This column will be devoted to geek news, geek life, and the myriad cultural ephemera that surround our modern lives. This column’s author realizes he has a long way to go to prove his bona fide geekiness to the discerning audience, so I’ll start with the basics: Athlon 1600 XP on a MSI Turbo Pro with 768 MB SDRAM. Following a disastrous fish tank episode (to be chronicled in later columns), I went from 80 GB on a Maxtor 7200 IDE to 4 GB on twin IDE 2G western digitals. Peanut Linux, KDE, and Opera.
Satisfied? Well, I must admit, I’m a Geek Lite. I don’t write code (except for HTML, and does that really count?) and I don’t run any websites (anymore).
Many, many other things make up a geek, as we all know: a love of improbable things, a distaste for the heroically stupid, and a passionate moral conviction that comic books are a form of High ArtTM.
The world of the geek is a strange one, made up of equal parts social ineptitude and blazing mastery among the peer group, monumental calculations of science, art and technology, and an inability to remember exactly how much the bus costs; all these contradictions and more make up our fragile ecosystem of geeks, nerds, dweebs, leet haX0r5, card players, role players, LARPers and yes, even the humble furry, possibly the weirdest and strangest geek of them all. Furries are people who are compelled to dress like giant cartoon animals and get yiffy together.
Yiffy? Don’t ask.
As we are such a motley group, instantly recognizable to the outside world and yet so often divided amongst our pale, twitchy, poorly groomed selves, we treasure above all things our freedoms and our rugged individuality. Whether that freedom is making fur costumes all kinds of messy or building three-dimensional renditions of incredibly complex mathematical propositions out of Legos, no matter. Our ability to be as weird as we want and to take anything apart is, we feel, a necessary component of a happy life.
Several continental shifts are taking place in our world, and by extension in the world we helped create, the world of technology and data, a world where nearly everybody can be instantly in touch with almost anybody else, a world where comicons draw armies that could awe the legions of Rome.
One of these fundamental shifts is taking place in the arena of intellectual property, in what is euphemistically called “Digital Rights Management.” DRM is a code word for making you a criminal for using your own property as you see fit. For instance, one of Microsoft XP’s spectacular innovations is that you, the owner of the box, are permitted no more than six hardware modifications before your very expensive operating system will lock you and your data out. That’s an extra hard drive, two video card upgrades, a new cdr/cdrw burner, a new RAM stick, and a replacement Ethernet card.
This is the grossest, most obvious example of something that will change the way we geeks and real people alike use and interact with our world, our media, and our machines. And it’s not good. Read on next week for more of the battle of good vs. DRM.