Re Douglas Rushkoff’s recent broadside, Are jobs obsolete? (with national unemployment and underemployment sky-high): Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen of Andreessen-Horowitz recently observed that “qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want.”

The reason: “more and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services by Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies, which are invading and overturning established industry structures,” Andreessen says.

“More than 10 years after the peak of the late-1990s dot-com bubble, the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale,” he says. “With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired — the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.”