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When I received my iPod for Christmas, I knew I was in for a lot of late nights of CD mining and playlist building. For someone who cannot make the half-hour drive to work without taking along a dozen CDs to suit any mood that might come over me, the iPod is both the greatest thing ever invented and a time suck nonpareil. The relationship some people have with crack, I am quickly developing with my new gadget: every time I go to someone else’s house, I’m scanning the CD shelves, looking for more music to rip; I go out in sub-freezing temperatures for brief walks around the building where I work just so I can press “Shuffle” and get a quick hit. When, with obvious reluctance, my wife gave me the iPod, it was with the stern instruction that I was not to neglect my 2-year-old daughter, and I have held true to the letter of the law, if not the intent. Evenings with Daddy have become explorations into the nether regions of his music collection. Someday, when she’s able to write that essay exploring the subtle yet profound similarities between the young Pete Townshend and Dizzee Rascal, and can correctly identify The Arcade Fire’s style as an amalgam of Suede, The Cure and Sonic Youth, I know she’ll thank me. The main thing my iPod has allowed me to do—apart from subjecting my daughter to dissonant guitars and foul language at the touch of a button—is to inhabit once more the mind of the unreconstructed geek I used to be during my teenage years, when I spent untold hours in my room avoiding my homework and letting the feedback squalls of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy lacerate my soul. Most of my enthusiasms over the years, from baseball statistics to Twin Peaks to local politics, have had their geekish tendencies, but none more so than my life-long love affair with pop music, beginning with the possibly apocryphal story that I learned how to read by following along with the lyrics on the back of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. Uploading the entire soundtrack of my life into this small snow-white marvel reminded me of the moment in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity when Rob, his shambling hero, reorganizes his collection of 2,000-odd records autobiographically, in the order in which he bought them: “I’m flushed with a sense of self, because this, after all, is who I am.” The truth is I’ve been anticipating this particular technological moment for years. Much was written during the halcyon late ‘90s about the triumph of techno-geek culture and all the wonderful things it would bring to the world. In retrospect, as a cultural phenomenon, Nerdvana was about as long-lived as the Beat Generation, Hippie Heaven, the Disco Inferno, the Do-Greeders, and Slacker Nation—which is to say, just long enough to become an annoyance to most people over age 30, a scapegoat-du-jour for our perennial social ills, a flimsy premise for countless bad novels and movies, and a source of embarrassing photographs for all who participated in the madness. (May the ascendant Christofascist movement suffer a similar fate.) But, like those earlier era-defining subcultures, each of which rose in part from the ashes of its predecessor, the world the geeks built has had long-lasting and often unexpected ripple effects on our everyday lives. Just as the hippies successfully promulgated the idea that we should question (or disregard) authority and do our own thing, so the geeks have successfully encouraged and enabled us all to reconnect with our inner geeks. And just as the hippie creed morphed into variants, such as Libertarianism and ecoterrorism, that its early adherents could not foresee, so the geek impulse has borne fruit in ways that have nothing to do with Blackberries or Red Hat Linux. No better evidence of this trend may be found than the bellwether New York Times bestseller list, where these days the greatest success goes to the books that tap into the largest geek communities. For British magic geeks, there’s Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; for Margaritaville geeks, there’s a new Jimmy Buffett novel; for Red Sox geeks, there’s Faithful, a non-fiction chronicle of last year’s baseball season by novelists Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King; for left wing political science geeks, there’s Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? and the Daily Show’s political primer, America (The Book). As for movies, the biggest DVD of the season is the final installment of the archetypal geek story, The Return of the King, and the front runner in the Oscar race this year, Sideways, is in part about the decline and fall of a wine geek. It may be no coincidence that gaming—the ultimate expression of the geek ethos—is now the most lucrative entertainment industry of them all. It’s still too soon to know whether such a proliferation of geekery in the popular culture represents the first stage of a fundamental reorganization of the broader culture along the lines we were promised in the pages of Wired magazine way back in 1999, ushering in a world where people spend most of their lives as members of virtual communities bound by interests and preferences that transcend class, race and creed. Evidence abounds that the effect has been just the opposite—that the technology has made it easier to retreat into solipsism and cultural myopia. The danger of carrying your entire music collection around wherever you go is that you’ll never have any need to hear something new. The music on my iPod may be who I am, but that does nothing to change the fact that other people are, ultimately, a whole lot more interesting. A2P |
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