The Archeology of the Geek

I am irritated by the kneejerk use of the term "geek" or "nerd" and by the attitude it represents. This is because it used by chronological adults to dismiss engineering concerns when those concerns threaten established (usually, deep patriarchal) relations of power.

Hell, I was a geek in 1979 when I discovered that a nameless software tool meant to assist table construction for an early cellular mobile phone was in actuality an assembler and for this reason I needed to access how one would go about developing an assembler.

I was bitch-slapped in a staff meeting by an out of control manager who told me that assemblers had already been written and that for this reason I was foolishly "reinventing the wheel" as a "nerd". I went ahead and developed the software anyway.

I have realized recently that in the binary opposition between "nerd" and "normal", in the opposition represented by the appeal, the night before the doomed Challenger launch of 1986, to "think like a manager and not a [geeky] engineer", an entire cultural presupposition needed to be deconstructed.

This is the equivocation of "feeling" and "emotion".

As philosopher Martha Nussbaum (Upheavals of Thought) shows, there is a significant continuum between a pure feeling such as pain or hunger, to an emotion like sadness or happiness.

My own analysis based on language teaching in Hong Kong, where the students learn advanced English in early grades including sentences that contain other sentences, is that it's somewhat different to say "I feel x because y", where x names a feeling or emotion and y is a statement of fact, and "I feel x THAT y".

You can't QUITE say "I feel hungry that I didn't have any lunch", you say "I feel hungry BECAUSE I missed lunch". An event y causes another event, the pure or reinen feeling.

But you can say either "I feel sad that my uncle died" OR "I feel sad because my uncle died".

There's a subtle difference here that exposes our entire culture's way of thinking about feeling, and, I shall show, the way we talk about "geeks and nerds"!

If you feel sad THAT your uncle died, you have an EMOTION, on Nussbaum's account, where an EMOTION has a state of affairs which the EMOTION is about. Nussbaum started writing Upheavals of Thought when her mother died, and she realized that the overwhelming sadness was like a great egg (my image, not Nussbaums), inside of which was the fact of her mother's death.

For Nussbaum, neglecting our emotions in thought means that we miss INTELLECTUAL gifts, eggs, which contain knowledge protected by their mothers, emotions.

Thus, Cindy Sheehan had a an emotion, sadness, because her son died five days after arriving in Iraq when he didn't want to go, but went out of loyalty to his buddies.

Phrasing her emotion "Sheehan is sad, Sheehan is angry, Sheehan has camped out in front of the President's obscenely lavish Texas ranch BECAUSE her son died" just connects two events without empathy and invites the response, she should get over it and get on with her life: shit happens.

But phrasing it as "Sheehan is sad, Sheehan is angry THAT her son's life was thrown away" means that to say "get over it", "shit happens", "be a patriot", "support the troops" is to be an insensitive clown because you are presented with Sheehan's anger and in it is the entire cognitive story INCLUDING the now-known, now-admitted FACT that the war was based on a lie.

Using the THAT word means that to empathize with Cindy, you have to, like the mothers of Russian soldiers whose lives were thrown away in Chechnya so Putin could seize power, like the Mothers of the Disappeared whose sons were taken away, study up on what actually happen in order to validate the emotion, in order to be able to live with it, lest it turn into nameless sorrow.

Hunger has myriad causes but the pure feeling is the same: "more fell than anger, hunger, or the sea" was Shakespeare's way of naming something, in Shakespeare's case Iago's motiveless, contentless, and indeed emotionless evil.

Whereas the emotions we feel are characterized, in the psychologically healthy individual, by his ability to say "I feel x THAT y". Sure, she can also say "I feel sad BECAUSE my mother died" but the meaning is different. The second report implies a mechanistic response, to-be-expected, while the first conveys the emotion as an ongoing sadness, in which one realizes (in the interval between our dream-haunted sleep and wakefulness), oh shit, Mother is dead, and the conscious and ongoing emotion takes over.

Now, what has this to do with "geeks" who refrain from "thinking like a manager and not an engineer" and who insist that NASA follow its own documented procedures, and not in essence field-test the O-rings of Challenger with live human subjects, the crew?

It is that our scientific and technical bureaucracy was strongly influenced, whether directly or not, by the interwar and discredited movement of Logical Positivism, in which "emotions" were equated with "feeling".

In Logical Positivism, a technical emotion (that we haven't been permitted to perform enough tests on O-ring alloys to approve the lunch, and we feel ANXIOUS that (not because) this is so) is systematically equated with contentless "feeling".

Hegel "felt" awe based on his consideration that given the course of human events, a dialectic seemed to be operating in the large which was making things come out right in the form of painful and tragic human progress. But the Logical Positivist Carnap equated this intellectual emotion to the nameless FEELING that Hitler whipped up at rallies, a feeling pretty much without content.

Influenced by this midcentury equivocation, "think like a manager and not an engineer" MEANS to think without emotion, including anxiety about insufficient testing and a violation of the NASA tradition of no live test with human lives at stake.

And, the "geek" or "nerd" is precisely he, to the point of a diagnosis of a fashionable disease (fashionable, that is, among ignorant and lazy therapists), Aspberger's Syndrome, has technical EMOTIONS.

He is excited to rediscover Euclid's proof that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the vertical and horizontal sides, by scratching in the sand. He is enchanted to discover as did Descartes that a series of curves correspond to simple equations.

He is thrilled to read of a discovery in 1970 at Princeton, that the Chomsky hierarchy of languages and grammars is isomorphic to a hierarchy of formal automata.

He gets off as did Richard Feynman on a new vision of physics. He gets angry as did Richard Feynman at the neglect of laws of nature in Challenger.

He loves the gesture, reinventing the wheel, his manager's misnomer for cracking a goddamn book of goddamn algorithms and encoding an algorithm in C, thereby avoiding the purchase of a mega-ton of bits from an unethical supplier.

But his manager does not have emotions anymore, about work. The "geek" deconstructs the cultural equivocation between feeling and emotion, and the "geek" lets the cat out of the bag: that not all emotion has to be reduced to feeling.

For this reason, the "geek" must never allowed to exist on his own terms. Must he now.

The term "nerd" seems to have emerged around the time of JFK's assassination as a teen putdown as the economy matured to the point where adolescence had a culture in the first place. Conveniently, it was a term that named, and through naming, isolated, the solitary or obsessed male.

Any name carves out a zone of reality and contains the meta-message that "this is important reality". "Geek" and "nerd" escapes addressing the content of the geek's or nerd's concerns, which in the language can range from the trivial (Trainspotting) to a serious endeavor to get a technical degree, which in places like India is not thought geeky but a matter of survival.

Another meta-message is one of a downsized, and subaltern futility. "Geek" contains the meta-message that in the ghetto, in the *barrio*, in the *souk*, it is a nameable nonconformity to attend technical college as opposed to chilling with the homes or joining some damn local Army of the Lord as a boy soldier.

I theorize, in other words, that other cultures have isomorphic names with the same referent: a male who in my Father's depression era would have been without name except something like a "good kid", attending Case Institute at night to have a shot, pre-Social Security, at suporting his own father.

A new language, subtly encouraged by mass media in search of profit, infects vast segments of the human race with hopelessness. Let's see, if you are passionate about mathematics, you are a "geek". The term short-circuits your potential (and, since it's EVEN WORSE to be a female geek, it moronizes women by the time they are 17).

At the same time, the American-driven mass media has quietly retired other more dignified words. "Solidarity", for one. And, many American men past forty no longer wish to be known as men.

The suicide bomber is confronted by a culture in which he's a problem if he can't get to work owing to Yet Another Israeli checkpoint, or Yet Another factional struggle between Hamas and Hezbollah. At best, in terms of the racist global culture, he's the American blonde's exotic but disposable boyfriend Ali or Malik, who is dropped on the floor after the first reel. Is it any wonder he says, are we not men, in the instant on the bus before blowing himself to Kingdom come?

"Geek" is part of a structure of oppositions neatly arranged to culminate in an American convergence of Power and Goodness, in which James Bond can imagine himself, not as the somewhat compromised fictional Bond of the Ian Fleming novels, but as Always Good, Always Right, Always Gets the Girl.

Fortunately and just in time, as it was in John Lennon's song "A Day in the Life", "a crowd of people turned away":

I saw a film today, oh boy
The English army had just won the war
A crowd of people turned away
But I just had to look
Having read the book

Which is to say we can refuse the oppressor's name, whether the oppressor is a high school bully or a global economy which seems to have decided that Moslems can't program (despite the evidence I have from my experience that they can).

Thus India created a software industry from nothing. I'll never forget the day a bunch of guys from India arrived at my university computer center in 1971. They were trying to keep IBM 1401 mainframes alive despite IBM's neo-colonialist withdrawal of all software support for the 1401 in 1971, a stunt to which I responded by fixing a Fortran compiler in object code form, as, probably, the guys in India had to do.

My message today: don't ever let them put you down, call you a geek. You are the motor of History. And don't let them make you ashamed for having "feelings" that are in reality emotions.