I'm trying to think of a better analogy. At first I thought of stagnation, like how a river that gets blocked and can't flow gets filled up with algae and gunk.

But then what you said about software staying the same while the environment changes around it immediately made me think of evolution, Like any species that can't keep up with changes in it's environment, software that is not continuously updated to fit it's.

What do you think?

I think the term of art for this model is "Red Queen's race" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race.

IMO again, this apply only along the social dimension of software. I can still boot up my decade-old computer and use decade-old software to do useful work (hell, many if not most factories do that all the time). I can be screwed over if I go on-line - either by getting pwnd, or by letting the OS update itself - but as long as I stay away from the Internet, the machine will keep working, and so will the software.

(Then again, 'smilliken turned out to be talking about much larger timescales - not decades, but centuries. There, no software artifact will survive, only its mathematical essence.)

It's first-class. They don't exactly encourage scripting in it (which makes sense I think) but you can do what you want really. The engine itself is written in C++, and you can extend/modify it if you want since it's open source and all.

I think the key is to vote third (alternative?) party in smaller elections (mayor, state senate), and then work up.

Voting third party for congress is mostly a waste of time for now, and it doesn't seem likely that we're going to see a massive enough shift in voter participation to change that all in one go, but I think with enough effort to build up non-D/R party support at the local level that could change a lot faster than most people think.

I'm less optimistic about the presidency, really. I doubt the reigning parties will let that slip out of their hands.

Your comment reminded me of a Sci-Fi novel I read when I was a kid, it was a mystery with the background being a fully automated world, a fairly central point was that all vehicles were self-driving. Standing in front of cars to stop them was somewhere between a fad and a minor rebellion against the status quo.

Ever since self-driving cars started being a thing I keep being reminded of this book, and am half-waiting for at lease that part of it to come true.

I've been searching for a bit now, and I still haven't find it. I think it was from the 70s or 80s.

Coils, by Zelazny & Saberhagen? It was first published in 1982.

Bless you, kind internet stranger! That was bugging me so much :)