Geeks (12 page)

For some of my classmates, college was preordained. It was always understood that they would go to college, and that their families would help them pay for it. My circumstances were different. College was never mentioned as a real possibility for me, and there was definitely no money to pay for it. So I never thought of it as an option, and, aside from a couple of teachers, no one encouraged me in that direction.

This is not meant to be an excuse, but an explanation. I was angry, distracted, and self-destructive. But I am responsible for what I did. And I believe my rebelliousness was necessary in order for me to get through the circumstances of my life. While I take responsibility, I also make no apologies. I’ve moved on. And in some strange ways, the experience made me better, not less, equipped for college.

During all of this trouble, I maintained my desire for challenge and continued to take the most advanced courses offered at Middleton High School. Even if I didn’t always perform at the top of my class, I always felt that it was with those minds where I belonged, and felt the most comfortable.

I could stand my ground in calculus and physics with any straight-A student, and I was very proud of that, because in many ways I was self-educated. Even if I didn’t always come out looking the best, I always tried not to take the easy path. And sometimes I more than held my own—as in the state’s Academic Decathlon, in English and other subjects where my curiosity and interest overcame my rebelliousness.

Since high school, I have maintained a voracious appetite for learning, from Dickens to Langston Hughes to writings about nanotechnology, chemistry, and biology. I have remained heavily involved in computing science, investigating and maintaining complex networks and studying everything from memes to artificial intelligence. I am not afraid of point of view, and am a sucker for almost any debate having to do with science, computing, or many aspects of politics and philosophy.

Out of this has come a rich and curious, if unsupervised and unstructured, education. An education taught by life, challenge, difficulty and will, born of my own spirit, and the spirit of the world in which I live and that I treasure. Never in the world would I replace the pleasure of reading a great author, or conquering some vast technical puzzle, for a perfect GPA.

But at the same time, I now want a different kind of education, a more structured one, and know how much I need it. I have lived entirely on my own in the world—something few nineteen-year-olds get to do—worked in an office tower, moved halfway across the country with no money or support in search of something.

A real education is what I’ve been looking for. I need it, and one way or another, I’ll get it. I want it to be at the University of Chicago. I’ve read the school’s catalogues, visited the campus, talked to students. I know it’s the right place for me, the next step. I won’t be disappointed if I come there, and I won’t disappoint.

I don’t have the words to explain to you how hard it is for me to sit and write this, to portray myself as if I were something special, as if I were not humble. Speaking about myself in such a tone is something that I find very hard to do. I don’t believe in bragging, nor do I think that I am a genius of my own making.

What I do believe is that I can do this. I believe that I am smart enough, and know how to work hard enough, to make anything happen.

I’d like to enter the University of Chicago this fall. I’ll need some help, financial and otherwise, but I can do it.

And I promise to do well by it, if I get the opportunity.

Sincerely,    

Jesse Dailey

9

THE DEAN

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

Hows it there? The weather is making me feel a little bit better, but I still feel like my life is beginning to plane off after a long, racing climb full of drastic change. And I don’t feel good about it. I would hope that as I live my life, these brief periods will be just that, brief. That they will constitute a short impetus in which to rest and to gather courage and drive with which to move on, to inspire further change and growth. I don’t know, maybe I need the distraction of constant movement. Maybe I won’t ever be content with the present, and maybe I should be.

>    >    >

I WAS
feeling particularly responsible for this situation: First I’d repeatedly urged Jesse to consider going to college, then I’d quailed at his decision to pursue one of the toughest.

At home, reality was seeping in. My daughter and her classmates were within weeks of getting their thin envelopes or fat ones. Some of her friends—students with solid academic records and all sorts of talents and accomplishments—had gotten shot down left and right as early applicants to schools like Brown, Amherst, and Yale. They and their families were in shock.

I was reading story after story about how difficult a year this was for college admissions, how selective the top schools had become, how even the brightest kids were meeting rejection.

Besides, the more I talked with Jesse, the more misgivings I had about how he would handle higher education. He was almost a wolf child, raised on his own for so long that he was ferociously independent, far more so than most twenty year olds.

Plus, there was a distinct twist to the evolution of a geek kid like Jesse: a significant part of his history, personality, education, and value system had been shaped by the Net where, by his own admission, he’d spent between twenty and forty hours a week for the past decade.

The Net had influenced him enormously, forming his libertarian mish-mash of political views, his suspicion of institutions and corporations, his eclectic interests in a thousand different subjects, his curious notions of intellectual and material property, and his penchant for developing ideas and theories in isolation.

Geeks who spend hours of their lives online, programming and gaming, practice what hackers call “deep magic”: They enter a zone unique to the online world, where they are transfixed by the digital environment around them. Colleges, though most have invested in massive bandwidth to give their students easy access to the Net, remain collective enterprises. You study and live and socialize in a community.

From his series of computer perches, Jesse had grown up at odds with the conventional educational system. He had, like David Copperfield, been so long on his own that the ways of his peers were alien. Could he adjust to a communal learning process? Would he want to?

Taking full advantage of all the archived information that was never more than a few mouse clicks away, Jesse had strong ideas and theories about everything—the size of government, genetic engineering, gun control. Everyone who knew him, from Mr. Brown to his classmates, described him as fiercely opinionated. Would he be able to set his own ideas aside long enough to hear other people’s?

What about that ingrained resentment toward yuppies, so strong he’d refused to even consider moving to some of the most interesting cities in America? Wouldn’t he find himself surrounded by those kids whose parents had bought them their computers?

Jesse’s gift—his equivalent of other kids’ passion for music or sports—was computing. He didn’t just talk about being a geek, it was his ideology, religion, identity. Was being “a geek on the rise” a valued asset at the University of Chicago, known for its classic core curriculum?

As I thought it through, I pictured a round of rejections—academic, social, cultural.

Money was an overriding factor. Jesse didn’t have any to spare; neither did his parents. I had my own kid’s tuition bills to face. Jesse would need nearly a full scholarship. Would he get it? Or be burdened with gigantic loans, years of obligations to finance an enterprise that would be difficult, at best?

One thing we had going for us was an excerpt from this book that ran in
Rolling Stone
in April 1999. Detailing Jesse and Eric’s move from Idaho, it was headlined
GEEKS: HOW TWO PISSED-OFF, CASTOFF NINETEEN-YEAR-OLDS ESCAPED A SEVEN-DOLLAR-AN-HOUR FUTURE IN DEAD-END IDAHO AND RODE THE INTERNET OUT OF TOWN.
It traced Jesse and Eric’s journey from Caldwell to Richton Park and ended with the Thanksgiving dinner we’d shared.

Predictably, the piece generated tons of e-mail and considerable interest online. Middle-school girls put Jesse and Eric’s picture up on their lockers; geeks, nerds, and hackers in Chicago e-mailed them. Just as predictably, the piece didn’t really alter their social reality as I’d hoped. They were invited to a regular hacker get-together, went once, then never returned. They emailed some kids online and traded some MP3s; that was about the extent of it.

But the piece would at least give Jesse and Eric something to send to college admissions committees. It wouldn’t make the difference between yea or nay, but it might attract some attention.

I’d called Kathy Anderson, the university’s press officer, and sent her the magazine piece, asking if she could help put me in touch with the admissions people. She invited Jesse to the university for lunch. Afterward, impressed by his intelligence and curiosity, she said she’d do anything she could to help. The university had an interest in finding and nuturing promising “nontraditional” students, but it set very high standards as to who was sufficiently promising. She suggested I write the Dean of Admissions, Theodore O’Neill.

I’d taught at New York University for a few years, and had seen a bit of the academic bureaucracy. Perks were savagely guarded, even the tiniest territory defended to the death. The Chicago admissions office would not be looking for input from the press office or, for that matter, from a magazine writer.

I’d sent Dean O’Neill the article, with an accompanying letter. But I also understood that something more was required, a bold gesture. If anything, most academics would wrinkle their noses at a
Rolling Stone
piece.

Flying out to make a personal appeal might make him take notice. If I felt strongly enough about Jesse’s deserving a shot—and I did—maybe such a trip would get his application a closer look or convince somebody in the admissions office that he was worth meeting.

It was an expensive undertaking on a dubious mission, but I would feel as if I’d done everything possible if I met with Dean O’Neill and made my pitch face to face.

In April, Jesse sent off the formal application that was due on January 1.

I called Dean O’Neill’s office and made an appointment.

Each passing week made college—or some other break—feel more crucial. Jesse had shown all the heart, courage, and enterprise in the world, but he could see it wasn’t getting him closer to where he wanted to be. He and Eric had the grit and skill that had propelled them out of Idaho, but grit and skill weren’t working so well now. Jesse had made a couple of friends at work, and did go out sporadically; he was adventurous when he could be. But he needed to do something much more dramatic if he really wanted to break out.

He and Eric remained close, but they had been together day and night for nearly two years, gaming, networking, going to movies and out to dinner. Even for a young geek, that was a pretty small world. Jesse was more outgoing, increasingly restless, almost desperate for the books I’d occasionally send, or for word of a new movie.

He worried continually about Eric. Early on, his fear was that Eric was troubled and anxious about not finding work. “I think Eric is really feeling kinda bleak,” he e-mailed me in November. “This is the same thing that happened last time he tried to be completely independent, when he went to Seattle. He ended up living off of and with his brother and never getting a job, and failing at interviews aplenty, and in general I think this has made him very afraid that the same thing will happen again . . . like maybe he thinks this is what is always going to happen.”

This, Jesse noted, was a frightening position to be in. “Personally, I think there are just a few things he has not yet learned about life, and that is that you
cannot
get through it without learning how to communicate with people.”

Now that Eric was working—and his job at Andersen was actually a little livelier than Jesse’s, with more young people around—he was still feeling bleak, it seemed.

My relationship with Eric was warm, but he always seemed a little uneasy on the phone and his e-mail messages were occasional and spare. Whereas Jesse was energized by impossible challenges, Eric was discouraged by them. He was thinking a lot about programming, artificial intelligence (AI), and science. But his messages, in stark contrast to Jesse’s feisty determination, were grim.

There was something hopeless in Eric’s e-mail, like this response to my asking if he was liking work any better.

From:
Eric P. Twilegar

To:
Jon Katz

Yah, things are going a lot better, I’m just depressed. I think I’m going to go out to the blues fest tomorrow and have some blues to calm my nerves. I’m not sure though, I may just sit around and program while I have the time.

This whole brain thing is really having an effect on me. I’m not quite sure if it’s good or bad. Everything from eating to seeing something gross is taking on a whole new meaning to me. I find myself analyzing every sensation, with every experience passing down the realization that I’m just a really fancy robot. . . . Everything has its downside, and in science it’s starting to show. We may reveal the essence of our soul, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. There needs to be some magic, there needs to be some conflict. This is going to be a major obstacle in AI I think. The robot will be totally aware of its own operations. It will know how to work because it will be able to read documentation describing it down to the last transistor. It takes the joys out of life, knowing everything has to suck.

Jesse hadn’t lost his optimism yet. He almost always took a chance at socializing when he could. “I went out last night after work with a few coworkers to the bar in the lobby, it was kind of a going-away party for the telecommunications lady, who is leaving to go work for a start-up company for 20 percent more pay,” he e-mailed me after one such foray. “It was fun, kind of the first chance I have had to get to know people around here a little. There is one guy who might be considered a geek (he’s into
South Park,
is an NT admin, loved
There’s Something About Mary
), he’s pretty cool outside of work, but on the job he’s kind of a hard-ass, not too bad though.”

He was always on the lookout for geeks and for the pop culture signifiers that were signs of geekhood (movies like
The Matrix
and
There’s Something About Mary
being reliable indicators, almost passwords, along with TV shows like
The Simpsons
and, especially,
South Park
). But, he realized over time, he wasn’t in an environment where he was likely to find many.

His constricted domestic routine, plus what he regarded as an often boring job, were becoming more suffocating as the novelty of being in Chicago wore off. Something had to give.

Around this time, he startled me by taking every penny he’d saved—about $1,300—and signing up for the 1999 Foresight Gathering, a weekend nanotechnology conference in San Jose, California, the capital of Silicon Valley.

Nanotechnology, a Jesse-obsession, was a subject matter so arcane and technical it’s almost impossible for non-geeks to grasp. It’s a hypothetical molecular-engineering technology in which objects are designed and built with the individual specification and placement of each separate atom. It’s been a hot topic in the hacker subculture ever since the term was coined by K. Eric Drexler in his book
Engines of Creation,
in which he predicted that nanotechnology would permit an exponential growth of productivity and personal wealth.

Nanotechnologists literally seek to arrange atoms, and could, Drexler wrote, trigger the greatest technological breakthroughs of all time.

He posed the question in his book: “What would we build with those atom-stacking machines?” His answer: assemble machines much smaller than living cells, materials stronger and lighter than any available today. Thus, tiny devices that can travel along capillaries to enter and repair living tissue; the ability to heal disease, reverse the ravages of age, or make human bodies speedier and stronger than before. These new technologies could change the materials and means that shape the human environment.

To geeks, subjects like nanotechnology are like sports for other people. They can spend days and weeks debating the subject, trading information, arguing with one another on websites and mailing lists.

But here was a chance to chew it over with fellow geeks, face to face. The Foresight Gathering offered a heavy-duty lineup of digital and scientific thinkers: author and inventor Ray Kurzweil; open source pioneer and author of
The New Hacker’s Dictionary
Eric S. Raymond; Drexler himself; and a variety of physicists, engineers, molecular biologists, and students. The conference had filled up months earlier, but Jesse managed to finagle his way in over the phone.