Software Didn't Eat the World

This article originally appeared on im1776.com on October 7, 2025.

The waves are towering over your craft as you slide into and through the frigid water, drenching your back as the bow violently slices it apart. You’re hanging on with your feet onto the netting on the deck, leaning into death at starboard. Without this machine, you’d surely drown, but by some magical force, you are suspended over your own demise. A gust of wind bends your mast to 30 degrees over the water. You’re no longer sitting but fully erect. The adrenaline pumps through every blood vessel. You loosen the mainsail by letting the rope slide out of your hand with the gentleness of a lover’s touch. With the other arm, you’re wrestling unseen oceanic forces to keep the rudder level. A minute mistake, and you will be thrown overboard. But even then, you know that you can redress your vessel by pushing down on the keel and retaking the helm.

The sailboat is simply one of the most ingenious human technological advancements ever made. Anyone who’s sailed alone in a storm viscerally understands this perfection. It’s a magnificent piece of technology that harnesses the simple force of the wind to keep you gliding over certain death. The controls are shockingly simple: the rope on the mainsheet, with which you tighten or loosen the mainsail, and the hiking stick, which orients the rudder. Additionally, you use your own weight to balance the tilt of the sailcraft. It also proves persistently anti-fragile. You can right a capsized small boat out of the water as if nothing happened. I once had a pulley on the mainsheet snap on me, and was able to sail back to safety with just the rope. It is no surprise that empires have been built on the trimming of sails.

As an engineer, I think back on the sailboat whenever I am building a system. I want my technic to share the qualities of the sailboat as much as possible: its simplicity, its resilience, its versatility. It goes without saying that this is as hard as it sounds.

It’s also helpful to keep our sailboat in mind when analyzing the course of innovation, such as Peter Thiel’s thesis that we are in an era of technological stagnation. Despite Silicon Valley’s sternest protestations as it enters its n-th hype cycle, the world has changed little since the 1960s. Materially, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction, as what were once working-class milestones, such as homeownership in safe cities, single-breadwinner families, and children, are now only available to the upper classes. A profound malaise grips our societies.

Decades of so-called technological advancements have given us increased luxury, but also decreased prosperity. It is natural, then, that the seemingly naive optimism we had in the 1960s for science and technology, and its ability to transform our lives for the better, has completely evaporated. We are undergoing one of the most profound anti-technological backlashes in modern history. Perhaps, if the technology we build and use were much more like that sailboat of ours…

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Thiel’s thesis that the only advancements in technology over the last 60 years have been in the world of bits—that software has eaten the world—is fairly disturbing. What’s even more disturbing is the sullen realization that software didn’t eat the world. If we engage in Thiel’s exercise of closing all the screens and examining how much the world around us would seem familiar to someone living in 1960, we would find that not only is the material world much the same, but our institutions and processes are also identical. We swapped typewriters for Microsoft Word, but we ultimately clicked ‘print’ and handed it to the mailman. We hit 3nm, but the 20th century won.

If we repeat this exercise with a variety of institutions, what we see is that software added some ‘interfaces’ but left our 20th-century models of organization unchanged. So many of our institutions were built in the 20th century and naturally adopted the structure of the most efficient institution at the time: the factory floor.

If we take education as an example, the inputs (children) are put through sequential industrial treatments en masse (classes) with quality control at every step (tests). When the processes are successful, we issue a certification of quality (diplomas). This is entirely antithetical to pre-19th-century ideas of education. Our schools also resemble factory floors, with industrial-looking buildings, perfectly aligned desks, identical schoolbooks, standardized curricula, and uniform outputs.

Those outputs (graduates) then become labor inputs into our institutions of production, where they are selected based on the reputation of the manufacturer and their quality grading. Labor and other inputs are used to generate economic outputs, which are sold at a certain price, and these transactions become statistics in inflation reports. Meanwhile, our aforementioned labor inputs become percentage points on unemployment charts. Central bankers and other planners scrutinize the charts with their morning coffee and make resource allocation decisions based on the movement of those numbers.

I’m caricaturing, but not by much. Whether these workplaces are in the manufacturing or services sector does not make much of a difference because, in the end, they are factories. Our entire economy, and subsequently, our society and modes of living, are extensions of the factory floor. If this caricature makes it sound like we have central planners, it’s because we do.

Convergence theory was the dominant theory of the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s. Academics theorized, at the time, that the Soviet Union and the United States would converge on some kind of hybrid system. Convergence theorists proved to be shockingly wrong—yet we can hardly blame them. Even the CIA was caught off guard by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they spent decades trying to destroy it.

While convergence theory was incorrect, it did highlight the similarities between the two systems. What if the Cold War was not a competition between capitalism and socialism but rather a competition between variations of the same factory model? After all, it was American companies that built the Soviet industrial stack in the 1930s. Soviet industry was a mirror of its American counterpart, and naturally, the systems themselves were extensions of the Fordist/Taylorist industrial model. Perhaps the Cold War was more a case of infighting between two revolutionary, anti-imperialist, hyper-industrialized sister empires, rather than an ideological total war.

Marshall McLuhan, on the other hand, correctly predicted which of the sisters would ultimately prevail. In his 1954 Counterblast, he wrote:

The Russians are impotent in shaping technological culture due to their inwardness and grimness. The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. At the present moment, America is shaping every phase of Russian life and policy by virtue of technological ascendancy […] We can win China and India for the West only by giving them the new media. Russia will not give them these.

McLuhan, a media theorist, not only predicted the demise of the Soviet Union but also the opening up of China and the rise of India. How was it that the entire International Relations establishment was wrong and a single media theorist was right? As McLuhan claims, “the medium is the message.”

McLuhan’s aphorism becomes incredibly useful when trying to understand the malaise we have with our own technology. How is it that we have this hyper-dominant communication medium, the networked computer, yet our entire society remains stuck in decaying states of mechanization?

The answer to this question lies in McLuhan’s concept of remediation. When a new medium is created, it absorbs content from an older medium. At the beginning of Greek literacy, Plato writes the dialogues in which he remediates conversations in Athens, notably those of Socrates, into manuscript. Oral culture becomes the content of manuscript culture. Similarly, films remediate theater, television remediates film, Netflix remediates television, and so on.

Between the Gutenberg press and the heights of literary culture of the 19th century, there were several centuries. It takes time for a medium to mature and to ‘eat the world’. Likewise, we are in the infancy of the networked computer as a medium, and much of the malaise lies in the contradictions between the medium and the content. If we consider our economy and subsequently our culture as aggregations of exchanges—exchanges of currency, commercial information, knowledge, advertising, and so on—and if the medium of exchange is the networked computer, then the content of our medium is mechanization. Like in the infancy of other media, the networked computer remediates industrial society. The 21st century has so far only remediated the 20th century.

We see this in critiques of the cultural moment. Culture is stuck in a loop. Regardless of how many new platforms we cycle through—Instagram, Vine, or TikTok—the content remains the same. Friends remains one of the most popular shows of all time and is still the content of choice for streaming viewers. Fashion keeps cycling the aughts and tens. No major musical genres have been invented since the 80s. As many have noticed, it’s curation over creation. The networked computer appears to upend time and space itself, thus allowing culture to be suspended at the exact moment prior to the dominance of the medium. The previous media became the content for the new medium.

This also explains the enthusiasm for generative AI. Nearly all major corporations are competing to implement generative AI. No other technology has generated such a strong appetite among our factory managers. Many are going ahead and laying off sections of their workforce in anticipation of some unspecified future AI picking up the slack. In a period of profound anti-technological stagnation, generative AI garners immense, and likely unwarranted confidence. Yet the explanation is simple: generative AI is the ultimate remediation tool. It’s regurgitation on an industrial scale. This is immediately appealing to structures and institutions of the 20th century. At the juncture of mechanization and the networked computer, the most profound desire of any industrial institution is to be remediated.

I expect generative AI, like so many other innovations from Silicon Valley, to fall short of the promises made by its snake oil merchants. Not for any particular deficiency in the technology itself, but because the institutions of the factory floor are not equipped to wield the networked computer. The factory floor needs to be rebuilt along the lines of a networked computer system. There comes a time for any medium to break free from its previous form and fully come into its own. This is likely to be a process spanning decades, perhaps even centuries. Having spent my career rebuilding factory lines into networked computers, I’ve managed to distill some lines of development. At the end of the day, we must return to our platonic sailboat.

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What makes the sailboat such perfect technology? Any experienced sailor will tell you that sailing is entirely intuitive. Controlling the sailboat becomes more akin to walking and running than operating a machine. The sailboat becomes a mechanical extension of the human body. It’s the fusion of man and machine, but where the machine is entirely under the control of man. You may not control wind and waves, but you have absolute control of the vessel itself. It will not do things you don’t want it to do. You are the helmsman in the complete sense of the term.

Can we really say the same of our technology, our software? Is there a helmsman in those billions of lines of code? Unlikely. As McLuhan wrote, “Electric Circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system”. Man is fused with machine, but it seems that, unlike the sailboat, it is the machine that controls the human—penetrating deep through the nervous system, leaving ideas, hallucinations, and instructions inside the mind itself. How many of your thoughts, emotions are actually your own? What if your own grief and joy were just a machinic hallucination? After all, is your nervous system safe from exploits?

The property that differentiates the circuit from the production line is synchrony vs asynchrony. The factory product can only be in one place at a time along the production process by definition. The logic of the factory floor is inherently sequential, chronological, and teleological in nature. By contrast, software is asynchronous, starting from the material base of the circuit itself. Computer hardware is built around parallelism by default; we often have to impose sequential logic as an abstraction to make it more manageable for engineers. Multiple calculations can be conducted simultaneously on the same bytes.

Not only does this mean that the feedback, measure, control loop is much faster, but that you can have a multitude of these loops running independently. If institutions and organizations are the outgrowths of the dominant media of their age, how would those look? If we go back to the example of education, which is synchronous by nature—everyone has to go through the same class, same grade together, to get to the next step together — what would asynchronous schools look like? Would even need asynchronous schools?

Suppose Institutions, companies, and organizations have to be rebuilt to overcome the dissonance between the medium and the content. In that case, the main challenge is bridging the gap between engineers and the world outside. Software professionals are often overly focused on software at the expense of all else. Tech is a bubble—the people within it are isolated. An enormous amount of talent is spent squeezing marginal efficiencies out of information systems in ingenious ways, while the rest of the world still operates as if it were the 1980s.

The bubble has to burst. And the push has to come from the software people themselves. The era of Saas businesses is over. What is required is much grander. The reality is that the institutions and companies that need to be rebuilt on an asynchronous footing have to be built to measure. Information engineering must go beyond building software systems to building human systems that operate like the best software—asynchronously and purposefully. Software didn’t eat the world, but it should.

The mind should begin to wonder towards the possibilities of asynchrony. What would the asynchronous city look like? What about the asynchronous state? If good technology implies purpose and direction—helmsmanship—can we overcome the rule by committee which characterizes the mechanized state? Someone should really figure out how we got the word government.

Avetis Muradyan is a Chief Technology Officer and an emerging markets expert based in Vancouver. He is a graduate of the University of British Columbia in Computer Science and English Literature. He can be followed @AvetisMuradyan.