Bring Back the 80's!

Who's your geek?

So I'm pretty sure that among the coblogger's I'm the biggest geek, probably not even Jake or Dane would challenge me on that.

As some background; I take being a geek very seriously. I feel as though "geek" is a cultural designation, just like "Texan" or "Jewish" or "Ferengi", and I feel deep respect for my culture in spite of our astoundingly low social popularity.

When I was young, I invested my interests in Science, Technology, and Computers. I felt as though these were the pavestones of the future, and that by becoming adept in their application, we geeks would slowly win over society's favor as our works began to become important to society.

Of course in the 1980's, Science and Technology were still pretty low key in the standard american household. You're average family had electricity, running water, plenty of electric light and sometimes electric heat, televisions, radios, eventually microwaves, sundry kitchen appliances, cars, and that pretty much summed it up.

All other technologies were still toys at the time, but it was pretty obvious that technology's roll in society would explode in our lifetimes. That has indeed happened. With the advent of the internet and all of the possibilities that near-infinite global communications has allowed us, technology is becoming important to everyone everywhere. However, society seems to snatch away from us geeks what it finds interesting, with little gratitude, and ridicules any aspects it doesn't immediately comprehend.. much like a spoiled toddler.

When I hit the information superhighway like a flaming pile o' crap in '95, virtually everyone online was a geek. The least-geekiest person you chatted with or veiwed the webpage of still resided in the top 1% of American Geekdom when compared with people who had never heard of computer networks. Those were the days when "Spam" and "commercial popups" were virtually unheard of. Most companies did not have their own websites, even the big ones, and domain squatting was expensive.. to the tune of $250/yr for a domain.

"Surfing" was the modus operandi of the time, where you would literally follow a link on one website to some loosely connected website, and so on all day long. We were still getting the hang of "Search Engines" and Yahoo was seriously a clunking behemoth. Your whole take on how to use the internet was geekily social: you surfed around until you got to somewhere interesting. mpg movies of fractal zooms, jpg images from the hubble space telescope, midi files of Dave Brubeck's Peanut's theme song, and chat rooms.

We all wanted our friends and families to jump on the internet. We all wanted businesses to invest in Ecommerce. We all wanted to be able to talk to virtually anyone in our new wonderland, and purchase anything we wanted and download it or have it shipped to us. Now that you're all here we mostly wish you would just go away and leave us alone again.

What the internet has changed into is much more money-driven and disheartening. There is now spam and popups, scams and viruses, and a huge number of people desparately trying to apply ruthlessness to the internet in order to squeeze cash out of it. All chatrooms have turned into impossibly sleazy pickup joints. All the David Brubeck midi's have become illegal to download.

All of our hard work to change the world has succeeded, but to little avail.

We are still treated as lepers. Half of people want to manipulate us to get things done and to simultaneously vent their frustrations at us. The other half of people are angry that we've succeeded in changing the world, and they want to change it back. You know.. the people who hate or mistrust computers, and dispise all of this technological hoo-ha.

There are some individuals who have friends who are geeks, but no facets of society have opened their arms to us as a culture in general. We are considered an abberance, even though we are easily stereotyped (thus obviously common) and highly productive people. Our only crime against society is refusing to conform to it — conforming instead to the needs of our industries.

A Computer Geek, for instance, knows an infinite amount more about what's going on inside an arbitrarily chosen computer than inside the head of an arbitrarily chosen person. They are much more confident interacting with the computer than with the person, since they know how the computer will react at every moment.

For instance, as a geek, I can honestly testify that I have no smegging clue what you people do when you go to bars or hang out at clubs or whatever. You somehow swim amidst a sea of strangers and make new friends. You somehow fail to piss people off nearly as much as we geeks tend to in similar settings. You somehow "have a good time" despite there being no computers or philosophy or anything we geeks find meaningful or worthwhile. I understand that alcohol, music, and dancing are usually involved, but that's about as helpful as saying it takes eggs, flower and sugar to make a cake. I also have seen that most communication happens non-verbally in such places.. upwards of 2/3rds I reckon.. so we geeks don't have to utter a single word to come off as insensitive assholes.

So just to recap.. you're among some friends, many strangers, there is music, you can dance around if you want. You have beer. The only way I can think of to build a good time out of such mishmash would be to call in MacGuyver.

Geeks on the other hand much prefer LAN parties. Just stop and think about this now.. we bring all of our computers into the same room and communicate with each other through them. More often then not we'll eschew the room itself entirely and lodge ourselves in emersive multiplayer games.. so we are interacting with our avatars (computer players) in a virtual world, occasionally talking in leui of hooking up a vox system. Instead of picking up subtle social cues from watching one another directly, we do so through the computer environments we feel more comfortable in. In case anyone is interested, yes, my bachelor party was a LAN party. :)

We don't fail to conform to society as some pseudo-social statement, but instead as an actual aversion.. and thus society remains averse to us. Still, other than being pompous sometimes, or difficult to understand, there isn't much normal society can charge against us geeks as a list of greivances. Our list of greivances against society on the other hand is great and long. Also the fruits of our labor are real, substantial, and the bedrock of progress in the twentieth century.. while I can't see a single advancement that's been made as a result of arbitrary socializing. Sure, being able to work as part of a team is indefinately useful — but that's a far cry from following the latest fashions, listening to the hippest music, or hanging out at the dopest clubs. Or playing golf.

So, I wanna know what gives.

Posted by jesse at June 22, 2004 02:57 AM