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    Cover of Geeks

    Geeks

    Jon Katz · 2000

    "Jesse and Eric were roommates in the tiny town of Caldwell, Idaho, two nineteen-year-old working-class kids squeezing out a living with their seven-dollar-an-hour jobs selling and fixing computers. College was never in the cards. They spent every spare cent on their computers, and every spare moment online.". "Jesse and Eric were geeks - suspicious or disdainful of authority figures, proud of their status as outsiders, fervent in their belief in the positive power of technology. They'd been outsiders as long as they could remember, living far from the mainstream of school or town life. Nobody spoke for them; they were on nobody's social or political agenda.". "Geeks is the story of how Jesse and Eric - and others like them - used technology to make it possible to change their lives and alter their destiny. They rode the Internet out of Idaho to Chicago, a city they had never seen, searching for the American dream, a better life. Geeks tells of this brave and difficult journey, as two self-described social misfits use the resources of the Internet to try to construct a new future for themselves, escape the boundaries of their dead-end lives, and find a community they can belong to.". "Geeks explores a growing subculture about which many of us know little, a world with its own language, traditions, and taboos. In telling the stories of Jesse, Eric, and others like them, Geeks reveals the very human face of technology."--BOOK JACKET.

    Biography & MemoirWeb & InternetElectronics & Hardware
    Open LibraryAmazon
    Stats for nerds
    2recommend
    2mentions
    2people
    2012–2020years
    100% recommend

    Mentions per year

    201220132014201520162017201820192020

    What Hacker News says

    1. FunnyLookinHatOct 2020
      Oof - that article brings back a lot of memories of Slashdot and being a geek back in the day.

      This is possibly one of the most infamous of all Slashdot threads - it was a collection of emails detailing how it was to be an outsider in the days after Columbine.

      https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from...

      If the stories in this post are interesting to you, a book to consider would be Geeks, by Jon Katz.

      https://g.co/kgs/p2rLUT

      thread
    2. zemSep 2012
      i recently read katz's "geeks" [http://www.amazon.com/Geeks-Lost-Boys-Internet-Idaho/dp/0375...], partly out of a sense of slashdot nostalgia, and found it surprisingly engaging.
      thread

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