I don't think it's dismissive to be honest. In many ways, software is not so different from the rest of the world. Industry (in the Industrial Revolution sense

I don't think it's dismissive to be honest. In many ways, software is not so different from the rest of the world. Industry (in the Industrial Revolution sense), underwent similar transformations (and is still going through them), from dirty/dangerous/back-breaking factories of the 1800s, to slightly-less-dirty and slightly-safer and more automated factories of the 1900s, to... whatever the 2000s will bring. I'm honestly not sure where software stands in relation; maybe software is actually closer to the 1800s-equivalent of the Industrial Revolution, than to the gleaming 2020 gigafactories of today. Maybe we are still too early. There is probably some golden age of industrial production that industrialists look back fondly on, in the same way the author and many others idealize Unix. Likewise, complaints about rampant/mindless over-consumption, are not new for society at large, especially as we as a civilization really finally start to wrestle seriously with the question of, just how much can this planet support, and what we can take away from it or pollute it with, before the ecosystem collapses? Do we really need another factory, another plastic widget that'll never decompose, another smartphone that will end up in a landfill in a two-year upgrade cycle? But, this progress, messy as it is, is still progress. In the aggregate, people live longer, are healthier and safer, and there are just more people, than there have ever been in the history of this planet. In part, all of these industrial processes made it possible. That doesn't mean there hasn't been waste. Now is the time to reconcile, what our waste is actually costing us, and how much waste we can actually support, as a society and a civilization. "Too much software" has potential for real harm, whether in physical pollution or in mental/emotional harm (i.e. the attention economy, the assault on user privacy, our partisan echo chambers, etc.).