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The Rise of Geekdom
cynagh0st writes "In what can only be described as the biggest newsflash for the Slashdot community since Microsoft was sued: It is the age of the geek. New York Times Op-Ed columnist and author David Brooks writes a brief article that can be best summed up in the following: All your culture are belong to us. In the article proper he summarizes the rise to power and discusses a technocratic geek dominance on the social construct. He writes, '... the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds ... They've created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated ... There are now millions of educated-class types guided by geek manners and status rules.'" I'm thinking Brooks must have been AFK for the 2nd half of the 90s when this started. To be more precise, late 97 ;)
Looks like geekdom has gone mainstream now. Great. Now I gotta find something else to be. I guess otaku still has a couple of years left, though the folks over in Akihabara are probably going to end up making that mainstream too before long.
And as for 1997, I had a Fidonet BBS back in 1993, then fixed IP DSL since early 2000.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
In other words, being a geek comes in and out of fashion, but there is an overall rising trend. For example, back in my day (the 80s) movies like Real Genius, Revenge of the Nerds, and Weird Science, along with the rise in popularity of the personal computer, role playing games, etc. were all evidence for the geek empowerment movement.
While I agree we are in a local maximum for the geek aesthetic where software engineers and programmers are like the supermodels of geek culture, the true litmus test for the Age of the Geek will be when a physics major can proudly say so at a party and not have everyone take two steps back. This has never been true, and I see no evidence of this yet.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Absolutely.
I was interested that TFA cited Harry Potter as a kind of geek icon. Either they didn't read the books, or they think that "geek" = "wearing eyeglasses fixed with sticky-tape". Harry Potter is always doing badly at his classes, is more interested in sports than books, and leaves all the really clever stuff to Hermione. In other words, he's pretty much the quintessential jock! If geek-kids want role models, they need to look somewhere very different.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Speaking for myself, the NBA players and rock stars don't hold much charm; billionaires are a different matter, but give me Sergei Brin over Prince William any day! Money is all well and good, but it won't keep your brain warm on a boring winter's evening...
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Where did I ever say "Dumb frat guys"? If anything, I don't think that geeks (or geekdom) is any special.
I wasn't particularly talking about oil, but in terms of fortune in general. Oil, tech and manufacturing company execs have background in those industries. News at 11.
That, however, does not necessarily translate across all industries. Secondly, a background in engineering means nothing. My undergrad was in EE. I'm a management consultant working on completely unrelated stuff. Your point?
Well, to be a geek you have to really, really, really be into something that most people find pointless, incomprehensible, or dull. To be a geek subculture, you have to be organized around something of that nature.
It follows that while many MBAs may be geeks, the MBA subculture is not a geek subculture. The last time I checked, making money had fairly obvious popular appeal.
"Cool" is in the eye of the beholder. There's another term that entered youth culture through jazz, with roots that go all the way back to Mother Africa. The word "hip" comes from a West African word "hep", mean "one who knows."
To be cool, you have to attract the admiration of others. To be hip you must possess knowledge not available to the public at large. For example, I had a friend who'd walk into a certain restaurant on a Friday night and get immediately seated. Even if they had a line waiting, they'd see him at the back of the line and immediately usher him from to a table. That was sort of cool. But it wasn't hip. His secret was available to anybody: you just had to eat there five times a week.
Now many years ago there used to be a restaurant in my neighborhood that opened at midnight and closed at 6:00am. It catered to an eclectic mix of insomniacs, workers leaving the night shift or going to the graveyard shift, musicians hanging out after their gigs, and vampirish denizens of the night (this was back before anybody had heard of the "goth" subculture).
Being a regular at that place made you hip.
I'd say the very definition of "geek" would be "hip" without being recognizably "cool" to most people. Slinging a mean soldering iron makes you hip to electronics, but cool only to your electronics geek buddies.
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Having worked offshore in the oil industry for the last 3 years, I can tell you who's making the money. Pretty much everyone working for oil makes good money, but most of us don't make great money. The engineers don't make much more than everyone else (DPOs, riggers, ROV mechanics, etc). In fact, the only ones who pull in over 100 a year are the client reps and execs, captains (if they've been doing it for long enough), project managers, and people who put up capital. The one thing all of these guys have in common is that they do very little work. All the workers (this includes engineers, chemists, and geologists) pull in about 60 - 100 a year, depending on tenure. There are of course exceptions, but generally, only about 5% of the people who actually do some kind of work pull in over 100 a year and those people usually have a lot of tenure.
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
Until the climate change thaws the perma-frost, I think tar sand oil extraction would be a hellish job. When the bogs thaw it'll get much worse.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
It depends where you are - supply and demand play a huge role in salaries for what would normally be considered low-end jobs. Out on the tar-sands projects in Alberta welders make $100 an hour, and most pipe-fitters rake in at least $30 an hour. The demand has exceeded supply by a huge margin, so the salaries have gone through the roof, and workers are coming in from all over the place. As a result, housing prices have skyrocketed (from less than 100k to 350k+ in the matter of a couple years), and even the local coffee shops have had to start paying their employees $15 per hour in order to compete for manpower.
On the other hand, if you're a basic worker employed on some almost-empty oil well in Texas, chances are you're not making much cash at all. That's because the supply of workers there either meets or exceeds the demands of the oil companies.
You want to create great opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled labourers? Start drilling in the southern coastal waters, and open up Alaska too. It will create jobs and help the US economy recover, and reduce the amount of money being funnelled into the middle-east. Also, while it probably won't lower the price of gas for consumers, it will slow the climb. Frankly, I'm shocked that Bush hasn't been able to push through legislation to allow the exploitation of at least a few new areas.
Wow, elitist much?
I geek on virtual machines, I post on LiveJournal. For one, I'm one of many guys behind the curtain, for the other, I'm one of many consumers. I think most of my friends and colleagues would be -more- than happy to call me an "actual geek."
Personally, I use these services as technology to improve efficiency, which is think is a pretty geeky reason.
Being an introvert, I only have a few close friends, and I update them personally for the most part. They're not the target audience, really.
However, I do a lot of stuff. So, I have a metric buttload of people who are either older friends I now see much less often, or acquaintances. For them, I can keep track of and update them en masse through social networking services.
The nice thing is that, being a pull technology, it avoids most of the pushiness associated with periodically letters/emails/etc that require replies by proper etiquette. Instead, it's just hanging out there. If they care, they can choose to read it. If not, no harm, no foul.
They also have high-pitched whiny voices, wear pocket protectors and thick glasses, are either impossibly skinny or impossibly fat, and have no social skills. Geeks on the other hand are just simpletons parading around with a little amount of extra knowledge as coloured feathers in a birds ass. They do know more about a subject than the people in their environment and they want the others to know that. However, often enough they are not able to grasp the subject fully. I would say that yes, they do have extra knowledge about a given subject, but I see no reason they can't grasp that subject fully.
Actually, I see two important parts of the 'geek' definition -- first, they're interested in things which aren't necessarily what society as a whole is interested in. It's impossible to be a fashion geek, or a sex geek.
Second, they're not just casually interested -- it's not just "I like computers, because The Matrix was faar out!" No, these are the people who code open source software and build robots in their spare time. Or they're a sound geek, so they have a custom built audiophile-friendly setup (but not on an audiophile budget; no amount of money makes cable "danceable"), and have probably made a few techno remixes of their own.
I think the difference I see is that "nerd" is a snotty, elitist attitude towards life -- which you kind of prove with your "simpleton" comment. "Geek" is an interest or a fascination, but it's only part of what makes up a person. Vin Diesel is a D&D geek, but you can't define him by his geekiness.
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