The Victory of the Geek
Apr. 15th, 2005 03:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caraigSomething occurred to me the other day in the way that most things occur to me: several disparate thoughts wandered around my head for a bit before coming together. As always, please grant me your indulgence since my thoughts tend to be somewhat incohate and disjuncted.
Some time ago, I participated in the web forum at Stardestroyer.net. (Don't run off to check that site just yet.) Way back then, the site was involved in the nigh-eternal Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate, to wit, throw the two universes together and who would win? Okay, a bit silly, but a fun diversion nonetheless. The site was basically oriented to the SW side of things, taking the stance from on-screen evidence that SW tech could kick the butt of ST tech... and yes, that is relevant. Basically, using on-screen evidence, calculations based on physics of observed phenomena, and the like, SW possessed a pretty terrifyingly high technology... which just makes sense for a 10,000-year-old (at least) starfaring government.
Sometime before I stopped actively participating on SD.net's forums, though, things started taking a turn. Obviously, with the way the internet is, people had opinions that differed from the view espoused by SD.net. Some people had pretty aggressively differing opinions. And many of these people sent in what could politely be called 'rebuttals' but more often than not were really rather screechy invectives and ad hominem attacks. I imagine there was quite a large volume of them, since the proprietor of SD.net took to putting these messages and his replies in a page called 'Hate Mail.'
I think it was about then that the tone of the site began to change. The basic idea of SD.net had been using observable evidence and physics calculations to establish what SW and ST tech was and was not capable of doing. And observable evidence and scientific method became king. (The proprietor of the website was, I think, a professional engineer.) The "off-topic" forums became a little more expansive and read, the "on-topic" forums became less used. The overall tone of the moderators and the 'leading posters,' and thus the site itself, took on a slightly 'aggressively rational' bent. I'm not entirely sure how to explain this, to be honest, since I'm hesitant to slap a label on the whole thing. I think it can in short be described as a place where hard numbers, hard evidence, and hard fact were the only important things (which is good in and of itself) and anyone who had anything other than the above were idiots (which I wasn't really cool with.) The tagline of the forums perhaps sums up this attitude better than I could: "Get your fill of sci-fi, science, and mockery of stupid people."
Now, keep this in mind; I'll be getting back to SD.net in a minute.
Once upon a time there were two general types of people amongst many different types. These two types were 'the Jock' and 'the Geek.' Popular legend has it that the Jock was a testosterone-laden, hyperaggressive, hypercompetitive person with an inclination towards sports and physical activities, while the Geek was socially defunct, hyperpassive, and noncompetetive. The Jock was low on intelligence and high on physical ability, while the Geek was the opposite. Invariably, it was the Jock who was bullying the Geek for their lunch money and dumping the Geek in garbage cans, and all that sort of thing. Despite Geeks having a reputation for being incredibly smart, they were still the total underdog in school.
Now, it's a stark generalization and as related above the situation is more akin to a fairy tale than the actual social situation of 'jocks' and 'geeks.' But the legend lives on, that the geek is the downtrodden, socially inept but very smart person and the jock is the dragon against which the geek must struggle against. Thus it is written, "And the geek shall inherit the Earth."
But then something interesting happened: the Internet came about.
I'm going to skip the dissembling and get right to the chase, here: Something that I've noticed in a variety of online fora -- MMO gaming, web forums, newsgroups -- the 'geek' can be if anything even more hypercompetitive than the 'jock.' Think about it: The fact that an argument online -- any argument -- can get so incendiary and vicious that people start invoking comparisons to Nazi Germany so much that it becomes a cliche. The fact that many consider 'flaming' -- the delivery (optionally exchange) of creative, increasingly brutal insults -- to be some sort of art form. The fact that you can search the net, even USENET archives, and find weeks-long arguments of increasing hostility on just about any obscure topic save but the most scientific.
I think that online, the role of 'geek' and 'jock' has been reversed, and far from being the gracious and honorable victor the 'geek' has become as obnoxious as the jock has been popularly portrayed and has in many cases exceeded the jock in terms of sheer mental and emotional brutality. The anonymity and disjunction of the Internet makes this not only possible but in the case of many inevitable.
For many many years the fairy tale I related above -- of the frog-prince Geek harrangued and hounded by the dragon/giant/windmill Jock -- was the popularly-held conception, and I won't deny that it was, sadly, quite true for the most part. The geek got the short end of the stick, being intelligent and uninterested in the jockish "male bonding" of carousing, athletics, and the like, and generally physically inferior. Being unwilling to engage in confrontation, they either were physically intimidated or came up far short in any physical confrontation.
Enter the Internet. Online, it's not about how big and burly you are, but how smart you are. (More to the point, it's not even about how smart you are, but rather how erudite you are, but that's actually not nearly so important.) It's the flexing of mental muscles and hand-eye coordination. It's not about making the touchdown or hitting a home run or such; Can you get that headshot with the AWP? And perhaps even more significantly, outside the realm of online gaming: Can you get your point accross? Is your logic infallible? The geek has a venue which they can excel at, in many ways exceeding the online capability of the jock.
Honor is a curious thing. It holds many different definitions for many different people. You can't demand it of anybody, though in some cases it has been codified. There was the "code of chivalry" that "good" knights ostensibly adhered to, and in more recent times there is the Geneva Conventions that dictate how defeated enemies are to be treated; even countries who are not signatory to them will often attempt to follow them since it behooves them to have their soldiers treated well if captured. It seems to me that the honorable conduct of a good person would be to exhibit grace in victory and show respect to even what they consider a dishonorable foe, if for no other reason to show that they are and always have been in the moral and just position.
It further strikes me that this "grace in victory" has eroded, if it was even there at all. Online the geek has the venue and field advantage. This is the geek's realm, where it is the power of the mind rather than the power of the body that matters. Frankly, we're very lucky that it involves only the mind, because just perusing a few CounterStrike forums leads me to believe that, if even half these words were spoken in person, and if the "mental testosterone" being pumped into posts had any physical equivalent, there would be multiple arrests for second- and third-degree murder and a LOT of people would be having the courts order that 'Poor Impulse Control' be tattooed on their foreheads. I suppose we should be fortunate that these 'venues of the mind' remain entirely insubstantial. Flames and vitriol -- and not even the more blatant insults that get thrown about, but the subtle intellectual egotism. Just as once Jocks would lord their physical prowess over the geek, so too now do we see a breed of online person who lords their intelligence -- or at least their ability to over-argue and -flame their opponent -- over others.
Now, I would like to point out the obvious fallacy of this entire missive thus far. That is the fallacy of the Other. Labeling someone as 'geek' or 'jock,' first of all, denies the fact that people are people. Moreover, it is attempting to pigeonhole the entire online population into one of two groups, which patently isn't the case. These are gross generalizations. It separates the online population into 'us' and 'them,' and provides an all-too-easy means of denigrating an entire subset of that population. We are each of us unique and different and it's kind of silly to say that someone is "label A" when they could just as easily be "Label B" because of some other characteristic. Labels are about as meaningful as slips of paper with words written on them, and just as substantial.
I left SD.net the day someone made the comment that Shakespeare was an overrated playwright and was boring. I knew I couldn't convince this person otherwise, I knew that this was the Internet, and I knew that to even cite a differing opinion -- one that was being agreed with by others -- would invoke a flamestorm. Looking back, I can really only shake my head. Is this what intellectualism has brought us? The entire collected works of Shakespeare measure up to several thousand pages, and while I wouldn't want to read all the collected works in one sitting, he had some damn fine turns of phrase and lyrics. They not only are timeless, forming the basis of much of our current written culture, but he puts Asimov to shame for prolificity even before anyone knew what science fiction was. His plays had no elaborate stage directions; you can sit on a stool on a stage and recite one of his plays and still get the meaning and passion across. (In fact this has probably been done.)
I've known a lot of people online who are smart and witty and who do not use their intelligence like a bludgeon on everyone else. They are open-minded and willing to debate their positions. People who disagree with them are not automatically denounced as idiots and imbeciles. I like to think that this is not a minority, but it's rather daunting sometimes.
Is this what the geek's victory on the battlefield of the mind has brought us? Where Shakespeare can be dismissed with a wave of a mental hand? Where is the grace in victory, the honorable bearing? I know that these examples and such are likely not a significant fraction of the online population, but it's certainly the most visible to me some days.
Guess that makes me neither jock nor geek, but one of the 'stupid people.' Oops. Look, a label.
Anyway, just some thoughts that rattled around in my mind in the shower this morning and came together. Must go now, need to run errands. Must talk to the video kisok since the copy of Versus that I got from her... shows subtitles, shows markers on the menu screen but shows no image whatsoever. And I'm pretty sure that it's an NTSC DVD; PAL would be making my screen go kerbonkers. More later, working on a story that I'l be posting a link to soonish.
Pax!
Some time ago, I participated in the web forum at Stardestroyer.net. (Don't run off to check that site just yet.) Way back then, the site was involved in the nigh-eternal Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate, to wit, throw the two universes together and who would win? Okay, a bit silly, but a fun diversion nonetheless. The site was basically oriented to the SW side of things, taking the stance from on-screen evidence that SW tech could kick the butt of ST tech... and yes, that is relevant. Basically, using on-screen evidence, calculations based on physics of observed phenomena, and the like, SW possessed a pretty terrifyingly high technology... which just makes sense for a 10,000-year-old (at least) starfaring government.
Sometime before I stopped actively participating on SD.net's forums, though, things started taking a turn. Obviously, with the way the internet is, people had opinions that differed from the view espoused by SD.net. Some people had pretty aggressively differing opinions. And many of these people sent in what could politely be called 'rebuttals' but more often than not were really rather screechy invectives and ad hominem attacks. I imagine there was quite a large volume of them, since the proprietor of SD.net took to putting these messages and his replies in a page called 'Hate Mail.'
I think it was about then that the tone of the site began to change. The basic idea of SD.net had been using observable evidence and physics calculations to establish what SW and ST tech was and was not capable of doing. And observable evidence and scientific method became king. (The proprietor of the website was, I think, a professional engineer.) The "off-topic" forums became a little more expansive and read, the "on-topic" forums became less used. The overall tone of the moderators and the 'leading posters,' and thus the site itself, took on a slightly 'aggressively rational' bent. I'm not entirely sure how to explain this, to be honest, since I'm hesitant to slap a label on the whole thing. I think it can in short be described as a place where hard numbers, hard evidence, and hard fact were the only important things (which is good in and of itself) and anyone who had anything other than the above were idiots (which I wasn't really cool with.) The tagline of the forums perhaps sums up this attitude better than I could: "Get your fill of sci-fi, science, and mockery of stupid people."
Now, keep this in mind; I'll be getting back to SD.net in a minute.
Once upon a time there were two general types of people amongst many different types. These two types were 'the Jock' and 'the Geek.' Popular legend has it that the Jock was a testosterone-laden, hyperaggressive, hypercompetitive person with an inclination towards sports and physical activities, while the Geek was socially defunct, hyperpassive, and noncompetetive. The Jock was low on intelligence and high on physical ability, while the Geek was the opposite. Invariably, it was the Jock who was bullying the Geek for their lunch money and dumping the Geek in garbage cans, and all that sort of thing. Despite Geeks having a reputation for being incredibly smart, they were still the total underdog in school.
Now, it's a stark generalization and as related above the situation is more akin to a fairy tale than the actual social situation of 'jocks' and 'geeks.' But the legend lives on, that the geek is the downtrodden, socially inept but very smart person and the jock is the dragon against which the geek must struggle against. Thus it is written, "And the geek shall inherit the Earth."
But then something interesting happened: the Internet came about.
I'm going to skip the dissembling and get right to the chase, here: Something that I've noticed in a variety of online fora -- MMO gaming, web forums, newsgroups -- the 'geek' can be if anything even more hypercompetitive than the 'jock.' Think about it: The fact that an argument online -- any argument -- can get so incendiary and vicious that people start invoking comparisons to Nazi Germany so much that it becomes a cliche. The fact that many consider 'flaming' -- the delivery (optionally exchange) of creative, increasingly brutal insults -- to be some sort of art form. The fact that you can search the net, even USENET archives, and find weeks-long arguments of increasing hostility on just about any obscure topic save but the most scientific.
I think that online, the role of 'geek' and 'jock' has been reversed, and far from being the gracious and honorable victor the 'geek' has become as obnoxious as the jock has been popularly portrayed and has in many cases exceeded the jock in terms of sheer mental and emotional brutality. The anonymity and disjunction of the Internet makes this not only possible but in the case of many inevitable.
For many many years the fairy tale I related above -- of the frog-prince Geek harrangued and hounded by the dragon/giant/windmill Jock -- was the popularly-held conception, and I won't deny that it was, sadly, quite true for the most part. The geek got the short end of the stick, being intelligent and uninterested in the jockish "male bonding" of carousing, athletics, and the like, and generally physically inferior. Being unwilling to engage in confrontation, they either were physically intimidated or came up far short in any physical confrontation.
Enter the Internet. Online, it's not about how big and burly you are, but how smart you are. (More to the point, it's not even about how smart you are, but rather how erudite you are, but that's actually not nearly so important.) It's the flexing of mental muscles and hand-eye coordination. It's not about making the touchdown or hitting a home run or such; Can you get that headshot with the AWP? And perhaps even more significantly, outside the realm of online gaming: Can you get your point accross? Is your logic infallible? The geek has a venue which they can excel at, in many ways exceeding the online capability of the jock.
Honor is a curious thing. It holds many different definitions for many different people. You can't demand it of anybody, though in some cases it has been codified. There was the "code of chivalry" that "good" knights ostensibly adhered to, and in more recent times there is the Geneva Conventions that dictate how defeated enemies are to be treated; even countries who are not signatory to them will often attempt to follow them since it behooves them to have their soldiers treated well if captured. It seems to me that the honorable conduct of a good person would be to exhibit grace in victory and show respect to even what they consider a dishonorable foe, if for no other reason to show that they are and always have been in the moral and just position.
It further strikes me that this "grace in victory" has eroded, if it was even there at all. Online the geek has the venue and field advantage. This is the geek's realm, where it is the power of the mind rather than the power of the body that matters. Frankly, we're very lucky that it involves only the mind, because just perusing a few CounterStrike forums leads me to believe that, if even half these words were spoken in person, and if the "mental testosterone" being pumped into posts had any physical equivalent, there would be multiple arrests for second- and third-degree murder and a LOT of people would be having the courts order that 'Poor Impulse Control' be tattooed on their foreheads. I suppose we should be fortunate that these 'venues of the mind' remain entirely insubstantial. Flames and vitriol -- and not even the more blatant insults that get thrown about, but the subtle intellectual egotism. Just as once Jocks would lord their physical prowess over the geek, so too now do we see a breed of online person who lords their intelligence -- or at least their ability to over-argue and -flame their opponent -- over others.
Now, I would like to point out the obvious fallacy of this entire missive thus far. That is the fallacy of the Other. Labeling someone as 'geek' or 'jock,' first of all, denies the fact that people are people. Moreover, it is attempting to pigeonhole the entire online population into one of two groups, which patently isn't the case. These are gross generalizations. It separates the online population into 'us' and 'them,' and provides an all-too-easy means of denigrating an entire subset of that population. We are each of us unique and different and it's kind of silly to say that someone is "label A" when they could just as easily be "Label B" because of some other characteristic. Labels are about as meaningful as slips of paper with words written on them, and just as substantial.
I left SD.net the day someone made the comment that Shakespeare was an overrated playwright and was boring. I knew I couldn't convince this person otherwise, I knew that this was the Internet, and I knew that to even cite a differing opinion -- one that was being agreed with by others -- would invoke a flamestorm. Looking back, I can really only shake my head. Is this what intellectualism has brought us? The entire collected works of Shakespeare measure up to several thousand pages, and while I wouldn't want to read all the collected works in one sitting, he had some damn fine turns of phrase and lyrics. They not only are timeless, forming the basis of much of our current written culture, but he puts Asimov to shame for prolificity even before anyone knew what science fiction was. His plays had no elaborate stage directions; you can sit on a stool on a stage and recite one of his plays and still get the meaning and passion across. (In fact this has probably been done.)
I've known a lot of people online who are smart and witty and who do not use their intelligence like a bludgeon on everyone else. They are open-minded and willing to debate their positions. People who disagree with them are not automatically denounced as idiots and imbeciles. I like to think that this is not a minority, but it's rather daunting sometimes.
Is this what the geek's victory on the battlefield of the mind has brought us? Where Shakespeare can be dismissed with a wave of a mental hand? Where is the grace in victory, the honorable bearing? I know that these examples and such are likely not a significant fraction of the online population, but it's certainly the most visible to me some days.
Guess that makes me neither jock nor geek, but one of the 'stupid people.' Oops. Look, a label.
Anyway, just some thoughts that rattled around in my mind in the shower this morning and came together. Must go now, need to run errands. Must talk to the video kisok since the copy of Versus that I got from her... shows subtitles, shows markers on the menu screen but shows no image whatsoever. And I'm pretty sure that it's an NTSC DVD; PAL would be making my screen go kerbonkers. More later, working on a story that I'l be posting a link to soonish.
Pax!
