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Hackers, freaks, outsiders, Homo Superior?
Call them what you will, geeks are everywhere, and
their stories help explain how science is shaping us
by Harvey Blume
July 13, 2000
Somewhere in the middle of
Martin Scorcese's film Mean Streets (1973),
Johnny Boy, the character played by Robert DeNiro,
calls another character a "mook."
"What's a mook?" the guy asks, looking
around the pool hall for guidance. Nobody seems to
know, so just to be on the safe side the guy slugs
DeNiro and starts a brawl. Today, the situation with
regard to "geek" resembles the melée over
mook. True, there is some rough consensus about the
meaning of the
word geek -- something to do with alienation and
lack of savoir-faire -- but when you try to get down
to particulars, it's chaos.
For one thing, as with mook, there is no agreement as
to whether geek is an insult or a compliment. Nor is
there much clarity about whether geeks can subsist
apart from the computer culture with which they are
often associated: in other words, is geek but a
synonym for "hacker"? (The Jargon
File, maintained by open source advocate Eric
Raymond, among others, pretty much equates the two
words, defining the computer geek -- and specifying no
other kind -- as "One who fulfills all the
dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an
asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all
the personality of a cheese grater." But with all
due respect for Raymond's exertions on behalf of open
source, on the matter of geek being the same as
hacker, his mind appears closed.)
At least one fact about geeks is beyond doubt -- they
are getting a lot of attention these days. Three
recent books -- Jon Katz's Geeks:
How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho,
Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish:
A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian
Culture of High-Tech, and Richard Powers's
novel Plowing
the Dark -- have made significant, if
contradictory, contributions to what might be called
"geek studies." But these volumes need to be
seen in the much broader context of the movies,
animated cartoons, comic books, television sitcoms, Web
sites, manifestos, and neurological writings that
are all by, for, or about the geek. And that bulging
corpus, in turn, has roots in a much older literary
tradition in which geeks went by the name of
"wild men" but were subjected to much the
same kind of scrutiny they are getting today.
Some constants emerge from geek studies. Geeks are
almost always depicted as deficient in traditional
social skills but as possessing some special gift or
talent in recompense. Writers tend to be divided over
which side of this equation should be emphasized
(usually to the exclusion of the other). Some fear
that the spread of geekdom means an irreparable hole
is being torn in the social fabric; others see geekdom
as a less hidebound and authoritarian society in the
making. But if there's one overriding theme to the
geek corpus, it's that tales of the geek will almost
always be tales of science -- of what science is doing
to us, what it's turning us into. Much as God is
always a presence, however peripheral, in the Hebrew
Bible, so science rules the expanse of geek studies.
That in itself is one reason geeks are getting so much
attention: the impact of science on our lives is
something we're endlessly anxious to understand.
 These
days, naturally enough, the science operative in geek
studies will most often be computer
science. But, contra Raymond, it's hardly computer
science alone that figures in geek lore. Katherine
Dunn's novel Geek
Love (1989), for example, a foundational work
in the field, traces the rise and fall of a carnival
freak show. That Dunn's book is set in the carnival,
not the cubicle, underlines the fact that the geek and
the hacker need not be identical. The carnival, after
all, is native ground for the geek. It was in the
carnival that the word itself came into being to
describe those performers whose sole claim on viewers'
attention was a willingness to bite off the heads of
live chickens. Dunn's characters have no need for such
uncouth devices. They are designer geeks, products of
rudimentary bioengineering. When pregnant, mama geek
Lillian ingests a home-brew rich in insecticides and
radioisotopes so that her progeny will be lavishly
deformed, and thus able to keep the family freak show
going. Dunn assigns her geeks a moral complexity some
later writers, prone either to demonize or adore the
geek, do not. Several of Dunn's mutants are sweet
souls, reconciled to life in the sideshow, but others
have a dark side, and an angry, vengeful will to
power. Arnie, for example, a leader of Dunn's geek
brood, plots an awful revenge on those who pay to
gawk, declaring of his kind, "We are the things
that come to the norms in nightmares. The thing that
lurks in the bell tower and bites out the throats of
the choirboys."
Jon Katz and Paulina Borsook, in their recent books,
take diametrically opposite positions to each other on
the question of whether geeks should be celebrated or
deplored. Katz portrays his geeks as outsiders whose
technical talents are finally of great use to society,
while Borsook sees behind every geek the unappeasable
image of an Arnie.
 In
his columns
for Hotwired in 1997 and 1998, and thereafter for Slashdot,
Katz became known as a leading advocate of geek pride,
and he continues in that vein in Geeks, tracing
the impact of the Internet on Jesse and Eric, a pair
of incommunicative working-class white kids.
Describing an encounter with Jesse, who is in the
process of taking apart a computer's motherboard, Katz
writes, "His face was void of expression, a mask
I came to know well and could rarely crack."
Several decades ago, Jesse might have been taking
apart a carburetor, but digital technology changes his
life more profoundly than auto-mechanics ever would
have. That motherboard helps link Jesse -- who had
been in trouble with gangs, liquor, and drugs -- to
the Internet, where he finds his voice, his community,
and his direction. "Such kids don't suffer alone
anymore," writes Katz. "They tell their
stories to one another almost continuously via
twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week messaging
systems." The Internet Katz describes is both a
technological and a social upheaval in progress, and
it sweeps Jesse and Eric out of the shallows and into
the mainstream. As Katz puts it: "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."
 Whereas
Katz sees an irresistible democratic impulse at work
in geek culture, Paulina Borsook, a former
writer for Wired, detects only a new,
stubborn elitism. Borsook grew up in California's
post-World War II aerospace milieu, and recalls that
the engineers and scientists of those days typically
subscribed to the view that "progress in our
shared civilization was helped along by government
programs supporting scientific research, public
health, education, and the bringing of electricity and
telephony to rural areas." They believed, above
all, that "there was a shared civilization
worth fostering, for geek and non geek, rich and
poor." In Borsook's account, that belief in
shared social values was shattered in Silicon Valley
and environs when computer geeks consolidated their
hold on power. Flush with money, prestige, and a
confidence that they were, as Katz puts it,
"uniquely -- and often solely -- qualified to
operate the most complex and vital systems,"
computer geeks grew contemptuous of any social or
philanthropic purposes beyond their own welfare.
According to Borsook, they dressed that contempt up as
a political philosophy and gave it the name "technolibertarianism."
Just behind the anti-government, anti-social biases of
that creed, Borsook sees a face much like Jesse's as
described by Katz -- a face "void of expression,
a mask I came to know well and could rarely
crack" -- and it frightens her.
Oddly, the moral complexity Katherine Dunn saw in her
carny geeks shows up better in pop culture than in
serious but one-sided studies such as Katz's and
Borsook's. A timely example is the X-Men
saga, which started in the late 1960s as a comic book
and has morphed into animated cartoons, action
figures, graphic novels, and now
the movies, along the way generating more
characters and plot lines than the Mahabharata.
X-Men is a story of mutants, "children of
the atom," whose numbers are increasing owing to
pollution and radioactivity -- the pervasive impact of
science and technology (as one X-Men novel
asks, "who knew what even sitting too close to a
TV set might do?"). Like Lillian's children in Geek
Love, these mutants are capable of extraordinary
feats, such as teleportation, flight, and control over
electromagnetism and the winds. Some style themselves
Homo Superior and want to dominate and punish the Homo
Sapiens who have persecuted them, but others -- the
band of X-Men led by Charles Xavier, who has
telepathic powers -- are determined to show that not
all super-powered mutants are bad guys.
A rift within mutantkind is likewise the theme of David
Cronenberg's best film, Scanners
(1980). Owing to an experimental drug taken by their
mothers, scanners are born with the ability to hear
the thoughts of those around them. The trick is to
control this power, and to turn it off when necessary,
lest its possessors be driven mad by the collective
roar of other minds. One scanner in particular, the
most powerful (the inevitable Arnie in the bunch), has
learned to use telepathy to dominate others and is
opposed by less malign members of the group. The
plight of Cronenberg's scanners, their inborn
defenselessness against other minds, is a superb
statement of another common motif of geek studies,
namely the terrible vulnerability of geeks to the
thoughts and judgments of the collective. Scanners are
not indifferent to others, as geeks are sometimes
thought to be, but only too painfully susceptible to
them.
In his new novel, Plowing the Dark, Richard
Powers takes up this theme, and recasts geek
vulnerability as a hyper-susceptibility to heartbreak.
Nearly all the book's characters -- programmers and
graphic designers for a Microsoft-like corporation
named TeraSys -- have lost at love so badly that
they're prepared to abandon the real world, which rubs
their hearts raw, and put their faith in virtual
reality. Geek talk, like science talk, is notoriously
brainy, but undeveloped when it comes to emotions.
Richard Powers's geeks, for example, are forever
overwhelmed by and at a loss for words for their
feelings. Questions of human intimacy reduce them to
whispers or to silence, but boot up a good stockmarket-forecasting
program on the company mainframe and they grow
effusive.
Yet Powers's geeks are still romantics at heart,
insulating a part of themselves from science (a part
that, for lack of any other language, grows mute).
Paulina Borsook sees no such partitions among the
geeks she describes. For them, the language of
intimacy and feeling has been turned into a dialect of
science and technology. She argues this point most
clearly with regard to geek sexuality. Borsook claims
that geeks are inordinately attracted to
sadomasochism, not, as trauma theorists would be quick
to assume, because they were physically or sexually
abused as children, but simply because S&M is
contractual and explicit -- with limits, roles, and
preferences negotiated in advance. S&M is nearly
algorithmic; it minimizes the difference between
having sex and writing code.
Different as they are in other
ways, Katherine Dunn's Arnie, David Cronenberg's
scanners, and Richard Powers's crew of
down-in-the-dumps VR designers bring together two
defining elements of the geek -- one modern, in the
form of science, and one very old.
The geek is an update of an ancient type -- the wild
man, as portrayed by John Block Friedman in his book The
Monstrous Races in Medieval Thought and Art
(1981) and Richard Bernheimer in Wild Men in the
Middle Ages (1952). With his roots in Greco-Roman
typologies, the wild man was a stock figure of
medieval bestiaries, travelogues, peasant pageants,
and aristocratic picture books. Bernheimer points out
that Shakespeare's Caliban, for example, the original
proprietor of Prospero's enchanted isle in The
Tempest, derives from medieval descriptions of the
wild man. The locale of the wild man, whether at the
world's edge or within the recesses of the dark
forest, was (Prospero notwithstanding) terra incognita
to civilized man. And though the wild man was barred
from the pleasures of society and forced to contend
with other strange beings at the chaotic margins of
the world, God compensated him with special powers,
such as an ability to control the winds and summon
storms. The wild man was among the many monstrous
races created by God to teach a lesson, the exact
nature of which medieval schoolmen spent a good deal
of time pondering -- though there was general
agreement among them that the wild man's very
existence had to be deemed a matter of "high
significance."
Medieval wild-man studies enjoyed one certainty geek
studies do not share -- a sense that God had installed
His wild men in the hinterland, where He meant them to
stay. There was no prospect of wild men crossing over
and going mainstream. When it comes to geeks, though,
it is significant that no such limit applies. The
mainstreaming of the geek is, in fact, one of the
things that most fascinates us about them -- and about
ourselves. We don't know how deeply science will
transform us, or what areas of our experience, if any,
will remain untouched. Borsook shows that for geeks,
even pillow talk is tech talk, and if geek studies
attests to anything it is to the fact that there's no
reliable dividing wall between geeks and others. Sure,
Arnie would stand out in a crowd, but Powers's
characters are indistinguishable from the rest of us
-- except for their urge, not so unusual these days,
to desert material for virtual reality. Despite
appearances, geek studies are not about the rarefied
or isolated other. We consult them for advance warning
of the physical, psychological, and intellectual
effects of science on us all.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Technology
& Digital Culture conference of Post &
Riposte.
More on books
in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic
Monthly.
More on technology
and digital culture in Atlantic Unbound
and The Atlantic Monthly.
Harvey Blume is a contributing writer for Atlantic
Unbound and The Boston Book Review. His interview
with Richard Powers appeared in Atlantic
Unbound last month.
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material copyright © 2000 by The
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