Corporate megasoftware suffers from the same structural problems as ancient megafauna; when there is a fixed amount of material to build the organism, it's almost always more efficient to split it into smaller, more coherent, repeatable bodies that project power through coordination, rather than a single large body that imposes its will on the world via sheer weight and size. The bottleneck was, as in the now-extinct branch of evolution, the viability of intelligence in smaller entities; that is now a solved problem. Now we are headed to an Anthropocene of cyberspace, where software is primarily a personal artefact, with optional collaboration, rather than a product designed and distributed from centralized organizations.
I'm with the UNIX old timers on this one; cleanliness is overrated. Life is messy, creation is messy. More uptime means more mess. Uptime is longevity; there are few things more valuable in life than longevity.
Yes, you found it. Blancs is the
browser prototype for non-technical users, but the full system, Mycelium, I'm currently working on
towards demos and distribution. I'll be sure to update the YT channel, if you want to follow the progress. I'm also on Twitter @livingsoft_
The author is spot on about the paradigm change of software as a lifeform. Living things provide us with genuine interactions and experiences of learning and growing, without forcing us to understand the code - You can learn to work with animals and plants without understanding their genetics at all. I believe this is how our relationship with software must develop, and in order to get there, we'll need to learn to design and develop software in a completely new way. I've been testing this hypothesis in my spare time, hacking together a server-browser system I call Mycelium. It's a bit like OpenClaw, except you can use it to create private local Webs, and print custom 2D Electron browsers to view and work in these webs.
https://www.youtube.com/@livingsoftw