The year is 2030.

What we got instead was an enormous proliferation of software systems. Software was everywhere, and everything was code, until physical reality and the systems that interacted with it became intertwined. Many of the world’s old problems had yielded to obscene levels of automation. In their place came new ones: we could build things we no longer knew how to govern.

Organizations hit the limits of their ability to manage what they had made. We still hadn’t learned how to work together or connect the parts into something coherent. Those remained human decisions, dependent on architectural taste, strategy, common sense, art, and science, all mixed together. Machines could produce implementations by the thousand, but someone still had to decide which were worth building and what would happen when they touched everything else.

Engineers became alchemists, conjuring what seemed like limitless capacity for work from the ether. Their abstractions took shape in physical and virtual structures unlike anything the world had seen. Problems that had occupied generations became tractable in a laboratory or on a borrowed cluster of machines.

The world remains a vicious market built on the labor of people maintaining its hulking mass of systems and integrations. A company that began with one useful application could find itself running infrastructure for hospitals, banks, and governments. Its first expedient decisions survived beneath every expansion, acquiring dependencies until replacing them threatened everything built above.

In the Monolith era, metaphors from software’s past are descriptions of the world people live in. Civilization rested on foundations nobody had intended to make permanent, and fortunes belonged to those who could keep them standing while building something larger. The railroad tycoons had returned, with antitrust suits in one hand and election money in the other.

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Who are you?

An upstart with a vision and a growing organization to make it real, with funds to raise, staff to employ, compute to secure, and more demands than your people can meet. At the center sits your own Monolith: a piece of software that works, carries debt, and must somehow support what you intend to become.

Your goal is to win at all costs. The consequences are dire and existential for your organization, your reputation, and the vision you have persuaded other people to spend their lives pursuing. Build an empire, survive when others fail, or bring about the technological breakthrough that makes this whole struggle obsolete.

Godspeed.