Geeks (19 page)

I explained that the university understood that “nontraditional” students would need help. He’d have to ask, but help would be there. And I pointed out that if he devoted half the time he spent online—which would amount to roughly twenty hours a week—to studying, he’d succeed and still hone his geek skills.

My hunch was that Jesse would become indispensable, helping to maintain the university’s computer systems, providing tech support to half the school, maybe even getting Dean O’Neill online to track down websites featuring his beloved Enlightenment philosophers.

In the interim, more preparation.

We went over the list of things he’d need, from notebooks to a bathrobe. Jesse wondered if he really needed a dresser; couldn’t he just keep his clothes in a plastic bag, as usual? I was firm about the dresser.

Many of these discussions took place in Eric’s presence, and Jesse and I were both conscious that it was probably painful. But Eric told me a dozen times how profoundly appreciative he was just to be where he was. He had a secure job that paid well and offered prospects for advancement. That, he reminded me, was a hell of an improvement over Caldwell.

And, said Jesse, he’d give Eric his queen-sized bed. What had happened to Eric’s water bed? I wondered. The one he’d hauled from Idaho? Eric had never gotten around to filling it up in Chicago, Jesse said, so he’d been sleeping on the beanbag chair.

Beyond the pragmatic concerns of furniture, computers, and medical forms, Jesse and I talked, too, about more amorphous issues. Like identity—he’d long had a penchant for defining himself by what he wasn’t: a preppie, a suit, a yuppie. But what
was
he? A geek, but that was only part of any person.

“I dunno,” Jesse said. “I guess I’m going to find out. Sort of the point, huh?”

Leaving Idaho had freed him of the need to taunt Mormons; nobody in the big city cared what his religious views were. I thought going to the University of Chicago would probably dilute at least some of his hard-core geekness, since he was, in a way, joining a larger tribe of brainy geeks, nerds, and outsiders. “I’m withholding judgment,” was all he would say about that.

Jesse never dared permit himself to think he’d have fun. Or that there might really be a community he could join. This, more than any other aspiration, had eluded him for so long and caused so much hurt that he simply did not allow himself to consider it.

He did say he was postponing construction of his Web site, Providence, until he got to the university. He thought it fitting that it coincide with starting college.

“Plus I bet you’d love to piggyback on one of the university’s servers and put the site up at their expense, with their bandwidth and memory,” I observed. He conceded that the thought had crossed his mind.

Apart from the logistics, however, he was excited about the symbolism of launching Providence in September. He sent me a logo, the third he’d designed, and attached a definition: “Providence,
n.
1. The act of providing or preparing for future use; a making ready, a preparation for things to come.”

But nobody’s life is simple or unambiguous. People in the mainstream, non-geek culture are right to be worried about Jesse and his generation. Fond as I am of many of them, geeks are often profoundly alienated from many of the elemental responsibilities, institutions, and traditions of American life.

They have acquired enormous power, but don’t frequently take moral responsibility for what they do, for what they have. They tend to believe in a world in which people take responsibility for themselves—and only themselves. They don’t see themselves as part of the political fabric of American life. They watch events like the Monica Lewinsky drama and increasingly turn away from the lunacy of mainstream culture to the rich, free, and diverse world of the Net and the Web.

Jesse’s generation is lost to the press, to the newspapers and newsmagazines and broadcasts that, until recently, were the nation’s common, universal information providers, agenda setters and value shapers. Geeks recoil from journalism’s relentlessly phobic, shallow, and hysterical portrayals of their culture; they simply disconnect. The best these institutions can hope for is to hang on until the next generation comes up. Maybe, by that time, they can do better.

Jesse’s notion of “propaganda shit,” a term used widely on the Net, is disturbingly broad: journalism, politics, much of education. There is no politician in Washington, or almost anywhere, whom people in the geek culture respect or pay much attention to, or who respects and pays much attention to them. It’s sometimes hard to believe that people like Jesse, as cynical as they are skilled, will ever reconnect to the political system that governs this country.

The geek nation is profoundly contemptuous of the education it’s gotten, and resentful of its treatment by most schools. Free to say and do what they please on the Net, geeks bristle at schools’ restrictive, noncreative environments. The cultural values of mainstream institutions—sports, clothes, popularity—are alien to them, while their own distinct beliefs and skills often go unrewarded and unacknowledged.

Deeply suspicious of businesses as well, they see large corporations as greedy, arrogant, and inhuman institutions, which makes it easy to pilfer from them at will.

The only institutions that can draw solace from the Geek Rise are the entertainment companies that dominate pop culture. Geeks’ passion for music and certain movies and TV shows is undiluted. Next to the Net, pop culture is their ideology and their common language. It may be one of the few reliable ways left for mainstream society to reach an elite that’s too skeptical and wary to domesticate, but too smart and creative to write off.

OVER THE
past ten months, I’d developed too much affection for Jesse to keep up the pretense of a purely journalistic relationship, something I unapologetically acknowledge.

Jesse’s told me more than once that he doesn’t know how to categorize our relationship. He already has two parents, and I have a kid.

Yet we both understood that I had slipped into a quasi-parental role, especially when it came to applying to college. Did it make him uncomfortable, I asked him one night, that I had sometimes usurped his parents’ place? Strange, he said, not uncomfortable.

Despite his feelings for his parents, he said, he knew they would “be out of place dealing with the University of Chicago. Any discomfort I have about you being here instead would be a lot higher if they were here.”

Like most kids his age, he was awkward about even discussing this. The closest he could come to describing what we are to one another, the one time I pressed the matter, was that I’d become a kind of “uncle, maybe.”

“I’d describe our relationship as a friendship,” I told him when we subsequently revisited the question. “We are good friends to each other. You are a very good friend to me.” Of all the descriptions, I think that was the one we both liked best.

But when you write a book like this, I’ve warned him, first and foremost you have an obligation to be honest, to play fair with the reader, to share everything that shaped the story. So I have to do that here. Sorry, Jesse.

As is probably quite obvious, I have come to love this kid. It’s a strange, unlikely evolution from a project that began as a straightforward journalistic inquiry.

I love his pluck, his humor, his bravery, his passion for technology, and, perhaps most of all, his bedrock integrity. Jesse is a pioneer. He’s building a new culture, and in the best geek tradition, even if he has no clear idea how, hopes to use his knowledge for the greater good of humanity.

His life gives testament to the idea that the outcasts are coming inside. After long and bitter persecution, they are taking their rightful place at the center of society—valuable, in touch with one another, even appreciated. The fact that a fabled university wants Jesse as a student is a startling metaphor for this new reality.

Jesse’s story embodies all the promise, shortcomings, and contradictions of the revolution he and his geek army are busily engineering. Many of these issues will play out for him at the University of Chicago:

In a world so absorbing, tempting and engaging, how can school compete? What will become of the traditional benchmarks of civilization—books, music, culture, politics? The Internet offers kids like Jesse unprecedented opportunity. But does it also make it tougher—or easier?—to build the elements of what we consider a stable life: family, friendship, balance, some sense of spirituality, a willingness to engage in the sometimes unpleasant tasks of life in a common society?

The rise of Jesse and his comrades ought to serve as a wake-up call (as I suspect it did for Dean O’Neill) for the institutions responsible for guiding our society—journalism, politics, education. Most have done poorly by these kids. They’ve also done a generally wretched job of preparing us for the staggering changes technology will bring.

A generation ago, Jesse and Eric would probably have been the kids who ran the projector during school assemblies—the only ones in the school who knew how to splice the film when it broke and get the movie rolling again. Since that wasn’t a terribly important function in the scheme of things, the projector kids languished at the bottom of the social pecking order. Their successors—Jesse, Eric and their fellow members of the Geek Club—now know something much more important.

And because they do, they are no longer ignored. Often, in fact, they are feared and resented for knocking the pecking order to hell. They are often the only people who really know how the world works.

Is this good or bad? Certain techno-utopians are heralding a brilliant future while certain Luddites are sounding the alarm that civilization itself is being eroded. There’s a case to be made either way. The great technology writer Samuel Florman calls this the tragedy of technology, reflecting the best human impulse to improve and tinker with the world, and the just as powerful human tendency to screw things up.

Jesse is part of a revolution that will change many of our conventional understandings about the world and how it works. As one scientist said, the Internet is like the discovery of fire. It makes possible developments we haven’t begun to imagine. Things will be lost as well as gained. The historians will have to sort it out.

For me, a perpetual outsider looking in, a restless man on the periphery of mainstream institutions, a geek in his soul if not in his computing skills, my heart is with Jesse and the free, raucous, engaging new civilization he is helping to invent.

Much as I love studying and writing about the species, I was born too early to be a full-fledged member. But I’m lucky to see it. And thrilled that this part of the story ends this way:

I arrived at my cabin in upstate New York one warm summer evening in June. The crickets were practically shaking the ground with their noise. I’d come to write this book, though I wasn’t sure how I’d end it. I threw open the windows of the musty house, and saw the answering machine blinking. One message.

I played it back. It was Jesse, speaking in a voice tinged with a kind of excitement I’d never heard before, that he’d never permitted himself. He was breathless, childlike, speaking twice as fast as normal—“Hey Jon, this is Jesse. I just got a letter from the University of Chicago today, and it’s a letter of acceptance. I got the fat envelope! You give me a call when you get in. ’Bye.”

My first reaction was disbelief, followed by rich, inexpressible joy. I called Jesse up and we screamed “Awesome!” and “Cool!” at one another for five solid minutes. Then I had to get off the phone, or I would have gotten squishy.

“Does this make you a preppie now?” I jeered before hanging up.

“No,” Jesse shot back, King of the Last Word, as ever, “just an infiltrator of the preppie regime.”

A million fireflies were winking in the meadow as I carried the answering machine out onto the porch and plugged it in. Across the valley, the mountains stood out against the dimming sky.

I played the message several times, sending Jesse’s words rolling down the meadow, across the valley, out into the world, even though there was nobody within miles who’d hear it.

I was glad he wasn’t there. He disliked any show of emotion, and I would have had to feign restraint. Instead my eyes welled up. For Jesse, and, a bit, for me. And also for the geeks, nerds, oddballs, misfits, the alienated, the different, the non-normal—all the names given over decades and centuries to the Others—for whom it was too late.

The geek had ascended.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J
ON
K
ATZ
is the author of
Running to the Mountain
and
Virtuous Reality,
as well as six novels. He has written for
Wired, New York, GQ,
Hotwired, and
The New York Times
and was twice nominated for the National Magazine Award for articles in
Rolling
Stone.
He writes on the Web for Slashdot.org and Free!, the Freedom Forum’s website. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife, Paula Span. He can be e-mailed at [email protected]. He can also be reached via ICQ: 18891303 and AIM ID: Quasimodem47.

ALSO BY JON KATZ

Running to the Mountain

Virtuous Reality

Media Rants

Sign Off

Death by Station Wagon

The Family Stalker

The Last Housewife

The Fathers’ Club

Death Row

Copyright © 2000 by Jon Katz

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Villard Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work were originally published in
Rolling Stone
in different form.

Katz, Jon.
Geeks: how two lost boys rode the Internet out of Idaho / Jon Katz.
p.        cm.
1. Computer technicians—United States—Case studies.   2. Electronic data processing personnel—United States—Case studies.   I. Title.
TK7885.54 K38   2000
338.7'61004'0973 21—dc21
99-043150

Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-0-375-50518-8

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