We Just Build Hammers Recap: Exploring Cyberpunk, Open Source Ethics, and the Hacker Ethos
Our third session of the (m)otherboard book club tackled the cyberpunk chapter of Coraline's book, diving into the world of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the open source movement, and the complex legacy of hacker culture. What emerged was a rich conversation about individual agency, systemic power, and the moral responsibilities of technologists.
🎵 Setting the Tone with Steely Dan Coraline opened with a delightful revelation: Steely Dan was her writing soundtrack for this very chapter! The connection runs deeper—William Gibson, who arguably invented cyberpunk with Neuromancer, also listened to Steely Dan while writing, embedding references to the band throughout his novels.
"I feel ashamed of the generation of my peers who put us in this situation... They used our own better natures against us." – Coraline on the co-optation of hacker ideals
🏛️ Conway's Law in Action Eric brought forward Conway's Law—the principle that "the technology an organization produces reflects the internal structure of the organization." This sparked discussion about how this pattern scales from individual families to entire societies, raising questions about whether individual technologists can truly influence outcomes within larger organizational systems.
🐑 The Softness Problem in Sci-Fi Mara shared insights from science fiction author Arkady Martine about the difficulty of capturing "soft and deep" qualities in speculative fiction. While cyberpunk excels at depicting scale and ambition (like 20-kilometer towers), it struggles to represent slower, wider, deeper transformations—a limitation that may reflect our broader cultural blindness to gradual, systemic change.
"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." – Referenced by Mara (originally Fredric Jameson)
🪛 The Agency Paradox Emily and Eric explored a fascinating tension: while the original hacker ethic emphasized hands-on control and understanding, today's AI systems create the opposite—opacity and powerlessness. Eric's hilarious (and mortifying) story of accidentally texting his daughter profanity via Siri illustrated how we've moved from agency to vulnerability in our relationship with technology.
9️⃣ The Nine vs. One Dilemma Coraline posed a powerful ethical thought experiment: If ten people could implement harmful technology and nine refuse on ethical grounds while one proceeds anyway, wouldn't you rather be among the nine? This framed individual responsibility within collective action, suggesting that maintaining personal ethics has value even when harmful outcomes seem inevitable.
🦸🏻♂️ Beyond Individual Heroes A key theme emerged around moving beyond the "individual hero engineer" model that characterized early hacker culture. Coraline emphasized the need for systems thinking and collective action, setting up the book's final section which promises to explore alternatives to individual-focused approaches.
"We have to be system thinkers if we want to have any chance whatsoever of impacting the course of events." – Coraline on evolving beyond individual agency
Next Up: Section IV
The conversation beautifully bridged past and present, showing how cyberpunk fiction both warned of and inadvertently enabled our current technological predicament. As we approach the book's final section, the group is primed to explore alternatives to both individual heroism and capitalist inevitability.
Next session promises to reveal Coraline's vision for what comes after recognizing the limitations of the hacker ethos—moving from "we just build hammers" to something more collectively transformative.
We extend a very warm invitation to join us for our final session and celebration on Wednesday, May 28 at 7 PM CT / 8 PM ET. This is your chance to catch up, drop in, and sync up as we dive into section IV and reflect on the book as a whole together. Sign up for book club here!
In collective solidarity,
The God(m)others