This sense of magical control can be intoxicating and fun; it lends itself frequently to a sort of starry-eyed idealism. And it can also lead, particularly in younger coders—who’ve yet to be humbled by life and their own screw-ups—to some epic hubris. People who excel at programming, notes the coder and tech-culture critic Maciej Cegłowski, often “become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.” Or as the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum noted in 1976, “one would have to be astonished if Lord Acton’s observation that power corrupts were not to apply in an environment in which omnipotence is so easily achievable.”