“Being a popular user of a “new media” site, or being a “new media” celebrity, doesn’t make you a geek. There’s absolutely no connection whatsoever … Being a good user of computers and internet-based services stopped being a geek-exclusive behavior a very long time ago. Geek culture isn’t something that a Twitter celebrity suddenly enters because Twitter was written by programmers and runs on servers.”—
Marco Arment. Shortly after moving to NYC, I stopped going to “geek events” because it turns out that very few geeks actually go to them. These events mostly seem to attract people who want to meet their twitter friends IRL, and a lot of folks who don’t really create any value.
Zed started the Freehackers Union so that people who create things can meet and share ideas with other talented people without having to filter through all the “geeks” who want to ride the coattails of real geeks. Sadly, it died in NYC after just a few meetings due to a lack of interest. If only he had provided an open bar & dropped the requirement to show off your work!
So I had a whole post written that I tried to submit just as the site went down, so you’re not going to get the whole version.
The jist is that the “geek” discussion maybe should be split into “hackers” and “early adopters”, where hackers create stuff and early adopters evangelize. My definition of geek is broad enough to encompass both types of people, but I understand if you’d want to limit it to the hackers only.
