Geeks (13 page)

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

I’m back, and in excellent shape. . . . I had an absolute blast this weekend. . . . Completely awesome . . .

I’d wondered how Jesse would fit in with these cyberheavyweights. It was astonishing that a kid who had yet to put together his first date in Chicago would bankrupt himself—it had taken him months to scrape that money together—to get to a nanotechnology conference. But I’d never seen him so excited. Naturally, he loved spending the weekend arguing and kicking around techno-ideas with people twice his age. I asked for details.

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

Absolutely loved it . . . 150 people with three days of free time to debate the future and everything between here and there . . . had a very interesting talk with Eric Raymond about open source, he’s definitely got some very good reasons for why open development is going to take over the world of software . . . a couple of good brain theories, lots of social development debate . . .

It was awesome, I really wish I could capture some of the magic in words . . . it was the magic of being in a room involved in active debate with 150 of the smartest people in the world . . . the mathematicians and writers and physicists and philosophers who you only get to read about, but being allowed to argue heatedly with them about all kinds of fascinating things from “first-strike” scenarios to the moral obligations of creating machine intelligence to living in a post-scarcity economy . . .

From:
Jon Katz

To:
Jesse Dailey

This is why we need to get you into college . . .

The weekend, structured around a series of confidential panels, idea-sharing programs, and discussion groups, was vintage Jesse. He paid little attention to the surrounding Silicon Valley, though he’d never seen it before. He made no friends there, had no fun beyond talking and arguing, yet described the experience as the best time of his life. He had no hesitation about wading into battle over some aspect of nanotechnology with an esteemed physicist. It was a classic geek experience, in which the idea is everything, the environment irrelevant. “I loved the arguing, but I might have overdone it,” he confessed later. “There was some silence at one point.”

Inevitably, he was down when he returned to work the following Tuesday and was assigned to install some new hard drives. “It is so hard to be here after the weekend,” he wrote me. “I think I might go out of my mind. Sitting here . . . well, it’s a little discouraging.” In Jesse-speak, “a little discouraging” meant profoundly depressing. My trip to Chicago to plead his case took on greater significance than ever.

If he got rejected at Chicago, would he muster the confidence to try again, perhaps at a slightly less selective school like Loyola or DePaul or the U of I? Or would he, as I suspected, deprive the yuppies of another crack at him and drift in some other direction?

On the flight, already unnerved by reading over a seatmate’s shoulder about the awful school massacre in Littleton, Colorado, I felt increasingly uneasy, cataloguing all the very sound reasons for not having undertaken this trip. I was a presumptuous meddler. I was playing with natural outcomes, setting up an already battered kid for a big fall. The divide was too great now.

But Jesse was counting on me. Somebody had to speak for this kid and who better than me, the guy who’d been nosing around his life for the past six months?

The night before, I’d called and asked him if he really wanted to go through with this. He didn’t hesitate. He knew all the risks but he wanted to apply. “I want to do something with my life besides fix computers in an office tower. I want to make a difference. I want to do interesting work, to be around ideas,” he said. “I have to . . . otherwise . . .” He left the thought unfinished. The biggest fear in his mind, he said, was money. The university cost more than $30,000 a year; he couldn’t imagine how he would get around that. Jesse dreaded debt and obligations.

As happened very occasionally in these late-night conversations, the cautious, guarded Jesse fell away. “Thank you for doing this,” he said. “It means a lot to me. Working here has given me a window into the rest of my life. I know a lot about computers, but I don’t know what to do with what I know. I don’t have any real idea what I know or don’t know. I don’t have any context for it, you know, any idea where to go with it. I have to find out. Otherwise, I’ll spend the rest of my life in Cubicleville.

“I want more. I really, really want more. I know now I have to go to college to do that. I didn’t know it before. So I’d like you to come. If it’s okay with you. If you want to.” He added: “You can speak for me. You can explain me.”

Making a direct plea was as painful as having his fingernails pulled out. I knew how hard it was for him to say what he’d just said. So early on the morning of April 21, I flew west and took a taxi to the University of Chicago for an 11
A.M.
appointment with the Dean of Admissions.

IF THE
University of Chicago was terra incognita for Jesse, it was also unsettling for me, not a world I was at ease in. Mediocre though it was, Jesse’s high school transcript outshone mine. I remembered poor Mr. Hauser, who, in a meeting with my mother, broke down in tears of frustration at the prospect of teaching me ninth-grade algebra for the third—or was it fourth?—time. I’d spent my youth “not living up to my potential.” I’d been bounced out of two different colleges, suspended for failing to attend class, for not completing the work.

Over the course of my adulthood, I’d had spectacular authority problems that dwarfed Jesse’s. I’d worked for a dozen different employers, invariably storming out in a huff over one disagreement or another, before I’d gone into analysis, realized I didn’t belong in institutions and needed to be my own boss, became a writer, worked at home to help take care of my kid, and more or less settled down. I had a visceral (and irrational) distrust of corporations and institutions like the University of Chicago. Though I wasn’t a computing geek, I knew all about being an outsider looking in. It was, in fact, something Jesse and I shared completely.

We had the same view of people telling us what to write, think, or do. We didn’t listen; we didn’t do it. Why should any college take my word for Jesse’s potential?

The day was gray and chilly. I had half an hour to kill, so I wandered through the university bookstore, then got some coffee and sat outside on a stone bench, watching the parade of undergraduates. I saw nose, cheek, eyebrow, and chin piercings. At least seven different shades of hair color that did not occur in nature. The bulletin board was crammed with the announcements and activities of groups that didn’t exist anywhere near Caldwell, Idaho. And yes, there were definitely Jesse-like computer geeks all over the place, heads hunched, laptops bouncing on their shoulders, backpacks overstuffed.

It did not feel preppie, stuffy, or conformist. In fact, Jesse would look straight here, almost like a Mormon, an irony I was eager to torture him with. As much of an outsider as he is, Jesse is personally surprisingly conservative. He rarely curses, drinks moderately, and dresses as plainly as possible. Would he sprout an earring if he came to a school like this? I couldn’t picture it. Still, settings like this had always been for other people, not me, and I fought back some ancient fear and melancholia.

My cell phone warbled. Brian McLendon, a Random House publicist who had become a friend, was wishing me luck—and reporting more details of the Columbine High School shooting. The response was already becoming hysterical—the shooters were being described as computer geeks who played violent games for many hours, were outcasts in their school, and had a site on the Web. This of course described half the kids I knew. When I checked my messages at home, Cate Corcoran, my former editor at the website Hotwired, had called to tell me that some of my writings had been archived on the Trenchcoat Mafia website, viewable until it was taken down by the authorities. When I got home, I knew I’d have a lot of e-mail.

I wondered how my media columns could possibly have found their way onto the website of the two kids who had just slaughtered so many of their classmates and themselves. I’d been writing online about geeks for several years. Perhaps that had something to do with it? Maybe I needed to write something about this.

But now, I had to focus on this meeting.

I had never had a college admissions interview and couldn’t have been more nervous if this were my own. I smoothed my sparse hair, tucked my shirt in, flicked some dog hair off my navy jacket.

The admissions office was in a literally ivy-covered hall, a Gothic-looking building that practically screamed Major University! It also yelled: You haven’t got a chance, bud.

Before I went in, feeling jangled from the coffee I’d been chugging since dawn, I called Jesse and arranged to have lunch with him afterward.

“Wish me luck,” I said.

“Luck,” Jesse said, never one for excessive verbalizing about feelings. But then, there wasn’t a need to say much.

The receptionist seemed puzzled about exactly who I was and what I was doing there, but was mollified by the fact that I did have an appointment. I sat on a plush sofa with an excellent view of the conference area where applicants and their parents come to meet with counselors. A series of parents with nervous kids in tow sat at oak tables and asked questions about the school. The parents seemed to do all of the talking; the kids were glazed-looking, nearly mute.

Everyone was dauntingly well dressed. I overheard references to daunting GPAs, too, and to horseback riding championships and symphony orchestras. These were, in fact, the very yuppies Jesse had gone to such lengths to avoid.

What were the odds that the people running this school would actually bestir themselves to make room for Jesse? The deck felt thoroughly stacked. We would see how nontraditional they were prepared to be.

A tall man who appeared to be in his early forties, with a shock of silvery hair, wheeled an aluminum bike into a paneled office, then reemerged to greet me. Dean O’Neill looked every bit the classic academic in khakis and a blue shirt. He seemed pleasant but wary, almost bewildered. When I introduced myself and asked him if he’d read the
Rolling Stone
article I’d sent on Jesse and Eric’s trek from Idaho, he said he hadn’t. This wasn’t a good beginning.

In fact, as politely as he could, O’Neill asked me who the hell I was. I explained that I was an author and media writer doing a book on geeks—his eyes widened at the term—and that I had been writing for several years about the Net and the Web. He told me that, other than e-mail, he had never really spent any time on the Net. This also wasn’t a great sign.

We circled for a moment, each of us trying to gauge how much trouble the other might make. He didn’t seem to want to talk that much about Jesse. But I perked up when he said he was teaching a class on the Enlightenment. I’d just written a series of articles for Slashdot, comparing the Enlightenment and the Internet. Many of the most stirring ideas of Enlightenment philosophers—freedom of information, intellectual autonomy, a broad inclusiveness about ideas, a willingness to reach beyond conventional wisdom and dogma—were being played out on the Net, I told him. It turned out we were both drawn to the same Enlightenment thinker, David Hume. O’Neill said he wanted to understand the Net better, and was aware how much the students and faculty were talking about it and using it.

He had been feeling me out, I realized, trying to grasp exactly what I was doing there. We were, I sensed, going to cut to the chase.

I told him about the book I was working on. I handed him a copy of the magazine article, with its photo of a serious-looking Jesse and Eric, and explained that the clean shaven one was, as of a few days ago, an applicant. I apologized for the lateness of the application, and warned that Jesse’s grades weren’t great, probably well below the standard University of Chicago hopeful’s.

He seemed taken aback when I explained that I’d come from New Jersey to make a case for Jesse and told me what I already knew: The university had had a record jump in applications this year.

“Look,” I said, leaning forward. “I made this trip because it was the most convincing argument I can make for how strongly I feel about Jesse, about my belief that he belongs here, that he is smart enough to do the work, and has enough character. If you take a chance on him, you will get paid back in spades. And he will pay the world back by contributing something special to it.”

O’Neill listened carefully while I went through Jesse’s story: His family’s involvement in a religious cult when he was young, the three divorces he’d lived through, his father’s illness. While kids like my daughter were piling up grades and accomplishments, Jesse was joining a gang, dabbling in drugs, battling Mormons, school administrators, and conformity.

He also, I said, lived in a digital world. I explained how I’d seen Jesse install operating systems, play online games from chess to Quake, use astonishing ingenuity to gather archived information off the Web.

“I want you to know if you admit Jesse, I will stick with him,” I said. “I will be here for the duration. He’ll need support, and I’ll provide it. I won’t walk away from him.”

I read a bit from two of Jesse’s essays. I even explained the origins of the term “geek,” how so many of them, once destined to be marginalized outcasts, were using technology to alter their fates, change their destinies, build a new culture.

O’Neill interrupted with questions from time to time. He asked more about my notions of the Net as a second Enlightenment. He wondered about the impact of the Net on traditional cultural enclaves, like academe. He conceded that it was important, but he was skeptical.

He didn’t say much about Jesse, except that he would be willing to meet with him. It sounded like Jesse didn’t have much of a paper trail to bring to the admissions committee, however. And, he added ominously, it was very late. Was Jesse actually applying for the fall?