The Takeover (or The Death Of The Geek or Who Will Be Running The Internet Next)
On his classic album Jay-Z wrote a song called The Takeover where he dissed Nas and announced his title as the real king of all things rap.
Well the Takeover is being sung again.
and this time the geeks are getting dissed.
The era of the geeks is coming to an end.
It was good while it lasted. But talking about PHP and Cold Fusion with a fevor usually reserved for Jehovah’s Witnesses is fading fast.
The Scoble era ended without him realizing it.
You guys built a place where everyone could come and hang out. The ‘problem’ is, they will.
There will be some holdouts.
Like the Apple geeks who had to get common cool to be recognized, some folks will shorten their skirts and stuff their pants in an effort not to lose attention.
But you can’t stop progress.
The common folks will win.
Hate MySpace? Too bad. It may not really be bigger than Yahoo but it doesn’t matter.
Like Napster bought us music folks online, MySpace is bringing the rest of us.
And with the teeming masses everything changes.
Watch the Technorati 100 flip.
Blogs as you know them? Paleeze.
Words are for suckers like me.
The Kids are already working on special effects.
Geeks will get regulated to the social networks they built for those other people who didn’t get it or understand what this stuff was all about.
But while the future may be bleak for the Geeks the new era is really gonna rock
Because the creatives are really gonna have some fun with this shit.
July 13, 2006 at 7:26 am
Is it the de-geekifying of the internet or the geekify-ing of the masses?
July 13, 2006 at 9:05 am
Uh. Kitkast is strange. I’m not sure which one I like best, Galatikast or Kitkast.
July 13, 2006 at 9:12 am
I just learned that Casey is from Montreal.
July 13, 2006 at 9:14 am
[...] Chartreuse on The Death ofthe Geek Era. [...]
July 13, 2006 at 10:02 am
Cool post. It’s true.
Things are all about creative and depth of knowledge
July 13, 2006 at 10:05 am
the geeks that survive are the ones that become cool to the pop culture. they create special effects inside their own universes and play disco music so loud it nearly breaks the neighbors hearing aids.
That’s hawt. That’s the future. Adapt or Die.
July 13, 2006 at 10:05 am
I think you need to talk about the networking possibilities and how wealth will mix with poverty as creativity crosses financial boundaries.
If you have bandwith, can load to You Tube, can Tag and link there are no financial boundaries and wealth classes
July 13, 2006 at 10:26 am
As Larry and Sergey go..
“G O G we runnin this web shit”
July 13, 2006 at 10:49 am
Nas is still king.
July 13, 2006 at 10:54 am
[...] My friend Chartreuse has a cool post about the switcheroo coming in the world of blogging. I could not agree more. [...]
July 13, 2006 at 11:06 am
Howard, very good point I need to do a post on.
Andy, let it go. Nas had one classic album and a few good cuts.
Jordan I really wish I would have thought of that!
July 13, 2006 at 11:09 am
Great post… love the Jay-Z reference but I’ve always like Mos Def’s *remake* of that song better :
Mos Def countered with his song, “The Rapeover.” He opens the song with the lyrics: “Old white men is runnin’ this rap s–t / Corporate forces runnin’ this rap s—t / Some tall Israeli is runnin’ this rap s—t / We poke out our @sses for a chance to cash in.”
The song ends with: “Cocaine, is runnin’ this rap s—t / ‘Dro, ‘yac and e-pills is runnin this rap s—t / MTV is runnin’ this rap s—t / Viacom is runnin’ this rap s—t / AOL and Time Warner runnin’ this rap s—t / Quasi-homosexuals is runnin’ this rap s—t.”
(via http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/06may/article163.html )
July 13, 2006 at 11:37 am
Great essay, I’ve been thinking about it all morning. The de-geekifying of the Internet is still a slow process. To use publishing as an example, I would say that the majority of our best writers (and publishers) are still trying to figure out the interactive side of the web. Pages are tough to navigate, too many frames, too much flash, and no way to start a webby conversation. It’s going to take years until geeky tools are mastered by all writers.
Another example–I worked hard on a vblog interview series this week, but it’s a serious struggle to plug that project into the mainstream journalism conversation. Too many of my journalist friends still write off the web as a geeky fad. The masses are hitting MySpace and YouTube, but the true shift–where the best creatives of our generation can work together with the geeky first-adapters to create stunning new work–has yet to happen in a meaningful way.
That said, it’s coming, and I’m just as excited about that day as you are…
July 13, 2006 at 11:47 am
Great post. Thank god I didn’t geek out *too* much.
July 13, 2006 at 11:49 am
Thanks Char, and it was even before noon..
I should have expanded a bit before, but a bar was all I could muster. While I completely agree that the userbase is going (maybe has gone) mainstream, the geeks will be *running* the show for a long time.
Just as Hova moved on to the executive suite, so have the geeks. Google being the prime example. And with the most valuable asset in the world being information, formulas and algorithms will soon replace English as the language of business. At least on the web.
A random side note.. this post also has me thinking about the similarties between Jay and web companies. Especially when it comes to launching new businesses, i.e. launching new records. Hova more than anyone embodied the “launch as many as you can” attitude that is prevelant with beta launches on the web today.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=184
Who remembers Jay-Z for his album w/ R Kelly? Who remembers Google for Google Scholar?
July 13, 2006 at 11:50 am
Hi,
This set off a whole daisychain of thoughts:
A professor who taught me IT once said that very little new IT was invented since the 1970s. Everything developed since then, he said, including the Web, was merely a new application of an existing technology.
Seven years ago, creating a web site required the knowledge of HTML, which folks used to write in notepad (later came HotDog etc.). Today’s bloggers are publishing (and mashing-up) online without any need to understand how the tech works.
But a little time spent with anyone who is less than 10 years old can be a humbling experience for those of us who think we have mastered the use of technology.
Another thought: THIS era of the geeks may be over, but a new one will rise over the ashes of this one. You just can’t stop scientific progress. As Calvin & Hobbes put it, it tends to go “boink”.
July 13, 2006 at 12:01 pm
I’ve never hoped more that you’re right.
July 13, 2006 at 1:17 pm
The creative geeks will take over . . . and we’ll call them CREAKS.
July 13, 2006 at 1:58 pm
You guys read, Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, by Adam Greenfield? http://v-2.org/
He’s a bit wordy, but here’s a quote from his blog: “So maybe what we’re finally talking about is a true post-Modernism? In this context, I simply mean a milieu in which the technical wherewithal exists to allow each of the six billion souls high Modernism claimed to represent to speak instead in their own voice. And to do so not (or not merely) digitally, but spatially and materially.”
This topic is pretty much what that book is about.
July 13, 2006 at 2:56 pm
The geeks were never that important to begin with, not the obvious ones, at least. Like the suburbia post there, the majority of the ‘geek masses’ are just trying to feel important.
Like anyone else, really.
I do try to distance myself from them as well, though. I at least have the advantage that I don’t look like a programmer or a sysadmin at all.
July 13, 2006 at 2:57 pm
Also. Some of the best hackers I know are hardly geeks at all.
July 13, 2006 at 6:14 pm
This relates: the inventor of the joystick died. Alan Kotok also invented the first video game.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/obit-kotok.html
July 13, 2006 at 6:50 pm
Nas responded with Ether which just killed it………..so will the geeks respond?
Or is it that Geeks already ether’d the public but you just dont know it yet?
July 13, 2006 at 8:37 pm
This might be my favorite blog post of all time.
Techno is not a math problem. It’s there to make you dance.
July 13, 2006 at 8:49 pm
Candice you’re a Bond girl!
Jecklin, It was wordy but I’ll read it. Really.
And Sean, I’ll be stea- remixing that Techno line.
July 14, 2006 at 1:25 am
Either a modern Bond girl with pistol and laptop in tow, (I was so happy to see the primary bond girl in Goldeneye was a programmer) or the occasional hacker chick in the movies.
But I still push bits for a living.
July 14, 2006 at 6:00 pm
We’re all pushing something.
July 15, 2006 at 5:18 am
It has been a long time since artists ahve been able to influence the masses through creating. I think the technology has finally begun to catch up with our brains so to speak.