Software ate the world.
I also remember feeling that optimistic about technology. It wasn’t until this past year, I am getting an inkling of what happened. It’s a continuation of much longer trends that I didn’t see until I started studying Carol Sanford’s work on regenerative paradigms, responsible business, etc.
The dominant worldview these days is that of the machine world view. It sees the world as complex machinery, with people as cogs. It denies the power of living systems to be able to live and grow on their own, instead, forcing them to intermediate through the machine.
As such, software eating the world is a continuation of that worldview.
I think perhaps, this is the “punk” in cyberpunk; that even though people become part of the machine, they can still change the world for the better against old powers. Old powers didn’t understand how the emerging technology works, so there’s a window of time. Perhaps, that, technologists will maintain a tech gap over old powers. But the old powers had been eaten by machines a long time ago, and when new tech companies arose, that machine world view became further entrenched.
It didn’t solve for the fundamental problem: living systems are not machines. We are capable of growing and changing on our own. We are not consumers. We are not users. Living systems are what makes software come alive; why would we want software to eat us?