Science & Tech Quote by Marc Andreessen

Andreessen’s line is a venture capitalist’s version of a weather report: not a prediction so much as a claim about inevitability, delivered with the calm authority of someone who benefits from the storm. The intent is strategic. By naming everything from “movies” to “agriculture” to “national defense,” he’s not just describing digitization; he’s widening the blast radius. If software eats the world, then every sector becomes fair game for Silicon Valley’s tools, talent, and capital. The rhetorical trick is the list: it collapses cultural life, food systems, and state power into a single category of “industries,” all equally legible as platforms waiting to be optimized.

The subtext is more pointed: if these domains are “delivered as online services,” then the real prize isn’t the product, it’s the interface and the distribution pipeline. Control shifts from makers and institutions to whoever owns the code, the data, and the network effects. “Run on software” sounds neutral, almost hygienic; it quietly swaps democratic accountability for technical management, and local knowledge for scalable abstraction. Even “national defense” gets treated like another vertical, which normalizes the idea that sovereignty can be mediated by private infrastructure.

Context matters. Andreessen popularized “software is eating the world” in the early 2010s, when smartphones, cloud computing, and venture-backed platforms were turning entire industries into apps, subscriptions, and APIs. Read now, the sentence also foreshadows the backlash: dependence on brittle systems, monopoly power, and the unease of outsourcing essential functions to companies whose primary obligation is growth.