2026-05-05 –, Ballroom
Campbell's Law states, "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
If we go deep, and wide in our thinking, just how far do the implications of Campbell's Law reach and what does it tell us about measurement, control, and corruption? In five minutes I'm going to explain how Campbell's law (or at least what it points us to) applies to everything we do... Everything!
Measurements used for control purposes can corrupt systems especially when you are measuring peoples behavior and coupling those measurements with incentive structures. But there are multiple laws that parallel Campbell's Law, and derivatives of Campbell's Law as well. These span multiple fields of study. Here I'm going to push Campbell's law to the maximum and apply it to everything...
Darren Carpenter (and both of his parents) were born in Los Alamos, New Mexico and were all probably raised on renaissance principles, plutonium and tritium (grandpa helped build the bombs, but shhhh...). As far as he knows their neutron emission levels are low enough to make any one or certain combinations of two of them safe to be around, at least in casual company. Darren lived The Phoenix Project as a sort dispositioner, performing and automating away the job role at Intel's Fab 11 in Rio Rancho, New Mexico in 1996 (It's all about the Pentiums!). He kept trying to do DevOps-like stuff blissfully unaware of the movement, or how he was helping fuel it, until about 2016. He finally got around to joining the ranks of the Austin DevOps community in 2018. Being a renaissance guy, he has done lots of different stuff in high-tech, but usually with a strong dose of software automation and a sprinkling of just about everything else too. If you are looking for a nuclear powered automation unicorn, Darren might be interested, especially for short or long-term consulting. When not DevOpsing, he is usually figuring out how to safely divulge all of the non-classified secrets he knows before his second half-life expires and the quantum behaviors in his neuronal microtubules lose any sense of long-range coherence (or Orch OR).