There’s an awful lot I could quote in this excellent piece by Paul Ford in Wired, but this part really got me:
Everyone living has spent the majority of their existence in the shadow of automated computation. It has been a story of joy, of mostly men in California and Seattle inventing a future under the occasional influence of LSD, soldering and hot-tubbing, and underneath it all an extraordinary glut of the most important raw material imaginable—processor cycles, the result of a perfect natural order in which the transistors on the chips kept doubling, speeds in the kilo-, mega-, and eventually gigahertz, as if the camera had zoomed in on an old IBM industrial wall clock that sped up until its minute hand was a blur, and then the hour hand, and then the clock caught fire and melted to the ground, at which point money started shooting out of the hole in the wall.