The Legacy of the Geek Clique

http://www.psmag.com/blogs/time-machine/radio-gender-women-technology-sector-52050 

Is it comforting that this “girls aren’t allowed in my tech-geek club” thing has a long and prestigious history? I mean, radio, that thing changed the world!

It does make me question how deep the gender hegemony rabbit hole goes, however. And more I see the righteous indignation about this “fake” geek girl, the fear that she has infiltrated our precious exclusive club and the rage at her presumption, the more I wonder about the gender-based implications of this. I have heard nothing of the “fake geek boy”. Is he a thing? Because I have seen no such memes on Tumblr yet— maybe I’m following the wrong individuals.

That said, let’s pan out a bit and look at this from a broader perspective. Let’s talk about the fake-geek versus the real-geek and ignore gender entirely for a moment. I know that this group was once fairly small and exclusive, founded on the precepts of liking-something-odd, liking-that-thing-too-much, and not-much-caring-about-the-effect-it-has-on-my-popularity-ranking. And our numbers have swelled to much larger than I ever assumed we would. We found the coolest things ever, but no one else got it and we couldn’t understand why. And then we were shunned, became social pariahs, banished to the far end of cafeterias across the nation and forced to surreptitiously sneak into unoccupied classrooms to roll new characters for the weekend’s campaign. Before it was a subculture, geekery was a clique, and not one you wanted to be in. And it was painful, but we wore that shit with pride when we got on the other side. WE SURVIVED.

But now more people are recognizing how cool those things are. They are joining us in our liking-it-too-much sort of way, and wanting to talk about it and learn the cannon, and write fanfic, and omg did you hear that Joss Whedon is coming to SXSW to discuss Much Ado? We broke that ground for these up-and-coming geeks and now they can like the things that we like and share it with this giant, (usually) accepting community. We should be happy how far we’ve come and be proud that we carried these precious relics through the metaphorical Dark Ages until the rest of the world caught up and saw it for how awesome it is. We helped promote share this with the world and that is ridiculously fantastic! And clinging to the pain-that-was, the exclusionary concept of if-you-didn’t-go-through-real-ostracism-you-aren’t-a-real-geek is the most negative and undeserving way to characterize ourselves. Geeks and geekery is too mindblowingly fantastic for that to be our defining characteristic.