Shifts in technology lead to transformative shifts in human consciousness.

The last big one happened during the 1960s, after the arrival of television when people began to see images and videos from around the world. For the first time, images from faraway lands traveled into our living rooms. As Marshall McLuhan wrote: “The plight of the slum child, via the TV image, is increasingly extended to the entire population.”

The Vietnam War exemplifies its cultural impact. The protests against it were so heated because Americans saw the blood of warfare and the tears of destruction with their own eyes through the television.

Today’s children have a new way of thinking. Instead of consuming images and videos, they can produce them for a global audience. Teenagers can use GarageBand to make music or high-definition smartphone cameras to make videos. Then, they can publish their music to SoundCloud or their videos to YouTube. TikTok accelerated the trends. The algorithms on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are built upon the “friend graph,” meaning that people you friend or follow are more likely to show up in your feed. But TikTok works differently. The algorithm aims to deliver engaging videos — no matter who made them or where they come from. Away from the spotlight of friends and family, people on TikTok don’t feel the same pressure for perfection that stops them from sharing on other social media platforms. Thus, the percentage of consumers on TikTok who also produce content is much higher than other social media platforms.

The Internet is a global talent show, and TikTok is the American Idol contest. Anybody anywhere can go viral. Kids know this and grow up thinking about how they can make videos for the entire world. In an age of near-infinite information, their rate of learning is limited by discipline — not access to information. Creators don’t need teachers or help from adults. The costs of failure are low, so they know to ignore the conventional wisdom that learning should come before doing. Instead, today’s creatives learn by doing. They take action, improve their craft, and follow the incentives of the algorithm — the same attitude that drives entrepreneurs.

There are social, theoretical, and technological reasons for the coming entrepreneurship explosion.

I’ll take each in turn.

Social: Earlier this week, I had dinner with a friend from college who wants to leave his corporate job. When I asked him what he wants to do instead, he replied, “Start a business, of course.” His words echoed what Tyler Tringas said more explicitly: “The New American Dream is to build a profitable, sustainable, remote software business that can be run from anywhere, scales nicely, and prints money.” Starry-eyed dreamers have grown up seeing entrepreneurs like Tim Ferriss and Emily Weiss on the cover of Forbes and Time Magazine. Like them, some want to start major venture-scale businesses. Others want to bootstrap smaller franchises and software-enabled businesses with recurring revenue and comfortable margins. Those who can start profitable businesses are showered with the praise of social applause, which is amplified for everybody to see on social media.

Technological: The new creation tools are so powerful that they shorten the time it takes for people to go from novice to expert. Much of the knowledge that people used to need is now embedded in the software itself. Musicians, for example, once had to calibrate their ears to become tone literate. Now, GarageBand guarantees a pitch-perfect track and a consistent eight-count beat. Likewise, Unfold makes it easy for creators to publish beautiful Instagram stories because the app’s default settings guarantee a well-balanced image.

Almost all of these platforms have a Software-as-a-Service business model, so entrepreneurs who use them can pay little at the beginning and increase their commitment as their business grows. Here are some examples, inspired by Tyler Tringas:

• Scalable Server Infrastructure: Heroku and Amazon Web Services

• Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• No Code Platforms: Zapier, WebFlow, Airtable, Shopify, and Squarespace

• Basic Operations of Software Businesses: Bench Accounting, Stripe, ConvertKit, Gumroad, Zoom, GreatAssistant, and UpWork

• Ways to Find and Validate Businesses: Traction, Lean Startup, Main Street

You no longer need to be an engineer to build a software-enabled business. I was able to teach more than 400 students in Write of Passage last year because of these tools. I run my live sessions on Zoom, integrate my APIs on Zapier, save my ideas in Evernote, host my curriculum on Teachable and my website on Squarespace, and communicate with you every Monday on ConvertKit.

Theoretical: We’re moving towards a more entrepreneurial economy, which will lead to an explosion of niche software-enabled companies. Investors like Fred Wilson and Marc Andreessen like to recommend a book called Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. The author Carlota Perez studied the four major surges of technological development:

• Industrial Revolution: 1771 – 1829

• Age of Steam and Railways: 1829 – 1873

• Age of Steel and Heavy Engineering: 1975 – 1918

• Age of Oil, Autos, and Mass Production: 1908 – 1974

• The Information and Communications Technology Revolution: Started in 1971 and still happening

According to Perez’s theory, these cycles unfolded in similar ways. As Jerry Neumann explained, “Each is characterized by some critical factor of production suddenly becoming very cheap, some new infrastructure being built, a laissez-faire period of wrenching innovation followed by a bubble, a post-bubble recession, a re-assertion of institutional authority, and then a period of consolidation and wide spread of the gains in productivity from using the new technology.”

Today, we are moving into the “Deployment Age,” characterized by widespread acceptance and application of the new paradigm of information and communications technology. For example, during the Age of Steam and Railways, technologies like the high-pressure steam engine, precision machine parts, and improved metallurgy transformed the global economy by reducing the cost of moving goods quickly and cheaply. Joint-stock companies were born, national markets were for trade and the repeal of tariffs preventing free trade led to economies of scale, and people moved away from their hometowns en masse for the first time. New businesses built upon these new foundations — in the same way, today’s entrepreneurs are building upon the foundations of new information and communications technologies.

Just as Perez’ theory predicts, the majority of companies in the coming entrepreneurship explosion will find markets with existing demand and serve them by integrating existing technologies. Crucially, entrepreneurs move away from risky exploratory projects and towards sustaining innovations with less technological volatility and fewer business failures. Companies created at the end of a technological paradigm are relatively low-risk because their products are cheap to fund and easy for customers to validate.

The combination of these social, technological, and theoretical forces have seeded the coming entrepreneurship explosion. These new companies will be built upon cheap software and founded in industries with low market risk. Thus, they’ll be mostly founded by bootstrappers. And those who raise capital won’t need much of it.

As predicted by my Naked Brands thesis, people on the Internet are increasingly becoming companies. Creatives use the Internet to shrink the world and connect with like-minded people at the tails of the bell curve for obscure interests. Building an online audience is already a leading indicator of entrepreneurial success.

There’s a clear market opportunity for schools, investors, and coaches who focus on teaching people how to create bootstrapped software-enabled businesses. Entrepreneurs with online audiences attract better employees, acquire customers at a lower cost, and benefit from developing specific knowledge in their area of expertise.