Zeynep Tufekci is an assistant professor of sociology at the School of Information at University of North Carolina, and a faculty associate at Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She is on Twitter.

Geek culture’s growing mainstream impact is often attributed to the rise of wealth in the information technology sector. That may be partially true, but misses what’s attractive in the first place about this culture for young geeks, who are often maligned as socially inept misfits clinging to each other in low-status huddles. However, rather than desperation, many young people are positively drawn to geek culture for something that is harder and harder to find in mainstream culture: the joy of making things.

As more and more jobs are reduced to pushing electronic paper or reading scripts to customers, geek culture stands out as a place where imagination and ingenuity are prized.

At its core, geek culture is maker culture, and a smart and creative one. In a world where more and more jobs are reduced to pushing electronic paper or reading scripts to customers, or otherwise turned into endeavors with little to no autonomy, geek culture stands out as a place where creativity, imagination and ingenuity are prized. This is especially true for programmers: mainstream culture badly misunderstands them and therefore projects onto them motivations that betray a lack of appreciation of geek culture’s strengths.

Take director Aaron Sorkin’s portrayal of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s motives in the movie “The Social Network.” Zuckerberg’s initial incentives as a programmer are depicted as either an attempt to impress an ex-girlfriend (historically inaccurate as he was already dating the woman he’d later marry), or an anxious attempt by a “low-status” person, which the movie assumes geeks must be, to join Harvard’s rarified social clubs that only accept high-status WASPs of old money.

In contrast, many geeks are motivated by the deep joy of building things and would be bored to tears in a pretentious, stuffy social club based on lineage. The flood of money to the sector is certainly having an impact, but for many, its true attraction is the pleasure, and the power, inherent in creating “worlds,” through line by line of code, a delightful endeavor that combines deep intellectual challenges with the pleasures common to other creative activities such as art, cooking or music. Much mainstream culture only portrays the geek culture’s outward appearance and through a distorted lens at that, missing the beauty and inspiration that draw many to it in the first place.



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