The Silicon Horizon

Software as Continuous Extraction

We began with the Silicon Exchange, where software first entered the home as a physical commodity. Cartridges were sold, inserted, and owned. We moved to the Silicon Border, where chip manufacturing was framed as a sovereignty project and turned out to be an exercise in managed dependency. This final stop is the Silicon Horizon, where the material story ends and software becomes the primary site of value extraction.

By 2026, the limits are no longer theoretical. Advanced nodes exist, but they are expensive, politically sensitive, and increasingly constrained by energy, yield, and supply chains. Whatever gains remain in silicon are marginal. The center of gravity has moved. Value is no longer created primarily at the hardware level. It is extracted above it.

Abstraction and Loss of Constraint

In the late 1970s, software had physical boundaries. It shipped on cartridges or disks. The code was fixed. If it had flaws, those flaws persisted. Improvement required replacement. Distribution required manufacturing and logistics.

Those constraints mattered. They enforced finality. Software behaved more like hardware because it had to.

That phase is over. Software now exists primarily as access rather than possession. It is delivered through platforms, accounts, and subscriptions. The code may run locally, but control does not. Updates are continuous. Ownership has been replaced by permission.

This shift did not just change how software is sold. It changed how it behaves. Once software could be modified remotely and continuously, it ceased to be a finished object. It became a process. That process is optimized for revenue capture rather than completion.

The Collapse of the Middle Layer

For most of the industry’s history, software development involved a large middle layer of human work. Ideas had to be translated into implementations by people who understood both intent and machinery. That translation imposed limits. It forced tradeoffs. It created accountability.

This shift has also been noted by Karri Saarinen, CEO of Linear, who has argued recently that the traditional middle of software work, the layer translating intent into implementation, is disappearing under agent-based workflows.

Agent-based development collapses that layer. Systems now accept goals and context and generate functional code with minimal human involvement. The role of the developer shifts from builder to reviewer. The tooling reflects this. Editors increasingly function as inspection surfaces rather than places where work happens.

The focus moves away from how things are built and toward what they produce. This is presented as efficiency. It is also a loss of internal knowledge. When the translation layer disappears, so does the intuition that comes from doing the work yourself.

Organizations retain responsibility for outcomes while losing the ability to reproduce the process that generated them. The system works until it doesn’t. When it fails, diagnosis becomes negotiation.

Pricing Follows Architecture

As production changes, pricing changes with it.

Traditional licenses made sense when software was a discrete object. Subscriptions made sense when software became a service. Outcome-based pricing emerges when software becomes an actor.

If an agent performs the work, the provider no longer sells tools. It sells results. Billing moves from access to execution. Costs scale with dependence.

This is not incidental. It is the logical endpoint of abstraction. Once the user no longer understands or controls the mechanism, pricing can be tied directly to success metrics. The software captures value continuously, not at the point of sale.

At this stage, software begins to resemble infrastructure that negotiates its own terms. It is not neutral. It enforces economic relationships through design.

Managed Systems, Diminished Understanding

Agentic systems are increasingly used to handle operational complexity. Customer support, internal tooling, logistics coordination, and monitoring are delegated to automated processes. This is framed as freeing humans to focus on strategy.

In practice, it produces a familiar pattern. Systems grow more capable while the people overseeing them grow less familiar with their operation. Control becomes indirect. Oversight becomes statistical.

The organization becomes dependent on systems it cannot meaningfully interrogate. Understanding is replaced by dashboards. When something breaks, the response is not repair but adjustment.

This is manageable for a time. It becomes brittle over longer horizons.

After the Hardware Story Ends

The reason this series ends here is simple. The silicon story has largely resolved. The remaining battles are about distribution of scarcity, not technological breakthroughs. The real changes are happening in software, where abstraction allows continuous modification, pricing leverage, and dependency.

The Silicon Exchange was about ownership.
The Silicon Border was about dependency.
The Silicon Horizon is about autonomy without comprehension.

Software no longer behaves like a tool. It behaves like a system that requires ongoing accommodation. The world it produces is cleaner and more efficient. It is also harder to understand and harder to exit.

From a distance, this looks like progress. Up close, it looks like management replacing craft, and extraction replacing completion.

That may be sustainable. It may even be profitable. But it is not neutral, and it is not free.