The Rise of Geek
The Post has a story in Sunday's paper about the resurgence of Geek Culture, and they're acting like it's a bit of a surprise.
What they fail to realize is that it was an inevitability that geeks would cast off the reigns of conformity, and begin to establish their own effective culture core. While D&D may have once been maligned, its online equivalent in World of Warcraft has 8 million people who pay $15/mo to play with digital bits with their friends. Nerdcore rap? Not a surprise that geeks would ask for more material that reflects their life experience without conforming to pop music's standards. iPhone lust? C'mon, now we're just getting silly. Who doesn't want a really kickass phone that also works as an internet browser?
Geek is chic. It has been since somebody decided that .com was the greatest business invention of the Twentieth Century. When designers and coders got together and decided their chocolate tasted good in their peanut butter, the design scene and the code scene got to be good buddies. The geeks and the design mavens began to hang out after work, too, listening to a lot of the same music, drinking the same beer, and even coordinating some semblance of fashion sense.
Tonight for Tiffany's comedy event, I looked, if I may say, pretty damned stylish, despite belying my geek heritage. A Work Shirt, a black and white t-shirt, and some nice antiqued jeans. I fit the part of a geek in a new era.
Sure, the football captain will always have his popularity handed to him on the backs of thousands of screaming deranged fans, but the geeks can have it too, with thousands of digitally-applauding geeks from across the Internet. The Internet is really what makes this all work. The shrinking of worlds that it allows, connecting thousands of geographically disparate people by electrons passed along a wire, is one that can elect its own culture core, and no one should be surprised by that, least of all the Washington Post.
Geeks are cool now. We get that. We've seen it for the last 15 years. It's not news. Get over it. It's life. And we should be embracing the popularity of geeks, because geeks bring us things like YouTube, the iPhone, Google, Wikipedia, 37 Signals, 43 Folders, and all manner of life-changing technological movements and effects. They make the world smaller, they make the world better, they shrink the gaps between people, one way or another. You don't have to pretend to like Nerdcore anymore than I have to like the NBA or read up on Stocks. It's just another option, and we should celebrate that, not act as if "Oh, look, the Geeks have their own little social movement, how cuuute," and treat it as if this is a quaint temporal anomaly.
Thank you.
Just another geek.
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