The Alpha Geeks

While I don't always see eye-to-eye with David Brooks, his New York Times op-ed piece about the ascendancy of the geek is right on, albeit a little late. The change actually occured some 5-10 years ago.

He begins with an interesting bit about the origin of the word "nerd".

In 1950, Dr. Seuss published a book called If I Ran the Zoo. It contained the sentence: “I’ll sail to Ka-Troo, and bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO, a NERKLE, a NERD, and a SEERSUCKER, too!” According to the psychologist David Anderegg, that’s believed to be the first printed use of the word “nerd” in modern English.

He, also, does a good job defining the difference between a nerd and a geek.

Among adults, the words “geek” and “nerd” exchanged status positions. A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked.

Geeks not only rebelled against jocks, but they distinguished themselves from alienated and self-pitying outsiders who wept with recognition when they read Catcher in the Rye. If Holden Caulfield was the sensitive loner from the age of nerd oppression, then Harry Potter was the magical leader in the age of geek empowerment.

He even acknowledges the inherent geeky-sex appeal of Tina Fey and the group's influence on fashion.

Tina Fey, who once was on the cover of Geek Monthly magazine, has emerged as a symbol of the geek who grows into a swan. There is now a cool geek fashion style, which can be found on shopping sites all over the Web (think Japanese sneakers and text-laden T-shirts). Schwinn now makes a retro-looking Sid/Nancy bicycle, which is sweet and clunky even though it has a faux-angry name. There are now millions of educated-class types guided by geek manners and status rules.

Perhaps most importantly (and accurately) Brooks reflects on the geek influence on the Presidential race.

The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.

It's hard to imagine a group who enjoys spending their Friday nights playing Kung Fu Fighting, tinkering with Linux, and deconstructing the latest Indiana Jones film as cool and trendy, but there you have it. At least as reported by The New York Times.