GOOD MORNING and
THANK YOU, everyone, for your kind words regarding my remarks to the world press and the President of the United States last Friday.
YOUR THOUGHTFUL COMMENTS have emboldened me to believe: IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. (And please stay tuned for some footnotes on the illustrations)
I WAS JUST ON the great WNYC show The Takeaway discussing it, and because radio is fast, and I am slow, I was left with a bunch of notes for things I did not have time to say.
BUT BECAUSE THIS IS THE INTERNET, which offers no such sensible restraints, I share it with you here.
ON THE SUBJECT OF JOCK v. NERD, look: I don’t want to make too much of this.
OF COURSE I was being somewhat reductive for the sake of comedy.
BUT ESSENTIALLY I was talking about a difference of philosophy that sort of begins in high school, around the time most people are exposed to team sports and math, and they choose a path.
JOCKISM IS NOT ABOUT ATHLETICS per se. It’s a philosophy–of certainty vs. endless nerdish questioning; of happy conformity, vs. nerdish loner ostracisim. Jockism is suspicious of complexity, because that’s how you lose games. It’s more comfortable with what it can see, touch, feel, punch.
JOCKISM is actually a great way to win a sports game or a ground war. But, gratefully, in this country at least that’s not what most adults ever have to do in their lives.
NERDISM conveys a certain comfort with technology, a certain faith in science to be sure, but also, it builds its teams around abstractions, ideas, weird enthusiasms. From Battlestar Galactica to cosplay to steampunk; from spirit photography to antique cocktails; from political news to even sports*, paradoxically, and, as well, the idea of free and fair elections in Iran.
AND AS THE INTERNET is the greatest idea propagation engine ever invented, It’s no surprise that global geekism is on the rise
I SAID ON FRIDAY HOW CURIOUS it was that the fate of the protesters in Iran is so strangely entwined with the sleep schedule of the geeks maintaining the servers at twitter and YouTube.
THAT THE PROTESTERS’ STRUGGLE IS VISIBLE, on a granular, person by person level, gives those protesters crucial optimism that their efforts are not wasted; and it gives we viewers a new window upon a remote land and culture.
AND WHAT ME MOSTLY SEE is similarity.
YOUNG PEOPLE, CLOSER TO US in wardrobe, vision, and optimism, than we might have thought. And though great divides may yet separate us, the protesters are similar in at least one way: they all use the internet. And not in the insidious, demonizing way we were warned of, to recruit terrorists and plan attacks on civilians. But in the most geekish way: to subvert authority with an idea.
WHEN IT HAS COME to democratizing the Middle-East, we’ve now witnessed two different approaches.
ONE, INCREDIBLY JOCKISH: an invasion, a top-down imposition of a new kind of order.
THE OTHER, IS DIFFUSED, SPONTANEOUS, founded on ideas and spread by technology. If the protesters in Iran have never heard of Doctor Who, their efforts now are undeniably geekish.**
WE’LL SEE which effort is more successful. And I mean this truly, for it is the essence of geek to admit: I do not know.
WE’LL SEE.
That is all.
*(AS I’VE MENTIONED BEFORE, Any fantasy baseballist has more in common with someone who dresses as an orc on weekends than an actual athlete, because they are analyzing and processing massive data, and communicating with unknown others on the web.)
** WHICH IS NOT TO SAY that they won’t need to organize some jockish kick-ass conformity before it’s all done.
UPDATED to clean up some very embarrassing typos and, as per the comments, to spell out DOCTOR in Doctor Who.
