geek

Peter van Heusden pvh at egenetics.com
Wed Sep 13 07:15:58 PDT 2000


On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, kelley wrote:

[snip]
>
> however, you have to admit that there is something *very* odd about this
> claim. for one thing, it is continaully upheld as unique to hackers and
> yet you'd think, listening to you two and countless other i've read on
> this, that no other occ. has such sentiments.

What other occupation has the possiblity of capitalising on those sentiments? I know it is too much to reduce it to technology, but there is something about the product which allows open source to exist like it does. In other fields (e.g. scientific paper publishing), different laws of production apply, and a different ethic applies with them. For example, in scientific paper publishing, the knowledge product is basically a only produced once - you don't get any kudos for re-doing or tweaking someone's paper post-publication. Maybe this is too base / superstructure-ish way to see things, but I think there is something there.

[snip]
>
> there is something odd about this claim, at least when you come at from
> where i do with a consideration of the history of other professions in
> which a key political process involved in the creation of a monopoly on
> knowledge.
>
> others love doing what they do in the same way as hackers describe loving
> what they do. but i *am* a sociologist and utterly refuse to presume that
> this is all there is to it, since i *know* that many other people love what
> they do beyond all external rewards they get for doing so. and i *rarely*
> see any other group whip this credential out of their back pocket and
> demand to be ooooooooooo'd and aahhhhhhhhhhhh'd at for it.

Geeks are hardly unique in the way their credentials are cashed in as 'cultural capital'. Try pitching up at an academic meeting without speaking the right lingo, and see how far you get.

Same kind of oohing and aahing goes on there, in my experience. Part of the 'dick slinging' behaviour might just be related to the fact that geeks are a profession in formation - they're young people, from a sub-field of the computing spectrum which has historically not gotten much appreciation (i.e. the 'cultural capital' has been rather valueless). Basically its the sysadmins coming in from the cold and demanding to have a seat next to the math-heavy engineers and algorithm guys.

Personally, I wish there were more people working on situating the emergence of geekdom with its freely exchanged knowledge products within the debate on 'immaterial labour' (ala. Negri, Lazzarato, etc.)

Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list