Calling all
geeks, it's festival time
By Patti Hartigan
Globe Staff, 3/31/2000
Tim McEachern is a true believer, and
he's trying to convert a newcomer to the fold.
"See, you can't even bring
yourself to say it," he prompts. "Go
ahead."
Ggg ... Gggg ... Geek ... Geek Pride.
Geek Pride? Is this somebody's idea of
an April Fool's joke?
Well, no, not exactly. The first Geek
Pride Festival hits town this weekend, with a gathering
tonight at the Modern Lounge on Lansdowne Street and an
all-day event tomorrow at the Park Plaza Castle on
Columbus Avenue. So just what is a Geek Pride Festival?
With the motto "Be there and be square," it's
hardly a revolutionary movement. With a Quake tournament
and a Moonwalk, it's not exactly a trade show. Even the
organizers, led by McEachern, can't say exactly what to
expect. "Who knows, it could be me and a couple of
guys drinking in a bar," says McEachern, who runs a
Web design firm in Spencertown, N.Y., when he's not
declaring the merits of geekdom.
Whatever it is, the festival is
another reflection of a culture desperately trying to
understand the enormous social and economic impact of
the Internet and digital technology. Who are these whiz
kids who turn megabytes into millions? What makes them
tick? If we could only understand them, perhaps we could
bottle their essence and transform our own boring little
lives. In other words, just what is a geek, and how can
I become one?
The question is everywhere. Author Jon
Katz asks it in "Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the
Internet Out of Idaho." (Katz is speaking at the
festival.) Po Bronson explores it in "The Nudist on
the Late Shift," a revealing look at Silicon Valley
(that, alas, unveils very little about the titular
nocturnal exhibitionist). But McEachern doesn't need a
treatise to describe the members of this subculture. He
subscribes to a theory popularized by both Descartes and
the Little Engine That Could. "If you think you're
a geek, you are," he says.
The free festival isn't really taking
itself too seriously: It's a gimmick, yet it's also
supposed to be a good time. "Break out your
fanciest pocket protectors and re-tape the bridge on
those eyeglasses," the promotional material reads.
It sounds like the festival is exploiting and exploding
stereotypes at the same time. Hey, what happened to geek
pride?
Maybe they're just showing that they
have a sense of humor; after all, they're laughing all
the way to the stock market, aren't they? And they also
have a certain sort of, well, appeal. Watertown resident
Tony Northrup, for instance, recently won "The
Sexiest Geek Alive" contest at the South by
Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas; he will MC
an event at the festival. The Sexy One wants everyone to
know that the title has nothing to do with physical
appearance and that the prize package amounted to
absolutely nothing. "It was about technical
accomplishment," he says, adding that the curious
can check out his, um, resume at www.sexiestgeekalive.com.
Northrup, 26, also notes that he has a girlfriend who is
"pretty nongeeky" and helps him out in the
sartorial department. "I shouldn't be allowed to
choose my own clothing," he says, with a sigh.
As for the pride thing, Northrup is
all for it. He wants to use his title to spread the
word, both at the festival and beyond. "I want to
make geeks proud and make the jocks jealous," he
declares on the Sexiest Geek AliveWeb site. "I want
to show the world that even if you can't get a date or
throw a football, you can still be a success." Go
geeks.
For a schedule of events, see www.geekpride.org.
A bill recently introduced in the
California Assembly calls for the creation of a dot-com
license plate. If passed, the bill would enable folks to
pay a premium to display such tags as, say, Geeky.com on
their brand-new, gas-guzzling SUV or overpriced luxury
vehicle.
But at the same time the dot-com bill
was being introduced, folks in San Francisco were
mounting an anti-dot-com campaign criticizing the excess
and greed of the Internet culture. The protesters, who
work in technology, pasted provocative posters and
stickers all over the city's high-tech district. A few
sample slogans: ButIDon'tNeedMyToothpasteDelivered.com,
AllThePornYouCanEat.com, and
ShredsOfSomeonesSoulForAuction.com.
The stickers are available free on the
campaign Web site, http://216.13.219.51, which was
overloaded with traffic last week. The movement's
spokesperson is a techie who goes by the pseudonym Sam
Lowry, the hapless bureaucrat in the futurist satire
"Brazil."
"There are a lot of people who
have a lot to say about this culture of overmarketing,
this Super Bowl-style hype," he says. "We're
saying, `Let's stop and think. We don't have to be
oversaturated. Maybe it isn't the coolest thing in the
world to be a part of a dot-com."' The campaign has
become a global movement among technology workers; the
Web site received hundreds of thousands of hits from
users all over the world. And stickers are appearing all
over the place, from Belgium to Brooklyn. Wonder if
anyone will post them at the Geek Festival? Now that
would be truly countercultural.
The Net isn't completely dominated by
soulless, money-grubbing capitalists, right? Consider TheHungerSite.com,
where you click on a button and sponsors automatically
donate a few cents to fight world hunger. Started by a
computer programmer named John Breen, the simple idea
has caught on: Copycats for other causes are all over
the place. At www.ecologyfund.com,
you click to raise money for environmental causes. The
catch? It's run by a for-profit shopping site that
donates a small percentage of its profits to charity.
Some of the other new sites, like www.peaceforall.com
and www.endcancernow.com,
take a 5 percent cut from the sponsors. Apparently,
folks are happy doing good - as long as they can make
money at the same time. Even the Hunger Site was
recently sold to a for-profit charity site called www.greatergood.com.
Nothing is pure forever. Everyone wants to make a buck,
even while supposedly doing a good deed.
Forget the dot-com license plates:
Bring in Sam Lowry.
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