Geek and Hacker Stories Code, Culture and Storytelling from the Technosphere [1st ed. 2019] 9781349958184, 9781349958191, 1349958182, 1349958190

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Geek and Hacker Stories Code, Culture and Storytelling from the Technosphere

Brian Alleyne

Geek and Hacker Stories

Brian Alleyne

Geek and Hacker Stories Code, Culture and Storytelling from the Technosphere

Brian Alleyne Department of Sociology Goldsmiths, University of London London, UK

ISBN 978-1-349-95818-4    ISBN 978-1-349-95819-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95819-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954945 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2019 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

To the memory of my father, Ellis Wilfred Alleyne (1935–1978), who taught me how to use a soldering iron.

Preface

I aim to provide my reader with a measured and informed perspective on geek culture: a field that has been romanticised and sensationalised both in the press and popular culture. I do not aim to reveal ‘the truth’ about geek culture, or to define it in exact terms, or to present findings that will change the way we think about geek culture. From a potentially vast area of interest, I selected one corner for investigation. I offer here an account based on textual investigation and my personal experience, building on periods of both intentional research and enthusiastic engagement against a wider background of my involvement with personal computers since 1982. I have been a computer geek since the 1980s, and the computer geek community is my community. I have been casting an ethnographic and autobiographical gaze on computer geek culture for many years; of the computer geek universe, those geek communities built around Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) are the ones most familiar to me. Stories lie at the core of what follows. The fundamental questions that motivated me were, what stories are told about geeks, and what stories do geeks tell among themselves? The Web is the best place to begin looking for answers because geeks are children of the digital age and the Web is their preferred medium of communication and space of self-expression. Most of the stories that I analyse in this book are found online in the form of text, audio, or video; I have given links to many of these in the text so that readers may explore the stories on their own. I have summarised the plots, characters, and themes of these stories instead of overburdening this text with lengthy quotations which, in any event being extracts, would still vii

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leave out some of the overall context that a reader might want to explore. So, I invite you the reader to seek out and plunge into the stories. We can never have detailed information about the full experience of every single user of personal computing devices, but we can generate knowledge from targeted social research into the experiences and in this case the stories of relatively small numbers of actual users. Whether we use statistics or free-flowing participant observation, all social researchers rely on synecdoche—a language construct through which we indicate a whole by referring to one or more of its parts, or vice versa (Becker, 1998, 67). Everyday observation, field observations or personal diary entries, a series of blog postings, as well as random samples of respondents, are all varieties of how social science knowledge is built on synecdoche. The selection of stories I discuss in what follows is a synecdoche I constructed to refer to geek culture through stories told by geeks and told about geeks. Chapter 1 introduces the key ideas of the book, starting with an overview of geek culture followed by a discussion of the methodology, methods, and data that inform the work. Chapter 2 examines representations of geeks across different genres: biography and autobiography, journalism and mass-market nonfiction, fiction, drama, and documentary. Chapter 3 discusses geek narratives about competing technology platforms, looking at how some geeks express loyalty around technologies, firms, and brands and how they argue in favour of their own choices and against the technology choices of other geeks. Chapter 4 treats themes, narrative frames, and plots under a general typology of geek political narrative, ranging across three broad ideological perspectives: cyber-utopianism, techno-­ libertarianism, and techno anarchism. Chapter 5 is a personal reflection on my own experience as a geek. I close the work with some thoughts on the significance of stories in geek culture. London, UK

Brian Alleyne

Acknowledgements

Peter Wilton, a fellow geek, was my research assistant and interlocutor. I had many fruitful conversations with my Goldsmiths colleagues and friends, some of them into geeky stuff, others not, but all of them wonderful interlocutors: Chris Brauer, Douglas Haywood, Brett St Louis, Kirsten Campbell, Tom Henri, Martin Williams, and David Oswell. Harriet Baker of Palgrave first encouraged the work; the anonymous reviewers gave useful critical feedback. Lynda Porter continues to teach me life skills. My students at Goldsmiths always stimulate and challenge my thinking. Joe Fay invited me to give a Register lecture and the questions that he and the participants asked helped me to clarify my thinking. Finally, I must thank Cristina Chimisso, my life partner, for her peerless support.

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Contents

1 Initialise (Key Ideas)   1 Introducing Geeks, Culture, and Storytelling   1 What Is Geek Culture?   6 Methodology   9 Sources  13 Summary  16 References  17 2 Representing Geeks  21 Clever People and Social Misfits  22 The Hippie Who Changed Everything  24 The Breakthrough  27 The Gender of the Geek  30 The Geek’s Journey  34 Start-up: Founders’ Stories  36 Summary  39 References  40 3 Platform War Stories  47 Plotting the Switch  48 When You Go Mac, You Never Go Back  53 Embrace the Penguin  57 Switching (Back) to Windows  61

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The Year of the Linux Desktop  62 Plotting Android as a Win for Linux  63 Narrating Self and Enemy  66 Plotting Market Share, Capturing Mind Share  67 The Microsoft Villain  68 Summary  70 References  70 4 Geek Political Narrative  75 Politics and Geek Storytelling  75 Utopians, Communitarians, Anarchists, and Libertarians  76 Narrating the State and Democracy  80 Narrating Meritocracy and Its Discontents  83 Performing Politics in Geek Narrative  87 Summary  89 References  90 5 Notes from a Geek Autobiography  95 Diary: December 17th, 2007  95 Becoming a Geek  97 Gadgets, Code, and Other Obsessions  99 Can We Be Ethical Consumer Geeks? I Want a Fairphone, September 2017 101 Once We Were Psioneers 102 Being Linux 104 Being a Geek 106 References 106 6 Afterword: Coda 109 I ndex 111

CHAPTER 1

Initialise (Key Ideas)

Abstract  This chapter sets out the key terms and concepts that shape this book. This chapter defines geeks, hackers, culture, and social relations and then moves on to outline the idea of distinctive geek culture. This chapter then discusses the methodology and source materials that informed this work. Keywords  Geek • Hacker • Geek culture • Narrative

Introducing Geeks, Culture, and Storytelling According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a geek was originally a ‘simpleton’ or a ‘dupe’, but that definition no longer holds. Geeks now exist in the general public view as people who are knowledgeable and obsessively interested in some highly specialised area such as comic books, science fiction and fantasy, science, role-playing games, video games, and computer technology (Feineman, 2005; McCain, Gentile, & Campbell, 2015; Woo, 2018). Some of these interests are highly correlated so that a geek can be a science fiction fan, an avid payer of games, as well as a computer programmer. In popular1 discourse, ‘geek’ is often  I will use ‘popular’ to mean widely read when discussing texts, and widely circulated when discussing film and TV. I establish the wide readership of books by Amazon sales rank, and wide viewership if the film, series, or documentary is produced by an established/mainstream studio (including Netflix and Amazon originals). 1

© The Author(s) 2019 B. Alleyne, Geek and Hacker Stories, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95819-1_1

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used to refer to someone highly knowledgeable (sometimes to the point of obsession) about technology, especially computer technology (Bergman & Lambert, 2010). Some geeks focus on computing, while for others computing is one element in a range of geeky interests; in this work, I will focus on the computing side of geek culture. While the geek is now identified and represented as tech-savvy, geeks are also popularly stereotyped (sometimes even by persons who self-­ identify as geeks) as ignorant of or indifferent to other important aspects of social and cultural life, such as etiquette, intimacy, and fashion, to name just three. Some might argue that these traits of social awkwardness are more applicable to ‘nerds’: while there is an overlap between concepts of nerd and geek (Goto, 1997; Kendall, 2000, 2011; Woo, 2018), I will use geek in this book as the overarching term; most of what I write about geeks could be applied to nerds. Debate on which of these two terms is more appropriate is not only outside the scope of my work here but holds little interest for me. Nerds are obsessed with knowledge, often obscure knowledge; they often narrate their childhoods as misfits; they are often obsessed with details of technology or collections of comics or games. All of this holds for geeks. So, when I use the term ‘geek’, I want you, the reader, to imagine that what I say about the geek is almost always applicable to the nerd. As discussed by Woo (2018), the term ‘geek’ can signify different identities and practices depending on who is using it, with the difference residing both in areas of interest and in degrees of interest. Computer geeks have a strong sense of collective identity and see themselves as belonging to various kinds of community. Both geeks and non-geeks imagine variously firm/porous boundaries that separate geeks from non-geeks. Self-­ identified geeks counter the negative connotations that people from the wider non-geek society have associated with geeks, thereby validating geek identity. As we live in an increasingly networked society of ubiquitous digital technology, and especially with the entry of tech billionaires as the newest stars in the celebrity firmament, being geek has come to take on a more positive image than what it was 40 years ago at the dawn of the personal computer (PC) era. The kind of geek I focus on is the computer geek, also sometimes referred to as a hacker. Hacking covers a broad spread of practices and identities and is an area of ongoing research and debate (Jordan, 2017), and my aim is not to add to that debate. For my purposes, the hacker is a person skilled in creating and/or modifying software and software-controlled objects of various kinds. There is an overlap

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between the hacker as a software coder and the geek in the sense of a computer geek as can be seen in the work of both Coleman (2012) and Kelty (2008). Moreover, in much of the body of popular literature and media representations that I will discuss in later chapters, a hacker is equal to a geek. I use both terms but favour the use of geek more than hacker because the public imagination of ‘hacker’ is overburdened by ideas of computer misuse and digital crime. To be a geek is to carry a social and cultural label and to do so is to have an identity. When mathematicians or logicians talk about identity, they have in mind A being the same as B in functional terms, so that A and B behave the same no matter what inputs we make to either. When we talk of identity in human relations, we are dealing with how to negotiate a sense of who an individual is, which groups she belongs to, how she responds to how other people view her as a social being, and with which groups they associate her (Jenkins, 2014; Lawler, 2013). So socio-cultural identity differs from logical identity in that socio-cultural identity is fluid and lacks the certainties of identity as found in logic and mathematics. While there is some overlap between social and cultural identity, it is helpful to distinguish between the two. Social identity refers to how you are placed in real social relations and structures, such as social class or gender, or as a parent. The existence of the social relations and structures that inform a social identity are recognised by most people in any society. Often there is an element of inequality in these social relations and structures. Social identity can be assigned at birth, or it can be achieved or assumed later in life. Cultural identity refers to a person’s sense of belonging to distinct groups. Cultural identities are almost infinitely varied and are constantly being re-imagined. Sometimes a cultural identity can put a ‘gloss’ on social identity, as when someone with the social identity of a woman (or man) declares that they are feminist. Many kinds of ethnic identities are both social and cultural. Another way to draw a working distinction between social and cultural identities is to think of a social identity as having a relatively objective existence in the sense that, say, social class exists in a way that is not entirely reducible to what individuals think or desire regarding their own social class. Cultural identities, on the other hand, have stronger elements of voluntarism to them in that a person makes choices about kinds of practices, uses of language, or working with different kinds of symbols to craft a (cultural) identity and a sense of belonging to a cultural group. While there is wider scope for crafting cultural than social identities, both kinds of identities are sites of struggle and are shaped by unequal power relations.

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The identities of people who are secure as members of powerful groups carry positive value, while identities assumed by or ascribed to less powerful groups carry lower value. Most people seek to construct positive identities for themselves because most people seek to feel secure and valued in themselves and society, but there is no getting around the fact that some identities carry more value in society than others (Lemert, 1994). Therein lies the fundamental contradiction at the heart of social and cultural identity. Everybody has several identities, but not everybody has the same set of identities. And identities are structured unequally. Gender and age are the two most fundamental differentiating social identities; and to these, we can add others such as class, nation, ethnic group, and sexuality, among others. We can usefully think of social identity as a network of different social positions along axes of, say, gender and class (but not only these). In so doing, we should bear in mind that identities are not abstract ideas on theoretical axes with smooth planes of objective difference, but instead, an actual identity lies somewhere on a continuum along which many identities are positioned, and these positions will take up points that have differential value, power, and prestige. Even though many people like to think of identities as given and fixed, from a sociological perspective they are anything but, and they have histories that have been extensively studied (Lawler, 2013). I have gone into some detail about sociological thinking about identity because I want from the outset to counter some of the simplistic and naive ideas of identity that are recurrent in geek storytelling. One of the guiding principles of this work is that it is possible, indeed desirable, to take both computer code and social theory seriously. My focus is on storytelling aspects of geek culture. In sociology and anthropology, debates around culture are at least as lively as geek debates around programming or software licences. Culture is notoriously difficult to define (Williams, 1990, pp. 87–92), yet ideas about it are ubiquitous. People make culture; it also makes them. Most of us would accept that culture is what separates humans from everything else in the living world: to be human is to have culture (Carrithers, 1992). Culture is both universal and particular: all humans have culture, and at the same time, humans have a huge variety of different cultures; this duality of culture may appear to be paradoxical at first glance. If we draw a parallel to language, then the seeming paradox becomes insignificant: all humans have a general capacity for language, and that universal human capacity is made manifest in ­hundreds of actual languages, which are mostly mutually unintelligible. The resolution of the seeming paradox of language lies in the fact of

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t­ ranslation—given time and effort any human language can be translated into any other human language. So, integral to being human is the capability, possessed by all humans, to learn actual languages. The parallel surely holds for culture: for there to be cultural variation among humans; there must be some underpinning universal cultural capacity in all humans: you need not be a social/cultural anthropologist or a sociologist to acknowledge that humans can and do learn to function in unfamiliar cultures. But what is culture? To offer a full answer would take us too deeply into ongoing debates across the humanities and social sciences. As a working concept let us take culture to include one or more of: . the process of becoming a full-fledged member of a given society; 1 2. the complex collection of mental ‘stuff’ that we hold in our heads about what it is to be a living human being; 3. the shared symbolic resources of a defined group of people; 4. the products of human endeavour in art and industry; 5. the way of life and customs of a group of humans; 6. knowledge about and knowledge of how-to-do. I could easily extend this list, but as it is here, it will serve our purposes.2 Sociologists are interested in understanding human life in its social and collective aspects. A key question for the sociologist is: what are the structures and processes that enable and constrain social life? Sociologists (almost all of what I say here also applies to social and cultural anthropologists) take all aspects of social life as potential material for investigation, from language and culture to technology and politics. We use a wide range of methods to generate sociological knowledge, from social surveys to participant observation, from textual analysis to statistical analysis. We treat everyday life as if it were strange, and we show how the seemingly strange for us is often everyday life for others. People who do not understand or like what sociologists do often accuse us of writing long articles on trivial matters. This criticism is misguided. The everyday social world as we experience it is far from trivial: it is much more than its surface appearance. When we seek to integrate history, biography, and social issues into our research, we are engaging in 2  There is an extensive theoretical literature on culture (Eagleton, 2016; Oswell, 2010; Smith & Riley, 2008).

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‘­sociological imagination’ (Mills, 2000). Such an imagination encompasses a sense of combining the big picture of a society with the individual life story as a way of understanding a social issue; it is what motivates this work. Geek culture is the social and cultural issue, and I draw on a range of stories to render an account of geek culture.

What Is Geek Culture? I use ‘geek’ as an umbrella term, with the usual connotation of being obsessively interested in computer-related matters. So, when I write geek I always mean computer geek, unless I state otherwise; when I write geek, I include hacker unless I state otherwise. Geek is the encompassing category, or in computer geek-speak, the parent class, which is a formal model or template from which actual objects are derived.3 Within the broad geek category, there are distinct subcategories or subclasses of which hacker is one. All hackers are geeks, but not every geek is a hacker. Unlike the precise specification of classes and subclasses in object-oriented computer programming, when I use the terms geek or hacker, I am working with social and cultural categories and identities that do not map as neatly into a classification scheme as would formal techniques of modelling classes and their members. While it might have been simpler to use the term geek exclusively, I have chosen to use both geek and hacker for two main reasons: first, much of the literature I analyse is aimed at a general readership, and in the mainstream public discourses on tech from which I draw story materials for study, geek and hacker are not carefully distinguished; second, in popular biographies and dramas about founders and in stories about start-ups both geek and hacker are used without careful differentiation. Geek and hacker are identities that are encompassed by a broadly conceived digital culture, which is underpinned and enabled by software (Fuller, 2017; Manovich, 2013). Software is a defining object in geek ­culture. Software exists in two forms: as code written in a human-readable language that is specifically designed for programming computers—source code; and as code converted from human-readable source code into the binary code of 0s and 1s that can be executed or performed on computer 3  The concept of ‘parent class’ comes from object-oriented software design and programming; for an accessible tutorial on object orientation, see: https://www.codeproject.com/ Articles/1137299/Object-Oriented-Analysis-and-Design

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hardware. While source code has meaning for anyone who understands how to read the language in which that code is written, the intended meaning of that code in action is only realised when it is executed on an actual computer. Writing and editing computer code, and reading and reviewing code, all together constitute a core practice—an element of culture—among those geeks who are hackers. Though the writing of code is generally a solitary activity pursued in often anti-social hours and environments, it is through adding that code to a wider software project (nowadays, few software projects of any size are the result of the work of a single programmer) that the creativity and skill of the computer geek are actualised and recognised. I am not writing here about hacker movements, on which there is a large and growing body of literature (e.g. Alberts & Oldenziel, 2014; Coleman, 2012; Jordan, 2017; Kelty, 2008; Söderberg, 2008), but about stories told by and about geeks and hackers. Geek culture includes but is not defined by a general technophilia; it encompasses different political imaginaries, different kinds of hacker identities and hacking activities, different platforms and genres, and different media practices (Coleman, 2012; Kelty, 2005). Geek cultural identity emerges from the subject position of being a technically skilled actor knowing, playing, contesting, and making in a world of ubiquitous digital technologies. Before we spoke and wrote of computer geeks, we had tinkerers, autodidacts, savants, inventors, and amateur scientists, all of whom I would count as geeks in a generic sense.4 Intense curiosity about technology (especially the digital kind) is a distinguishing geek trait, but since curiosity is a universal human trait, we cannot define geeks solely in terms of curiosity. The history that lies behind the tinkering and curiosity that typifies the geek goes back a long way and touches every society and culture, but real geeks are not found in all ages and all places. Geeks as we know them emerge as a social type at a time and in quite specific social settings in the late twentieth century (Woo, 2018). For anthropologist Christopher Kelty, geeks are members of a ‘recursive public’, which he defines as ‘a group constituted by a shared, profound concern for the technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own association’ (Kelty, 2005, p. 185). The Internet lies at the core of computer geek culture. Geeks are not just people whose curiosity is satisfied by the 4  It is tempting to project geeks and hackers back in time: pre-print textual culture could be viewed as a form of hacking, according to Kennedy (2015), in a work on ‘medieval hackers’.

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Web in a way that was not possible before; geeks are especially interested in, and indeed some build and maintain, the information technology that underlies and enables the World Wide Web. Wikipedia is the ultimate geek artefact: a commons-based global open access knowledge store that allows (almost) anyone anywhere to contribute, but where expert knowledge tends to filter up through the rounds of scrutiny and open editing. Wikipedia, like geek culture, is potentially universal but is not actually so: most of the content is created in the major languages, with English predominating, and what counts as important is what matters to a demographic of mainly Western, male, formally educated users. Information networks in the real world display a tendency to concentrate power and influence at a few strategic nodes; most people who contribute to online culture are part of a long tail with little influence or audience (Galloway & Thacker, 2007; Lovink, 2011). Most of what I asserted about geek culture applies to hacker culture, which comprises identities, artefacts, practices, and relationships that revolve around computing. Hackers are a kind of geek. While taking hacker culture to be a substantial subset or a subclass of the more generic geek culture I mapped earlier, I remain aware that hacking has evolved its own distinct character. Hacking involves computer programming, combining hardware and software in often unconventional ways, and building and modifying and re-purposing digital object. Hacking involves a range of material practices, from the clandestine to the openly shared, ranging across software, hardware, culture, and politics (Jordan, 2008). The pioneering hackers who emerged from the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s were motivated by a desire to wrest the computer away from the exclusive control of big corporations and the state and transform it into a tool for individual creativity and learning (Turner, 2006). The 1980s saw the emergence of new kinds of hackers, who operated clandestinely with the aim of cracking computer networks for reputation, to do sabotage, or for personal gain. There is a distinctive political aspect to many kinds of hacking, for which hacktivism is a good term. Hacktivism involves using the skills and technologies developed in hacker cultures—Free Software, hardware, and sometimes clandestine—to advance political aims (Jordan, 2004; Sorell, 2015; Tanczer, 2016). As the term implies, ‘hacktivist’ combines ‘hacker’ with ‘activist’. In this case, the hacker is using his or her hacking skills towards clearly defined political ends that cannot always be reduced to the politics of either clandestine or open hacking. Given the varied political

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motivations of hackers, we should not expect in all cases to make a tidy distinction between hackers and hacktivists. Depending on the circumstances, perspective, or project, the same person may shift between both types; moreover, when a game mod or a mashup is built to achieve a political end, then the work can be classed as hacktivist. Many free and open source hackers see themselves as activists and argue that a focus on information freedom is a fundamental aspect of democratic freedom in today’s world, but while many Free Software hackers are hacktivists, not all hacktivists are Free Software hackers. Under the broad umbrella of hacktivism, we find civic hackers, who put hacking knowledge and skill to work on trying to ameliorate social problems ranging from humanitarian projects (Haywood, 2013) to advocacy around public access to data and citizens’ rights to privacy (Schrock, 2016). Hacktivism as a form of action has lines of descent that reach back to the pirate radio of the 1970s, even earlier to samizdat and indeed the pamphleteering traditions that are as old as social movements themselves (Downing, 2001). The aims of hacktivism are similar to many new social movements: articulating, packaging, and interpreting/re-interpreting knowledge; organising to bring about social and political change; contesting existing political subjects and social relations and imagining and seeking to realise new ones. What distinguishes hacktivism is the terrain that is contested and the techniques employed in such contestation (Kahn & Kellner, 2004). But even the comparatively new terrain and techniques of hacktivism have lines of continuity that reach back to established forms of media activism (Downey & Fenton, 2003).

Methodology Storytelling is an area of geek culture that is under-explored. Several researchers have used story material in their work on geek and hacker cultures (e.g. Coleman, 2012; Levy, 2010; Lin, 2004; Woo, 2018), but none have done the kind of sociological analysis of geek narrative that I essay here. Perhaps not surprisingly, given that anthropology has long had an interest in narrative methodology, we find that it is two ethnographers who have made extensive use of narrative material in their research on geek/hacker culture (even though narrative was not their central concern): Coleman (2012, chapter 1) used hackers’ personal narratives to construct a composite life history of a generic Free Software hacker, while Kelty (2008) used geeks’ stories to illuminate geeks’ social imaginary and politics. In sociological narrative approaches, we work with an explicit

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model of narrative that encompasses authorship, plotting, characterisation, story presentation, and story reception in a social context (Alleyne, 2015; Elliott, 2005; Polkinghorne, 1988; Richardson, 1990a). In this book, I use narrative methodology to explore several questions: What stories are found in geek culture? What can we learn about geek culture through stories? What are the main plots and characters of geek storytelling? Are there recurrent themes in geek storytelling? This is a good point to specify several key terms for my methodological approach (Alleyne, 2015). Narrative refers both to a story and to how that story is presented. A narration is a delivery of a story to an audience, real or implied. A narrator is a real or imagined person who is telling the story. Discourse is language in use, above the level of the sentence; discourse is language at work in the world. A discourse can be viewed as a sense-making story. You can analyse a discourse using many of the same tools as you would analyse a sentence because discourse is comprised of sentences. But discourse rises to a level above the sentence and as such that requires a distinct set of analytical tools and schema for interpretation. Narrative discourse is a story packaged up for delivery, as it were. I will often refer to the master plot in later chapters: Abbott (2008, p.  236) defines master plots as recurrent skeletal stories that are widely circulated in a culture and used to craft identities and histories in that culture; the skeletal story is a guide to arrange events into an actual story, a framework to plot these events. Character and type will recur in much of what follows. Characters are humans or other living beings whether real or imagined. The action in a story revolves around one or more characters. Types are recurrent characters that enable easy recognition based on shared cultural codes; we all recognise fundamental types such as hero, villain, and seeker. Archetypes are fundamental character types in a culture, while the stereotype is an oversimplified character type. The model of narrative I will be using throughout is built on the two fundamental elements of story and narrative discourse. Story is the content, comprising events, real or imagined, living beings, objects and settings. The narrative discourse is the story as expressed in a structure and medium (Chatman, 1978, pp.  19–34). Narrative methodology divides into two distinct yet overlapping branches: analysis of narrative and narrative analysis (Bruner, 1991; Polkinghorne, 1988). In analysis of narrative we begin our work with the narrative text, which we read to arrive at a generalised basis of comparison to other narratives. In this mode of working, we treat individual narratives as cases that we fit into a wider

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framework. Analysis of narrative is a categorising strategy in that it seeks to isolate elements of the narrative such as structure and theme, which we treat as nodes in a classificatory scheme. Analysis of narrative involves a range of questions and procedures. There is the identification of the narrative text to establish the validity of the source material. Having established that the source text is narrative, we can then move on to explore the core narrative features of the text: what are the events, agents, characters, and experiences signified in the text? Who is the author? What is the stance of the narrator (e.g. first or third person, partial or all-seeing, and embedded or ‘objective’)? What are the structural features—story, plot, and genre (fiction, ethnography, history, and biography)? How is the story being told—what is the narrative discourse? We might also explore various textual features of the material: syntax, lexis, and rhetoric. Some tools from discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis are often employed (Fairclough, 2003, 2010) to investigate which ideological positions are being made explicit and which ones remain implicit in a narrative discourse. We might ask: what is the narrative about? What is being told? What are the recurrent themes in the text (Riessman, 2008, chapter 3)? While content and form are interrelated, it is useful to analyse them as distinct properties of a narrative text, using the most appropriate tools. In a sociological analysis of narrative, we might explore the master plot, which is a skeletal story embedded in a culture and which all members of that culture have a capability of using; a master plot is a guide to arrange events and characters into a story. As this is a work of social research, my discussion will eventually circle back to the social-cultural and political-economic setting in which the stories circulate and in so doing address a key question: what is the social, political and cultural context for the creation and reception of narratives by and about geeks? In narrative analysis, we aim to organise events into meaningful plots with the ultimate aim of producing a nonfiction narrative, rather than treating each narrative as a case to be slotted into a coding scheme. The nonfiction narrative forms of the travelogue, autobiography, and biography are all familiar to the reading public; these forms have their academic variants in ethnographies and the life and case histories produced by ethnographic work in sociology and social/cultural anthropology (Denzin, 1997; Hatch & Wisniewski, 1995). The very distinction between fiction and nonfiction is rather unstable, as we see in ‘evocative’ forms of new ethnography (Banks & Banks, 1998) and in creative nonfiction and ‘new journalism’, where nonfiction stories are told by

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drawing upon well-­ established conventions from fictional genres (Berger & Quinney, 2005; Boynton, 2005; Kramer & Call, 2007). One of the first tasks of the narrative analyst is to establish the narrativity of their source texts. Narrativity is that quality of a text whereby the text may properly be classified as a narrative. Theorists of narrative (for an overview see: Abbott, 2008) have established a core set of features, which if present lends support to the narrativity of a text: among these are representation of transformation over time and representation of humans and human-like beings and their experience, other living beings, and natural events. Narrativistion is the means whereby text is crafted into a narrative: we narrativise by selecting and ordering events into a plot and by characterising real or fictional persons. We can think of narrativisation as bringing narrativity to a text. Textuality is a key part of geek culture: geeks read and write and debate in forums, blogs, podcasts, and social media generally. The Web is not just the preferred platform for geek discourse but is indeed the sine qua non for contemporary geek culture. Moreover, a great deal of what geeks write and share is in the story text form. My focus on geek stories offers insight into the work of world-making that is done through the evocative personal register, which is a complement to the rational-cognitive register through which geeks and other technologists have tended to represent themselves and their work and to be represented by others. I examine writing by and about geeks as one element of wider geek culture. I analyse texts as narrative, focusing on plot, structure, character, and themes, all of which I identify and categorise. I examine geek narratives from four analytical perspectives: thematic, structural, rhetorical, and ideological. In thematic analysis, we shift our gaze towards what is being said, as against how the text is assembled structurally. Themes are ideas we use to represent the substance of the narrative text on which we are working. From where do we get themes? There are two distinct yet complementary approaches to thematic analysis: we can either start with themes derived from existing theory or prior research, or we can generate our themes inductively, from a close reading of the narrative texts we are ­analysing. I derived my themes both from research literature and from a reading of the primary texts. In structural analysis of narrative, the focus is on how the narrative is put together. There are recurrent structures that form templates for building stories, such as the Hero’s Journey (Campbell, 1993; Vogler, 2007), the Conversion (Stromberg, 1990, 2008), and the Fairy Tale (Bettelheim, 1991), among

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others. In analysing rhetoric in narrative, I focus on textual devices deployed by the author of the narrative in order to persuade the reader of the truth of the story or at least to entice the reader into the comfort of verisimilitude. Rhetorical devices work at the level of the clause and sentence—syntax and lexicon, and at the level of text above the level of the sentence. One such rhetorical device is the metonym, where we refer to something by reference to one of its characteristics or constituent parts: in computer geek storytelling Silicon Valley is a much-used metonym; Silicon Valley or just ‘the Valley’ denotes a real place in the US state of California, and at the same time it connotates innovation and wealth. In reading geek narratives ideologically, I am guided by Barthes (1993a, 1993b), for whom all textual expression is shaped by ideology in the sense of being articulated from a position in societies shaped by unequal power relations. The analytic moves of investigating themes/ content, rhetoric, and structure enable consideration of what is being signified in geek narratives (themes), how the signification is assembled (structure and rhetoric), and why the text signifies as it does (ideology). In sum, geek culture comprises varied representations and practice, of which I will be focusing on popular representation of geeks and geek practice through analysing stories by geeks and stories about geeks. Specifically, I analyse a body of journalists’ writing about individual geeks, the tech firms and projects they founded, and representations of geeks and hackers in fiction and on screen in drama and documentary (Chap. 2); I examine stories told by computer geeks about competing for computing platforms (Chap. 3), and I examine the political perspectives that are expressed in and which also shape popular geek narratives (Chap. 4); I present a short autobiographical account of my positioning in geek culture (Chap. 5).

Sources My sampling strategy was purposeful (Maxwell, 2005): I began with a set of questions I wished to explore, and being a computer tech enthusiast I drew on my own knowledge to decide where to start looking for relevant material; after a round of selection and examination of texts, I assessed what I had gathered for reliability and validity insofar as these are relevant in narrative research (Polkinghorne, 1988, pp. 175–176; Webster & Mertova, 2007). I drew on printed books, online texts, and film and TV on different aspects of geek culture; I paid special attention to biographies of prominent geeks and histories of tech firms; I examined dramatic and documentary film and

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TV in which geeks were central; I examined print and online magazines, as well as blogs, YouTube videos, and tech websites. YouTube (videos and comments) is an especially rich space for exploring geek culture: affordable camcorders and editing software mean that anyone can (learn how to) make a good quality video, and geeks have not been slow to exploit the capabilities of the medium. Of course, big corporations and media outlets use YouTube, but it is among the millions of ordinary YouTube producers that we can see geek culture richly representing itself in product reviews, benchmarking, comparison, unboxing, and gameplay videos. My print sources encompassed biographical and autobiographical works on famous and some not-so-famous geeks and hackers, stories on platform switching published in magazines (especially Linux Format and Linux Voice) and novels about geeks and hackers. For printed material, where possible I used Amazon sales ranking to establish ‘popularity’ of these texts, but I also knew that some works were frequently cited and referenced and I included these in my selection even if I could not establish their Amazon sales rank. I sourced the greater part of my online material from tech websites and blogs on personal and mobile computing, with some material from forum postings and social media: here I combined reading of the biggest tech sites, such as www.theverge.com, www.cnet. com, and www.engaget.com, with more specialist tech sites such as www. anandtech.com. For the switching stories I discuss in Chap. 3, my main sources were Linux enthusiast magazines, Linux Format and Linux Voice, and online material from sites such as www.androidauthority.com, www. windowscentral.com, and www.appleinsider.com. I surveyed film and TV series on geek culture, as well as documentaries on geeks and hackers. All these sources are cited in the text as appropriate, with end of chapter lists of references or URLs in footnotes. I kept a journal of my tech experience, as well as a field diary of any technical events or meetings I attended. I also talked informally to a range of users, from casual to expert, about their choices and experiences in using personal computing technology; I recorded my recollection of these conversations in my journal the same evening or on the next day. The research database on which the book draws is made up of material from my personal and field diaries and from various online sources: Web pages, blog postings, blog and forum comments, social media commentary, and audio and video podcasts. All the Web materials were originally collected by Web clipping and importing into OneNote, where I tagged/coded the material.

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As to the scope and limitations of my sources, most significant is that biographical accounts of famous geeks and hackers, popular histories of tech firms, and stories of start-ups are overwhelmingly US-based/biased. Many of the works I analyse are nationalistic and inward-looking not only in their almost exclusive focus on the US tech scene but also in their assumption that tech ‘genius’ and innovation are uniquely American; nonetheless, it is the case that the world centre of computer technology remains in the USA, and that fact, coupled with the US public taste for stories that celebrate the successful entrepreneur, the unparalleled cult of celebrity and veneration of wealth in the USA, works to account for the US bias of much of the literature I examine. There is a growing literature on geek and hacker culture in other parts of the world, especially in Europe, but that literature draws on different political and literary imaginations from that of the most widely narrated geek stories. Geek storytelling culture is about much more than the life and works of famous geeks, but it is these latter stories that form the core of the biographical material I analyse. Stories about platform politics from the Web are also heavily US-focused, which is an effect of the dominance of English online and the gravitational pull of Silicon Valley. I sought out the most popular books and films about geeks and found that these were mostly of US origin. There is great scope for studying geek storytelling from outside the USA, or outside the Western world for that matter, and in languages other than English. That work is yet to be done, and I hope to do some of it, but not in the present slim volume. Before closing, I need to define some more terms that will recur in later chapters. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) will come up frequently in what follows. Free Software is free in two senses: free to read and modify as in free speech; and free of cost, as in free beer. The first is more significant because it has spawned a whole area of activism around intellectual property rights. Open source software is free in the first sense—you have access to the underlying source code.5 Both the acronyms FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software, where ‘libre’ captures the first more significant sense of freedom) are widely used; I will use FOSS throughout. A Linux6  See discussion by Berry (2007) and http://www.fsf.org/ and https://opensource.org  ‘Linux’ on its own strictly speaking refers to the Linux kernel developed by Linus Torvalds; a Linux distribution bundles up that kernel with utilities developed by Richard Stallman’s GNU work, and Stallman and others insist that the term should be ‘GNU/ Linux’. I will use ‘Linux’ throughout. 5 6

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distribution or distro—is a complete collection of all the software needed to enable a fully working Linux operating system to run on a computer, from the core kernel that communicates directly with the actual hardware, to the many applications that ordinary users require for their everyday work and entertainment, such as Web browsers, word processors, and games. Nowadays, a Linux distro intended for individual users will generally be a large downloadable file of more than a gigabyte, with a built-in installer. On running the installer, you imitate a process at the successful completion of which you have a full Linux system on your PC, enabling you to do anything that you would on a computer that runs Apple’s or Microsoft’s’ operating systems. A full discussion of Free Software licences is beyond the scope of this work (but see: Edwards, 2005; de Laat, 2005), but it will be useful for the reader if I make an initial distinction between those licences that allow you to take and modify source code without sharing your modifications BSD (Berkeley Standard Distribution) type licences and those which require that you make all of your modifications available for use by the community GPL-GNU (General Public License) type licences. With both types of licence, you have to acknowledge your use of the source code and recognise the work of the creators; the distinction turns on whether or to what degree you are obliged to share the source code of any modifications or derivative products.

Summary I use the term ‘geek culture’ to describe and explore a world of computer technology enthusiasts. Geek culture includes but is not limited to hacker culture. So, virtually all hackers are part of overall geek culture, but not every geek is a hacker. Geek culture is the parent class, from which hackers and gamers (as subclasses) inherit some characteristics, but to which they bring their unique characteristics as well. Culture is one of the most difficult terms to define: with regard to my interest in geek storytelling, I take the term culture to encompass practices, identities, objects, symbols, and social relations that make geeks distinctive, even though some of these are shared with others not identified or labelled as geeks. Geeks have a passion for science and technology, usually but not only digital technology, and especially computer hardware and software. My source data are texts produced about or by geeks: books and magazines, film and TV, Web resources, social networks, hardware and software objects, and informal and formal associations. Most of the popular printed and multimedia biographical texts on geeks are of US origin and have the tech scene of that country as their backdrop.

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Storytelling is one of the two main ways that all humans construct knowledge of the world, the other involving analysis and categorisation; humans know by narrating as well as by analysing and categorising the world. Analysis and categorisation are logical and rational ways of thinking that are closely associated with the ‘hard sciences’ and much prized among geeks, while storytelling is associated more with feeling and experience, and the humanities and arts. When stressed too strongly, this distinction leads to a false dichotomy, as narrative and analysis complement each other in the sciences as well as the humanities (Bruner, 1991; Polkinghorne, 1988; Richardson, 1990b). One of my aims in focusing on storytelling in geek culture is to destabilise the complacent rational and technophilic imagery with which geeks represent themselves and are represented by others.

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Chatman, S. (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Coleman, G. (2012). Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Denzin, N. (1997). Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks and London: Sage. Downey, J., & Fenton, N. (2003). New Media, Counter Publicity and the Public Sphere. New Media & Society, 5(2), 185. Downing, J.  (2001). Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage Publications. Eagleton, T. (2016). Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Edwards, K. (2005). An Economic Perspective on Software Licenses  – Open Source, Maintainers and User-Developers. Telematics and Informatics, 22(1–2), 111–133. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/ B6V1H-4D1YV1T-3/2/4194668e2677b57068531cd67bf7a7d8 Elliott, J. (2005). Using Narrative in Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. London: SAGE. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (2nd ed.). Harlow: Longman. Feineman, N. (2005). Geek Chic: The Ultimate Guide to Geek Culture. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press. Fuller, M. (Ed.). (2017). How to Be a Geek: Essays on the Culture of Software. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Galloway, A.  R., & Thacker, E. (2007). The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goto, S. T. (1997). Nerds, Normal People, and Homeboys: Accommodation and Resistance Among Chinese American Students. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 28(1), 70–84. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ doi/10.1525/aeq.1997.28.1.70/full Hatch, J.  A., & Wisniewski, R. (1995). Life History and Narrative: Questions, Issues, and Exemplary Works. In J.  A. Hatch & R.  Wisniewski (Eds.), Life History and Narrative. London: Falmer. Haywood, D. (2013). The Ethic of the Code: An Ethnography of a ‘Humanitarian Hacking’ Community. The Journal of Peer Production, 3, 1–10. Retrieved from http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-3-free-software-epistemics/peerreviewed-papers/the-ethic-of-the-code-an-ethnography-of-a-humanitarianhacking-community/ Jenkins, R. (2014). Social Identity (4th ed.). New York: Routledge. Jordan, T. (2004). Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause? New  York, NY: Routledge. Jordan, T. (2008). Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism. Cambridge: Polity.

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Jordan, T. (2017). A Genealogy of Hacking. Convergence, 23(5), 528–544. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856516640710. Kahn, R., & Kellner, D. (2004). New Media and Internet Activism: From the ‘Battle of Seattle’ to Blogging. New Media & Society, 6(1), 87–95. https://doi. org/10.1177/1461444804039908. Kelty, C. (2005). Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics. Cultural Anthropology, 20(2), 185–214. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2005.20.2.185. Kelty, C. M. (2008). Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software and the Internet. Durham: Duke University Press. Kendall, L. (2000). ‘Oh No! I’m a Nerd!’: Hegemonic Masculinity on an Online Forum. Gender and Society, 14(2), 256–274. Retrieved from http://www.jstor. org/stable/190274 Kendall, L. (2011). ‘White and Nerdy’: Computers, Race, and the Nerd Stereotype. Journal of Popular Culture, 44(3), 505–524. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1540-5931.2011.00846.x. Kennedy, K. (2015). Medieval Hackers. Cincinnati and North Charleston: Punctum Books CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform [Distributor]. Retrieved from https://www.dropbox.com/s/xdyfuy2826szw4w/Kennedy_ Medieval_Hackers_EBook.pdf?dl=0 Kramer, M., & Call, W. (2007). Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. New York: Plume Books. de Laat, P. B. (2005). Copyright or Copyleft?: An Analysis of Property Regimes for Software Development. Research Policy (In Press, Corrected Proof). Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V774H5DY6W-1/2/23f78c9804ef378fbdfb6a5fb084be68 Lawler, S. (2013). Identity: Sociological Perspectives (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Lemert, C. (1994). Dark Thoughts About the Self. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Levy, S. (2010). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution – 25th Anniversary Edition (1st ed.). Newton: O’Reilly Media. Lin, Y., & University of York. (2004). Hacking Practices and Software Development: A Social Worlds Analysis of ICT Innovation and the Role of Free/Libre Open Source Software. York: University of York. Lovink, G. (2011). Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media. Cambridge: Polity. Manovich, L. (2013). Software Takes Command. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Maxwell, J. A. (2005). Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications Inc. McCain, J., Gentile, B., & Campbell, W. K. (2015). A Psychological Exploration of Engagement in Geek Culture. PLoS One, 10(11), e0142200. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0142200.

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Mills, C.  W. (2000). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oswell, D. (Ed.). (2010). Cultural Theory (Four-Volume Set). Sage Publications Ltd. Polkinghorne, D.  E. (1988). Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (L. Langsdorf, Ed.). Albany: State University of New York Press. Richardson, L. (1990a). Narrative and Sociology. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 19(1), 116–135. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241900 19001006. Richardson, L. (1990b). Writing Strategies: Reaching Diverse Audiences. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications Inc. Riessman, C.  K. (2008). Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Inc. Schrock, A. R. (2016). Civic Hacking as Data Activism and Advocacy: A History from Publicity to Open Government Data. New Media & Society, 18(4), 581–599. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816629469. Smith, P., & Riley, A. (2008). Cultural Theory: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Söderberg, J.  (2008). Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement. London: Routledge. Sorell, T. (2015). Human Rights and Hacktivism: The Cases of Wikileaks and Anonymous. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 7(3), 391–410. https://doi. org/10.1093/jhuman/huv012. Stromberg, P. G. (1990). Ideological Language in the Transformation of Identity. American Anthropologist, 92(1), 42–56. Retrieved from http://www.jstor. org/stable/681389 Stromberg, P.  G. (2008). Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative (New ed.). Cambridge University Press. Tanczer, L. M. (2016). Hacktivism and the Male-Only Stereotype. New Media & Society, 18(8), 1599–1615. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814567983. Turner, F. (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vogler, C. (2007). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions. Webster, L., & Mertova, P. (2007). Using Narrative Inquiry as a Research Method: An Introduction to Using Critical Event Narrative Analysis in Research on Learning and Teaching (New ed.). London: Routledge. Williams, R. (1990). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Fourth impression 1990). London: Fontana Press. Woo, B. (2018). Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Representing Geeks

Abstract  This chapter discusses representations of geeks and hackers in fiction and popular non-fiction across a range of media, looking at film, novels, projects, organisations, and mass market biographies. The approach entails reading the texts as narratives, exploring themes, identifying characters and types, and isolating master plots—story templates that recur across various media and genres. Keywords  Representation • Master plot • Fiction • Genius • Character • Epiphany • Biography In this chapter, I will examine a range of stories about geeks in popular biographies and histories as well as in fiction, focussing on plots, types, characters, and themes. As I discussed in the previous chapter, concepts of types and characters are central to the work of analysing narrative. Characters are the people or other living beings around which stories are built, and types are culturally embedded models of characters that enable readers and viewers to connect with and recognise characters (Chatman, 1978, chapter 3; Scholes, Phelan, & Kellogg, 2006, chapter 5). Characters will in many cases change over the course of a story; as readers and viewers, we are all used to tracing a character’s development as a plot unfolds in fiction and non-fiction stories.

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‘Case’ is the main character in William Gibson’s (1984) Neuromancer, a novel that coined the term ‘cyberspace’ and which gave us much of the language and imagery with which hacking is represented. Case is a console ‘cowboy’, not a console ‘highwayman’. The cowboy, as the frontiersman and the settler, sits among a spread of heroic archetypes integral to an American national mythos or national narrative (Buhs, 2010), and the American frontier, real and imagined, is a symbolic resource from which popular representations of geeks and hackers have been drawn by writers of fiction and non-fiction, as well as makers of film. We shall see both the hero and American exceptionalism at work as recurrent frames and themes in popular stories about geeks. We begin, however, with the figure of the genius.

Clever People and Social Misfits Though the term ‘geek’ originally denoted a simpleton, few people would recognise that meaning today. The geek is now mythologised as a clever person obsessed with their chosen body of knowledge, socially clumsy perhaps, but smart. This representation is recognised by many of the self-­ described geeks in Woo’s (2018) study, but those geeks expressed ambivalence about how they were labelled in popular discourse; some of those interviewed challenged what they saw as stereotyping, acknowledging that they had deep knowledge of their domain of interest but questioning the popular assumption that geeks are clever by definition. Geeks are not passive objects of labelling: Kelty (2008, p. 19) found that ‘geeks are vocal, loud, persistent, and loquacious’ and that they were active in generating self-representations, though he cautions that social research on geek culture must do more than recount geek self-representation. The ‘genius’ label is a common descriptor in popular discourse about geeks, especially geeks who started the most successful tech firms or most famous tech projects. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs are all storied as geniuses in biographical and journalistic accounts; so too are free software guru Richard Stallman and Linux creator Linus Torvalds.1 The world’s most valuable corporation has arrogated genius to itself: Apple supports its customers at in-store Genius Bars. Ada Lovelace 1  I will pay special attention to writing on the life and work of Jobs later in the chapter. On Zuckerberg see (Kirkpatrick, 2010; Lacy, 2009); on Gates see (Cheongbi, 2009; Wallace, 1992); on Stallman see (Williams, 2002); on Torvalds see (Moody, 2001; Torvalds & Diamond, 2011).

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(1815–1852), who has a strong claim to be the world’s first computer programmer, is described as a ‘female genius’ (Essinger, 2013a). Genius is a complex and loaded term with a convoluted history (Baudson, 2016; Robinson, 2011; Weiner, 2016). Of many extant senses of genius, the one which is most applicable here is that of heightened or extraordinary cognitive ability. The geek or hacker as a genius is someone who can think more quickly and clearly than the ‘average’ person. Geniuses are deemed to have exceptional focus coupled with the ability to grasp complexity quickly. They are creative, far-sighted, and insightful. Debate continues as to whether nature or nurture bears the greater responsibility for genius. Geek and genius are synonymised in the popular imagination. While the genius label carries mostly positive connotations, there is a negative aspect where we find geek geniuses represented as social misfits. These negative constructions of geek genius are presented as illustrations of the essential dark side of genius. When hackers appear as central figures in fiction, they are extreme individualists, social misfits with overdeveloped technical skills, and often with underdeveloped interpersonal skills, as in Gibson’s Neuromancer, Stephenson’s Snow Crash (2002), and Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008). The clever misfit geek type appears on the small screen in The IT Crowd, Sherlock, Silicon Valley, and The Big Bang Theory. In his introduction to software engineer and novelist Ellen Ullman’s geek autobiography, Close to Machine (Ullman, 2013), philosopher–hacker Jaron Lanier writes that ‘male nerdiness’ is associated with ‘autism spectrum disorder’. In Microserfs (Coupland, 1995), one of the earliest novels about geek culture, several characters note that being autistic seems to be a common trait of people working in computer tech. In a 2001 article in WIRED, Silberman wrote that ‘Autism—and its milder cousin Asperger’s syndrome—is surging among the children of Silicon Valley’, and asked if ‘math and science genes’ were responsible (Silberman, 2001). Lanier, Coupland, and Silberman all direct us to another recurrent association made in popular representations of geeks: the geek is implicitly (and sometimes quite explicitly) placed on the autistic spectrum. Given that some of the personality and behavioural traits traditionally associated with genius (e.g. intense focus on the activity at hand, above average ability to recognise and to decode patterns, and difficulty in empathising with others) are often associated with persons on the autistic spectrum, it is easy to see how this connection might be made in popular representations of geeks and hackers. But, given that our understanding of autism, as indeed of human cognition in general, is ever evolving (Pinchevski & Peters, 2016;

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Silberman & Sacks, 2016), we ought to be cautious and seek to avoid making what are often superficial connections based on a few easily observed traits and an often shallow understanding of the complex psychosocial and neurological issues which are the object of ongoing research with respect to autism. Nonetheless, there remains a persistent tendency in popular culture to connect the geek, and especially the hacker, with a crudely rendered sense of autism. A further implication of this stereotypical representation is that since geeks are supposedly deficient in empathy, they are deemed to frequently value numbers above human welfare. The popular representations of geeks cannot be reduced solely to the effects of media stereotyping. Most stereotypes are grounded in a distorted understanding of some underlying reality. For geeks, the underlying reality is their close association with technology that is now ubiquitous and which stimulates complex feelings of admiration and anxiety among the wider public. Moreover, geeks bear some degree of responsibility for their public representation: not only do geeks at times take on the label of the tech-savvy insider, but they often imagine themselves as belonging to a distinct group shaped by a (mythical) common set of socialisation experiences, as members of a ‘fictive ethnicity’ (Cross, 2015)—an idea to which we will return at a later point in this chapter.

The Hippie Who Changed Everything Apple launched the Macintosh in 1984 with a TV advert first shown during that year’s Super Bowl. Directed by Ridley Scott, the advert opens in a monochrome totalitarian world where we see people marching sullenly. Then, a colourfully dressed woman carrying a sledgehammer races ahead of chasing riot police. She runs into a hall filled with drably dressed people watching an address by a great leader type on a giant screen. Twisting like an Olympic field thrower, the woman hurls her hammer towards the giant screen. The hammer smashes the screen; in the ensuing explosion of light and colour a voiceover states that Apple will launch the Macintosh in early 1984 and that everyone will then see why ‘1984 will not be like 1984’. The reaction of many people to the death of Steve Jobs (1955–2011) was remarkable (Kane, 2014, pp. 1–3). In the days following his passing the Web was awash with YouTube videos of grieving ordinary people from around the world. Many of the books and films about Jobs that emerged after his death have presented a figure that has characteristics of a rock star, genius, and saint (Blumenthal, 2012; Boyle, 2015; Dormehl, 2013;

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Isaacson, 2015; Schlender & Tetzeli, 2015; Stern, 2013). There can be no doubt that Jobs had profound business skill. He is one of the most celebrated figures in general geek discourse, even though hackers do not all view him positively. By paying attention to how his own life’s critical events, and the closely linked history of Apple, are storied, we have a case study of how the archetypical figure of the leader as hero (Shadraconis, 2013), and related recurrent themes of ‘leadership’, ‘genius’, and ‘innovation’ are narrated in popular stories about geeks, especially those about geeks who founded successful tech firms. In print and on screen, Jobs is portrayed as intensely driven and self-­ absorbed. He appears to have had a very high opinion of himself. He was a perfectionist and pushed his colleagues and employees very hard. He was so focused on building his firm, that when he discovered he had become a father, he insisted on having tests done to prove his paternity. Even after acknowledging his paternity, Jobs kept his former partner and mother of their child at arm’s length, because he did not have space in his life for parenting, as his character says in the 2015 biopic in which Michael Fassbender plays Jobs (Boyle, 2015). In his bestselling biography of Jobs, Walter Isaacson (2015) repeatedly returns to Jobs’ self-representation as a uniquely creative individual: Jobs at times compared himself—implicitly and explicitly—with famous thinkers. Jobs certainly was the creative driving force behind a series of Apple adverts that stressed the first Mac as a tool for the creative persona, and by extension, the genius. His marketing vision was hugely successful: notwithstanding the offence to English grammar, most people working in creative industries took up Apple’s invitation to ‘think different’ and use a Mac. That early Mac success with media and creative professionals would lay the groundwork for Apple products capturing personal computing’s largest mindshare. Jobs is storied in popular biographies as the genius who made tools for creative geniuses, and as the person who bridged hacker and business cultures. Much is made of Jobs’ interest in Eastern mysticism, and his taking of Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), but Jobs fits uneasily into the American counterculture. He drew very selectively on the hacker ethic of experimentation and knowledge sharing: he thought highly of the individual empowerment aspects of hacker culture but was at the same time contemptuous of hacker culture’s open sharing aspects. And there lies a contradiction in the radical image cultivated by Jobs and by Apple: while Jobs seemed at times to fancy himself being part of the hacker culture, Apple’s growth trajectory took the firm in an entirely corporatist direction. The closed and tightly controlled

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architecture of the Mac, as well as the zeal with which the firm protected intellectual property, was in 1984, and remains now, anathema to the hacker ethic. Apple the firm and its products are by no means universally loved by hackers. To imagine your work making a dent in the universe, as Jobs seemed to have done, is not just narcissistic, but megalomaniac. Is this megalomania excused only because Jobs piloted Apple to become the world’s most valuable company? Because he refined the PC, the music player, the smart phone, and the tablet with a laser-like focus on design and user experience above all else? These are not questions to which I can offer any straightforward answers. The Jobs represented in Isaacson’s (2015) biography is somewhat difficult to warm towards; that Jobs comes across as sometimes a bully and manipulator who often treated other people as a means to an end. Jobs is a divisive figure in geek storytelling: not all geeks and not many hackers admire Jobs or the firm he founded. Of those that do admire him, it is for his ability to invent and refine products and services and to market these with unmatched panache. It is not clear to what extent Apple’s success is attributable to Jobs. One recurrent framing device for popular biographies of Jobs, as for many other life stories of tech founders, is the redemptive self (Mcadams, 2013), which is a model life history in which the life is seen in retrospect as a story of redemption. Redemptive life stories display the quality of ‘generativity’: as a mature individual looks back over the course of their life, they plot the course that life in a way that supports who they believe they are at that reflective point of maturity; according to Mcadams, ‘generative adults’ are the subjects of such stories. Generative adults make sense of their lives through constructing narratives of the redemptive self. These narratives are structured as a series of life challenges confronting the individual; the meaning of a person’s life is revealed in the account of how she/he dealt with these challenges; the life is ‘forged’ through struggle.2 Mcadams argues that this template is shared cultural capital for adults in the USA who use it in autobiographical as well as biographical writing. Biographies of Jobs, as of other tech founders, story his life as that of a generative adult. 2  The redemptive life narrative is a template that is rooted in Judeo-Christian literary history (the life stories of the biblical prophets and of Christ himself are models of redemptive story-making) and is found everywhere that Christianity has had a significant influence on education; the form is employed in secular as well as religious writing.

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Jobs’ inability or unwillingness to share power and his unshakeable even narcissistic self-belief are storied as leading to his being pushed out of Apple in 1985 (Deutschman, 2001). Jobs then wandered a bit in a tech wilderness before founding NeXT Computer, and returning to enacting the creative genius and visionary, but this time in a slimmer organisation where he has more control than he had at Apple. In 1986, he set up Pixar and revolutionised computer animation. Biographies of Jobs recurrently narrate the period of 1986–1996 as one of Jobs wandering in a virtual desert (even though he built Pixar into a billion-dollar business in the period). The scene is then set for the second coming of Jobs in which he returned to take the helm at Apple in 1997. The decade away from Apple represents first an atonement for his earlier sins of hubris and then becomes a vindication of his vision for personal computing, which his biographers view retrospectively as having laid the foundation on which Jobs would lead Apple along the path to becoming the global colossus it is today.

The Breakthrough What makes a story more than a strict chronological recounting of events is a plot in which decision points confront the characters, who, having made a decision, willing or not, find that the course of their life is changed. One test of the narrativity of a text is that it represents passage of time and change through alteration of the course of events. We should therefore not be surprised that a series of significant turning points or breakthroughs structure popular stories about famous geeks. Some of these turning points have taken on mythical status in geek culture, such as when Steve Jobs first saw the graphical user interface that had been developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) (Nicholson, 2014, chapter 9). In narrative research, the life-altering turning point has sometimes been termed an epiphany (the word comes to us from Christian theology), which is (for some narrative analysts if not Christian theologians) a key pivot point around which a life story is organised. Epiphanies connect key events into meaningful sequences (Denzin, 1989a). The epiphany enables an author to construct dramatic pivot points that simplify messy and complex histories. Geek success stories draw on established dramatic conventions for rendering epiphanies in mainstream film and fiction on scientific and technical subjects: the accidental discovery; the late night breakthrough after days of superhuman concentration; the outsider/maverick/amateur seeing more clearly than the insiders/

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experts; the character’s extreme reaction to a point of frustration leading to a breakthrough; the missed opportunity due to making a banal choice, which later turns out to have profound consequences. Epiphany frames that oft-related story of Steve Jobs visiting Xerox PARC in 1979: during that visit Jobs encountered work on the Graphical User Interface and is supposed to have had a revelation that he had seen the future of all personal computing (Hiltzik, 2000; Smith & Alexander, 1999). From that epiphany comes the Lisa and the Mac; and the rest is history. Epiphany also frames the almost equally often retold story of how Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen got involved in the launch of the first International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) Personal Computer. In 1980, computer giant IBM requested a proposal for an operating system for its planned launch of a PC from Gary Kildall’s Digital Research; variants of the story claim that Kildall was out flying his private aircraft when the IBM executives called in at his offices, thus leaving an opening for Bill Gates, of the then tiny Microsoft, to negotiate a contract to supply IBM with what would become Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) and evolve into the most widely used operating system for PCs (Nicholson, 2014). Tech’s most famous epiphany—the Jobs visit—was in fact not a singular turning point: there were more people and events implicated in the encounters than in the mythologising epiphanies through which these stories circulate (Gladwell, 2011; Hiltzik, 2011). Eureka/breakthrough epiphanies recur in geek culture for the same reason they recur elsewhere: they facilitate simple dramatisation and plotting of events and enable neat explanations for complicated interactions and sequences of events. Plotting complex histories around epiphanies enables characterisation of the genius figure; an economical and elegant way to portray genius is to frame events through the eureka moment. A reader of biographies and popular histories of tech cannot but notice the frequent assertion that the USA is a uniquely innovative nation. In The New New Thing,3 Michael Lewis (2000) writes that Europeans did not ‘get’ tech; in his account ‘the British’ are represented as old fashioned and a bit ignorant. In similar vein, Stross (2013) and Isaacson (2015), among others, variously assert that there is a uniquely inventive and 3  The work was composed in the late 1990s. Lewis sets out on a quest to find the most successful tech entrepreneur; the central character in his story is Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape.

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entrepreneurial element in the ‘American character’, which is seen to account in large measure for the success of Silicon Valley. Apart from the fact of this literature being largely of US origin, there is no doubt that the centre of innovation in information technologies has been in the USA from the first emergence of the field immediately after the Second World War until the present. Key innovations in transistors, microprocessors, magnetic storage, personal computing, the Internet and most recently the app economy have either originated in or been consolidated and fully marketised in the USA.  Important developments occurred in the UK, and the consumer electronics industries of Japan and South Korea are world leaders, but the national core of research and development in information technologies remains the USA, especially but by no means exclusively, Silicon Valley. In popular geek stories, American innovation is frequently linked with a putative American genius, manifesting the innovative national character in real persons. Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson is fascinated by genius, which is the central idea in his widely read biographies of Leonardo da Vinci (2017b) and Albert Einstein (2017a). He is especially keen on the idea of American genius, of which he sees Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin (Isaacson, 2003) as two paradigmatic examples. In his Jobs and Franklin biographies, Isaacson leans towards assigning the motor of events to the unique individual rather than to structural forces, which is in keeping with his project to narrate the life of an individual genius. By contrast, in The Innovators, where Isaacson’s compass extends to the UK to include Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing, he looks beyond the USA and writes about more than one central character. In Innovators, Isaacson gives greater weight to wider social and structural factors in creating the context in which individuals were able to innovate. In The Innovators (2014), Isaacson, as in his Jobs biography, reflects on the method of biographical writing, acknowledging the tension between rendering historical events as the outcome of uniquely gifted individuals, on the one hand, and on the other, rendering events as the outcome of structural forces. As have others who wrote on Jobs’ life and work (Blumenthal, 2012; Deutschman, 2000; Moritz, 2009; Stross, 1993), Isaacson ponders what weight to give to a ‘great person’ view of history—that the driving force in history is the thought and action of great individuals—before deciding that the uniquely creative individual does matter after all. An individualistic methodology in biography is congruent with the neoliberal ideology that is prevalent in some areas of geek culture, as we will see in a later

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chapter. Isaacson is renowned as a journalist and biographer, whose work on Jobs and computer tech history (Isaacson, 2014) lies at the informed and thoughtful end of the spectrum of tech journalism. At the other— mass market—end of that spectrum the tone of the writing is sensationalist and little concerned with the methodological subtleties of biographical and historical writing. It is safe to assume that many of the readers of work in the latter grouping are deemed by the authors to share the basic assumption that the USA is exceptional and that that exceptionalism is made manifest in the emergence of the heroic geek founders of tech firms.

The Gender of the Geek If you use a computing device then you owe a debt to Ada Lovelace: this claim opens a short film by Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency project, in which Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) is given her due as the first computer programmer.4 The film aims to vindicate Lovelace and to redress her marginalisation in computing history. The documentary makes the point that Lovelace has too long been portrayed as the junior partner in collaboration with Charles Babbage. Women are often represented as outsiders in tech, and seldom as geeks (Chang, 2018), despite many women working in computing, women making up the greater part of consumers of many core digital commodities, and significant numbers of women having been involved in computing from its inception. Notwithstanding their pioneering work in computing, women are today underrepresented in tech employment in Silicon Valley (Molla & Lightner, 2016), and it is worth asking why. In the 1940s and 1950s, computing was seen as largely clerical and lower status and therefore more suited to women in a patriarchally structured division of intellectual labour. As computing became a field that expanded from the late 1960s to influence more and more areas of modern life its prestige grew and so did the proportion of men, with the result that women were pushed to the margins (Ensmenger, 2010). The marginalisation of women in tech is argued to be attributable to the very structure and organisation of the work of software production, long working hours that favour young single males, sexist language in the very discourse 4  https://feministfrequency.com/video/reflecting-on-the-brilliance-of-ada-lovelace/. There has been a substantial amount of work published on Lovelace’s life in recent years (Essinger, 2013a, 2013b; Stein, 2004; Woolley, 2002).

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of  computer technology (Lin, 2008; Lin & den Besten, 2018), and a generally unwelcoming environment for women in the tech workplace (Chang, 2018). Women in tech have not been silent. A growing body of US-focused writing by tech insiders (Sandberg, 2015), activists, and journalists (Cabot, 2018; Newnham, 2016) is challenging misrepresentation and mistreatment of women in Silicon Valley and tech more broadly. That writing, much of it in story form, uses experiential accounts to challenge stereotypes of women as less technically able and to document various forms of sexism in tech. These stories acknowledge the gender problem; they advocate mainstream reforms and emphasise efforts to individual women in tech to devise strategies to advance their careers (Wheeler, 2017); the role-­ model and hero remain the central character types here, except that the gender is now female. As with much mainstream tech storytelling, socially inequality and wealth and power disparity are barely acknowledged, never mind informing the analysis and advice. The figures of the leader and founder are glorified and the actual people whose lives are recounted are intended to serve as role models. In these stories, sexism is acknowledged, mostly represented as an obstacle which can be overcome by changes in attitudes and policy. There is no real questioning of the underlying assumption of private enterprise, and no recognition that capitalism itself might be part of the problem.5 There are no precise measures of the extent of sexism in tech, but there is evidence that the environment can be hostile to women, and it is this hostility to which the vindicating narratives of women in tech are a response. Few, if any, sociologists would accept the assertion, made by male software engineer James Damore (2014) in his infamous ‘Google memo’, that women might be inherently less suited than men to careers in software engineering and that ‘left-leaning’ bias at firms like Google represses discussion of this issue. Whatever the merit of Damore’s— bizarre—claim that ‘leftist’ ideology pervades the corporate culture of Google (Damore, 2017), the basic claims of innate gender differences in computing aptitude and ability have been refuted (Paoletta, 2017; Saini, 2017). Damore’s is one among other stories narrated by some men in tech in which it is men are who the victims of gender discrimination and repres5  In what is perhaps the most critical collection in this area (Shevinsky, 2015), with stories from people rarely represented in tech, the ultimate aim still remains for women to succeed in the existing tech ecosystem.

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sive political correctness (Bowles, 2017; Solon, 2017). Reading some of these accounts, one might even think that racialised white male geeks are an embattled minority in Silicon Valley. But all available data on tech employment suggest that racialised white men are neither embattled nor a minority in the Valley, or in tech generally. What is clear is that women, and especially women labelled as Black and Hispanic, are rare in tech in the USA. For ethnic minority women who have written about their experiences working in tech, their sense of being perceived as ‘out of place’ is a central theme in their stories (Joy, 2015; Taylor in Wheeler & Dyson, 2017). When Jamie Broadnax, who is female, racialised Black, and a self-described nerd, searched in 2012 for ‘Black girl nerd’ on Google, she says that she received no results. It seemed that people with her demographic profile were invisible in geek culture. She set out to redress the lack, creating the Black Girl Nerds website.6 Given that women of all ethnicities7 and ethnic minorities of all genders fully participate as consumers of digital technologies, the statistical and narrative underrepresentation of these groups in tech employment and media portrayals of geek culture is a fact that calls for some explanation. There is no doubt a problem with sexism in tech (Anonymous, 2016; Fusion, 2016; Salter & Blodgett, 2012); and the question of ethnic diversity in the field may be even more acute (Singleton, 2015). Taking the US-centric Web as our starting point, if women, in general, are underrepresented in online geek culture, then ethnic minority women are virtually invisible. Applying the gender and ethnic template of US identities (there are many ways to think about ethnic identity, but most discussion of ethnicity in geek culture is US-centric, and so I use the US labels for ethnicity) to geek culture, we see that most geeks who get represented are male and racialised white; the next most common group are males of either South or East Asian ethnicity; next comes racialised White women and then women of South and East Asian background, with Black and Hispanic women being rarely seen (Jeong, 2017; Ricker, 2015). ‘Silicon Valley has for years accommodated a fringe element of men who say women are ruining the tech world’ according to Nellie Bowles (2017) in a New York Times article about the growing male backlash against women in tech. Whether embattled or not, male geeks at times do themselves no favours. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth found himself in some trouble when, at a 2009 Linux conference, he remarked that  https://blackgirlnerds.com/creator/jamie-broadnax/  Ethnic representation in tech is itself an area of ongoing debate and research, which I do not have the space to explore in this work. 6 7

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Ubuntu developers should give greater consideration to consider non-­ technical users, so that ‘explaining to girls what we actually do’ could be made easier. There was a furious reaction from women and some men in tech; Shuttleworth issued a full apology (Schroder, 2009; skud, 2009; Sneddon, 2010). In 2014, Microsoft’s male Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Satya Nadella, while seeming to acknowledge the gender pay gap in tech, advised women in the field to trust in karma, instead of asking for a pay increase (Staff & Agencies, 2014). Again, the reaction was swift and vociferous. Nadella issued a full apology. Some male geeks seem to have difficulty seeing women in the tech field as their equals (Bowles, 2016; Chang, 2018; Simon-Lewis, 2017). The protagonist in much geek storytelling is presumed to be male; when the protagonist must impart knowledge to someone outside the geek community, that outside someone is often presumed to be female: as an example consider that when talking about making a system accessible to non-expert users, some male computer geeks use a metaphorical expression of the form ‘make it simple so that your grandmother/mother/sister’ can understand it. When confronted with this kind of evidence of sexism, many male geeks often go on the defensive (Newcomer, 2013; Simpson, 2013), denying sexist intent, or even attacking the messenger for what they see as bringing divisive sexual politics into what is for them a meritocratic and gender-blind geek culture. One element of an explanation for the defensive reaction to charges of sexism is that some male geeks believe that cognitive styles are gendered— a view which is hotly contested (Fine, 2011; Saini, 2017)—and supposedly male-oriented ways of thinking are better suited for computing. It would then not be surprising—so the defence of the status quo runs—that men predominate in tech. Another explanatory element may be found in the self-image of many male geeks as having a ‘fictive ethnicity’ that is built on a presumed shared set of formative experiences such as being marginalised for interest in geek subjects, and exclusion from the heteronormative sexual economy by desired women who are assumed to prefer more conventionally masculine men (Cross, 2015). We see the injured geek reacting angrily in the film Social Network, when the Zuckerberg main character, having been rejected by a woman he desired, enacts the ultimate nerd revenge by building an app that rates women on physical appearance. In its most extreme form, the male geek response to a sense of injured identity has manifested in the misogynist online activity of the alt-right (Nagle, 2017).

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The Geek’s Journey Popular non-fiction and journalistic accounts of famous hackers (Mitnick 2011; Torvalds & Diamond 2011; Williams 2002) and their work use variations on the classic three-act structure of crisis followed by struggle and then resolution, with the action usually opening at some point of crisis in the life of the hacker, and working backward to the early development of the hacker. These texts draw on standard master plots (Abbott, 2008, p. 236) of the hero’s journey (Vogler, 2007), a voyage of discovery, the coming of age story, the confessional, and the conversion story. Free as in Freedom (Williams, 2002), a biography of Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman, opens in 1980 in a quintessential geek space a computer lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our hero Stallman is fighting with a printer: there is a bug in the software that controls the printer, and Stallman is frustrated because he cannot get access to the source code of the printer’s software and therefore cannot diagnose and fix the problem himself. The text frames the battle with the printer as an epiphany from which Stallman’s lifelong campaign for Free Software follows. As we read, we discover details of technical problems and the steps Stallman takes to address them. By looking over Stallman’s shoulder, we discover fundamental aspects of his character that are in keeping with the commonplace understanding of geek personality: Stallman is bright, a loner, and enjoys getting inside complex systems to figure out how they work. Then, in the second chapter of the book, we see the mature Stallman evangelising the benefits of Free Software. In chapter three of the book, we return to Stallman’s childhood, which is storied as that of a child prodigy who was misunderstood by teachers and was socially ostracised. Stallman would eventually be vindicated and his genius recognised. Free as in Freedom is partly coming of age story and partly hero’s journey. In Rebel Code (Moody, 2001), we find similar plotting of early brilliance, frustration at proprietary technology, and an epiphany that leads to a Free Software path in a story of how Linus Torvalds developed Linux. Again, a precocious youngster becomes a crack coder; in Torvald’s case, as related by Moody, the point of frustration was not having access to a free and open source version of UNIX that he could run on his PC compatible. He decided to build his own version of UNIX in response. By the time he had settled in to write his life story in Ghost in the Wires, Kevin Mitnick, after spending time in prison for criminal hacking, had become an ethical hacker (Mitnick, 2011) and was working as a computer security

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consultant. Ghost in the Wires opens with a preface that drops the reader into the middle of the action: Mitnick is about to sneak into a secure building using a false identity card that he had earlier fabricated. He aims to get physical access to a computer workstation, from which he will hack into a secure computer network. As with the Stallman printer incident, the plot has the hacker confronted by a problem; the action and setting reveal to us the clever and insatiably curious character of the hacker. Mitnick’s narrative combines the confessional and coming of age tales. Working back from his biographical present as a famous hacker writing his life story, Mitnick plots events into a personal story that explains his growth into the hacker he eventually became. With the film War Games in 1980, geek stories began to move onto the screen. We should not be surprised that some reduction in character complexity occurs when geek biography is translated from book to mainstream film, if only because of the roughly two-hour length of mainstream feature films. Length aside, the two media have different properties and storytelling works differently on screen from on the page. Within the film genre, dramas intended for a general audience are built on a handful of well-worn narrative templates, among which is the hero’s journey, often combined with the now-familiar theme of misunderstood genius. Just such an apparatus is used to retell the life stories of Julian Assange and Alan Turing mainstream film. In the Fifth Estate (Condon et al., 2014) and the Imitation Game (Tyldum, 2014), nuanced biographies of Assange (Assange & Dreyfus, 2011) and Turing (Hodges, 1992) were recrafted to meet the requirements of portraying the uber-geek as an easily ­recognisable type. It would be pointless to complain that Hollywood oversimplifies and uses stereotyping characterisations of geeks, since the storytelling conventions of mainstream filmmaking are an integral part of a global media culture (Berger, 1997); it nonetheless matters for the current discussion that we should consider the consequences of adapting printed geek biography for the screen. In The Imitation Game, the requirements of a two-hour feature film mean that Alan Turing’s childhood is compacted into several scenes where he is bullied at boarding school and is shown to be obsessed with having particular combinations of colours and shapes of vegetables on his plate (an unsubtle reference to some form of autism, perhaps?). He has just one close friend. He finds communication in general difficult and it is mostly through mathematics that he can fully express himself. These scenes all serve to set the stage for rendering the adult obsessive and compulsive Turing and his work on Enigma. Hodges’ 570-page biography of Turing, which informed the film (though to what to an extent is

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not clear), renders a far more complex picture. For Hodges, Turing was indeed socially awkward, and had been bullied at school, but rather than letting these facts suggest themselves as a simplistic prefiguration of who Turing would become as an adult, Hodges treats them as elements in a detailed and nuanced life account, which renders the social and cultural context for Turing’s childhood. Hodges shows that while Turing was introverted and awkward, he was also of a particular time and social setting in early to mid-­twentieth century England, where boys were socialised to repress a large part of the human emotional spectrum. In Hodges’ biography Turing is a person formed from a complex interplay of the individual and social-­cultural process, but on screen in the Imitation Game, Turing is one-­dimensional. In Underground, the account co-authored by journalist Suelette Dreyfruss and Assange, a considerable portion of the text is devoted to the culture and relations of the early hacker community in which Assange matured. As in the Hodges biography of Turing, Underground treats the environment in which the central character is formed not as an iron determinant but as a field with which the main character is in constant interaction. That subtlety is missing in The Fifth Estate.

Start-up: Founders’ Stories The figure of the founder is a central character in geek storytelling and the environment of the start-up is a recurrent setting. Life narratives of those individuals who founded Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook stand out from the extensive body of work on tech founders and start-ups, and in turn from the long-established sub-genre of entrepreneur biography. We find here (as I have already discussed several biographies of Steve Jobs, I will not cite these here) works on the Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Beahm, 2014; Brandt, 2011; McPherson, 2010) on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (Stone, 2014); various accounts of the life and work of Microsoft founder Bill Gates (Cheongbi, 2009; Ilian, 2015; Manes, 2013; Wallace & Erickson, 1992); and numerous books and a feature film on the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Fincher, 2011; Kirkpatrick, 2011; Lacy, 2009; Mezrich, 2010). Founder and start-up stories are shaped by the hero-leader archetype (Shadraconis, 2013) and the unfolding genius master plot. The founder main character is shown to be smarter and more driven than other people, but it takes a series of challenges and setbacks to surface these crucial qualities. Once the main character realises and has it recognised that they are indeed

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smarter and more driven than others, then their life course and that of the firm they founded follows a sequence of innovations. Both character and technology reveal themselves in the systems and platforms that the central actors build. As we look back from the present of the successful tech firm, we are invited to look back to earlier life stages of the founder, and we see there the embryonic hero-innovator-genius. Founder biographies are stories; they are also histories that assume steady progress in technology and society, culminating in the tech present of Silicon Valley, and only sensible when viewed from that present. These stories are mechanically evolutionist, narrating the present as the culmination of a sequence of failures and struggles and breakthroughs that, through a process of technological social Darwinist selection, ultimately yields the innovations on which hero-founders build successful tech companies (Stone, 2017). The underlying political worldview of these works is based on a belief in the inherent fairness of capitalist free enterprise. Founder stories deploy the imagery and characterisation, admiration for the self-made person, that is typical of contemporary mythologies of celebrity in the USA (Mcadams, 2013). The start-up mantra of failing often and early (Stross, 2013) aligns neatly with a focus on youth (Ross, 2017) in geek stories of all kinds, which often narrate impatience with traditional expertise of the kind associated with academia. Even though cutting-edge knowledge is highly valued in geek culture, and the big tech firms often model their workplaces on an idealised campus, heroic geek narrative gives short shrift to actual academia, with professors frequently portrayed as too slow and ponderous to keep up with the fast pace of tech.8 In computer geek start-up stories, we often find the hero breaking free of the academic cloister, following in the path of the dropouts who founded Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook. The academy would come to court the dropouts: the world’s major universities pay eager attention to Zuckerberg and Gates and did to the late Steve Jobs. Microsoft and Apple built vast corporate headquarters that they termed campuses, but these are not universities: they run on a logic driven by engineering and markets rather than the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself (universities are becoming more like corporations, but that is another discussion). Nonetheless, the tech giants are among the largest employers of PhD computer scientists, with research units that are better endowed 8  Paypal founder, libertarian and hero founder Peter Thiel created a fund to encourage young people to leave university and work fulltime to get start-ups going (Wolfe, 2017); Paul Grahams’ Y-Combinator project has as one of its premises that a start-up hothouse is a better preparation for would-be tech entrepreneurs than time at university (Stross, 2013).

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than all but a handful of the world’s top universities. While leading tech firms pride themselves on providing an environment where ideas flow freely and experimentation is encouraged (Levy, 2011; Schmidt & Rosenberg, 2015), there is a dark side to tech if you find yourself at the sharp end of the tech workplace, in a gig economy writing code or creating digital content on less than the minimum wage (Dyer-Witheford, 2015; Terranova, 2000), or if you are one of the low-wage cooks, cleaners, and security guards, whose stories are not celebrated, but whose labour enables the super geeks to be coding ninjas and rock stars.9 At 50 years of age, Dan Lyons (2016) had his life disrupted when he was made redundant from his long-held job as a technology journalist for Newsweek. His account begins with him going onto the job market to find that even though tech is a young person’s field, his journalist skill can fill a niche. Lyons takes up the post of ‘Fellow’ at a software service firm that sells marketing software to small businesses. Thus begins Disrupted, Lyon’s exploration of the new digital economy, which he finds to be permeated with narcissism, greed, and at times, plain stupidity. As Lyons sees it, one fundamental problem with tech is that there is a flood of spare capital washing over digital start-ups (99 per cent of which fail), desperately seeking sources of return. In big tech, there is far more money than sense, it seems to him. Lyons found many of his co-workers to be childishly self-centred, obsessed with flowery aphoristic language and feel-good gestures. Where Ross (2017) sees a bubbling cauldron of creative youth, Lyons sees ignorance and inexperience covered up with bravado and marketing babble. Lyons constantly wonders if anybody sees through the façade of narcissism and pretentiousness of people holding what anthropologist David Graeber (2018) termed ‘bullshit jobs’. We cringe with Lyons as he lampoons this Panglossian workplace: a manager brings a teddy bear to meetings, and people at these meetings are encouraged to address the stuffed toy; powerful insiders receive a steady stream of praise from peers and subservient juniors. Disrupted sits in a long tradition of the insider journalistic exposé of sectors which, under normal circumstances, have the power and financial clout to manage their portrayal in a positive light. The form of the story 9  Following Dyer-Witheford’s (1999), Terranova’s (2000) and Benner’s (2002) pioneering work on labour in the digital economy, there is a growing body of stories from the dark underbelly of tech, many focusing on the inequality and marginalisation that is a by-product of the vast wealth generated by big tech (e.g. Pein, 2018; Weigel, 2017).

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Lyon’s tells is not exceptional, following as it does a familiar plot of the unanticipated midcareer change and the encounter of a middle-aged man with people younger and presumably abler than he is. What does make this story a compelling read, apart from the author’s acerbic style, is the clarity and wit that he brings to his observations of Silicon Valley culture, the same that he brought to his work as a writer and editor on HBO’s Silicon Valley comedy-drama. The book’s thematic concerns have to do with greed, egotism, people being rewarded beyond their abilities in a sector awash with money, and the vacuity and cynicism of turbocharged marketing.

Summary Journalistic and fictional representations of geeks construct mythologies of the heroic tech founder. Stereotypical ideas of the awkward genius are invoked for what is supposed to make geeks worthy of the attention of the wider public. Geeks are presumed to be male, despite the presence of women at all levels from the very beginning of computing, and many male geeks seem to fear or resent the presence of women in the computing field. The heroic archetype and hero’s journey plot shape accounts of the many biographies of Apple founder Steve Jobs, the most storied of tech founders, who in film and print biographies is represented as the very essence of a creative genius. Popular stories about Jobs follow established narrative templates of discovery, challenge, atonement, and redemption and these templates recur across the body of popular writing on tech founders. We saw that one of the ways we recognise a geek hero/genius is by identifying a major technical breakthrough for which that geek was responsible. Why are these plots and characters so common in writing about geeks? Geek and hacker biographies based on the heroic character archetype and the hero’s journey plot template make for texts that fit easily into familiar cultural frames, but that familiarity comes at a price: heroic characters and their mythic journeys obscure as much as they reveal when used in narrating the lives of real people. It may seem quaint in the era of infotainment, but as a sociologist, I think it is important to distinguish entertainment from informed research. Individuals geeks, even the most famous ones, are entangled in institutions and social relationships, the rendering of which requires complex and sociologically imaginative (Mills, 2000) accounts that balance biography, social forces, and history, akin to what

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anthropologist Clifford Geertz termed ‘thick description’ (1993) or sociologist Norman Denzin (1989a, 1989b) terms ‘interpretive interactionism’ and ‘interpretive biography’. With few exceptions (most notably Isaacson, 2014, 2015), popular geek biography and history, a largely US-centric body of text, is built from well-worn templates of Promethean moments, heroic characters, and hero’s journey plots. We will consider why this might be so in a later chapter.

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Lacy, S. (2009). The Facebook Story: The People, the Hype and the Deals Behind the Giants of Web 2.0. Crimson Publishing. Larsson, S. (2008). The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Quercus. Levy, S. (2011). In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. Simon & Schuster. Lewis, M. (2000). The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story: How Some Man You’ve Never Heard of Just Changed Your Life. London: Hodder Paperbacks. Lin, Y. (2008). Techno-Feminist View on the Open Source Software Development. In Global Information Technologies: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (pp. 3365–3373). Retrieved from https://www.igi-global.com/ chapter/techno-feminist-view-open-source/19185 Lin, Y., & den Besten, M. (2018). Gendered Work Culture in Free/Libre Open Source Software Development. Gender, Work and Organization. https://doi. org/10.1111/gwao.12255. Lyons, D. (2016). Disrupted: Bean Bags, Big Money, and Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-up Bubble (Main). London: Atlantic Books. Manes, S. (2013). Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America. Cadwallader & Stern. Mcadams, D. P. (2013). The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By – Revised And Expanded Edition (Revised and Expanded ed.). New  York: Oxford University Press. McPherson, S. S. (2010). Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Founders of Google. Twenty-­ First Century Books (CT). Mezrich, B. (2010). The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook (Film Tie-In ed.). London: Arrow. Mills, C.  W. (2000). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitnick, K. (2011). Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures As the World’s Most Wanted Hacker. Little Brown & Co (T). Molla, R., & Lightner, R. (2016, April 10). Diversity in Tech Companies. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://graphics.wsj.com/diversity-intech-companies Moody, G. (2001). Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. London and New York, NY: Allen Lane. Moritz, M. (2009). Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs, the Creation of Apple, and How It Changed the World. London: Duckworth Overlook. Nagle, A. (2017). Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-right. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books. Newcomer, E. (2013, December 26). YC’s Paul Graham: The Complete Interview. Retrieved November 10, 2017, from https://www.theinformation.com/ YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete-Interview Newnham, D. (2016). Female Innovators at Work: Women on Top of Tech (1st ed.). Berkeley, CA: Apress.

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CHAPTER 3

Platform War Stories

Abstract  Geeks have often enjoyed a fractious relationship with non-­ techies, but nowhere near as toxic as their relationships with other geeks who dare to have slightly different tech preferences. Geeks have always organised themselves along techno-tribal lines. Heated exchanges and tribal conflicts go back to the earliest days of personal computing. This chapter examines how platform war stories construct the ‘self’ and the ‘enemy’, and how both mindshare and market share are constructed and debated by plotting numbers as well as stories. Keywords  Platform • Mindshare • Plot • Marketshare Before we consider platform switching stories, we should pause to ask: what is a platform? There is no straightforward answer beyond a platform providing hardware and software on which we can operate. A platform can connect producers and consumers, users to other users, and firms to other firms (Srnicek, 2016). When hardware and software are combined into a system that enables people to use digital technology for work, creativity, and play, we have a platform. The platform is the base on which programmers and designers build the kinds of user experiences in applications or games that will attract users in the kind of numbers that hopefully make the platform a viable target for further development; this, in turn, makes the platform more prominent in the public eye and more attractive to more users. Familiar platforms are operating systems such as © The Author(s) 2019 B. Alleyne, Geek and Hacker Stories, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95819-1_3

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Windows or Mac OS; the Sony PlayStation or Microsoft Xbox in the gaming world; or Google’s Android for mobile phones. At an even deeper level, we can view Intel’s microprocessor architecture as a platform for desktop and laptop PCs. In hardware maker communities, the Arduino and Raspberry Pi are major platforms. The platform enables human creativity and exploration of computer systems, but it also constrains what we can do. In the early 1980s, when computer screens offered low-resolution monochrome or at best several hundred colours, designers of application software and digital media were constrained by these technological capabilities. At the same time, having to work within these constraints unleashed a wave of creative effort to make the most of what was afforded by existing PC platforms like the Sinclair Spectrum or the Apple II. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, when even cheap mobile phones have high-resolution colour displays, photorealism is a universal feature offered by all smartphone platforms. There is both virtue and vice in the life cycles of platforms. When a platform first catches the attention of consumers and begins to expand in the market, more developers are attracted to build software and hardware on that platform, which in turn makes the platform more attractive to more consumers; this process is a virtuous circle, of which the growth of Apple’s ecosystem for its smartphones and tablets is one of the best examples. In contrast, when a platform becomes less attractive to developers, perhaps because the stewards of the platform fail to innovate quickly enough to keep with competing platforms, the flow of new or improved applications and user experiences for that platform slows down, which makes the platform less attractive to consumers, who then turn their attention elsewhere. As users leave the platform, it becomes even less attractive to developers. In this scenario, we have a vicious circle, or rather a death spiral, as narrated in histories of the last days of the Symbian mobile phone platform (Wood, 2014), the fall of the Blackberry smartphone (McNish, 2015), and the demise of the Commodore Amiga (Bagnall, 2017).

Plotting the Switch While many geeks define themselves in terms of their loyalty to a platform such as PlayStation or Android (Anderson, 2014), it is also the case that many geeks relate stories about how and why they changed platforms.

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Given the rapid pace of development in digital tech, only the youngest of geeks will know only one platform in their areas of interest; for most geeks, the norm is to have lived through, whether by choice or circumstance, several platform changes. Loyalty to a platform and curiosity regarding other technology platforms are two strands of geek culture that can lead in opposite directions: should you stay on your current platform or should you move to see what life is like on some other platform? The options are not limited to just these two since a person can use several platforms at once, and many geeks pride themselves on having multiplatform interests. The geeks who are loyal to the platform tend to be the most vocal. Geeks did not invent the conversion master plots that shape platform switching stories; as with the hero’s journey and coming of age plots that we encountered in the previous chapter, the conversion master plot is deeply embedded in common culture. The conversion master plot is as old as literature itself, and one of the longest established comes to us from the history of Christianity: the epiphany and then eventual conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus is readily recognisable in form if not detail, even to a secular humanist like the author. In his anthropological work on the narratives of people who had converted to evangelical Christianity, Stromberg (1990, 2008) found that converts used ideological language to account for their conversion and to manage problems that endured after conversion. Stomberg notes that many people, including Christians, claim to have had their lives transformed as a result of coming into contact with some organised system of symbols (which is an ideology for Stromberg). The conversion is not to be taken as a discrete event, but as an ongoing process, which has to be managed by the convert. In narrating and managing the ongoing conversion, the convert will draw upon the system of symbols provided by the thought and practice of the new belief system. Following Stromberg’s lead, in much of the remainder of this chapter, I shall examine the ideological language deployed by geeks in their platform conversion stories to indicate why and how they changed platforms and to justify the decision to change. I am indeed aware that geeks and evangelical Christians have no obvious ideological similarity; I do not draw the parallel arbitrarily, however. Kelty found that the geeks he worked with were fond of stories about the Protestant Reformation, which they saw as parallel to their own Free Software movement in the battle against proprietary software figured as

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the Catholic Church: ‘Allegories of Protestant revolt allow geeks to make sense of the relationship between the state (the monarchy), large corporations (the Catholic Church), and small start-ups, individual programmers, and adepts among whom they spend most of their time (Protestant reformers)’ (Kelty, 2008, pp. 66–67). Moreover, the term ‘evangelist’ is widely used in tech circles to refer to someone whose role is to promote, to proselytise on behalf of a particular platform or tech brand (Greant & Zickerman, 2005).1 The platform convert, having gone through the process of conversion, now takes on the role of an evangelist, spreads the good news about the life on the other side of the conversion. Consider ‘Linux Gamer’,2 who uses Linux exclusively; his YouTube channel is dedicated to spreading the word about Linux gaming, offering reviews and technical advice on how to get the best out of Linux for entertainment. The basic premise of Linux Gamer’s channel is that Microsoft Windows is restrictive and unreliable; his main reasons for using Linux are that it is free and open, and it is more enjoyable than Windows. For Linux Gamer using Linux is a different and better way of personal computing. He presents himself as a guide who will take you into the new territory that opens after you switch to Linux. More fun and greater knowledge and understanding are what you gain bewitching to Linux, according to the Linux Gamer. In the similar evangelical vein, in 2014, one ZDNet author claimed that using a Mac would make you not only more productive but also happier (Casserly, 2014).3 Freedom, fun, coolness, and reliability are recurrent themes in stories by geek vloggers and tech journalists about switching personal computing platforms. While curiosity stimulates many geeks to switch platform, it is frustration that lies at the heart of the most compelling platform switching stories. Such stories open with our geek main character in crisis, facing technical problems on their computing system (Chinchilla, 2017a, 2017b; 1  Another cultural model for geek conversion stories if found in the travellers’ tales that are the ancestors of the ethnography; in these tales, someone travels to a faraway place, encounters a new culture and society, and is immersed in the new way of life’, even ‘going native’ for a time. The accounts of Ahmad Ibn Faldan (b. 921) and Marco Polo (1254–1324) are two of the earliest examples (Lunde & Stone, 2011; Polo, 2016). The journey of conversion and revelation are recurrent elements in geek platform switching stories 2  See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K44FFHrVEEw 3  See: http://switchtoamac.com/site/why-are-macs-becoming-more-popular.html

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Hern, 2017; Williams, 2013).4 So that we can see how the system or software is a problem, we will in a conversion story often meet the geek main character as he/she is attempting to do something that is part of his/her normal work or play routine: writing a document; editing some code; editing a video; and loading a game. Our main character is narrated as having a reasonable expectation that the task he/she is carrying out would be accomplished, but things do not proceed as expected. The next stage is one of increasing frustration. Our geek main character might be required, by the technical constraints of the platform she/he is using, to carry out the task in a way that is a departure from how she/he had already learnt to work on another system or without a computer (remember we are thinking of computer-based platforms here), or the present platform might exhibit an ‘unintuitive’ interface or buggy behaviour. At this point in the narration, the user constructs the technological or aesthetic obstacle that is frustrating their use of the computing system: the user narrates wanting to use the problematic platform to do something ‘reasonable’, but is prevented by some aspect of the system that is attributed by the user to poor design or engineering or even bad politics. It is important to show that the narrating user is struggling to do something that any reasonable person would expect to be achievable without too much bother on the computing system in use: having a Windows machine slowed by malware is a frequent scenario in switching stories. In making the attribution, the user can draw upon online sources for help. These forums are sites where the stories of previous switchers are linked, so there is an already existing body of discourse that provides the language needed to construct the obstacle. The increased level of frustration our geek character is now experiencing leads them to seek out a solution to the problem. In the platform switching story, the solution is frequently a drastic one: the problems that our geek main character is fighting against are diagnosed—usually by a knowledgeable person (the classic figure of the guide in quest narratives)— as fundamental, deep-seated, and embedded in the very platform that our 4  There is a rich stock of switching stories online, with those covering moving between Windows and Mac/Linux, moving between IOS and Android, and moving between PlayStation and Xbox being especially numerous. For this project I focussed on stories moving between Windows and Mac or Linux. On switching to an Apple Mac, see http://www. switchtoamac.com/site/switch_stories/; on switching to Linux, see https://opensource. com/tags/my-linux-story. There are too many switching stories on Reddit and YouTube to list here, but a good start would be to search for ‘switch to [platform or tech brand]’.

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geek character is using. So, the solution may well lie in changing platforms. Platform switching is no simple matter, as new skills and ways of thinking must be learned: our geek character is now embarked on a long journey of discovery. In the case of operating systems—the platform type I have in mind here—our geek character learns about an alternative system or software, often through personal recommendation or after searching online. The alternative promises to overcome or alleviate the problems encountered by our geek friend in their current platform environment. In attributing difficulties encountered on a computer system to its underlying operating system, the narrator of the switching story will draw upon the switching stories of those who made the change before, in many cases because the narrator may not have the technical knowledge or experience to diagnose the computing problems that confront them. A simple conversion will not lead to a good story. While the new platform shows promise, there are obstacles to be overcome, a learning curve that must be traversed, even if it is a shallow one. The switch is never entirely painless. But whether slowly or suddenly, our geek character discovers that the new system is faster or easier or more powerful, or all three. The key discovery is that the new system fits with the way our geek friend would like to work or at least promises to do so. Added on to this stage we might find a detailed sub-narrative of learning and discovery, sometimes including accounts of setbacks and almost complete reversals in which the geek main character is tempted to give up on trying to adopt the new platform and return to the old and the familiar. Finally, we come to the conversion, the big switch; our geek character comes to discover that the new system does fit their desired way of working, and they feel more empowered than frustrated. The switch to the new platform is now complete, and there remains only the work of platform evangelism: our geek character is now a convert and wants to share the good news of the new platform. The narrative structure of platform conversion stories echoes fundamental schema identified in narrative theory: the story moves through time from a starting static condition to increasing levels of challenge and transformation, then to a resolution in a transformed state (Alleyne, 2015, chapter 5). The meaning of the narrative is revealed through following the course of the story. Geeks employ the conversion story template in part because geeks are human beings and all human beings draw on a finite set of templates to tell stories (Boyd, 2010; Bruner, 1991, 2004). The knowledge on which computer geeks and hackers base their practice is

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technical and prima facie logical and deductive, but geeks live their lives in story forms drawn from wider storytelling cultures in which all geeks share because they are human. To turn platform switching story templates into actual stories, a broad spread of technical and philosophical issues in computer design and usability must be distilled to fit into the framing of the conversion plot. In establishing that the platform being left is less powerful or less secure or harder to use, complex issues of measurement at hardware, software and human response levels have to be reduced to some simple metric, such as the aggregate scores commonly used in hardware and software reviews. The decision to award say four out of five to one platform on usability, and three out of five to a different platform in the same comparative test can frequently lead to angry retorts by the loyalists of the lower-scoring platform. Geeks find it easy to accept ‘hard numbers’ such as clock speeds of electronic components, or power output figures of batteries, but when clock speeds and power outputs are combined with qualitative measures to form an overall score of a product or platform, there is considerable room for debate over methodology.5

When You Go Mac, You Never Go Back In a study of symbolism surrounding Apple, Robinson (2013, p.  71) writes that: ‘The religiosity of the Apple brand community can be traced to the function of the device in the lives of users and the way it is represented in the advertising’. I teach sociology at a university with renowned art and design departments; as I walk around, I see an ocean of Macs. I own a Mac myself, though I also own and use a Windows PC.  I have found Macs to be good systems, but not so much that I would use one exclusively for my own personal computing needs. Mac users say that they find their Macs ‘easier’ than a PC, or more reliable, or more secure; some talk about Apple’s superior design. Art, design, and media professionals often justify their use of Macs on the basis that the machines run all the software they need—usually the Adobe creative suite of specialised media production software—‘better’ as in more reliably than on a PC. The issue of performance of Adobe creative applications on Macs is contentious: benchmark tests of Adobe video editing software 5  When reviews award high scores to Apple products on widely read technology site www. theverge.com, there is often a flood of comments accusing the reviewers of pro-Apple bias.

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on comparably specified Macs and PCs are either inconclusive or may favour current PCs because Adobe’s software is better optimised for Nvidia graphics cards, which in 2017 and 2018 were not used in MacBook Pros.6 Since Adobe’s suite of multimedia creation software runs on both Mac and Windows, there is in principle a basis for comparing the preferred software suite of creative professionals on both platforms. In practice, however, there is far too much variation in conditions and methods to take too seriously the many comparison videos on YouTube that pitch Macs against PCs when both are running Adobe software. The responses to many of these videos are nonetheless worth attention for how commentary accounts for the sometimes poorer performance showing of Macs: when confronted with evidence of better performance of Adobe’s flagship video editing software—Premiere Pro—on Windows machines, Mac fans sometimes respond with the assertion that a video professional on a Mac should be using Apple’s Final Cut Pro (FCP), because FCP gives faster-­ rendering performance than Adobe Premiere Pro on a Mac. Here perhaps the famous loyalty of Mac users (Kahney, 2006; Robinson, 2013) might be trumping ‘objectivity’: because Adobe’s software is the standard for creatives, a person seeking employment in a creative industry must in most cases be able to claim Adobe competence. And everything else being equal, and given that time is money for freelancers, why would you not run Adobe’s creative software on the platform that gives the best performance? But then ‘everything else’ is not equal. When I ask people why they believe that their Macs perform faster and more reliably than Windows machines in general, I have sometimes found that Mac users have not used a PC for many years, so that they appear to be comparing their current often high-end Macs to PCs that were current years ago, but which would be deemed obsolete now. I am not suggesting that people are somehow mistaken in how they assess their Macs against PCs. I am claiming that, from my perspective as an ethnographer, choosing a Mac because it performs better is a choice more firmly grounded in affinity and taste than in ‘objective’ benchmarking criteria: Mac users, like people in general, value what they value. And here we find an instance of a distinctive feature of geek discourse at work: the articulation of affinity in the language of objectivity. 6  For a ‘review of reviews’ on MacBook Pro performance with Nvidia and AMD chips, see https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2017/04/09/macbook-pro-15-2016-with-amdradeon-pro-vs-dell-xps-15-2017-nvidia-gtx-1050-reviewers-take/#3117dc75117b

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Control variables and a level testing field do not figure prominently in how many people—from geeks to ‘normal’ users—justify their brand and platform loyalties. We must look beyond the technical and rational language of specifications and the carefully crafted language of focused engineering and user experience design as articulated by the most knowledgeable geeks, to uncover a more emotive connection through which hardware and applications feel good to users. It is the feeling that is fundamental; the talk of specs and design is justification for the feeling. Being a computer geek means having some basic grasp of test design and of benchmarking, but these are rational matters for reasoned discourse. Verbal combat over platforms cannot be understood only in terms of rational discourse based on evidence; we also have to read platform debates as exercises in rhetorical combat. Geeks draw on test data and specs to make their arguments, but they also resort to classic dirty tricks of misuse of numbers, exaggeration, and ad hominem. Slashdot, Reddit, and the YouTube stories and comment threads are all rewarding places to see geek platform discourse in the raw. In 2012, on its website Apple gave several reasons as to ‘why you will love a Mac’: • It comes with better software • It is made with better hardware • Has a better operating system • It is compatible with your stuff • It is the ultimate upgrade The first three of these five items are issues which, if it could be established that their claims are true, would constitute good reason for choosing a Mac. There is, though, no widely accepted method of establishing what is better software or a better operating system. What we have are judgements and debate. Perhaps better hardware would mean more reliable, or faster, but how do we judge these? The Web is awash with comparisons between Macs and Windows machines with the same basic hardware running ­comparable workloads, and there is no clear winner in the speed stakes. ‘Compatibility with your stuff’ sounds like a good thing, but then it is not clear how that would favour a Mac from over a PC; indeed the opposite is likely to be the case, in that Windows machines have a wider range of software and hardware peripherals available than any other traditional (as in not smartphone) personal computing platform.

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Not being able to rely on following ‘objective’ criteria in comparing software means that claims about the superiority of Apple’s software are opinions and based on the use of rhetorical devices. Of course, Mac fans and advocates do draw on studies, statistics, and tests, but on all of these, there is no universal agreement amongst computer professionals. Given all this, what explains the widely held view that Macs are better computers? Platform loyalty is in one sense the answer but what explains platform loyalty? The answer may have more to do with which platform media professionals use than any other reason. People in the media and design worlds have long settled on the Mac as their platform of choice, in part because Apple’s platform took an early lead in providing creative software for the print and then multimedia creatives. This early success with creative professionals solidified the place of the Mac as the system of choice in these fields (several media and design students told me that they could not turn up with a non-Apple laptop to pitch for work because they would be worried that other brands might give the wrong impression), and so the very people who write and report on technology for the mass media are the people who are already in the majority Mac users. This is one reason why Apple has the strongest brand and mindshare in tech and is likely to remain unchallenged for the foreseeable future: the professionals who build brands and mindshare are mostly Apple users. The brand is a kind of story; branding is commercial storytelling (Twitchell, 2004); if we accept these assertions then Apple, with the world’s strongest brand, is tech’s best corporate storyteller. Jonathon Ive is the head of design for Apple and a superstar in the world of industrial design (Kahney, 2014). Over the years Ive, born and raised in the UK, where he attended design school, has fronted various video adverts for new Apple products.7 In these videos, Ive tells a story about the conception and execution of the Apple product that is the subject of the video (other top Apple executives also feature in the firm’s promotional videos, but Ive’s are for me the most interesting). Ive’s Apple product videos all tell a story about challenge and people stretching themselves to make the best possible product. Ive speaks slowly and carefully; he is attired in dark t-shirt (Apple execs always dress down for big media events); the background is white and austere. Ive’s face, hands, and upper body fill the frame; he uses slow and deliberate hand gestures. The themes of Ive’s 7  For a compilation of Ive videos, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydkvO6C9 pTs&t=2s

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creation stories are care, passion, excellence, and the use of the best materials. Characteristic of Apple communications (and much imitated in the personal tech industry) is that technical specifications are contextualised within and indeed subordinated to discourse about passion, challenge, and excellence. Design and usability, look and feel, come first; engineering is presented as supporting these. By reversing the themes of the Ive-­ narrated product video, we can imagine how Windows computers and their users appear from a Mac perspective: PCs are engineered first, with look and feel coming second; PCs get the job done, but they lack style; can you really love a PC the way you would a Mac? Even though in recent years material and experience design in the PC world have risen to the high standards set by Apple, a sense of the difference between the cultures of the two main personal computing platforms can still be had by looking at the widely viewed and parodied ‘I’m a PC, I’m a Mac’ videos, in which the hipster Apple user is pitted against the nerdy, awkward PC user.8

Embrace the Penguin In April 2015, Episode 360 of the Linux Action Show carried a feature entitled ‘Chronicles of a Linux Switcher’.9 The aim was to document stories of people who had attempted to make the switch to Linux. The two hosts, Chris and Noah, are talking about techniques for making a switch to Linux as easy for the user as possible. They say that their target audience is dissatisfied Windows users. Noah says that promoters of Linux must start by meeting ‘users where they are’. He recommends Ubuntu to switchers because it is the version of Linux that everybody is gravitating towards, as he sees it. He talks about initiating the switch by removing the mechanical hard drive of the user’s Windows computer and replacing it with an SSD on which he installs Ubuntu Linux. Noah says he has a collection of original hard drives from people who he helped to make the switch, going back four years. He is happy to absorb the cost of supplying the SSD if it leads to a switch to Linux. He comments that users are pleased with how fast their new Ubuntu installations work. Noah and Chris wonder if Noah might be  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eEG5LVXdKo  The Linux Action Show is one of several online broadcasts produced by Jupiter Broadcasting, which was started in 2008 by Chris Fisher and Bryan Lunduke. It is made by Linux geeks for Linux geeks. In mid-2017, Jupiter Broadcasting’s YouTube channel had 49,000 subscribers and over 16 million total views. 8 9

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misrepresenting the speed of Linux to the people he helps to switch, given that he is replacing Windows on slower mechanical spinning hard drives with Linux on an SSD which has no moving parts, and is as such faster than a traditional rotating hard disk. Both presenters seem implicitly to acknowledge that a fairer comparison would be comparing a fresh installation of Windows on an SSD with a fresh installation of Ubuntu on an SSD. Noah and Chris then joke that Noah might not be completely transparent in his switching method. Then Noah says that, given how Linux is so frequently misrepresented, he thinks that he is countering negative spin about Linux when he does not fully elaborate that the new Linux installation is much faster because it is installed on an SSD; Chris interjects that the user might not understand the technical detail anyway. Noah says that if swapping a slow hard drive with Windows for a fast SSD with Linux gives a competitive advantage to Linux, then he is okay with that. This episode illustrates something of the sense of being an embattled minority that is typical of many Free Software geeks. They see themselves as fighting the good fight in a war against a massive and implacable enemy—proprietary software and Microsoft. They proselytise and evangelise, not in the name of a religion, but of a platform. And they must remain ever-vigilant for signs of back-sliding: on 12 September 2017, Free Software enthusiast and developer Bryan Lunduke opened a YouTube vlog by warning that he was about to ‘chastise’ Jim Zemlin, Director of the Linux Foundation. The offence: it appeared that Zemlin, in an address where he declared that 2017 would be the ‘Year of the Linux Desktop’, had presented his slides using either a Mac or Ipad.10 I do not know what platform Zemlin was using, but it is not hard to see why the accusation might raise hackles among Free Software geeks, for whom it is vital that you practice what you preach; if you advocate Free Software then you should use Free Software (especially when making a public presentation about Free Software). Dan Gillmor (2016) moved to Linux from an Apple Mac in 2012; he recommends the move to anyone who ‘values freedom’ and is not afraid of getting into some level of technical detail. Unlike the ease of switching to a Mac, moving to Linux is more of a ‘no gain without some pain’ kind of story, since Linux has a considerable learning curve. Linux advocates argue that switching to Linux—from Windows as is usually advised— offers several benefits (Bothwick, 2010a; Morrison, 2015):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f8FPnAsIJ4

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• Freedom from restrictive licencing; • Freedom to examine and modify and share code; • Greater security, because Linux is more resistant to malware and hackers; • Better value for money, due to savings in software licence fees; • Overall, Linux offers a better engineered operating system platform. The form of stories about platform switching to Linux that we find in geek discourse follow the same basic structure of generic platform switching stories that we saw earlier: using a non-free platform (usually Windows)  ->  disruption  ->  frustration  ->  epiphany  ->  struggle -> conversion -> new improved equilibrium as a Linux user.11 The stories proceed from an initial situation of using Windows with a gradual accumulation of problems that are often virus-related, to the discovery of Linux, struggle to learn new tools and techniques, often with frustrations and setbacks, and then finally culminating in an epiphany when everything just works. The story’s opening state of normality is rendered as a state of ignorance of the benefits of Free Software; then a disruption occurs, generally due to virus or software instability. Then the narrator comes to realise that there is a problem. This problem recognition leads to new challenges in learning about Linux or Free Software in general; often a geek friend or co-worker plays the role of a guide to the new world of Free Software. Then there is the epiphany after one or more setbacks. During the challenging periods the switcher often feels frustrated and thinks about going back to the former system, but they persevere, and with help from the Linux and wider Free Software community, they get through the hard period. The conversion is complete when the potential convert realises that they never can or need to go back. In Linux switching stories, the benefits of switching from Windows are narrated on mainly technical and engineering grounds (better security and greater stability if the target is Linux). Switching from a Mac to Linux is a relatively rare scenario, because there are so many more Windows than Mac users and because most Mac users remain loyal to their platform; indeed one Linux Format evangelist article warns the reader: ‘If they’re Mac 11  See: https://opensource.com/tags/my-linux-story; Linux Format magazine publishes conversion stories both in themed issues and on a standalone basis; Reddit has several threads devoted to the topic, and I examined several hundred Linux conversion stores on YouTube.

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users—don’t bother [trying to get them to switch to Linux]. The typical Mac fanboy can out-zeal even Richard Stallman. Trying to convince a Mac fanboy of the benefits of Linux is like banging your head against a wall—it’s good when you stop’ (Bothwick, 2010b, p. 51). Unlike stories of switching to a Mac from Windows, stories about moving from Windows to Linux cannot reference the pull-factor of Apple’s hardware design. No PC hardware is specifically designed to run desktop Linux (several attempts to make Linux specific tablets and smartphones have failed to gain market traction). You can buy a laptop or desktop with Linux already installed, but the hardware will be based on generic designs that were intended to run Windows, and therefore, hardware design cannot be an intrinsic advantage of using Linux on a PC. Moreover, software usability is one of the most contentious areas in Linux, and if anything, Linux usability is worse than on Windows, if only because of the many competing desktop environments and lack of centralised design control and testing. Freedom comes with costs regarding usability. For each of the different Linux desktop environments, there is a great deal of high-end work on usability, but in different and sometimes competing projects; as such, there is no unified Linux desktop as there is a unified Mac desktop or Windows desktop. There is some degree of compatibility among the Linux desktops, but they all have a distinct look and feel. If you use a GNOME desktop on Linux you can install and run KDE desktop packages, and vice versa (and the same holds for Unity, MATE, and XFCE). This choice of desktop environments and being able to mix and match applications written for one desktop environment on any of the others is a strength of Linux compared to Windows or Mac, where the desktop environment is built into the operating system, and customisation is strictly controlled, especially by Apple. Freedom to choose a desktop in Linux comes at a cost, however: the different graphical style and interface design of the various desktops on Linux can clash visually and in terms of ease of use; debates around usability are recurrent in the Linux world (Englich, 2004; Garcia, 2017; Vaughan-Nichols, 2010). On Linux you have arguably the opposite of the unified Apple desktop experience and one that does not compare favourably to the unified desktop in Windows 10. The proliferation of different desktop interfaces in Linux is a mark of the freedom of the platform, but it also a sign that design and engineering are spread across many projects rather than being centrally coordinated in the way that Apple and Microsoft develop their desktop platforms. The bazaar of desktop interfaces has in no way hindered Linux geeks in promoting their platform.

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To date, various attempts to bring Linux to smartphones and tablets have met with market failure, the most recent example seeing the well-resourced Canonical withdrawing completely from its efforts to bring Ubuntu to smartphones. Android and its Linux kernel is another matter that we will come to shortly.

Switching (Back) to Windows While the most common personal computing platform switching stories are of people switching from Windows to a Mac or a Linux-based computer, the opposite does happen, however: switching from Mac or Linux to Windows.12 Switching to Windows goes against the tide, if only because Windows remains the dominant desktop operating system/platform and is as such the place you switch from more than the place to which you switch. And if you are using a Windows desktop or laptop computer to run productivity software, then you are part of a majority and as such do not need to justify your choice. The question nonetheless remains: why do people switch to a platform that is frequently portrayed as the cause of many of the problems faced by PC users? There is a substantial body of geek discourse that defends the use of Windows as a traditional personal computing platform (leaving aside the case for using Windows in the workplace).13 Windows advocate stories draw on the platform’s strongest selling point for a potential convert: Windows is the uncontested leading platform for gamers; not even the most powerful Xbox or PlayStation can match the capability of a custom build gaming PC running Windows. Stories about switching (back) to Windows are mostly narrated by hardcore gamers and/or people keen on modifying their personal computing hardware. In their stories, we see that two further points in favour of the Windows platform are that it offers the possibility to build a machine and to customise the hardware, and Windows users have the benefit of unparalleled economies of scale and competition in hardware (https://www. pcper.com/). It should be said that these two points also favour Linux.

12  See for example: https://www.digitaltrends.com/apple/why-i-switched-back-confessions-of-a-former-mac-user/ and https://www.jitbit.com/maxblog/23-thinking-aboutswitching-from-mac-to-pc-here-is-my-story/ 13  For informed but at times critical pro-Windows perspectives see: https://www.thurrott. com/ and https://www.windowscentral.com/

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There is a defensive edge in stories by geeks who switch back to Windows as a tool for media creation: they acknowledge the uneven reception of various versions of that operating system over the past two decades, conceding that while people disliked Windows Vista and then Windows 8, both Windows 7 and Windows 10 were widely praised for fixing the flaws in their immediate predecessors. Windows 10 is even cited as a source of attraction for bringing people back to the Windows platform, because it removes what many people disliked most about Windows 8, while bringing better Web integration, built-in in apps, and better gaming support.

The Year of the Linux Desktop In January 2016, ZDNet tech journalist Stephen Vaughn-Nicholls (2016) wrote: ‘In 2015, Microsoft embraced Linux, Apple open-sourced its newest, hottest programming language, and the cloud couldn’t run without Linux and open-source software. So, why can’t people accept that Linux and open source have won the software wars?’ In his piece, Vaughan-­ Nicholls assembles a narrative of events in recent years that, he says, shows beyond any doubt that Linux and open source have won. As we saw earlier, when we examined stories about switching to Linux, claims about the superiority of Linux as a desktop platform (and about free and open source software (FOSS) more generally) turn around freedom of various kinds, security, value for money, and superior engineering. Of these, freedom is the strongest selling point. According to its advocates, switching to Linux promises freedom of two kinds not available with computers powered by Apple’s or Microsoft’s operating system platforms: freedom from restrictive licensing terms, freedom to examine and modify and share the source code of any software installed on your machine. While stories about Linux winning are related to tales of switching to Linux, the two kinds of stories are not quite the same: Linux platform switching stories are about persuading people to use Linux on their PC, starting from a minority position and seeking to challenge a dominant platform; ‘Linux has won’ stories are about narrating plots to show that Linux has already surpassed Windows on some particular measure. Stories about switching to Linux are about switching desktop platforms, while stories about how Linux won are about platform conquest. Narrating a win for Linux requires the narrator to confront and resolve difficult issues of how to conceive Linux and its userbase. While Linux has not achieved significant market share among desktop users (all estimations

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put Linux desktop use in low single digit figures), Android with its Linux kernel is the most widely used personal computing platform on the planet. That Linux has the majority share of the Web server market is a fact that is of little significance to ordinary computer users. With no bragging rights about the numbers of Linux desktop users, geek supporters of the platform base their assertions that ‘Linux has won’ on data and stories about Android overtaking Windows globally in early 2017 regarding numbers of users (‘Android Overtakes Windows for First Time’, 2017; Marzouk, 2017). In so comparing numbers of mobile phone uses for Android with numbers of PC users for Windows, Linux geeks are liable to accusations of moving the goalposts. I prefer to see them as plotting a narrative with data that they select and deploy to fit their aims. It is true that both the core of Android and OSX are built on the classic Free Software work done to create UNIX: Android has a Linux kernel, while OSX’s kernel was built on a version of BSD UNIX; so Linux, Android, and OSX are members of the same family in the sense of sharing a common ancestor in the UNIX operating system (Salus & Hall, 2008). Significant here is that Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has said that his main aim was to build Linux as an alternative desktop operating system (Muktware, 2011). Given these complications, stories about a win for Linux require some agile plotting. If you confine yourself to talking about desktop computing, then Linux has not only failed to overtake Windows but is languishing in single percentage figures. In tactical terms it would be better rhetorically to move on to talking about mobile platforms, where Android, with its Linux roots, reigns supreme.

Plotting Android as a Win for Linux In each year since 2000, when I first began to use Linux regularly and to read books and journals about Linux, enthusiasts have looked to the ‘Year of Linux’, when that operating system would rise to 5 or even 10 per cent of regular end users. These years have not been kind to the cause of desktop Linux, at least not if we look at the number of users, and even Linux evangelists concede this, though with caveats (Anon, 2015). In the years since 2000, Apple has slightly expanded its share of desktop users, but far more significant is that Apple now dominates the high price and high-­ profit end of the smartphone and tablet space, and takes the greater part of the total profit in the industry. Along the way, Apple overtook Microsoft as the most valuable tech company in mid-2010; it is problematic though

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nonetheless possible for Free Software geeks to derive satisfaction from Apple’s success.14 More irritating still, if you are a fan of desktop Linux, is that despite the eclipse of the PC by the Android smartphone in terms of computing devices, Microsoft Windows has retained a market share between 85 and 90 per cent of desktop computer users globally. What is at stake in the claim that Linux has won? On what grounds is the claim made? To whom is the claim addressed? The assertion that Linux has won can turn on different statistical bases, but ultimately rests upon imagining a synecdoche (‘Android is Linux’) and making that synecdoche the premise in an argument such that: Android is a kind of Linux; Android is the most widely used computing platform on the planet; a form of Linux is the most widely used computing platform, therefore Linux Has Won. But ‘Android is Linux’ is an unstable synecdoche. Claims of Linux geeks in narrating a win for Linux notwithstanding, Android does not map without problems into the philosophy and politics of FOSS, and Linux is as defined as much by Free Software philosophy and politics as by technology. Android development is not entirely open. The core of an operating system is its kernel, which is the software that works closely with the hardware, and on which the operating system, utilities, and user applications all depend for fundamental capabilities. Android uses a Linux kernel, which is open source. As a condition of having the kernel source and being able to make changes to that kernel, Google’s kernel developers are required to contribute their modifications back to the kernel source code repositories still under the ultimate control of Linux Torvalds, the creator of Linux. The Googlesupplied development toolkit that app creators use to develop Android apps is open source, but developers are not required to create open source apps with that kit, and most do not. Further, while any firm 14  That Apple is now the leading technology company in personal computing in terms of profits and trend setting can be read as evidence both for and against a Linux win: counting for the win is Apple’s desktop operating system MacOS/OSX being based on a version of UNIX and that it can be seen as sharing the same DNA as Linux (Salus & Hall, 2008); but counting against Apple for a Linux win is the fact that Apple’s laptops and desktops hold less than 10 per cent market share globally, and Apple is not a community player in Linux. Having chosen a platform based on BSD UNIX as the core for OSX, Apple could then legally take source code, modify it, and not be obligated to share their changes with the wider base of UNIX/Linux users and programmers—which could not have been done if Apple had based OSX on Linux with its GPL licence that would have compelled Apple to open source all of its code.

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can  create an Android-based mobile phone, Google’s services and app store are closed and controlled by Google. A developer can obtain source code and produce a smartphone or tablet using Android, but to have access to the Google play store, that developer would have to accept a range of restrictions and licences imposed by Google. Without the Google app store and proprietary Google services, Android would not be as viable for non-technical users as the Google-­sanctioned version. So, if the overwhelming majority of Android phones and tablets are Google-sanctioned and controlled and given that Google’s terms and conditions for its services and app store conflict with some of the ideals of FOSS, then there is no unassailable case to be made for Android as a Linux win. Moreover, the way Google uses personal data to sell advertising does not sit well with the individual rights focus of FOSS. Chromebooks are laptops that run Google’s Chrome OS: an operating system based on a Linux kernel, but which presents an interface to the user that is built around Web browsers tabs; Chrome OS is essentially the Chrome Web browser running on a Linux kernel. Chromebooks initially used only Web applications (those made by Google, of course, but any Web application will work on a Chromebook) with applications and the users’ data stored on Google’s servers, but in 2018 Google introduced the meads to allow Android apps to run on Chromebook.15 A Linux Format magazine review of a group of Google Chromebooks (Mohr, 2015) opened by acknowledging that the Chromebook as sold to the general public was some way from the Free Software ideal of an open source personal computing platform while going on to claim that ‘market-leading’ Chromebooks constituted a win for Linux. The article leaves open the question, in what sense is Chrome OS a market leader? Outside the elementary and high school sector in the USA, Chromebooks have not achieved market share above single figure percentage. It is unclear to what extent most users of Chromebooks (as of Android smartphones) are even aware that they are using a system that is based on a Linux kernel. Moreover, even if aware of this fact, unless these users were advocating Chrome OS on its Free Software merits, then there is no unambiguous case to be made for a Linux ‘win’ here. 15  Potentially bringing over a million Android apps to the Chromebook, but not without problems, since many of the apps were designed for the small screen of smartphones and do not scale well to laptop screens.

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Narrating Self and Enemy We have seen geeks taking sides and engaging in defence of their preferred platforms, in doing so they imagine, articulate, and even generate differences between platforms and their users. The concept of schismogenesis (Bateson, 1935) can help us understand how and why geeks generate strongly opposed positions from equally informed  understanding  of personal computing. In work on a dispute between local conservationists and corporate mining developers in Australia, Hobbs (2011) found that the opposed groups had similar experience and knowledge of environmental issues, yet they were in complete opposition over a proposed salt mine; there was antagonism between equally informed parties. We see something like this opposition in Free Software versus open source (Berry, 2004), where we find people with very similar levels of knowledge about the field in question (i.e. software engineering); the schism does not lie in differential knowledge and expertise, but in fine distinctions drawn on technical and political lines. We need not go beyond Free Software to find entrenched opposition: there is the divide between Linux and BSD UNIX, or the ongoing opposition of KDE and GNOME desktop Linux e­ nvironments, or contestation between pragmatists and Free Software purists (Saunders, 2012). And that is just in Free Software. Following Hobbs, I think it is useful to shift attention away from platform opposition itself, which is in any event well-documented, to the processes by which the opposition is generated and sustained. Doing so allows me to pay special attention to the role of narrative in the generation and reinforcement of differences in geek culture. The early computer tech enthusiasts wanted to make computing ­personal—to realise the potential of the tool to enable enhanced personal creativity (Dormehl, 2013; Freiberger, 2000; Markoff, 2006; Turner, 2006). One initial divide was drawn between, on one hand, those who came out of a hobbyist sharing culture, for whom collective enthusiast work on hardware and software was what personal computing was about, and on the other hand, those like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who felt that private enterprise and intellectual property constituted the best course strategy to realise the full potential of personal computing. For there to be significant profit in the Gates and Jobs model, knowledge had to be treated as intellectual property; one consequence of doing so was that a schism opened between peer production and private enterprise; that schism remains a feature of personal computing. On the private enterprise side of the private property/peer production schism there was a further subdivision: Gates and Jobs founded their respective firms with different visions

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of how personal computing should be built—Gates opted for open hardware standards and a generic operating system, while Jobs started open but with the Mac in 1984 went for closed hardware and software in a tight coupling that maximised Apple’s control over the entire user experience. Jobs would insist that engineering must serve design, while Microsoft and IBM sought to achieve a more even balance between the two. Gates’s 1975 letter to hobbyists was one line in the sand; Jobs insisting on closing the Macintosh hardware to user intervention was another. These fundamental schisms are reflected in and frame geeks’ platform stories. The enthusiasm and passion with which geeks narrate stories in defence of their favourite platforms, gadgets, apps, and games appear at first glance to be a healthy rivalry but look closer, and you will find definite signs of sectarianism. It might seem odd at first to associate sectarianism with geek culture: after all, sectarians are people deeply committed to their ethnic group or religion, say, and are almost a paradigm case of irrational attachment to a group identity. Most geeks proclaim their commitment to rationality, so does it make sense, and is it fair, to label geeks as sectarian? Each faction, in geek computer culture, will seize on a spec or feature change, mod or new benchmark, and assail those in other factions with the results; the opponents then seek out aspect or feature changes, or mods or benchmarks, with which to counter the attack. Given the fast pace of technological change, this narrative arms race has a high clock rate.

Plotting Market Share, Capturing Mind Share In computer geek culture, a lot of energy is expended on measuring, demonstrating, and arguing over, both the market share and the mindshare of their favourite platforms. While market share can be quantified as numbers of users, of sales, or numbers of site visitors, mindshare is less about such ‘hard’ data. Rather, to have mindshare is to be talked about in influential media spaces, to have weight in the tech zeitgeist, to have representational power (Acuna, 2012). Apple has the biggest mindshare of any consumer brand in tech, not only because  almost everyone is aware of the Apple brand, and those who cannot own an Apple product at least aspire to do so, but also because influential people in media and arts are loyal Apple users. Equal numbers of people may be aware of Microsoft as of Apple, but Apple has more soft power, more mindshare, especially among millennials. You can plot both market and mind share with stories as well as with

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­ umbers, but market share is mainly based on numbers, while mindshare is n based more on symbolism and desire than on statistical foundations. There are different ways to assess the relative weights of the major personal computing and smartphone platforms: licences shipped or sold by the major platform owners—Google, Microsoft, and Apple; various market share surveys and Web analytics. Figures come from user groups, consulting firms, and industry monitoring organisations. Various Free Software organisations produce their own figures as well. Data from these sources must be plotted, interpreted, and cast into story form to be deployed in debates around the politics and economics of Free Software. Plotting usage data in geek narrative is an area fraught with conflict and the data are subject to different, and often conflicting, interpretations and plots. This is, in turn, all framed by ongoing debates around methodologies used as well as the standpoint and aims of organisations collecting the data as against various parties using these data. To score a point around the market and mindshare of your platform, you need to know how to plot numbers as well as how to plot compelling stories. Earlier in this chapter, we saw that different metrics are taken by Free Software geeks as evidence that Linux has won the software wars. Establishing market share here is just a matter of establishing the percentage of users of different platforms, but mindshare is harder to work out, as most people know little and probably care less about which operating system runs the kernel of their smartphone or the servers behind their social media. Computer geeks, as people who take pride in their numeracy, would probably rather argue about platforms based on benchmarking or market share numbers, but these numbers are themselves the subject of debate, and so geeks must resort to nonnumeric plotting to make the numbers fit the stories that they want to tell.

The Microsoft Villain Any compelling story with a moral overtone needs to characterise both hero and villain. If there is an archetype villain in computer geek storytelling, it is Microsoft the firm, and Bill Gates, its founder. The source of hostility towards Microsoft is Bill Gates’s letter to hobbyists in 1975.16 The backstory to that letter is worth recounting: Gates and Allen wrote a BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code: a computer programming language designed in the 1960s for those new to computing) interpreter for the pioneering Altair PC in 1975. The availability of BASIC  https://worldhistoryproject.org/1976/2/bill-gates-writes-open-letter-to-hobbyists

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made the Altair far more useful to people who were not hardcore computer scientists and engineers; more and more Altair owners were using BASIC, but Gates was unhappy that people were copying the software that he and Allen had created, without paying licence fees (Nicholson, 2014, chapter 3). Gates makes a number of assertions in the ‘Letter to Hobbyists’: that software is intellectual property; that programmers have a right to earn a living from their work in writing software; that using software that was copied without the consent of the software’s creator is a form of theft; that for a viable software industry to exist, programmers need to be paid for their work, which implicitly points to restrictive licensing so that each user copy of the software in question yields a financial return to the creator. As Gates’s assertions all run counter to the hacker ethic that emerged in the 1960s at many US universities and government-funded research institutions (Levy, 2010), it is not surprising that Gates’s letter opened a major fault line which remains a feature of geek discourse on computer technology to this day. Another schism that emerged in early computing culture and which endures to the present is that between software created in research institutions, often with state funding that remunerates developers versus software as a craft industry where the craftspeople depend directly on the users of the software for an economic return. We see here two political, economic, and social models of organisation that remain at odds into the present and are associated with different narrative strategies as we shall see in the following chapter. There is a rich set of stories in circulation in geek culture that narrate Microsoft as the linchpin in a proprietary software industry that is the enemy of the freedom that is prized by many geeks and hackers. These stories are built around a core set of master plots (as we saw in an earlier chapter, the master plot is a skeleton story or template that is recurrent in a culture; actual stories are based on one or more master plots). First, there is the ‘abuse of monopoly’ master plot, which is based on the well-­ documented charges that Microsoft abused its monopoly power, and for which the firm has been fined (Brinkley, 2000; Economides, 2001; Gavil & First, 2014; Hirshleifer, Liebowitz, & Margolis, 2001). Then we have the ‘FUD’ (‘fear, uncertainty and doubt’) master plot, which is informed by battle in the sphere of public relations and propaganda revolving around the FUD that Free Software supporters accuse Microsoft of fomenting (Ferris, 1999; Nicholson, 2014, pp.  225–232). Microsoft is here shown to have suggested to its customers that using competitors’

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products could expose a firm to risks, which can be mitigated or avoided by using Microsoft products. Running through stories built from these master plots are questions over the ethics surrounding Microsoft’s obtaining of the source code on which its first major success was built (Finley, 2012; Miller, 2011).

Summary In narrating accounts of difficulty in using a platform and switching to another platform, geek stories employ the basic form of the conversion story that is at least as old as Christianity; geeks employ ideological language that is parallel in form to the language used to describe religious and other kinds of cultural conversions. There is a complex interplay of ethical, technical, and political reasoning at play in platform stories, which are narrated out of a space of real or imagined competition where, for your platform, your side, to win the other side must lose. Geeks organise ­themselves along techno-tribal lines as they create and challenge partisan ideas and practice in their struggles over technology platforms.

References Acuna, N. (2012). Mindshare: Igniting Creativity and Innovation Through Design Intelligence. Henderson, NV: Onearchetype. Alleyne, B. (2015). Narrative Networks: Storied Approaches in a Digital Age. SAGE Publications. Anderson, L. (2014, January 21). Fanboys. Retrieved June 2, 2018, from https:// www.theverge.com/2014/1/21/5307992/inside-the-mind-of-a-fanboy Android Overtakes Windows for First Time. (2017, April 3). Retrieved November 9, 2017, from http://gs.statcounter.com/press/android-overtakes-windowsfor-first-time Anon. (2015, March). 2015: The Year of Linux. Linux Voice. Bagnall, B. (2017). Commodore: The Amiga Years. Variant Press. Bateson, G. (1935). Culture Contact and Schismogenesis. Man, 35, 178–183. https://doi.org/10.2307/2789408. Berry, D. M. (2004). The Contestation of Code: A Preliminary Investigation into the Discourse of the Free/Libre and Open Source Movements. Critical Discourse Studies, 1(1), 65–89. Bothwick, N. (2010a, December). 20 Reasons to Use Linux. Linux Format. Bothwick, N. (2010b, December). 22 Ways to Convert Your Friends to Linux. Linux Format.

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Boyd, B. (2010). On the Origin of Stories (Reprint ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brinkley, J. (2000, April 4). U.S. vs. Microsoft: The Overview; U.S. Judge Says Microsoft Violated Antitrust Laws with Predatory Behavior. The New  York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/04/business/usvs-microsoft-overview-us-judge-says-microsoft-violated-antitrust-laws-with. html Bruner, J. (1991). The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical Inquiry, 1–21. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343711 Bruner, J. (2004). Life as Narrative. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 71(3), 691–710. Retrieved from http://socialresearch.metapress.com/index/ e9dffrmjv9aq9xg5.pdf Casserly, M. (2014, October 8). 5 Reasons Why Macs Are Better than PCs. Retrieved December 17, 2017, from https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/feature/ apple/5-reasons-why-a-mac-is-better-than-a-pc-115151/ Chinchilla, C. (2017a, January 13). A Switchers Tale My Week with Windows – Hacker Noon. Retrieved December 4, 2017, from https://hackernoon. com/a-switchers-tale-my-week-with-windows-612ea605291 Chinchilla, C. (2017b, February 20). A Switchers Tale My Weeks with Linux. Retrieved November 11, 2017, from https://hackernoon.com/a-switcherstale-my-weeks-with-linux-deededb3b635 Dormehl, L. (2013). The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the Counterculture and How the Crazy Ones Took Over the World. Virgin Books. Economides, N. (2001). The Microsoft Antitrust Case. Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, 1(1), 7–39. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/ article/10.1023/A:1011517724873 Englich, F. (2004, July 9). Open Source Usability Is a Technical Problem We Can Solve on Our Own. Retrieved November 16, 2017, from https://www.linux. com/news/open-source-usability-technical-problem-we-can-solve-our-own Ferris, P. (1999, December 2). The Long Siege of Microsoft Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Retrieved November 9, 2017, from https://www.linuxtoday.com/dev eloper/1999120200107NWSM Finley, K. (2012, August). Was Microsoft’s Empire Built on Stolen Code? We May Never Know. WIRED. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2012/08/ ms-dos-examined-for-thef/ Freiberger, P. (2000). Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer/Paul Freiberger, Michael Swaine (2nd ed.). New York and London: McGraw-Hill. Garcia, J.  (2017, October 24), Top 5 Linux Pain Points in 2017. Retrieved November 16, 2017, from https://opensource.com/article/17/10/top5-linux-painpoints Gavil, A. I., & First, H. (2014). The Microsoft Antitrust Cases: Competition Policy for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Gillmor, D. (2016, January 4). I Moved to Linux and It’s Even Better Than I Expected. Retrieved November 11, 2017, from https://medium.com/ backchannel/i-moved-to-linux-and-it-s-even-better-than-i-expected9f2dcac3f8fb#.c0gau6svc Greant, Z., & Zickerman, J.  (2005, July). How to Win Friends and Influence People, or: Effective Evangelism for Geeks. Linux Format, 68. Hern, A. (2017, January 7). Is It Time to SWAP Your Mac for a Windows Laptop? The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/07/mac-windows-pc-macbook-pro-microsoft-surface-book Hirshleifer, J., Liebowitz, S.  J., & Margolis, S.  E. (2001). Winners, Losers & Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology (Expanded ed.). Independent Institute, U.S. Hobbs, E. (2011). Performing Wilderness, Performing Difference: Schismogenesis in a Mining Dispute. Ethnos, 76(1), 109–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/001 41844.2010.537757. Kahney, L. (2006). The Cult of Mac (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press. Kahney, L. (2014). Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. London: Portfolio Penguin. Kelty, C. M. (2008). Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software and the Internet. Duke University Press. Levy, S. (2010). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution – 25th Anniversary Edition (1st ed.). O’Reilly Media. Lunde, P., & Stone, C. (Trans.). (2011). Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North. London: Penguin Classics. Markoff, J.  (2006). What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Reprint ed.). Penguin Books. Marzouk, Z. (2017, April 4). Android Overtakes Windows as World’s Most Popular Operating System. Retrieved November 9, 2017, from http://itpro. co.uk/go/28419 McNish, J. (2015). Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry. New York: Flatiron Books. Miller, M. (2011, August 11). The Rise of DOS: How Microsoft Got the IBM PC OS Contract. PCMAG. Retrieved from https://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/ software/286148-the-rise-of-dos-how-microsoft-got-the-ibm-pc-os-contract Mohr, N. (2015, September). Chromebooks Roundup. Linux Format, 202, 24–29. Retrieved from www.linuxformat.com Morrison, G. (2015, September). 9 Things Wrong with Windows 10. Linux Voice. Muktware. (2011). Linus Torvalds: Why Linux Is Not Successful on Desktop. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPUk1yNVeEI Nicholson, M. (2014). When Computing Got Personal: A History of the Desktop Computer (1st ed.). Matt Publishing. Polo, M. (2016). The Travels (N. Cliff, Trans., Reprint ed.). Penguin Classics.

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Robinson, B. (2013). Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Salus, P. H., & Hall, J. (2008). The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin (J. C. Reed, Ed.). Reed Media Services. Saunders, M. (2012, October). The Great Linux Debate. Linux Format. Srnicek, N. (2016). Platform Capitalism. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Stromberg, P. G. (1990). Ideological Language in the Transformation of Identity. American Anthropologist, 92(1), 42–56. Retrieved from http://www.jstor. org/stable/681389 Stromberg, P.  G. (2008). Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative (New ed.). Cambridge University Press. Turner, F. (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Twitchell, J.  B. (2004). An English Teacher Looks at Branding. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(2), 484–489. https://doi.org/10.1086/422125. Vaughan-Nichols, S. J. (2010, October 14). Five Problems Linux Still Needs to Overcome. Retrieved November 16, 2017, from https://www.computerworld.com/article/2469581/network-software/five-problems-linux-stillneeds-to-overcome.html Vaughan-Nichols, S. J. (2016, January 24). Linux and Open Source Have Won, Get Over It. Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://www.zdnet.com/article/ linux-and-open-source-have-won-get-over-it/ Williams, O. (2013, November 10). Switching from Windows to Mac: What I Learned. Retrieved November 11, 2017, from https://thenextweb.com/ apple/2013/11/10/switching-windows-mac-learned/ Wood, D. (2014). Smartphones and Beyond: Lessons from the Remarkable Rise and Fall of Symbian (ebook). The Author.

CHAPTER 4

Geek Political Narrative

Abstract  Political issues are ever present in geek culture even though many geeks claim to be outside politics and concerned mainly with technology, which many geeks claim is politically neutral. There is a strong streak of libertarian individualism in geek culture—especially in the USA— that is suspicious of traditional forms of political expression and organisation, whether on the Left or the Right. This chapter draws together many of the themes and narrative forms from the stories examined in previous chapters. This chapter outlines three political perspectives that are influential in geek culture: cyber-utopianism, techno-libertarianism, and techno-­ anarchism; examines the distinctive narrative strategies that are associated with each perspective; and looks at how geek stories use these to try to resolve tensions around democracy and meritocracy. Keywords  Politics • Cyber-utopianism • Techno-libertarianism • Techno-anarchism

Politics and Geek Storytelling We have so far seen various recurrent plots, characters, and themes in geek narratives. Many geeks claim to be beyond ideology, but these claims are belied by deep ideological cleavage in geek narrative. While platform and other kinds of technological allegiances may appear to outsiders, and to geeks themselves, as central points around which geeks cluster, platforms © The Author(s) 2019 B. Alleyne, Geek and Hacker Stories, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95819-1_4

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are not themselves politically neutral. In this chapter, I will lay out the main political tendencies of geek culture and I will show that each tendency has distinctive narration. One fundamental ideological cleavage in geek storytelling is apparent on surveying geek narrative: on one side we find techno-libertarians, who focus on individual rights, sovereign consumers, and those who believe that capitalism is good or at least that it can be made good through digital technology; on the other side, we see techno-anarchists and communitarians1 who focus on the information commons and collective endeavour and who either detest capitalism or believe that it must be made more socially and democratically accountable. These two positions lie at opposite ends of a continuum, with an anodyne cyber-utopianism, which sees many social and economic problems as soluble by applying more technology, forming the third point of a triangle of political standpoints. As we shall see, geek stories narrated from these standpoints draw on and refigure different myths, master plots, and characterisations, and the three standpoints afford distinct rhetorical strategies.

Utopians, Communitarians, Anarchists, and Libertarians Technophilic utopianism runs throughout geek storytelling. It is beyond dispute that networked personal computing device and the Web generally have brought enormous benefits to humanity, but is more net/tech/computing always a good thing? Evgeny Morozov (2014) thinks that digital tech is a solution in search of problems. In an equally sceptical vein, Jaron Lanier (2013), Jonathon Taplin (2017), Nick Srnicek (2016), and Geert Lovink (2011) all write that ‘free’ access to digitised goods has negative consequences for the majority of individual creatives, in that monopolist owners of platforms earn huge returns, while the majority of producers of content earn nothing. In the first decade of the globalising Web (the 1990s), when commentary and analysis regarding net/Web/digital society focused on the ­positive potential of information technologies, the dominant frame was 1  By ‘anarchist’, I refer someone who is sceptical of centralised power and authority, not to a person working toward generalised disorder. Techno-anarchists may also be thought of as communitarians: the key is their focus on peer production, decentralisation, and favouring cooperation over corporation.

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utopian. For leading cyber-utopians of this period (Dyson, 1998; Rheingold, 2000), information technologies and especially the World Wide Web were not just a positive development for civilisation, but it was an article of faith that the very expansion and availability of these technologies would lead to more prosperous and fairer society at the local, national, and global levels. Cyber-utopianism is not generally critical of the existing corporate and governmental structures in liberal democratic capitalist societies and tends to see these as being enhanced by the Web. WIRED magazine is perhaps the purest distillation of the cyber-utopian worldview, while Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s paper ‘Californian Ideology’, written in 1995, remains among the sharpest critiques of cyberutopianism (Barbrook & Cameron, 1995). With awareness of the critique of early cyber-utopianism, Shirky (2008, 2011) rejuvenated the cyberutopian ideal, arguing that the interactive Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing would bring the early promise of the Web to full fruition, as it transformed capitalism by breaking down barriers between producer and consumer and transformed politics by enabling the harnessing of collective intelligence to tackle a range of problems. What Paulina Borsook termed techno-libertarianism in her book CyberSelfish (2000) is a rugged social Darwinist version of libertarianism emerging from Silicon Valley. This strand of libertarianism builds on the conceptual base of cyber-utopianism insofar as tech libertarians see networked computing as a great disruptor. Techno-libertarians assert the untrammelled right of the individual to privacy and to access information and see that right running smoothly into the right of tech businesses to accumulate wealth with as little hindrance, or taxation, as possible. Techno-­ libertarians are individualistic and strongly opposed to state intervention in the digital economy; they place the accumulation of wealth from digital enterprise as their highest purpose. Counting among their number are PayPal founder Peter Thiel, and other members of the ‘PayPal Mafia’, a group of highly successful tech entrepreneurs (O’Brien, 2007) many of whom are heavily influenced by the radical individualist and anti-statist philosophy of Ayn Rand (1905–1982). In her fiction, Rand’s hero-­capitalists struggle to realise their creative vision against oppressive states and the cowed masses (Rand, 2007, 2008). The right to earn untrammelled profit from visionary entrepreneurship is the highest moral imperative in Rand’s philosophy. In techno-libertarian discourse, sharing, innovation cultures, market metrics, and development methodology are all subordinate to the ultimate aim of getting rich quickly and keeping as much of that wealth as possible.

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Big government is the enemy, but not big corporations. Techno-­libertarians imagine the digital economy as a complex ecology that will be harmed by state intervention. In the two decades since Borsook’s book was written, techno-libertarian ideas—shorn of their most extreme winner-­ takes-­ all aspects—are increasingly influential in the USA.  The US federal government exercises light touch regulation, ostensibly not wanting to harm the world-leading US digital sector. The new evil entity in techno-­libertarian eyes is probably now the EU competition commission in Brussels, perhaps the only entity in the Western capitalist world that is powerful enough to challenge the US tech titans, given the extent to which American big tech has captured the regulatory apparatus in the USA (Taplin, 2017). The EU has few indigenous digital champions, but as a huge buyer of US digital tech, it represents a market that is comparable in spending power to the North American market and is neither easily bullied nor at the same time ignored. Brussels is perhaps the techno-­libertarian nightmare: a superstate apparatus run by powerful bureaucrats who persist in meddling with the market (as the EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) came closer in May 2018, there was a rising tide of critical commentary from US tech circles, ranging from irritation to hysteria and hostility). Tech communitarians are wary of both the state and big corporations. While sharing the libertarian distrust of the state, the communitarian imagination has different sources. The roots of techno-communitarianism are in the 1960s counterculture in the USA, when the certainties of post-­ war US society were challenged by a generation for whom alienation was too heavy a price to pay for the bourgeois comforts of mainstream life, and who saw under the veneer of prosperous normality at home the oppression of women and entrenched racial discrimination, while abroad the US was pursuing imperialist projects. In seeking change, many of the 1960s US radicals eschewed the paths of trade unions and the leftist parties, and distanced themselves from the violence of the most militant wing of the oppositional cultures, choosing instead to pursue alternative lifestyles (Gair, 2007), and a few of these would become key figures in the development of the PC (Dormehl, 2013; Turner, 2006). Techno-anarchists sit at the opposite end of the political spectrum from techno-libertarians, and in some ways are to the left of communitarians. In common with cyber-utopians, techno-anarchists see information technologies as potentially heralding improvements in life for all of us, but where they differ from cyber-utopians is in their distrust of and in some cases open hostility towards existing capitalist tech enterprises and the liberal

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democratic states that support them. Techno-anarchists look and work towards the transformation or even transcendence of states and state structures through non-hierarchical networked democratic systems of social and political organisation (Barassi, 2015; Frediani & Ziccardi, 2013; Papadimitriou, 2006); the most radical anticipate the passing away of the state altogether. Techno-anarchists see information technologies as the means to bring about radical transformation or even destruction of capitalism and its attendant state structures. Techno-anarchism is more prevalent in Europe than in the USA. There are several structural and historical reasons for this. In Europe, there is no equivalent to big tech with its army of lobbyists and the EU regulatory apparatus has stressed preservation of consumer rights and has led the world in developing privacy legislation and policy. Social democracy in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Nordic countries has meant that for many radicals the social democratic state was sometimes seen as a potential ally in realising the social benefits of computing. In Southern Europe, the militant left with its tradition of distrusting both the state and private sector, has adopted computing in projects to reimagine autonomous social spaces, as with Indignados in Spain and the activists around the centri sociali in Italy. In the UK, there is a vibrant scene of community activist computing projects that work independently of state and private corporate structures. Techno-anarchists are alive to the dangers of a centralised corporate Web. They are networked technologists first, so they do not resist by going offline and refusing the Web; instead, they rely on encrypted communication channels, explore cryptocurrency, and some choose to work on the dark Web (Coleman, 2015; Frediani & Ziccardi, 2013). Their politics are anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, anti-state, and in favour of autonomous organisation. For some techno-anarchists, the state is the primary obstacle to realising the promise of Free Software and free digital culture, while for some others large corporations are the main obstacle. Techno-anarchists locate themselves in a long tradition that goes back to the earliest socialists and anarchists. Many are closely aligned with existing radical leftist movements, and indeed some key figures straddle both the techno-anarchist hacker scene and radical left politics (Berardi, Cox, & MacLean, 2012). All techno-anarchists look to a small state: for those on the right, the small state should co-exist with a largely free market and in this they have much in common with techno-libertarians; for those on the left, a small state should co-exist with but not dominate local organisation and network peer production.

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In the remainder of the chapter, I will discuss how these political standpoints are narrated in and how they enable the framing of geek stories. Geek stories are expressive as well as performative: they represent aspects of the social world at the same time that they have or are intended to have an impact on the social world.

Narrating the State and Democracy In one early scene of the 2009 TV drama Micro Men, British PC pioneer Clive Sinclair, played by Alexander Armstrong, is shown objecting that the state support his firm is receiving from the UK’s National Enterprise Board (which invested in Sinclair’s firm in the late 1970s) is, in fact, a form of ‘Bolshevik’ interference that blocks the realisation of his inventive and entrepreneurial vision for new projects. In that scene, the state is the enemy of progress; but later in the story, the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation is the catalyst of the computer boom that briefly saw the UK take on the global leadership n microcomputer ownership in the early 1980s, overtaking for a time both the USA and Japan (Lean, 2016). Margaret Thatcher, in keeping with her neo-liberal ideological standpoint, attributed the explosion of British personal computing to personal enterprise (Lean, 2016, chapter 4), but she would have had little historical evidence for her claim, given the pivotal role played by public investment in computing in the UK. As with social and historical studies of science and technology more generally, we find recent work on the social aspects of computing to be methodologically rich, drawing on concepts from gender studies (Abbate, 2017; Ensmenger, 2010), post-structuralism, and radical political economy (Berardi et al., 2012), to name just three strands of influence. Recent academic survey histories of computing reject simple chronologies and tales of individual genius and discovery, choosing instead to narrate the PC as emerging from a complex interplay of state-funded research and development, tech geek enthusiast activity, and private enterprise. Ceruzzi (2003, 2012) opens both his comprehensive and concise histories of computing with reflection on the work of creating historical narrative, while Aspray and Campbell-Kelley structure their work on computing history (Campbell-Kelly, 2004; Campbell-Kelly & Aspray, 2013) as narratives involving a Web of human agents and technological systems in carefully rendered social and political context. These mainstream academic histories of computing all state unambiguously that governments funded the pioneering early work leading up to the first electronic computers in the second world war; from these and other works, we learn about the role that

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the US government played promoting the underlying technologies for PCs, the internet, and smartphones (Hafner & Lyon, 1998; Mazzucato, 2013: esp. chapter 5). And more than the government in general, the US military was among the first users of electronic computers (Edwards, 1996). In the UK, the government directly subsidised research and funded strategic firms in the computer sector (Campbell-Kelly, 1990). Techno-libertarian storytelling has no patience with academic subtlety and methodological complexity. It is an article of faith in libertarian/liberal individualist geek narrative that innovation comes chiefly from individual genius and that state involvement in tech is more hindrance than help (Thiel & Masters, 2014). As with Rand’s hero in Atlas Shrugged, libertarian tech founders see it as a moral imperative to avoid or frustrate all forms of state intervention beyond those of securing private property and enforcing contract. Tech founders are archetypical heroes and villains in popular geek stories. The world’s two wealthiest individuals are Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; these two men between them possess wealth that exceeds that of hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people. In techno-libertarian stories, Gates and Bezos are sanctified, while for techno-anarchists they represent much that is wrong about how personal computing and the Web have evolved over the past three decades. Is the vast wealth accumulated by leading figures in the digital economy the just reward for innovation and entrepreneurial flair? Or, is it a manifestation of a deeply flawed economy in which, as Jaron Lanier puts it, the person with the biggest computer is the winner who takes all (Lanier, 2013)? The tech giants are extracting immense wealth from the economy, and as traditional businesses and work shrink, the overall purchasing power of populations (what economists call ‘aggregate demand’) is not keeping pace with the output of goods and services. An increasing share of national income goes to owners of capital (with big tech prominent among these) while wage and salary earners see their share of the pie shrinking in relative terms (Piketty, 2014). The government of the USA (most conspicuously but not exclusively) encourages people to fill the demand gap with personal debt, but that strategy is unsustainable. Cyber-utopian hype from the likes of Uber and Airbnb around the gig economy does not entirely disguise the fact that many people are working in that gig economy much harder, with less security and for less income in real terms than 30 years ago (Scholz, 2016).

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At least some of tech’s key founders are aware of these developments. When Bill Gates called for a tax on robots to redistribute wealth in the new digital economy (Waters, 2017) there was lively pushback against (Bessen, 2017; Smith, 2017): big business in general and big tech, in particular, remain wedded to the idea that we will all be better off as the digital economy expands. They claim that the rising tide of automation will lift all boats and that the state should play only a background role in all this. The fact that big tech is mostly based in the USA is key to understanding this scenario. In Japan, France, Germany, South Korea, and China, the state plays a much more openly interventionist role in industry than is the case in the USA. But to put it that way is not entirely correct—the US state is, in fact, a key player in digital tech, as funder of basic research, and as a buyer (Mazzucato, 2013), but where it differs from states in other leading industrial nations, is that it has been more generous in giving tax breaks to these firms (the anti-state rhetoric coming out of the Republican party is disingenuous, at best). In the USA, the state colludes in the fabrication of the fiction that it plays only a minor role in big tech, and mainstream tech stories are one manifestation of that fiction. Tech founding stories point to the main economic benefits tech firms have brought, especially consumer choice and employment. Big tech is largely silent on calls to pay more taxes, however. The justifications for the huge wealth accumulated by big tech look rather thin and self-serving. In making their case for why they should be allowed to use tax advantages offered by different jurisdictions to minimise their tax bills, spokespersons of big tech narrate the benefits their firms offer to the rest of us in terms of solutions and new possibilities, in a classic cyber-utopian discourse that masks its libertarian undercurrent. Insiders and admirers of big tech big weave their stories from ideas of meritocracy; theirs is a light version of techno-libertarian discourse (Schmidt & Rosenberg, 2015; Stone, 2017). Tech journalists, ‘evangelists’, and corporate communication people must be aware that hardcore techno-libertarianism can be toxic in the public square. That would explain why their discourse is built on telling stories centred on heroic innovation and meritocracy; stories that focus on individual achievement in big tech while ignoring the inequality that ­accompanies it; such stories sidestep hard questions about the social, economic, and political problems in which their firms are implicated. We are seeing something of a backlash against tech in the wake of allegations that the political process has been influenced by powerful actors using data from social media platforms. In response, big tech has promised to refine how

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it uses personal data, with Facebook undertaking to focus on the quality of time spent on its platform more than quantity of time. Tech humanist (Tarnoff & Weigel, 2018) tweaking of algorithms and policies to quell public anxiety while leaving the structure of ownership and power in big tech unchanged is in the interest of the shareholders of big tech, but what about those billions of ordinary users whose attention creates vast value for Facebook and Google? Human welfare is being threatened by the wealth inequality and weakening of the public sector in which these very firms are implicated. Cyber-utopian storytelling sells the dream of improvement through tech while concealing the dark libertarian underside of digital capitalism. We have been here before: in earlier stages of capitalism, we saw storytelling serving the ideological functions of presenting the ideas of a ruling elite as universal ideas, and of legitimating structures of unequal relations as leading towards the best achievable society (Williams, 1977). Alongside utopian and libertarian geek founders, we have angel investors and venture capitalists. Their narrative discourses are much more openly focused on making money (which after all is their raison d’être) and justifying the existence of the digital economy based on finding ever more problems to solve by computation (Ries, 2011; Thiel & Masters, 2014). The positive narration of founder stories of big tech and big money is made much easier in the USA than elsewhere because of the American culture of veneration of the individual who made enormous wealth and a widespread belief in a unique American genius and spirit of exploration that is part of an American national narrative (Parini, 2012). Mass-market biographies, Netflix and Amazon originals, and feature films all come into play in support of the meritocratic and solution-obsessed worldview of big tech. The numbers may raise doubts, but the stories about getting rich quick and American genius continue to carry the day.

Narrating Meritocracy and Its Discontents Social sciences such as anthropology and sociology are often given short shrift in popular geek narrative. I suspect this is because these disciplines are seen as lacking the supposed rigour of hard science and hard numbers, and because they are more likely than business studies or psychology to question the capitalist managerialism that is common sense in mainstream media discourse in the USA and much of the rest of the world. When social science appears in geek narration, it most often does so in the form of psychology, economics, and management studies based upon quantitative data. What is often lacking in geek

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­ arrative discourse concerning social issues is the kind of critical pern spective which is the hallmark of sociology and social and cultural anthropology. And by critical here I mean critical of social relations, identities, and explanations for how society is structured and the way it works. In mainstream geek discourse counting comes to stand for both description and explanation of how and why the things counted have come to be (Lovink, 2016; Toyama, 2015). Is this just plain naivety or bad faith, or both? I would accuse some geeks of being naïve when they argue that science and computer technology are value-free and that all that matters when people come to engage with technology is the extent of their knowledge of the field. This naivety may mask a certain bad faith which manifests itself as a conservative defence of the tech employment status quo: the fact that middle-class males hold most of the influential and well-paid positions in the US tech sector is taken as evidence of the working of identity blind educational and employment selection system. People who criticise the way that the system of selection works for tech training and employment are accused of bringing unwarranted and spiteful identity politics into a domain where only meritocracy and technology should matter, and in fact, do matter. There is, admittedly, considerable variety in how mainstream geek storytelling handles themes of meritocracy, but that discourse appears often ignorant of or oblivious to the extensive body of work which shows that what appear on the surface to be meritocratic systems in tech are in fact deeply layered with ethnic, class, gender, and sexuality based systems of discrimination which favour the progress of some people while hindering that of others. There is no good social scientific reason to believe that tech is independent of social inequality, yet the dominant techno-libertarian and utopian geek discourses seem oblivious to the issue. We can see this clearly in the way mainstream geek discourse addresses gender issues in tech. The supposed gender blindness of technology is asserted by many geeks, even in the face of mounting evidence that there is systematic sexism in all areas of high technology. This evidence is often dismissed as the politically motivated manoeuvring of social justice warriors, mean-spirited feminist women and their naïve male supporters (Damore, 2017; Jones, 2017; Simpson, 2013). The same unwillingness to discuss, if not outright hostility to, gender issues is seen with respect to ethnicity (Molla & Lightner, 2016; Wong, 2017). Stories by and about the pioneering hackers all express a strong belief in freedom from arbitrary (non-technical) constraints on their exploration and development, and many narrate distrust of bureaucracy and

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management systems. The pioneering hackers described in Steven Levy’s or Eric Raymond’s works on hacker culture, or in Where Wizards Stay Up Late (Hafner & Lyon, 1998), are mostly male; they are either well-paid professionals or students of mostly prestigious universities. They may well have believed that what counted the most was curiosity and knowledge and skill, and that gender, ethnicity, and class were irrelevant in their selection, but they were almost all racialised white males, and the research culture in which they found themselves was one where social class was not so important once you were formally accepted for the studentship or job; this class neutrality may have blinded some of the geek pioneers to how other social characteristics could block entry into computing. There are few women in the canonical stories of early computing culture.2 While commitment to meritocracy is articulated in stories of the birth of hacker culture, meritocracy’s outer bounds are not much explored. An even stronger critique might suggest that the early hackers had a conveniently self-serving politics; freedom was fine so long as it was freedom to do what they valued and freedom from constraints on an activity that they valued in cultural as well as technical terms. Thus, claims about meritocracy serve an ideological function in founding hacker stories. Different senses of ideology are at play in these stories: if by ideology we mean the ideas characteristic of a distinct social grouping, then the worldviews and ethics in, for example, Levy’s and Raymond’s accounts are clearly the ideology of hackers; but if by ideology we mean a set of ideas created to serve the interests of a particular group, but which are articulated as if they were of general rather than specific benefit, then we have a somewhat different perspective on meritocracy as an ideal in geek storytelling. The pioneering hackers asserted that computers should be freely available and would tend towards the good of society (Markoff, 2006; Turner, 2006). Their assertion that what was good for the hackers was good for society is a claim that remains somewhat wanting for evidence. We ought to look back on the early hacker ideology with due regard for the technical accomplishments and spirit of openness and experimentation, but we should be sceptical of some of the wider political claims around computing as a social good. Anxiety, ignorance, and unease about social justice issues and identity politics in some geek stories can be explained by a naïve assumption that tech’s meritocracy regards only knowledge and skill, and that people who hold the 2  Abbate (2012) and Evans (2018), among others, have reconstructed the history of women in early computing in the USA and UK.

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best jobs in tech today do so purely due to their knowledge and hard work. As a sociologist, I distrust simple explanations for social phenomena, because sociologists know social phenomena to be complex and that recounting of the current state of affairs is in no way adequate as a social explanation of how those affairs came to be. A statement of the demographic composition of geek culture (and here I mean Western geek culture, and throughout this book, I have drawn on representation and research that is overwhelmingly Western) is a description and an answer to a ‘what’ question. It is not an explanation, nor an answer to ‘how’ and ‘why’ social questions. So, where should we look for answers to the latter kinds of questions? First, the USA, the centre of geek culture, is a diverse and complex society, with long-standing and ongoing debate and struggle over issues of class, ethnicity, and gender exclusion and discrimination. To make the point that these long-standing features of US society are reflected in general geek culture in the USA and indeed in the tech workplace more specifically should not result in hysterical accusations of being a bitter social justice warrior. At the same time, I also want to suggest that a person could be well-intentioned and still believe that the tech space as it is currently composed is entirely due to the workings of a meritocratic system in which technical ability is the only discriminator. That well-intentioned person would be wrong, though. Computer geek culture started off as majority racialised white male and middle class because these were the demographic characteristics that afforded the best access to the kinds of technical and scientific training that afforded entry and mobility in the pioneering computing period of the 1960s and 1970s. In the canonical stories of hacker culture from the 1960s to early 1980s, the key figures are indeed racialised white middle-­class men; when difference is figured, it is in terms of the social class outsider (Hafner & Lyon, 1998; Hiltzik, 2000; Kidder, 1986; Levy, 2010). I repeat that commitment to free play and creation of the experimental space of early hacking are properly to be commended, but we nonetheless must ask how people got selected to be part of the elite universities and research centres where hacking emerged and where the first computer geeks appeared. Early hacker spaces were elite spaces in a system of unequal social relations and discrimination, so it is not enough to say that the people in the canonical accounts were the best and brightest; we also must ask: who got to play?3  The mostly US-focused literature of early hacker culture, the US counter culture, and the radical feminist and civil rights movements all must be brought into closer contact and tension. 3

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A recurrent claim in geek narrative discourse is that digital technology is a force for good. This claim is commonplace among the leaders of high-­ technology firms, journalists, and other commentators on high-tech, and of course the technology evangelists. The liberal individualism that is prized in much geek storytelling is constantly in tension with the radical rejection of property rights in information that is the hallmark of the anarchistic Free Software tendency in  Free and Open Source  geek culture. Many geeks make light of this tension by claiming that geek culture is a space where knowledge and technology trump politics and identity; but the contradiction between private property and the free culture sharing ethos cannot be so easily wished away. Big tech has ignored the property rights of millions of individual writers, artists, and musicians while vigorously defending its own rights to property in information.

Performing Politics in Geek Narrative Differences in political perspective are manifest in the recurrent themes, characters, and plots in geek storytelling. The main distinction is between utopian and libertarian stories on one hand and anarchist stories on the other. In mainstream popular geek stories, libertarianism is softened with a helping of social liberalism. While the founders’ biographies and project histories we discussed in Chap. 2 take the market as a given, the pernicious side effects of the growth of big tech are rendered mostly invisible by ­centring the plot on the unfolding personality of the genius founder, on exploring leadership, and on identifying personality traits and life experiences that foster an enterprising spirit. Where reference to inequality cannot be avoided, ideas of an identity blind meritocracy are invoked to justify the wealth of the successful founder and the relatively high wages of software engineers. In mainstream geek storytelling, meritocracy is a sign that also serves to neutralise criticism around gender inequality in tech, with gradual reform being advocated as the best way to address the rather grudgingly acknowledged problem. Cyber-utopian thinking has always been a feature of mainstream geek storytelling. The idea that more networked computing would promote, in most instances, human flourishing remains at the centre of both the public imagination of tech and the social imaginary of many geeks. Even after a run of scandals around surveillance and misuse of personal data, there is little sign that the general public will give up their smartphones or depart social networks, and while the general public remains committed to tech

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as consumers, there is a core set of geeks who remain committed as consumers and producers of tech. While tech remains hugely profitable and popular, it will have legions of promoters, from journalists to lobbyists to venture capitalists and politicians. Libertarian and utopian stories focus on individual achievement, genius, and vision; a social and economic good is seen to trickle down from the work of these innovators. Today’s techno-libertarians owe an intellectual debt to the philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (1905–1982). In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Rand (2008 [1966]) argued for the total marketisation of life, with the land, water, and even airwaves all being privately owned. Rand would no doubt be pleased with today’s technology giants. By contrast, libertarian geeks favour stories in which the singular genius makes breakthrough apps and services; the individual inventor gains wealth and fame while the individual consumer gets choice. In libertarian storytelling, there is very limited social benefits analysis beyond market value: the human agents are rendered as sovereign consumers and individual entrepreneurs and inventors; the community is shorthand for groups of people organised as consumers (Brandt, 2011, 2012; Thiel & Masters, 2014). There remains a significant community of geeks, mostly but not exclusively involved with FOSS, who question and at times reject outright the mainstream techno-libertarian and cyber-utopian vision of tech. Some of these dissident geeks are communitarian, focusing on the commons, on collective work; their narrativisation is mainly about self-organisation and connection among peers, eschewing emphasis on visionary founders and leaders. The extensive body of narration on Free Software is the best example of geek communitarian storytelling (see accounts in: DiBona, Cooper, & Stone, 2006; DiBona & Ockman, 1999). We also find a small but expanding body of writing from Europe, where the techno-libertarian obsession with the individual genius geek did not take a firm hold in geek culture, and where playfulness was more important than profit in the emergent computing cultures of the 1980s, where the demoscene (a computing culture where small software demos were created and circulated with the aim of displaying programming and multimedia skill over and above producing digital commodities) was a site and object of geek storytelling in Europe (Alberts & Oldenziel, 2014).4 Other dissident 4  The playfulness of the demoscene should not be taken to mean that computer geeks in Europe had no interest in start-ups: many did, as attested by the accounts in European Founders at Work (Santos, 2012).

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geeks are techno-anarchist, sharing much in common with the political outlook of communitarianism, but less willing to co-exist and compromise with big tech or the state. Techno-anarchists narrativise stories about collective and social benefits, as well as accounts of outright rejection and undermining of big tech. In techno-anarchist stories, the individual is characterised as an activist who uses technology to gain autonomy from large state and corporate control. In anarchist geek stories, people are empowered by peer production and the gains from tech development are widely shared (Coleman, 2012; Mason, 2008).

Summary Geeks see many of the problems faced by contemporary humanity as amenable to computational solutions. In geek narrative, authors can point to the development of new medicines and new materials, and to new ways to produce a whole range of goods and services more cheaply and efficiently. A cynic might say that these people have products to sell and ask: why would we expect them to claim anything else? When confronted with evidence that digital technology can lead to unequal social outcomes, a common geek response is to claim that the technology has been improperly applied or not fully understood by those in charge of addressing the social problem in question. Geek faith in the empowering possibilities of technology is unshakable. Then we have many instances of gender troubles and discourse. A core belief in the virtues of meritocracy can lead up to a denial that gender inequality in access to the benefits of digital technology can be explained by long-established sexism in society. If more women worked harder to understand digital technology, then the numbers of women employed in this field would rise consequently, so it is claimed. Stories about the history of computing are among the core texts of geek culture. In these stories, we see political perspectives at play, tension between libertarianism and communitarianism, scepticism versus utopianism. In explaining how and why computing cultures emerge and develop, authors make judgments as to the relative influence of the state, the private sector and peer production. Walter Isaacson (2014) concludes his comprehensive and thoughtful The Innovators, by taking the safe option of taking all three influences on board. He ends by asserting that innovation comes out of three modes of organising work: state, private sector, and peer-based commons production, and while these three are sometimes in conflict

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the story of computing shows that the three were present in different combinations in every key development. When there was tension, it was often a creative tension; the lone genius does not accomplish nearly as much as the right combination of these ways of working. Isaacson is surely correct in this conclusion. By tracing the ideological fault lines in geek discourse, we can better understand how and why authors choose from these three explanatory strands.

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Coleman, G. (2012). Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coleman, G. (2015). Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Reprint ed.). Brooklyn: Verso Books. Damore, J. (2017, August 11). Why I Was Fired by Google. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-i-was-fired-bygoogle-1502481290 DiBona, C., Cooper, D., & Stone, M. (2006). Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution. Beijing and London: O’Reilly. DiBona, C., & Ockman, S. (1999). Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (1st ed.). Beijing and Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media. Dormehl, L. (2013). The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the Counterculture and How the Crazy Ones Took over the World. London: Virgin Books. Dyson, E. (1998). Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. New York: Broadway Books. Edwards, P. N. (1996). The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Ensmenger, N. (2010). The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Evans, C. L. (2018). Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. New York, NY: Portfolio. Frediani, C., & Ziccardi, G. (2013). Inside Anonymous: A Journey into the World of Cyberactivism. Informant. Gair, C. (2007). The American Counterculture, 1945–1975. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hafner, K., & Lyon, M. (1998). Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (Touchstone ed.). New York: Simon & Schuster. Hiltzik, M. (2000). Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: HarperBusiness. Isaacson, W. (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. London: Simon & Schuster UK. Jones, O. (2017, August 8). Google’s Sexist Memo Has Provided the Alt-right with a New Martyr | Owen Jones. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/08/google-sexist-memo-altright-martyr-james-damore Kidder, T. (1986). The Soul of a New Machine. New York: Avon Books. Lanier, J. (2013). Who Owns the Future? London: Allen Lane. Lean, T. (2016). Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer. Bloomsbury Sigma. Levy, S. (2010). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution – 25th Anniversary Edition (1st ed.). Newton: O’Reilly Media. Lovink, G. (2011). Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media. Cambridge: Polity.

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Lovink, G. (2016). Social Media Abyss: Critical Internet Cultures and the Force of Negation. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Markoff, J.  (2006). What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Reprint ed.). London: Penguin Books. Mason, M. (2008). The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Hackers, Punk Capitalists, Graffiti Millionaires and Other Youth Movements Are Remixing Our Culture and Changing Our World. London: Allen Lane. Mazzucato, M. (2013). The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. London: Anthem Press. Retrieved from https://www.dawsonera. com/guard/protected/dawson.jsp?name=https://idp.goldsmiths.ac.uk/idp/ shibboleth&dest=http://www.dawsonera.com/depp/reader/protected/ external/AbstractView/S9780857282606 Molla, R., & Lightner, R. (2016, April, 10). Diversity in Tech Companies. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://graphics.wsj.com/diversity-intech-companies Morozov, E. (2014). To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist. London: Penguin. O’Brien, J.  (2007, November 13). The PayPal Mafia. Fortune. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2007/11/13/paypal-mafia/ Papadimitriou, F. (2006). A Geography of ‘Notopia’. City, 10(3), 317–326. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604810600982289. Parini, J.  (2012). The American Mythos. Daedalus, 141(1), 52–60. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23240301 Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rand, A. (2007). Atlas Shrugged (Updated ed.). London: Penguin Classics. Rand, A. (2008). Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New ed.). New York: Penguin. Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Revised ed.). Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (1st ed.). New  York: Currency. Santos, P. G. (2012). European Founders at Work (1st ed.). Berkeley, CA: Apress. Schmidt, E., & Rosenberg, J. (2015). How Google Works. London: John Murray. Scholz, T. (2016). Uberworked and Underpaid (1st ed.). Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organisation Without Organisations. London: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books. Shirky, C. (2011). Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. London: Penguin. Simpson, C. (2013, December 28). Paul Graham Proves Sexism in Tech Is Still a Problem. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/paul-graham-revives-sexism-tech-talk/356541/

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Smith, N. (2017, February 28). What’s Wrong With Bill Gates’ Robot Tax. Retrieved August 21, 2017, from https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-28/what-s-wrong-with-bill-gates-robot-tax Srnicek, N. (2016). Platform Capitalism. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Stone, B. (2017). The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley are Changing the World. London: Transworld Digital. Taplin, J. (2017). Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All of Us. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Tarnoff, B., & Weigel, M. (2018, May 3). Why Silicon Valley Can’t Fix Itself. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/ may/03/why-silicon-valley-cant-fix-itself-tech-humanism Thiel, P., & Masters, B. (2014). Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. New York: Crown Business. Toyama, K. (2015). Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. New York: PublicAffairs. Turner, F. (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Waters, R. (2017, February 19). Bill Gates Calls for Income Tax on Robots. Financial Times. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/d04a89c2f6c8-11e6-9516-2d969e0d3b65 Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wong, J. C. (2017, August 7). Segregated Valley: The Ugly Truth About Google and Diversity in Tech. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-valley-google-diversity-blackwomen-workers

CHAPTER 5

Notes from a Geek Autobiography

Abstract  There is joy in geek culture: the excitement of receiving a new gadget, viewing an unboxing video, loading software onto a smartphone which was not really designed to run that software in the first place. Then there is a geek ‘gold standard’, which involves fine-tuning of the latest Linux distribution to get it to work on hardware not specifically designed for it. Curiosity is related to joy. Joy comes from the satisfaction of curiosity and overcoming technical challenges. Keywords  Autobiography • Obsession • Psion • Linux • Programming

Diary: December 17th, 2007 My 30-day experiment to work mainly in Linux hit a snag. I tried several Linux distros on a Dell XPS m1330 laptop: I installed Ubuntu 7.10, but I don’t like the Gnome look and feel; Kubuntu also ran well, but Mandriva offer the best KDE desktop in my experience. So Mandriva it was to be. I have been using Linux on and off and since 2002 moving between SUSE/ OpenSUSE, Mandrake/Mandriva and Xandros. I decided to go all the way and run only Linux on a laptop for 30 days, so I took out the Windows Vista PC dual boot hard disc and stuck that in an external drive enclosure, then installed Mandriva 2008 on a separate hard disc and stuck that into the laptop. No going back without getting the screwdriver out, I thought. Except I did. I

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could not get sound to work nor could I get the built-­in web cam going. I was getting no joy from any Linux games apart from Darwinia; and no games at all worked in Cedega. In a moment of intense frustration, as so many times in the past, I felt I did not have the time to troubleshoot all these issues; so, I swapped hard disks and went back to the comforting environment of Vista: web cam working, great sound, Bluetooth synch with my mobile phone, all the familiar Windows software, all my games … As I have often thought over the years: life is too fucking short for Linux. But no. Hang on I thought. Calm down. I gritted my teeth and decided to have another go at switching to Linux. If I needed to use Windows urgently I had my desktop. I reminded myself—again—that trying to move my work to Linux would give me first-hand insight into a range of issues involved in switching to Free Software. So, I swapped hard discs again and went back to a full Linux environment on the laptop [17 December 2007 and already a wobble]. As I will be building an application prototype that must run cross platform, I set up a WinXP VM (virtual machine) running under VMplayer for software testing on Windows. Not quite a pure Linux set-up, but as I have no Office productivity software loaded in the Windows VM, and no easy option to dual boot back to Windows, I am forced to investigate the nuances of getting the laptop to work with Linux, while getting on with my normal work of preparing teaching material, writing up notes and journals, and developing an e-learning application. What do I like so far? Multimedia on Mandriva is great: I have flash, win32 and QuickTime codecs, and a full DVD player. I prefer the ease of a Linux installation with proprietary plugins and have no interest in an-all Free Software purist solution. What really swung it for me is that I now have the built-in Novatel 3G HSPDA wireless broadband card working out of the box. This is key as I don’t like being tethered to WIFI hotspots. What do I not like: Sound is still not all there, and I can’t use the webcam on the XPS 1330. Integrated media buttons do not work (they did in Ubuntu); the integrated remote control has limited functionality, and Bluetooth remains a no-go area for me. All of these I will tackle over the next week or two. Cedega [a software utility designed to allow running Windows games on a Linux desktop] has no

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sound, but I may have found the problem, I think (Gaming is not central to this experiment … but is fun). Battery usage is about 10–15% down compared to Vista: 4:40  hrs as against 5:30  hours on an extended battery, but I will investigate optimizations. OpenOffice offers most of what I would do in Microsoft Office, but Impress seems a poor substitute for PowerPoint 2007; maybe I just need to source some good templates or create my own. The DIY aspect to Linux is fun, but it does require time. This could be a barrier to adoption by busy people. It certainly has been for me in the past. In 2007, when I wrote the journal post above, I remember I was tired and frustrated and on the point of giving up on attempts to use Linux as my everyday computing platform. What had brought me to that point? One reason was a desire to reinforce my credibility as a Free Software geek, which as I saw it required setting up and using Linux instead of Windows (or Mac OS). Running Linux was a sign of belonging to an enlightened elite who had invested the time and energy in learning how to use Linux. Oddly, on reflection, there were not that many people around to whom I could demonstrate that knowledge and to whom it would have mattered. The public performance of being a Linux geek was done online in user forums or in person at local Linux User Groups. No one in my social circle knew anything about Linux.

Becoming a Geek Beginning in 1983, when I was 16/17, I took both formal and informal training in programming and information technology. After that start, I had periods when I flirted with becoming an application developer—but these were never quite serious, and by the time I was thinking seriously about a programming career in the later 1980s, I had already been drawn towards sociology. I was then, and remain, a kind of geek—the computer technology enthusiast—a rarer creature in the 1980s than in the early twenty-first century. Back then, the ‘computer guy’ (always referred to as male, though I remember working with quite a few female computer specialists) was recognised as highly knowledgeable and skilled. I made a decent living as a part-time programmer and computer literacy tutor, earning enough to support myself while I attended university as a full-time undergraduate in sociology. I was the person to whom people would turn for computing help and advice; before personal computing became ubiquitous, there was

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an air of mystery attached to the computer specialist: people respected you for being in command of esoteric—as it was then—knowledge. And they paid you well for your knowledge. As I write this, it is now more than 30 years since first I stared at green glowing alphanumeric characters on a computer monitor, back to 1983 when I learned word processing with WordStar and got my first BASIC programs to work. Now I stare at high-resolution screens with rich displays that mimic a glossy magazine, and my smartphone has more memory than the washing machine-sized IBM minicomputer on which I worked as a system operator in my first proper job; that was in 1984. What has not changed is my sense of wonder at personal computing. I am a computer geek. My interest in computers goes back even before I first ever used one, to about 1978 when as a secondary school student, I was spending time thinking about how I could make a computing device using magnets and rolling paper tape. I bored my schoolmate and best friend with my ‘brilliant’ idea. After some reading around, I realised that my ideas were not just unoriginal, but, in the crude form I had thought my design through, completely unworkable. But no matter. I had encountered the idea of computing. I would never look back. In retrospect, I was quite ignorant about the history of computing, even though I like to give my younger self some credit for thinking about the problem. Another early high point was getting a Commodore Amiga in 1986 when I was first introduced to graphical user interfaces and their underlying philosophy. Apple II microcomputers and the first Apple Macs were far too expensive. Atari’s machines no longer interested me, because I had become one of the Amiga faithful. I bought a stack of Amiga programming manuals; I was determined to learn how to program this fantastic machine. The Amiga was a breakthrough multimedia machine (Maher, 2012), it had a sleek design, and it offered graphics, audio, and animation that were ahead of anything else on the market, including the Mac. I started to learn C, Pascal and Modula 2 on my own time. At work, I learned to program in Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC and to work with scripting and databases on UNIX. The hype around the Amiga began to subside, and I could not find the time to move beyond the basic level of C programming. I turned my attention to studying informatics and planning a career in business computing. My next PC was a Toshiba portable computer with 2.5-inch floppy drives and black-and-white display screen. It was quite slow, but it was the first computer I used on which my main activity

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was not learning to program. Forward to 1988–1989, I had just started a degree in sociology and I began to write my undergraduate essays and keep notes on the computer. The computer was now for me more of an information appliance than a hobbyist tool. Like many geeks, I often found technology to be preferable to other people because the technology was more predictable, and I told myself that I had more control over the relationship with the computer than with other people. If I were to tell my ‘childhood story’ it would share many elements and forms with stories of other geeks as children. I was awkward; I had thick spectacles. My father encouraged my geeky interests by buying me a transistor radio kit and a camera. A radio enthusiast, he gave me access to his books on electronics, and he taught me the basics of electrical circuits and how to use a soldering iron. My early geek story is standard.

Gadgets, Code, and Other Obsessions The rate of introduction of new digital gadgets seems to be accelerating. The introduction of new smartphones is dizzying with at least one new device seemingly being announced every week. Online media keep up a frenetic pace of new product announcements in the commercial world, and new software and system developments in the free and open source worlds. The gaming world straddles the commercial/free-open divide, and the pace of introduction of new products and modifications of existing ones is also hectic. Computer geeks pride themselves on being up to date with the latest technical developments; keeping pace means that the geek must constantly consume reviews and comparison articles and videos (Langley, 2013). To be caught out by having missed a new release of a game or Linux distro, or not to know about the latest microchip, is to have your geek identity brought into question, at least by yourself if not by others. When the geek manages to stay up to date, she/he is living on the bleeding edge of technological change. Being in the vanguard does indeed have its perks regarding recognition by others that you are someone in the know about technology, and perhaps a smug sense of keeping ahead of the mass of ‘normal users’ of computer tech. There is, however, a downside: cost. Keeping on the edge can cost money. There are ways to keep the costs to a minimum, especially if you focus on Free Software: once you have acquired a decently powerful computer, then you can spend years tinkering with free software on that hardware. The costs rise sharply however if you get hooked on having new hardware. Gadget lust

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is an occupational hazard in geek cultures. We love Shiny New Stuff. We geeks never grew out of our childhood excitement at unwrapping tech toys at Christmas and birthdays. My first memory of gadget excitement is of a construction set—not Lego—in the early 1970s, then the many model ships and aeroplanes that I built. And my first camera. In each case, the object was of value not only in itself but because I had to learn new skills to make full use of the object; that meant reading, which I was eager to do. I still enjoy reading instruction manuals, and I have even saved some user manuals for gadgets that I no longer own. Construction sets, chemistry sets, microscopes, transistor radio kits, and cameras were for me evocative objects (Turkle, 2007). I find it easy to plot my childhood and adolescence as a series of encounters with these objects and their attendant practices. That takes me to another cost—time. Geeky activities are for the time rich. Whether you go for new gadgets or stick to Free Software, you must have a great deal of time to hand. There is always more to read, to learn, and to try. In the late 1970s, there was no public Internet, but there was the amateur radio club at my school; naturally, I joined and spent hours after school studying radio circuitry and fiddling with hardware. Nowadays, there are unboxings and reviews and tutorials to watch on YouTube. There are workshops and hack sessions to attend. There are countless evenings and nights needed to hack software and hardware. And you must always make time to read. Seldom talked about in geek culture is the social cost, in terms of the opportunity costs of staying in to hack, as against spending time with friends, though it must be said that since I had almost no friends as a teenager, geekery had no real downsides for me. With age, however, I have less time for geeky things. And ageing increases the emotional cost of anxiety about whether you are losing your technical edge to younger and brighter geeks and intensifies the depression that often follows the high of starting up a new piece of hardware or of first encountering a new Linux distro or a new game. The novelty soon wears off and you find yourself seeking the next new thing to recapture that sense of excitement that you are certain you had once, but could not say quite when exactly perhaps because the sense of excitement is many years in the past and has over the years come to be laden with imagery perhaps more invented than real, but which nonetheless motivates you to keep trying to get again the buzz, the excitement of a technical discovery. I wrote my first ever working computer program in early 1983. It was trivial  code in BASIC, but it was code that I had written, and it ran without errors. Some people in my introductory programming class were struggling with flowcharts and algorithmic logic, but I was able to

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visualise algorithms, and from these images, I could write code. With a programming certificate in hand, I secured a job as a trainee operator with a computer consulting firm. I was in the big league now; well at least the computers were bigger. I wrote my first ‘grown-up’ program in RPG II (RPG (Report Program Generator) was a terse language used on IBM minicomputers; code had to be written in columns; I thought it was ugly). Fast forward a year or two, and I am writing moderately complex code in Pascal (a language with what I thought was an elegant syntax), on an IBM compatible. Now I had full control of a computer and was learning more about algorithms and data structures. Each programming breakthrough I remember as a moment of clarity and realisation that I had turned a decisive corner in my life. I did not know then what an epiphany was, but I had several of them. I have spent much of my geek life since then trying to recapture that exciting rush of discovery and control over the machine when fingers, eyes, and brain meld with the glowing screen and clicking keyboard. Having squashed that bug or got that algorithm figured out in your head, you race desperately to get it into code; time is of the essence, a good programming idea is of no use until expressed in code. You never forget your first working code.

Can We Be Ethical Consumer Geeks? I Want a Fairphone, September 2017 Agbogbloshie, outside Accra, Ghana, is the world’s largest e-waste dump, a hellish poisoned landscape that is the dark side of global gadget obsession.1 Consumer tech culture is hideously wasteful. Planned obsolesce, and the annual upgrade cycle in the First World produces mountains—literally—of e-waste in the global South, where people are themselves adding to the mountains as they too get on the upgrade cycle, albeit starting from a lower technical rung. Whether the next version of hardware or software is going to increase our pleasure or our productivity is not at all clear. We are all rodents on an upgrade treadmill. The Silicon Valley dream machine has sold us geeks a fantasy of constant improvement through upgrade. Perhaps if we stop to reflect and take a critical look, we might realise that the only clear upward trend-line is the profit that accrues to the tech giants. And the growing mounds of e-waste. 1  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2014/feb/27/agbogbloshieworlds-largest-e-waste-dump-in-pictures

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The Fairphone (https://www.fairphone.com/en/) is a modular reparable and user-upgradeable smartphone. You can take it apart with a screwdriver in minutes, and all the major components—screen, camera, battery, are all user replaceable. It runs Android, which does go some way to making it ‘open’. The firm behind this phone is an ethical corporation basing its business model on sourcing raw materials from conflict-free zones, with its hardware built in factories with fair employment practices. But the Fairphone presents some problematic issues to a tech geek like me: it is very expensive for what it offers and has a rather clunky and uninspiring design. And it is not cutting edge. For a geek to commit to owning a Fairphone means being well off in global terms and very committed to accepting compromises entailed in ethical consumption of what is, after all, a material commodity with a finite lifespan and a clear even if extended upgrade path, rather like eating relatively expensive organic food. As a geek, I want a Fairphone, but I suspect it is probably not much of a solution to the ugly inequality and environmental degradation that underlie the Shiny New Things that geeks love to have and to use. So, should the ethical geek get off the upgrade bandwagon?

Once We Were Psioneers I first saw a Psion handheld in the late 1980s. I was fascinated by the possibility of being able to take my computing with me and though by the late 1990s, laptops had become fairly common, and indeed I owned one myself, the Psion was something different: it was a pocket computer. In 1998, I bought a Psion series 3. Here in a pocket-sized device, I had a word processor, notetaker, a spreadsheet, and games—indeed all the facilities of a full-sized PC. Of course, it was too small to be used for touch typing, and it took me a while before I realised that the most efficient way to use it was to type using one’s thumbs. It was battery-powered and it ran for two weeks. The small screen and keyboard were not suitable for extended periods of work. All this was of no concern to me. What really mattered was that I had a computer in my pocket. And unlike the swathe of organisers made by Casio and Sharp that were a bit like pocket calculators, this Psion series 3 looked like a tiny laptop. The appearance was significant, the looks mattered. But was it good value for money? No, it probably was not. It cost several hundred pounds, which was rather more than I could afford

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on a postgrad student budget. But, it fulfilled my teenaged desire: to have a truly portable computer, a pocket-sized computer, that I could take anywhere and use anywhere. Psion was the British PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) innovator and for a time a design and technology leader (Orlowski, 2007), frequently represented as the plucky David against the US and Japanese PDA Goliaths of the likes of Palm and Sony. After exiting the consumer market in 2001, Psion’s legacy lived on for another decade in the form of the intellectual property vested in Symbian, which underpinned Nokia’s rise to domination of the mobile and early smartphone market in the early 2000s. Psion users—Psioneers—were a very enthusiastic group. Psioneers were hardcore fans, noted for their deep knowledge of the handheld computers that were their main passion, and more so for their ability to come up with original ways to use their Psion handhelds. In Palmtop Magazine, you could read about people writing novels on their Psion handhelds or about people using Psion handhelds in exotic locations. In one sense it was impractical, indeed absurd, to write a novel on a Psion or for that matter, on any handheld. But the whole point of being a Psioneer was to be as far out of the normal zone of personal computing as possible. Odd things were done on Psions because they could be done. This boundary-pushing to the point of impracticality is a core aspect of geek and hacker culture. On further reflection, some of these exploits were not so odd after all: a robust pocket-sized device that ran for weeks on two standard batteries was ideal for a highly mobile person. For my own part, I had trialled the Psion 3 and then 5 as devices for taking fieldnotes between 1995 and 1998 when I was a PhD student in social anthropology but found them to attract too much attention from people I was interviewing. In the late 1990s, handheld computing devices were not ubiquitous and very few people had a mobile phone. There were no tablets as we know them today—some people had PDAs like the Palm Pilot, but a use-anywhere computer that was ‘pocket’ sized was unusual. My Psion handheld computer was not suited for a fieldnote capture device, mostly because the keyboard was too small for touch typing. On the other hand, I persevered, because I had read stories (in Palmtop Magazine and online), of people using Psions to capture data in the field. Why was it not working for me? As an agenda and alarm clock the Psion was fantastic, but maybe overkill for my needs since I was not a busy executive juggling a complex diary, but a graduate student for whom the typical day involved spending most

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of it in the university library. But for taking notes, no. The problem was that if I took the device out during a field interview, I would have to spend time showing it to the person being interviewed and then explain how it worked and give an account of why I was using it. It was a distraction. My Psion was a solution in search of worthwhile problems (a position other geeks might recognise). As geeks, we often seize upon new technologies and then figure out what we can do with them. When in 2001, Psion announced that they were exiting the handheld computer business, I was bitterly disappointed as was the case with many other fans of this handheld computing platform. But the writing had been on the wall for several months perhaps even a year before that announcement. The firm had been finding the trading environment to be increasingly difficult and there were many hints that a promised cellular mobile connected device to be built in partnership with Motorola was not making the expected progress. The Psion era was officially over. What happens when a technology platform dies? I was one of the many thousands of people who had become addicted to that handheld computer and who felt that a major pillar of their entire technological world had been ripped away. We Psioneers allowed ourselves a period of mourning, and then looked forward to what would come next. Beyond the pain and loss, there is always something coming up next.

Being Linux A year after the early 2007 struggle to switch to Linux, with which I opened this chapter, I was at it again: Field Diary: January 20th, 2008. Well, after the near tragic events [sic] I reported in my post of the 15 January, I am back in full operation with my Free Software desktop. Basically, what I did was reinstall Mandriva Linux 2008 and manually reconfigure my Firefox profile, using guesswork and a backup. I do not know why Zotero died on me, but I have come to realise how much I rely on it for managing my online research. Over the past month, I have learned an enormous amount about Linux and the KDE desktop. It may not have been time-efficient, but it certainly stimulated my inner geek. I have decided to stay with GNU/Linux as my academic workstation, with a VMware virtual machine installation of Windows XP for NVivo 7—which

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I need for some MA teaching and some of my own research, as well as Minitab and SPSS for quantitative analysis. I can’t say that I miss Windows, but then when I am using Windows I don’t miss Linux or OSX. I’m just technologically promiscuous I guess :). I discovered UNIX in 1986. So, when Linux arrived on the scene in the 1990s, I knew what it was and how it could be used since Linux is a descendant of UNIX (Salus & Hall, 2008). What was special about Linux was being able to use it on a PC, which was not possible when I first encountered UNIX. So, when I got a Compact Disc Read-Only-Memory (CD ROM) with Caldera Linux in 1999, I just had to try it out. I was now part of the Linux user scene. My first efforts at installing Linux on an HP laptop in 2000 were not altogether successful. I abandoned the attempt. I tried again in 2001; then gave up and tried again in 2002, when I was able to get current versions of both SuSE and Mandrake Linux to install and run on a new Acer desktop. I still remember how thrilled I was when I first saw a windowed graphical user interface on Linux (KDE on SuSE Linux). After years of looking on with envy at Mac and Windows user interfaces, I now had a graphical interface sitting on top of a version of UNIX that I could tinker with and for which I had full user documentation. I still had hardware compatibility problems, but the core was there, and I was hooked. I was excited by the level of control and the possibility for tinkering that the Linux distros seemed to offer to me. Linux seemed to offer autonomy, freedom from restrictive technologies and politics. It offered freedom to examine and modify source code (which was of little real use to me as by 2002, I was a lecturer in sociology and really could not make the time to update my now outdated programming skills). To try out all kinds of software tools for free and to find out how they are built takes a fair bit of technical skill, which I had, and a lot of time, which I did not. In the early 2000s, using Linux meant confronting the challenge of installing and customising a Linux distro on hardware on which Linux was likely but by no means guaranteed to work. Another attraction was the dozens of Linux distributions—distros. Deep customisation could be done: if you invested time in learning the inner workings of your distro, you could build a fully custom working environment. You could, indeed. Those were pioneering times. Since 2002, I have had a period of running Linux every year, even trying to go full time on several occasions, but always falling back to Windows and Mac because of hardware or software compatibility issues. As I write

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this in 2018, I still haven’t felt able to switch full-time to Linux. As soon as I have a bit of time, I tell myself, I will give it another try. Nth time lucky?

Being a Geek In this chapter, I made a narrative of events in my own life. I have over the years suffered the loss of several platforms that meant a lot to me. First, there was the end of Amiga: I spent much of the late 1980s hoping that the Amiga platform would be revived; it was not. Then there was the end of Psion in 2001. Next came the demise of the Symbian platform and then Windows Phone. My favourite Linux distro—Mandrake—is long gone. All of these were platforms in which I had invested a great deal of time and energy. Were all those long hours of joy and frustration worthwhile? I have no idea. To be a geek is to gather yourself from the ruins of an obsolete platform and move on to the next new thing. As I surveyed my diaries, notebooks, and memories to write this chapter, it occurred to me that I was framing my experiences with some of the very devices that I show elsewhere in this book as shaping geek storytelling. I am a geek telling a story about myself as a geek. I do not believe that I set out consciously to draw on recurrent geek master plots and frames when I was making notes about my tech exploits over many years. I do know that I had been reading computing histories and inventor biographies before I became a sociologist and developed an interest in narrative. Nonetheless, I am not altogether sure if the geek experiences I remember had a pure existence outside of how my present self chooses to frame my ‘geek experiences’. To the question: ‘do we live stories or just tell them’? (Fay, 1996, chapter 9) I have no definite answer. There is a way to go back in time to relive your earlier computing life: emulation—where the functions of a hardware platform are emulated in software on another platform—allows us to reanimate dead technology. Using an emulator, I can relive my Amiga and Psion days, but somehow the experience is not quite the same.

References Fay, B. (1996). Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science: A Multicultural Approach. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Langley, A. (2013). Geek Lust. Iola, WI: Krause Publications.

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Maher, J. (2012). The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Orlowski, A. (2007, June 26). Psion: The Last Computer. Retrieved August 11, 2008, from http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/06/26/psion_special/ print.html Salus, P. H., & Hall, J. (2008). The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin (J. C. Reed, Ed.). Reed Media Services. Turkle, S. (Ed.). (2007). Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

CHAPTER 6

Afterword: Coda

Abstract  Though narrated as if generic and universal, the mostly US-focused literature I surveyed carries political assumptions and ideological viewpoints that are specific to the fictive ethnicity of geeks and specific to cyber-utopian and techno-­libertarian worldviews of mainstream journalists and media commentators on tech. By taking apart some of the narratives, we understand how they create the effects that they do, and we can question them and think about alternative narrativisation. I claim that understanding geek culture requires that we engage with the stories that geeks tell and that others tell about them. Popular geek storytelling expresses identities and relations, building a world from a range of themes and master plots, ranging from neoliberal individualism to the Silicon Valley American Dream. There are overlaps and crossovers and conflicts in geek culture that are too subtle to be captured by either the broad brush of quick-fire journalism or the sensationalist urges of print fiction or box-office film. Keywords  Myth • Cyber-utopianism • Master plots • Geek storytelling Though narrated as if generic and universal, the mostly US-focused literature I surveyed carries political assumptions and ideological viewpoints that are specific to the fictive ethnicity of geeks and specific to cyber-­ utopian and techno-libertarian worldviews of mainstream journalists and media commentators on tech. By taking apart some of the narratives, we © The Author(s) 2019 B. Alleyne, Geek and Hacker Stories, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95819-1_6

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understand how they create the effects that they do, and we can question them and think about alternative narrativisation. I claim that understanding geek culture requires that we engage with the stories that geeks tell and that others tell about them. Popular geek storytelling expresses identities and relations, building a world from a range of themes and master plots, ranging from neoliberal individualism to the Silicon Valley American Dream. There are overlaps and crossovers and conflicts in geek culture that are too subtle to be captured by either the broad brush of quick-fire journalism or the sensationalist urges of print fiction or box-office film. The geek stories we discussed are structured around a small set of master plots: the hero’s journey, a voyage of discovery, and the redemptive self. The literature from which I selected stories for analysis is mostly of American origin, and we saw that the master plots are embedded in American narrative culture. These master plots simplify and make the unfamiliar seem unfamiliar. Geek narratives build their characters from stock types and archetypes, and in some cases stereotypes such as the geek genius who is a social misfit. Platform stories articulate a sense of belonging by drawing a boundary between the in-group of the geek’s platform preference, and those who make other technology choices; platform loyalty is like belonging to a religion, with platform converts taking the role of evangelists. Tech histories and biographies are clearly about technology—that is their manifest aim; they are also about people, identities, and social relations, and these texts take ideological positions some of which are more latent than manifest. It is not so much that social and political issues are concealed underneath the tech discourse, but that effort and energy go into ‘normalising/ simplifying’ the politics of the technology. Geek stories are not just representations: they also have a performative aspect in the sense that these stories are intended to have an impact on the real world. The stories we analysed are performative in that they are aimed to do one or more of the following: to justify a technocratic worldview; to advocate a platform; to justify and challenge liberal notions of meritocracy; and to articulate and to challenge cyber-utopian visions and projects. Why should we care about the stories told about and by geeks? It is in and by means of storytelling, of myth-making, in geek culture that identities are constructed, actions and outcomes are rationalised and justified, and tensions and contradictions are smoothed over. By turning our attention to geek stories as narrations, we can de-mythologise them, and so gain the critical perspective that is necessary to question dominant cyber-utopian ideas, which mystify the problematic aspects of big tech. The insight of the kind gained from analysis of geek storytelling is not technical, but social and political. After all, what can we know of technology if technology is all we know?

Index1

A Android, 48, 51n4, 61, 63–65, 65n15, 102 Apple, 16, 22, 24–27, 36, 37, 39, 48, 51n4, 53–58, 53n5, 60, 62–64, 64n14, 67, 68, 98 Autobiography, viii, 11, 23, 95–106 B Biography, viii, 5, 6, 11, 13, 21, 25–29, 34–37, 39, 40, 83, 87, 106, 110 C Character, vii, 8, 10–12, 21–23, 25, 27–29, 28n3, 31, 33–37, 39, 40, 50–52, 75, 87, 98, 110 Community, vii, 2, 16, 33, 36, 48, 53, 59, 64n14, 79, 88 Conflict, 65, 68, 89, 110

Culture, vii, 1–11, 5n2, 7n4, 15, 16, 24, 25, 31, 35, 36, 39, 49, 50n1, 53, 57, 66, 67, 69, 77–79, 83, 85–89, 86n3, 101, 103, 110 Cyber-utopianism, viii, 77 E Epiphany, 27, 28, 34, 49, 59, 101 F Fiction, viii, 1, 11, 13, 21–23, 27, 82, 110 FOSS, see Free and Open Source Software Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), vii, 15, 30, 62, 64, 65 Free Software, 8, 9, 15, 16, 22, 34, 49, 58, 59, 63–66, 68, 69, 79, 87, 88, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

G Geek, vii, viii, 1–17, 7n4, 21–40, 48–55, 50n1, 57n9, 58–64, 66–70, 75–90, 95–106, 109, 110 culture, vii, viii, 2, 4, 6–10, 12–14, 16, 17, 22, 23, 27–29, 32, 33, 37, 49, 66, 67, 69, 76, 86–89, 100, 110 Genius, 15, 22–25, 27–29, 34–36, 39, 80, 81, 83, 87, 88, 90, 110 Google, 31, 32, 36, 48, 64, 65, 68, 83 H Hacker, 2, 3, 6–9, 7n4, 13–16, 22–26, 34–36, 39, 52, 59, 69, 79, 84–86, 86n3, 103 L Linux, 14–16, 15n6, 22, 32, 34, 50, 51n4, 57–66, 57n9, 59n11, 64n14, 68, 95–97, 99, 100, 104–106 M Market share, 64, 64n14, 65, 67–68 Master plot, 10, 11, 34, 36, 49, 69, 70, 76, 106, 110 Microsoft, 16, 28, 33, 36, 37, 48, 50, 58, 60, 62–64, 67–70, 81, 97 Mindshare, 25, 56, 67, 68 N Narrative, viii, 9–13, 17, 21, 22, 26, 26n2, 27, 31, 32, 35–37, 39, 49, 51, 52, 62, 63, 66–69, 75–90, 106, 109, 110

O Obsession, 2, 88, 99–101 P Platform, viii, 7, 12–15, 37, 47–70, 75, 76, 82, 83, 96, 97, 104, 106, 110 Plot, vii, viii, 10–12, 21, 26, 27, 35, 39, 40, 49, 53, 62, 67, 68, 75, 87, 100 Politics, 5, 8, 9, 15, 33, 51, 64, 68, 77, 79, 84, 85, 87–89, 105, 110 Programming, 4, 6, 6n3, 8, 62, 88, 97, 98, 101, 105 Psion, 102–104, 106 R Representation, viii, 3, 12, 13, 22–24, 32n7, 39, 86, 110 S Story, vii, viii, 6, 7, 9–15, 21, 22, 25–29, 26n2, 28n3, 31, 31n5, 32, 34–39, 47–70, 76, 80–90, 99, 103, 106, 110 T Techno-anarchism, viii, 76, 76n1, 78, 79, 81, 89 Techno-libertarianism, viii, 77, 82 Type, 7, 9, 10, 16, 21, 23, 24, 31, 35, 102, 110 W Windows, 48, 50, 51, 51n4, 53–55, 57–64, 96, 97, 104–106