Code makes efficiency and scale easy, seductive, almost inevitable. That is also why programmers fit so easily into business building and part of why some slide so frequently into libertarian thinking. Their talents are torqued perfectly for capitalism’s central trick, which is, basically, “do something marginally more efficiently than before and then skim off the profit.” Mind you, software also, by its very nature, weird-ifies a lot of the assumptions of capitalism. A piece of software is a thing, a machine that does something, so you can own it; but because it’s also a form of speech, it can be easily shared. And so it is shared, almost incessantly. Coders are remarkably chatty and open about their everyday work, regularly posting their software problems to online forums and spending hours helping other people solve theirs. (A study in the ’80s concluded that coders were “less loyal to their employers than to their profession.”) Even in the bowels of the most rapaciously capitalistic Silicon Valley firm are coders who spend a lot of time—at their desk, at work—helping solve the bugs of other randos. And there’s often a communitarian spirit in the worlds of free and open source software, where coders often contribute work freely, to software that anyone can also use themselves, freely.