Geeks Read online

  A society that desperately needs geeks, however, does not have to like them. In fact geeks and their handiwork generate considerable wariness and mistrust. Historians of technology like Langdon Winner have written that throughout history, widespread unease about science and technology has amounted almost to a religious upheaval.

  Notice the moral outrage present in so much contemporary media coverage and political criticism of technology. Critics lambaste overdoses of TV-watching, violent video games, and porn on the Net; they warn of online thieves, perverts, vandals, and hate-mongers; they call for V-chips, blocking and filtering software, elaborate ratings systems. They even want the Ten Commandments posted, like reassuring sprigs of wolfbane, in public schools.

  If we are outraged and frightened by the spread of new technology, how are we supposed to feel about the new techno-elite busily making it all possible? “Why do I get this feeling that they—all of them, politicians, teachers, bosses—hate us more than ever?” e-mailed Rocket Roger in the week after the Columbine High School tragedy.

  Not surprisingly, geeks can harbor a xenophobic streak of their own. Geeks often see the workplace, and the world, as split into two camps—those who get it and those who don’t. The latter are usually derided as clueless “suits,” irritating obstacles to efficiency and technological progress. “We make the systems that the suits screw up,” is how one geek described this conflict.

  The suits, in turn, view geeks as antisocial, unpredictable, and difficult, though they need them too badly to do much about it. They resent the way geeks’ strong bargaining power exempts them from having to mainstream, to “grow up,” the way previous generations did when they entered the workforce.

  Why shouldn’t they have autonomy and power? geeks respond; they can be unnervingly arrogant. Geeks know a lot of things most people don’t know and can do things most people are only beginning to understand.

  Until now, nerds and geeks (and their more conventional predecessors, the engineers), marginalized as unglamorous, have never had great status or influence. But the Internet is the hottest and hippest place in American culture, and the whole notion of outsiderness has been up-ended in a world where geeks are uniquely—and often solely—qualified to operate the most complex and vital systems, and where the demand for their work will greatly exceed their ability to fulfill it for years to come.

  For the first time ever, it’s a great time to be a geek.

  DEFINING GEEKHOOD

  WHAT, EXACTLY, is a geek?

  After years of trying to grapple with the question, I still find it largely unanswerable. Continually meeting and corresponding with geeks has made my idea broader than the stereotype of the asocial, techno-obsessed loner.

  For one thing, you can hardly be a geek all by yourself. The online world is one giant community comprised of hundreds of thousands of smaller ones, all involving connections to other people. The geekiest hangouts on the Net and Web—the open source and free software movement sites—are vast, hivelike communities of worker geeks patching together cheap and efficient new software that they distribute freely and generously to one another. That’s not something loners could or would do.

  In fact, the word “geek” is growing so inclusive as to be practically undefinable. I’ve met skinny and fat geeks, awkward and charming ones, cheerful and grumpy ones—but never a dumb one.

  Still, in the narrowest sense, a contemporary geek is a computer-centered obsessive, one of the legions building the infrastructure of the Net and its related programs and systems. Geeks are at its white-hot epicenter.

  Beyond them are the brainy, single-minded outsiders drawn to a wide range of creative pursuits—from raves to Japanese animation—who live beyond the contented or constrained mainstream and find passion and joy in what they do. Sometimes they feel like and call themselves geeks.

  The truth is, geeks aren’t like other people. They’ve grown up in the freest media environment ever. They talk openly about sex and politics, debate the future of technology, dump on revered leaders, challenge the existence of God, and are viscerally libertarian. They defy government, business, or any other institution to shut down their freewheeling culture.

  And how could anyone? Ideas are free, literally and figuratively. Geeks download software, movies, and music without charge; they never pay for news or information; they swap and barter. Increasingly, they live in a digital world, one much more compelling than the one that has rejected or marginalized them. Being online has liberated them in stunning ways. Looks don’t matter online. Neither does race, the number of degrees one has or doesn’t have, or the cadence of speech. Ideas and personalities, presented in their purest sense, have a different dimension.

  Geeks know—perhaps better than anyone—that computers aren’t a substitute for human contact, for family and friends, for neighborhoods and restaurants and theaters. But cyberspace is a world, albeit a virtual one. Contact and community mean somewhat different things there, but they are real nonetheless.

  THE ROOTS of the term are important. At the turn of the century, “geek” had a very particular meaning—geeks were the destitute nomads who bit the heads off chickens and rats at circuses and carnivals in exchange for food or a place to sleep.

  For nearly seventy years, the term was unambiguously derisive, expanding to label freaks, oddballs, anyone distinctly nonconformist or strange.

  But in the 1980s, a number of sometimes outcast or persecuted social groups in America—blacks, gays, women, nerds—began practicing language inversion as a self-defense measure. They adopted the most hateful words used against them as a badge of pride.

  Rappers began singing about “niggas” and gay activists started calling themselves “queers.” A motorcycle group called Dykes on Bikes roared proudly at the head of gay pride parades. Young women invoked “grrrl” power. The noxious terms became the coolest—a cultural trick that, for their targets, seemed to remove the words’ painful sting.

  Similarly, as hacker and writer Eric Raymond suggests, in the nineties the word “geek” evoked newer, more positive qualities.

  As the Internet began to expand beyond its early cadre of hackers, some like-minded tenants in Santa Cruz, Austin, San Francisco, and Ann Arbor began dubbing their communal homes “geek houses.” Formed at a time when the wide-bandwidth phone lines necessary to explore the Net were expensive and rare, these enclaves became techno-communities, sharing sometimes pirated T-1 lines and other requirements. The bright students they attracted used technology not to isolate themselves, as media stereotypes would have it, but to make connections.

  The geek houses didn’t last long. Faster and cheaper modems, ISDN and T-1 lines and other useful developments for data transmission became ubiquitous, spread to offices and university campuses, and made techno-communities almost instantly obsolete.

  But the term kept spreading, picked up by the smart, obsessive, intensely focused people working to build the Internet and the World Wide Web—programmers, gamers, developers, and designers—and by their consumers and allies beyond. Geek chic—black-rimmed glasses, for instance—became a fashion trend. Bill Gates was a corporate geek, a category inconceivable a decade earlier, and no one was laughing. As the Web became culturally trendy, the image of its pale and asocial founders faded. Now it’s amusing to see the term “geek” springing up almost everywhere—on TV shows (you know you’ve arrived when a network launches a primetime series called Freaks and Geeks), in advertising, on T-shirts and baseball caps. And appropriated by people who wouldn’t have given a real geek the time of day just a few years ago.

  People e-mail me all the time asking if they are geeks.

  In this culture, I figure people have the right to name themselves; if you feel like a geek, you are one. But there are some clues: You are online a good part of the time. You feel a personal connection with technology, less its mechanics than its applications and consequences. You’re a fan of The Simpsons and The Matrix. You saw Phantom Menace opening weekend despite the hype and despite Jar Jar. You are obsessive about pop culture, which is what you talk about with your friends or coworkers every Monday.

  You don’t like being told what to do, authority being a force you see as not generally on your side. Life began for you when you got out of high school, which, more likely than not, was a profoundly painful experience. You didn’t go to the prom, or if you did, you certainly didn’t feel comfortable there. Maybe your parents helped you get through, maybe a teacher or a soulmate.

  Now, you zone out on your work. You solve problems and puzzles. You love to create things just for the kick of it. Even though you’re indispensable to the company that’s hired you, it’s almost impossible to imagine yourself running it. You may have power of your own now—a family, money—yet you see yourself as one who never quite fits in. In many ways, geekdom is a state of mind, a sense of yourself in relation to the world that’s not easily rewritten.

  THE UR-GEEK AND HIS TRIBE

  PONDERING GEEKNESS and its meaning, I made an excursion to Berkeley last year to put the question to somebody I trusted to know: Louis Rossetto, founder of Wired magazine.

  The trip was a pilgrimage and an excuse. Louis was a geek in every sense of the word as I understood it, although not without his considerable contradictions: He lived and worked outside the mainstream, eschewed suits and “suits,” was short on patience and social skills but passionate about the power of digital technology to reshape the world. I had written for Louis for five happy years, until he lost control of his magazine in a bitter financial wrangle and Wired was acquired by the Condé Nast Publishing Group.

  I met him in the early nineties when I was media critic for Rolling Stone and got an unexpected e-mail: Louis was coming to New York on a business trip and invi
ted me to dinner. There was no small talk of any sort in the message, no chat, no preamble. What he sent was a long and thoughtful invitation to write for Wired—a summons, really—accompanied by a wonderful screed about the Internet blasting away corrupt Eastern media institutions and replacing them with a new culture in which nothing would be the same—not words, images, businesses, or institutions.

  A few years earlier, Louis had come out of nowhere—Amsterdam, in fact—to peddle his notion for a magazine about the computer culture. In Europe, he’d published a forerunner, a magazine called Language Technology that then became Electric Word. Now he thought America was ripe for such a publication, an idea almost universally rejected until Wired eventually made its debut and hit the magazine industry like a nuke.

  Our dinner, Louis proposed, would take place at a coffee shop on Eighth Avenue. This was a surprise; media moguls that I’d dined with usually preferred Orso or, if truly anxious to signal their importance, had sandwiches brought into the office. I e-mailed somebody I knew at Wired to ask what Louis was like.

  “Well,” my friend replied, “we just had our annual Election Day meeting in which Louis calls the whole staff together and urges us all not to vote, so that we won’t be supporting a useless, outdated, two-party political system.”

  I fell in love.

  When I bought some copies of the magazine, I was further mesmerized. The cover was a luminous orange; some strange purple graphic blotted out most of the text on the contents page; and an incomprehensible quote about the future was sprawled across a staggeringly expensive four-page color spread up front.

  Everyone I knew in New York, including editors at Rolling Stone, New York, and GQ, jeered at Wired. It was ugly. It was silly. It was, well, geeky. And doomed. Computers would never grow much beyond a small group of nerds. The middle-class, whose dollars advertisers lusted for, would never embrace computers; thus nobody would ever make money with a computer magazine. Kids would never read it. Or, only kids would read it. It was incomprehensible, indulgent crap. The Net was a fringe medium, a toy, a fad. Wired was a brutal rebuke to the ingrown, narcissistic media culture of New York, where no story could be more important or interesting than the people who covered it.

  Inside Wired, the stories were text-heavy and surprising, sometimes brilliant features about the wiring of the world, sometimes rambling manifestos about how the Internet would one day transform all of civilization.

  The magazine violated every publishing precept and was almost immediately ragingly successful. It launched a counterculture that elbowed the increasingly resentful rock-and-rolling baby boomers aside for good and created a parallel nation, almost entirely constructed and inhabited by the people called geeks.

  Intrigued, I sat in a Greek coffee shop and watched the door for the arrival of a man who had described himself as pale, skinny, and rumpled. A half hour or so after the appointed time, a pale, skinny, and rumpled man wearing a worn black sweatshirt that said Wired in barely visible letters, with the hood up over his head, came in and scanned the tables. My first thought was that this was the Unabomber; he rather resembled the hooded visage on the “wanted” posters being circulated by the FBI.

  Louis sat down and ordered some tea. He wasn’t hungry.

  He talked like a Trotskyite, all fierce idealism, taking off on amazing riffs about history and politics, but also making it clear that he wanted to make a lot of money. He imagined a Wired media empire that would trumpet news of the coming revolution all over the world. For some reason, he took it as a given that I was potentially a kindred spirit who just didn’t get it—yet.

  He wanted the old media, which he reviled and castigated continuously, to love Wired and appreciate what he had done. (He was always astonished and hurt when they didn’t.) He hated Wall Street; he wanted Wall Street to give him money. He had sometimes brilliant, sometimes barely fathomable visions for the future. Some of them came to pass.

  A radical, even a revolutionary, it was easy to picture Louis tossing bricks outside the Bastille or running through the streets of Moscow with the Cossacks in hot pursuit. Yet he was approachable, too, at least if he found you interesting. If he didn’t, he wasted no time in letting you know it.

  The news about computers, he announced, wasn’t about money, but ideas—how they could be manipulated, reproduced, stored, represented, combined, and connected. Computers and the Net would transform everything; nobody and no institution would remain untouched—not scientists, academics, artists, politicians, journalists, homemakers, doctors, lawyers, or schoolkids. Computing was no longer the sole province of nerds and engineers but also the new locus of creative people—poets, painters, novelists, critics. These, he said, were the geeks. It was probably the first time I remember hearing the word outside the context of freaks and carnivals, and I was momentarily startled. But it was just a word, a passing reference, and it didn’t surface again for a while.

  Computing had always been seen as a scientific process, Louis went on, but that was shortsighted. Networked computers were a medium, a world, a nation even—a new thing, a new method, a new process. Imagine words and images as fluid, mutable, nonlinear; all broken down into data, bits, atoms; all transmitted freely around the world to anyone with the right machine.

  He pulled out several articles, some reprints of Net writings, early copies and prototypes of Wired and tossed them all at me. He peppered me with questions, harangued me with diatribes. I’d rarely met a magazine editor with such raw enthusiasm; the ones I knew tended to talk about marketing plans and demographics.

  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.