Philosopher Noam Chomsky is famously quoted as saying that technology is neither good nor bad, but simply a neutral tool. He likens it to a hammer, which can be used by carpenters and torturers alike. While the neutrality of tech is an idea that appeals to many technologists, this perspective is out of alignment with today's realities of pervasive ad-tech, surveillance capitalism, algorithmic manipulation, and rising techno-fascism.
We Just Build Hammers applies a lens of speculative and science fiction to connect you with a historical lineage of thinkers and activists in the responsible tech movement. Its narrative spans a century of major technological upheavals: from the advent of the atomic age to the formative years of computing; from the hacker visionaries of the turn of the century to the tech justice revolutionaries of today.
This book challenges technologists to consider for themselves whether they're really just ""building hammers""– technologies whose potential for good balances their potential for harm– or if they are unwittingly contributing to systems that exacerbate inequality, inequity, and injustice.
What You Will Learn
A historic grounding and a science fiction perspective to help untangle the difficult and fraught topic of tech ethics Ways to bring ethical considerations into the development of new technologies How to navigate the increasing complexity of the techno-social world we live and work in
Who This Book is For
Designed to appeal broadly, not just to engineers and technologists, but to anyone interested in the history and future of ethics and technology.
By:
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Imprint: APress
Country of Publication: Germany
Dimensions:
Height: 235mm,
Width: 155mm,
ISBN: 9798868812484
Pages: 261
Publication Date: 27 February 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Part One: A Snare to Catch the Sun.- Chapter 1: ""A Snare to Catch the Sun"" summarizes the H.G. Wells book The World Set Free and its predictions for the dangers and benefits to the world in an imagined atomic age..- Chapter 2: ""The War to End All Wars"" traces the impact of Wells's book on one of the most important physicists to work on the Manhattan Project..- Chapter 3: . ""The World Set Free?"" explores how scientists responded to the devastating technology they had unleashed on the world, from the Doomsday Clock to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist..- Part Two: The Parable of the Locksmith Part Two brings the early years of computing into focus. We learn about computing pioneer 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..- Chapter 4: . ""The Parable of the Locksmith"" recounts a thought experiment intended to explore questions about the social and ethical responsibilities of technologists..- Chapter 5: ""Machines That Think"" tells the story of Edmund Berkeley, who fought to bring ethical considerations to the nascent field of computing..- Chapter 6: ""Machines That Kill"" reveals the response to Berkeley's calls for responsible tech. Speaking at the 1972 ACM 30th anniversary event, he challenged his colleagues– by name– who were working on military applications of computer technologies to quit their jobs, prompting most of his audience to walk out..- Part Three: Walking Around, a Mile High 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 low-life/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 frame the early internet's ideological conflict between monopolistic tech companies and open source revolutionaries..- Chapter 7: ""Walking Around, a Mile High"" summarizes Neil Stephenson's dystopian cyberpunk novel Snow Crash and its immersive world of globally networked computers called the Metaverse..- Chapter 8: ""The Ego and the id"" traces the influence of Snow Crash on the development of the ""hacker ethic,"" and how it lent momentum to the burgeoning open source movement..- Chapter 9: We're Building The Torment Nexus"" traces the shortcomings and naivete of the hacker ethic in the face of rising technology-fueled injustice.- Part Four: An Ambiguous Heterotopia 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..- Chapter10: ""Trouble on Triton"" summarizes the Delany novel and its complex depictions of racial, sexual, and gender identities in a technology-fueled war between competing cultural and political philosophies.- Chapter 11: . ""The Modular Calculus"" relates Delany's themes to the contemporary questions around diversity and equity in tech, and recounts for the first time some of the critical history of the tech justice movement..- Chapter 12: ""An Ambiguous Heterotopia"" explores how the interpersonal and cultural conflicts depicted in Delany's novel relate to conceptions of power, trust, and identity in the modern technology industry– and challenge us to do better.- Chapter 13: ""Has the Future Been Written?"" concludes the book with a series of questions and calls to action.
Coraline Ada Ehmke is an internationally recognized tech ethicist, activist, and software engineer. For more than a decade, she has worked on practical approaches to promoting the values of diversity, equity, and justice in the technology industry. As a highly sought-after speaker, she has delivered keynotes at technology conferences on five continents. She is best known as the creator of Contributor Covenant, the first and most widely-adopted code of conduct for open source communities. She was recognized for her contributions to open source with a Ruby Hero Award in 2016. In 2018 she addressed the United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights on the topic of human rights abuses by tech companies. In 2019, she authored the Hippocratic License, an innovative ethical source license tied to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Coraline is profiled on Wikipedia, where she is recognized as a pioneer among women in computing history. Her work has been featured by media outlets including CNN, the BBC, WIRED, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Register, The Mary Sue, Buzzfeed, Vice, The Verge, ZDNet, The Daily Beast, and Business Insider.
