The Death Cross from the Margins

The 2026 SaaS death cross wiped a trillion dollars from software company valuations. You On AI analyzes the event as a repricing — the market discovering that the value of software companies was located in code, and code was approaching commodity pricing. The analysis is economically literate. Escobar's framework extends it. The death cross is not merely a repricing of software companies. It is a restructuring of the global division of labor with consequences that fall disproportionately on populations the financial analysis does not see. And it is a restructuring of the relationship between human knowledge and machine capability with consequences that extend far beyond the software industry.