1
Quote
Because hackers as a group are particularly creative people who define themselves partly by rejection of ‘normal' values and working habits, it has unusually rich and conscious traditions for an intentional culture less than 50 years old.
Incompetent grooming and wearing the same clothes through one's teens, 20s, and 30s do not constitute traditions. Neither does snickering at a shared mantra of pop culture references and catchphrases. Neither does espousing various clueless political philosophies all of which depend heavily on the never going outside. Neither does answering questions in the least helpful manner possible or assuming the stubbornness of an eight-year-old whenever their preferred method of doing something is rejected. Neither does watching Star Trek and Japanese cartoons.
Whereas the introduction from which I quoted asserts that geeks are inventive in their use of language, my experience has been that the best you can expect from them is slavish adherence to partially absorbed rules. In the worst cases they exhibit outright antipathy for expressive language and react with stock phrases (evidently to protect themselves). Creativity is out of the question, and what you most often get is a retarded patois of computer references which bespeak not cleverness but a very confined lifestyle. For the geek, language is a finite array of words and phrases lifted from lowbrow entertainment and repeated, parrot-like, with the same primitive design as that of avian chirps and squawks. Many of the geek's attempts at communication seem merely to serve the purpose of announcing his physical proximity, or are otherwise unanswerable.
So the egoism of the above quote is unbecoming--first, the central claim is untrue, and second, even if it were true it is crass to indulge in self-praise based on an idealized group affiliation that is basically involuntary (no one else wants to hang around him).
Creativity with language is actually the least of the geek's farcical self-delusions. Tolerance, non-conformity, fairness, even (amazingly) worldliness are very much senses that the geek has about himself but which no one outside his circle would detect. During his evolution from insecure twerp to advanced know-it-all the geek acquires a self-regard that is incredible. He will naturally assume that whatever skills he has are indications of genius or heroic mental endurance (or both), but that skills exhibited by members of other professions are easily learned rote tasks.
In this spirit geeks sometimes make a show of embracing a pastime unrelated to computers, such as watching cartoons. When they try to go beyond passive consumption they either pick something completely ridiculous or dither around the edges of a real hobby--enough to make incorrect but superficially arguable claims on the various message boards that are their preferred mode of communication. If you observe him closely, you will find that a geek approaches non-computer avocations with the certainty that he can master any subject with a dilettante's effort. Expressing this attitude seems to be the whole point of the rare excursion into non-computerized activity. Once his shallow sense of mastery is satisfied he ceases to progress because really hard work bores him.
It is the total lack of humility that stands out in all this. The geek claims to reject "normal" values as if he has some basis for doing so--as if he has written enduring pieces of music or literature, as if he has solved difficult engineering problems with only a pen and paper, as if he has explicated some philosophical paradox or riddle. In fact the geek has done none of these things--most often he's merely written a software program that does exactly what some other software program does. He doesn't even solve new problems, rather he fussily re-solves old ones to no effect (the motivation is usually some childish nerd squabble).
Even the definition of his culture as "intentional" betrays the geek's lack of self-awareness. His culture is merely an outgrowth of social defects, immaturity, and distraction, with an additional influence provided by the temporary need for intellectual grunt labor (nearly all computer programming is grunt work, with the greatest exertion usually devoted to understanding another geek's obscure reasoning).
The biggest reason why you should avoid and denigrate geeks is that their only solution to any problem is to replicate geek traits throughout it. The cliche about the hammer and nail applies even moreso to the geek and his truncated mental development. Because he understands nothing beyond the geek perspective, he is incapable of adapting outside the peculiar circumstances of late Western civilization that support him. He tends to support ideas which are really applicable nowhere but in the computerverse and which even there fail spectacularly when the computerverse comes into contact with reality.
A few futurists have warned that nanotechnology could eventually lead to all existence being replaced with "grey goo", as nanotech organisms digest everything into lifeless waste product. What I am describing, and which is actually happening, is a kind of geek goo: a numbing, cultureless void in which geek code ceaselessly processes all human thought into more lines of geek code.
