ESR on Geek Culture

Eric Raymond spends a bit of time outlining the evolution of the modern geek:

Kids today have trouble believing the amount of negative social pressure on intelligent people to pass as normal and boring that was typical before 1980, the situation Revenge of the Nerds satirized and inverted. It meant that the nascent geek culture of the time attracted only the most extreme geniuses and misfits — freaks, borderline autists, obssessives, and other people in reaction against the mainstream. Women generally looked at this and went "ugh!"

But over time, geeky interests became more respectable, even high-status (thanks at least in part to the public spectacle of übergeeks making millions). The whole notion of opposition to the mainstream started to seem dated as "mainstream" culture gradually effloresced into dozens of tribes freakier than geeks (two words: "body piercings"). Thus we started to attract people who were more normal, in psychology if not in talent. Women noticed this. I believe it was in 1992, at a transhumanist party in California, that I first heard a woman matter-of-factly describe the Internet hacker culture as "a source of good boyfriends". A few years after that we started to get a noticeable intake of women who wanted to become geeks themselves, as opposed to just sleeping with or living with geeks.

Eric references an online draft of the book Plenitude by Grant McCracken, which is worth downloading and reading if cultural analyses are your thing. Grant's This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology & Economics is another site I recommend you visit on occasion: he thinks interesting thoughts.