Geeks (3 page)

We talked about the Net and about Louis’s idea of a civil society. We talked about Elvis and Thomas Paine. One thing you can be sure of, he told me, as he picked up the check before I had finished eating: the media I’d worked in were done, over. Newspapers were tired, stuffy, aging. Network TV was finished. The slick magazines, all of which featured the same celebrities on the same covers, were dinosaurs. None of them had anything to say to the young, to the future.

Was I coming or not? he asked abruptly.

Where? I stammered, thinking for a second that he meant San Francisco.

“Along,” he said.

“Sure.”

Good, he said, because otherwise, a media critic like me would soon have nothing to write about.

He tossed his backpack over his shoulder and got up. He was sorry he had to go, he said, but he had to get up early the next morning to get out to Bell Labs in New Jersey. They were doing a lot of neat stuff.

For the next few years, I had more fun than I’d ever had in my life writing for
Wired,
then for its website Hotwired as well.

In stunning contrast to the from-the-top-down world of Eastern media, where publishers and editors huddle constantly to decide what they want writers to write, Louis was a profoundly libertarian, if undisciplined, editorial genius. He overreached, alienated, and offended. But he also captured and advanced a revolutionary culture.

What happened to
Wired
was almost mythical, of course, following the inexorable march of modern American capitalism and its Darwinian laws. Louis overextended his revolution. After building the magazine, he hired platoons of brilliant geeks to develop the ambitious and expensive Hotwired. He launched British and Japanese editions of the magazine, followed by a book-publishing division and an ill-fated and short-lived TV show.

In July 1996,
Wired
offered its stock to Wall Street. The IPO failed to attract enough investors, and was withdrawn. The company that had defined the digital revolution so spectacularly was firmly rebuffed by the existing order. And the man who had helped spark the revolution was soon back on the outside—the traditional geek fate. Louis eventually lost control of everything in the
Wired
empire and retreated to the Berkeley Hills with his wife,
Wired
publisher Jane Metcalfe, where, in the next few years they had two children, Zoe and Orson.

Louis and I stayed in touch via e-mail. We never talked about the financial or legal maneuverings, but it was clear he was devastated by the loss of
Wired,
uncharacteristically depressed, in pain, uncertain about what to do next.

Condé Nast, the publisher of slick, sweet-smelling magazines like
Glamour
and
Details,
quickly purged
Wired
of the ideas, arguments, and rhetoric that had been the hallmarks of Louis and his strange band of cyber-theorists. If the new
Wired
was intelligent and professional, it also seemed bland, focused on celebrity, business, and machinery. It became the very kind of medium that Louis had always railed against. Not long afterward, Hotwired was also sold off, to the Net company Lycos.

I’d retreated back to
Rolling Stone
before
Wired
’s new editors had a chance to toss me out, which they clearly were eager to do. Louis had e-mailed me his regrets when he’d heard I’d left.

Publicly, he had vanished, at least in the media sense. He was rumored to be involved in the legal and financial maneuverings over the sale of the magazine. He had refused to say anything to the press.

I felt almost superstitious about not starting this book without his input and his blessing, however. Though he’d hardly given an interview since his retreat, he agreed to see me and e-mailed elaborate directions to his house.

Louis’s aerie proved accessible only by footpath. His son, Orson, was running around with his nanny, while workmen banged and hammered at the residence, which hung above San Francisco Bay. Louis made a cup of tea, then sat down on a couch.

He looked fit, but saddened, the pain visible in his eyes. But he was warm and welcoming. When I told him about my book and asked how he defined a geek, he grew instantly animated, leaning forward and waving his hands as he always did when captivated by an idea.

My own sense of a geek, I prompted, centered around the idea of alienation. That was part of what fascinated me, not the technology, but the seemingly common experience of life outside the mainstream, life with resentment and some pain. It seemed a thread linking the residents of the burgeoning Geek Kingdom.

Louis had little time for emotional deconstruction. Alienation was part of life for him and people like him, the ticket you paid to get in, neither surprising nor, to him, particularly interesting.

Class used to be about race, gender, social standing—old ideas, he said. Geeks were involved with the new ones. “The new cultural class has no physical demands or restrictions,” he said. “There are music geeks and dance geeks. Geekdom is evolving. Anybody who is obsessed with a topic and becomes completely one with it . . . whether it’s computers, music, or art—geeks come into that. Geeks is sometimes about technology but mostly, it’s about brains, and about being resented for being smart.”

He told me a story about the first time he met Bill Atkinson, “one of the people who worked on the Macintosh with Steve Jobs back at the beginning. He engineered the interface. I met him in Amsterdam when he was going around promoting a new Apple product called Hypercard. After our interview, we went out to the center of town, where we sat at a street café and watched the amazing people go by. He’d never been to Amsterdam before.

“He was there with a colleague, another nerd. And suddenly they started talking about calling home to find out what was on
Star
Trek
; the first episode of the second series was debuting that night. And it struck me: these guys don’t just make technology because they’re paid for it, they do it because they like it, and they like it because of how it works and because of what it makes possible. They like it because they find aspects of it really cool.

“All geeks have this magpie sensibility, right up to and including Gates,” he went on, warming up now. “Jobs says ‘insanely great,’ and Gates says ‘really neat,’ and what they both really mean is that they like the ingenuity, smartness, cleverness, intelligence, just plain coolness of stuff.”

Then, lapsing into the sixties’ jargon that marked his own youth, he said, “Geeks are cats who dig a special kind of cool. It’s the newest cool, the cool of the new—and there’s nothing sleeker, shinier, and newer than the human race’s latest scientific intuitions that alter the universe.”

Most of the editors and publishers I knew didn’t want to talk about geeks at all. Louis would talk about them forever. “Because they revel in redefining what’s possible, they are inherently revolutionaries,” he went on, getting excited. “They live to hallucinate new visions, to invent the next big thing, to prove the smug adherents of the status quo wrong. For the longest time, they were unappreciated, servants to bureaucrats and politicians in whatever organization they were part of, a benign cult relegated to the margins of social respectability. But in a world where the human mind is the most precious node on the planet’s nervous system, pure meritocracy is not only possible and desirable, but inevitable.”

A few years earlier, a vintage Louis rant like this would have been emblazoned, along with suitably arresting and strange artwork, across several pages of
Wired.
But that morning, the only audience was me, sitting alone with him in his living room.

There had always been a biblical element to Louis’s saga—he’d screwed up, and was therefore condemned to wander in the desert. He might never enter the promised land, but the young people he’d led out of bondage would cross over.

AND THEY
were having a marvelous time, it seemed.

As responses to the geek columns continued to roll in, I heard from a Texas minister whose website allowed his parishioners to give him feedback on his sermons, and from an Alaskan Inuit who ran her tribe’s computer operations. Programmers, gamers, designers, and systems operators weighed in with their tales of vindication, of a new order unfolding. “We’re building the pyramids of tomorrow,” wrote JameB2. “Ain’t it cool?”

They thrilled to the great reversal: The suits were dependent on them. Let the gatekeepers and moral guardians cluck and caw about civilization crumbling. They loved their bold new world and were filled with passion and enthusiasm about it.

They also celebrated the experience of finding one another. They were almost painfully eager for community.

“The term ‘geek’ and the terribly powerful social and emotional stigma that accompanies the term had me running from it,” e-mailed Doug Riordan, an online developer. “Now I find myself embracing what I am. I am my own geek.”

One response stood out, from another correspondent who’d become his own geek. I happened to be online late at night, sorting through the geek outpouring, when an e-message appeared from a small town in southern Idaho. E-mail sometimes has a peculiar chemistry all its own. Instantly transfixed, I had the sense a writer sometimes gets when he’s stumbled across the very thing he’s been looking for.

Here was someone—a kid barely out of high school, Jesse Dailey—expressing surprise that his own experience with geekhood was so widespread, even universal; he’d been stunned to recognize his travails—and also his triumphs—in my columns.

He’d written to tell me about a Geek Club that a sympathetic teacher had founded for Jesse and a few of his friends, and how the club had quickly become an institution at their rural school. The idea of a Geek Club in Middleton, Idaho, amazed me in itself. But I also responded to the kid’s tone; his mixture of vulnerability, pride, and defiance.

I e-mailed him back and asked him to tell me more about himself.

He was a working-class geek who had done almost everything it was possible to do to and with a computer, and who’d graduated from high school a year earlier, Jesse wrote. He was working unenthusiastically but diligently in a small computer shop in dreary Caldwell. He shared an apartment with a classmate and fellow Geek Club alumnus, Eric Twilegar, who had a different kind of dead-end job: selling computers at Office Max in nearby Nampa. They spent most of their lives online, Jesse said, gaming, trawling for music, downloading free software.

The Geek Club—and this was where the triumph came in—had changed his life, he said, given him a place to belong, a name to call himself. Caldwell wasn’t a particularly rewarding or stimulating place to live, he acknowledged, but that mattered less than it used to: He lived on the Net, which alone formed the boundaries of his life.

I’d been planning to crisscross the country visiting a number of the geeks who had contacted me. But after exchanging a few e-mails and phone calls with Jesse, I dropped that idea. I thought I’d found a better way to tell this story. I was soon on a plane to Idaho.

1

FIRST ENCOUNTER

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

. . . It makes no sense to try, or even to want, to fit into a place where you don’t belong. . . . It’s not going to happen, and if it ever did, it’s not what you would want anyway. . . . It’s a delusion. The trick is to take something that’s painful, and to make it so trivial that it’s inconsequential. Just walk away and make it trivial. My advice to geeks? If you don’t like it, leave, leave fast, make it trivial. Come to terms with who you are.

>    >    >

THE BOISE
airport boasts several “fresh” French-fried potato vending machines, spaced at intervals throughout the facility, to let visitors know that they are in the proud Home of the Spud.

Caldwell is forty miles west, in the center of a flat plain known, for reasons that may have made sense long ago, as Treasure Valley.

Majestic mountains loom to the north, but they are a tease; the Idaho of snowy peaks and ski resorts, plus a handful of militias and survivalists, is a long way off. This corner of southwestern Idaho is unrelentingly poor and plain, with vast stretches of empty roads and treeless farmland, intersected by equally vast swatches of fast-food franchises and car dealerships.

Driving into town in my rented car, I saw no obvious signs that Caldwell had ever prospered. It practically smacks you in the head with its barren agri-ugliness, its literal and architectural poverty, and its homogeneous Mormonness. The Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS, to the locals), the dominant political, cultural, and social force, makes its presence seen and felt everywhere—on radio stations, in the newspapers, in education and business, in the ubiquity of church buildings, and the flow of ordinary conversation.

Stopping for coffee at a tiny restaurant near the center of town, I heard a waitress firmly quiet a customer who was mouthing off to a buddy about Monica Lewinsky: “Hush, we don’t talk about that kind of thing in here.”

Cruising the lifeless streets, I couldn’t help thinking how tough it must be to be different here, because hardly anyone is. Residents are quick to acknowledge this: People who are restless, unusual, or ambitious get out quickly, sometimes heading for more forward-looking Nampa nearby, more often for booming Boise down the highway. I couldn’t imagine a less hospitable place for a nineteen-year-old noncomformist.

The September heat was broiling but dry, under a desert sun. A layer of fine dust covered cars and roadways. I called Jesse at Emco Computers, where he worked.

“Hey,” he said. No pleasantries, as in “Welcome” or “How was the trip?”

“Hey. Want to have lunch?”

“Sure. Stop by. I don’t have a car. I ride my bike to work.”

A surprise—in this open landscape, where the distance from home to work to a friend’s place could easily be twenty miles, a car didn’t seem like a luxury.

He gave me directions and a few minutes later I pulled into the parking lot of a small storefront on the town’s Main Street. There was a green monitor painted on the outside window, along with hand-lettered signs offering repairs and software installations.

Tiny retail computer shops like Emco serve as a haven and gathering spot for idiosyncratic geeks, nerds, and techs who are miles from the nearest computer superstore and will never set foot in a lab at MIT or Caltech. Computers have replaced automobiles for a certain tribe of working-class American tinkerers who can never stop tweaking their machines and are constantly scrounging for new or used parts.

In a way, it made perfect sense that Jesse had a computer but not a car: Young Americans seem much more in love with their computers these days. The kid who might once have cruised through town showing off his new Mustang is more apt to invite friends over to see his turbocharged new hard drive.

Computers are cheaper and less greasy, but eternally evolving. Geeks’ work is never done. There is no equivalent of the ’56 Chevy, lovingly restored and meticulously maintained. Computers get outdated hourly. There is always better Net access, newer software, a continuous stream of updates, a more powerful hard drive, a by now incalculable inventory of gadgets and gizmos, programs, graphics, and operating systems.

Small shops like Emco, often started by techs who bristle at the idea of working for big corporations, are magnets for local geeks. They ultimately don’t have a prayer, any more than the local five-and-dime can survive against Wal-Mart, though they try to find a niche by offering peripheral services, from repairs and wholesale part distribution to servicing small business systems.

Still, it made sense that Jesse Dailey would have gravitated to a place like this, where he could use the gift he’d developed in grade school—taking computers apart and putting them together again. At his high school graduation a year earlier, a classmate, a son of Emco’s owner, had approached him with a vague job offer. Jesse, having no other real prospects, grabbed the chance. What better way to cruise the Net and the Web, his work and his play as long as he could remember, than on somebody else’s phone line?

ERNIE, THE
owner, seemed to be expecting me and gestured to the repair bay in the rear of the store. Emco’s tech department had the dimensions of a good-sized bathroom, with three or four desks where Jesse, the senior man, and a couple other techs replaced hard drives, added memory chips, assembled PCs, and resuscitated tired or fried modems.

Ernie looked a bit surprised to see that Jesse must have been telling the truth—some writer guy from New York had met him on the Net and had actually come all the way to Caldwell to talk to him. In fact, I anticipated that I might have to overcome some wariness from Jesse’s employer, or puzzled colleagues, or cautious family members urging him to be careful. He was only a year out of high school, after all.

It was the first but not the last time I toted along my middle-class notions about parenting, only to learn that Jesse had been almost completely on his own for years.

The boomer ethos in which I’d raised my own daughter was obsessively protective, perpetually on guard against everything from lead paint and genetically engineered food to helmetless bike-riding, drinking, smoking, sex, and possible learning disabilities. Strangers, of course, represented the greatest danger of all—and in my mind, I was the classic stranger on the Internet, one of the central media-stoked phobias in American life, winging in from parts unknown to visit a nineteen year old who had no real idea whether I was who I said I was, or was doing what I said I was doing.

But Jesse’s world was different. Hardly any of the decisions he made had involved consultation with or the supervision of adults.

It wasn’t a question of estrangement—Jesse was quite close to members of his family, fractured though it was—but of a different value system. In Idaho, once you could take care of yourself, you did. You separated not the way upper-middle-class boomers’ kids did, gradually and in long and expensive stages, but abruptly, usually irrevocably. It was understood that life involved dangers, but that kids learned how to handle themselves.

Emco had only one phone line, astonishingly, and Ernie’s son was on it playing a computer game. His father turned to gently remind him that the store took business calls on that line. Otherwise, the place was quiet.

Around the corner of the front counter, a skinny, unsmiling kid looked up from a littered table and nodded, meeting my eyes only glancingly, then looking away. His face was void of expression, a mask I came to know well and could rarely crack. Jesse was taking apart a motherboard—the guts and circuits of a computer. He told me he’d be with me in a minute.

He was pale, his complexion like the underbelly of a fish, and he wore black-rimmed glasses. He had slightly stooped shoulders, as if his spine and neck had frozen in place after too much time hunched over a keyboard. He wore a red “Emco Computers” polo shirt, brown pants, and black Nike Airwalks.

I waited a few minutes, as he silently put the board together and told Ernie he’d be back in an hour.

WE SAID
little as we drove past a string of modest prairie houses into Caldwell’s fading downtown, except that Jesse pointed out several landmarks where he’d brushed up against the law. Here, he’d been stopped and searched while riding his bike. There, he’d been busted for driving under the influence. Over there, he’d hung out with some members of a gang he’d briefly joined.

This was the first manifestation of what I came to learn was bedrock Jesse ideology: He distrusted almost all authority and bureaucracy. Institutions—government, religion, school administrations, the music industry, Microsoft—were roadblocks, put on earth to obstruct and torment him, invade his privacy and limit his freedom of movement on the Internet. They were barricades to be circumvented, and he was part of a growing guerrilla force that knew how.

Downtown Caldwell had a sun-blasted Western feel. Half the stores on the wide street seemed to be pawnshops and check-cashing agencies, and the other half were shuttered.

Jesse had picked the town’s only Chinese restaurant, run by white Mormons, he said. On cue, a severe-looking elderly white woman with blue-rinsed hair came to take our order. The food was, of course, dreadful. The Mexican place was better, Jesse said, but this one was farther from work, more private.

We were about as different as two American males could possibly be. I was a middle-aged bald guy more than thirty years older than he, a lifelong easterner. Jesse knew me as a writer for
Rolling Stone,
Wired,
and Hotwired, the former website of the
Wired
empire, and that seemed to be enough. He knew nothing about my personal life as a father and husband and seemed utterly uninterested in my background as a former newspaper reporter and editor, TV producer, and professor turned media critic and author. What mattered was the context in which we had come together: the Internet.

Jesse was nineteen, a graduate of Middleton High, in an even smaller and emptier town a few miles away. Through his parents’ various marital split-ups, he’d moved repeatedly from one remote and inhospitable town to another, learning to negotiate a series of stepparents along the way. He’d lived mostly in Montana until his mother decided to go to college to become a social worker and sent him to live with his father and stepmother for high school.

When Jesse decided to talk, which generally took a while, he had plenty to say. He was almost shockingly bright. Before we left the restaurant an hour and a half later, we had argued about
Wired
magazine, social responsibility, Charles Dickens, the future of the Net, and the definition of a geek; we’d discussed the
Star Wars
trilogy, the power of Bill Gates, the impact of the Web on big business, and the quality of various operating systems. We’d tackled gun control, the meaning of intellectual property, the structure of American education, and the future of networked computing.

We also began what was to be a running debate—and joke—on the subject of whether or not Jesse was intense, a word that came to mind. “No, that’s not right,” he challenged. “I wouldn’t say intense. I’d say that I have ‘clarity of intent.’ ”

As the check came, I couldn’t help wondering about a central question, especially given that my daughter was up to her neck in the highly fraught college admissions process and had visited half a dozen campuses. “Why the hell aren’t you in college?” I almost blurted.

He shrugged. “It wasn’t anybody’s expectation,” he said. “It never really came up.”

Did he have a lot of friends? I asked. He smiled, shook his head. Did he travel much? Never. Spend a lot of time outside? Only to ride his bike around. Had he hated high school? Completely, except for the members of the Geek Club and one or two teachers, especially Mr. Brown, the English teacher who had founded and named the Club. How did he get along with the Mormons who dominated this part of the world? Poorly. He’d taunted them repeatedly in school, arguing that the idea of God and of organized religion in general was very nearly insane. But then, he hadn’t gotten along with preppies or jocks either, or with the school’s administrators. He had disrupted commencement ceremonies by deliberately wearing a gold cap and gown, and the principal had threatened to bar him unless he changed into the mandated blue ones.

Did he know what he wanted to do in life? Sure. Work with computers.

We talked a bit more, and then I asked him if he was as alone as he seemed. He seemed startled by the question.

“I have the Internet,” he tried to explain. “The Net is my safety. It’s my community. It’s not a substitute for life for me. It is life.”

We agreed to meet later, with Eric, after work. They had some business to transact.