the solvent that is not consumed

Part two of four in “into solution,” on what software does to a problem when you take the word literally. Each part stands alone.

“Software is the true universal solvent” has three words in it that have to carry the claim, and dissolve is the easy one. A burden is friction that recurs, and dissolving it means redesigning its environment so nobody does the task afterward. Fine. But universal sounds like the kind of thing people say at conferences, and true sounds like a claim against somebody.

Both are doing precise work. Here is what they mean.

why universal

Water gets called the universal solvent, and the reason is not that it dissolves everything. It doesn’t. Water is polar — its charge sits unevenly, positive at one end, negative at the other — so it pulls apart anything held together by ionic or polar bonds, and walks straight past everything else. It dissolves one kind of thing. That kind happens to be most of what is around.

Every technology dissolves a burden. The wheel dissolved carrying. The plow dissolved digging. But each of them is one solvent for one solute, and a plow dissolves nothing in the world but soil.

Software is different in kind, and the reason is Turing’s. A universal machine can imitate any other machine, given a description of it. Software is not a tool; it is the medium that tools are described in, and in that medium the description is the tool. There is no fixed shape to argue with. Whatever structure the burden has, software takes that structure.

Which gives the line its chemistry. Software’s polarity is describability. The bonds holding a burden together are procedural — this, then this, then this, every Tuesday, unless it’s a holiday. Those are ionic bonds. They come apart on contact. “Software is the universal solvent” is the Church–Turing thesis read from the problem’s side instead of the machine’s: anything statable as an effective procedure can be run as one, so any burden with that shape can be dissolved.

“Universal” is not hyperbole and it is not a boast. It is a boundary condition. The solvent’s reach stops exactly where describability stops, and for seventy years that was a hard stop.

the solvent that is not consumed

Here is where the chemistry runs out, and where it runs out is the most important fact about software.

Every physical solvent has a capacity. Water saturates; past a point the salt sits on the bottom and stays there. To dissolve more you need more water, and the water you used is now salt water and cannot be used again for free. The solvent is spent in the act.

Software is not spent. Once a burden is dissolved, dissolving it again costs nothing — not less, nothing. The second run and the millionth run cost the same as each other, which is to say they cost nothing worth measuring. Every economics of software starts from this fact, and the fact is also what makes solvent the right noun rather than tool. A tool is used. A solvent takes something into itself, and software will take an unbounded quantity of the same burden into itself without ever filling up. It burns and is not consumed.

Which brings up the rival claimant. Social theory has had a universal solvent for a hundred and seventy years and it is not software, it is money. All that is solid melts into air, as Marx and Engels had it in 1848, writing about what a market economy does to every fixed relation it touches. There is a whole literature behind that line on money as the thing that reduces every qualitative difference — honor, craft, place, obligation — to one number anybody can hold.

Money is a real solvent. It is the weaker one.

Money moves a burden. Software is the first solvent that removes one without handing it to anybody. That is what the word true is doing in the third line of my offer. One person with a laptop and a clear head routinely dissolves what a department could not buy its way out of, because what gets spent is not a quantity.

the salt is still there

The part of the metaphor almost everyone drops: salt in water is still salt.

It is dispersed. It is invisible. It is evenly distributed through a medium that does not look like it is doing anything. And it is all still there — boil the water off and every grain comes back. Nothing was destroyed. The arrangement changed.

That is the exact status of a burden software has dissolved. The reconciliation still happens. The rule is still enforced. The invoice still goes out on the first. The work is done, nightly, by a process nobody watches and most people in the building could not name. It has gone into solution.

This is where my line and the famous one part company. Andreessen’s 2011 version is that software is eating the world, and eating is a verb about destruction and digestion and one party getting smaller. Dissolving is a verb about dispersal and retention. What software did to the record store was not consume it; there is more music more available to more people than at any point in history, and it is dispersed into a medium nobody looks at. Dispatching did not end when the dispatcher’s office closed. Dispatching now happens continuously, everywhere, for everyone, invisibly, millions of times an hour. The verb matters. Eating is the wrong one, and the industry has been quoting the wrong one for fifteen years.

There is a version of this in sociology, and it is worth having: we never eliminate labor with our artifacts, we delegate it to things that are not people and then stop seeing that we delegated it. We see it again only when the thing fails, at which point the whole delegation surfaces at once and turns into an object we have to deal with. The broken hammer, back again.

Dissolved is not eliminated. Dissolved is everywhere and unseen. The work runs into the system and the system is never full.

the obvious objection

Anyone who has worked near an IT department for more than a year has the counterargument ready, and it is a good one: most software does not dissolve anything. Most software is a burden. The rollout that replaced one phone call with eleven required fields. The approval chain that grew a fourth approver because the system supported it. The dashboard nobody reads and somebody updates every Friday. If software is a solvent, the beaker is full of sediment and the sediment is shaped like a change-request form.

All of that is true and none of it touches the claim, for a reason Ackoff’s four treatments already name. Almost every system like that is solving, dressed up as dissolving and funded as transformation. Someone now runs a tool. The task did not stop existing; it acquired a login. The test is unforgiving — after the project, does anybody still do the thing? Run it honestly across the software you have personally shipped or suffered and the answer is no for most of it, which tells you dissolving is rare, not that it is unreal.

The rest of the objection is better still, because the failures are not exceptions to the model. They are the model’s own prediction. A system that adds eleven fields is a system where the burden did not fit the description it was given, and what did not fit does not disappear. It comes back out as a solid.

So the claim is not that software removes burdens. The claim is that software is the only medium we have ever had in which dissolving one is cheap — and cheap enough that it gets attempted carelessly, by people who have not asked what else goes with it.

What else goes with it is the rest of this.

Sources: Why is water the universal solvent?, USGS ↗ · Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 1, Moore trans. ↗

Works cited without a link: Turing, “On Computable Numbers” (1936) · Simmel, Philosophy of Money (1900) · Latour (as Jim Johnson), “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together” (1988) · Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World” (2011). Figures still in copyright are paraphrased, not quoted.