It'll Take More Than Joes to Get Us Through This AI Mess

The revolution will be…coded

A comparatively lesser-known but prescient TV series, Halt and Catch Fire, tells the story of the dawn of the internet, captured perfectly by one of its taglines: “The revolution will be… coded.” You see, the characters in this tale aren’t just part of a scrappy tech company navigating the chaos of dotcom startup culture. Each represents something far deeper. They embody the forces, or better yet, the MGPs IRL, that emerge when we step into the unknown together. They reflect the story of a generation in flux—much like the one we are living in today.

Take Cameron, for example. She’s the badass coder—the gritty technologist working out of a garage. Brash, gifted, troubled. Hers is a story not unlike that of the tech bros of today, except this one happens to be female. Then there’s Gordon, the Wozniak of the group, the trained and diligent engineer who keeps things running. Donna, on the other hand, is the hardworking operations doer—perhaps a bit naive, but willing to believe in the impossible. And standing in her way is Tom, the ever-present contrarian naysayer. Tom isn’t just a person though, but a symbol—of bureaucracy, apparatus, and policies that always seem to stand in the way of progress. Oh, the pesky regulations that are Tom!

And then there’s Joe, the protagonist of the story. He is the true embodiment of philosophical curiosity, entrepreneurial drive, technological spirit, and flawed temperament, all wrapped into a single character. A Jobs-esque visionary, he could easily stand among today’s Silicon Valley leaders. But here, Joe is something more. He represents the next dimension—of what exists just beneath the surface, waiting to be realized but not yet fully visible.

This show isn’t just about building a product or a company. It’s about vision, futurism, and simplicity in a world consumed by complexity and urgency.

This tension is captured brilliantly in one scene. Joe invites the team into a dimly lit room to show them something revolutionary—something they can’t yet see but would change the world. On the whiteboard are a few scribbled lines of code. It’s Berners-Lee’s code, the foundation for what would become the Netscape browser.

It’s just a few lines. Elegant, simple, and infinitely profound. Yet, within this code is the potential to build almost anything: commerce, knowledge, politics—an entire world upended. The team stares at the board, trying to grasp what they’re looking at. Slowly, with some nudging, they begin to understand the enormity of it. There’s nothing tangible yet—no product, no structure. It’s only a vision.

But as Joe puts it: “We just have to walk through the door.”

Walking Through the Door

Just as the characters in Halt and Catch Fire represented the world in its many facets at that moment in time, today, we find ourselves staring at a whiteboard with scribbles that signify something transformational—something we can’t yet fully comprehend. As the age of the internet once peeked over the horizon, a new era of artificial intelligence now beckons possibilities beyond our wildest imagination.

Sure, there are still the contrarians—the Toms—saying this is all hype. But for the majority of us, the moment we typed our first prompt into ChatGPT, the world shifted. In that instant, we all became a Donna, recognizing the magnitude of what was before us. And for most of us, the last two years have been an exercise in trying to build a new understanding of a future we can barely fathom.

The experts—the coders and programmers crafting these tools—keep telling us we haven’t seen anything yet. And just like Gordon, they’re probably right.

So, where does that leave institutions struggling to keep up, especially those most likely to be upended by this transformation? For answers, perhaps we shouldn’t look forward but backward. The postmodern philosophers of the mid-century—the Joes, let’s say—saw this coming all along. Gilles Deleuze captured it best when he wrote, "There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons."

What he described was the same realization the team faced in that room: the understanding that a web browser could be wielded for good or for evil. Unlike the nihilists, though, postmodernists and Joes alike believed that a connected future was as much about hope as it was about doom. It was, simply put, about the choices we make.

Yet, they also warned us. Once we walk through that door, we enter a Society of Control where technology becomes both our greatest tool and our greatest source of bondage and surveillance. This is a new world without clear beginnings or endings, without on or off switches, without right or wrong answers. A world where we are connected instantly, constantly, left to navigate infinite truths.

And here’s the spoiler: that part was never a choice. They knew it then, and we see it now, that we have already walked through that door.

"There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons." ---Philosopher Gilles Deleuze

Elegant Code

If we acknowledge that we have all entered a space where anything and everything is possible, other choices still remain. For now, a blank slate lies in front of us. If we choose the path of hope, we must craft something elegant and simple—something that could fit on a single board. A design that unearths solutions already present but not yet visible, emerging organically from the “rhizome” Deleuze described.

And like nature, perhaps it begins with a return to primal “source code”, simple zeroes and ones, that can guide both organizations and society. This isn’t a trite observation; it’s an opportunity to align our processes with the massively transformative inputs before us, lest the outputs stray far from our intent.

Before we walk too far into the distance, let us calibrate what counts most: Trust, Transparency, and Time.

In a computational, coded world, trust can be distilled into three letters: RWX—Read, Write, Execute. What Joes and philosophers understood in their respective moments was that we were moving away from a “hello world” of Read-only interactions. In this new reality, everyone holds the unimaginable power to execute virtually any command at their fingertips.

This was true at the dawn of the internet, but it has been fully unleashed in the age of generative AI. Today, RWX means a pupil can arguably wield the same knowledge as the teacher; everyone is a coder, a designer, and the virtual plane we walk on has truly flattened.

But RWX also signifies maximum permissions granted to a “file” to execute as needed, based on faith that the underlying architecture can bear the weight of that trust. Thus we must ask: Are we building systems robust enough to sustain this level of permission, or are we trying to bend the future back to a read-only reality?

What Joes and philosophers understood in their respective moments was that we were moving away from a “hello world” of Read-only interactions.

Choosing the latter may stem from two reasons: either ignoring the force of nature unfolding before us or being unprepared to accept it. And by readiness, we mean the elegance required to embrace vulnerability and transparency amidst imperfection.

Up to now, humanity has masked its vulnerabilities by moving from one “enclosure” to the next—from school to college to work. This has fostered an illusion of control, now unraveling in a world with no true beginnings or endings. Are we ready to create systems that transparently reveal our shortcomings, allowing us to debug the inevitable imperfect scripts that lie ahead?

Finally, the age ahead promises to either save time or consume it, depending on the choices we make. As tasks are automated and complex challenges are resolved in seconds instead of years, what will we do with the time that remains? Will we fill the void with rest, family, and human connection—or wield this new weapon to return to work?

Berners Lee’s Basic Code for WorldWideWeb Project Written in 1990

#include <stdio.h>

// A simple function to simulate serving an HTML document
void serveDocument(const char *url) {
    printf("Serving document at URL: %s\n", url);
    printf("<html>\n");
    printf("<head><title>Welcome to the Web</title></head>\n");
    printf("<body>\n");
    printf("<h1>Hello, World!</h1>\n");
    printf("<p>This is the first step towards a connected world.</p>\n");
    printf("</body>\n");
    printf("</html>\n");
}

// Main entry point of the program
int main() {
    const char *documentURL = "http://localhost/index.html";

    printf("Starting web server...\n");
    serveDocument(documentURL);
    printf("Web server running. Visit %s to view the document.\n", documentURL);

    return 0;
}

Staring at the Board Again

With every passing day, we find ourselves staring at the whiteboard again, marveling at inventions that hold the power to either bring us together or pull us apart. Today, the future feels chaotic, uncertain, and at a loss for clear answers. The board before us is filled with scribbles that are far from elegant.

But in this story, we are all playing a character in a tale of our own making. And we need more than Joes. We need every one of us—the wonder in the Donnas, the skill of the Gordons, and yes, the rational order of the Toms, to get us through this.

Remember: we have already walked through the door…and the revolution will be coded.