Geeks

First lines

THE BOISE airport boasts several "fresh" French-fried potato vending machines, spaced at intervals throughout the facilty, to let visitors know that they are in the proud Home of the Spud.

About this book

"Jesse and Eric were roommates in the tiny town of Caldwell, Idaho, two nineteen-year-old working-class kids squeezing out a living with their seven-dollar-an-hour jobs selling and fixing computers. College was never in the cards. They spent every spare cent on their computers, and every spare moment online.". "Jesse and Eric were geeks - suspicious or disdainful of authority figures, proud of their status as outsiders, fervent in their belief in the positive power of technology. They'd been outsiders as long as they could remember, living far from the mainstream of school or town life. Nobody spoke for them; they were on nobody's social or political agenda.". "Geeks is the story of how Jesse and Eric - and others like them - used technology to make it possible to change their lives and alter their destiny. They rode the Internet out of Idaho to Chicago, a city they had never seen, searching for the American dream, a better life. Geeks tells of this brave and difficult journey, as two self-described social misfits use the resources of the Internet to try to construct a new future for themselves, escape the boundaries of their dead-end lives, and find a community they can belong to.". "Geeks explores a growing subculture about which many of us know little, a world with its own language, traditions, and taboos. In telling the stories of Jesse, Eric, and others like them, Geeks reveals the very human face of technology."--BOOK JACKET.

Themes & subjects

About the author

Jon Katz

8 August 1947

Jon Katz is an American journalist, author, and photographer. He was a contributor to the online magazine HotWired, the technology website Slashdot, and the online news magazine Slate.