Darryl Campbell’s Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software seeks to explain the unexplainable digital webs around us. Campbell is both a veteran of the tech world (having worked at Amazon, Uber, Tinder, and other firms) and a chronicler of it (as a former reporter at The Verge). Armed with this experience and perspective, he tells the story of the rise of “managerial software” and the takeover of the tech industry by a class of narrow-minded, bungling elite managers. Fatal Abstraction gets at something essential by placing the unholy marriage of managerialism and software at the center of modern tech’s dysfunctions, but he misattributes their cause. For the unity between software and the managers, between the Computer Revolution and the Managerial Revolution, is no arbitrary, reversible thing but the reflection of an enduring tension between the growth of information and the need for control. Software has not been co-opted by managerialism; it is co-constitutive with it…

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