Geeks Read Free

heard the term a generation ago, the United States will have more than 133 million Net users this year, according to the
Computer Industry Almanac.
    Historians can point to other periods of astonishing technological upheaval—the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution—but they’re hard pressed to find a similar convergence of a particular subculture and an explosive economic boom. Tech industries are growing so quickly that almost anything you publish about them is instantly dated. A finding like the American Electronics Association’s 1997 estimate that the U.S. high-tech industry employed 4.3 million workers is inaccurate as this is being written and will be more inaccurate when it’s read.
    But the sense of limitless prospects for geeks is confirmed by the job market itself. At the beginning of 1998, the Commerce Department reported that about 190,000 U.S. information technology jobs were going begging at any given time, and that close to 100,000 new ones would be created annually for the next decade. The three fastest-growing occupations over the next several years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics added, will be computer scientists (who can work as theorists, researchers, or inventors), computer engineers (who work with the hardware or software of systems design and development, including programming or networking), and systems analysts (who solve specific computer problems, and adapt systems to individual and or corporate needs).
    Geeks, then, are literally building the new global economy, constructing and expanding the Internet and the World Wide Web as well as maintaining it. They’re paid well for their skills: Starting salaries for college grads with computer degrees average $35,000 to $40,000, says the National Association of Colleges and Employers, but the demand is so intense that many geeks forego or abandon college. Elite geek-incubators like Caltech, Stanford, and MIT complain that some of their best students abandon graduate school for lucrative positions in technology industries. Top-tier recruits not only command high salaries, but the prospect of stock-option wealth before they’re thirty.
    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