The essence of a Geek

...given an award by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, responded with a note saying, "When I hear the words 'social responsibility,' I want to reach for my gun."

Autism = geek?
It has become commonplace to link typical programmer personality traits to Autistic Spectrum Disorder, and particularly to Asperger syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. Wired Magazine even ran a lengthy investigation into a sharp rise in the number of autistic children born in the Silicon Valley area, though no conclusive link to the population of computer engineers there has ever been proven. While the relationship between Asperger-type personality traits and a talent for computer programming is difficult to pin down, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that one exists. As Hans Asperger himself wrote: "It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential."

To those who consider themselves true geeks, however, personality traits are beside the point — what's important about a geek is the passion to understand the way things work, to the point of being able to construct working systems yourself. Programmers are admired not because of their fame or social status, but for the quality of the code they write.

This appreciation even has an aesthetic side to it, something that non-programmers often find surprising, says developer Higgins. "When people talk about code and whether it's any good, the criterion that's most damning is that it's ugly," he says. "There's a simplicity and elegance in the expression that's appreciated." This aesthetic side is often missed by the outside world, but it is a recurrent theme. For example, Stallman, despite his apparently ascetic view of the world, is said to be something of an epicure who appreciates being taken out for a fine dining experience.

Social changes
It isn't just that the fame of geeks that has increased; society itself has changed dramatically. Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, a 1981 account of introverted young computer engineers working 24-hour shifts to create a minicomputer, seemed like bizarre science fiction at the time, but by the end of the 1990s it was another matter. In her 2003 novel The Bug, veteran programmer Ellen Ullman described how the developer's universe seems to have taken over the outside world:

"The workstation in a cubicle. The morning begun not with hello but with a system prompt. Everyone's day begins like that now, but on that morning of March 5, 1984, only programmers and testers lived that way. From log-in to log-out, email to email, mouse click to mouse click — we were just then starting to make computers 'friendly' for everyone, preparing the world for a programmer's life.''

Ullman's point is that while computers are making wonderful things possible, they are also recreating the world in their own image. "Computers abhor error... [and] abhorring error is not necessarily positive," she says in a 1990s Salon.com interview. "We learn through error... so it affects us to have more and more of our life involved with very authoritarian, error-unforgiving tools. I think the more time you spend around computers, the more you get impatient with other people, impatient with their errors, impatient with your own errors."

ADD?
Ever more pervasive technologies have only heightened the effect, to the point where it has become a cliché. "Sure, a lot of geeks tend to have ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder], and we all have ADD now," says Governor. "I can't have a conversation with my mother for five minutes because I want to check IM. We are living these bizarre, mediated lives, and of course there are drawbacks."

This shift isn't a one-way street, however — we may be coming to resemble geeks a bit more, but through the growing importance of design, technology is also changing to be a bit more human. Strangely enough, many have found the emerging crop of digital video recorders, such as Sky+, far easier to use than the traditional VCR. Gadgets such as the iPod employ complex technology — it's even possible to install Linux on one — but they employ very simple interfaces.

The iPod's success was crowned at the end of last year with designer Jonathan Ive receiving a CBE, and many see such products as the direction geek culture will take next. A new crop of influential programmers, such as 37 Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson or Ubuntu Linux's Mark Shuttleworth, are not even particularly geeky.

"These kinds of people are where the next great successes are coming from, they're great designers and great coders, and also uber-communicators," says Governor. "Great design is a way to create huge new markets, and that is a lesson IT is learning."