Geek Theory

When talking about geek culture, there’s a few things to know. The first is how it views itself:

• * Geeks are superior to non-geeks
• * Knowledge is one of the ultimate prizes
• * One-upmanship is the only battle worth fighting

The shorthand for the above list is “ego”, which is seemingly at odds considering that earlier treatment of geeks by non-geeks should have lead to a total teardown of ego. But thanks to the Internet Age, geeks have come to view themselves as indispensible and desirable for the one thing that they hold in the highest regard: their knowledge.

Geeks don’t care for the mainstream at all. It’s understandable, since the mainstream is filled with images of mainstream ideals, and the lionization of sports and athletes and gorgeous movie stars, and like with most cultural depictions in entertainment, hasn’t been kind to geeks. Popular culture is antithetical to geek culture, which has never been popular. Until recently.

The mainstream is coming around to not only like but truly value geek culture. Everyone (it seems) has an iPhone or iPad. Movie studios consider the San Diego Comic-Con to be a major PR event. All kinds of people are putting geeky tattoos on themselves, or are watching The Big Bang Theory, or are playing the latest version of Madden on their Xbox, or…

Basically, the mainstream is forcing itself into geek territory, rolling over the barricades that geek culture has erected to protect itself, and inside which it has developed it’s own culture – and formed it’s identity. Geeks aren’t sitting idly by while this happens, but they’re not exactly tackling the problem with aplomb.

Some of the weapons in a geek’s arsenal are:

• Sarcasm
• Insults
• Denigration
• Invalidation

Which is ironic, of course, since these were the tactics used against geeks in the early days of the culture.

So geeks have learned to give as good as they got, but why? Shouldn’t it be good for the culture to gain new blood, and to be welcomed into the fold with open arms? The problem is that history is on the side of those who experienced it. Geekdom isn’t just something that people do, it’s something that people live, and when a culture lives it’s creed, that creed becomes the culture’s identity. This identity is very important to the geek culture as the punk identity is important to punks, and the goth culture is important to goths. It’s not just a way to dress, or even an attitude: it’s a person’s life, and lifestyle.

Like other cultural identities, then, outsiders who attempt to co-op the identity for themselves are met with a range of obstacles from the community, whether it’s a sidelong glance or outright hostility. To someone within the culture, anyone wanting to get “in” needs to prove him or herself to the satisfaction of whomever they’re dealing with – which means that the outsider may have to prove him or herself over and over again every time they meet another person from within the culture. You’ll often see non-geeks getting excited about “geeky” things like the Lord of the Rings movies, or that they’re a “gamer” because they play Facebook games. Of course, geeks will deny them a pass because they watched the movies and didn’t read the books, or because Farmville isn’t Call of Duty. Poseurs are deserving of nothing less than full-on scorn, which many geeks are more than willing to provide because it helps identify those with legitimate claims on the identity, and those without legitimate claims on the identity. It also helps to shame the poseurs in to not even bothering to keep trying to find common ground in the hopes that they’ll just go away.

How can we explain, then, the wild success of the Lord of the Rings movies if hardcore geekdom considers them to be a shadow of the original tomes? Geeks, as we have said, aren’t stupid. They also like money, and because of their generally insular nature, they’re an untapped market compared to sports fans or car aficionados. Geekdom has been verboten for decades, but now marketers want in – and enterprising geeks are more than willing to create conduits through the otherwise dense morass of self-styled “keepers of the culture” who would prefer that the mainstream stay far outside the walls.

At this point, it seems that the mainstream is winning, which is making the hardcore geekdom more and more agitated, more and more vocal, and sometimes violently so. Like any explosion, though, the pressure always starts building on the inside before it explodes outward, and geekdom is no different.

Sometimes, the community is it’s own worst enemy.

The 90s were a kind of “coming of age” decade for the geek culture. Home computers were becoming more and more ubiquitous, and were filling more roles than just that of a massive calculator. Video game consoles were finding their way into people’s hands on a regular basis. We even saw the segue in pop culture from electronic synthesizers in music (almost everything from the 80s) to full-on electronic music (like industrial rock) who’s creators could easily be considered geeks.

But nothing could hold a candle to the Granddaddy of Geek Achievements: The Internet.

I was a biology student in college in the early 90’s, and I remember standing in my dorm room reading an article about the “World Wide Web”, which wasn’t even a thing at the time. The article explained Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of what the Web would be, using the example of a research paper which would “hyperlink” citations to other articles on the Web instead of footnotes. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, because as someone who had to write lengthy and well documented research papers, I understood all too well how this kind of technology could benefit. I had no idea how quickly the Internet could and would explode, making billionaires out of the same people who had grown up in the geek cadre and pushing technology further into the lives of people around the globe.

Companies rushed to monetize the Web, which meant that every company needed a web presence, which in turn meant that IT departments rapidly expanded. Businesses fell over themselves to hire geeks and nerds to set up their networks and connect them to the Internet and to design and build their websites, manage their email, and to explain – in layman’s terms, if possible – how it all worked, and why the company was laying out huge amounts of money for all this new technology in one fell swoop.

Keep in mind, however, that many of these new “IT geeks” were the same bullied geeks who had simmered in anger over their treatment earlier in their lives. Now the world needed them. Now the corporations were engaging in bidding wars for their talents, offering massive salaries and insane perks for their knowledge. In a perverse way, geeks were being elected the “homecoming queens” almost overnight.

The problem was that the turnover from being an ostracized class to a much needed and increasingly acceptable class was too short for the culture to redirect its energies. Just as the Internet sprang up almost overnight, the situation turned for the community, but the resentment and anger and sadness and depression didn’t simply vanish in a puff of new good will. Instead, all the baggage came along for the ride.

I am the father of an 11 year old daughter. She’s a wonderful kid, and aside from having my temper, she seems to be growing up right. Her hobbies include Pokemon, Adventure Time and Regular Show, and Minecraft and Skylanders.

In short, she’s a geek, just like her father.

But unlike her father, she’s growing up in an environment where being geeky isn’t an instant social death-sentence like it was when I was growing up. I’m sure that it’s still not all wine and roses, and that geeky kids aren’t embraced by the boatloads in this “Enlightened Age”, but considering that my daughter is representing the culture in 2012 tells me that we’ve made significant progress.

I grew up in the 1980s, so all those obnoxious “are you a child of the 80’s?” quizzes you auto-delete from your inbox? I score 100%. 1980, I was 7, and when the decade closed, I was 18 (I was born in January, so close enough). That makes the 80’s my “formative years”, and it was, as far as I’m concerned, the “formative years” for the modern geek culture.

Geek culture is actually a sub-culture, like those old guys you see gathering at the 50s themed diner on a Sunday morning to look at each other’s vintage cars, Harley owners, or people who go to yard sales an hour early to get the best deals. These sub-cultures take shape around a common interest, and get together to discuss their hobbies and to share and compare notes and ideas.

The geek culture owes its existence to two factors. The first is a common interest in “geeky” things like tabletop roleplaying, computers, comic books, science fiction and fantasy, and video games. Before the modern era, connecting with people who shared your interests wasn’t easy. You had to know them through regular social interaction, or you had to go somewhere where like-minded people could be found. The second factor was the ostracism. Geeks – to this day – are often portrayed as socially inept, fashionably challenged, awkward, weak and/or sickly, and genetically lacking. We might get scientific and talk about “survival of the fittest” here, which would explain that animals like this tend to fall out of the gene pool, but humans have always bucked the trend. Instead, the more “fit” specimens resorted to behaviors which amounted to bullying in order to establish the pecking order.  Again, as any 1980’s “coming of age teen comedy” will tell you, this was rarely benign indifference and although writ large for Hollywood effect, the truth was painfully close. I believe that this treatment had more of an impact on the development of the culture than any other factor.

The problem with being forced into this social situation is that there’s no time to prepare. Geeks either knew other geeks, or they didn’t. If they had solidarity with others, things weren’t so bad, because misery loves company, so they say. The problem was of its own doing, of course, because geeks weren’t as socially adept as their more socialite counterparts, nor were they as fortunate enough to do the things that defined social position in those days. Geeks didn’t usually play sports, or go to parties, or get on the cheerleading squad. They were in plays, or in the band, or…did nothing. It was easy to segregate them when they were more or less segregated under their own free well to start with.

Compounding this problem was the fact that the people pushed out of the mainstream really weren’t at all interested in being pushed out of the mainstream. They had nothing against the mainstream until the mainstream had something against them. True, geeks might have been socially awkward, or introverts, and might have kept to themselves as a result, but that didn’t mean they wanted to be excluded. They desired social interaction just like all kids who were learning how to interact socially. The only problem was that they didn’t know how to go about it, and were now being told they couldn’t socialize with the mainstream.

Even with whatever camaraderie geeks may have had in their community, there was undoubtedly feelings of anger, sadness, resentment, and depression over the treatment they were subjected to at the hands of their peers. This is one element that would prove to be an unfortunate foundation for the modern state of the geek culture, and one that’s almost impossible to reverse on a large scale.