Slashdot Mirror
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 ;)
and oil worker.
Paper shufflers and pixel movers are beginning to get a dose of harsh reality.
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; }
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...
What makes you think MBA types are not geeks? I am currently in an MBA program and let me assure you that there are plenty of geeks. When classroom discussions turn to Linux, open source, GPL, etc there is no shortage of students to provide a better overview or definition than the text book or case study is offering. There are even leaders in the FOSS community who have decided to pursue MBAs. Some geeks eventually learn that technical expertise is insufficient to make their dreams occur. That business knowledge may also be required.
Being an adult geek is one thing - and your peers have generally learned to respect your choice, no matter how they may feel about it...
But on the school yard, especially for 10-14 year olds, "geeks" still get beat up, and tortured by the "jocks" and the popular kids.
it might be the age of the geek-y adult, but it is NOT the age of the geek-kid.
Any jock can have a facebook, blog, or 'text message'. The real geeks are, and will always be the ones who work in the background.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
He's a self-described liberal that cheered on our Iraq warmongering, providing the Bush administration with the kind of media cover they need. His social commentary is equally misguided, and as such, he's a pundit without a real audience. He's been unapologetic on his cheerleading, wishing upon a star for a 3rd party (built on the "centrism" and "bipartisanship" of Joe Lieberman and John McCain). In short, an idiot.
RW
Nah. "Geekdom" used to be about doing stuff. Now it's about owning stuff. Marketing has taken over "geek" the way it took over "cool".
It's all words, I guess, but I'd say there's more to being a true geek than using Facebook.
In fact, one of the real oddities of our age is that it depends hugely on high-tech and yet actual knowledge of even elementary scientific principles is still not regarded as mainstream, or part of what every person with a claim to be educated should know.
Look at the quality of science journalism or of science-related politics - people still, on the whole think that there's no shame in being ignorant of even basic science.
Not "Age of the Geek" by a long shot, yet.
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
Really? Which manners are those? I deal with people deep inside geek culture, and those as far away from it as possible. Some of the brightest, most articulate, well-mannered people I know are geeks. But then, that also describes some farmers I know. And some artists. On the other hand, taken as a group, the larger body of geeks with which I'm familiar also contains the biggest number of rude, snarky, grasping, deceitful, jerky, foul-mouthed louts I've ever encountered. Very bright people that don't just lack good manners, they aggressively pursue a manner and bearing that is confrontational, mean-spirited, hypocritical, often delusional and ultimately often self-destructive... even as they complain that nobody likes them. You all know who I'm talking about (or know who you are!).
I know some very inspiring geeks. But I don't find them to be any more numerous than I do inspiring fine artists, or even inspiring landscape designers, chefs, dog trainers, or English teachers. Every demographic has some. But few demographics have as many mal-adjusted asses per capita as do the geeks. I know, since I'm one of them. This whole concept is wrong. It's not "rise of the geeks" as seen in their online public forums and playgrounds. No, this is just "re-emergence of smart people who are able to communicate in interesting ways
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
And for once, it's not just a meme, I really mean it when I say:
"I, for one, welcome our new geek overlords!"
If an article on geek culture references facebook as part of showing how superior we are then the writer doesn't really understand geek culture at all.
:)
All of the *real* geeks that I know either shun facebook ("Hello, privacy invasion!") or use it in some very minimalist manner. Facebook is for the masses and we geeks aren't the masses.
One might even argue that the real geek still posts replies here as "anonymous coward" for the same reasons as they don't use facebook: slashdot doesn't need to track what I read, from computer to computer and if people don't mod up our comments, so what? We don't need to bask in the glory of being "5: Insightful" - we know our comments are
I'd venture to add that if being geek-cool implies facebook, then this has potential to include more MBA-types than geek-types.
I'm sorry, but "geeks," "supple," "well-modulated emotions," "Facebook," "blogs," and "Twitter" should never appear in the same sentence.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
While being a geek is now acceptable, it's not automatic coolness. Technical prowess has some merit and the online community is overflowing to "real life" but the pimply overly self conscious kid is still socially awkward.
I think more to the point it has become clear that technology is a valid career path and, that being the case, the "popular" people are willing to accept it as a career path. Socially outgoing people have made geekdom popular, not the other way around.
Eschew Obfuscation
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
Sorry, but if if it's really true that "All your culture are belong to us", then it's time to remember the following sequence:
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
From http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/g/goreinternet.htm: From http://www.perkel.com/politics/gore/internet.htm (referring to an article by Mountain Democrat columnist David Jacobsen): The same is incidentally true of some of his other seemingly far-fetched stories (which, again, are often based on mis-quotes). For instance, from the same article: This quote was quickly changed to "I was the one that started it all" by the time the media reported it, then to "I was the one who started it all" by the Republicans.
And "Erich Segal, author of Love Story, corroborated that Gore and his Harvard roommate, Tommy Lee Jones, were indeed the models for the story's main character" [played by Ryan O'Neal].
While it does seem sad that some people should define themselves merely as 'different' at any expsnse, there are other, more legitimate reasons why the mainstream - whatever that may be - can be argued to be unappealing.
The problem is that once something goes mainstream, the quality of the content that makes up that culture begins to decline rapidly. People interested in making money enter the game, and try to squeeze out those who are genuinely interested in making something neat. It's happened again and again as various niche cultures are thrust into the mainstream consciousness. For every real, interesting work/artist/idea there are 10 cheap knockoffs being peddled by media/retail companies.
Music is a perfect example; every time a new genre becomes popular, imitation bands are "discovered" by all the recording companies, and they flood the market with dozens of identical-sounding bands until what was appealing about the culture is eroded by bottom-dollar competition and fear of experimentation with something that already "works".
You're dead on.
If Holden Caulfield was the sensitive loner from the age of nerd oppression, then Harry Potter was the magical leader in the age of geek empowerment.
Fucking Harry Potter? What does he think we are, a bunch of overgrown man-children?
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"Use of computer" is hardly a culture in its own right. What I was arguing was that geek culture - what is now the lifestyle and mindset of technology, math, and science, not just their general application - may very well be overwhelmed with junk rip-offs if it becomes big enough to merit attention. If you think that geek culture is immune from this because it doesn't involve "financial aspects", brace yourself. If no one has found a way to monetize it yet (and I'm by NO means saying no one has), they will soon enough, and the big content/media/retail companies, like vultures, will follow shorty thereafter.
In the case of mom and pops, its easy to ignore them, as they don't hold sway over powerful forces that can influence culture. Big companies looking for the Next Big Thing to exploit are another matter. It's this form of mainstream adoption that causes the signal-to-noise ratio to fall. Over time, the culture identity can be destroyed, as up-and-commers are not often introduced to the "real thing".
It's happened to me before, and I generally don't quit; I try to find the quality amongst the garbage rather than leaving. But as time goes on, fewer and fewer people try to do their own thing, and more often they just try to imitate the emergent monocolture. In the case of music, interesting bands abandon their own style in order to match the 'norm' so that they can be more popular, and make money. I believe this is called "Selling Out". New artists do much the same thing, but maybe *their* contract requires them to produce 5 identical sounding albums.
Not only does the new attention not contribute anything, it can actively errode the existing culture - and fast. This kind of cycle isn't usually broken until people are bored with the culture, and move on to something else.
This isn't the rise of geekdom... It's the rise of pseudo-geekdom.
Thomas Jefferson : Geek. Made all sorts of inventions at Monticello
Westinghouse : Geek. Invents airbrakes.
Edison : Geek. Genuine Geek. Anyway one that could think of electrocuting an elephant to prove the superiority of his or her technology, well, that's a geek.
Henry Ford, the Dodge Brothers, Stanley family: all geeks.
Being a genuine geek is not about the kind of clothes you wear or what sort of a show you watch. It's about having an uncontrollable urge to express yourself by making things. Geekdome isn't even an academic thing. Machinists at WL Gore, guys that build their own cars and people that alter their own guns, those are all geeks.
Sure, its nice to hope that some of us will get stinking rich off of something we invent, but most of the time, we're really more inventing because the curious act of exploration occupies the mind in such a way as to silence for a time the storms that otherwise lie within it.
This is my sig.
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!