1. Marc Andreesen's "Software is eating the world" investment theory.
2. The history of the robber baron era in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Technologies like steamboats, steel, railroads, oil, etc. also arose first in industries where they were "strictly beneficial" and let people do things they couldn't otherwise do. But by the early 1900s, they'd started eating other industries. The automobile eliminated the professions of carriage drivers and horseback riders. Oil eliminated the whaling industry. Textile manufacturing moved from water-power mills in New England to steam & oil-powered mills in the South. The largest single occupation in 1900 was "domestic servant" - by the 1950s, it no longer existed, because home appliances had completely replaced the job.
All of these involved significant dislocation of workers, and the corresponding political blowback. There was a large anarcho-communist movement in the U.S. from the 1890s to 1920s [1], including violence and bomb scares [2]. We almost became a fascist country in 1933 [3], a "counterrevolution" of sorts to FDR's New Deal.
But that doesn't mean we'd want to return to a world where we didn't have cars, horseshit lines the streets, whales are extinct, everybody sleeps at dusk, and the bulk of the population works in textiles or domestic service. The process of getting here wasn't easy, but all of the political upheaval and human dislocation was very necessary to build the world we have now.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_the_United_States#...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_United_States_anarchist_bo...