanocommunism, nanofeudalism? As ever, platforms at this scale are both cure and poison at once.
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