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>> but I think that power will be diffused across society as the cost of production falls

I feel like this is the kind of optimistic sentiment, expressed over the years, that this essay is countering.

Empirically, we've seen the opposite. Yes, "software ate the world." But no, it hasn't diffused anything. Once upon a time, it was expensive to press records or print books. Someone had to bankroll it, and so record labels and book publishers became. What actually happened when music and print digitized? Did they go to a flat, federated, diffused or disintermediated structure. No. They got more centralized.

Unaffiliated musicians and TV/film makers work for the youtube or spotify. They have no control or influence over those companies, and have no power. In fact, they have less power than before because they, unlike the platforms, are decentralised.

>> Music - democratised as the means of production are cheaper but the incumbents are not dead yet, however their position is becoming untenable.

Untenable in theory. Sure, there is no need for someone to bankroll record pressing or book printing anymore. Hello zero marginal cost abundance. Yet, labels and publishers still exist. The industry structure is more centralised and more intermediated. Above labels/publishers are amazon, netflix, spotify, apple or google.... the new top of the pyramid.

OOH, we can believe our own 2004 speculative reasoning about digital economics... and what is or isn't tenable. OTOH, we can look at reality in 2021 and accept the prevailing trends. Youtube, spotify, itunes, amazon, netflix and future monopolies are what abundance looks like, not Wikimedia, Linux or the www.

We were wrong. Abundance has not impacted economic structures the way we expected. We have what we had before, but now with a tech monopoly at the top.

I disagree that music and publishing have become more centralised.

I have seen the death of the book publishing industry first hand - from the outside it might appear relatively unscathed, from the inside it has been hollowed out and is untenable. Publishers are clinging on but increasingly irrelevant and their margins are non-existent, which pushes their quality down, which undermines their business model further. They will survive another generation though on nostalgia and with steadily declining sales. They simply don’t have a viable business model any more.

Sure we’re not living in the utopian future some imagined but that does not mean the transformation was not profound and ongoing.

The transformation is far from over in those that were vulnerable to the internet and many industries have only just started being consumed.

I see the author is here, so I feel kind of weird defending the position for him. What the heck though (sorry benedict)...

The point isn't that technology hasn't had an impact, or that software didn't really "eat the world." Old businesses and industries do have to adjust, and sometimes fail. That's not the point either. The point is "what comes after?" or rather, "how do these industries look now?" The answer to that is closer to "same as it was in 2005" than it is to "what we expected would happen in 2005."

IIRCC self publishing is still at 5%-10%. How does book publishing work today, 13 and 30 years after kindle and the wordwideweb were digitised publishing? A writer sits around wondering who they need to shag to get a publishing deal. If they're lucky, they get a publishing deal, like in 1988. Then Amazon sells it.

Maybe publishing is going through a technology induced lean years. Maybe a lot of them will go out of business. News publishing has gone through crisis moments, where they beg politicians to make Google and FB share some ad revenue back with them. What has not happened is diffusion, disintermediation or somesuch. Creators or consumers aren't more empowered. From the outside, it's business as usual and the outside view is what counts.

I remember Seth Godin's take on the kindle. At first he was excited. New medium, new message. Then he was disappointed. Digital books would cost the same. That meant the goal was to keep everything the same. There would be no penny-per page business model. No nonfiction equivalent of a short story. Amazon would be chasing deals with publishers, not opening up to new people. Jeff was right. Seth was wrong.

I share a lot of your sensibilities. But when reality contradicts theory, we need to adapt the theory.

The same is true of most large industries touched by digitization. Some (like publishing) had tumultuous transitions. Some (like banking) had pretty cushy transitions. In almost no cases has "economic untenable" logic proved out. Banks have not evolved into lean, mostly software, organisations. They've gotten bigger and hairier. Is this "tenable?" Maybe not, but it is the norm.

OK I see where we disagree I think.

You (and the author) think this transformation is over, I think it's just starting.

IIRCC self publishing is still at 5%-10%. How does book publishing work today, 13 and 30 years after kindle and the wordwideweb were digitised publishing? A writer sits around wondering who they need to shag to get a publishing deal. If they're lucky, they get a publishing deal, like in 1988. Then Amazon sells it.

This is not an accurate summary no. Today an author doesn't need a publishing deal to get in front of millions of readers in a way they most definitely did in 1988. They can set up a web page and sell their book themselves (and many are doing so). Just to pick one example, this book is self-published[1] and has its own website, on Amazon - Publisher : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. There are certainly problems, Amazon is a predatory monopoly which will suck the margins out of any successful seller on its platform, but the entire industry is being shaken and self-publishing is growing in importance. Many of the old publishers see this coming but have no idea what to do about it, they're either watching their business slowly die or moving online selling curated content and leaving books behind.

To pick another example, video, channels like youtube and twitch have lead to the rise of internet celebrities not chosen by any producer or channel, but who set up their own stall and sell themselves. Gaming channels like steam or mobile have led to a boom in indie game studios and small games. There are certainly excesses and mistakes involved in that, but it is an entirely new mode of production enabled by the internet, and again I think it's in its infancy. It's not a fad which is going away - broadcast TV itself is going away and being replaced by a more interactive mode, it just doesn't know it yet.

So I don't agree the information revolution is over, it's only just beginning and will probably take about 50 more years at least to play out fully. We only just started carrying powerful internet connected computers in our pockets about a decade ago; the implications of that alone are far-reaching.

[0] http://momtestbook.com

Maybe we're getting closer but I don't think "You (and the author) think this transformation is over" is accurate. There is no pre/post. Change is continuous. Business is tumultuous.

Speaking for myself, I think over/not-over is part illusion to shake. It is part of the theory, which has failed. A pre-digital world and a digital world... where our first principles economics will finally play out. That day is not coming, marginal cost economics is not going to play to the "logical" conclusion.

There is a real reality out there. In it, digitisation of content has consistently led to monopoly. Google produce the world's most popular operating system and web browser just to support their search monopoly. They have no intention of being a neutral pipe.

To get grandiose... I feel like we are/were misguided by deterministic thinking. We see the possibilities of digitization, and assume they're inevitable. They aren't. They were opportunities, but they were never just going to manifest themselves.

The WWW was/is free because TBL made it that way. We believed that openness was an inevitability. Reality has schooled us.

I am also disappointed that Kindle and other eBook costs are not much lower than printed books. BTW, my wife and I were talking about how differently Amazon runs Audible and Kindle. While it is true that Amazon extracts $30/month from us for two Audible accounts, Audible gives away an amazing number of free Amazon Original branded audio books for members. These are often short books or experimental stuff, but often very good. We also get access to each other’s paid-for audio books.

Contrast this to Kindle where we can’t freely read each other’s book purchases. We try to use other platforms like Google Play Books that enable family sharing.

I have my own take on the publishing industry. I started by writing ten books for conventional publishers like Springer Verlag, McGraw Hill, etc. I ended up self publishing my own eBooks, for free or people can pay me. I earn much more money doing technical work than writing, and I enjoy maximizing interaction with people reading my books, so I think that I have reached a global maximum strategy for myself.

It's true that content publishers (music, books, video, academic papers, news, software, etc) are all being eliminated by the current disruption. The problem is that they added real value to the chain, and that value is also being eliminated.

The current trend towards heaping massive quantities of low-value undifferentiated product in a heap at the feet of the consuming masses is wonderful if your metric is quantity. By eliminating discoverability, accessibility, quality, and curation you can massively increase the quantitative choice of consumers. In theory the cost difference is either saved by the consumer or passed on to the creator.

In addition, eliminating the idea of capitalizing investment in content creation means far less investment in content creation. The marginal cost of copying is virtually free, but the cost of creating the first instance to be copied has not decreased.

I suspect what we're seeing is the first wave of restructuring: tearing down the old to create a vast swamp of crap. I expect a second wave to come in which the vacuum created by tearing down the old will be filled by new publishers and their ilk to provide the services of discoverability, acessibility, quality, and curation and the capitalization of content creation.

I agree broadly, and I think we both agree with the author's main point... life goes on.

But, I think we need to be careful with our expectations. Currently, the biggest factor determining what content gets created is the preferences or MO of a handful of big guys.

Netflix is like the old world. Executives. Deals. Do Netflix insiders still like sexposition or do they think it's corny now? It's a lot like selling a show to a cable channel. On Youtube, a minute of news equals a minute of fart jokes and subscribers are important. That's their ethic.

The future isn't really about what "content" will do.. it's about what youtube or amazon will do. These companies are not neutral conduits of consumer preferences, whether or not they make decisions algorithmically.

> The current trend towards heaping massive quantities of low-value undifferentiated product in a heap at the feet of the consuming masses is wonderful if your metric is quantity.

But filtering for quality should be the job of critics/reviewers, not gatekeepers to the industry.

Typically the encouraged participation of Twitch and YouTube is a mechanism to strengthen para-social relationships people make with "content creators" which I don't think is a good thing, if more and more people aren't making friends and building communities around them in favour of their "friends" and "communities" online then they're going to continue being at the mercy of the established order (whether that be Governments or Corporations) as there's no real unity in an online collective and there's no meaningful action a disparate group of people can do to effect change in a single place.

On your publishing point it seems to me we're just abandoning quality control and rigour under the guise of begrudging gatekeeping (sometimes the gate does need to guarded) and whilst I agree that the subjectivity of art means more people being able to make and share music is probably a good thing (you can't definitively say there's "bad music") the same can't be said for information.

Perhaps I'm too cynical but a large aspect of the past 20 years in software proliferation I don't like is the idea that we should just build things consequences be damned (Mark Zuckerburg especially has this belief) as we're never then taking the time to properly reflect on if there's a way to prevent harm up front or if the harm produced can't be mitigated maybe we shouldn't build these things in the first place. A rhetorical but interesting question is how many relationships do we think were ruined by Facebook? How much dysmorphia and self-loathing caused by Instagram?* How much hate spread by YouTube and Twitter?

*(These two I find particularly interesting as we weren't even part way through uncovering the ill effects of unrealistic beauty standards set by Hollywood and the advertising industry over the last 50 years before along came these websites/apps whose solution was to allow you to airbrush and manipulate your own life and set your own unrealistic standards. There's now a generation and more to come who have just grown up with this being the way the world is).

There are certainly a lot of bad aspects to the popularity contest which is the current internet. Sorry if I sounded too panglossian about recent changes, but I think people overlook just how profoundly our lives have been and are being transformed.

Thanks for reading. However, that’s not what Marc meant by ‘software eating the world’ and it’s not how I described consultants.

Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read.

Genuinely interested, what do you think he meant? What do you feel the phrase means today? I read it as software will transform and replace many industries and physical things but will go back and find that essay again now - perhaps it's the bit about software permeating the physical world you object to? It was a really interesting phrase that I think resonated with a lot of people, so perhaps I read into it lots that wasn’t there.

Re consultants, I was referring to this bit:

There’s an old joke that consultants are like seagulls - they fly in, make lots of noise, mess everything up and then fly out. That’s pretty much what tech has done to media industries...

It seemed to me your thesis was that software is done transforming these industries and the only interesting problems are industry specific and not related to software? I think there is still a lot of change left to go.

One downside to lowering the barrier of entry in all of these areas is the lack of any kind of quality control or content curation. Sure, anyone can publish their thoughts online for free, which I agree is a good thing for openness and freedom, but not everyone is equally qualified or competent. It becomes increasingly difficult to sift through the mountains of sub-standard garbage to find things worth consuming (NB I dislike the word “consuming” in this context, but I don’t know of a better catch-all term).

Now sure, the old gatekeepers weren’t perfect at this either and they published a lot of garbage too. But I think this is something that needs to be discussed as content creation becomes increasingly democratized.

Completely agree as popularity != quality and curation without cornering the market does have a lot of value. When I said gatekeepers I was thinking of academic publishers vs sci hub for example, or non-fiction publishers who operate on selling big names rather than quality.