people.” When he ticked off the names of friends he grew up with, it was a litany of trouble: one was an alcoholic and divorced at twenty, with a child and no job. Another, unemployed, was perpetually blasted on drugs. One lived from party to weekend party; he was in a beery stupor much of the time in between. They all worked at bottom-rung jobs in “big-box” superstores and fast-food franchises for $7 an hour.
For Jesse and Eric, therefore, getting out of Idaho was less a lifestyle choice than a matter of survival. There was no net beneath these kids, only the Net. It had guided much of their lives—how they thought, what they did, what kind of a future they could have. It was the only thing they trusted absolutely and relied on continuously. So far, it was one of the few things that had never really failed them. “The Net isn’t work and it isn’t play,” Jesse explained. “It’s work
and
play.”
Not surprisingly, both harbored smoldering class resentment at people whose parents bought them computers and $100 pairs of Timberlands and unquestioningly paid for their college expenses. Unhappiness and suffering builds character, Jesse told himself—and me—again and again, repeating one of his Nietzschean mantras. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
They’d learned to expect little from bosses and other authority figures, with the single and crucial exception of a teacher named Mike Brown, whom they both credited with having changed their lives.
GEEK VOICES
January 1997
Yeah, although I was considered a geek by most of the people throughout my high school years, I found that even geeks get laid in the ’90s. . . . I have been working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, for about three years now and I am surrounded by geeks at work. The Vietnamese geek and the American geek are the same breed, containing the same amount of personality quirks you outlined in your articles. . . . I feel at times that this is the first time in the history of the world that geeks can really take charge. The faceless quality of the Net erases the problems geeks face in the “real” world of image, fashion, communication skills, etc. I foresee an International Geek Tribunal emerging through the vast slowly connecting networks that are already forming between geeks here and geeks there. Hopefully, it will help.
Thanks,
—Kirk
3
THE GEEK CLUB
From: Jesse Dailey
To: Jon Katz
In my junior year of high school, me and three of my close friends began to hold the meetings of what would soon become the infamous Geek Club. Perhaps “meetings” is too formal a word for this. It merely consisted of four of us, in the English teacher’s (the local liberal) classroom, eating lunch every day and reveling in our self-imposed and self-indulgent segregation. By the end of my senior year, it had become a veritable institution. We had become quite well recognized by the school populus, it became a kind of running joke among all the people in our class, and for one of the first times, it wasn’t a joke to which we were the butt, we were the ones delivering the punch line.
> > >
THIS WAS part of the first e-mail Jesse sent me, the one that sent me off to Caldwell to meet the author. He later described it as “a nuclear bit of e-mail,” given the chain of events it subsequently triggered.
It was engagingly well-written, with a sense of irony and a nearly wicked wit, and it was strikingly self-aware for a nineteen year old.
Perhaps inadvertently, his message also reflected the transformation of geeks all over the world: They were suddenly the ones delivering the punch line. I saw that sense of ascent and transcendence expressed scores of times daily on the Net and the Web: that geekdom wasn’t primarily about technology, it was about
using
technology to effect change—personally and often, albeit unconsciously, politically.
Jesse and Eric have a community and even a religion: The Net will provide. It will help
For Jesse and Eric, therefore, getting out of Idaho was less a lifestyle choice than a matter of survival. There was no net beneath these kids, only the Net. It had guided much of their lives—how they thought, what they did, what kind of a future they could have. It was the only thing they trusted absolutely and relied on continuously. So far, it was one of the few things that had never really failed them. “The Net isn’t work and it isn’t play,” Jesse explained. “It’s work
and
play.”
Not surprisingly, both harbored smoldering class resentment at people whose parents bought them computers and $100 pairs of Timberlands and unquestioningly paid for their college expenses. Unhappiness and suffering builds character, Jesse told himself—and me—again and again, repeating one of his Nietzschean mantras. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
They’d learned to expect little from bosses and other authority figures, with the single and crucial exception of a teacher named Mike Brown, whom they both credited with having changed their lives.
GEEK VOICES
January 1997
Yeah, although I was considered a geek by most of the people throughout my high school years, I found that even geeks get laid in the ’90s. . . . I have been working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, for about three years now and I am surrounded by geeks at work. The Vietnamese geek and the American geek are the same breed, containing the same amount of personality quirks you outlined in your articles. . . . I feel at times that this is the first time in the history of the world that geeks can really take charge. The faceless quality of the Net erases the problems geeks face in the “real” world of image, fashion, communication skills, etc. I foresee an International Geek Tribunal emerging through the vast slowly connecting networks that are already forming between geeks here and geeks there. Hopefully, it will help.
Thanks,
—Kirk
3
THE GEEK CLUB
From: Jesse Dailey
To: Jon Katz
In my junior year of high school, me and three of my close friends began to hold the meetings of what would soon become the infamous Geek Club. Perhaps “meetings” is too formal a word for this. It merely consisted of four of us, in the English teacher’s (the local liberal) classroom, eating lunch every day and reveling in our self-imposed and self-indulgent segregation. By the end of my senior year, it had become a veritable institution. We had become quite well recognized by the school populus, it became a kind of running joke among all the people in our class, and for one of the first times, it wasn’t a joke to which we were the butt, we were the ones delivering the punch line.
> > >
THIS WAS part of the first e-mail Jesse sent me, the one that sent me off to Caldwell to meet the author. He later described it as “a nuclear bit of e-mail,” given the chain of events it subsequently triggered.
It was engagingly well-written, with a sense of irony and a nearly wicked wit, and it was strikingly self-aware for a nineteen year old.
Perhaps inadvertently, his message also reflected the transformation of geeks all over the world: They were suddenly the ones delivering the punch line. I saw that sense of ascent and transcendence expressed scores of times daily on the Net and the Web: that geekdom wasn’t primarily about technology, it was about
using
technology to effect change—personally and often, albeit unconsciously, politically.
Jesse and Eric have a community and even a religion: The Net will provide. It will help
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