The geek shan’t
inherit the Earth

by RAF KATIGBAK

We’re all doomed. The world is going to heck in a hockey bag and no amount of corny Canadian sport metaphors can save it. Of course, I blame Willard Boyle. He’s the 85-year-old Halifax man that just won part of the Nobel Prize for physics, alongside his buddy George Smith of the U.S. Together, Mr. Boyle and Mr. Smith invented the charge-coupled device (CCD) while working together in 1969. The CCD is a light-sensitive integrated circuit that revolutionized electronics and is now in everything from digital cameras, camcorders, CD and DVD players, bar code readers, fax machines, photocopiers, cameras used in weather satellites and pretty much everything cool invented in the last 30 years.

Reading that the pair recently won half this prize (which they share with Shanghai-born British-American Charles Kao, who won for an entirely different discovery) might be one of those proud, heartwarming, Canadian Heritage moments for some people, but it scares the shit out of me. It made me realize what an insane world we’re living in. How the amount of technological advancement we’ve had in the last three decades is absolutely frightening. Okay fine, most people born after 1989 will probably find this anxiety “totes wtevr,” but for us older-ass people, it’s all rather mind-blowing.

Mind-blowing not because we can do all sorts of weird things that I never dreamed possible, like having your phone tell you what song is playing in a bar or sending a circus guy into space, but because we have all this insanely futuristic science stuff everywhere but no one really understands it.

Let me explain: I don’t mean people don’t understand technology as in they don’t know how to do shit like set up their TiVo, but rather that, if you ask anyone about the underlying science behind a digital video recorder, they just look at you blankly for a moment and go, “Um, Gossip Girl is my favourite!” Sure, society is being driven further by technology, but who the heck knows how this shit even works? If we don’t know, then whoever does will be driving our future technology and, as a result, our lives. Who, in the end, will be making those decisions for us? I’ll tell you who: the nerds.

Let me make this clear. I’m not talking about geeks or dorks. Geeks being people who have an obsessive propensity to immerse themselves in the substrata of pop culture and dorks being just like geeks but who don’t realize they’re lame for being geeks. I mean true nerds. The brainiacs that can not only hold a discussion of their favourite time-travel movies, but can also understand the underlying principles of how time machines work and debate the Novikov self-consistency principle or the viability of quantum entanglement in regards to Back to the Future II. Nerds are usually a bit socially inept not because, like dorks, they think what they’re into is actually cool, but rather their brains are too busy figuring out how to make shit that will change the world to even care.

I’m a geek. Ask me about science fiction, Japanese animation or action movies from the ’80s or ’90s, and I will talk all frakking day about BSG, Full Metal Alchemist or the pantheon of films by the late great Sho Kosugi. I am far from being a nerd. But reading about William Boyle’s recent recognition inspired me to take a stake in the future. I want to be a nerd.

But to paraphrase Casey Siemaszko’s character in the 1988 film Young Guns, “You can’t just be a geek off the street. You gotta be handy with the steel, earn your keep” (also sampled by Warren G in his hit “Regulate”—extra nerd points?). Even though I have the mathematical skills of a second grader who has an aneurism trying to figure out restaurant tips, I’ve decided that I need to get nerdy. Gone will be my weekend benders watching clunky Asian monster movies and reading graphic novels with copious amounts of tentacle sex. No more quoting Jean Claude Van Damme movies to girls who don’t care and listening to Stan Bush mixtapes while punching the mirror. From now on, I need to be less into Steven Seagal and more into Stephen Hawking, less all about Carl Weathers and more about Carl Sagan. I will take out books from the library about nanotechnology and try to watch Cosmos without thinking it would be waaaaaay better if I were stoned. Indeed, it’s time for me to make a transformation for the sake of the future. From this moment on, it’s time to eat, sleep, breathe and think like a genius. And failing that, at least I’ll know what one looks like, so I can dress like one for Halloween.

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA