BenjaminSte.in

This month is the 15th anniversary of my last CD. I stopped buying them the day I downloaded my first mp3 (Tom’s Diner by Suzanne Vega) and the first shareware mp3 encoder. I knew immediately this was the future of music. CDs were going to die so I ripped all my CDs to mp3 (the process took about 12 hours per disk at the time) and got rid of the physical discs.

Keep in mind this was 6 years before the iPod came out, so listening to it was a bit of a challenge. But that’s the small price you pay for being an alpha geek.

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.

Nerds were dialing up BBS with their modems and sending each other electronic mail long before the public Internet and Email was accessible. We used instant messenger and Twittered back when it was called IRC. We posted our thoughts on the latest Star Trek episodes on USENET until it was rebranded “blog”. We used our computers as televisions via Bit Torrent, not Netflix. CB radio is remarkably like chatroullette. Nerds have been playing Farmvile for years, but all our soil was MUD.

For each of these things, you could just look at what the nerds were doing, dismiss it as weird, but you know it was the direction that things were going. In 2001, all my electrical engineering professors switched to Powerbooks running OS X 10.1. That’s when I knew Apple was set for their Renaissance.

But then something strange happened. Nerds switched to Apple laptops. Then lots of people switched to Apple laptops. But the nerds didn’t move on. My nerdiest programmer friends use the same MacBook model as my wife.

My Grandma and I use the same Instant Messenger client. Every resume I get for a software engineer has a gmail address, just like my Mom’s. My sister-in-law and I both watch movies with NetFlix (although I admit our instant queue is hilariously different). That strange “why would you ever need Internet on your phone” phone that I carried looks quaint compared to my sister’s iPhone 4. Nerds ALL carry iPhones and it’s the most popular phone in the country. (NB: Android, the platform I would have expected nerds to flick to recently passed iPhone in sales, so no nerd haven there).

So my question is, why haven’t the nerds moved on? Where are all the alpha geeks and what are they doing? I look around and I don’t see them anywhere.

I have a couple theories about this.

1. I’ve become cool (“i doubt that” -My Wife)
2. I’ve gotten old (this is possible)
3. It’s hip to be square. Large companies push consumer technology so hard that nerds can’t escape

I hope I’m wrong about this phenomenon. I hope Alpha geeks *have* moved on but I’m just not one of them anymore. This would make me sad on a personal level, but keep me optimistic about nerds in general.

What do you think?

Footnotes:

1. Please don’t mention Linux on the desktop. Seriously.
2. I’m talking here about consumer technology. Maker culture and other nerd hobbies are still alive and thriving
3. Dear family, please don’t be offended. I use you all as examples because you’re cooler than me. Take it as a compliment :)