Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho

INTRODUCTION: THE GEEK ASCENSION

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WHERE DOES it begin, this sense of being the Other? It can come early on, when you find yourself alone in your childhood bedroom, raising tropical fish, composing a poem, writing code, meeting friends mostly online, playing by yourself. Or in middle school, when the jocks turn on you and you pray you will get through gym class alive.

Or maybe it comes in high school, where you find yourself on the outside looking in, getting jostled in the halls, watching TV on weekends while everyone else goes to parties.

After some time, there’s an accumulation of slights, hurts, realizations: You don’t have a lot of friends; other kids avoid you; you’re not good at sports or interested in shopping; the teachers seem to like their other students a lot more. There are few school activities you want to be part of, even if you could. The things you like aren’t the same things most other people like.

The alienation is sometimes mild, sometimes savage. Sometimes it lasts a few years, sometimes a lifetime. It depends on where you live, who your parents are, whether there’s a single teacher who appreciates you, whether you can cling to one or two friends, how well you can hide your brains.

Increasingly, your lifeline is technology. Computers and the amazing power they give you—to install a new operating system, to confide in like-minded allies three time zones away, to slay tormentors on the screen even if you can’t do much about the ones at school—are your passion. They give you skills and competence, or distraction and escape, or direction and stature, or all of the above.

Eventually, many of the people who call themselves geeks report a coming out, not unlike coming to terms with being gay or lesbian: a moment when you realize and acknowledge who you are and who you’re never going to be.

One day in my sophomore year, a kid named Jason e-mailed me, I was sitting in the school cafeteria watching the kids at the other tables laugh and have fun, plotting how I was going to get home early and start playing Quake. And I suddenly got it. I was a geek. I was never going to be like them. They were never going to let me in. So I came out as a geek. . . . I can’t say life has been a breeze, but after that, it was okay.

Some say they get comfortable with themselves afterward; many never do. But however long it lasts, at some point somewhere, you brush against this outsiderness—among geeks, it’s the one common rite of passage. A few carry the scars around with them for good. Sometimes they hurt themselves. Sometimes—rarely—they hurt other people. But if you’re lucky, you move past it, perhaps to a college where Others go. You find a community, a place where you’re welcome.

For the first time, you’re important, vital, on the inside; a citizen of an amazing new nation. You can instantly connect with the others like you. Being smart isn’t a liability; it’s usually the only thing that matters.

Whether you’re a programmer or Web designer or developer, an artist, help-desk geek, or tech supporter, a filmmaker or writer, you’re a part of the Geek Ascension. People need you. They hire you. They can’t afford to be contemptuous. Life isn’t a breeze, but it sure is different. You have an open invitation to what is, at the moment, the greatest party in the world: the Internet and the World Wide Web.

THE RISE OF THE GEEKS

I CAME face to face with the Geek Ascension at an ugly suburban Chicago cable-TV studio on a bitter winter morning in 1996, toward the end of a contentious tour for my first nonfiction book.

Virtuous Reality was a collection of essays about kids, culture, violence, and morality, a loosely focused defense of screen culture—the Net, the Web, TV, movies—against the politicians, journalists, and academics banging the drums, then and now, about the looming collapse of civilization. It was a position, therefore, that had prompted weeks of media sparring with members of the so-called intelligentsia and representatives of groups that had decency in their titles. I was the degenerate, the anti-Christ, a champion of porn and perversion.

The tour was winding down, thankfully, when I arrived for this predawn breakfast show. There was hardly anyone in the building but the anchorman, a handful of cameramen, the control-room techs, a producer, my book-tour escort, and me. Outside, the wind was howling; my fingers, though I was gripping a cup of coffee, were numb.

Watching the monitor in the green room, I saw Brian, the anchor, launch into the by-now-familiar tease of the segment as the inevitably frenetic producer guided me through makeup, prepped me for about ninety seconds, hustled me into the studio.

Here’s an interesting point of view, I heard the anchor say cheerfully just before I walked onto the set. "A former TV producer—and a father—who says the Internet isn’t a dangerous place for your kids!"

I was wearing out, worn down by weeks of arguing. I was sick of myself, of the blah-blah coming out of my interviewers’ mouths and my own. I was even more sick of people like this Parents for Decency flak, on the phone from Washington, D.C., where spokesmen for decency all seem to be.

Just last week, a nine-year-old girl was lured into a park by some pervert online and raped, she announced in professional alarm. Is that the kind of thing Mr. Katz wants us to ignore?

Brian appeared stunned. That sounds awful, he said, suddenly less friendly. What about that?

Brian, I snapped, it seems so dumb for us to be sitting here in a TV studio—with all the junk that you people put on the air all day, from soap operas to freeway shootings—and have to actually argue that the Internet isn’t a dangerous place. Kids are more likely to have planes fall on their heads than to get hurt on the Net.

Brian and I were both startled to hear the sound of applause coming from somewhere in the cavernous studio. Brian flushed, hesitated, then plowed on. Shocked, I looked around. Two cameramen were standing right on the studio floor clapping. So were a handful of techs inside the darkened control room, nodding at me, smiling and waving, giving me the thumbs-up, and yelping, Yeah! and Awright!

In a past life, I’d been executive producer of The CBS Morning News. I knew how CBS management—or I, for that matter—would have reacted to such an outburst. Blood would have been spilled.

In fact, Brian was livid when we went to a commercial. The bastards, I can’t believe they did that.

Jeez, I said, still startled but pleased. How do they get away with that? I would think they’d get fired.

Are you kidding? Brian muttered through gritted teeth. We just built a new digitalized control room and automated camera system. We’re still working out the bugs. How could we fire those guys? Nobody else could possibly run the damn place!

On the way out, I stopped by the control room. Three kids were sitting at the blinking, beeping, spaceship-like console, beaming at me and high-fiving each other. They had scraggly longish hair and were wearing T-shirts—one Star Trek, one that said HACKERS DO WANT SEX! and one that really caught my attention: GEEK AND PROUD.

I made the rounds, shaking hands, collecting good wishes and slaps on the back like a candidate working the crowd. Nothing remotely like this had happened on any of my previous book tours. I liked it. Hey thanks, I said. I appreciate that. I hope you don’t get in trouble.

The three of them snorted. Hey, no sweat, one answered. We’re safe in here, man. There are a hundred pretty-boy anchors they could hire. And they change general managers every other month. But we’ve been here for two years. We set this control room up. The cameras, graphics, and commercial scripts are fully computerized, all digitalized. We worked up the programs that run the studio. We are the only irreplaceable people in the building. Welcome to the geek kingdom.

During the tour, I’d been filing daily Virtuous Reality book tour reports to Hotwired, the website I wrote for. Readers followed my travels, critiqued my press interviews, showed up at book signings, called in to chat on talk shows. So I reported my encounter with the control-room crew in a column headlined The Rise of the Geeks. The next day, I had hundreds of e-mail messages from people all over the country, proudly claiming the name for themselves.

It was eye-opening. The definition of geek no longer had anything to do with biting the heads off chickens. These self-proclaimed geeks invited me to visit their offices, studios, and homes. We run the systems that run the world, one e-mailed me from New York. Until recently, most CEOs wouldn’t have let us in the door. Now we sit next to the CEOs. We are the only people who know how the place operates, how to retrieve files, how to keep the neural systems running. We are the indispensables.

I’d been inducted, suddenly, into a previously secret society. Wherever I went—Wisconsin Public Radio, CNN, radio stations in L.A. and San Francisco—these mostly young men in T-shirts, more secure and cheerful than almost everybody around them, came up and introduced themselves, patted me on the back, offered to take me out for pizza, warned me about nasty anchors and interviewers. They were all walking billboards for Star Wars, various ISPs, Beavis and Butt-Head, diverse websites and computer games.

As I learned more, I wrote several additional Hotwired columns about geekhood, and e-mail responses poured in by the metric ton. They flowed in for months. I’m still getting them.

THEIRS IS an accidental empire. Almost no one foresaw the explosion of the Internet or its mushrooming importance. The Internet’s pace of adoption eclipses all other technologies that preceded it, a U.S. Commerce Department report declared in 1998. Radio was in existence thirty-eight years before fifty million people tuned in; TV took thirteen years to reach that benchmark. Sixteen years after the first PC [personal computer] kit came out, fifty million people were using one. Once it was opened to the general public, the Internet crossed that line in four years. Although most Americans had never even 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 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