The rise of industrial software

Chris Loy:

the industrialisation of production is giving rise to a new class of software artefact, which we might term disposable software: software created with no durable expectation of ownership, maintenance, or long-term understanding.

Not gonna lie, that seems like a pretty good bet.

Industrial systems reliably create economic pressure toward excess, low quality goods. This is not because producers are careless, but because once production is cheap enough, junk is what maximises volume, margin, and reach. The result is not abundance of the best things, but overproduction of the most consumable ones.

Here’s one to ponder:

Technical debt is the pollution of the digital world, invisible until it chokes the systems that depend on it. In an era of mass automation, we may find that the hardest problem is not production, but stewardship. Who maintains the software that no one owns?