Inspiration

I arrived at the vision set out here, as a result of my childhood experiences growing up on the edge of a small village plus knowledge of two very relevant technology changes: the internet and shipping containers. Each of these has been hugely disruptive but incredibly beneficial. The two “revolutions” brought about by these innovations point clearly towards a third that can recapture what was good about small community life before we all drove everywhere.

Growing up in a Village

I grew up on the outskirts of a small village in Northern Ireland. It was a half-mile walk up a very steep hill to the village shop and another quarter of a mile to the Post Office. My mother didn’t drive and it was a real struggle to drag more than one bag of groceries from the shop to home. However, we could drop off a shopping list, or phone one through to the shopkeeper and have a couple of cardboard boxes of groceries delivered to our door within a few hours. The village shop seemed to stock everything imaginable – well, at least everything we knew existed in those days. It was several years later that I discovered there are more than two types of cheese in the world. For the record, these were known universally as “yellow” – which was fairly common – and its much rarer cousin “orange” cheese.
As I grew up and learned more about the ordering process I noted that there were “exotic” items (I was tempted to say “garlic” but I can’t actually recall that being available) that had to be ordered a day or two in advance as they actually were shipped in specially from the “big” town seven miles away. A good example of this was the newly discovered third type of cheese (“blue”) which reached Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s. This system seemed to work very well. The only person in the village who really needed a car was the shop-keeper. We didn’t need a big kitchen because we didn’t have to keep large amounts of anything in the house and could get pretty much anything we wanted by the next morning. At the time, it didn’t seem that special but now I realise how much time and energy that system saved us.
We also had regular visits from the postman, milkman, butcher, baker, fishmonger and travelling library – all of which came within 50 yards of our house. They must have burned a lot of diesel getting to us but in those days, fuel was nothing like as expensive as it is today.

Shipping Containers

Nothing has revolutionised world trade more than the standardised shipping container. They come in a few standard sizes and can be stacked, lifted and carried on lorries, trains and boats – regardless of what is in them. They can also be reused almost indefinitely. By amortising the costs of the containers and the shipping infrastructure across all of the goods to be shipped, we have affordable long distance bulk shipping for almost all types of goods.
A level further down the shipping hierarchy, there are standardised ranges of plastic containers that stack, that fit into standard pallet sizes and are reusable. They are probably most commonly seen in or on their way to our neighbourhood shops – typically holding trays of pastries, loaves. They’ve not been designed to end up in our homes but are rugged, hygienic and, given the huge volumes used, relatively cheap.

The Internet

Data on the internet is broken up into manageable chunks, each of which is routed to its destination – with the overwhelming majority getting there intact. The technology takes care of splitting, addressing, routing, reordering and reassembly at the destination.
The “packet-switched” collection of networks that is the internet therefore does not care what the data it ships around means. They’re just bits and bytes as they travel around the world. Only when they reach their destination does anyone need to know what they represent. Again, a vastly expensive infrastructure, put in place for the long term and for the transport of all types of data now gives us affordable transmission of any type of data to and from any location.