Down the Rabbit Hole

In days gone by, geeks were distinguished from the general populace by their love of technology and involvement in obscure subcultures. But in an age where iPhones and Blackberries have become de rigueur among middle managers and every tweenage girl is a self-confessed vampire junkie, has the idea of geeks as a people apart become anachronistic? Just as the revamped Casino Royale saw the removal of Q, James Bond’s long-suffering gizmo wizard, has society now evolved beyond the need for a separate nerdish nomenclature? The short answer is: no. Mainstream culture might have finally given the nod to some of geekdom’s more well-known pursuits, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to see. As both Lewis Carroll and Morpheus have had occasion to point out, the rabbit-hole is deeper than it seems, and in keeping with the principles of Timelord science, it continues to be bigger on the inside.

Before we proceed, a brief disclaimer: I am a geek, but I am not every geek. Cultural affiliations work to a sliding scale. As far as my parents are concerned, I am a source of tech support, but compared to my friends who work as Pixar animators and write code for Google, I am but a toddling babe who knows her way around the clicky end of a mouse. I’m a devout enough fan of anime that I can sing The Real Folk Blues from Cowboy Bebop in Japanese, but not such a hardcore otaku that I’ve ever cosplayed, contemplated life as a nekomimi or sat through more than one episode of Escaflowne. And if none of that last statement made any sense whatsoever? Good. You’re getting the point.

Because geeks are everywhere. We may not be the agent of orange or the Prince of Hiroshima, but we are in ur internets, breedin ur memes, and we are not always readily identifiable by our strangely worded t-shirts. Sooner or later, you will encounter us, whether at work, within your family or sometime during a good ole’ fashioned shindig, and where once the stereotype of Geeks In A Basement might have ensured public silence on the Kirk vs Picard debate, we will now openly discuss MMORPGs and Firefly with confidence – nay, joie de vivre. Which means, dear Normal Person, that our issues have become your issues. You are well within your rights to be disinterested, of course, just as I will lapse into unconsciousness at the first mention of trout fishing, nail polish or Catriona Rowntree. But if you are just a wee bit curious as to the deeper peculiarities of our kind, then this is – or hopefully will be – the column for you.

I do not promise to be an expert on all things. I may be fluent enough in the language of World of Warcraft to know that players who ninja on the boss loot roll are scoundrels of the first order, but that doesn’t mean I’ve ever logged on myself. I will be biased, catering shamelessly to my own interests and passing them off as a functional, all-encompassing snapshot of geekdom: it is up to you, should the inclination strike, to argue otherwise. But in the time-honoured tradition of Flanders and Swann, who once posited that the tragic inability of scientists to communicate with everyday people could be remedied by singing about the first and second laws of thermodynamics, I shall aim to be of some small, irreverent use.     

So, to begin with: language is everything. Geekdom and its myriad attendant subcultures are havens for neologisms, creative malapropisms, acronyms and jargon – fabulously so. Digital culture being what it is, almost everyone will have encountered AFK, IMHO, NSFW and some variant of ZOMG, but despite having gestated in the same swamps, terms like borked, grok and slashdotting are still relatively unfamiliar. Actually, these three are quite useful: borked describes broken technology; if you grok something, you understand it; and slashdotting is what happens when a popular website links to a less frequented one, causing the sudden influx of visitors to down the second site’s servers. There are many more, of course, but the quickest way to broaden your vocabulary is to bookmark Urban Dictionary and look up unfamiliar terms as they cross your path, thereby ensuring future comprehension. Not that it’s all geeky: I’ve spent many a lazy afternoon reading up on obscure slang and trying to guess which new portmanteau words will sink or swim (I’ll take bromance over remembeer any day).

Actually, I lie. It’s all pretty geeky. But in these exciting times, why let a label stand in the way of a good time? The rabbit-hole runs deep, and as Frost wrote, there’s miles and miles to go before we sleep.

Image credit