Geeks Read Free Page B

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