It's obligatory. If you're in the IT business or hobby, and if you get into Warhammer 40,000, then your favourite faction has to be Adeptus Mechanicus. Well, it's not actually obligatory at all. You can do whatever you want. It's your life. But it feels obligatory. The Cult of the Omnissiah is the closest thing to an IT department that the Imperium has, and Adeptus Mechanicus travel far and wide in search of new ancient technology they can put to good use. They're against AI but excited about old Kastelan robots and meatware servitors. Interestingly, though, that's just the superficial connection between an IT person and Cult Mechanicus. There are some good reasons for latching onto the Omnissian faithful, and it's got less to do with cables and screens than you might expect.
In the grim dark future of Warhammer, there is only ignorance.
The Adeptus Mechanicus are super cool cyborgs who despise the weakness of the flesh and favour the power of technology. However, like everybody else in the 41st millennium, they're crippled by blind and vehement faith. They don't actually understand how most technology works, and they honestly believe that there's a "machine spirit" that governs how well their equipment functions.
As an IT person, this is hilarious, and I laugh out loud every time it's talked about in a book or on WarhammerTV. You don't have to be a C programmer to understand the reliability of math, and math is all that governs programmable machinery. There aren't any machine spirits in real life or, I think, in Warhammer 40k. And I like to think that no real world society could fool themselves into believing that machines are fickle, subject to moods and emotion and "spiritual" health. Deep down, though, I know better.
In real life, lots of People without an understanding of how computers work ascribe personalities to their devices. And they blame that invented personality when something goes wrong. It's not unlike our ancestors assuming that gods or land spirits controlled weather systems and earthquakes, but we still do it. I try not to, but if my car breaks down 80 kilometers away from the nearest town, I wouldn't be surprised to hear myself utter a few requests to its machine spirit.
The Adeptus Mechanicus, though, are the technology experts of the Imperium. Take your laptop to Mars for repair, and they won't even both opening it up, because they can't interface with microchips. They can attach a loose cable, or solder a bad power connection back together, but as far as we can tell they have no ability to overwrite firmware, for instance. I might be underestimating them because, unsurprisingly, there aren't any Warhammer books containing the source code and usable blueprints of the Mechanicum, but the implication in the novels is that they're amazing power users of tech, but not progenitors.
Since 1983, most of modern IT is actively pushing back against the idea that data and technology should be privately held trade secrets.
It started when an MIT hacker called rms started the GNU project, an ostentatious rebellion against UNIX, the major corporate computing system of the time.
Fighting fire with, oddly, a different colour of fire, he sought to re-implement everything UNIX did, except better.
Seems like a weird plan, but amazingly it worked.
It took literally thousands of people across the globe to contribute, which has grown to millions today, but over the course of a few decades GNU grew.
It eventually got paired up with a cool new kernel out of Finland, and formed the Linux operating system.
This in turn empowered "normal" people (like me) who had no business getting into professional-level computing to, well, get into professional-level computing.
People started up Internet servers on commodity hardware, wrote their own applications, and created an entire culture of software developers and users in which all the code was open for study, use, and sharing.
It's called open source and it goes against everything the Mechanicum stands for.
So why is Adeptus Mechanicus so appealing to an open source nerd like me?
Like the rest of the Imperium, the Adeptus Mechanicus thrives on willful ignorance. To attempt to understand how technology functions is to question the Omnissiah. Knowledge is a sign that you lack faith that something should work.
However, the Adeptus Mechanicus is infamous for its endless pursuit of ancient technology. Far and wide, there are Tech-Priests searching through ancient ruins for archeotech, scavenging through the wreckage of fallen civilizations in hope of uncovering something new they can add to their armoury.
Open source geeks today similarly delve into user manuals and source code. When I study and test code or a physical networking system, I've learned something new. I've gained a new understanding of something mysterious, and I've gained a new skill. And I can use that skill to solve an even more complex problem later.
It might sound grandiose, but there's a real sense of discovery when you delve into a new lesson on technology that's new to you. And likewise, it's exciting to explore old technology still relevant today (there's a lot more than you'd expect in the world of IT).
Similarly, the weakness of the flesh compared to the strength and certainty of steel is a real consideration for the IT worker. You feel almost superhuman when you wield a cluster of several hundred compute nodes to serve up a nifty Flask app you've developed.
It's the sense of discovery that's the appeal of the Adeptus Mechanicus to the modern IT worker. The Cult Mechanicum might not be discovering the source code or PCB specs of the tech they use, but they brave threats that don't usually appear in technical manuals. When I figure out a new command or get a complex network path working, it feels like I've conquered an agent of the Dark Mechanicum, though, or an ambull lurking in the Blackstone Fortress, or like I've interfaced with a Titan. It's the aspiration, not the process, that connects the Mechanicum to modern IT.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.