Have the Geeks Really Won?

Maybe you’ve seen the venerable email passed around years ago which compares Michael Jordan with Bill Gates.  If you’re not familiar, it breaks down Jordan’s pay in increasingly smaller figures until it gets to a “by the minute” figure which by normal human terms is pretty astronomical.  Then, you get to see Gates’ current worth which frankly dwarfs the income of  greatest basketball player to grace the game.  It ends with the words “nerds rule!” and we all laughed and dreamed of the day where our awkward adolescence would be redeemed.

Flash forward to today’s world and a lot has changed.  Geekdom is celebrated on a regular basis and is even catered to ones own taste.  We have various geek conventions about the country celebrating geekness, for example CONvergence which we’ll be attending this year.  We have things like PAX, which celebrates the video gaming community and where Wil Wheaton is king.  Add a splash of Renn Fests, which corny they may be, we still go and enjoy the same damn thing every year.  Geek culture is widely available and in some ways generally tolerated or even accepted.

But what has bothered me recently is that there’s this thought amongst some geeks out there that “we’ve won”…and I’m not entirely sure what that means.  Won over…who exactly?  The local jocks of our high school?  The people who teased us in our formative years?  And what exactly have we won?

Maybe what we’ve supposedly won was mainstream acceptance.  Personally, I don’t think it’s true.  And I certainly hope that I’m right, that we haven’t won, because I think it’s important for geeks to be on the outside of mainstream culture.  Allow me to make some rather broad generalizations here to make a point.

It’s true that we have business that caters to the geek crowd more than ever.  But business will go to where there is money and geeks are particularly rich targets to exploit.  When you take people who generally like being early adopters of expensive new technology and are not the best handlers or planners of money, it’s a no-brainer for a businessperson to be engaged with this sector of society (Please remember, I’m using very broad stereotypes here, not specifics).   We’ve developed a gadget culture where all of our needs can be met by the new piece of technology, and I think it’s fair to say that geeks can take some credit with ushering in this way of life.  Generally though, I don’t think that our new found economic power is something we can count on as acceptance.  We’re just another reliable revenue stream for a certain line of products.

Along the lines of business itself, there are a number of tech companies started by truly geeky people.  But there is a familiar pattern here.  Geeky people create something new/unique/fun that some people pick up on, it gets pretty popular and grows beyond the initial expectations.  Geeky people are thrilled by the usefulness/popularity of their work which turns into a full time job for them.  Geeky people are approached by venture capitalists who will not only monetize their product, but leave the main person/people generally in charge.  This turns into a business which now has a board and a bunch of smart business people come in to run the day to day while the geeks in charge are still in C-level capacity, but do much less grunt work and more visionary, big picture planning/execution.  I can think of a handful of companies that pretty much fit this mold off the top of my head.  My point being is that even if you have a geek start a company, if it gets really successful, the lead geek could remain CEO, but more savvy business people are brought in to navigate the business world.  Not that geeks cannot be successful businesspeople, but our challenge is not jumping off with the next new thing and staying focused.

It could be argued that Hollywood has sat up and took notice of the geek world.  By all measures, 2009 has been a good year for geeks.  Star Trek got a pretty good reboot treatment (though purists may argue some points).  Watchmen finally made it to screen and didn’t entirely screw the pooch.  CBS continues to show the Big Bang Theory.  Not too bad.  But then we also got an idiotic Transformers movie and a G.I. Joe movie barely recognizable from the original cartoon.  X-Men: Wolverine?  A Dragonball movie?  The pseudo-science, pseudo-history of 2012?  A Street-Fighter movie?  Land of the Lost?  No thank you.  Not to say there weren’t movies out there that were good geek films–I’ve heard nothing but positive word about the movies The Road, Moon and District 9.  But big Hollywood is looking for new and exciting ways to piss on our childhood–have you heard about all the favorite board games we had growing up?  Well, they’re getting a movie treatment.  Good geek movies are likely going to be smaller studio or independent movies.  See what I did there?  The good geek stuff is “on the outside”.

Proving to me that the entertainment world just doesn’t get us is the catastrophe which is the Video Game Awards on Spike TV.  Year after year, it’s an unnecessarily splashy, juvenile, insulting show that wastes everyone’s time.  All of the voice acting awards are for known actors, some of which do not deserve to be there because they are not voice acting…they are essentially being themselves and getting nominated for being known.  All of the male nominations, with the exception of Samuel Jackson, are for well known actors playing familiar characters.  I will make a huge exception here for Mark Hamill as he is a fantastic voice actor.  There are also twenty eight awards with five nominees a piece.  I counted fewer than twenty original games that were not sequels.  This includes the entire independent game category for five of them.  This is a big case of same shit, different year.  This also proves to me there’s a disrespect to gaming geeks with the existence of this show.

Although I could go on and on about this, the last thing I want to mention is something called the Society of Geek Advancement.  On their page, they lift from the Wikipedia entry on “geek” a couple of definitions.  Let me quote the important ones here:

“A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who passionately pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance.

A person with a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream.”

These are accurate definitions to me and definitions we should embrace.  But in a somewhat noble attempt to promote these types of values, they put together a video which pretty much says that being a geek pretty much means that you are social media savvy and not participating in long standing geek pastimes of RPGs, Star Trek, computer culture and a host of other things.  The video framed the typical geek as a blogger who used Digg, Twitter and Facebook.  I want to stress that this was not the intention, but that’s how it turned out.  This did stir up a kind of hornet’s nest and not much has been heard from them since, which is unfortunate as a lot of genuine geeks wanted it to work.

So where does this leave us?  I don’t know how it is for most people, but the mainstream makes me uncomfortable…and it always has.  I like the idea of being on the outside, to be diving into something that I’m curious about and seeing how far down the well of information goes.  I love the idea that some people consider me a resource of obscure knowledge and being the guy who if he doesn’t know the answer, I’ll know where to look for it.

The question I ask in the title really doesn’t have an answer.  We didn’t need to win because we don’t need or require the acceptance of mainstream culture.  It’s more valuable to get the right kind of recognition from fellow geeks, a status acknowledgment, rather than the kind of welcoming you get from John and Jane Doe down the street with their 2.5 kids and ranch style house.  The challenge for us is to keep testing those boundaries outside of mainstream culture, to be the explorers.  Sure, now and then what we use or discover filters down and gets that acceptance, but by that time, we’ve moved on.  We’re not going to win–that’s because we’re not playing the same game.  And honestly, that’s just fine.