In a 2004 paper published by the Journal of School Health, it is divulged that parents of American schoolchildren would prefer, by a 2 to 1 margin, to bring up children who would “make C grades and be active in extracurricular activities rather than make ‘A’ grades and not be active.”[1] Arguably, this was due to a strong correlation between participation in said extracurricular activities (generally meaning “sports” in this context) and the likelihood of future college attendance and steady labor force participation (or better yet, “earn[ing] more as an adult”). I would seriously have to wonder what the results of a similar survey would be if conducted today. Sure, the stereotype of the socially active, athletic, vital “jock” still has plenty of societal pulling power in high schools and beyond, with participation in American-style football still acting as a signifier for the entire gamut of positive character traits. However, the erstwhile arch-enemy of this culture, the outcast “nerds” and “geeks” with their propensity for “weird” obsessions, enthusiasm for academics and peregrinations in virtual fantasy realms rather than the here-and-now of social engagement, are now a formidable power bloc of their own.
In many ways, the figure of the geek is now indispensable to a bureaucracy whose machinery depends on a technologically adept “expert class” with hyper-specialized areas of interest, and which can exploit their discomfort with objective reality just enough to advance its strategy of using perpetual anxiety to justify expansive controls. Thanks in great part to the conformity laboratories that are American public schools, we have a neatly demarcated caste system in which the stereotypical geek is a complement to the “jock” rather than his natural adversary: in their adult manifestations within the workforce, the former models and quantifies various aspects of State policy in order to maximize their efficacy, while the latter enforces these policies when they are put in action.
This month’s mass layoffs of Twitter and Meta employees – tens of thousands altogether - certainly mean many things to many different constituencies. At least one revelation, judging by the thousands of “geek”-friendly positions existing at these two companies alone, is the sheer number of such people that have found their way to lucrative positions in which they help to craft wide-ranging, consequential policy decisions. These individuals’ systemic thinking and natural acumen for connecting distinct data points has aided in the crafting of algorithmic tools meant to boost or downgrade publicly stated opinions based on their congruence with “official lines”. This activity has gone hand in hand with content moderation censorship imperatives strongly suggested by federal agencies (and here I use “strongly suggested” in the way that these federal agencies’ counterparts in organized crime might employ phrases like “it’d be a real shame if something were to happen to you…” when thinly veiling naked acts of extortion). That this should become the public face of the geek is sobering, as this term formerly applied to a culture who felt social engineering got in the way of more ludic forms of experimentation, or perceived the political sphere as a malevolent extension of adolescent clique warfare, or were just contentedly oblivious to it all.
On composer Pamela Z’s “Geekspeak,” a humorous piece composed of densely collaged nerd truisms and jargon-laden confessionals, one speaker provides a self-definition pointing towards this more benign, open-ended, and perhaps endangered manifestation of geekery:
My definition of a geek would be someone who finds a machine or a really esoteric, like, logic to be a really fascinating construct, and likes to understand it, see what its limits are, and see exactly what it entails […] they probably find it slightly more fascinating than conversation with most people.
This sentiment is helpful in sketching out the personalities of geeks that were more prevalent in the 1990s than in the present era. I knew plenty who harbored a-social or anti-social tendencies, to the point where machine interactions would indeed be “more fascinating” than the communications awkwardly carried out in what cyberpunks used to call the “meatspace”. Yet there was a qualitatively different approach to tech that is less common among those now inhabiting the seamless “internet of things”. This could be partially ascribed to these individuals’ adventitious identities: residing in a liminal space between the gradually declining music-based subcultures, and the yet-to-be-born digital / virtual landscape identified by J.A. McArthur as “a new resource for the affiliation and expression of subcultural identity,”[2] the geeky entities I came into contact with were often genuinely unique mergers of vitalist / Dionysian energy and a cooler, more analytical disposition. This combination of personality traits meant that finding “logic to be a really fascinating construct” could and would translate into flourishes of experimentalism whereby logic informed aesthetics and vice versa. It meant a relationship to machines, virtuality and speculative realities that was not purely instrumental, and in which machines’ misuse / hacking / glitching was as edifying and as fun to engage with as these tools’ intended regularity of behavior. Such an attitude, if adhered to consistently, made for culture which did not point to some fantastical future but – in the words of occasional sci-fi author Bernard Wolfe – dealt with “the overtone and undertow of now.”
My experiences are mine and mine alone, but somehow I feel confident enough that these interactions were representative of what many others were experiencing in this heady and somewhat more liberated, earlier period of techno-cultural development. I did not find it all unusual in the mid-late ‘90s to run across someone who could opine on, say, the “Unix philosophy” and then abruptly switch gears to discuss Fassbinder’s filmography. Hybrid culture primers like Erik Davis’ TechGnosis, arguing for an interlaced history of esoteric practice and technological development, were quite popular in “art” circles. Old-guard counterculture heroes like Timothy Leary, perhaps tired of setting back the cause of serious psychedelic research by 50 years, spoke earnestly of “computers” being “the most subversive thing” they had “ever done [sic]”, while none other than Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow took it upon himself to author the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, with its poetic insinuation that geeks would play a starring role in dismantling the colonization of external and interior space.
There were pragmatic reasons for these types of hybrids existing, including the fact that artistically-inclined eccentrics found the prospect of working in nascent cyberspace a relatively attractive one: by learning the intricacies of digital world-building, you might not have to drag yourself into an office where you were constantly required to prove that you were “more than” just your eccentricities of thought and personal appearance. Yet there was also an earnest excitement over being a stakeholder in an emergent new world, as well as being part of a general lineage of pioneering outsiders whose family tree didn’t always bifurcate into branches reserved for “artistic” outsiders and “analytical” outsiders.
It is my educated guess that the more experimentally-minded among this culture - those who can both observe and shape experience without the need for there to be meaning, purpose or clear resolution – are not particularly well-represented among the geeks that have been curated for positions of authority in the present day. From my observations within the castle walls of Big Tech, geeks that presently find themselves in the corridors of power are chosen for how well they mirror a reigning logic of obsessiveness, quantification / “metric”-ification of every conceivable value, and simple materialism – their insistence on an awkward or adolescent aesthetic is an easy thing to tolerate in exchange for having a managerial and administrative workforce on one’s payroll that takes these qualities more seriously than a cultural mainstream supposedly more based in “reality.” The romanticized geek alchemist of yesteryear has little place in a managerial environment wherein even notorious cyber-criminals have been rehabilitated as digital security experts.[3] In their place we have, appropriately enough, the geeks whose defining feature is their consumption habits, not their digital trickster-ism and capacity for rewriting the rules of communication. We have, in other words, the geek as defined by loyalty to a fandom.
In his review of the 2009 comedy Fanboys, the late Roger Ebert touches upon aspects of fandom cultures that lend themselves well to authoritarianism, namely the cultivation of whole categories of knowledge that are exclusive to the fan. Ebert’s criticism is not too far off from something like H.L. Mencken’s dismissal of modern art critics (who, like many fandom-oriented geeks, can make “one [come] away with a feeling that one is somehow grossly ignorant and bounderish, but unable to make out why.”)[4] For Ebert, fandom-related knowledge notably has “no purpose other than being mastered”, and it sees the enthusiasm for creativity being limited to existing cultural templates:
Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. If you are Luke Skywalker and she is Princess Leia, you already know what to say to each other, which is much safer than having to ad-lib it. Your fannish obsession is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That’s why it’s excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They’re always asking you questions they know the answer to.
This brings us to another by now uncontroversial opinion, namely that geeks are integrated into the present consumer culture with exceptional ease. With things as they currently stand, I would not consider it above my pay grade to refute a 2009 academic study in which “the subculture of geeks […] demonstrates resistance to the mainstream culture in terms of appearances and entertainment”[5]. Indeed, their reliability as believers in the talismanic value of merchandise, and their propensity for taking their entertaining security blankets as seriously as others might the aversion of nuclear conflict, have made it more or less inevitable that their tastes would be in the driver’s seat of mass media culture. Half of the highest grossing films of all time, all of them released within the geek-saturated 21st century, are based upon the comic book or sci-fi properties of big-league fandom, and we can tap the same vein for much of what still passes for universally acknowledged monoculture (take, for example, the fact that the high fantasy series Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones are the most commonly “pirated” properties within modern episodic entertainment).
Meanwhile, all of the great manipulative principles utilized in the parent consumer culture (the principle of false scarcity, for example) are deftly woven into the collector subculture, which provides one reliable source of hierarchical ordering within geek-dom. It really is no surprise that the Pokémon media franchise has achieved such longevity (nearly three decades) in geeky circles: its emphasis on the activities of capture, domestication and collection is a metaphor for geek fandom as a whole, in which social status is also determined by skill in these areas. It is fascinating to see those who would still see this activity as being an alternative to consumerism writ large; if anything the conspicuous consumption of geek-dom differs only from other forms of this activity in its favoring of less “realistic” environments and a pronounced temporal displacement onto idealized pasts or futures. The actual interaction with these idealized, virtualized experiential realms (particularly where gaming is concerned) is much more bound up with various activities of dominance and mastery than with free experimentation or non-purposive exploration. With these combined attributes of taxonomical fanaticism and eagerness for total control over one’s environment, we see the transformation from the geek into the “subject matter expert” serviceable to corporations and federal agencies.
What, then, could be responsible for the de-evolution of the geek into an unpalatable mix of authoritarian postures and totemic consumerism? Much like anything else, this is not a mono-causal process, though one major part of this process has to be the increased ease with which the digital / virtual world is accessed, and the somewhat overlooked fact that disruptions to its communicative flow are increasingly rare and exceptional. Illusions of total security were far more difficult to maintain prior to the 21st century, given the previous instability of computers, and illusions of total control were likewise countered by (to give one infamous example) idiotic operating systems that would not cleanly shut down on demand. Until such illusions of total stability were capable of being successfully maintained, it was not possible for the digital / virtual world and “meatspace” to melt together into a unified experiential flow.
Flash-forward to a present in which the transition from living with the virtual world to living in it – having near-constant access to the infosphere and its augmentations of organic “IRL” life – has occurred. This has very much meant a triumph of geeks’ preferred lifeworld, in which their superior tech fluency meant they would at last be able to call the shots in regards to everything from aesthetics to idiolectic trends in speaking and writing. I can’t imagine a situation in which those feeling responsible for the cultural maintenance of this world would want to relinquish it, and a heightened sense of defensiveness would naturally lead to a police mindset distributed throughout all of geekdom (this talent for self-policing had already been developed in an age where digitally networked communities were more fragile, with juvenile “griefers” running roughshod over serious attempts to develop communicative nodes). Clearly seeing an impassioned and idealistic population to exploit for their own ends, various State actors and agencies found ways to convince them that enemies of the State were one and the same as those who wished to threaten the integrity and smooth surfaces of the infosphere, and thus the tech industry’s censorious “trust and safety” teams were given their enthusiastically accepted casus belli and marching orders.
Whatever else one may think about geeks as a cultural phenomenon, the drastic reduction of their human potential – having gone from creative and inquisitive marginals to docile functionaries hoarding imagery of anime girls with neotenous faces and huge breasts – is tragic. It is somewhat naïve to assume that the attitudes of tech’s “early adopters” would ever be widely distributed among the generations for whom unlimited data is a given, and that the sense of duty towards risk-taking would not be overwhelmed by a pathological obsession with security. But if anyone wishes to get back on the road leading to this former state, it isn’t all that difficult to find. As Stanislaw Lem insists, it is a matter of knowing the difference between the scientist and the vulgar technologist:
Faced with the possibility of carrying out “synthesis in a living organism,” should that be his goal, a technologist will be satisfied with obtaining just “the final product.” A scientist, in turn, at least in the conventional understanding of the term, will wish to learn in detail about “the theory of synthesis in an organism.” A scientist wants an algorithm, whereas a technologist is more like a gardener who plants a tree, picks apples, and is not bothered about “how the apple tree did it.”[6]
Along the same lines, there is a profound difference between geeks as interrogators of technology, and geeks as the uncurious subordinates of technological determinism. So long as we have technology at the level we enjoy it, the art of asking our technologies “why?” should not vanish from the earth. Otherwise, the ultimate legacy of the geek will have been to fortify massive, malicious informational empires whose malice derives from the belief that they already know all the answers.
[1] Bishop, J.H. et. Al. (2004). “Why We Harass Nerds and Freaks: A Formal Theory of Student Culture and Norms.” Journal of School Health, 74(7): 235-251.
[2] McArthur, J.A. (2009). “Digital Culture: A Geek Meaning of Style.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 33(1): pp. 58-70.
[3] A virtual training session at my present employer was partially hosted by none other than Kevin Mitnick.
[4] Mencken, H.L. (1982). “Art Critics” in A Mencken Crestomathy. New York: Vintage Books.
[5] McArthur (2009).
[6] Lem, S. (2013). Summa Technologiae. Trans. Joanna Zylinska. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press