Giving Thanks for Geeks

This Thanksgiving, I was far from home, visting with two young geeks who set across the country with $10 extra bucks looking for good computer jobs. On Thanksgiving eve, they helped me to my first online gaming kill, thus inspiring me to recount the many ways in which I give thanks for geeks.

Just after midnight Thanksgiving Eve, I scored my first online kill ever, on an old version of Doom with the cheat controls turned on so I couldn't be killed.

Armed with a Number Six Laser Blaster, I incinerated some dull-witted, slow moving commando with big muscles bulging out of a sleeveless T-shirt. I smiled as his blood splattered all over the cold stone floor.

It's a geek Thanksgiving for me, in the literal sense of word, and I'm grateful for it. I'm writing this in a motel room 35 miles south of Chicago, a thousand miles from home. On this day, I'm especially grateful to geeks, perhaps because I'm spending this holiday with two 19-year-old geek Pilgrims who left the safety of their homes for a new life in a strange new place.

Three months ago, Jesse and Eric, both 19, and both members of their local high school geek club - they actually called it that -- uprooted themselves and trekked halfway across the country looking for computer jobs. When they left the West for Chicago in a Ryder truck, they had $10 to spare.

They were geeks before they even knew what the term meant. Nobody bought their computers for them. They patched their own machines from mail-order parts and tiny computer stores, played computer games in the school library until outraged parents who were just learning what the Internet was made them stop.

In addition to courage, smarts and humor, they posess the astonishing new skills of geeks, only beginning to be appreciated by the world beyond. My role is to keep them laughing at my ignorance. Setting out to chronicle their lives, they ended up teaching me things about mine.

When Jesse and Eric left their dead-end jobs in a small town in the West for a Chicago suburb in a rented truck a few months ago, they had enough money for some fast food burgers, gas, the first months' apartment on a small two-bedroom apartment, and $10 to spare.

Geeks to the bone, they've been gaming and prowling the Internet since junior high. Cyberspace isn't a hobby, but the rhythm of their lives, the evolution of the Net, then the Web, the way in which they measure the passage of time. They patched their own computers together from mail-order parts and the leftover carcasses of friend's machines. Unencumbered by pesky dates, too many friends, social lives, or party invitations, they mastered the most arcane details of networking and connectivity on the Internet.

Social awkwardness is not a liability for them, but an article of faith. They are, says Jesse, a small but distinct community of social discontent.

Jesse and I met after he e-mailed me nearly six months ago when I wrote a series for Hotwired called "The Rise of the Geeks." In his message, Jesse said he looked forward to the day when geeks could use the word with pride. I was on a plane to meet him weeks later. The columns drew e-mail from thousands of geeks all over the world, and the idea became a book I'm working on now.

Jesse and Eric's journey is a part of this book. Every couple of months, I come out to Chicago to see how they are getting along, to watch them patch their new lives together.

Riding home with Jesse on the train after work, watching him come into the apartment silently, sitting down even before taking his jacket off at his homemade, guts-exposed Pentium II/300 and start to play MotoCross Madness, I got the idea that I ought to write a Thanksgiving column giving thanks to the geeks.

I thank the geeks for providing a community in which being different isn't only all right but normal. For providing social refuge to people who often have lived without one. I thank them for all sorts of strange things I wouldn't know about if not for them and barely understand still - MP3's, Motherboards, Buttons, Packet Switchers, Domain Names, Bus Extenders, Bytes and File Allocation Tables.

I thank them for the many wonderful acronyms they've brought into the world: HTML, LOTSS, MS-DOS, POLOS, SLOS, SLAT, UNIX, LINUX, ASCCI, ICCC, ISP. I thank them for their acerbic T-shirts ("Sentenced to Life on Planet Earth," is Jesse's), decaying sneakers, rancid pizza, for the Doritos and tacos they are responsible for keeping in our world.

I thank them for grungy apartments, surge protectors with wires sprouting like wild beans, humming computers that are always on, for the piles of discs and manuals that surround them, for their extraordinary patience browsing and downloading. I thank them for loving movies and TV and the rest of popular culture so much, even as the normal world seems to hate it more and more all the time.

I thank the geeks at Bolt, Beranek & Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts who got a contract in December, l968 to build the ARPAnet Interface Message Processors (IMP's) and began changing the world. I thank the UCLA Network Measurement Center, where geeks connected an IMP to their Sigma 7 computer and installed the first node of the ARPAnet, and to the geeks at Stamford who installed the second to their SDS 940 computer, and logged the first ARPAnet message ever: "LOG-IN...Crash!"

I thank the hundreds of pioneering and free-spirited souls on the Internet who established the Whole Earth's 'Lectronic Link (WELL) in l984. And I especially thank Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web at CERN in Switzerland in l990.

I thank the geeks for sharing what they know, improving what they have, fighting to keep information free - by hacking, organizing, communicating, inventing, and joining generous and revolutionary political movements like OSS and Free Software. For making music, text, research and programs available to everybody, not just big fat corporations. For my reliable Powerbook (yes, Powerbook) and my wireless digital phone.

I thank all of the grumpy geeks from all over the world who scold, berate, educate and thump me upside the head for poor computing skills, endemic technical ignorance, even bad grammar. I thank those generous ones who shower me with praise, try and heal any wounds they think I might have suffered. And who offer me encouragement, education, ideas, free software and thousands of interesting thoughts, jokes, offerings from idiosyncratic digital archives, a daily outpouring of links to places I ought to go, and various brainy insights.

And I thank Jesse and Eric for a great pre-Thanksgiving fete in which we went out for a pizza, laughing and chattering for hours about Bill Gates, the Y2K hysteria, hacking, the Unabomber, Linux, Java and gaming, and then showing our very powerful attachment for one another by loading up on ammo, first aid kits and armor, and killing each other into the early hours of the morning. There was talk of a microwave TV dinner, assuming any stores were open. We'll see.

So this is for those geeks who won't be able to stay off Slashdot all day. Thanks to you, too. For me, this was a great start to Thanksgiving. Turns out I was with family after all.

I can be e-mailed at [e-mail]