When Good Geeks Go Bad

What should the prevalent geek community view as evil? I read a thought provoking Mashable article today by Pete Cashmore, and I knew I should share and comment on it.

The Viacom versus YouTube case is in the forefront of Web 2.0 news, and rightly so. A billion of anything is something to notice and the obvious legal implications of this case will affect all of us. "The Geeks Guide to Good and Evil" invites comment and some focused "geek" thought.  

Geek is a term I have wrestled with for some time (even before the Internet if you can believe that), and I thought perhaps more definition should be added to the term so that we might delineate who inhabits so much of our giant Web 2 point whatever community.

Geek (1970) - Any person who likes weird things/ideas more than people

Geek (1980) - Any person who likes gadgets more than most people, except hot girls

Geek (1990) - A diverse set of people with (special) knowledge, who seem unchallenged by technology and who still stare longingly at hot girls.

Geek (2000) - Really smart people who have somehow managed to attract all the hot girls, for some unseen or unknowable reason. The group's membership has become much more diverse and it is often difficult to distinguish a geek from a non-geek. Many of them do however still retain excessively skinny necks.

Geeks (2005)- A veritable horde of techno, neo and pseudo - intellectuals who permeate online society like the cold virus. This group varies so much in gender, race, socioeconomic class, physical characteristics and intellect that it is virtually impossible to distinguish them from non-geeks. The term "geek" becomes a sub-set of terms used to define anyone with specific knowledge about anything unexplainable by observers.  Super-Geeks still often retain the pencil neck physical attribute but actually have brilliant minds demonstrative of intellect.

Geek (2007)- The sub-phylum of this subspecies has become non-distinguishable from its human roots. In effect everyone on the planet has become some type of "geek". There are old fart geeks (like me), cooking recipe geeks, travel geeks, electronic geeks, social networking geeks, blogger geeks and I expect even policeman geeks. Alarmingly many millions of hot girls are now geeks too, and Super Geeks can be stupid if they have money.   

Now that we have some definitive (however feeble) characterization of what a geek is, we can more readily respond to Pete Cashmore's multi faceted guide to "Good versus Evil":

"Luckily, we uncovered this ancient guide to good and evil, which will help you make moral decisions about these cases without the need for rational thought."

Could this ancient guide provide insight into the 1970 geek as well? Outside my uncontrollable laughter over the article and comments to it, I found a sort of buried or veiled question. Of course this could be a flashback from back in "the day", where we listened to Beatles albums in reverse to reveal hidden satanic messages and the like. A true geek (whatever their neck size) must always be inquisitive in the search for truth.

People stealing value from other people is always evil. However, allowing your stuff to be stolen in order to recover an even greater value for it is perhaps even more evil and Machiavellian. Trust and truth have been the greatest commodities in history, yet in a world bombarded with "information pollution", how are we to uncover any truth at all?

Does a search result on Google reveal a truth, and if so to what degree is it true? Are all 10 hits the answer to the query? Does a story that gets 1200 diggs have more value than the one buried for whatever reason? All we are left with are more questions, and no one is getting closer to the nature of good or evil. Maybe we are looking longingly into what once was a crystal pool that has now become so murky that meanings are forever obscure to even the mightiest geek mind.

I follow a simple rule, if an injured party can show me that I have harmed them, then I apologize. I suspect that if that injury involved some copious amount of money and I had the means, then I would compensate them. We are at the crossroads between existential and traditional business practice. I think history might show traditional business practices to have been "slightly" evil, as for existentialistic business we have yet to have enough of that to evaluate. BTW, I like Bill Gates, and any resemblance my amateur mashup of him bears to true evil is, well, intended for the purpose of this discourse. See, how hard was that?  

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