Where are all the alpha geeks and what are they doing?

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.

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.

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.

Hardware:

http://thecrucible.org/kinetics-electronics http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/004214.php http://www.arduino.cc/ http://shopping.netsuite.com/s.nl?c=ACCT88394&sc=2&c...

Software:

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!".

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.

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.

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.

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.

Let me paraphrase the post: "I have a random thought that is edgy but not well thought enough for me to permit reasonable counterexamples."

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.

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.

I like iOS but I do not want my primary computer to go that simplified route.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.