Culture

Geek As Citizen: Introduction

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So in the weeks to come I’m going to be exploring a subject near and dear to my heart: what it means to be a geek and a citizen of our communities, nations, and the world.

Yes, that can be a fascinating topic, and of course I’m a compelling author (and handsome, too, just noting). But the question comes up: Why write about Geek Citizenship in the first place, or at least why am I doing it when I could be ranting about the video game industry or interviewing cool people?

As much as I love those things, this is a serious subject.

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Sympathy For The Intoxicated: Drunk On The Power of Technology

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Monday, we got to meet Nathan Shumate of the accurately named LousyBookCovers. It’s a fascinating insight into the man, the project, and the . . . less than ideal covers that occasionally appear in self-publishing.

He mentioned one thing that struck a truth with me; that some people get drunk on the power that modern technology, print on demand, distribution, etc. presents. I wanted to explore that a bit because it’s rather personal, and very telling for us MuseHackers.

There’s plenty of power modern technology gives us. In many ways modern technology is all about empowering because power sells and people want to do their own thing. People want to make videos and books and music and games; many of them can now live the dreams that years ago would have stayed dreams except for a few. We have sheer ability now.

However, as we’ve seen power may not be misused but . . . well it can result in products of questionable value. Oh we’ve all done it. We all have that fanfic we don’t want to mention, that bad book cover we’re not proud of, that AMV that was kind of awful, or the company brochure that proved there’s a reason we’re shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near desktop publishing. We wonder how we missed how . . . not that great we were.

We miss it because we get drunk on the power.

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Cool Futurism: You Can’t Have Science Fiction Without Science

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So as we come to the end of my posts on what happened to Cool Futurism, let’s go on and whack reality with the truth stick: Anti-Scientific attitudes really put a cramp in the Cool Future.

As naive, distant, and consumeristic as the Cool Future we remember from the Omni days was, it was all about the science. It was all special materials and computers and sexy tech. There was also a lot of reality in there, even if some ideas seem laughable or we’re proven wrong or were modified.

However, science really has taken a beating in American culture. Wether its denial of global warming despite the evidence, or the idea that a well-used theory like evolution is completely equal to Creationism, that vaccines are worse than diseases, or that smoking really isn’t bad for you, science was a might inconvenient for some folks. It gets questioned a lot – and of course the bizarre trend in America to blame teachers and education for everything didn’t help (you don’t support by education by acting like everyone doing it is a moocher out to destroy society).

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