Geeks (9 page)

7

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE

From:
Jon Katz

To:
Jesse Dailey

Jesse, would you describe your life as having been painful?

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

I don’t know how to answer. I don’t have the words. The best answer is for you to go to Chapter Sixteen of David Copperfield. You’ll know the part when you see it. That’s how I feel about myself. I can’t say it any better.

>    >    >

IF YOU’RE
going to ask somebody to speak for you, I e-mailed back, it might as well be Dickens.

I did know the passage when I saw it:

It seemed to me so long, however, since I had been among such boys, or among any companions of my own age . . . that I felt as strange as ever I have done in all my life. I was so conscious of having passed through scenes of which they could have no knowledge, and of having acquired experiences foreign to my age, appearance, and condition as one of them, that I half believed it was an imposture to come there as an ordinary little school-boy. I had become . . . so unused to the sports and games of boys, that I knew I was awkward and inexperienced in the commonest things belonging to them. Whatever I had learnt, had so slipped away from me in the sordid cares of my life from day to night, that now, when I was examined about what I knew, I knew nothing.

A computer geek who explains himself through Dickens is less remarkable a phenomenon than one might think. Geeks’ passions often crisscross back and forth between technology and more traditional forms of culture, with unusual depths of interest in both. One programmer I know loves Disney animation; another calls himself a “hardware and sailing geek.” An e-mail correspondent has memorized the script of every
Simpsons
episode. I’ve encountered a geek with newly minted coins from around the world and one who’s written an elaborate digital music script for all of Beethoven’s works.

At Jesse’s suggestion, I visited a giant bar code site where geeks gathered on weekends to talk about bar code technology. Yet Jesse had also picked up
David Copperfield
from a discount bin at the Waldenbooks near his office, and it had rocked him.

Jesse and Eric were thankful for their deliverance, but it was shocking, even disheartening, to see that while they’d ridden the Internet halfway across the country, in some ways they hadn’t gone anywhere.

Outside their apartment, almost everything about their lives was different. Inside, almost nothing was.

The same computers sat on the same tables, surrounded by the same ratty chairs and lampless rooms with bare walls. The nearly empty refrigerator held the same packets of Chinese takeout sauce, even the same Katz Diet Coke can, which I’d bought in Idaho and they’d carefully transported across the Great Plains. The same clothes were strewn on the uncarpeted floors.

They were living almost exactly as they had in Caldwell. There was work, sleep, and a life shaped around computing, technology, and the Net.

Although they’d never mentioned it, I’d been startled to see that almost everyone else living in the Richton Park apartment complex was black. They didn’t seem to notice or even slightly care, but though Jesse shared many geeks’ Net-spawned tolerance (since you never know anyone’s race, sexual orientation, or even, sometimes, gender online, they just don’t matter much), the racial and cultural differences made a social life even less likely. The residents were not only overwhelmingly African American, but generally considerably older.

One night, Jesse had spotted a young guy he suspected might be a geek on the train, but he never saw him again. Other than that ephemeral close encounter, he hadn’t had a single interaction with another human in Richton Park in the three months he’d lived there.

Work was proving tricky to maneuver, too. After his initial terror eased, the tasks had quickly become routine, yet the environment felt strange. Jesse had a rough time figuring out his boss’s expectations. One coworker was openly hostile and competitive, the first time Jesse had ever encountered office politics. He couldn’t believe how much like “Dilbert” work really was, he told me over and over. There were meetings, which made him feel boxed in and claustrophobic. Eric, too, was shocked by the bureaucracy and politics surrounding his job, and bristled at the temporary help-desk work he was assigned (answering phone calls for technical assistance)—the bottom rung of the geek pecking order.

Jesse’s company also frowned on Net explorations during work hours, and installed filtering software to keep employees off porn and other recreational sites, so Jesse had to be careful when he trawled the Net or burned or downloaded music.

Geeks keep their computers on round-the-clock and often work irregular hours, in part because Web-surfing, software trading, and collecting and ICQ and Hotline messaging are factored in. Geek-friendly companies tolerate, even encourage this: The more wired and current geek employees are, the quicker they are to spot bugs and glitches, the better and more efficiently they can set up operating and security systems, run up the best spreadsheets and database programs.

At companies run by suits, such activities definitely don’t qualify as work. Straight companies are also paranoid about employees getting into pornographic websites or downloading violent games, let alone pirated CDs, software, and movies.

It felt a bit like school, the first time in a while that Jesse had to hide his geek activities. Ernie had never cared what Jesse or other Emco techs did online as long as they got their repairs done. Now Jesse’s supervisors wanted him to appear absorbed in something conventional, even when he had nothing to do.

Meanwhile, there was Chicago.

Jesse was still talking about the man he’d seen a few weeks back, dressed as Jesus—robe, wooden cross and all. He’d walked into a downtown restaurant where Jesse was eating, took an adjacent table, and politely ordered dinner.

An urbanite now, Jesse browsed discount book stores. He’d walked past his first gay bar, encountered his first drag queens. He bought some slightly hipper shirts and shoes. Chinese takeout replaced Taco Bell as his lunch of choice. He made a couple of friends at work, people who were older but with whom he could occasionally go out to lunch.

STILL
,
THE
ability of these two to instantly pick up the digital rhythms of their lives and make them focal points of their existence was striking, and sometimes disturbing. Their entrenched inwardness, a profoundly interior consciousness, seemed at times woven into their personalities.

I called Jesse up one day to tell him the president had been impeached. He was stunned. “You’re kidding!” He and Eric went on CNN.com to read about the House of Representatives’ vote and even discussed it for an hour or two. Then he never mentioned it again. For geeks, both politics and journalism represent—in Jesse’s words—“an insane and useless” system that has little bearing on their lives.

Making computers work requires a particularly rational mind. Programming, the installation of software, getting computers to speak properly to one another, all require very particular languages, protocols, and conventions—in sharp contrast to the emotional, visceral, manipulative drama of the political system. Jesse could hardly comprehend a Congress that would care about a president’s sex life. Or one that passed a Communications Decency Act to ban dirty language on the Internet.

He actually refused to believe me when, some months later, I informed him that the House had passed a bill allowing public schools to post the Ten Commandments. Why should he pay the slightest attention to a system like that? Where did these people get the gall? He wasn’t inclined to fight it or change it, he simply had nothing to do with it, blocked it out. He didn’t know who the mayor of Chicago or the governor of Illinois were, nor did he care.

He saw himself as a citizen of the Net, a separate nation with rules, boundaries, and traditions of its own. He was free to go where he pleased, take what he wanted. Other than paying for bandwidth, which he bitterly resented, he was subject to no regulation, no taxes, no restrictions on his ability to say what he wished.

Such citizenship had certain lingering limitations. One weekend a few months after he’d moved, I heard on my car radio that a vicious blizzard had hit Chicago, closing the airports, shutting down public transit, stranding cars on highways. Mindful of his father’s warning that if anything would send Jesse packing for Idaho, it would be Chicago’s winters, I called that afternoon to ask the boys about their first big snowstorm.

Jesse was shocked. He and Eric had been engrossed in some complicated networking program all morning and were about to go catch the Metra downtown in search of a theater—as usual, they didn’t know which movie or what theater at what time.

“But I hear there’s a blizzard in Chicago,” I said. “In fact, I’m watching it on CNN.” The storm was impressive, overwhelming snow-clearance efforts; the mayor had declared a state of emergency.

There was a pause, while I heard Jesse yell to Eric, “Hey, man, look outside. It’s really snowing out there.” Eric was dispatched to peer out the window at the train station across the street. He reported that the tracks were snow-covered and that the trains didn’t seem to be operating.

“Good thing you mentioned this,” Jesse said. “I guess I was aware that it was snowing, but I just hadn’t paid much attention.”

Would anything, I wondered, ever seem more compelling to them than the Internet? The two always were neck-deep in a techno-project, but only sporadically conscious of the world around them. Their already substantial computer knowledge was growing daily—they were keeping pace with every advance or evolution of the Net and the Web. But they weren’t making parallel progress in their personal lives.

I was sorry I hadn’t spoken up more forcefully about the risks of apartment hunting via search engines. Journalistic detachment was one thing, letting kids walk blindly into a trap was another. Jesse couldn’t have found less appropriate community if he’d asked AltaVista: “What’s the worst place in the greater Chicago metropolitan area for two nineteen-year-old kids from Idaho to live?”

Once the novelty of moving wore off, I feared Jesse would sink into the same torpid, depressed state he’d been in back in Idaho, only worse. He was stuck in a grim Chicago suburb almost as far from an interesting cultural life as Caldwell was. Only he had a non-geeky office job and a long commute to endure as well. Because Chicago’s clubs, museums, music, and theater were distant, and Jesse and Eric were so dependent on the Metra train, they went out rarely. He’d even lost his only source of physical exercise now that distances were too far to bike and the weather too bitter and snowy. They lived a surreal, quasi-adult existence, becoming sober straphangers as many of their peers were getting drunk at frat parties.

Sure enough, the crash came that winter. “I’m glad we left Idaho,” Jesse told me one night on the phone. “But I admit it, this is a letdown. Long commute, dull job, no social life.” I reminded him that he wasn’t stuck: He could move, switch jobs, consider college. He was nineteen. He didn’t have to stay mired in a Richton Park rut any more than he’d been doomed to one in Idaho.

This message always did the trick with Jesse. His life had consisted of a series of traps and obstacles—all the way back to the Nampa gang—that he’d slip or bump into and come to see as his inevitable fate. But once reminded that he could get out, he usually did. He loved making plans, solving problems. He began sniffing around for jobs and other apartments.

The one area where no amount of prodding seemed to work was his social skills. He hadn’t met anyone his age. Sometimes it seemed to me he just didn’t have the strength. One woman at work had invited him to lunch a couple of times, but since she didn’t know or care much about computers, he wasn’t interested. Nor did the isolation seem to bother him, particularly. He reminded me that they hadn’t known their neighbors in Idaho either.

Although both Jesse and Eric professed to wanting marriage and a family—Jesse clearly imagined himself a suburban dad one day—that was well in the future, far away. For now, their friendships were online, and their world was on a screen.

When I asked Eric about this, he verbally shrugged. “All I know is I’m never going back to Idaho,” he said. “I feel as if my life has been saved.” He’d always shown less interest than Jesse in engaging with the broader world. He’d accomplished his first great goal—moving—and hadn’t yet focused on the next.

With Jesse, who agreed with my reservations about their so-called new lives, I went many rounds. Our discussions and arguments sometimes ping-ponged from e-mail to late-night phone chats and back again. I had no difficulty with e-mail—I got tons every day—but it was a medium that made it too easy for Jesse to evade or ignore my questions, or to parry with one-liners. To get him to think and talk, you had to pry him off the computer, which wasn’t easy. But generally, once we got rolling, he enjoyed the musings, and especially, the battles.

Richton Park, he countered, was a good transition to life in Chicago. In his head, he was still adjusting to the move, and to life in an office tower. “It’s so much like Idaho it doesn’t feel strange,” he explained. “I know I need to get out of here, but it’s served its purpose. It’s safe and cheap. It’s not a bad place to get our bearings.”

Though he was sometimes discouraged that everything in his life hadn’t changed, he saw that much had. He was especially conscious of that when he glanced behind him.