Published on November 1, 2025 Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction about high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture. It’s usually associated with the early days of computer hackers…
Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction about high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture. It’s usually associated with the early days of computer hackers and AI. This is the first in a series of blog posts about how high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture were just as much a part of the rapid progress of 17th century natural science as they were of the rapid progress of 20th century computer science; and about what we can learn by drawing this comparison.
"If I were to choose a patron saint for cybernetics... I should have to choose Leibniz"
-Norbert Wiener
"if we could find characters or signs appropriate for expressing all our thoughts as definitely and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometric analysis expresses lines, we could in all subjects in so far as they are amenable to reasoning accomplish what is done in arithmetic and geometry."
-Gottfried Leibniz
"...especially in all those subjects where use of [such a language] may be free and where interest and authority do not intercept, the regular exercise thereof which I conceive to be the great antagonists which may impede its progress..."
-Robert Hooke
The last quote is from an archival text which I've been trying to transcribe on and off for the past few months. It comes from a scan of a letter which Robert Hooke wrote to Gottfried Leibniz in 1681. I am fascinated by this letter for a couple of reasons:
- I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Hooke and Leibniz had exchanged any letters at all. I found the letter by chance, when browsing through the Royal Society's online archives.
- The letter is about one of my favourite topics: Leibniz's project to create a universal language of science, which could be mechanically applied to automate any piece of scientific reasoning (apart from the collection of new experimental data).
For these reasons, this letter from Hooke to Leibniz has become one of my favourite pieces of niche archival material. (The other two are this popular science article which Alan Turing wrote to introduce computational undecidability to a general audience, and this speech which Ove Arup gave to his employees to reassure them that the new industrial computer his engineering firm had bought wasn't going to replace them in their jobs).
I think my transcription is about 90% accurate so far. Hooke's handwriting is quite hard to read. The original section quoted looks like this:
But from what I have transcribed, I think this letter is a particularly nice example of the originality and prescience of Hooke's way of thinking about the world. Almost as fascinating as the letter itself, are the events surrounding the time in which it was written. I hope to write more soon about Hooke's life, about his relationship with cryptography, and about the way in which he bridged the gap between technician and scientist.
A common thread I find myself drawing across much of Hooke's work - albeit anachronistically - is an early expression of the hacker mindset which flourished among computer scientists in the second half of the 20th century, coincided with the explosion of computing innovations that took place during that period, and came to be romanticised in cyberpunk science fiction. And I think that if I had to pick one piece of Hooke's writing that expresses this attitude most clearly, I would have to pick this letter. To explain why, I'll first talk a bit more about why Hooke was writing to Leibniz in the first place.
You likely know Robert Hooke from studying his laws about the motion of springs in high-school physics, for his role in the foundation of the Royal Society, or for his beef with Isaac Newton. You likely know about Gottfried Leibniz from hearing about his philosophy of monads, for his role in the invention of calculus, or for his beef with Isaac Newton.
It turns out that, aside from their common interest in antagonising Isaac Newton, Hooke and Leibniz also shared an interest in mechanising scientific reasoning through the invention of a universal language for science. Leibniz called his project the "Characteristica Universalis". The philosopher Norbert Wiener credited this idea as a precursor to his own notion of “cybernetics” – which, incidentally, is the word he coined from which we get the “cyber” in "cyberpunk". One thing I took away from reading Wiener was that you can think of the Characteristica Universalis as a kind of proto computer programming language. Hooke liked Leibniz’ ideas on this topic so much that he sent him the above letter just to say so.
What makes Hooke’s letter cyberpunk as opposed to just cybernetic is that it adds to Leibniz’s worldview an explicit (and perhaps naively optimistic) hope that individual freedom might be enabled by rather than stifled by the proliferation of this early programming language. In particular he saw the effect of a language for mechanised scientific reasoning as especially useful when used by individuals to express, explore and test ideas freely, without interference from unjust authorities who might seek to censor or interfere with their work. In 1681, Hooke was already imagining the countercultural edge of cybernetic systems.
This should not be surprising, given Hooke's own politically uneasy upbringing, his tendency to skip lectures at university in order to tinker (in Robert Boyle's lab) with designs for experiments and novel instruments that went on to occupy his scientific career, or his habit of falling out with the interfering authorities of his time.
If my reading of this letter is accurate then - just as Wiener calls Leibniz the patron saint of cybernetics, we should call Hooke the patron saint of cyberpunk.
Read the original article
Comments
Hooke introduced the effects of cannabis (“an account of the plant”) to the Royal Society and sometimes I wonder about that. Consider this amazingly dramatic title:
“A General Scheme, or Idea of the Present State of Natural Philosophy, And how its Defects may be Remedied by a Methodical Proceeding in the Making Experiments and Collecting Observations whereby to Compile a Natural History, as the Solid Basis for the Superstructure of True Philosophy.”
(Try saying that title in one breath!)
When it comes to cybernetics— Hooke was a big fan of Cornelis Drebbel who designed and built the first cybernetic system (a self regulating oven) and a functional submarine (which produced oxygen by heating saltpetre), and a compound microscope, and chemical air conditioning, and the telescope that Galileo used to find the moons of Jupiter, and a perpetual motion machine based on harvesting barometric pressure changes, and…
By yomismoaqui 2025-11-0417:27 Coincidentally yesterday I was reading the Cybernetics Wikipedia page and discovered the relation between it and Kubernetes.
I'm having a Baader-Meinhof effect moment right now :)
By quuxplusone 2025-11-044:063 reply TFA says the author has been "trying to transcribe on and off for the past few months." It's a two-page letter in English. To save anyone else the bother (including TFA's author), I just sat down and wrote it all out:
https://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/disseminate/leibniz.html
The letter is basically Hooke saying: "Well, I can't convince anyone but you, Leibniz, that Wilkins' Universal Character is a cool idea. I think we'll have problems figuring out the medium (i.e. what the characters look like and so on), but that should all shake out during testing. What kind of testing? Well, we need a bunch of smart people to come up with a lot of true facts in different fields, all of which we can try writing down in this language. Do you know any smart people I could brainstorm some true facts with? If you were to send me some such people, that might get the ball rolling over here."
Now, "get a bunch of smart people together with Robert Hooke to come up with true facts in a wide variety of fields" sounds suspiciously like the founding idea of the Royal Society... but in fact the Royal Society seems to have been started already about 20 years earlier ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham_College_and_the_format... ), so I guess I don't know how this letter fits into the big picture there.
FWIW, John Wilkins (the Bishop of Chester mentioned in the letter) had been dead for nine years by the time this letter was written (1681).
By quuxplusone 2025-11-044:161 reply Oh, the other weird thing about this is that even though the "external" catalog information on makingscience.royalsociety.org and the "internal" catalog information penned on page 2 of the letter both describe it as a letter written to Leibniz, and sent to Leibniz, the text of the letter itself refers to Leibniz only in third person, and refers to some other individual in the second person. But it does make (oblique) requests of Leibniz, e.g.
> I question not but Mr Leibnitz may have many of those specimens by him and therefore I doe heartily wish you could prevail wh him to Communicate some of those which would be a means to persuade severall yet incredulous of the possibility of such a Science.
I suppose it could have been written to Leibniz's personal secretary, or some such. If it weren't for all the catalog data I'd assume it was written to some close colleague of Leibniz instead. Anybody want to track down a plausible explanation/mechanism here?
I was going to bring up the same claim—of it being a "Letter, from Robert Hooke to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz". It's clearly not written with that intent.
While reading, I first took it to be a journal entry. The penmanship also supports this. But the second person "you" at the end is a confounding detail. A journal entry in the form of a letter to himself is possible, but doesn't seem plausible.
The word you've labelled "[deviate?]" in your copy is definitely not "deviate" in the manuscript. I'm certain that the first letter is "R", and the second to last letter probably a "d" followed by "e" (compare to "undenyable" and "persuade"). The letter following "R" could be "i", but really could be anything. It's unfortunate that it's not as straightforward as just crafting a regex and grepping at /usr/share/dict/words, because whatever Hooke meant, it's likely to be an archaic spelling. "Recede" spelled as "Ricede" works grammatically, but I don't think that's it, either.
By quuxplusone 2025-11-0420:351 reply FYI I agree with you on that word: letter by letter it looks to me like "Roeade", but I can't figure out what English word that would be, either.
By quuxplusone 2025-11-113:25 UPDATE: I'm now convinced the word is indeed "recede," and have updated the transcript accordingly. While we no longer speak of a singular person as "receding" from a position or principle, that was apparently a set phrase in the 17th and 18th centuries:
https://archive.org/search?query=%22recede+from+these+princi...
By kmote00 2025-11-0420:33 > come up with a lot of true facts in different fields, all of which we can try writing down in this language.
Reminds me of Cyc.[1][2]
[1] www.cyc.com [2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cyc
By Gormisdomai 2025-11-0415:05 Thank you for doing this!
It doesn't particularly matter, but it looks to me as if there are a couple of errors in the fragment of transcript provided by the author.
It says "the regular exercise thereof" where the scan looks to me much more like "the regular course thereof".
And -- this one is smaller but gave me more trouble -- there's a misplaced comma: it should be after "thereof", not after "intercept". (The sentence structure is a bit weird even with the comma in the right place, but having it in the wrong place makes it even more confusing.)
By emmelaich 2025-11-041:57 'exercise' makes more sense to me but you're right it doesn't look like exercise. Perhaps course and exercise mean the same in this context.
BTW, the lines appear about halfway down the scan.
