Yeah, Geeks are Replacing Hipsters. But Why?

In this weekend’s National Post, I came across a familiar-sounding piece entitled “Behold the Geek Triumphant”. I can’t link to it – the Post, a veritable bastion of forward thinking, hasn’t quite figured out this internet thing yet – but if you read the mainstream press, it’s something you’ve heard a hundred times already: that it’s the John Hodgman geek who is the new cool kid and the Justin Long asshole hipster who is the outcast.

This ascendancy of the geek is something we tech-heads have read over and over, partly because it’s become so common and partly because we hope it means we’ll get laid more. Still, a suddenly inflated sense-of self aside, some sort of explanation as to why this has happened seems in order – what sort of cultural shifts are necessary to transform a once-derided identity into one that is desired?

I think the most obvious reason is also the most important: the transfer of cultural desirability from fashion to tech. I’ve said this before, but there has been a marked shift of the objects of conspicuous consumption from more traditional items – clothes, watches, cars, even yatchs – to technology: iPods, plasma TVs, and techology in those more usual luxury items like cars, yatchs and homes. The same sort of stratification that exists in clothing has also occurred in tech – we mere mortals have regular iPods and Razrs while Hollywood stars have them encrusted in Swarovski crystal or even diamonds. What’s more, things like the iPod have even reached the status of universal commodity – those who go about wearing white earbuds are called ‘sheep’, mere followers of those in the know who use a pair or Shures or Ultimate Ears – and with the introduction of elitist condescension, the movement of tech into position of desired object is complete.

So this we know. But its importance lies in the cultural significance of the thing that has become a fetish. Why, after all, was and is fashion so central? One answer might be that it represents the bleeding edge: those who are on top of fashion are in some sense ‘on top of culture’. Couture is also a matter of display, showcasing not only your aesthetic sense but your cultural sense too, your capacity to do a number of desirable things: to know the swirl of aesthetic and cultural trends; to pull them off; and have the money to do it all. So it is not too outrageous to say that tech has in a way ‘become fashion’, if we take fashion as a catch-all term for that which is in a very literal, contemporary sense ‘modern’. Tech and web savviness is now that marker of knowing trends, knowing those who knew them first and having the money and resources to have it all and display them. Indeed, what else but technology represents the cutting edge, when the very term has become emblematic of the pace of change in the tech world?

And, perhaps unfortunately, I’ve just banged out five-hundred words to return to a bit curmudgeonliness. The rise of the geek is not due to some supposed egalitarianism at the core of the new era, the former oppressed loser now become hero, as if life were some eighties movie. It is, rather, only a change in the object that is being fetishised, an object not significant in itself but because of what it stands for: in both cases, all that is desirable in a given cultural context. Tech, like fashion before it, is a sign of what we desire and desire to be. All of which is a rather circuitous way to say that, twenty years ago, we all wanted to fuck/be the hipster. Now we all want to fuck/be the hipster-geek.

Note: The image in this post comes from, er, this post.