Recently in geek philosophy Category

We knew Barack Obama was a geek, but his chief speechwriter is Jon Favreau? Iron Man director? Went to Vegas in Swingers?

Nah, not that Jon Favreau, it turns out. From the Guardian:

Not only is Barack Obama America's first Generation X president, he's our first geek president. Not that the two don't often go hand in hand. Says the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON - Spider-Man has a new sidekick: The president-elect.

Barack Obama collected Spider-Man comics as a child, so Marvel Comics wanted to give him a "shout-out back" by featuring him in a bonus story, said Joe Quesada, Marvel's editor-in-chief.

"How great is that? The commander in chief to be is actually a nerd in chief," Quesada said. "It was really, really cool to see that we had a geek in the White House. We're all thrilled with that."

Can we expect Obama to add a mutant superhero to his cabinet? Or perhaps he could make Bruce Wayne the Secretary of Kicking Ass?

What is geek philosophy, and why do we need it?

Look, we won. Guys, we won. Some of the richest men in the world are geeks -- c'mon, people don't come any geekier than Bill Gates. The most popular movies and TV shows revel in geekery -- if the kids who actually liked high-school biology (I was one of them) created a TV show, it'd be CSI; everyone and their mom is seeing this new Star Wars flick -- even if most of the people who enjoy them would never define themselves as geeks. A scan of the help-wanteds demonstrates that every other job going wanting demands skills that we geeks were honing during our sad, pathetic teenhoods when everyone else was out at football games and sock hops or whatever the cool kids were doing in the 1980s.

So why doesn't it feel like we won? Because, despite the triumph of everything geeky, we are still rejected. Made fun of. Teased. Looked upon with a combination of revulsion and pity. It is time to take back the word "geek," to overcome our shame and our embarrassment, to stand up and proudly announce, "We're geeks, we're here, deal with it." It cannot hurt us to take a cue from our queer brothers and sisters (some of whom are geeks, too) and come out of the closet as happy, productive, weird human beings. For our weirdness is redefining "normal."

But this isn't just one of those ludicrous exercises in building self-esteem that ignores, you know, reality: Geek philosophy isn't about making people feel better about one's closest relationship being with a computer, or a complete collection of still-in-the-box Buck Rogers in the 25th Century action figures, or whatever stereotype of geekiness is in vogue at the moment (because of course there is a tiny minority of folks for whom it would probably be healthy to be a little less stereotypically geeky). It's about recognizing that there is value in the geek outlook and the geek aesthetic and the geek approach to life, and about putting the fact that the geek outlook is spreading into some sort of cultural context.

Okay, so why the focus on Generation X? ("Celebrating the culture of Generation X" is the blog's subtitle.) Of course there are geeks older than GenXers... but I'm not so sure the term "geek" has any meaning when applied to people younger than Xers. For though geekiness has always been with us, adult Xers have taken it mainstream -- a 15-year-old geek today, in 2005, is not a freak like a 15-year-old geek was in 1984, when I was 15, was. Geeky is cool, today... and Xers, in many ways, made it that way. In a similar way that hippies defined the Baby Boom generation even though they constituted but a tiny percentage of that generation, I believe that geeks have defined and are continuing to define Generation X -- if you're an Xer and not a geek, that's how you define yourself: as not-a-geek. Geekiness and GenXness goes together without saying.

Who we are -- as geeks and as Xers -- is going to have a dramatic impact on our culture as a whole, and it's starting in earnest right now, as Xers -- the oldest of whom are now 40ish -- begin to move into positions of authority and start to blossom creatively. I believe we're in for a new golden age of entertainment, of pop culture, produced by Xers... and it's going to be geeky. I'm gonna show you why that's something to celebrate.