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equality either. Partly this is because of something Janelle spotted: The remarkable advantage, the wealth and opportunity, that accrues to the people and nations and businesses that can compress space and time. Die Ware liebt das Geld, Marx famously wrote: Commodities love money. Speed is now the decisive commodity – and it loves money. (The feeling is mutual.) Velocity lets us achieve that ancient goal of doing more with less. The race for speed lights something competitive: The faster I go, the faster you feel you need to go, the more powerfully you feel your slowness.

The centripetal charm of acceleration, the way that speed attracts us, and then makes us demand even more speed, honestly surprised the earliest architects of steamships and rail and airlines and roads. They under-guessed how popular their tools of space-time compression would be. Surely the maximum number of people who would ever want to zip from LA to New York would be about 1,000 per week, jet airline pioneers assumed. Would more than a few hundred engineers really want their own computers, Gordon Moore asked at a dinner party shortly after Intel proposed putting his chips in the first PCs. Yes, it turned out. Billions more. Highway designers call this surprise “induced traffic”: The faster a highway, the more people pile onto it. Urban planners in Los Angeles in the 1950s looked at their packed, congested roads and thought they could fix them by adding lanes. They embarked on construction programs, tore up the transportation network that girded the city and built a new one featuring optimistic 20-lane highways as wide as a football field and flat as a plate. Traffic got worse.

Say’s famous economic law that “supply creates its own demand” seems especially fulfilled in an age where velocity is so valuable. Speed too creates its own demand. The faster any one piece of the network starts to rattle and move, the more profoundly we notice how slow the leftover bits are. We want them accelerated too. Total network bandwidth grew by an heroic factor of 1000 times between 2005 and 2010. Speed? It increased by just 20 times. Induced traffic.

What is it, exactly, that we’re so hungry for? The extreme end of fast connectivity is what computer systems designers call “statefulness” – a word that has nothing to do with states like nations, but rather with the condition of a connection, the “state” it is in. Early electrical circuits were either in a charged or uncharged “state”, switched on or off. Today when we talk about a “stateful” connection, we mean a link that we maintain, always on. It’s the difference between a video call and a letter, between looking at your wife here and now (a “stateful connection”) and a photograph of her (“stateless”). Real-time everywhere connection doesn’t merely kill distance; it attacks delay too. Older generations would “break state” when they left family at home or friends at school with a “see you later.” Our generation? “See you always”. We never quite leave. Technology permits us to remain in constant touch this way, to neve break state. “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, that’s what I’d want in life,” the milenial writer Marina Keegan wrote in a famous essay that captured more than a little of this zeitgeist. “More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web that we’re in. This elusive,

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