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The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth
erick99 writes "With so many self-proclaimed geeks here at Slashdot, this particular article concerning geeks seems fitting. The article covers the gamut from science fiction to comic books to the "mainstreaming of geeks." The author seems to conclude the it is not such a good idea that the geek may inherit the earth. But, hey, what does he know. "
Matrix, comics, and computer, sheesh! It's Revenge of the Nerds that brought geekdom to its pinnacle!
Everyone now realizes the difference between nerds and geeks. Geeks are the cool nerds!
Now, if we could only get the hot women...
Geeks tend to get along with their own better than warrior-king types.
I want my pre-september-that-never-ended internet back! ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
As geek contains within in a notion of separateness and awkwardsness, the whole notion of a mainstream geek is an oxymoron.
I suspect the author was just out to get a bit of cash or notorioty.
Both society as a whole, and science fiction/fantasy, would benefit if the latter were put back in its proper place - that is, as a satisfying diversion, rather than as life's raison d'être.
Coming from a guy with not one, but two planned sci-fi conventions coming up. I think he's lost any rights to be casting the first stone at someone because they liked lord of the rings.
Everything will be taken away from you.
No, I don't think so, geekyness is a subculture ... and if the mainstream comes towards us, we shall step aside. Not to rule the world, but to change it!
This "geek" crap has long gotten on my nerves. The only stereotype even more BORING than a DnD playing, emasculated, Buffy the Vampire Slayer watching, socially crippled dweeb is the "business/entrepenur" dork.
Want proof? Bloggers. Give even a cursory look at the personal "blogs" out there and you realize none of these people have even a semblance of a life.
"The internet often breeds individuation and solipsism" Yes.. let's blame the internet for every social evil! Si.
No, they were blaming the internet for two very specific social evils. Why would you extrapolate EVERY social evil from that?
"Rather than being integrated into society by being forced to take people as they come, the internet allows you to preselect whom you choose to fraternise with, based upon whether or not they share your specific interests."
This is one of the most annoying things to me, about some of my old friends. I grew up in a relatively small community, school of about 1000 students, near a city of a quarter of a million.
The VAST majority of my old schoolmates still hang out together and shag each other and bitch about each other and steal each others partners and generally stay in the same old pond.
They put up with the same shit from the same shits for year after year because they dont want to get out there and find people with common interests.
Geeks, nerdy boys and the like are oft criticised for being anti-social / a-social but from my experience are WAY more adventurous in building social circles which, while relativly small are created from a very wide geographical pool.
Long live the geek for spreading what genes they CAN exchange with further flung chicks that your average small town wanker obsessed with tribalism and football.
Ok - rant over - Im off for a coffee!
- Geeks are science fiction fans
- Geeks are fantasy fans
- Geeks are socially inapt
- Geeks are a consistent subculture
- Intarwebby will make you less social
None of these are true -whatsoever-.
c'mon guys, dont let some markedroids push you over in a stubborn prejudice label.
"/Dread"
That is really only true in the US... comics/graphic novels are considered to be art just like literature and the cinema in most of the rest of the world; they are particularly popular and respected in Japan and France. The attitude of many Americans towards comics is rather similar to what people first thought of movies, that they are not "Serious Art." Of course most of the people who think that know rather little about art at all! and tend to overemphasize high/low art and genre distinctions... as exemplified by the author of this article.
Essentially the ease with which the author moves from interest in science fiction/fantasy to antisocial behavior marks him a trafficker in stereotypes and a painfully unironic one at that.
It is rather sad to hear that being an individual is now considered evil.
Obsession with anything is bad if it interferes with your life. Sci-Fi/Fantasy is no different.
But the criticism of science fiction and fantasy fans - that we are infantile and escapist people, and socially inept to boot - sadly has a little more truth to it.
Yeah, and people who are obsessed with Survivor, American Idol or any of a dozen soap operas are less escapist then fantasy fans.
As long as science fiction and fantasy fandom remained a fairly marginal subculture, then while certain fans may have pursued their passion to an unhealthy degree, the existence of the subculture was harmless. But when society as a whole starts to become obsessed with the otherworldly, then society as a whole threatens to go hikikomori - to become more interested in whiling away its time dreaming, than in addressing the real problems that confront it.
When society as a whole becomes obessed with anything, it becomes a problem. The existence of a few people obsessed with the genre does not imply that society as a whole will become obesessed with it if if becomes popular. Yes, there are some very obsessive fantasy fans, but the majority are quite capable of functioning in a normal society. And to suppose that all society will become obsessive fantasy fans because a few are is ridiculous.
Nothing quite like taking an exaggerated stereotype and applying it to everyone.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
I don't know about you, but my heart swells up and I brim with pride when someone calls me a nerd (okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration...). But seriously, I enjoy being recognized for my mental abilities in a world where you can get paid hundreds of millions of dollars for hitting a ball with a stick or throwing a dead pig 70 yards. Who would you rather be, the all brawn no brains guy jacked up on designer steroids hitting 75 homeruns a season, or the mastermind that designed the drug and made it all possible?
Personally, I feel to doing quality research and being published in a scientific journal or writing code for a new program is much more of an accomplishment than throwing a 95 mile an hour strike. Call me a nerd all you want.
Fifty years ago, what is now mainstream would have been geeky. Color TV, more than one TV, more than five TV channels, more than two radios, media other than plastic audio records, remote controlled anything, microwave oven, dishwasher, identical potato chips, non-aspirin painkiller, pocket tissue, velcro, airbags, seat belts, FM radio, cupholders, fuel injected engine, anything near steering wheel other than turn signal and shift lever, radial tires, pager, radio phone, pocket-sized phone, non-incandescent home lights, overnight messages, ballpoint pens. Oh, and a pocket or home calculating machine.
I fraternise with people who share my specific interests in my social life in generally. It tends to be the case that the only people who come along to my dance lessons are people who are interested in dancing, the only people I see at games evening are people who enjoy gaming, and the only people who come to my church are Christians and people interested in finding out about Christianity. I didn't find out about the dance club, the games evening, or the church from the Internet.
To me, geeks are now people who are obsessed with a particular field or endeavor because they like being obsessed with it. Like people who drool over 2% increases in benchmarks, or make crazy case mods, or overclock their PCs, or fantically advocate open source.
Other people aren't geeks. People who own and use a digital camera or PC or scanner or keychain drive...those are every day people! They have tools, then use them. It's when you get obsessed with your tools that you're a geek.
Excellent point.
The author seems mainly concerned that the spreading of geek values will result in a mass retreat from the "real world." Well, the "real world" is whatever we choose to make it. I live a pretty geeky life -- I work as a DBA, study computational biology in school, read (and occasionally write) science fiction, listen to obscure music, and hang out primarily with other people who have similar interests. But guess what? There are a lot of those people -- and yes, half of them are women, and some pretty good-looking women at that. My academic studies may be incomprehensible to the monkeys who think an MBA constitutes higher education, but my research has the potential to change lives while they're shuffling papers. And my job is interesting, challenging, and pays me enough for a comfortable life. You don't get much more real than that.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
When people talk about traditional "geeks", a lot of people think a lot of different things. People think of computer programming, for one thing. But are all programmers geeks? Cobol programmers, or SAP programmers, or other "corporate" programmers, including to a large extent many of the modern-day "business app" programmers (Java, Delphi, VB, Clarion, etc), for example have been around for a long time, and typically they don't have all of the same qualities traditional geeks are supposed to have: they don't mind wearing suits and ties, they don't usually like comic books or chatting on the internet, in fact, besides the fact these programmers code for a living, they have nothing in common with traditional geeks.
What else are geeks sometimes known for? Guns. A lot of geeks are gun freaks, but is this a geek-only thing? Certainly not, a lot of non-geeks are gun enthusiasts.
Lord of the Rings fans? Yes, most self-respecting geeks love Tolkien's work, but there are a lot of non-geeks who feel the same, especially in literary or academic circles. These people might love the Tolkien mythology and the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit stories, but that doesn't neccessarily mean they are gun geeks or computer programmers as well...
Martial arts is another thing that lot of geeks are into. But the majority of martial artists are not traditional geeks, either.
And of course, computer knowledge. At one stage, computer operation was a hobby of geeks - they loved tweaking the systems, setting up systems, trying out new software, and so forth. But as computers have grown in popularity, even watered-down geeks or borderline non-geeks can handle all of these things and even have come to enjoy learning more about software and computers.
So what's really happening here? These individual things are becoming popular, and suddenly it seems that the sky is falling and Geekdom is becoming "too mainstream". This reminds me of the Linux crisis - "Everyone is running Red Hat, it's not Elite Enough anymore! Time to switch to Debian..." Next year: "Too many people are running Debian, time to switch to SuSE/Gentoo/etc." And now that non-geeks are starting to use Linux, a lot of people are looking into FreeBSD. It's quite the same sort of thing. Geek boundaries will just keep expanding.
The definition of geek that I employ is more "technological elite" than "nose stuck in a fantasy book". In fact, with very few exceptions, I can't stand science-fiction/fantasy. I even go so far as to define the sci-fi/fantasy kids as "nerds" (shock and awe!).
Actually, my definition of geek is essentially "someone who knows a lot about a subject." For example, I fall into the following categories:
We're pretty sure we all know what a computer geek is, but what is, say, a beer geek? Well, if you know someone who hides his heads in his hands when someone asks "what beer do you drink?", there's a good chance he's a beer geek. If you know someone who says, "it's not a bad beer, but Burton Ales are a little too salty for me": BEER GEEK!
Your average beer drinker will say things like "Sam Adams is the best beeah evah" or possibly define the multitude of beer styles as "regular, lite, dark, and Guinness". On the other hand, a beer geek needs to determine what he's having for dinner before he makes his beer selection (and will actually send a waiter away until such a determination is made).
That is a geek.
He should inherit the earth.
Not someone who thinks "Lite" is a style of beer,
:wq
So you are a nomad as opposed to them being tribalists and this makes you better somehow?
You are no better than them, nor they you. There's just a lot of diversity in the way humans live their lives. If everyone did what you do then there would be no communities and that would really suck.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
But the criticism of science fiction and fantasy fans - that we are infantile and escapist people, and socially inept to boot - sadly has a little more truth to it.
I don't see the problem. What is socially inept is defined by the prevailing culture. By 1950's standards, almost all of today's socially respectable, well-adapted individuals are "socially inept" as well--they know none of the behavioral norms, dress norms, or skills that any respectable member of society was expected to know back then; culture and social standards have already shifted radically.
Will social norms shift even further? Who knows. But which set of social norms we get depends on the norms we prefer, and to the degree that those preferences are subject to change, the norms can change. If enough people find a geek lifestyle acceptable for others and maybe for themselves, then that lifestyle will become more mainstream.
Nope, sorry, language has moved on. AFAICT, "geek" now refers to those of us who are systems thinkers about, increasingly, any subject. You can now find people, as the article mentions, saying that they are "geeking out" about anything from auto repair to barbeque.
/. and while most of us may have looked like, and been, pasty-faced social isolates at the age of ten, we now do martial arts, ride and rebuild motorcycles, can at the least effectively simulate the patter and behavior required to do well at parties, and, well, we get laid.
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"nerd" now denotes the tape-on-the-glasses weakling.
Personally, I think that this separation was inevitable since:
A.) Society will never maintain contempt for any class of people who make lots of money and get lots of power.
A'.) Any class with lots of money and power will achieve at least a passable baseline of nookie.
and more interestingly
B.) Real geeks are, by nature, hackers of our environment and, increasingly of ourselves. Sure, some techies seem to sincerely think that they can transcend their social cluelessness and isolation by becoming experts in yet another obscure subject (beer-making, cpu customization, wargaming) but most of us long since figured out that we can apply our skills at analysis and redesign to ourselves.
I look at my friends on
I am a geek. I am seriously fucking proud of that. I know that I am not only smarter and more capable in several dozen ways then just about anybody I have ever met, I am also more honest, ethical, and self-aware. All are geek traits.
I have also done more bed-hopping then many a guy.
Sure, we start out as "losers" but at what iteration?
I'm thirty-seven. Old enough to now see what is happening to my age cohort well beyond the baselines provided by genetics, family, and cultural mores. Most guys my age are getting sloppy, flabby, passive, and sloppy about their appearance and even their careers. I look at the geeks my age and we are all more self-assured, all working on our health, mostly getting stronger and more physically capable, and generally on the way up while those around us go down. We are stronger, fiercer, and more formidible then our non-geek equivalents and the gap is widening.
As far as I'm concerned, being a geek is defined by what I call "two and a half" variables. Firstly, being a systems-oriented thinker, seeing the world not as a random set of causeless phenomena but as overlapping groups of editable, comprehensible events. Secondly, having a brain that doesn't turn off. In other words, living with a default setting of starting to figure out "why" as soon as one is provided with the data on "what".
The "half" is that nobody becomes that passionate about understanding the world just because they felt like it. That level of involvement *always* is a consequence of something serious having been wrong when one was a child. After all, if the world gives you everything you want, then you don't question it too deeply. So all of us, each of us, were striving for something and were smart enough that we found that thinking and understanding got us closer to get what we strove for. Kids develop the tool that gets them what they want. We developed the habit of thinking. Of making sense of things.
But that "malformation" is only the starting point, not necessarily a permanent state.
Where do computers fit into all of this? Only as easy ways to make a living that are best handled by us. Built by geeks, specc'ed in part by geeks (Vannevar, we call to you!), they are logic machines, however faulty. So a lot of us have drifted there. Whatever. It's only a local and temporary anomaly. In the eighteen-fifties we would have been in the railroad business.
As for the "make-believe" thing, I call bullshit on that. I have repeatedly had to endure crowds of dim bulbs on their way to Yankees games recently and these halfwits were far more involv
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.