Words&Dirt

“‘Shakespeare said it best,’ Tamaru said quietly as he gazed at the lumpish, misshapen head. ‘Something along these lines: if we die today, we do not have to die tomorrow, so let us look to the best in each other.’”

––1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, pg. 873

“Choose any person in the world at random, no matter how non-geeky they might seem, and talk to them long enough, and in most cases you will eventually hit on some topic about which they are exorbitantly knowledgeable and, if you express interest, on which they are willing to talk, enthusiastically, for hours. You have found their inner geek. Sometimes the inner geek may be hidden very deeply indeed. The grizzled, taciturn machinist, who normally speaks in sentences of one or two words, will light up and deliver an extemporaneous dissertation about his favorite alloys of steel. The forklift operator at Wal-Mart will turn out to be a Civil War reenactor who can recite the full history of the Battle of Shiloh down to the level of individual squads and soldiers. This is how knowledge works today, and how it’s going to work in the future. No more Heinleinian polymaths. Instead, a web of geeks, each of whom knows a lot about something.

Twenty years ago, we called them nerds, and we despised them; we didn’t like the power that they seemed to have over the rest of us, and we identified them as something different from normal society. Now, we call them geeks, and we like them just fine, because they are us. Nerds were limited to math and science and computers. Geeks also do those kinds of things––which isn’t saying much, because everyone works with computers all the time now––but geeks can also be experts on welding or Civil War battles or fine cabinetmaking. Everyone gets, now, that this is how society is going to work, and as long as geeks bathe frequently enough and don’t commit the faux pas of geeking out at the wrong time, in the wrong company, it’s okay. It’s better than okay. It’s desirable. We’re all geeks now.”

–– “Gresham College Lecture,” Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 78-9