Abstract
Political issues are ever present in geek culture even though many geeks claim to be outside politics and concerned mainly with technology, which many geeks claim is politically neutral. There is a strong streak of libertarian individualism in geek culture—especially in the USA—that is suspicious of traditional forms of political expression and organisation, whether on the Left or the Right. This chapter draws together many of the themes and narrative forms from the stories examined in previous chapters. This chapter outlines three political perspectives that are influential in geek culture: cyber-utopianism, techno-libertarianism, and techno-anarchism; examines the distinctive narrative strategies that are associated with each perspective; and looks at how geek stories use these to try to resolve tensions around democracy and meritocracy.
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Notes
- 1.
By ‘anarchist’, I refer someone who is sceptical of centralised power and authority, not to a person working toward generalised disorder. Techno-anarchists may also be thought of as communitarians: the key is their focus on peer production, decentralisation, and favouring cooperation over corporation.
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- 3.
The mostly US-focused literature of early hacker culture, the US counter culture, and the radical feminist and civil rights movements all must be brought into closer contact and tension.
- 4.
The playfulness of the demoscene should not be taken to mean that computer geeks in Europe had no interest in start-ups: many did, as attested by the accounts in European Founders at Work (Santos, 2012).
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Alleyne, B. (2019). Geek Political Narrative. In: Geek and Hacker Stories. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95819-1_4
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