Friday, 28/Aug/2009
There's a NEW kinda pretentious in town.
It was about 3 years ago when I had a under-paying job where the owners encouraged us to use "some sort of social network tool" and about 2 years ago when I found a slightly less under-paying job that forced everyone they liked (pretty anyone who wasn't me and two others) to utilize "social media" which I then derided in a older update as nothing more than a database-driven website with user login capability. Well, I eventually, reluctantly adopted using such tools with the mindset I would only use those tools to converse with people I didn't work with. That worked for most of the time I was working at my previous job, and it assisted me finally getting out of a miserable city that everyone believes is so wonderful despite the fact that it took 5+ police officers to chase one teenage loser and catch him (after he put himself in the position to be caught) on the other side of town.
But in encountering people on these social tools and going to similar live gatherings, I notice a pattern. First, people proudly consider themselves "geeks." I have no idea why, and for some time I wondered what that meant. It didn't take long, however, for me to figure out it really means nothing. Being a "geek" means:
- You're in marketing
- Your solution for any problem, including a strictly IT problem, is to instruct the person with the problem to sign up for Twitter and Facebook
- You strictly use Apple products, since Apple legitimately cares about their customers. They're not a business after all, so they'd never do anything shady like that evil Micrsoft.
- You use any and every excuse to drink, then label it something obnoxious like "tweetup"
- The term "microcelebrity" means something to you
- ANY minute event has to be spammed. EVERY cause must be supported, as long as it's a friendly cause. You won't find anyone supporting Black/Americans of African descent mobility or causes. After all, the only ethnic groups are Hispanics, Asians, and, when you want to show you can do something pointless like green tint your avatars, Iranians (or rather Kurds, Persians, etc.).
- Expressing uneducated, half-truth, contradictory political opinions.
Every "geek" has, when asked, always said they work in PR or general marketing. Nearly every so-called tech meetup I go to is really a bunch of PR and marketing specialists. While I don't have a problem with the profession overall, I'm tired of trying to gather technical information and instead listen to more rhetoric about social causes and social media. Social causes are great, but unless I'm single, not an entrepreneur or I'm unemployed, there's no way and no need to support every social cause. It's just unrealistic. Also, not everyone is in their 20s and lives in the city—some people have better things to do than follow fads.
These types always claim to be heavily into the tech scene but ask them something simple like what PHP is used for and they blow it off by saying "I'm not a techie or anything. I just support it." Support what? What's to support? Technology? Is their a legitimate effort to control and retard the rate of progression in technology? I sure wish there was. Maybe then people would learn to enjoy their game console and focus on irrelevant things like story and gameplay, even though we all know graphics are what matters. It's like a cult—a cult I don't want to join.
To add insult to injury, certain people at the cult label themselves "microcelebrity." That's just snob for "I have a lot of friend on Twitter." Nobody cares. And instead of sharing valuable information about their profession, since the notion of being a celebrity implies that you are famous because several people have decided to tell us why you're good at what you do (nothing) and why you're important, they talk about irrelevant pop culture topics like Dancing with the Stars, as if anyone with a job cares about reality TV. No, I don't care why a developer thinks a team lost a championship, I care about their issues on development. I wish people would stop saying you need to be "personable" when you're talking about your professional work. Stop dropping names and telling me why they're important. If they were important, I'd know it. But they're just PR writers/salesmen/janitors who spend their workdays talking and not doing.
And finally, geeks, especially those who label themselves politically conservative, think the rest of us care about their political opinions. Perhaps someone might if anything suggested an educated opinion that factored in the actual political process and the history (specifically in the US), but since late-20s web developers who earn a hefty $36k a year have no relevance in the political process, feel free to stop talking. Maybe you'll be taken seriously when you take off that "conservative" label and form a real political ideology. That means not immediately trying to categorize yourself as something and spewing nonsense nobody wants to hear and, in a face-to-face encounter, you'd be too afraid to share. Yeah, where's your dogma now? It's time to ditch these people