To be a geek is, in one way or another, to be over-enthused, over-informed, over-excited, over-detailed. There is an awkwardness born out of a superfluity of an extraneous kind of desire that becomes a febrile quiver in the face of an interesting problem. To be geeky is to have too much interest in something to the detriment of comportment, code spilling over into a gabble, a liveliness found in something that a more reserved protocol would keep under wraps or avoid. To be a geek is to be a bit too public with your enthusiasms, to be slightly unaware in turn that these thrills may, to others, rightly be dull as dust dehydrated with a special process of your own invention. Its mixture of juiciness and dryness, being able to get juiced on dryness, perhaps gets to the core of the problem. Frankly, it's a ludicrous position to be in — it is after all a bit bewildering to find this stuff so fascinating — but it is one whose perversity puts it in a strange relation of proximity to fundamental dynamics in contemporary life.

Such a condition leads many geeks into precariously powerful positions. Companies founded and staffed by geeks rule the world in any ways. They fill institutions and create commercial entities. One can be both ludicrous and lucrative, a maniac for certain details that remake the cosmos by their syntax, or that found a new grammar of relation between things. Geeks created the internet and fight over its meaning. They govern and subvert governance, or keep it ticking over with regular incremental upgrades. Geeks produce extravagant contraptions that cement their positions in the most comedically venal ways, but they also make machines with panache that auto-destruct in deserts and car parks and servers; sometimes intentionally. They make games that provide the grounds of individualism for millions, and then find the wealth it occasionally brings depressing pointless but irresistible.