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The Rise of Geekdom
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sat May 24, 2008 10:52 AM
from the news-to-nobody dept.
from the news-to-nobody dept.
cynagh0st writes "In what can only be described as the biggest newsflash for the Slashdot community since Microsoft was sued: It is the age of the geek. New York Times Op-Ed columnist and author David Brooks writes a brief article that can be best summed up in the following: All your culture are belong to us. In the article proper he summarizes the rise to power and discusses a technocratic geek dominance on the social construct. He writes, '... the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds ... They've created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated ... There are now millions of educated-class types guided by geek manners and status rules.'" I'm thinking Brooks must have been AFK for the 2nd half of the 90s when this started. To be more precise, late 97 ;)
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No, it is the age of the farmer and miner (Score:5, Insightful)
Paper shufflers and pixel movers are beginning to get a dose of harsh reality.
Re:No, it is the age of the farmer and miner (Score:5, Insightful)
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Who really makes the money (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No, it is the age of the farmer and miner (Score:4, Interesting)
It depends where you are - supply and demand play a huge role in salaries for what would normally be considered low-end jobs. Out on the tar-sands projects in Alberta welders make $100 an hour, and most pipe-fitters rake in at least $30 an hour. The demand has exceeded supply by a huge margin, so the salaries have gone through the roof, and workers are coming in from all over the place. As a result, housing prices have skyrocketed (from less than 100k to 350k+ in the matter of a couple years), and even the local coffee shops have had to start paying their employees $15 per hour in order to compete for manpower.
On the other hand, if you're a basic worker employed on some almost-empty oil well in Texas, chances are you're not making much cash at all. That's because the supply of workers there either meets or exceeds the demands of the oil companies.
You want to create great opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled labourers? Start drilling in the southern coastal waters, and open up Alaska too. It will create jobs and help the US economy recover, and reduce the amount of money being funnelled into the middle-east. Also, while it probably won't lower the price of gas for consumers, it will slow the climb. Frankly, I'm shocked that Bush hasn't been able to push through legislation to allow the exploitation of at least a few new areas.
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Re:No, it is the age of the farmer and miner (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are Exxon's top five executives, only two on the list didnt work at inherintly nerdy positions at exxon and thats because they joined company later in their careers after they had transitioned to management (ie they started out as nerds):
CEO has a degree in civil engineering, joined the company as a production engineer.
Mark Elbers, senior vice president, has a degree in petroleum engineering and joined the company as an engineer.
Michael Dolan, joined the company working in a research laboratory, also has many academia related positions in engineering.
Stephen Simon, has a degree in civil engineering.
Donald Humphries, has a degree in industrial engineering
I could go through and list every executive working at any of these "big oil" organizations, but you get the idea. We all love to hate on executives, but generally speaking board members want somebody very smart and hardworking to run their multibillion dollar company.
I guess there may be some areas where the guy at the top of the food chain is a sales guy who cant do algebra, but if the company has any "nerd" positions at all those are generally the people who will rise to the top.
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Re:No, it is the age of the farmer and miner (Score:4, Interesting)
I wasn't particularly talking about oil, but in terms of fortune in general. Oil, tech and manufacturing company execs have background in those industries. News at 11.
That, however, does not necessarily translate across all industries. Secondly, a background in engineering means nothing. My undergrad was in EE. I'm a management consultant working on completely unrelated stuff. Your point?
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Re:No, it is the age of the farmer and miner (Score:4, Insightful)
The point is that being an engineer doesn't equal being a geek. Many engineers are boring salary counters.
The geeks I knew were in departments like film, art and philosophy. These people cared about computers and comics the way that the others cared about their salaries, cars or social status.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Aw, furrfu! (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like geekdom has gone mainstream now. Great. Now I gotta find something else to be. I guess otaku still has a couple of years left, though the folks over in Akihabara are probably going to end up making that mainstream too before long.
And as for 1997, I had a Fidonet BBS back in 1993, then fixed IP DSL since early 2000.
something going mainstream does not become bad (Score:2, Insightful)
with your logic, one has to go evil, if the majority of people becomes good. its absurd.
Re:something going mainstream does not become bad (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that once something goes mainstream, the quality of the content that makes up that culture begins to decline rapidly. People interested in making money enter the game, and try to squeeze out those who are genuinely interested in making something neat. It's happened again and again as various niche cultures are thrust into the mainstream consciousness. For every real, interesting work/artist/idea there are 10 cheap knockoffs being peddled by media/retail companies.
Music is a perfect example; every time a new genre becomes popular, imitation bands are "discovered" by all the recording companies, and they flood the market with dozens of identical-sounding bands until what was appealing about the culture is eroded by bottom-dollar competition and fear of experimentation with something that already "works".
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Re:something going mainstream does not become bad (Score:4, Insightful)
In the case of mom and pops, its easy to ignore them, as they don't hold sway over powerful forces that can influence culture. Big companies looking for the Next Big Thing to exploit are another matter. It's this form of mainstream adoption that causes the signal-to-noise ratio to fall. Over time, the culture identity can be destroyed, as up-and-commers are not often introduced to the "real thing".
It's happened to me before, and I generally don't quit; I try to find the quality amongst the garbage rather than leaving. But as time goes on, fewer and fewer people try to do their own thing, and more often they just try to imitate the emergent monocolture. In the case of music, interesting bands abandon their own style in order to match the 'norm' so that they can be more popular, and make money. I believe this is called "Selling Out". New artists do much the same thing, but maybe *their* contract requires them to produce 5 identical sounding albums.
Not only does the new attention not contribute anything, it can actively errode the existing culture - and fast. This kind of cycle isn't usually broken until people are bored with the culture, and move on to something else.
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I don't think so (Score:5, Informative)
Brooks is out of touch. (Score:5, Funny)
If Holden Caulfield was the sensitive loner from the age of nerd oppression, then Harry Potter was the magical leader in the age of geek empowerment.
Fucking Harry Potter? What does he think we are, a bunch of overgrown man-children?
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Re:I don't think so (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I geek on virtual machines, I post on LiveJournal. For one, I'm one of many guys behind the curtain, for the other, I'm one of many consumers. I think most of my friends and colleagues would be -more- than happy to call me an "actual geek."
Personally, I use these services as technology to improve efficiency, which is think is a pretty geeky reason.
Being an introvert, I only have a few close friends, and I update them personally for the most part. They're not the target audience, really.
Technical expertise is insufficient ... (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think MBA types are not geeks? I am currently in an MBA program and let me assure you that there are plenty of geeks. When classroom discussions turn to Linux, open source, GPL, etc there is no shortage of students to provide a better overview or definition than the text book or case study is offering. There are even leaders in the FOSS community who have decided to pursue MBAs. Some geeks eventually learn that technical expertise is insufficient to make their dreams occur. That business knowledge may also be required.
Re: (Score:2)
Probably tells something about the aspiration level of the 'text book' or 'case study' (singular ?!).
CC.
Geeks are hip. (Score:5, Interesting)
It follows that while many MBAs may be geeks, the MBA subculture is not a geek subculture. The last time I checked, making money had fairly obvious popular appeal.
"Cool" is in the eye of the beholder. There's another term that entered youth culture through jazz, with roots that go all the way back to Mother Africa. The word "hip" comes from a West African word "hep", mean "one who knows."
To be cool, you have to attract the admiration of others. To be hip you must possess knowledge not available to the public at large. For example, I had a friend who'd walk into a certain restaurant on a Friday night and get immediately seated. Even if they had a line waiting, they'd see him at the back of the line and immediately usher him from to a table. That was sort of cool. But it wasn't hip. His secret was available to anybody: you just had to eat there five times a week.
Now many years ago there used to be a restaurant in my neighborhood that opened at midnight and closed at 6:00am. It catered to an eclectic mix of insomniacs, workers leaving the night shift or going to the graveyard shift, musicians hanging out after their gigs, and vampirish denizens of the night (this was back before anybody had heard of the "goth" subculture).
Being a regular at that place made you hip.
I'd say the very definition of "geek" would be "hip" without being recognizably "cool" to most people. Slinging a mean soldering iron makes you hip to electronics, but cool only to your electronics geek buddies.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I never said it was what you were taught, I said it was what many MBAs actually do. I know why they do it because I once asked one I respected about why so many MBAs do things that increase the short-term bottom line at the expense of long-term disaster and he told me how greedy, ambitious MBAs were using the short-term results as a springboa
Geeks still get beat up.. (Score:5, Insightful)
But on the school yard, especially for 10-14 year olds, "geeks" still get beat up, and tortured by the "jocks" and the popular kids.
it might be the age of the geek-y adult, but it is NOT the age of the geek-kid.
Re:Geeks still get beat up.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely.
I was interested that TFA cited Harry Potter as a kind of geek icon. Either they didn't read the books, or they think that "geek" = "wearing eyeglasses fixed with sticky-tape". Harry Potter is always doing badly at his classes, is more interested in sports than books, and leaves all the really clever stuff to Hermione. In other words, he's pretty much the quintessential jock! If geek-kids want role models, they need to look somewhere very different.
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Re:Geeks still get beat up.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You have valid points about Harry Potter, but I still feel that Harry Potter was a huge step forward in the world of geek protagonists. My opinion is fueled further by the fact that I just finished watching a re-run of "Saved By The Bell". Boy am I glad the days are over w
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Harry isn't a geek, I agree. But Hermione is definitely a geek-girl! Frankly, I've always been a tad astonished that the Sorting Hat didn't put her into Revenclaw, but I guess her courage must have won out over her geekishness. Either that, or Harry got lucky that th
Age of denial (Score:5, Insightful)
David "Bobo" Brooks is an idiot (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Not only that, he started his diatribe out with a quote from Dr. Seuss. I think he fancies himself a geek. He should be taken outside and soundly thrashed.
It's folks like him and Twitter that get us all in trouble.
Real Geek punishment (Score:3, Funny)
No, that'd make you a jock. You're supposed to snicker at him, make condescending remarks about his writing and journalistic ability, point out every flaw in his reasoning (being as pedantic about it as possible), and all the while saying it with the Comic Book Guy's voice.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No. He's a conservative, albeit a moderate who feels "estranged" [newyorker.com] from the conservative movement (you'll have to search for the quote). According to the Wikipedia article on him [wikipedia.org], he "started out" as a liberal, but claims to have had a conversion moment during a debate with Milton Friedman. He worked for the conservative National Review. He was an editor for the conservative Wall Street Journal op-ed page. He was an editor for the conservative Weekly Standard.
He's still an i
Nerd Geek? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know. To me, `nerd' has a positive connotation: he or she is a kind of homo universalis
. A nerd is interested in almost everything and is able to grasp many different subjects on a high level.
Geeks on the other hand are just simpletons parading around with a little amount of extra knowledge as coloured feathers in a birds ass. They do know more about a subject than the people in their environment and they want the others to know that. However, often enough they are not able to grasp the subject
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A nerd is interested in almost everything and is able to grasp many different subjects on a high level.
That just seems like an "intelligent person". To me, a nerd is a person who is interested in the most esoteric, obscure, technically challenging aspects of every field -- that is, if a nerd plays videogames, they never touch Counter-Strike, they play Core Wars [corewars.org] instead. They don't just watch Star Trek, they know Klingon. They don't just play D&D, they're invariably rules lawyers [wikipedia.org].
They also have high-pitched whiny voices, wear pocket protectors and thick glasses, are either imposs
Nah. It's marketing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah. "Geekdom" used to be about doing stuff. Now it's about owning stuff. Marketing has taken over "geek" the way it took over "cool".
More like the Age of the End User (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, one of the real oddities of our age is that it depends hugely on high-tech and yet actual knowledge of even elementary scientific principles is still not regarded as mainstream, or part of what every person with a claim to be educated should know.
Look at the quality of science journalism or of science-related politics - people still, on the whole think that there's no shame in being ignorant of even basic science.
Not "Age of the Geek" by a long shot, yet.
Only Geeks Think So (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Which manners are those? I deal with people deep inside geek culture, and those as far away from it as possible. Some of the brightest, most articulate, well-mannered people I know are geeks. But then, that also describes some farmers I know. And some artists. On the other hand, taken as a group, the larger body of geeks with which I'm familiar also contains the biggest number of rude, snarky, grasping, deceitful, jerky, foul-mouthed louts I've ever encountered. Very bright people that don't just lack good manners, they aggressively pursue a manner and bearing that is confrontational, mean-spirited, hypocritical, often delusional and ultimately often self-destructive... even as they complain that nobody likes them. You all know who I'm talking about (or know who you are!).
I know some very inspiring geeks. But I don't find them to be any more numerous than I do inspiring fine artists, or even inspiring landscape designers, chefs, dog trainers, or English teachers. Every demographic has some. But few demographics have as many mal-adjusted asses per capita as do the geeks. I know, since I'm one of them. This whole concept is wrong. It's not "rise of the geeks" as seen in their online public forums and playgrounds. No, this is just "re-emergence of smart people who are able to communicate in interesting ways
Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
"I, for one, welcome our new geek overlords!"
Writer doesn't know what a real geek is. (Score:5, Insightful)
All of the *real* geeks that I know either shun facebook ("Hello, privacy invasion!") or use it in some very minimalist manner. Facebook is for the masses and we geeks aren't the masses.
One might even argue that the real geek still posts replies here as "anonymous coward" for the same reasons as they don't use facebook: slashdot doesn't need to track what I read, from computer to computer and if people don't mod up our comments, so what? We don't need to bask in the glory of being "5: Insightful" - we know our comments are
I'd venture to add that if being geek-cool implies facebook, then this has potential to include more MBA-types than geek-types.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Modern society tends to view a desire to learn as "geeky", I've helped a number of friends in the past with various subjects and lost track of the time that I've heard them say things like "I'm such a
Ah, Brooks (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the same David Brooks who coined the term 'bobo' (short for Bohemian Bourgeois), which deserves more use.
I am not completely sure I agree with his conclusions though. In my experience, the less technical a person is, the more likely they are to use Twitter, Facebook and SMS. The third he mentioned, blogs, really transcends other categories. Since Livejournal, the barrier to entry has been very low for creating a blog - just set up an account and type - and hasn't required technical ability or even having anything interesting to say.
No....just....no (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sorry, but "geeks," "supple," "well-modulated emotions," "Facebook," "blogs," and "Twitter" should never appear in the same sentence.
Not quite true. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think more to the point it has become clear that technology is a valid career path and, that being the case, the "popular" people are willing to accept it as a career path. Socially outgoing people have made geekdom popular, not the other way around.
Rise and fall and rise of the geek cool aesthetic (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, being a geek comes in and out of fashion, but there is an overall rising trend. For example, back in my day (the 80s) movies like Real Genius, Revenge of the Nerds, and Weird Science, along with the rise in popularity of the personal computer, role playing games, etc. were all evidence for the geek empowerment movement.
While I agree we are in a local maximum for the geek aesthetic where software engineers and programmers are like the supermodels of geek culture, the true litmus test for the Age of the Geek will be when a physics major can proudly say so at a party and not have everyone take two steps back. This has never been true, and I see no evidence of this yet.
Pay attention to Cats (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but if if it's really true that "All your culture are belong to us", then it's time to remember the following sequence:
They have it all wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
America has always been a nation of geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
Westinghouse : Geek. Invents airbrakes.
Edison : Geek. Genuine Geek. Anyway one that could think of electrocuting an elephant to prove the superiority of his or her technology, well, that's a geek.
Henry Ford, the Dodge Brothers, Stanley family: all geeks.
Being a genuine geek is not about the kind of clothes you wear or what sort of a show you watch. It's about having an uncontrollable urge to express yourself by making things. Geekdome isn't even an academic thing. Machinists at WL Gore, guys that build their own cars and people that alter their own guns, those are all geeks.
Sure, its nice to hope that some of us will get stinking rich off of something we invent, but most of the time, we're really more inventing because the curious act of exploration occupies the mind in such a way as to silence for a time the storms that otherwise lie within it.
Label-loving assholes (Score:3, Insightful)
They've created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated...There are now millions of educated-class types guided by geek manners and status rules.
This is such stereotyped, self-righteous, pat-myself-on-the-back bullshit. M.B.A.-types can be geeky ... business is the study of economics!
Who Cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most nerds take pride in their intelligence and they should be! If that is not what is coming out of this 'rise of the geek' movement then who cares? I certainly don't. I would much rather have the influence be that society beings to respect and value intelligent people... something that was lost during generation X/Next and who knows if we can ever get it back... I have my doubts.
Re:Late 97? (Score:4, Informative)
From http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/g/goreinternet.htm [truthorfiction.com]: From http://www.perkel.com/politics/gore/internet.htm [perkel.com] (referring to an article by Mountain Democrat columnist David Jacobsen): The same is incidentally true of some of his other seemingly far-fetched stories (which, again, are often based on mis-quotes). For instance, from the same article: This quote was quickly changed to "I was the one that started it all" by the time the media reported it, then to "I was the one who started it all" by the Republicans.
And "Erich Segal, author of Love Story, corroborated that Gore and his Harvard roommate, Tommy Lee Jones, were indeed the models for the story's main character" [played by Ryan O'Neal].
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking for myself, the NBA players and rock stars don't hold much charm; billionaires are a different matter, but give me Sergei Brin over Prince William any day! Money is all well and good, but it won't keep your brain warm on a boring winter's evening...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if you have more than the minimum of standards, you'll never get the girl or guy of your dreams with anything "alone".
The kind of person who's only looking for one thing (money, looks, status) is not the kind of person I, for one, think I could be happy with. Even a genius IQ will not make the perfect partner unless it's allied with a half-decent personality!