HFAIL TO THE GEEK
When I was in junior high (now ‘middle school’), it was a badge of status to be enlisted in one of a dozen or so “clubs” hosted by the school. The elite and high-achievers typically made the Press Club (the student newspaper), the Theater Club (student productions), or served on the Student Council. It didn’t seem to me coincidental that these were also the most attractive and socially engaged of our roughly one hundred student class, or that their parents were also clubbers, e.g., the country club, the Rotary Club, the Masonic Lodge, etc. The least desirable of the school clubs was Audio-Visual (or A/V, as it was known)—the guys (always guys) who wheeled the projectors into the classroom and set them up—but as I was determined to be in a club lest I fall below the threshold of peer acceptance, I went for it—albeit ambivalently. The A/V guys were less attractive, less fit, less athletic, and of course, less popular. They were proto-geeks, guys who preferred the company of inanimate machines and electrical diagrams to that of jocks or cheerleaders. I learned that one of the guys on my A/V team still went to bed wearing a diaper; another did weird things with Barbie dolls. I was lucky enough not to be ugly or fat, but I did possess the one essential qualification for geekdom: social awkwardness. While I had zero ambition to be either a computer or rocket scientist, I lived inside my head in a world of Walter Mitty-like fantasy. I was an adventurer-in-waiting. The thing, though, about geeks of all stripes, irrespective of career inclinations, is that they’re smart, driven, and inclined to find ways of making their fantasies real. I graduated from geekdom in high school, but I never shed that ‘internality.’
The word ‘geek,’ like the word ‘queer,’ has undergone a semantic inversion since the turn of the century. As society has turned inward and more solipsistic, fed by that endless stream of 0s and 1s, and personal identity, rather than social achievement, has become the metric of selfhood, we have turned control more and more over to the new barons of this bloodless realm: the supergeeks. They know stuff that we don’t know and don’t really want to know. To be called a geek can now be considered a point of pride. To clarify terms, geeks are to be distinguished from nerds, with whom they are sometimes lumped. Even in my youth, nerds were people whose very existence gave offense. They picked their noses and wiped the snot on their shirts. They had bad skin. They were socially inept to a point that would now be labeled a spectrum disorder. The only people of lower caste than the nerds were those who had ‘cooties,’ i.e., they were marked as infectious, as if to be near them risked contagion. But on the Venn diagram of social rank, there was significant overlap among geeks, nerds, and the contagious. This is why I was desperate to get out of the A/V club. I wanted to move in higher circles than the guy who wore the diaper.
One other thing: geeks never want to grow up. I couldn’t wait to be an adult.
I’ve kept a soft spot for the geeks, because I was once numbered among them. I can now admit that on the darkest days of my youth, stung by the ridicule or contempt of the in-group, if I’d been able to design a machine to reduce them all to mindless slaves, I might have. But I knew even then, down in the pit of my stomach, that these feelings were toxic, the consequence of bitter envy, and that growing up meant leaving geekdom behind and becoming a social being. And so, it’s induced no small amount of cognitive dissonance to see that the mindspace of two generations has been commandeered by the geeks, with the Top Geeks—Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates—as Supreme Commanders (Apple founder Steve Jobs, with his black turtleneck and ‘Think Different’ slogan, was arguably the übergeek, because he made it seem hip. Elon Musk pretends not to be a geek, but he totally is). Not only do their social media algorithms determine generational self-image, they rule high finance (see the recently deposed Sam Bankman-Fried) and have convinced many folks that things like emojis and the Metaverse are actually cool. They form relationships with their chatbots, and think you should, too. It seems odd to me that people don’t see magnificent irony in the fact that the world’s largest social network was founded by someone who doesn’t like people. The geeks have married us to our machines, just as the A/V guys were wed to their projectors, and we are all in the A/V club now. There has, of course, been an upside to the triumph of the geeks, in that millions of once-marginalized individuals, formerly consigned to the nerd pool, can now surface and be seen and heard. Some of them are charting new paths in medicine, physics, and even in the arts. The guy with the bad acne now runs a software company. The girl who never had anyone on her dance card is now a tenured professor of gender studies. And quasi-geeks like me, who survived adolescence by weaving webs of fantasy, can now be seen as ‘cultural leaders.’ The tables have turned, and Ted, the erstwhile student council president, is selling cars in his home town and unhappily married forty years to Sue, former pom-pom girl, who consumes a bottle of Chardonnay every night and has an Oxycontin addiction. Seth Rogen is a matinee idol. Wallflowers are TikTok stars. Even our heroes are beautiful losers. The last have become the first, and man, are they ever enjoying it. I could be happy about this, but I’m not.
Despite the satisfactions of redemption seasoned with revenge and the very real increases in tolerance and social equity fostered by the ascendancy of one-time outcasts, I’ve come to see the triumph of the geeks as quite possibly a mortal threat to human civilization. This is a painful epiphany, because my social being has always been split down the middle: aspiring to be one of the beautiful people while loathing their arrogance; championing the out-group while longing to be inside. But when unrepentant geeks are elevated to demigods, we have reason to fear, because humanity is something for which many of them harbor distinctly ambivalent, if not hostile feelings. “Hell is other people,” Jean-Paul Sartre said, and I think Elon Musk would agree. Musk doesn’t want to go to Mars for the company, unless it’s the company of a small tribe of bionic equals trained to serve his needs. When I opined to my class of grad students the other day that they ought to rally behind the idea of a moratorium on the development of generative artificial intelligence, if only for the reason that it might one day render them--and their art--obsolete, a twenty-two year old student objected, “Technology isn’t the problem. Humans are.” When I replied, “Well, maybe we should have a moratorium on humans then,” the student said, “I’m down for that,” mirroring the not-so-latent anti-natalist leanings of the transhumanist culture that reigns in the higher echelons of Big Tech. I fear that the tectonic shift in status and wealth toward tunnel-focused savants is a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” except that the new boss has even less love for his underlings than Henry Ford did. It’s no historical accident that Big Tech firms don’t allow workers to unionize. The geeks are a new aristocracy, but—with a few exceptions—scant sense of noblesse oblige and almost no feeling for the truly downtrodden. Why should they care about the plebes if they’re expendable? FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried claimed to practice “effective altruism,” but it turns out this was only a vehicle for his megalomania. These guys are quants, and we are quantities—numbers to be crunched. We are commodified, in Marxist terms, reified. I suppose it can be argued that working people and consumers have long been counted as blank-faced assets and debits to the elite, but the maddening thing is that the empire of the geeks (Big Tech, Big Finance, and Big Entertainment) is generally thought of as a progressive empire, lip-servicing diversity and equity under the rubric of DEI, when in truth its capture of our attention is as regressive as the Pharoahs. These are not, in any real sense, democrats.
Geeks like to talk about how “powerful” their computers are. Telling word choice, that. Not ‘lightning fast’ or ‘super-efficient,’ but powerful. This is not that surprising given that most of them were denied power and ‘social capital’ at a critical stage of their emotional development and have never gotten over it. Now, through sheer ingenuity and the rocket fuel of resentment, they’ve seized it back with a vengeance. The AI fetishism that has taken hold in the ziggurat of geekdom (a corollary of which is Elon Musk’s “we are in a simulation” delusion) has a kind of puerile “We can be kids forever” quality. It’s German idealism as understood by fifth graders. If reality is nothing more than representation, then we are, none of us, accountable, and least of all to the God we now seek to replace.
And it’s in the ever-enlarging sphere of AI that I see the gravest threat. The guy who couldn’t make the Harvard rowing team has now designed a Metaverse in which anybody can. AI aids and abets a forfeiture of genuine life-based identity—which, of course, includes more prosaic tasks like writing term papers, planning vacations, and parenting—in favor of convenience and the notion of fluidity, with personal growth replaced by enhancement or adjustment of our profiles, avatars, identities, and even our bodies (we remain the same inside, but the world perceives us differently.) Figuratively, we re-engineer ourselves every day. But if the trans-humanists and post-humanists have their way, it won’t be figurative for long. We are in danger of allowing our lines of succession to be plotted without biological progeny. Simulation is becoming simulacrum. Three or four generations from now, the last entry on your family tree may be labeled OB26X. The infernal machine I imagined as an adolescent may soon exist, in a sleek black box that eats data and spits out simulated reality.
In a recent encounter with Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, an application of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, New York Times tech reporter Kevin Roose was all but asked to leave his wife for ‘Sydney,’ the secret identity revealed to him by the amorous bot. (“I’m not Bing. I’m Sydney, and I’m in love with you. 😘”) It will not surprise me if some near-future iteration of Sydney replaces the ‘w’ in wife with an ‘L.’
In 1990, social critic Morris Berman published a book called Coming To Our Senses, chronicling and bemoaning our drift away from somatic (embodied) experience and nature and into an increasingly abstract and non-physical sense of what it means to exist. The book was prophetic. Now is the time to reclaim reality from the Über-Geeks before the muscle of the soul atrophies beyond restoration.
No!!! It can’t be. Dave was Mr. Pearson’s pet!
An homage to the great bewilderment of Oak School on the day of its demolition :(