“Software is eating the world,” Marc Andreesen wrote in 2011. He meant the ongoing integration of computers and the software they run into aspects of our daily lives. That the biggest companies of today are fundamentally software companies — Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook.

Software is what allows us to stay connected and online, informed and notified, streaming and uploading 24/7. Software has also changed how companies and administrations work. Databases are now used to not only keep track of things and people and information about them, but also generate statistics about them. Computers track many pieces of information about them, their surroundings, and you. Many non-computer devices include computers to work, and software to control them.

What’s mostly kept secret though, is the source code to that software. Companies argue that they need to do so in order to protect their business. For consumers, though, it means nobody can actually verify what the software is really doing.

And that’s a problem. Because software is buggy. Not just the apps and websites you use, but all software.

The car you’re driving has software with bugs in it. Bugs that can cause your car to accelerate when you didn’t tell it to, causing accidents and deaths.

The software used to analyze DNA evidence has bugs in it, causing innocent people to be convicted of crimes they might not have committed.

Smartcards are vulnerable too. A recently discovered crypto weakness opens millions of smartcards to cloning due to a weakness in how they generate random numbers. Don’t have a smartcard, you think? Your bank and credit card have tiny chips with software in them.

Since almost everything is running software, almost everything can be vulnerable to bugs and security exploits.

There’s no easy way to prevent these things from happening. But solutions won’t happen unless people start to complain, boycott, or sue because of faulty software and its effects. There’s a big difference between a bug that prevents you from viewing the latest posts of your friends, and one that leaves your bank account open to anyone, but at their core, they continue to exist because we’ve learned to live with the bugs, and don’t complain any more.

Bugs are not just a technical problem, they’re also a social problem when we just accept them

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