No, software is not going downhill. Rather, it has reached the bottom of the hill. The incentives are completely upside down. The chief "innovation" of the pas

No, software is not going downhill. Rather, it has reached the bottom of the hill. The incentives are completely upside down. The chief "innovation" of the past decade has been to shift software from being something that at least theoretically worked in the interests of its users to something that works in the interest of a burgeoning digital surveillance industry. The field has always been ruled by a kind of fashion. But with Metcalfe's law plus the new mainstream popularity of the industry, the definition of "success" has become whatever has the most advertising money faking social proof for it. In other words, what is expected to be the most lucrative to exploit. Metrics now revolve around things like how much of users' time has been wasted, or whether they were tricked into buying something. And to continue the landscape analogy - with remote attestation, software is now poised to be pushed into a canyon. Widespread computational disenfranchisement as corporations can wield software against individuals, but individuals will no longer have even an escape hatch to use software for cutting through that generated complexity.