"Beginning in 1983, when I was 16/17, I
took both formal and informal training in programming and information technology.
After that start, I had periods when I flirted with becoming an application
developer—but these were never quite serious, and by the time I was thinking
seriously about a programming career in the later 1980s, I had already been
drawn towards sociology. I was then, and remain, a kind of geek—the computer
technology enthusiast—a rarer creature in the 1980s than in the early
twenty-first century. Back then, the ‘computer guy’ (always referred to as
male, though I remember working with quite a few female computer specialists)
was recognized as highly knowledgeable and skilled. I made a decent living as a
part-time programmer and computer literacy tutor, earning enough to support
myself while I attended university as a full-time undergraduate in sociology."
In “Geek and Hacker Stories Code, Culture and
Storytelling From the Technosphere” by Brian Alleyne
"As I write this, it is now more than 30
years since first I stared at green glowing alphanumeric characters on a
computer monitor, back to 1983 when I learned word processing with WordStar and
got my first BASIC programs to work. Now I stare at high-resolution screens
with rich displays that mimic a glossy magazine, and my smartphone has more
memory than the washing machine-sized IBM minicomputer on which I worked as a
system operator in my first proper job; that was in 1984. What has not changed is
my sense of wonder at personal computing. I am a computer geek."
In “Geek and Hacker Stories Code, Culture and
Storytelling From the Technosphere” by Brian Alleyne
The
last quote above could be applied to me…Has there been a better time to be
a nerd/geek than now? Or is it all about the 80s? Well that's the headlines at
least. And if you can read between the headlines, it's pretty simple. These two
statements contradict each other. If "there's never been a better time to
be a nerd", then that means that being a nerd used to be a much shittier
experience than it is today. And that means that being a nerd/geek most
definitely is a thing. As somebody who actually knows what the 80s and 90s were
like, it wasn't a pleasant experience to be a nerd in those days. People simply
assumed that your opinions didn't count. People wished you were more
"normal". People just assumed that you deserved all the stick you
were getting. There will always be one
faction who insists that the oppressive system must be called to account,
versus the other faction who thinks that you should man up and solve real world
problems instead of whining about it. There will always be one faction who
thinks that you should make peace with the system and another who thinks the world
should meet you on your own terms and if they can't, well fuck them. There will
always be people who, if you complain about being an oppressed race, they'll
tell you that women have it worse. If you complain about being a woman, they'll
tell you that being gay is worse, and if you complain about being gay, they'll
tell you that being a minority race is worse. Fact of the matter is that
identity politics - whether about race or religion or gender or sexual orientation
or being a nerd/geek - will have plenty in common with each other.
Being deeply interested in science and math is
just as much of a choice as going to a cosplay convention, no? Having an
aptitude for those things may not be, but none of us are obliged to focus only
on things we have an aptitude for and ignore everything we don't. Alleyne’s book
reminded me that as a kid I used to misspell words on purpose so as to get out
of participating in the spelling competition, probably because I'd been skipped
a grade ahead and didn't want to be seen as a nerd. It's not something I'd urge
anyone else to do and my mother would've been furious had she known, but it was
a choice I made. Incidentally I Also did the same when I went to do the conscription
exams (physical and theoretical) when I was called up (I was still in college and
I wanted to finish it before I went there to do my duty to my country). You may
actually not be aware that there are cultures out there who see nerdiness/geekiness
as a neutral or maybe even good thing. If you want to know why Western
schoolchildren do badly in school compared to people from other developed
countries, for me the chief culprit is the problematic relationship with its
nerds. This equation of nerdiness/geekiness with cultural undesirability is
already a large form of hostility.
To me there are two problems in society that
arise from this: first is that a lot of human potential is wasted when people
are discouraged by their peers to push themselves to do the nerdy thing and
pick one or two fields to excel at. And the second problem is that the cultural
contempt for nerds is paid back with interest when the nerds grow up and get to
run the world, and decide that the rest of humanity who treated them that way
in high school would be better off with minimum wage jobs for the rest of their
lives.
Did I "reflexively" not decide for
myself, that I didn't want to be seen as a nerd at school? Nope. It was
something I thought about over an extended period of time later on - who I was,
who I wanted to be, and who might be my allies. I had possibly an unusual
opportunity to give this thought because my school took an experimental
approach, combining 2 grades in one classroom in an effort to minimize
disruption for kids who needed to repeat a year, and for those of us who might
skip a year ahead. I was given the chance to skip 2 years ahead and my parents
(wisely I think) decided that it would have been too awkward socially, since my
birthday is in the summer and I was already younger than most of my classmates.
I wouldn't go so far as to say I was savvy or mature in my thought process at
that age, but all of us make an endless series of choices as to who we are and
want to be. I was strangely far less sensitive about reading voraciously than
spelling well, and had to be taken aside by the librarian and told to stop
entering reading-related competitions so as to give other kids a chance.
I agree that nerdiness/geekiness can be a good
thing, but pressure to be an academic success can be overbearing too, sometimes
beyond all reason. I think much smaller classes would go a long way towards
reducing bullying, and towards helping schools help students work out what
their strengths and weaknesses are, but it's an expensive way to operate.
On the bright side, there were large rooms that
were full of techie stuff to "play with". You more or less just got
on with what you wanted, within reason. If you wanted to do something
interesting then you wrote a bubble sort program in C and a data formatting
program in Basic (my parents bought me a ZX
Spectrum) or you built your own BBS server (as
I did back in the day). Plus we had the Fairchild Channel F, Atari 2600,
APF-MP1000, Magnavox Odyssey 2, etc., Love and Rockets, X-Mal Deutschland, etc.,
and that was just the gaming and music sections. In films we still had Aliens,
Predator, and Star Wars before they got fucked up by accountants and toy
manufacturers. It was a great time to be a nerd/geek.
NB: Nerd & geek are not synonyms. Ed
Milliband is a nerd, Bill Gates is a geek. They may have both been picked on at
school for being 'different', but it's a different kind of 'different'. And as
someone once (almost) said, "The geek shall inherit the earth". Geek is always tech related, nerd is more
comic books and dungeons & dragons. There are obviously many geeks into
nerdy stuff, and many nerds that are into tech stuff. But I (a total geek) hated
most of the nerdy stuff (still do). I've a degree in Computer Engineering, and
have spent all my first working years since graduating working as a *nix and Oracle, and SAP R/3 sysadmin before moving on to the nasty world of consulting and corporate greed.
Being a sysadmin I couldn't give a shit whether trendy cocks thought being
geeky was "chic" or not. I've Been There, Done that, wrote my T-Shirt 16 Years Ago. And, no, you can't
buy the T-Shirt any more. Tough shit, trendies. Besides, geeks don't wear geek
t-shirts. They wear a t-shirt that declares their favourite Linux distro, or
plain t-shirt that badly need ironing (T-shirts need ironing? News to me; my
t-shirt today says "I DON’T NEED GOOGLE.
MY WIFE KNOWS EVERYTHING".
