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Software Is Eating the World
Marc Andreessen's 2011 Wall Street Journal essay arguing that software would disrupt every industry — a thesis so thoroughly confirmed that its completion created a problem the thesis did not anticipate.
Andreessen's 2011 Wall Street Journal essay argued that software companies were poised to take over large swaths of the economy — not as a new industry among others but as a new substrate on which all industries would be rebuilt. The thesis was controversial when published and obvious fourteen years later. Every sector the essay identified — media, retail, finance, entertainment, transportation, healthcare — has been substantially software-reconstituted. The essay's completion, however, created a problem the original thesis did not address: when software eats every industry, software eventually eats the industry that builds software. The builders become the built-upon. The metaphor describes the reality its author now inhabits.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay appeared at a moment when the dominant narrative about software companies was skepticism — the dot-com crash was a decade old, and many observers treated internet businesses as speculative froth atop a fundamentally physical economy. Andreessen argued the opposite: that software