In this RedMonk conversation, Coraline Ada Ehmke discusses her new book, We Just Build Hammers: Stories from the Past, Present, and Future of Responsible Tech, with Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk. In addition to outlining the book’s argument and major themes, they consider lessons speculative literature can teach us about what is means to be a hacker and the importance of connecting historical narratives with contemporary tech justice movements.

Links

• LinkedIn: Coraline Ada Ehmke
• Mastodon: @CoralineAda
• Bluesky: @coralineada.bsky.social
• We Just Build Hammers: Stories from the Past, Present, and Future of Responsible Tech

Transcript

Kate Holterhoff (00:12)
Hello, and welcome to this Redmonk Conversation. My name is Kate Holterhoff, Senior Analyst at RedMonk, and with me today is Coraline Ada Ehmke. Most folks probably know Coraline for the Contributor Covenant, the Hippocratic License, and the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto. But this year, she also published her first book, is entitled, We Just Build Hammers, Stories from the Past, Present, and Future of Responsible Tech. Coraline, I am just so excited that you were able to join me on the MonkCast.

Coraline Ada Ehmke (00:38)
Yeah, thank you so much for the invitation and I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I think we have a lot to talk about and I can’t wait.

Kate Holterhoff (00:45)
Awesome. All right, so to begin with, give us an abstract of We Just Build Hammers. What is the book about, and what is your general argument?

Coraline Ada Ehmke (00:52)
Sure. The book traces 100 years of history from the atomic age to the formative years of computing, the personal computer revolution, the open source revolution, and the tech justice movement of today. And what it does is the idea was to connect readers with a lineage of people who have been working in responsible tech forever. Because I think a lot of the problems that we’re facing, the technosocial problems we’re facing, rising techno-fascism,

These are problems that feel very new, but the struggles and the hopes and aspirations for using technology for good are as old as technology itself. So I wanted to bring to light some of the stories of those unsung heroes of responsible tech. But the other angle on it is that I learned while doing research that many of these early responsible tech thinkers were highly inspired by science fiction or what back then was called speculative fiction. And that science fiction not only

predicted the future in a lot of cases, but actually shaped it. So those were the kind of the two angles that I was coming at, establishing a lineage and showing how imagination can really be harnessed to change the future.

Kate Holterhoff (01:59)
I love that. And can you talk about the title? I found it a very provocative way to frame your story.

Coraline Ada Ehmke (02:06)
Yeah, yeah. There’s a quote by Noam Chomsky that I think gets very broadly interpreted, even though it was rather narrow in scope, that technology is neither good nor bad. It’s neutral like a hammer. A hammer can be used to build a house or it can be used by a torturer. And so this is an argument for the neutrality of tech. But as I like to point out, Chomsky was talking about technologies, broadly speaking, like the internet, like the cell phone.

not like any conceivable piece of technology. So I think the neutrality of tech is a sort of moral firewall that we’ve become very used to in the modern day. And we think we’re just building hammers, we’re just building tools, but the purpose of a system is what it does, right?

Kate Holterhoff (02:49)
I am super interested in how you got started in your literature journey here. So have you always been excited about speculative literature? Is that something that you’ve been attracted to, you know, since you were a kid? Or is this something that you were drawn to as part of your, political work?

Coraline Ada Ehmke (03:03)
Yeah, I think I was a big sci-fi fan when I was growing up, but the genre that kind of stuck with me over time is kind of classic weird fiction from the late 1800s and early 1900s. So I didn’t have a lot of respect. I didn’t have a lot of experience with sci-fi going into the book, but of course I’d read cyberpunk novels in the 80s and 90s. so…

I’ve been keeping up with what’s happening in sci-fi, but I wouldn’t call myself a fangirl by any stretch of the imagination. And it was kind of by accident that I discovered the science fiction connection anyway. So that part was as much a learning journey for me as the history was.

Kate Holterhoff (03:44)
I’d love to hear more about that journey. How was it that you discovered that this history was, deeply tied to imaginative literature?

Coraline Ada Ehmke (03:51)
Sure. It was 2022 and I got an invitation from a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which of course was the site of most of the work on the Manhattan Project. And I got an invitation to come and speak for Ethics Week at Los Alamos. And I was kind of taken aback, like, you what can I teach atomic scientists about ethics that they probably haven’t already thought of?

but I decided I would accept the invitation. sounded like a great challenge and a great opportunity. and, you know, to experience firsthand some history and talk to some really interesting people. And, so I started doing research into the Manhattan project because I wanted to draw some parallels between, what the world was like then and what the world was shaping up to be now. and I came across this little throwaway line. I think it was even on.

on Wikipedia about a Hungarian physicist named Leo Szilard, who is the scientist who conceived of the neutron chain reaction, and how he didn’t want his patent to become public because he knew what it would do to the world, and he knew because he had read H.G. Wells. And that was the spark of the entire thesis for the book. This little throwaway line, I think, on a Wikipedia page.

Kate Holterhoff (05:09)
It’s extremely compelling. I can see why that would have pulled you in. And so you went and found this H.G. Wells text and read it and could see that connection immediately.

Coraline Ada Ehmke (05:20)
Absolutely. The text was a book called The World Set Free. It was first serialized in Century Magazine, which was a very popular serial. I actually found a copy of the actual issue where the first installment of The World Set Free was published in 1913, which is pretty amazing to hold in my hands. So yeah, The World Set Free is about the discovery of atomic energy, the harnessing of atomic energy, and its inevitable use in

warfare. And at the end of the conflict in the book, the thing that I really found compelling was this sort of utopian vision that Wells had of establishment of a world government to control the technology, to contain its destructiveness. And the fact that with the advent of atomic energy, everyone was now free to be a painter or a poet. That sounds like pretty good future to me.

Kate Holterhoff (06:07)
Yeah, that sort of optimism is something that we don’t see in our science fiction very often, but I think does kind of typify what H.G. Wells brought to the table. In my own research, I studied 19th century literature. And so working on my dissertation, I’m actually just publishing it as a book next month. So that’s exciting. Yes, I know. It’s only taken me a decade. So it’s finally happening.

But I tend to focus more on his work from the 1890s. And he was just so prolific that I actually hadn’t encountered this text. So I’m really excited. You’ve given me things that I need to be looking up more from the 20th century that I have skimmed over. I tend to stop reading at World War I, which this actually fit within that. I…I’m embarrassed that I haven’t seen it before, but it seems extremely important. Did you think it was a fun read or was it a little dated?

Coraline Ada Ehmke (06:56)
It was a fun read and I think even though maybe some of the writing is period and may seem a little strange to us now, but was a really good writer and a really clear writer. I think there was one critic, I forget the name, who said that Wells was a propagandist who hid his propaganda in speculative fiction.

And I think what’s fascinating about the writing of Wells is not just the scientific imagination, but the political imagination. And his socialism really showing through. And it’s kind of fascinating to see how that developed over the arc of his life, starting out with a very dystopian view, having a period of utopian views, and at the end of his life, kind of giving up on humanity.

Kate Holterhoff (07:43)
He’s a complicated guy, for sure. I have a whole chapter in my book devoted to the island of Dr. Moreau because I tend to study the history of science as it relates to evolution. But, The Time Machine is certainly something that’s a touchstone for many of the folks who I know who’ve stuck with academia and tend to teach these texts in the classroom.

So, yeah, very cool. Okay, well, I think all that just points to the fact that I learned something from your book, and that was really exciting for me. Yeah, I mean, I’m a big history of science nerd. I mean, here was something that I was thinking of while I was reading your book.

Coraline Ada Ehmke (08:11)
that’s wonderful.

Kate Holterhoff (08:20)
So, the first half of the book, I was surprised how much you sort of excised your own story and relegated it to the second half because, I’m familiar with your blog and I was really hooked on your voice. I thought that that was really an interesting way to be introduced to not only this historical aspect but also your thoughts on literature and the sort of connections that you were seeing there. And so, I was curious about if you ever considered like making it more of a memoir or if you wanted to almost remove your voice entirely. Was your editor involved at all in helping to craft your voice for this story? What did that look like? What was your writing process?

Coraline Ada Ehmke (08:57)
Oh, that’s a really, really, really good question. It’s something I struggled with quite a bit. And actually a colleague of mine expressed a similar thing. He was like, I’m surprised you didn’t bring yourself more into it. I was expecting more of a memoir. I wanted to make sure, know, what I said at the beginning about connecting folks with the lineage. I really wanted to focus on the history. one reason is that

not much of this history has been recorded or assembled into a cohesive story. So especially in the last quarter of the book where we’re in contemporary times, we’re talking about the tech justice movement of the sort of the 20 teens, that those stories have never been written down before. And that was a period of intense struggle within the tech industry and intense change.

And a lot of people put a lot of energy and blood, sweat, and tears into bringing about some changes in the tech industry in that time. And I just couldn’t let that be forgotten. so it wasn’t about me. I do talk about my work a little bit in the places where it’s relevant, but I didn’t want it to be about me. And I wanted the reader to draw their own conclusion rather than convince them of my own philosophy. I wanted to meet them where they were.

Kate Holterhoff (10:18)
That makes sense to me. Yeah. Okay. Well, it’s interesting to me to hear. I’m not the only one that was like, I know so much about you, and here are these wonderful historical figures, but I wanted you to come down a little bit with your own interpretation of it at times. But I get it. You know, in my own writing, I have that same sense too, where it’s like, well, here’s the story. Not a lot of folks know it, and we need to draw attention to it. And so…

I’m going to take a step back and tell this in the most objective way that I can. Of course, all writing is political, all writing is biased. It’s the stories that we want to highlight that are important. And so that’s going to be the way that I moderate this is by showing it to you and allowing that to stand on its own. Would you call it like a social science type book? What genre is this?

Coraline Ada Ehmke (10:52)
Yep. Yep.

Exactly. That’s a really good question as well. I think genres are fake. I’m a musician and I think genres are fake. I think there’s a lot of social science to it because one of my heroes in academia is a researcher named Lelia Green and she wrote a book called Technoculture. She made a name for herself doing ethnographies of online like BDSM communities. So she went in as a social scientist looking at these like really deeply entwined internet communities. And the argument that she makes is like there’s no difference between the technical and the social. They’re so intertwined that you cannot really study one without the other. And I think I tried to bring that to the book as well with talking about

social science and its relevance to the topic of technology because technology exists within a society. It’s not isolated and we can’t just focus on one slice of it. That wouldn’t be the complete story. So I did try to bring in perspectives from multiple fields over the course of the book. There’s history, there’s psychology, there’s literature, there’s feminism. It’s a strong thread through the book.

I tried to bring in lots of different ideas and disciplines. I think that’s the superpower that I have is to connect ideas from different disciplines. As a generalist, I think that’s a superpower that generalists have. And I tried to bring that to the book,

Kate Holterhoff (12:23)
That’s really helpful, and I think you succeeded well. I got that sense while I was reading through it, too, that you were connecting all of these different narratives that maybe hadn’t been brought together in the past. So yeah, thank you for that. So let’s talk a little bit about the hacker aesthetic. And I thought you did such a good job talking about hackers. I have always been really interested in that idea. So you especially get into Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which was published in 92.

Coraline Ada Ehmke (12:27)
Thank you.

Yes.

Kate Holterhoff (12:49)
I’ve always enjoyed this idea of humans interacting with anthropomorphized programs. So I’m thinking of Tron. My kids are obsessed with a Scooby-Doo called Cyber Chase. Same basic idea, only it’s a virus that’s the monster. So I think these are a lot of fun. And of course, there’s a lot of movies that dig into this as well. So I guess what I’m curious about is you’re an accomplished programmer. But I get the sense you’re also attracted to the romance, to this sort larger-than-life fictional character. So do you identify with these fictional hackers? Do you maybe see yourself in Snow Crash?

Coraline Ada Ehmke (13:25)
I think it’s really interesting because I think one of the defining characteristics of William Gibson’s work, so he was instrumental in really bringing the genre to serious attention, I always observed that his main characters were kind of hollow. We didn’t really see character development in the protagonist over time. And at first that kind of bothered me and then I realized that it made it awfully easy to insert yourself as a character in the story because there was no dissonance.

There was no one telling you what you thought or what you felt. You were able to really engage fully as almost like an actor in the story, almost like you’re an improv actor just responding to the storyline that the author was putting in front of you. So in that way I did. And certainly when I was coming up in the 90s, the hacker aesthetic was… extremely influential on my politics, on my work, on my extracurricular activities. So absolutely was interested in some of the, not only the aesthetics, but the principles, the philosophy, the ethos. Very inspirational to me in lot of ways at a very formative period in my career.

Kate Holterhoff (14:34)
Right. I think again, what was so compelling to me about reading this book is when I think about the fact that you’ve authored 25 Ruby gems and that you were just such a prominent voice in the community, that here you are not only creating this history, but you’re also reporting on it. You’re also thinking about it, synthesizing these big ideas, thinking about it at this high level. And so I think that does give you such a compelling…

perspective because you’re able to see it both sort of in the weeds, but also from this high level as someone who’s interpreting it, historically, also like politically, all of that I just think really gives you an interesting voice, you know, I’ve heard some of your talks at the Ruby conferences as well. You know, it just kind of gives you a really unique perspective.

Coraline Ada Ehmke (15:04)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

hope it gives the book and the message an aura authenticity as well, because I’ve been in the tech industry for 30 years and I’ve seen some shit, as they say. So I hope that I’m able to speak one-on-one to the young engineer, the young technologist who is going to be facing these ethical crises over the course of their career.

I hope they hear it coming from someone who they trust, someone who they know has been through it and maybe can meet them where they are. I wanted to use that position of influence within the tech industry to amplify the story and reach those young engineers.

Kate Holterhoff (16:07)
I would love to talk about some of the things that you say about the hackers aesthetic as well. And that’s sort of my framing of it. But you mentioned that, quote, “capitalism has a corrosive effect on the hacker ethic itself.” I would love to hear you expand on this idea. Do you tie it with your own experiences? Is this something that you’re seeing today, maybe more than you have in the past? Talk to me about that idea.

Coraline Ada Ehmke (16:28)
Sure. So I think when we were first presented with the archetype of the hacker as it emerged through cyberpunk fiction, it was the scrappy underdog, I think Gibson famously said, “high tech, low life.” So hackers in the beginning, we were fighting our corporate overlords and we were fighting…

an overstepping government and we’re fighting all these centralized authorities that we distrusted. But then the world discovered the internet and we suddenly had careers. And that changed us, for sure. I know I had to take some jobs that I was not very proud of after the fact, but, you know, reality, life, you have to make some hard decisions sometimes. So I feel like, yeah, it had a corrosive effect because at first,

We were valued for our skill, valued for our creativity, and eventually we were commoditized. And that spirit, I think, was twisted by corporate tech. And we were manipulated, and we were used based on an understanding of what made us tick. Understanding that meritocracy was an idea that appealed.

Ubiquity of computing was an idea that appealed, but we’ve seen it twisted, like the hands-on imperative. Now we have ubiquitous access to computers, but no one understands how they work because ubiquity without literacy was a trap. We can’t repair our own devices because we’ve made them so clever and so carefully engineered that you can’t even open a case anymore. And it was hackers who made that happen. Somewhere along the way, we lost our way.

So the argument that I make in the book is there’s still value in a hacker ethic if we reinterpret it for the 2020s instead of the 1990s.

Kate Holterhoff (18:13)
Yeah. And I think, I guess I’m curious about where we are with the hacker ethic today. Would you say, so you mentioned a little bit about how a lot of women and minorities were able to, groups who were classically underrepresented in the tech industry, were able to join the ranks of computer engineers by way of boot camps and these DEI initiatives.

where they were trying to bring folks into these companies. So would you say that folks who came up through boot camps are still hackers or is the term sort of losing its resonance? Like what makes someone a hacker? Does every software engineer have to be a hacker?

Coraline Ada Ehmke (18:55)
Right. No, I think it’s a mindset. think it’s, I think, I think I go back to the original meaning of the word where it was a clever technologist who had a mischievous streak. I think, I think the folks who came up through boot camps, the non-white men who came up through boot camps and other non-traditional means, they were following in the footsteps of the hackers who got hired into these corporate jobs in the nineties. None of us had degrees either.

And they were making this industry their own in lot of ways. And I thought that represented very much the hands-on imperative because here are people coming from other careers. They’re in any other industry in the economy and they decided that they were gonna learn how computers work and they were gonna learn it so well that they would be able to tell computers what to do. Those are hackers.

Kate Holterhoff (19:43)
Yeah, I like that. Yeah, my own research on the history of science, I saw this little poem that talks about the tinkering fool with a hammering tool. And I always liked that as sort of fitting where the hackers are, at least, were in the 80s and 90s. You just don’t hear it as much. I guess it’s kind of considered like, it’s fallen out of favor. But again, I love it. I like the movies. I don’t think it disappeared for sure, but you just don’t hear the word hacker anymore, and I’m not sure why.

Coraline Ada Ehmke (20:11)
Well, it kind of negative connotation with criminal activity and that became pretty socialized. And I think a lot of people who, and maybe it’s maybe it’s kind of a retro term. I’m Gen X and that was just my language. But I think, I think the word has a lot of meaning and I think its history makes it fascinating and its complexity makes it fascinating. And I would love to see it reclaimed because I think with what we’re seeing in the world today, we need more scrappy underdogs.

technologists, heroes working against corporate and government takeover. I think we need that. So no matter what we call it, we need to find that spirit again.

Kate Holterhoff (20:48)
So I should mention in your book, yeah, you just use it sort of interchangeably with software developers pretty often in ways that I don’t see very frequently. But I liked it because I could understand where you were coming from. And I think it resonated with the literary parts of this. So I mean, you explicitly draw these parallels between hackers and early technologists. I would actually love to hear more about that connection.

So what do you see as the major nexus joining hackers who say, this is a quote from your book, “couldn’t make the world any more rational than the atomic scientists or Edmund Berkeley,” who is the computer scientist responsible for co-founding the Association for Computing Machinery, and his peers had before them.” So just in short, how would you characterize that connection between this nice Gen X term for tinkerers on computers and folks who were working on the atomic bomb.

Coraline Ada Ehmke (21:41)
think one of the parallels that doesn’t cast us in a very positive light or kind of shows the situation that we’re in, the complexity of the situation we’re in, is one of the things that I really wanted to emphasize in the section when I was talking about the Manhattan Project is that there were about 10,000 people working on the project of whom less than 10 knew what the project was about. So we saw this intense compartmentalization.

of the work that was all part of this larger effort. And I think that we see that same mindset in open source today with tools for making tools. Our tool chains are so abstract at this point that it’s difficult to trace accountability. And that’s a trap. That’s a trap we fell right back into. And I hope that it can be offset by this.

by taking a broader picture, by understanding that the world resists rational modeling. And so maybe we need to be a little bit more creative than we’ve been in the past. Yeah, and that’s part of that spirit. That’s part of the ethos is solving intractable problems. yeah, more of that.

Kate Holterhoff (22:48)
Yeah, I’m all for it. Yeah, I love that you drew attention to what you call the argument of the beard, which instead of me defining it, talk to me about that particular logical fallacy.

Coraline Ada Ehmke (22:51)
Yeah. it’s also called the paradox of small differences, but I kind of like the beard analogy better. when I created the Hippocratic license in 2019, it was in response to the No Tech for ICE campaign by Mijente And it was in response to an individual developer taking an act of conscience and trying to pull his code out of the ecosystem that was being co-opted and he wasn’t allowed to do that.

So I created the Hippocratic License as a response to this kind of moral failure of the industry. And the next day, Bruce Perens, who is the author of the open source definition and co-founder of the Open source Initiative, wrote a blog post called, Sorry Ms. Ehmke, the Hippocratic License Won’t Work. And in this blog post, he stated that ethics are slippery. They change from place to place and from time to time. So how can we define?

what is ethical and what is not ethical. And that absolutely epitomizes the argument of the beard. The argument of the beard goes like this. I will ask you, Kate, how many hairs does a man need to have on their face to be considered having a beard? And you might say, 1,000. And I’ll say, great. So a man with 999 hairs on his face doesn’t have a beard? And you’ll say, well, okay, maybe it still counts as a beard. And the paradox is that there is no one number.

that can be rationally agreed upon that determines the gradient between the extremes. That doesn’t mean that the extremes don’t happen though. That doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as a beard. And it doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as a clean shaven face. There’s this gradient in between that can’t be clearly defined. And I think that ethics and technology are the same way. There are some things that are clearly for social good and some things that are clearly for social ill, you know.

a carpenter doesn’t build a house with autonomous drone navigation software. It doesn’t work that way. That’s not a hammer. So the argument of the beard does away with shirking responsibility saying, well, we can’t even agree on what’s good or bad. So what does it matter? That’s, can’t, I can’t stand for that.

Kate Holterhoff (24:54)
Yeah, And I think it’s important to get into definitions when we’re especially talking about things like licenses for software. so bringing in the Open Source Initiative’s definitions and their leadership’s feelings about them, I think can be valuable for thinking through the nuance here.

And on that note, I’d be interested to hear more, so this is kind of outside of your book, but what is your take on open source currently? There’s been some recent rug pulls. At RedMonk we’ve covered the situation with Valkey and what Terraform’s licensing. Are you keeping up on that? Is that something that you follow and have strong opinions about?

Coraline Ada Ehmke (25:32)
I will say that I’m not a licensing nerd. I know a lot of folks in open source are licensing nerds. I’m not a licensing nerd because my definition of open source has very little to do with licenses. My definition of open source is social and cultural and techno-social. So what I’ve observed is that open source at the beginning with what I describe in the book with what happened with Mozilla,

open sourcing Netscape, the Netscape browser and this like sort of wind in the sails of this movement that had been burgeoning for a while of making software differently. Open source in the beginning was very much a reaction against corporate control of the internet because Microsoft’s browser had 97 % of the market share. So open source was this scrappy underdog, just like we saw in cyberpunk, but just as happened

to the hackers, open source got co-opted by corporations. And I think we set ourselves up for that by the focus on licensing over the focus on collaboration and the human element and the community aspects. I think one of the shifts that we saw in the 2010s was the shift from thinking of open source as being centered around projects and understanding that it was actually centered around communities.

And I think that caused a lot of the friction that we saw. And we see open source traditionalists standing by the licenses as if that’s the, well, they claim it’s the canonical definition of open source. And I would argue that most developers don’t really think about licenses. They pick what GitHub offers. They’re like, MIT, sure. Everybody in the Ruby community uses MIT. I’ll use MIT. And that’s about as far as it goes.

So to me, open source is broader than licenses. Licenses, intellectual property, were a hack. And I think we got too caught up in it.

Kate Holterhoff (27:12)
That’s really interesting. it seems, if I’m hearing this correctly, that the hacker ethic is opposed to the current way that we deal with licenses by virtue of the fact that It’s kind of built for lawyers. It’s built for big corporations rather than built for humans and folks who have a sort of libertarian or I guess maybe an… anarchic view of how I interpret the world or My personal morality that I thought about deeply, I’ve read a lot of philosophy, and that’s what I want to bring to the software that I create. And these licenses in their current form, don’t let me do that.

Coraline Ada Ehmke (27:45)
Sure. Yeah, they explicitly prohibit it. We have two clauses in the open source definition, two clauses devoted to the fact that you can’t restrict the use of your software in any way, even if it means explicitly evil uses. And I’m quoting from the annotated open source definition. You can’t stop your software from being used by anybody, even for explicitly evil purposes. They say it right out loud.

Why do we have to accept that? Why do we to believe that software is neutral? Why can’t we build software explicitly for good? What’s the draw of neutrality? What would that world look like if instead of building another JavaScript framework, we built something that assisted in community organizing or…

participatory budgeting or direct democracy. There are so many things, there are so many ways we could be using our talents to really have positive social impact. And instead, we’re building JavaScript frameworks. And that that maddens me. And that’s why I say that spirit is gone from the industry. We lost sight of the big picture. We lost sight of the fact that we are supposed to distrust centralized authority.

That was like, that’s the fundamental defining characteristic of the hacker is that this trust is centralized authority and we all went to work for them.

Kate Holterhoff (29:05)
Wow. Yeah, I love how this conversation’s taken a turn to reclaiming what it means to be a hacker. And it also kind of gets back to the title of your book,

All right, so we’ve talked a lot about history so far, and we’ve also talked about some of the things that you’ve been involved in, some of your initiatives. So let’s talk a little bit about a call to action. How can folks become involved?

Coraline Ada Ehmke (29:22)
Sure. I think that now more than ever, it’s a time for us to build and strengthen our communities because our local communities, whether they are online or in our neighborhoods, are going to be more more critical to our everyday survival. So we need to come together in communities just like we saw happening in our industry. But we need to take those lessons and expand them to our communities as well.

We need to be very thoughtful about the technologies that we create and think ahead a little bit. We need to evaluate before we write that first line of code, like, can this be used to cause harm? How will this be abused? And is there a way that I can design it ergonomically, technically to resist abuse? I think we have to be very actively thinking about the world that we want to live in.

Do we want to live in the world where corporations have us living in shipping containers and living our lives virtually? Or do we want the future that H.G. Wells wanted for us where we’re all artists and poets? I think it’s clear in my mind which future I want and all of my work is predicated on building toward that future. And I hope that the book brings some inspiration to folks who also want to contribute to a future that we can all live in and we can all breathe in.

Kate Holterhoff (30:36)
I love this vision of utopia.

Coraline Ada Ehmke (30:38)
I would say not a utopia, but a heterotopia, as Samuel Delany describes in his work, and I talk about it in the book. It’s a place of differences, not a place of uniformity.

Kate Holterhoff (30:46)
All right. I like that. Thank you. Okay. So we are about out of time, but before we go, how can folks hear more from you? What are your preferred social channels and are you doing any speaking in 2025?

Coraline Ada Ehmke (30:56)
Right now I’m lining up a lot of podcasts appearances and I’ve applied to some conferences. So I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to get the message out. I’m doing a talk right now called Four Reasons Not To Care About Ethics in Open Source, which the hammer argument features prominently in, but also the argument of the beard features pretty prominently in. I’m on Mastodon at CoralineAda@ruby.social, pretty much CoralineAda everywhere on the internet, except you won’t find me on X for obvious reasons.

Kate Holterhoff (31:21)
All right, and I have really enjoyed speaking with you today. Again, my name is Kate Holterhoff, Senior Analyst at RedMonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you are watching us on Redmonk’s YouTube channel, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.