THE POINT OF AN ECONOMY:

LIKE ANY SENTIENT person, you've noticed that software is eating the world, to use venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's famous phrase. You've seen Facebook swallow the public sphere, Uber overhaul urban transportation, Instagram supercharge selfie culture, and Amazon drop off your shopping within 24 hours. Technological innovators generally boast that their services change the world or make life more convenient, but underpinning everything they do is speed. Whatever you were doing before--hailing a cab, gossiping with a friend, buying toothpaste--now happens faster. The thrust of Silicon Valley is always to take human activity and shift it into metabolic overdrive. And maybe you've wondered, why the heck is that? Why do techies insist that things should be sped up, torqued, optimized?

There's one obvious reason, of course: They do it because of the dictates of the market. Capitalism handsomely rewards anyone who can improve a process and squeeze some margin out. But with software, there's something else going on too. For coders, efficiency is more than just a tool for business. It's an existential state, an emotional driver.

Coders might have different backgrounds and political opinions, but nearly every one I've ever met found deep, almost soulful pleasure in taking something inefficient--even just a little bit slow--and tightening it up a notch. Removing the friction from a system is an aesthetic joy; coders' eyes blaze when they talk about making something run faster or how they eliminated some bothersome human effort from a process.

This passion for efficiency isn't unique to software developers. Engineers and inventors have long been motivated by it. During the early years of industrialization, engineers elevated the automation of everyday tasks to a moral good. The engineer was humanity's "redeemer from despairing drudgery and burdensome labor," as Charles Hermany, an engineer himself, wrote in 1904. Frederick Winslow Taylor--the inventor of Taylorism, which helped lay the groundwork for manufacturing assembly lines--inveighed against the "awkward, inefficient or ill-directed movements of men." Frank Gilbreth fretted over wasted movements in everything from bricklaying to vest buttoning, while his industrial-­engineering partner and wife, Lillian Evelyn Gilbreth, designed kitchens such that the number of steps in making a strawberry shortcake was reduced "from 281 to 45," as The Better Homes Manual enthused in 1931.

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