Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Technology

Technology: View from the top
It's about relationships
Do women have a natural edge in tech-support innovation? That's the word from Support.com CEO Radha Basu.
By Mark Compton
[02/22/00]

Column
Lonesome Internet blues, take 2
Another day, another dubious study finds that the Net makes you lonely -- and the press goes nuts.
By Scott Rosenberg
[02/18/00]

Review
Sims in the hands of an angry God
Why are we so eager to torture the beings we've created? The latest game from Maxis opens a window into the psyche.
By Janelle Brown
[02/17/00]

The world according to Will
How do Sims die? How do they fight or fall in love? An interview with game creator Will Wright reveals the game's guiding philosophies.
By Daniel Sieberg
[02/17/00]

Dot-com addiction
The resolution of a few domain-name disputes offers some breathing room in the crowded Net name arena. But is it enough?
By Damien Cave
[02/16/00]

Complete archives for Technology

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Each cohort brings along its own totems and fetishes -- flappers with their bathtub gin and hot jazz; beatniks with their freewheeling road trips and angular, free-verse poetry; hippies with their free love and electric Kool-Aid acid tests.

The latest generation of malcontents has joined the timeless chorus of dissent with some decidedly modern accouterments, booting up their computers and flocking onto the Internet to pursue their own underground culture of Quake-style video games, rogue MP3 sites, hacking and other variations on the digital sock-hop. They have co-opted the designation "geek" -- formerly an archaic pejorative for ghoulish circus performers and unsavory, un-personalitied computer addicts -- to describe their own brand of freethinking, nonconformist cyber-hip. Geek chic, if you will.

Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho By Jon Katz Villard Books 256 pages Buy Geeks

In "Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho," journalist Jon Katz shoulders the prickly mantle of geek bard/apologist and attempts to explain this newest subculture to the rest of the world.

His main conceit is tried-and-true: "Geeks" is essentially a Horatio Alger-style tale of self-improvement and upward mobility: two working-class, socially backward but technically inclined lads leverage the power of the Internet to grab the bottom rung of the infotech employment ladder and climb to higher socioeconomic ground.

At the same time, "Geeks" is an attempt to diagram the somewhat elusive essence of geekness. This is a daunting, but not impossible task; though the soul of geek is slippery to the touch, there is almost certainly a canon of core values somewhere in the restless heart of everygeek, which Katz struggles to capture.

But the book's dual ambitions -- to be at once a tender story of coming-of-age in the Age of Internet, and a general dissertation on geek culture -- seem to work against each other. Katz's attempt to explain in broad terms the geek "movement" is hindered by his primary narrative obligation, the more specific and intimate saga of his two subjects.

In arranging his investigation as he has, Katz finds himself a victim of induction; inferring the great truths of the geek nation from a sample size of two may not have been the best plan of attack. Katz's anecdotal angle of analysis is less convincing than if it were pure ethnography. This is unfortunate; he seems eminently qualified to do one or the other.

It's easy to see how it happened. "Geeks" began as an article for Rolling Stone, a pop-journalism foray into this latest mutation of youth culture. Journalist Katz made the trip to Caldwell, Idaho, to investigate the story of his two geek subjects, Jesse Dailey and Eric Twilegar, having made their electronic acquaintance on the Internet. "Geeks" appears to be an extension of that magazine piece, wrapped in more general peregrinations on geek life.

A good deal of the padding derives from the author's lengthy campaign writing pieces for that rough-and-tumble, free-fire zone of geek culture, Slashdot. Many of Katz's broader assertions on geek nature derive from the tsunamis of electronic responses to his postings on that Web site.

Somewhere in that ocean of e-mail, though, Katz seems to have gotten oversaturated by his subject. Clearly, the jacket copy of the book suggests a loss of objectivity with its definition of geek: "A member of the new cultural elite, a pop-culture-loving, techno-centered Community of Social Discontents." Overly proud, perhaps, but defensible. But then it continues: "Most geeks rose above a suffocatingly unimaginative educational system, where they were surrounded by obnoxious social values and hostile peers, to build the freest and most inventive culture on the planet: The Internet and World Wide Web. Now running the systems that run the world."

Next page | Is this the story of two geeks forever changed by the Net, or by Katz?