Abstract
This chapter discusses representations of geeks and hackers in fiction and popular non-fiction across a range of media, looking at film, novels, projects, organisations, and mass market biographies. The approach entails reading the texts as narratives, exploring themes, identifying characters and types, and isolating master plots—story templates that recur across various media and genres.
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Notes
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The redemptive life narrative is a template that is rooted in Judeo-Christian literary history (the life stories of the biblical prophets and of Christ himself are models of redemptive story-making) and is found everywhere that Christianity has had a significant influence on education; the form is employed in secular as well as religious writing.
- 3.
The work was composed in the late 1990s. Lewis sets out on a quest to find the most successful tech entrepreneur; the central character in his story is Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape.
- 4.
https://feministfrequency.com/video/reflecting-on-the-brilliance-of-ada-lovelace/. There has been a substantial amount of work published on Lovelace’s life in recent years (Essinger, 2013a, 2013b; Stein, 2004; Woolley, 2002).
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In what is perhaps the most critical collection in this area (Shevinsky, 2015), with stories from people rarely represented in tech, the ultimate aim still remains for women to succeed in the existing tech ecosystem.
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- 7.
Ethnic representation in tech is itself an area of ongoing debate and research, which I do not have the space to explore in this work.
- 8.
Paypal founder, libertarian and hero founder Peter Thiel created a fund to encourage young people to leave university and work fulltime to get start-ups going (Wolfe, 2017); Paul Grahams’ Y-Combinator project has as one of its premises that a start-up hothouse is a better preparation for would-be tech entrepreneurs than time at university (Stross, 2013).
- 9.
Following Dyer-Witheford’s (1999), Terranova’s (2000) and Benner’s (2002) pioneering work on labour in the digital economy, there is a growing body of stories from the dark underbelly of tech, many focusing on the inequality and marginalisation that is a by-product of the vast wealth generated by big tech (e.g. Pein, 2018; Weigel, 2017).
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Alleyne, B. (2019). Representing Geeks. In: Geek and Hacker Stories. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95819-1_2
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