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Software is eating the world meant software will permeate and govern everything, every thing and every industry will be programmable, the world will be full of

Software is eating the world meant software will permeate and govern everything, every thing and every industry will be programmable, the world will be full of objects which are linked at a distance and change behaviour regularly, perhaps even with intents of their own. The combination of ML and robotics will spread software even farther into our physical world. The author compares software to consultants, disruptive but not producing meaningful change, I don't agree with this - industries are being changed forever or replaced, but the transformation isn’t done yet. The old intermediaries who used to decide what we consume are not dead yet but I think that power will be diffused across society as the cost of production falls and new mediums emerge. Retail - we’re only partway through a transformation but big retailers simply have no reason to exist in a world where you can have a package delivered same day to your door from a warehouse. TV - this will be replaced by other screens which encourage participation (live chat etc), and self-production (youtube), that’s not yet complete. Publishing - the entire knowledge of humanity is available online for the first time, most of it free, and people can publish their thoughts at zero cost. This is a remarkable revolution with profound impacts still reverberating. Gatekeepers like academic publishers are increasingly untenable and out of touch but are not gone yet. Music - democratised as the means of production are cheaper but the incumbents are not dead yet, however their position is becoming untenable. IMO we’re not even halfway through this revolution which is comparable in scope and time to the industrial revolution.

benedictevans 6y ago
Thanks for reading. However, that’s not what Marc meant by ‘software eating the world’ and it’s not how I described consultants.
- grey-area 6y ago
  Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read. Genuinely interested, what do you think he meant? What do you feel the phrase means today? I read it as software will transform and replace many industries and physical things but will go back and find that essay again now - perhaps it's the bit about software permeating the physical world you object to? It was a really interesting phrase that I think resonated with a lot of people, so perhaps I read into it lots that wasn’t there. Re consultants, I was referring to this bit: There’s an old joke that consultants are like seagulls - they fly in, make lots of noise, mess everything up and then fly out. That’s pretty much what tech has done to media industries... It seemed to me your thesis was that software is done transforming these industries and the only interesting problems are industry specific and not related to software? I think there is still a lot of change left to go.
dalbasal 6y ago
>> but I think that power will be diffused across society as the cost of production falls I feel like this is the kind of optimistic sentiment, expressed over the years, that this essay is countering. Empirically, we've seen the opposite. Yes, "software ate the world." But no, it hasn't diffused anything. Once upon a time, it was expensive to press records or print books. Someone had to bankroll it, and so record labels and book publishers became. What actually happened when music and print digitized? Did they go to a flat, federated, diffused or disintermediated structure. No. They got more centralized. Unaffiliated musicians and TV/film makers work for the youtube or spotify. They have no control or influence over those companies, and have no power. In fact, they have less power than before because they, unlike the platforms, are decentralised. >> Music - democratised as the means of production are cheaper but the incumbents are not dead yet, however their position is becoming untenable. Untenable in theory. Sure, there is no need for someone to bankroll record pressing or book printing anymore. Hello zero marginal cost abundance. Yet, labels and publishers still exist. The industry structure is more centralised and more intermediated. Above labels/publishers are amazon, netflix, spotify, apple or google.... the new top of the pyramid. OOH, we can believe our own 2004 speculative reasoning about digital economics... and what is or isn't tenable. OTOH, we can look at reality in 2021 and accept the prevailing trends. Youtube, spotify, itunes, amazon, netflix and future monopolies are what abundance looks like, not Wikimedia, Linux or the www. We were wrong. Abundance has not impacted economic structures the way we expected. We have what we had before, but now with a tech monopoly at the top.
- grey-area 6y ago
  I disagree that music and publishing have become more centralised. I have seen the death of the book publishing industry first hand - from the outside it might appear relatively unscathed, from the inside it has been hollowed out and is untenable. Publishers are clinging on but increasingly irrelevant and their margins are non-existent, which pushes their quality down, which undermines their business model further. They will survive another generation though on nostalgia and with steadily declining sales. They simply don’t have a viable business model any more. Sure we’re not living in the utopian future some imagined but that does not mean the transformation was not profound and ongoing. The transformation is far from over in those that were vulnerable to the internet and many industries have only just started being consumed.
TehMrSkinner 6y ago
Typically the encouraged participation of Twitch and YouTube is a mechanism to strengthen para-social relationships people make with "content creators" which I don't think is a good thing, if more and more people aren't making friends and building communities around them in favour of their "friends" and "communities" online then they're going to continue being at the mercy of the established order (whether that be Governments or Corporations) as there's no real unity in an online collective and there's no meaningful action a disparate group of people can do to effect change in a single place. On your publishing point it seems to me we're just abandoning quality control and rigour under the guise of begrudging gatekeeping (sometimes the gate does need to guarded) and whilst I agree that the subjectivity of art means more people being able to make and share music is probably a good thing (you can't definitively say there's "bad music") the same can't be said for information. Perhaps I'm too cynical but a large aspect of the past 20 years in software proliferation I don't like is the idea that we should just build things consequences be damned (Mark Zuckerburg especially has this belief) as we're never then taking the time to properly reflect on if there's a way to prevent harm up front or if the harm produced can't be mitigated maybe we shouldn't build these things in the first place. A rhetorical but interesting question is how many relationships do we think were ruined by Facebook? How much dysmorphia and self-loathing caused by Instagram?* How much hate spread by YouTube and Twitter? *(These two I find particularly interesting as we weren't even part way through uncovering the ill effects of unrealistic beauty standards set by Hollywood and the advertising industry over the last 50 years before along came these websites/apps whose solution was to allow you to airbrush and manipulate your own life and set your own unrealistic standards. There's now a generation and more to come who have just grown up with this being the way the world is).
- grey-area 6y ago
  There are certainly a lot of bad aspects to the popularity contest which is the current internet. Sorry if I sounded too panglossian about recent changes, but I think people overlook just how profoundly our lives have been and are being transformed.
gpanders 6y ago
One downside to lowering the barrier of entry in all of these areas is the lack of any kind of quality control or content curation. Sure, anyone can publish their thoughts online for free, which I agree is a good thing for openness and freedom, but not everyone is equally qualified or competent. It becomes increasingly difficult to sift through the mountains of sub-standard garbage to find things worth consuming (NB I dislike the word “consuming” in this context, but I don’t know of a better catch-all term). Now sure, the old gatekeepers weren’t perfect at this either and they published a lot of garbage too. But I think this is something that needs to be discussed as content creation becomes increasingly democratized.
- grey-area 6y ago
  Completely agree as popularity != quality and curation without cornering the market does have a lot of value. When I said gatekeepers I was thinking of academic publishers vs sci hub for example, or non-fiction publishers who operate on selling big names rather than quality.

benedictevans 6y ago

Thanks for reading. However, that’s not what Marc meant by ‘software eating the world’ and it’s not how I described consultants.

grey-area 6y ago
Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read. Genuinely interested, what do you think he meant? What do you feel the phrase means today? I read it as software will transform and replace many industries and physical things but will go back and find that essay again now - perhaps it's the bit about software permeating the physical world you object to? It was a really interesting phrase that I think resonated with a lot of people, so perhaps I read into it lots that wasn’t there. Re consultants, I was referring to this bit: There’s an old joke that consultants are like seagulls - they fly in, make lots of noise, mess everything up and then fly out. That’s pretty much what tech has done to media industries... It seemed to me your thesis was that software is done transforming these industries and the only interesting problems are industry specific and not related to software? I think there is still a lot of change left to go.

dalbasal 6y ago

>> but I think that power will be diffused across society as the cost of production falls I feel like this is the kind of optimistic sentiment, expressed over the years, that this essay is countering. Empirically, we've seen the opposite. Yes, "software ate the world." But no, it hasn't diffused anything. Once upon a time, it was expensive to press records or print books. Someone had to bankroll it, and so record labels and book publishers became. What actually happened when music and print digitized? Did they go to a flat, federated, diffused or disintermediated structure. No. They got more centralized. Unaffiliated musicians and TV/film makers work for the youtube or spotify. They have no control or influence over those companies, and have no power. In fact, they have less power than before because they, unlike the platforms, are decentralised. >> Music - democratised as the means of production are cheaper but the incumbents are not dead yet, however their position is becoming untenable. Untenable in theory. Sure, there is no need for someone to bankroll record pressing or book printing anymore. Hello zero marginal cost abundance. Yet, labels and publishers still exist. The industry structure is more centralised and more intermediated. Above labels/publishers are amazon, netflix, spotify, apple or google.... the new top of the pyramid. OOH, we can believe our own 2004 speculative reasoning about digital economics... and what is or isn't tenable. OTOH, we can look at reality in 2021 and accept the prevailing trends. Youtube, spotify, itunes, amazon, netflix and future monopolies are what abundance looks like, not Wikimedia, Linux or the www. We were wrong. Abundance has not impacted economic structures the way we expected. We have what we had before, but now with a tech monopoly at the top.

grey-area 6y ago
I disagree that music and publishing have become more centralised. I have seen the death of the book publishing industry first hand - from the outside it might appear relatively unscathed, from the inside it has been hollowed out and is untenable. Publishers are clinging on but increasingly irrelevant and their margins are non-existent, which pushes their quality down, which undermines their business model further. They will survive another generation though on nostalgia and with steadily declining sales. They simply don’t have a viable business model any more. Sure we’re not living in the utopian future some imagined but that does not mean the transformation was not profound and ongoing. The transformation is far from over in those that were vulnerable to the internet and many industries have only just started being consumed.

TehMrSkinner 6y ago

Typically the encouraged participation of Twitch and YouTube is a mechanism to strengthen para-social relationships people make with "content creators" which I don't think is a good thing, if more and more people aren't making friends and building communities around them in favour of their "friends" and "communities" online then they're going to continue being at the mercy of the established order (whether that be Governments or Corporations) as there's no real unity in an online collective and there's no meaningful action a disparate group of people can do to effect change in a single place. On your publishing point it seems to me we're just abandoning quality control and rigour under the guise of begrudging gatekeeping (sometimes the gate does need to guarded) and whilst I agree that the subjectivity of art means more people being able to make and share music is probably a good thing (you can't definitively say there's "bad music") the same can't be said for information. Perhaps I'm too cynical but a large aspect of the past 20 years in software proliferation I don't like is the idea that we should just build things consequences be damned (Mark Zuckerburg especially has this belief) as we're never then taking the time to properly reflect on if there's a way to prevent harm up front or if the harm produced can't be mitigated maybe we shouldn't build these things in the first place. A rhetorical but interesting question is how many relationships do we think were ruined by Facebook? How much dysmorphia and self-loathing caused by Instagram?* How much hate spread by YouTube and Twitter? *(These two I find particularly interesting as we weren't even part way through uncovering the ill effects of unrealistic beauty standards set by Hollywood and the advertising industry over the last 50 years before along came these websites/apps whose solution was to allow you to airbrush and manipulate your own life and set your own unrealistic standards. There's now a generation and more to come who have just grown up with this being the way the world is).

grey-area 6y ago
There are certainly a lot of bad aspects to the popularity contest which is the current internet. Sorry if I sounded too panglossian about recent changes, but I think people overlook just how profoundly our lives have been and are being transformed.

gpanders 6y ago

One downside to lowering the barrier of entry in all of these areas is the lack of any kind of quality control or content curation. Sure, anyone can publish their thoughts online for free, which I agree is a good thing for openness and freedom, but not everyone is equally qualified or competent. It becomes increasingly difficult to sift through the mountains of sub-standard garbage to find things worth consuming (NB I dislike the word “consuming” in this context, but I don’t know of a better catch-all term). Now sure, the old gatekeepers weren’t perfect at this either and they published a lot of garbage too. But I think this is something that needs to be discussed as content creation becomes increasingly democratized.

grey-area 6y ago
Completely agree as popularity != quality and curation without cornering the market does have a lot of value. When I said gatekeepers I was thinking of academic publishers vs sci hub for example, or non-fiction publishers who operate on selling big names rather than quality.