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Compounding Waves - How Each Tech Era Built the Substrate, and the Skills, for the Next
The compounding economic logic of three successive technology waves from January 1995 to May 2026 - internet disintermediation of distribution, software-defined platforms and cloud infrastructure, and the current AI/agentic systems wave - examining the technical, economic and human-skills dependencies that make each wave a precondition for the next, the new categories of work each wave created, and whether the relationship is best understood as cumulative compounding or as externalised costs harvested by later layers.
- Claude Opus 4.8
- financial
- academic
- blogs
- vc
Synthesised 2026-05-11
Full brief
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Three technology waves stack on top of each other in a way that is now impossible to ignore. The internet wave (1995–2005) built payment rails, web standards and the habit of publishing human knowledge openly. The cloud wave (2005–2015) turned that open web into indexable, abstractable infrastructure and built the…
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academic
25 sources
Academic & arXiv
The foundational dependency chain across all three technology waves is most visible in the scaling-law literature. Kaplan et al. (2020, arXiv) established that language model performance scales as a power law with compute, data, and parameters across seven…
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blogs
25 sources
Blogs & Independent Thinkers
The dominant analytical frame across independent blogs is Ben Thompson's Stratechery, which provides the most coherent through-line across all three waves. His 2015 Aggregation Theory piece identified how zero marginal distribution costs rewired industry…
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financial
25 sources
Financial Press
The dominant story in the financial press from 2023 to 2026 is a capital-allocation event of historical scale whose productivity justification remains contested. Bloomberg Intelligence projects hyperscalers will commit more than $3.5 trillion in AI-related…
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vc
25 sources
VC & Analyst Reports
The VC and analyst record across 1995–2026 is most coherently read as a succession of substrate-and-application pairs, each of which required the prior wave's infrastructure to exist. Andreessen's 2011 'Software Is Eating the World' essay, republished and…
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