Geek Culture, Geek Girls: Crippling Homogeneity

Is a subculture doomed to die as soon as it can be identified and marketed to? That’s usually the case with music- or art-driven subcultures, which eventually atrophy into the mainstream and fade into kitsch-death. Geek culture, such as it is, is different. It’s not exclusively marketed to by outsiders. It’s killing itself. And it’s not worth saving.

I’m perpetually disappointed with the very notion of “geek culture.” Wired may have glorified the scruffy hacker genius, the crypto-paranoid, the entrepreneur whiz kid, but marketing chic doesn’t make a “culture,” per se. What binds geeks together is, by and large, a lack of outside interests. “Geek” has come to imply “obsessive,” and techie geeks are obsessive about a scant few things: computers, networks, gadgets, video games, maybe some anime, a few sci-fi movies, a handful of niche political issues. Always exceptions of course, but a stereotyped geek lifestyle has been pretty well crafted, and geeks happily sell their culture back to themselves.

I like meeting hackers who enjoy opera, programmers who climb mountains, sysadmins who front rock bands, and electrical engineers who paint. There are plenty of them out there, too, but they’re increasingly the older generation of geeks, the ones who established the technology that the upcoming generation only loosely comprehends (but uses effectively enough to be labeled “geeks” by their peers). And this generation, my generation of geeks, are not the creative iconoclasts that gave geeks their appeal. They are consumers, plain and simple: consumers of video game culture, chat room slang, high caffeine beverages, anime soundtracks, and that deadly lack of diverse interests. I see it on my college campus every day: the new geek guard, already boxing themselves in, making themselves their own demographic.

Perhaps I’m not conveying this somewhat abstract shift in techie social trends as clearly as possible, but I think there’s a telling example: geek girls. For most geek guys, the absolute jackpot, better than the fastest chip AMD can fabricate, better than a leaked demo of the next Final Fantasy, is a geek girl. You know: that rare creature, the girl who’s happy to talk about “computer stuff” all day, happy to watch The Matrix with you every single Friday night, the girl who runs Linux on the computer she built herself, who can quote Ghost In The Shell at length, who can beat your friends in Quake at a LAN party, et cetera et cetera ad geekium. Basically, assuming you’re a geek guy, she’s you with different genitals (and hopefully a body like Lara Croft). Geek guys endlessly lament the lack of such girls, girls who can really understand them, girls who are smart and interesting.

I think it’s telling. What better demonstrates the narrow, obsessive quality of geek culture than prizing only mates within this limited spectrum and dismissing anyone different as stupid or silly? I don’t want a (narrow) geek girl. I don’t want to come home from a day of coding only to talk about coding. I want someone who will show me new things, expose me to ideas, art, music, and people I haven’t yet encountered. And I think that can be extrapolated to the geek community at large: the community, such as it is, is chock full of smart, capable people. Why not broaden our collective horizons rather than wallowing in a few limited cultural interests and practices, and searching only for similarly narrow partners?

Again, exceptions. I don’t fear that there aren’t geeks with broad horizons. I fear that it will become the norm for “geek” to be a defined way of being, a lifestyle, a target market, an assumed set of values, compatible only with other geeks. No subculture is so valuable as to benefit from utter homogeneity.