Being a geek / hacker at heart is not about using the latest whizbang gadget. It is also not about using the newest medium of communication or hanging out in the places tech journalists write about in exquisite detail. It is about mastering one field and using the experience gained from it to jumpstart into the next one. The problem is that it is often impossible to tell what will be the new thing of today that we will fondly look back on tomorrow.
Some may say today it is Twitter streams or Facebook walls or they may say it is the startup culture like we have here on HN but nobody knows. It could be something as benign as upvoting only thoughtful comments here on HN instead of funny ones like on reddit/fark/digg that could bring about a long-lasting effect on the future of open discussion on the Internet. We could be the guys that beat Eternal September while sharing our code and ideas with others. We don't have to phreak or use IRC to be considered true geeks. We could use the same tools as our moms (I'm using an iPad right now, I got one for my mom too) and still be doing very different things. She plays Farmville while I'm trying to create apps that help the disabled.
The fact that our tools have matured to the level of flexibility and stability that both hackers and their moms can use them is something to be proud of, no despair. After all, I use the same faucets as my mom and the same washing machines. 60 years ago the geeks made their own electronic devices. Oh and we still do that too. Check out the Arduino forums.
So Alpha geeks are failing fast and failing cheap (or failing expensive on somebody else's dime) whilst making stepping stones across the pond for others to follow (or see)?
I don't think the Alpha geeks are failing. I do think that computer literacy has increased as younger generations have grown up with technology and also, because a lot of smart alpha geeks have improved the usability of the technology (two forces meeting so to speak).
It is a little bit like the motorists of old - they were first really weird, then being good was largely regarded as being ultra cool as others battled with the new cars, then they were sponsored in races and now they still exist. They exist as kitset car builders, engineers, racers, and oh dear... boy racers. The alpha geeks may not use the latest technology (some Linux users manage to keep their machines going with their skills) but hasn't it always been the skills and knowledge of the geek? If that's the case, I think we are doing very well. The improvement in usability of the internet and easy availability of knowledge means the barrier to entry is lower which means more geeks. On the other side of the spectrum it also means more non-geeks know how to fix their computers etc. Rather like cars. However, being able to replace a battery doesn't make you a car enthusiast, nor does being a savvy Facebook user mean you could build it.
>It could be something as benign as upvoting only thoughtful comments here on HN instead of funny ones like on reddit/fark/digg that could bring about a long-lasting effect on the future of open discussion on the Internet.
I don't know; the highest voted comment I've had on Hacker News was one that was funny. By an order of magnitude.
What's wrong with humor, anyway? On reddit, it's easy enough to close an entire thread you don't find interesting to see what else was voted up.
This is sort of like the disappearance of the "jet set" as air travel became a commodity. People no longer dressed up to go on a flight, jobs involving flying all over were no longer so glamorous, and socializing on a plane or in an airport wasn't as fascinating.
But the huge benefit is what happens when so many have access to the power only a few had before.
So now that "everyone" is a geek, being a geek is not that distinctive anymore. But as the technology is a lot closer to people's lives, the impact of the alpha geek has become much larger.
If just having a cell phone counts then we're there at least for the majority of the population, apparently we now have 5 billion cell phone subscriptions.
Thats pretty useless - you have to remove the couple of billions of people from the pool who are too poor to feed themself, stuck in refugee camps or otherwise unable to live their life. It sounds heartless, but they don't really matter in any sense since they have to live life by the rules others make.
The alpha geeks are into transforming old-world technologies into geek-friendly forms. The field I'm personally familiar with is desktop manufacturing. Robotics used to be expensive and arcane. Machinists used to be either old graybeards or undereducated trade school graduates. Custom plastic parts were something you got made in China at great delay and expense. Now, there is a new wave of machinists who read Make and have 3d printers and buy lathes for their garage. There's people with a software background putting robots together out of hardware store parts and arduinos. The whole field is transforming from high-capital professional only to geek and hobby friendly. So I think that geekdom has moved out of computing and software to some degree, into the rest of the world because frankly, computing for the sake of computing is a solved problem, a boring field, now.
Spot on! I posted the same thing without reading yours (now stands deleted 'cos it was more or less a duplicate).
I'll just add this - Even MIT's famous formerly-known-as-SICP course is now around programming real world asynchronous machines - robots. A big meld between electronics engineering and software as far as I can tell.
This is what fascinates me. I want to know how to get my programs to reach out into the world and do something "real." That's been the most interesting thing to me for a while.
Grab an Arduino. Make it blink things. Then make it move things. Then make it move itself. Then make it interact with the things around it. Then your creativity's the limit.
What would qualify as "real" to you? Do you want to turn lights/AC/heat on and off or are you talking about cleaning up the kitchen?
I want to make a MVP for a web developer who wants to start affecting the real world but I am not sure how much would be enough. Please get in touch with me http://gadgeteer.org
How can one say "where are the alpha geeks" and then say "please don't mention Linux on the desktop" in the same damn posting? Unix is where they all headed. That OS X has a GUI that you can _completely_ ignore while you're in the perfectly usable terminal with bash is a sexy proposition. Then again, there's always Fedora with GNOME.
The geeks that I knew first started with .mod files. Remember those? Those were terrible-sounding representations of music. The beat tracks were mixed with "instrument packs" that approximately recreated the melodies of songs. They were passed around usenet and on places like Undernet IRC. Then we all moved to .mp3 and the Napster beta. Then AudioGalaxy. Then eDonkey. Then gnutella, then bittorrent. All the while, alot of the geeks stuck with usenet.
While "everyone else" played Playstation, we were making quake mods and "total conversions". While the rest were chatting on AOL, we were IMing with ICQ. When the public zigged with Windows, we zagged with Linux. Now, there seems to be a strange convergence toward OS X. Maybe _that's_ what Benjamin is talking about? The convergence?
Here's what happened. Geek culture merged into mainstream culture. The geeks that used to be shut-ins and social outcasts are suddenly normal in the suburbs. Put them in some big scary city with a questionable populace that has a perhaps less-than-honorable stance on high intellect and literacy and they'll be the same outcasts they were before the Social Network was #1 at the box office. But for now, geeks are the EF Hutton of modern culture: They talk, the masses listen. And retweet. And Wall. And submit to reddit/HN/etc. And, when an alpha geek suddenly gets attention, I believe they stop being a geek.
Maybe the bible had it wrong: it's the _g_eek that shall inherit the earth. Perhaps we're at the tail end of the "hey, let's all be/act stupid as hell like we're rich heiresses or supreme-court appointed drunken presidents, derp" phase. We're now entering our "meritocracy or bust", Libertarian-ish hyper-intellectual Vulcan mind meld phase. The geeks stopped living in the basement and started living in the now. They know the future of business, hell _America's_ future, is in technology. The geeks he's talking about are now Mark Zuckerberg, are Paul Graham, are Elon Musk and Steve Chen and Notch. They're building. They're launching. And, they're monetizing. It's a great time to be a geek. So much open source software and open APIs to hook into. So many frameworks and languages to evangelize and adopt and exploit and forget. The world is gigantic breadboard from Radio Shack, and we're all Captain Crunches looking for the right frequency for our Blue Box.
Perhaps the alpha geek is post-"user". Now, they're (we're?) trying to be Creators.
Amusingly enough I've just switched away from my last Mac and am now happily running Gnome on Fedora. And I find it better, and certainly more fun. Tools like Shotwell are better than iPhoto nowadays.
Clojure, Haskell, Scala, Any of the NoSQL's, Startups of any variety
Go to the Maker's Faire. You'll see a swarm of R2D2 robots, people making scale miniature battleships that shoot 1/4" ball bearings at each other, robot battles, physical pong games that play like the original video game, etc...
I strongly disagree with the premise that alpha geeks are doing anything other than what alpha geeks have always done. We're trying to build stuff that makes our friends say, "That's awesome!".
Yea, I see the Maker movement as in the alpha geek phase, but it's certainly becoming mainstream. Now MS, Intel, TI, etc. are all embracing it with their own products. I guess we'll see where it goes.
But then something strange happened. Lots of people switched to Apple laptops. But the nerds didn’t move on. My nerdiest programmer friends use the same computer as my wife.
No? He circulates in a different universe to mine where it feels more like a 50/40/10 Mac/Lin/Win mix among the "nerdy programmer" group.
Pretty similar here, and rapidly edging closer to your ratios. My parents are Win, but my sister and her husband are Linux, my brother, my wife, and almost all of my geekier friends are Mac, and nearly every other geeky person I encounter with Windows is planning for their imminent escape.
It's important to note that during each "nerd phase" that the author cites there were also other technologies being developed that simply never exploded. That doesn't mean that nerds weren't toying with them.
That same concept applies today. There are tons and tons of startups out there with plenty of alpha geeks playing with each. Some will inevitably take off while others won't. Regardless, the alpha geeks will not serve as an indicator of what will go mainstream as the alpha geeks will play with everything.
> In those days, it was really easy to see where consumer technology was going. You could just look at the nerds and know that’s what you’d probably look like in 2-5 years.
I heavily disagree with that statement. No one knew that the internet (or any other example the author cites) was going to be THAT big. Let's look to more modern times... No one in 2007 was watching the "nerds" play on Twitter and thinking to themselves: "that's what I'm going to be doing 2-5 years from now."
Ultimately, this post is indirectly asking what's going to be the next big thing. That's a question that only time - and not the nerds or alpha geeks - can answer.
I know geeks who use IRC and Usenet way more than the average person. So I'll probably be re-explaining this stuff to my brother-in-law all over again in a couple of years.
We've hit a bit of a plateau when it comes to gadgets. We have laptops, which fit in a backpack and are more than fast enough for most purposes. We have smartphones, which fit in a pocket and are a decent tradeoff of portability vs speed/features. And we have desktops, which can have more storage than laptops, but for most stuff they're not much faster.
Now which one of those three things can you build yourself?
That's why nerds/hackers are using the same things as everyone else. They simply don't have the resources to build or customize tightly-integrated devices like laptops and phones. So they buy what works best for them. Lately, a lot of the time macs work best for them.
I'm probably being overconfident, but I think there's a new frontier for nerds and hackers. Advances in microdisplays and embedded computing have made wearable computers a somewhat practical idea. And individuals can build them. And the costs are decreasing. A few people have already hacked their own together from video goggles (like the Myvu Crystal) and single-board computers like the BeagleBoard. The biggest problems with wearables are fashion and software. The fashion issues will probably be resolved as technology gets better and people become more used to them. Software for wearables has to be really really responsive, since the idea is to completely integrate the computer with your life. Smartphone software has a similar constraint, but not to the same degree.
I think as wearable UIs and software improve, people will see the advantages of them. It would be incredibly useful to have a local cache of Wikipedia, e-mail, personal notes, and other data sources and software. You could become the smartest person in the room, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Lifelogging (don't you wish you had video of the first time you met your significant other or best friend?), augmented reality, etcetera etcetera.
Why is it logical to presume all the geeks would/should switch to OSX/Apple?
1) it doesn't fit with classic geek- you pay a lot of extra money for shiny hardware. Classically, a geek did it on the cheap and 'hacked' something together.
2) I consider myself pretty geeky, and yet I run Windows exclusively now. (and my servers run Linux, and I agree with OSX for media computing) Why is this? Well, to start all the tools I care about run on Windows. CAD programs, Matlab (USED to work on OSX. Key word USED), development tools, and to some extent games.
I should mention I'm into hardware more than software. Unlike software dev, with hardware dev tools, Windows is the common denominator (and often the only supported platform period)
Yeah, I'll agree to that. For HW Dev, It's still easier to talk myself into buying a laptop with a docking station and a bunch of different ports than to buy a beautiful, clean, yet limited mac.
Thank god Virtual Machines feel fast enough and do usb i/o these days, I'd go nuts if I still had to dual-boot Windows and Linux.
We're in the minority here. I planned to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04, but Windows has served all my non-server needs, and I didn't get around to installing Ubuntu.
The people that I think of as 'alpha-geeks', that is the ones for whom technology is their creative outlet have moved from doing things with the internet to doing things with the physical world. Whether building 2-d tables for homebrew lasercutters, enthusiastically joining the cult of arduino, or more mundane things like building houses they want to live in or learning to fly, the common theme seems to be getting physical. That's just my take.
My "nerd" friends (I hate that term) are fiddling around with robots and hardware. Stuff like Arduino and mbed. I'm trying to spec out a DYI book scanner robot that can automatically scan all of my old books.
But frankly, I don't think that's very nerdy. My blue collar friends that welders and electricians build stuff like that all of the time.
You are looking for something computer related, because it's the last change. The world is probably not going to evolve twice in the same way. That would be ungeek ;). Alpha geeks seems to be in space rocketship and biology today. May be this is where we will see the big changes in the future ?
I think the issue is that things move faster these days which means the gap (in terms of time) between early adopters and mass market has shrunk.
Part of this is because of the internet, but it's also down to the fact that the changes are largely software rather than hardware and can be adopted faster and cheaper.
This means that where in the past alpha geeks would have adopted a behaviour and had it as their own for several years before the man or woman on the street, that period is now several months and the gap between something being identifiable as a geek trend and going mass market is so small that it's effectively disappeared.
This isn't true for everything but I think it accounts for why there are less solid non-mass market geek trends than there might have been.
Your main computer will not run iOS till you can build iOS from within iOS. When that is possible, iOS can be considered a full desktop. Till then, you will need an OS that can build iOS.
Most people's main computer won't be a computer, it'll be a games console and a Tivo-niche filler (maybe the same thing, it's Sony vs Microsoft vs Apple vs the cable and satellite companies, and a pox on all their houses) paired with a smartphone.
Why do most people need a computer? I can't remember the last time I had to send a personal letter - all my bills are electronic and if someone really needs my signature they send a form. And my entire extended family does email.
Most people's main computer won't be a computer, it'll be a games console and a Tivo-niche filler
How long before that's just running on the TV, with the TV acting as a thin client?
For what most people do, why doesn't a HD TV, a smartphone, and a bluetooth keyboard suffice hardware-wise? Just put the PC in the TV and make it capable of nice 3D graphics.
The idea of computer-as-integration-point is really a Western one. In Japan you have your smartphone, your console, your camera, etc, and they all overlap more than Western counterparts on what would otherwise be done by a PC.
That's why Sony make great hardware but lousy PC software. Their core market in Japan doesn't need to plug their phones into their PCs to manage their music, they do it all on the device...
In Japan you have your smartphone, your console, your camera, etc, and they all overlap more than Western counterparts on what would otherwise be done by a PC.
So, for reasons of user-habit, there's no single point of integration in Japan? I'd like to be able to use my smartphone to tell my TV-attached device to record show X or download its bittorrent, and have it all just work.
Just that the assumptions are different. Actually, the West is becoming more and more like Japan in this regard. In the past people started with a computer and built out from there. Now I know people with a smartphone and a games console and a Sky+ box and no actual "computer".
To examine this I think we need to think about the stereotypes in modern terms and apply them to future trends.
Here are my top 3:
1. Startups - Nerds these days are worshipped more-so for their mainstream accomplishments than their underworrld ones. It's cool and sexy to own your own startup in the nerd world and it's still for the elite. The best data point for this is the movie The Social Network. All around the world people are envious of Mark, who is portrayed as the ultimate alpha geek. Moving forward, startups are going to be further romanticized and every fanboy is going to want to try their own (more-so than the common trend already).
2. Anime. It seems to me that a lot of Alpha Geeks like Anime and Manga. Over the summer Naruto was the #1 show on Hulu. This trend will definitely continue to grow. As a general trend, I'd bet on more mainstream adoption of Asian culture as a whole.
3. Social Shopping. Sites like thinkgeek.com, woot.com, sparkfun.com are filled with Alpha Geeks tweaking with the latest gadget (Arudino, which is still primarily an Alpha Geek toy). This will slowly adapt to other more mainstream consumer companies as consumers start coming online.
How does old money separates it from new money? I can't think of anything less nerdy/geeky than an Iphone or Iwhatever - everyone have them now. New money.
Being a consumer of new tech things and download fart apps does not make you a nerd.
Building a computer within MineCraft or doing something inherently difficult which seems like a waste of time to normal new-shiny-money-iPhone-people-without-creative-thinking. That's nerdy.
Largely, this is what I think has happened; the interests of big business and corporations have aligned with the interests of nerds and geeks.
Geeks like cool technology because it's interesting .. whereas the other interested (commercial) parties like cool technology because it's enables them to increase their reach, power and profit.
Society has become more enamoured with technology because a shift was necessary for commercial enterprise to flourish. In my opinion, the fact that our families all use the technologies we were championing 15 years ago, is a result of commercial might.
Therefore, my bet is that the majority of 'alpha geeks' are all working happily for 'the man'. At the end of the day, most people who have a love for learning and technology just want interesting projects to work on - if they can be handsomely rewarded for doing just that, the majority probably wont say no.
How do you define the alpha geek identity?
Is it the guy who writes down a beautiful piece of algorithm in notepad or on a piece of paper, or is it the guy who knows everything about the latest cool things, but maybe never programmed? Is it a 'long-beard' or a tech journalist? Is it Donald Knuth or Michael Arrington?
As far as I am concerned I was always a geek in the first meaning of the word. When I was young we were competing with my friends to write the fastest polygon filler routine in ASM. I was never really a geek in the second meaning. I was mostly late with the newest gadgets, I don't use yet Facebook and I am not yet on Twitter. I did not care too much about what OS I use in case it was not really important.
He notes at the end to ignore maker culture but why not consider that as possible to reach the masses? With things like the Arduino and 3D printers making hacking easier and easier, maybe non-nerds will start (return to) building things.
One thing to consider is that the usability and maturing of the mainstream tech has helped it's easy adoption by people who otherwise wouldn't be bothered. I'd say the same thing will happen with 3d printers. Possibly we will see an easy abstraction over the top of things like the arduino - roomba type gadgets which are customizable?
The biggest change is the improvement of devices, platforms, development tools and distribution. The bar for playing with new tech has lowered significantly, in effect shifting the line of "alpha geek" further and further into developer territory. It used to take a pretty determined geek mindset just to get things like mp3s working, whereas now it doesn't take much at all to bring some new idea to the consumer market in a reasonably usable form. In other words tech is no longer geeky in general.
I'm a geek and I've always belonged to the late majority when it comes to new technology. Within my area of expertise (programming) I'm at the frontier, but outside of that area I see technology as something that should be useful.
Bought my first smart phone (an Android) two months ago, but have been using Linux as my sole OS for five years now.
And if I look at my nerd friends it seems to be the same thing. The nerds have the newest and coolest in a thin niche, and outside that niche they don't care.
Well, we grey-beard geeks love and use Mac OS X for many reasons, but the most important is that a very pleasant Emacs subset is hard-coded into the Cocoa text subsystem. ;-)
Some may say today it is Twitter streams or Facebook walls or they may say it is the startup culture like we have here on HN but nobody knows. It could be something as benign as upvoting only thoughtful comments here on HN instead of funny ones like on reddit/fark/digg that could bring about a long-lasting effect on the future of open discussion on the Internet. We could be the guys that beat Eternal September while sharing our code and ideas with others. We don't have to phreak or use IRC to be considered true geeks. We could use the same tools as our moms (I'm using an iPad right now, I got one for my mom too) and still be doing very different things. She plays Farmville while I'm trying to create apps that help the disabled.
The fact that our tools have matured to the level of flexibility and stability that both hackers and their moms can use them is something to be proud of, no despair. After all, I use the same faucets as my mom and the same washing machines. 60 years ago the geeks made their own electronic devices. Oh and we still do that too. Check out the Arduino forums.