Photography by Tanner Garza
After moving to Dallas for his wife in 2014, Lakewood neighbor Darryl Campbell became part of the city’s big tech scene. At the time, he was working a remote job for Amazon, but after realizing Dallas had a bigger tech community than he originally thought, Campbell went back to working in person. Since then, he has worked at companies like hotels.com and Uber as well as tiny tech startups that didn’t quite make it off the ground. Through his work with corporate strategy and finance at these businesses, Campbell gained an insider’s perspective but also, eventually, a disillusionment with the industry itself. He says that after years of seeing how strategic and management attitudes in big tech had started to cause people real harm, he knew he had to leave the industry. His new book Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial class Loses Control of Software gives readers a glimpse into the world of big tech and a warning: things will get much worse if the industry continues to prioritize financial statements. We spoke with Campbell about the book’s origins and how he views the tech industry now.
Why did you leave the industry?
The first, sort of immediate thing was that I was at a pair of startups, and they both failed. But I think one of the reasons that I left big tech specifically, and kind of the genesis for the book, is that when I started back in 2010, Google, Apple, Microsoft — the big companies — were not the biggest in the world. They were still kind of underdogs, and there was this sort of utopian idea that we’re making products that are going to make the world better, make us more efficient, drive down costs and so on. Then, around 2015/2016, it felt like the whole industry had changed. It went from being “tech the underdog” to being the 500-pound gorilla. People were using it to create monopoly-like power and to gouge customers out of pricing and to use our data in ways that were more manipulative.
Why did you start writing the book?
Like many people, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands during lockdown. This was right after the two Boeing plane crashes, the 2020 election and accusations that Facebook had really manipulated the way that people were trying to vote. There was this big debate about that, and it really felt like if I put some thought into it, that I could find the common sort of theme behind everything. Everybody’s saying the same thing: ‘I’m running the business to maximize profits, to boost the share price, to return value to shareholders.’ While that’s something companies have done for a long time, there is this special kind of danger that came with technology. For the first time, if you’re an engineer at Facebook, you push a button and whatever you do instantly goes out to three billion people around the world. Whereas 50 years ago, if you’re making a car and you make a little change, that takes 18-24 months to even get in front of customers. There just is no longer that level of restraint.
Photography by Tanner Garza
You spoke about similar themes this year at South by Southwest. How did that go?
South by Southwest is really ‘Rah, rah, technology,’ and what I found really gratifying was that, I don’t have a huge profile, but in a room with a 500-person capacity, it was still probably two-thirds full, and I had 20 minutes of questions afterward. It was really encouraging to see that even within the tech industry and within an event that’s very much still in that utopian optimist mode, there are still a lot of people who say, ‘OK, that’s great. But we also need to think about ways that technology can go wrong.’
Have you gotten any pushback on the book?
I think there’s two main areas where people say, ‘I don’t know about this.’ The first one is a lot of other books on technology say, ‘Mark Zuckerberg is evil or Elon Musk is evil, and you can’t really do anything about that.’ Or it’s like, ‘Oh, this is just capitalism, and you can’t change that.’ I think both of those are very pessimistic world views, whereas for mine, it’s really saying that, ‘Yes, you are going to have these people who are only focused on profit maximizing, but you also have all of these software engineers, developers, coders, whatever, who got into technology, sure, because it’s a lucrative profession, but also because they just believe in that fundamental promise of technology as this useful tool and this potential path to utopia. They actually have a vested interest in making that happen and the power to be a counterweight to some of these more financially focused strategies. Mark Zuckerberg can do whatever he wants, but he really depends on these tens of thousands of programmers.’
Through the process of writing this book and working in tech, have you found a community that shares your views?
I’ve been surprised at how receptive a lot of people are. I think especially because a lot of them are my age or younger, it’s like this rising generation of people who maybe haven’t had these big CEO-type roles before, but they’re going to get there in the next couple of years. They’re increasingly concerned that the industry that they’ve loved for so long has been kind of derailed by people who just come from a different generation. There’s this really big groundswell of interest in that.
What are some of the main takeaways you hope readers get out of the book?
The first one is that while people always have to pay attention to their finances, that can’t be the only way that people think about the direction of their company. There’s no market pressure that can force Boeing to make safe software. You just have to decide that that’s a goal to have. The second is that most of the problems that we’ve seen with technology are not because the software is inherently evil or unfixable, but it’s just because a lot of this stuff is really rushed and the people don’t have the level of quality control and thought that they really need to put in to make it properly safe. The third one is that there actually is this large group of people who can be counterweight to the profit maximizers and the managers who are only able to think in terms of finance.
How did the Dallas tech scene influence your writing?
People don’t think about Dallas as a tech city, but I think it’s really interesting both in terms of places where tech companies expand to but then also just the way that people talk about technology and how they integrate it into their lives. It’s very different than like San Francisco or Austin, where it is very much everybody has to be on the super cutting edge and talk about technology 10 ways to whatever. Dallas is that happy medium of places where people just want to get on with their day, and they want the tools that make things better. I think that’s a really useful lens and probably why I don’t think I could have written this book if I were in a place like San Francisco.
Fatal Abstraction is available at your local bookstore, Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble and wherever books are sold.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
