Instead of delivering services and software that unlocks value for their client industries, the software industry has spent the past decade or so trying to control their customers and their client industries. Why make software for hotels when you can control the hotel industry? Why make software for taxis when you can replace the entire industry with software? Instead of trying to entice customers to upgrade their software by making new versions more valuable to them, push them to a subscription service where you control what they get, when they get it, and what value they’re allowed to unlock from their own businesses. Why sell Word when you can sell an Office 365 Cloud Subscription?

The endpoint of this is to replace every industry that remains with generative models. Cut back on actual development of Photoshop, for example, lower development costs and programmer overhead even as you replace the industries that are your customers with automatic image and video generators.

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The ground is shifting underneath every industry that was built on the assumption that the US would protect and preserve the globalised status quo. The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you’re in charge.

It’s impossible to guess what exactly will happen next to software or tech. All I know is pretty much all of modern software is built on a premise that no longer holds. Even free and open source software is contingent on everybody agreeing to similar policies regarding copyright. Whether tech has enough clout on its own to continue its strategy of capture and control, whether it compromises with local governments to retain its power, whether we’re in for a period of collapse and fragmentation is anybody’s guess. The old world is dying and the new cannot be born.