Geeks
For Rob (CmdrTaco) Malda
and Jeff (Hemos) Bates
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Geek
(noun)
[probably from English dialect
geek, geck fool,
from Low German geck, from Middle Low German; First
appeared 1914]:
1. a person often of an intellectual bent who is
disapproved of. 2. a carnival performer often billed as a wild man
whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or
snake.
—Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Computer geek
n. 1. One who eats (computer) bugs for a living.
One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hack
ers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the
personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be used by outsiders without
implied insult to all hackers; compare black-on-black vs. white-on
black usage of “nigger.” A computer geek may be either a funda
mentally clueless individual or a proto-hacker in larval stage. Also
called turbo nerd, turbo geek. See also propeller head, clustergeek
ing, geek out, wannabee, terminal junkie, spod, weenie. 2. Some
self-described computer geeks use this term in a positive sense and
protest sense (this seems to have been a post-1990 development).
—Eric S. Raymond,
The New Hacker’s Dictionary, third edition
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Geek:
A person who, for one reason or another, is considered so
cially unacceptable by the person speaking. A computer geek is
someone who is socially inept but expert with computers. As com
puters become more important in the average person’s life, this term
becomes more often a compliment than an insult.
—Mike McConnell,
High-Tech Dictionary
Geek:
Short for computer geek, an individual with a passion for
computers, to the exclusion of other normal human interests. De
pending on the context, it can be used in either a derogatory or af
fectionate manner. Basically, geek and nerd are synonymous.
—Webopedia
Geek:
Encarta Encyclopedia found no matches for:
GEEK
—Microsoft Encarta Encylopedia,
1998 edition
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Geek:
A member of the new cultural elite, a pop-culture-loving,
techno-centered Community of Social Discontents. Most geeks rose
above a suffocatingly unimaginative educational system, where
they were surrounded by obnoxious social values and hostile peers,
to build the freest and most inventive culture on the planet: the In
ternet and World Wide Web. Now running the systems that run the
world.
Tendency toward braininess and individuality, traits that often
trigger resentment, isolation, or exclusion. Identifiable by a singular
obsessiveness about the things they love, both work and play, and a
well-honed sense of bitter, even savage, outsider humor. Universally
suspicious of authority. In this era, the Geek Ascension, a positive,
even envied term. Definitions involving chicken heads no longer
apply.
—Jon Katz,
Jackson Township, New York
June 1999
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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A HOST
of people supported this book.
I’m grateful to Cate Corcoran, my editor at Hotwired, to whom I brought my initial notions about geeks several years ago; she encouraged, published, and edited my first writings on the subject. And to Mike Kuniavsky, a geek pioneer. And, especially, to Louis Rossetto.
I appreciate Ann Godoff of Random House for agreeing to take on this book, though she had no idea what I was talking about. My thanks, as well, to Brian McLendon, Bruce Tracy, and Diana Frost of Villard and Random House. And to Brian DeFiore.
I’m grateful to Beverly Kees, Ken Paulson, Paul McMasters, Adam Powell, and Brian Buchanan of the Freedom Forum for supporting me at a crucial time.
I thank Jann Wenner, Bob Love, and Will Dana at
Rolling Stone
for loving this idea from the beginning, and for commissioning a story about Jesse Dailey and Eric Twilegar, thus making possible my treks to Idaho and Chicago. The wise David Malley, who helped me sort through stacks of e-mail, notes, and tapes, and Deb Goldstein also deserve my gratitude, as does Daryl Lindsey.
I’m particularly grateful to Rob Malda and Jeff Bates of Slashdot, for giving me a home on the Web and for publishing the “Hellmouth” series and the many responses to it. Ethical and gifted, they embody the very best qualities of geekhood.
Kathy Anderson and Theodore O’Neill of the University of Chicago lent an ear in a noble, if impossible, enterprise. Mike Brown of the English department at Middleton High School in Idaho reminds me that teaching can be the noblest profession.
Thanks to Flip Brophy, Ruth Coughlin, my wife, Paula Span, and my friend Jeff Goodell. John Heilemann and George and Janet Scurria were also helpful. I am grateful to Mary Robertson.
I owe a great deal to the thousands of geeks who have e-mailed me these past few years to tell me their stories, share their theories, challenge my assumptions, and offer encouragement. They are building the most exciting subculture in the world.
Most of all, I am forever in the debt of Jesse Dailey, who reached out to me via the miracle of the Internet, and of Eric Twilegar. They opened up their lives to a stranger. They spent countless hours with me face to face, on the telephone, and via e-mail and various messaging systems. They graciously, courageously, and truthfully answered my endless and very personal questions. They also made possible my first online gaming kill, on Doom. They are awesome geeks, bound for glory.
INTRODUCTION: THE GEEK ASCENSION
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WHERE DOES
it begin, this sense of being the Other? It can come early on, when you find yourself alone in your childhood bedroom, raising tropical fish, composing a poem, writing code, meeting friends mostly online, playing by yourself. Or in middle school, when the jocks turn on you and you pray you will get through gym class alive.
Or maybe it comes in high school, where you find yourself on the outside looking in, getting jostled in the halls, watching TV on weekends while everyone else goes to parties.
After some time, there’s an accumulation of slights, hurts, realizations: You don’t have a lot of friends; other kids avoid you; you’re not good at sports or interested in shopping; the teachers seem to like their other students a lot more. There are few school activities you want to be part of, even if you could. The things you like aren’t the same things most other people like.
The alienation is sometimes mild, sometimes savage. Sometimes it lasts a few years, sometimes a lifetime. It depends on where you live, who your parents are, whether there’s a single teacher who appreciates you, whether you can cling to one or two friends, how well you can hide your brains.
Increasingly, your lifeline is technology. Computers and the amazing power they give you—to install a new operating system, to confide in like-minded allies three time zones away, to slay tormentors on the screen even if you can’t do much about the ones at school—are your passion. They give you skills and competence, or distraction and escape, or direction and stature, or all of the above.
Eventually, many of the people who call themselves geeks report a coming out, not unlike coming to terms with being gay or lesbian: a moment when you realize and acknowledge who you are and who you’re never going to be.
“One day in my sophomore year,” a kid named Jason e-mailed me, “I was sitting in the school cafeteria watching the kids at the other tables laugh and have fun, plotting how I was going to get home early and start playing Quake. And I suddenly got it. I was a geek. I was never going to be like them. They were never going to let me in. So I came out as a geek. . . . I can’t say life has been a breeze, but after that, it was okay.”
Some say they get comfortable with themselves afterward; many never do. But however long it lasts, at some point somewhere, you brush against this outsiderness—among geeks, it’s the one common rite of passage. A few carry the scars around with them for good. Sometimes they hurt themselves. Sometimes—rarely—they hurt other people. But if you’re lucky, you move past it, perhaps to a college where Others go. You find a community, a place where you’re welcome.
For the first time, you’re important, vital, on the inside; a citizen of an amazing new nation. You can instantly connect with the others like you. Being smart isn’t a liability; it’s usually the only thing that matters.
Whether you’re a programmer or Web designer or developer, an artist, help-desk geek, or tech supporter, a filmmaker or writer, you’re a part of the Geek Ascension. People need you. They hire you. They can’t afford to be contemptuous. Life isn’t a breeze, but it sure is different. You have an open invitation to what is, at the moment, the greatest party in the world: the Internet and the World Wide Web.
THE RISE OF THE GEEKS
I CAME
face to face with the Geek Ascension at an ugly suburban Chicago cable-TV studio on a bitter winter morning in 1996, toward the end of a contentious tour for my first nonfiction book.
Virtuous Reality
was a collection of essays about kids, culture, violence, and morality, a loosely focused defense of screen culture—the Net, the Web, TV, movies—against the politicians, journalists, and academics banging the drums, then and now, about the looming collapse of civilization. It was a position, therefore, that had prompted weeks of media sparring with members of the so-called intelligentsia and representatives of groups that had
decency
in their titles. I was the degenerate, the anti-Christ, a champion of porn and perversion.
The tour was winding down, thankfully, when I arrived for this predawn breakfast show. There was hardly anyone in the building but the anchorman, a handful of cameramen, the control-room techs, a producer, my book-tour escort, and me. Outside, the wind was howling; my fingers, though I was gripping a cup of coffee, were numb.
Watching the monitor in the green room, I saw Brian, the anchor, launch into the by-now-familiar tease of the segment as the inevitably frenetic producer guided me through makeup, prepped me for about ninety seconds, hustled me into the studio.
“Here’s an interesting point of view,” I heard the anchor say cheerfully just before I walked onto the set. “A former TV producer—and a father—who says the Internet
isn’t
a dangerous place for your kids!”
I was wearing out, worn down by weeks of arguing. I was sick of myself, of the blah-blah coming out of my interviewers’ mouths and my own. I was even more sick of people like this Parents for Decency flak, on the phone from Washington, D.C., where spokesmen for decency all seem to be.
“Just last week, a nine-year-old girl was lured into a park by some pervert online and raped,” she announced in professional alarm. “Is that the kind of thing Mr. Katz wants us to ignore?”
Brian appeared stunned. “That sounds awful,” he said, suddenly less friendly. “What about that?”
“Brian,” I snapped, “it seems so dumb for us to be sitting here in a TV studio—with all the junk that you people put on the air all day, from soap operas to freeway shootings—and have to actually argue that the Internet isn’t a dangerous place. Kids are more likely to have planes fall on their heads than to get hurt on the Net.”
Brian and I were both startled to hear the sound of applause coming from somewhere in the cavernous studio. Brian flushed, hesitated, then plowed on. Shocked, I looked around. Two cameramen were standing right on the studio floor clapping. So were a handful of techs inside the darkened control room, nodding at me, smiling and waving, giving me the thumbs-up, and yelping, “Yeah!” and “Awright!”
In a past life, I’d been executive producer of
The CBS Morning
News.
I knew how CBS management—or I, for that matter—would have reacted to such an outburst. Blood would have been spilled.
In fact, Brian was livid when we went to a commercial. “The bastards, I can’t believe they did that.”
“Jeez,” I said, still startled but pleased. “How do they get away with that? I would think they’d get fired.”
“Are you kidding?” Brian muttered through gritted teeth. “We just built a new digitalized control room and automated camera system. We’re still working out the bugs. How could we fire those guys? Nobody else could possibly run the damn place!”
On the way out, I stopped by the control room. Three kids were sitting at the blinking, beeping, spaceship-like console, beaming at me and high-fiving each other. They had scraggly longish hair and were wearing T-shirts—one
Star Trek,
one that said
HACKERS DO
WANT SEX!
and one that really caught my attention:
GEEK AND PROUD.
I made the rounds, shaking hands, collecting good wishes and slaps on the back like a candidate working the crowd. Nothing remotely like this had happened on any of my previous book tours. I liked it. “Hey thanks,” I said. “I appreciate that. I hope you don’t get in trouble.”
The three of them snorted. “Hey, no sweat,” one answered. “We’re safe in here, man. There are a hundred pretty-boy anchors they could hire. And they change general managers every other month. But we’ve been here for two years. We set this control room up. The cameras, graphics, and commercial scripts are fully computerized, all digitalized. We worked up the programs that run the studio. We are the only irreplaceable people in the building. Welcome to the geek kingdom.”
During the tour, I’d been filing daily
Virtuous Reality
book tour reports to Hotwired, the website I wrote for. Readers followed my travels, critiqued my press interviews, showed up at book signings, called in to chat on talk shows. So I reported my encounter with the control-room crew in a column headlined “The Rise of the Geeks.” The next day, I had hundreds of e-mail messages from people all over the country, proudly claiming the name for themselves.
It was eye-opening. The definition of “geek” no longer had anything to do with biting the heads off chickens. These self-proclaimed geeks invited me to visit their offices, studios, and homes. “We run the systems that run the world,” one e-mailed me from New York. “Until recently, most CEOs wouldn’t have let us in the door. Now we sit next to the CEOs. We are the only people who know how the place operates, how to retrieve files, how to keep the neural systems running. We are the indispensables.”
I’d been inducted, suddenly, into a previously secret society. Wherever I went—Wisconsin Public Radio, CNN, radio stations in L.A. and San Francisco—these mostly young men in T-shirts, more secure and cheerful than almost everybody around them, came up and introduced themselves, patted me on the back, offered to take me out for pizza, warned me about nasty anchors and interviewers. They were all walking billboards for
Star Wars,
various ISPs,
Beavis
and Butt-Head,
diverse websites and computer games.
As I learned more, I wrote several additional Hotwired columns about geekhood, and e-mail responses poured in by the metric ton. They flowed in for months. I’m still getting them.
THEIRS IS
an accidental empire. Almost no one foresaw the explosion of the Internet or its mushrooming importance. “The Internet’s pace of adoption eclipses all other technologies that preceded it,” a U.S. Commerce Department report declared in 1998. “Radio was in existence thirty-eight years before fifty million people tuned in; TV took thirteen years to reach that benchmark. Sixteen years after the first PC [personal computer] kit came out, fifty million people were using one. Once it was opened to the general public, the Internet crossed that line in four years.” Although most Americans had never even heard the term a generation ago, the United States will have more than 133 million Net users this year, according to the
Computer Industry Almanac.
Historians can point to other periods of astonishing technological upheaval—the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution—but they’re hard pressed to find a similar convergence of a particular subculture and an explosive economic boom. Tech industries are growing so quickly that almost anything you publish about them is instantly dated. A finding like the American Electronics Association’s 1997 estimate that the U.S. high-tech industry employed 4.3 million workers is inaccurate as this is being written and will be more inaccurate when it’s read.
But the sense of limitless prospects for geeks is confirmed by the job market itself. At the beginning of 1998, the Commerce Department reported that about 190,000 U.S. information technology jobs were going begging at any given time, and that close to 100,000 new ones would be created annually for the next decade. The three fastest-growing occupations over the next several years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics added, will be computer scientists (who can work as theorists, researchers, or inventors), computer engineers (who work with the hardware or software of systems design and development, including programming or networking), and systems analysts (who solve specific computer problems, and adapt systems to individual and or corporate needs).
Geeks, then, are literally building the new global economy, constructing and expanding the Internet and the World Wide Web as well as maintaining it. They’re paid well for their skills: Starting salaries for college grads with computer degrees average $35,000 to $40,000, says the National Association of Colleges and Employers, but the demand is so intense that many geeks forego or abandon college. Elite geek-incubators like Caltech, Stanford, and MIT complain that some of their best students abandon graduate school for lucrative positions in technology industries. Top-tier recruits not only command high salaries, but the prospect of stock-option wealth before they’re thirty.
A society that desperately needs geeks, however, does not have to like them. In fact geeks and their handiwork generate considerable wariness and mistrust. Historians of technology like Langdon Winner have written that throughout history, widespread unease about science and technology has amounted almost to a religious upheaval.
Notice the moral outrage present in so much contemporary media coverage and political criticism of technology. Critics lambaste overdoses of TV-watching, violent video games, and porn on the Net; they warn of online thieves, perverts, vandals, and hate-mongers; they call for V-chips, blocking and filtering software, elaborate ratings systems. They even want the Ten Commandments posted, like reassuring sprigs of wolfbane, in public schools.
If we are outraged and frightened by the spread of new technology, how are we supposed to feel about the new techno-elite busily making it all possible? “Why do I get this feeling that they—all of them, politicians, teachers, bosses—hate us more than ever?” e-mailed Rocket Roger in the week after the Columbine High School tragedy.
Not surprisingly, geeks can harbor a xenophobic streak of their own. Geeks often see the workplace, and the world, as split into two camps—those who get it and those who don’t. The latter are usually derided as clueless “suits,” irritating obstacles to efficiency and technological progress. “We make the systems that the suits screw up,” is how one geek described this conflict.
The suits, in turn, view geeks as antisocial, unpredictable, and difficult, though they need them too badly to do much about it. They resent the way geeks’ strong bargaining power exempts them from having to mainstream, to “grow up,” the way previous generations did when they entered the workforce.
Why shouldn’t they have autonomy and power? geeks respond; they can be unnervingly arrogant. Geeks know a lot of things most people don’t know and can do things most people are only beginning to understand.