![]() Whatever details shows like The Big Bang Theoryand Silicon Valleymay get right are smothered by tone-deafness to the culture they are supposedly sending up.Īt its worst, real geek culture results in a dangerous elitism: the notion that you’re so much smarter and better than society that you can do without it. (They are often rather boring to those who don’t share their passion-people like philosophy geek Derek Parfit, math geek Martin Gardner, and computer geek Donald Knuth may be eccentrics, but are remarkable more for their work than for their personalities, which is as it should be.) Consequently, pop-culture portrayals of “geek culture” are about as accurate as Austin Powers’ portrayal of the 1960s. Geeks do not get into the Whitney, geeks do not care that much about money, and geeks don’t care that much about fame. ![]() ![]() Any culture that is so indifferent to trappings of success like money and fame is bound to be misrepresented by mainstream media. Zeynep Tufekci wrote in the Times, “Much mainstream culture only portrays the geek culture’s outward appearance and through a distorted lens at that.” This is probably inevitable. Perhaps the “activist” wing of techies-people such as Richard Stallman or the late Aaron Swartz-is more visible, but even they don’t seek the limelight, and see publicity as a necessary evil. Most of these hackers aren’t out for fame or damage or money, but for the thrill of the chase itself-which is what it really means to be a geek. We may hear about the “hackers” behind the Fappening or DDoS attacks on game servers, but these are trivial attacks next to what security wonks like Bruce Schneier discover every week, from the infamous “goto fail” bug to byzantine weaknesses in RSA Security. To be a real geek is largely to be invisible. Meanwhile, “cool” and “hip” have become so uncool and unhip that trendiness now has to dress itself in “geek” clothes. But “geek” has come to mean anything having to do with tech, and as tech became bigger, more and more culture invariably falls under the “geek” banner. ![]() But no, first these geeks have to make something like Facebook or Buffy-something not geeky. You’ve heard of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, but have you heard of Alan Perlis or Edsger Dijkstra, founding fathers of computer science? If geeks had really taken over, we would be talking about Henri Poincaré and Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara. Cannell, capable of synthesizing junk culture in clever and knowing ways. Joss Whedon is not a geek but a talented hack writer in the tradition of Ben Hecht and Stephen J. Cory Arcangel is a Damien Hirsty hipster artist. Tech executives are just Wall Street’s traders in new clothes. In this light, “geek culture” is nothing of the sort. They’re neither social climbers nor rebels, because they are indifferent-or oblivious-to how the world sees them. These two characteristics are one and the same: caring more about some thing (computers, comics, Old English, rock climbing) more than society or social advancement. That clock is noticeable enough that it’s entirely possible it was inserted by the writers to foreshadow the events of season 4.Look at the two classic characteristics of geeks: social ineptitude and obsessive devotion to some pursuit. The sound team at Stranger Things has been tasked with creating a foreboding vibe and the echoing ring of a clock at night certainly helps capture that. Having said that, however, there is something more articulated and loud about the clock noise that accompanied Billy in the Upside Down in season 3. The clock noises heard in season 1 and potentially season 2 are almost certainly coincidental. That plan was wisely scuttled once it became clear how magical the original cast was. Recall that early on, the Duffers even planned for the show to be an anthology with a new cast and story stepping in each season. Like many great TV shows, Stranger Things appears to have been more of a collaborative improvisational process among its writers than a strictly plotted out series with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Knowing what we know about the creation of Stranger Things, that seems fairly unlikely.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |