AgPerson

A Slashdot posting pondering the stupid assertion that geeks have “gone mainstream” drummed up a major backlash. As scary as it is, yes, I’m going to link to Slashdot again: This comment about what it means to be a true geek is pretty good. The definition of “geek” is not someone who is “good at computers,” meaning they can fix Windows and the like, or someone who plays with lots of gadgets and can wire your home theater setup. Those are attributes that geeks may have, but the definition of a geek is someone who participates in hobbies that others consider eccentric or not socially mainstream. The idea of a “mainstream geek” is an oxymoron. Geeks are a lot of things, in a lot of fields, but mainstream they ain’t, and can never be.

In a similar mode, this explanation of why enrollment in CS majors has drastically dropped is spot-on: I had a lot of contact with CS majors who were really clueless about technology and clearly were not in the program for a love of computers and programming. I think it is the same today with many people in the bio-med and economics fields. They may have convinced themselves that it is their calling, but its pretty clear that the reason so many more people are going into some of these fields and abandoning fields like CS and other sciences like physics is because that is where the jobs and the money are. I mean, seriously, there can’t be that many people who really want to be bioinfomaticians.

CS as a field isn’t dying, its just that programming jobs and the like are no longer where the money is, as those jobs are all outsourced and off-shored. The drop in majors is a natural market reaction, and the people who are legitimately interested in the field (and less concerned about short-term financial success) are the ones who are staying. I mean look at me — I didn’t do an American Studies major for with the expectation that I could jump into a high-paying career. Not to look down on people who go for popular majors, and not to say that practical people are in any way wrong for taking the course they do, but I think there is something more pure about pursuing a major you enjoy or a subject you are passionate about rather than something that is just going to give you money without the same return in happiness.

Why did I do AMST? Many reasons, but a lot of it was that I got to take courses in journalism, in the study of law, in American culture, markets, history, literature… I could have been CS or some other major, but I did AMST because it let me take classes that were neat and that I enjoyed, and, equally important, it gave me time to pursue other interests that I probably won’t ever get to do again in my lifetime — being on a Mock Trial team, working in politics through student government, and co-editing a newspaper. I consider those experiences far more valuable than a few extra courses that would have propelled me immediately into a high-paying job doing investment banking, or something equally dull.

At some point I’ll post a bit more about Berkman’s technical infrastructure (and maybe even post X-rated pictures of our sexy servers), but for now I just want to note that our cute little web server, already a few years old and soon to be replaced, is happily chugging along at a load level of 15 and serving out somewhere around half a million requests today as we get an unusually high amount of traffic (as usual!) after being featured on a few prominent sites. Not to mention that its doing okay at fending off the occasional (did I say occasional? I meant constant!) ssh brute force attack, where we generally see about one connection attempt per second. Fun, isn’t it?

A year and a half ago I posted an entry that discussed online relationships and the beginnings of blogging, in which I briefly discussed the relationship of two semi-prominent bloggers and also took a few moments for self-pity. The two, Jason and Meg, were written up in a _New Yorker_ piece that introduced the world to blogging by telling a classic love story with an electronic twist. Doesn’t it make you nostalgic, thinking back to a time when people didn’t know what a blog was? When, in fact, a blog was something different than it is today?

Anyway, the follow-up is that Meg and Jason are now engaged, an interesting tidbit I stumbled across when I happened to click on Meg’s “about” link today. Backtracking a bit I found an entry announcing the good news and reflecting on that original 2000 _New Yorker_ article:

bq. A lot has changed in the five years since Rebecca wrote “You’ve Got Blog.” Pretty much everyone knows what a blog is now, and most people are probably sick of hearing about them. Pyra was bought by Google, who now own Blogger. Neither Ev nor I nor any of the people who were involved in Blogger when Rebecca came to visit our offices in San Francisco are involved in the product anymore. Most of us don’t even blog very consistently these days. And I don’t think any of us qualify as “A-list” bloggers anymore — there certainly are no more shrines to Pyra!

Blogging has, like everything always does, sold out, gone mainstream, gone corporate, been invaded by spammers, been monetized, been vanilla-ized so that everyone has a LiveJournal or a MySpace or any of a thousand other blog-pretender services, there are millions of blogs, most of them are crap, and there is just no way (and really no reason) to keep up. Meanwhile so many of the original techie webheads who started the blogging “revolution” have moved on to other things and don’t post frequently or with any consistancy anymore, if at all.

I know I’m going a little overboard with the nostalgia lately, but I was reading some of Luis’s and Nat’s older entries about working in a high tech company even after the supposed bubble had supposedly burst, and I just keep feeling like I missed out on the revolution. The world is fundamentally different, and when it was all happening I was just growing up and in school, and missed out on a chance to really experience it all first-hand, get my feet wet, make my millions, and be part of the revolution. Will we ever again in our lifetimes have that sort of atmosphere of unbridled enthusiasm and belief in the power of technology to change the world? Will we ever again have such a concentration of raw energy, such a massive engine of change? Man, I hope so. I really hope so.

At Berkman its easy to feel the change, to feel it in your bones. At one point that place was a shining beacon of light in a legal world that couldn’t get a grip on the internet. They were leading experiments and bringing people together and figuring out how to regulate the net and how to apply the law to new and shifting tech. Now that, too, is mainstream, the law has adapted, things have settled, and Berkman is about putting out studies and working on research projects, like a “real” research institute. Not that there is anything wrong with that, or that Berkman has gone down hill, its just that the whole climate, the whole atmosphere has changed. A global warming of the net, so to speak — that is, if you believe in that sort of thing. 😉 The Berkman of today just doesn’t feel as sexy and cutting edge as it did when I was reading about it in high school and was participating in OpenLaw and the like.

So here I sit, awaiting the next big thing. Probably not a great way to be spending my time, but really there is not much for me to do. I get a job doing something I enjoy, I stick with it, I get another one, etc. I’m not going to easily or quickly find a job that lets me feel like I’m changing the world, not anymore. I’m going to have to find a different kind of satisfaction. Perhaps one that is more earned.

I read some people’s blogs and I wonder why I’m not as thoughtful and witty and knowledgable and well-traveled and introspective as they are. Also makes me sad I wasn’t born five or six years earlier, so that I could have taken part in the dot-com boom. I often feel unfulfilled at the end of the day, and I’m not quite sure what to do about it. There is a promise of an intangible wholeness and connectedness around every corner, but I haven’t yet been able to corner it and grab it or even see through the veil and figure out what the heck it is. Its about finding your place, and if there is one big thing on my long list of “not yet found,” that is definitely it. How to describe it — its like in a TV show like _West Wing_ when they accomplish something and the music swells, or in _Grey’s Anatomy_ when Meredith voiceovers the silly theme and the pop soundtrack rises in intensity and everything wraps up to a meaningful, 44-minute conclusion, or in _Buffy_ when she stakes the vampire, says something witty, and wanders off into the night. I can go on my little adventures and have fun with my friends and go into work, but I’m just not in that ethereal place I need to be in to feel like I’m living a meaningful, fulfilling layered life. I don’t really know what to do about it, or what I can change.

And I need to take more pictures. I always need to take more pictures. No matter how many pictures I take, I need to take more.