This went up first on my own site. I'm cross-posting it here because the people it concerns most are the ones who type for a living. I say that as one of them, and as someone who builds the systems making the typing free.
Between 2004 and 2012 I broke into computer systems. It turned out to be an education in economics disguised as a technical career. Every wall I climbed existed for one reason: something behind it was scarce. Money. Data. Access. Reputation. And every time a wall came down, the scarcity behind it refused to die. It moved. Somewhere else in the system something ordinary quietly became precious, and the game reorganized around the new treasure before most players noticed the board had changed.
I don't break into systems anymore. I build them, and for the past few years I've been building the kind that makes skilled work cheap. So read this as a confession as much as a claim. I'm one of the people flooding the valley, and I'm writing about where the water goes.
The law
Technology never destroys value. It relocates scarcity, and value pools at the next binding constraint.
