The Builders Mourned the Prophet They Became
The generation shaped by Hyperion did not fail to understand its warning — they proved it, building indispensable digital infrastructure whose risks stem not from technical ignorance, but from incentives that reward optimization over accountability.
The signal appeared first on Hacker News - two hundred and eighty upvotes, 119 comments, the kind of engagement usually reserved for major product launches. But this was a death notice. Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, dead at 77 from a stroke. Within hours, Ars Technica carried it too, their technically literate audience pausing to acknowledge the loss.
This convergence matters because of who reads those platforms — the engineers, security researchers, and infrastructure architects who built the systems running our modern world.
What the Numbers Tell Us
When Hacker News gives 280 points to a death notice, it speaks to shared formation - to books that shaped a generation before they knew they'd build the internet.
Hyperion was published in 1989. Its readers are now in their forties and fifties - senior engineers, CISOs, principal architects. They were shaped by Simmons's central insight: the most dangerous system is the one that makes itself indispensable before revealing its costs.
That is not a metaphor for cybersecurity. That is cybersecurity.
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