We Just Build Hammers is divided into four parts, each corresponding to a different era of massive social and technological upheaval. Each part consists of three chapters. The first introduces an author who used speculative fiction to explore the question of the ethical obligations of technologists. Next, we meet the people who were influenced by their writing, directly or indirectly, and were inspired to factor social responsibility into their own work. The third chapter in each part describes what actually happened in the aftermath.
In 1913, futurist and science fiction author H.G. Wells published The World Set Free, a future-history describing the political and social consequences of a world-changing discovery: the harnessing of atomic energy. Physicist Leo Szilard read the book in 1932, and a year later, conceived the idea of neutron chain reactions. He assigned his patent to the British War Office to keep it safe from the wider scientific community, writing: “Knowing what this would mean—and I knew it because I had read H. G. Wells—I did not want this patent to become public.” His ideas, and Wells’s warnings, were instrumental during the Manhattan Project, and especially to the subsequent efforts of scientists to mitigate the threat of worldwide atomic warfare.
Part Two brings the early years of computing into focus. We learn about Edmund Berkeley, who published the first computer magazine and co-founded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 1958, he published a thought-provoking editorial titled “The Parable of the Locksmith,” which tells the story of a hypothetical locksmith who is approached by a mysterious stranger offering untold wealth in exchange for opening a safe under suspicious circumstances. We learn about his lifelong pursuit of ethics in computing and the barriers he faced as someone unafraid to confront ethical indifference.
In 1992, Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash, a seminal cyberpunk novel that introduced the concept of a globally networked, three-dimensional alternate reality called the Metaverse. The book is set in a dystopian future where technology is the primary tool of economic and class-based oppression. Only the efforts of disregarded high-tech anti-heroes can save the world, by subverting and undermining corporate control of society. The reader will learn how these ideas helped shape the hacker ethos of the 90s and framed the early internet’s ideological conflict between monopolistic tech companies and open source revolutionaries.
As the father of Afro-Futurism, Samuel Delany is among the most well-regarded sci-fi writers of the 20th century. His 1976 novel Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia imagines a future in which humanity has colonized the solar system, and describes the intense cultural conflict between the anachronistic dystopia of Earth and the anarchistic heterotopia of Neptune’s moon Triton. A central theme of the book is the social impact of technology on power structures and intersectional identities. This theme is of increasing relevance today, as the internet witnesses the clash between a new wave of activist-technologists and the status quo of the modern technology industry.