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Geek and Hacker Stories
Code, Culture and
Storytelling from the
Technosphere

Brian Alleyne
Geek and Hacker Stories
 Brian Alleyne

Geek and Hacker

Stories
Code, Culture and Storytelling from the
Technosphere
Brian Alleyne
Department of Sociology
Goldsmiths, University of London
London, UK

ISBN 978-1-349-95818-4    ISBN 978-1-349-95819-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95819-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954945

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Limited 2019
The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan

This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
To the memory of my father, Ellis Wilfred Alleyne (1935–1978), who taught
me how to use a soldering iron.
 Preface

I aim to provide my reader with a measured and informed perspective on

geek culture: a field that has been romanticised and sensationalised both
in the press and popular culture. I do not aim to reveal ‘the truth’ about
geek culture, or to define it in exact terms, or to present findings that will
change the way we think about geek culture. From a potentially vast area
of interest, I selected one corner for investigation. I offer here an account
based on textual investigation and my personal experience, building on
periods of both intentional research and enthusiastic engagement against
a wider background of my involvement with personal computers since
1982. I have been a computer geek since the 1980s, and the computer
geek community is my community. I have been casting an ethnographic
and autobiographical gaze on computer geek culture for many years; of
the computer geek universe, those geek communities built around Free
and Open Source Software (FOSS) are the ones most familiar to me.
Stories lie at the core of what follows. The fundamental questions that
motivated me were, what stories are told about geeks, and what stories do
geeks tell among themselves? The Web is the best place to begin looking
for answers because geeks are children of the digital age and the Web is
their preferred medium of communication and space of self-expression.
Most of the stories that I analyse in this book are found online in the form
of text, audio, or video; I have given links to many of these in the text so
that readers may explore the stories on their own. I have summarised the
plots, characters, and themes of these stories instead of overburdening this
text with lengthy quotations which, in any event being extracts, would still

vii
viii PREFACE

leave out some of the overall context that a reader might want to explore.
So, I invite you the reader to seek out and plunge into the stories.
We can never have detailed information about the full experience of
every single user of personal computing devices, but we can generate
knowledge from targeted social research into the experiences and in this
case the stories of relatively small numbers of actual users. Whether we use
statistics or free-flowing participant observation, all social researchers rely
on synecdoche—a language construct through which we indicate a whole
by referring to one or more of its parts, or vice versa (Becker, 1998, 67).
Everyday observation, field observations or personal diary entries, a series
of blog postings, as well as random samples of respondents, are all varieties
of how social science knowledge is built on synecdoche. The selection of
stories I discuss in what follows is a synecdoche I constructed to refer to
geek culture through stories told by geeks and told about geeks.
Chapter 1 introduces the key ideas of the book, starting with an over-
view of geek culture followed by a discussion of the methodology, meth-
ods, and data that inform the work. Chapter 2 examines representations of
geeks across different genres: biography and autobiography, journalism
and mass-market nonfiction, fiction, drama, and documentary. Chapter 3
discusses geek narratives about competing technology platforms, looking
at how some geeks express loyalty around technologies, firms, and brands
and how they argue in favour of their own choices and against the technol-
ogy choices of other geeks. Chapter 4 treats themes, narrative frames, and
plots under a general typology of geek political narrative, ranging across
three broad ideological perspectives: cyber-utopianism, techno-­
libertarianism, and techno anarchism. Chapter 5 is a personal reflection on
my own experience as a geek. I close the work with some thoughts on the
significance of stories in geek culture.

London, UK Brian Alleyne

 Acknowledgements

Peter Wilton, a fellow geek, was my research assistant and interlocutor. I

had many fruitful conversations with my Goldsmiths colleagues and
friends, some of them into geeky stuff, others not, but all of them wonder-
ful interlocutors: Chris Brauer, Douglas Haywood, Brett St Louis, Kirsten
Campbell, Tom Henri, Martin Williams, and David Oswell. Harriet Baker
of Palgrave first encouraged the work; the anonymous reviewers gave use-
ful critical feedback. Lynda Porter continues to teach me life skills. My
students at Goldsmiths always stimulate and challenge my thinking. Joe
Fay invited me to give a Register lecture and the questions that he and the
participants asked helped me to clarify my thinking. Finally, I must thank
Cristina Chimisso, my life partner, for her peerless support.

ix
 Contents

1 Initialise (Key Ideas)   1

Introducing Geeks, Culture, and Storytelling   1
What Is Geek Culture?   6
Methodology   9
Sources  13
Summary  16
References  17

2 Representing Geeks  21
Clever People and Social Misfits  22
The Hippie Who Changed Everything  24
The Breakthrough  27
The Gender of the Geek  30
The Geek’s Journey  34
Start-up: Founders’ Stories  36
Summary  39
References  40

3 Platform War Stories  47

Plotting the Switch  48
When You Go Mac, You Never Go Back  53
Embrace the Penguin  57
Switching (Back) to Windows  61

xi
xii Contents

The Year of the Linux Desktop  62

Plotting Android as a Win for Linux  63
Narrating Self and Enemy  66
Plotting Market Share, Capturing Mind Share  67
The Microsoft Villain  68
Summary  70
References  70

4 Geek Political Narrative  75

Politics and Geek Storytelling  75
Utopians, Communitarians, Anarchists, and Libertarians  76
Narrating the State and Democracy  80
Narrating Meritocracy and Its Discontents  83
Performing Politics in Geek Narrative  87
Summary  89
References  90

5 Notes from a Geek Autobiography  95

Diary: December 17th, 2007  95
Becoming a Geek  97
Gadgets, Code, and Other Obsessions  99
Can We Be Ethical Consumer Geeks? I Want a Fairphone,
September 2017 101
Once We Were Psioneers 102
Being Linux 104
Being a Geek 106
References 106

6 Afterword: Coda 109

I ndex 111
 CHAPTER 1

Initialise (Key Ideas)

Abstract This chapter sets out the key terms and concepts that shape this
book. This chapter defines geeks, hackers, culture, and social relations and
then moves on to outline the idea of distinctive geek culture. This chapter
then discusses the methodology and source materials that informed this work.

Keywords Geek • Hacker • Geek culture • Narrative

Introducing Geeks, Culture, and Storytelling

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a geek was originally a ‘sim-
pleton’ or a ‘dupe’, but that definition no longer holds. Geeks now exist
in the general public view as people who are knowledgeable and obses-
sively interested in some highly specialised area such as comic books,
science fiction and fantasy, science, role-playing games, video games,
and computer technology (Feineman, 2005; McCain, Gentile, &
Campbell, 2015; Woo, 2018). Some of these interests are highly cor-
related so that a geek can be a science fiction fan, an avid payer of games,
as well as a computer programmer. In popular1 discourse, ‘geek’ is often

1
I will use ‘popular’ to mean widely read when discussing texts, and widely circulated
when discussing film and TV. I establish the wide readership of books by Amazon sales rank,
and wide viewership if the film, series, or documentary is produced by an established/main-
stream studio (including Netflix and Amazon originals).

© The Author(s) 2019 1

B. Alleyne, Geek and Hacker Stories,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95819-1_1
2 B. ALLEYNE

used to refer to someone highly knowledgeable (sometimes to the point

of obsession) about technology, especially computer technology
(Bergman & Lambert, 2010). Some geeks focus on computing, while
for others computing is one element in a range of geeky interests; in this
work, I will focus on the computing side of geek culture.
While the geek is now identified and represented as tech-savvy, geeks
are also popularly stereotyped (sometimes even by persons who self-­
identify as geeks) as ignorant of or indifferent to other important aspects
of social and cultural life, such as etiquette, intimacy, and fashion, to name
just three. Some might argue that these traits of social awkwardness are
more applicable to ‘nerds’: while there is an overlap between concepts of
nerd and geek (Goto, 1997; Kendall, 2000, 2011; Woo, 2018), I will use
geek in this book as the overarching term; most of what I write about
geeks could be applied to nerds. Debate on which of these two terms is
more appropriate is not only outside the scope of my work here but holds
little interest for me. Nerds are obsessed with knowledge, often obscure
knowledge; they often narrate their childhoods as misfits; they are often
obsessed with details of technology or collections of comics or games. All
of this holds for geeks. So, when I use the term ‘geek’, I want you, the
reader, to imagine that what I say about the geek is almost always appli-
cable to the nerd.
As discussed by Woo (2018), the term ‘geek’ can signify different iden-
tities and practices depending on who is using it, with the difference resid-
ing both in areas of interest and in degrees of interest. Computer geeks
have a strong sense of collective identity and see themselves as belonging
to various kinds of community. Both geeks and non-geeks imagine vari-
ously firm/porous boundaries that separate geeks from non-geeks. Self-­
identified geeks counter the negative connotations that people from the
wider non-geek society have associated with geeks, thereby validating geek
identity. As we live in an increasingly networked society of ubiquitous digi-
tal technology, and especially with the entry of tech billionaires as the
newest stars in the celebrity firmament, being geek has come to take on a
more positive image than what it was 40 years ago at the dawn of the per-
sonal computer (PC) era. The kind of geek I focus on is the computer
geek, also sometimes referred to as a hacker. Hacking covers a broad
spread of practices and identities and is an area of ongoing research and
debate (Jordan, 2017), and my aim is not to add to that debate. For my
purposes, the hacker is a person skilled in creating and/or modifying soft-
ware and software-controlled objects of various kinds. There is an overlap
 INITIALISE (KEY IDEAS) 3

between the hacker as a software coder and the geek in the sense of a
computer geek as can be seen in the work of both Coleman (2012) and
Kelty (2008). Moreover, in much of the body of popular literature and
media representations that I will discuss in later chapters, a hacker is equal
to a geek. I use both terms but favour the use of geek more than hacker
because the public imagination of ‘hacker’ is overburdened by ideas of
computer misuse and digital crime.
To be a geek is to carry a social and cultural label and to do so is to have
an identity. When mathematicians or logicians talk about identity, they
have in mind A being the same as B in functional terms, so that A and B
behave the same no matter what inputs we make to either. When we talk
of identity in human relations, we are dealing with how to negotiate a
sense of who an individual is, which groups she belongs to, how she
responds to how other people view her as a social being, and with which
groups they associate her (Jenkins, 2014; Lawler, 2013). So socio-cultural
identity differs from logical identity in that socio-cultural identity is fluid
and lacks the certainties of identity as found in logic and mathematics.
While there is some overlap between social and cultural identity, it is
helpful to distinguish between the two. Social identity refers to how you are
placed in real social relations and structures, such as social class or gender,
or as a parent. The existence of the social relations and structures that
inform a social identity are recognised by most people in any society. Often
there is an element of inequality in these social relations and structures.
Social identity can be assigned at birth, or it can be achieved or assumed
later in life. Cultural identity refers to a person’s sense of belonging to dis-
tinct groups. Cultural identities are almost infinitely varied and are con-
stantly being re-imagined. Sometimes a cultural identity can put a ‘gloss’ on
social identity, as when someone with the social identity of a woman (or
man) declares that they are feminist. Many kinds of ethnic identities are
both social and cultural. Another way to draw a working distinction between
social and cultural identities is to think of a social identity as having a rela-
tively objective existence in the sense that, say, social class exists in a way that
is not entirely reducible to what individuals think or desire regarding their
own social class. Cultural identities, on the other hand, have stronger ele-
ments of voluntarism to them in that a person makes choices about kinds of
practices, uses of language, or working with different kinds of symbols to
craft a (cultural) identity and a sense of belonging to a cultural group. While
there is wider scope for crafting cultural than social identities, both kinds of
identities are sites of struggle and are shaped by unequal power relations.
4 B. ALLEYNE

The identities of people who are secure as members of powerful groups

carry positive value, while identities assumed by or ascribed to less power-
ful groups carry lower value. Most people seek to construct positive iden-
tities for themselves because most people seek to feel secure and valued in
themselves and society, but there is no getting around the fact that some
identities carry more value in society than others (Lemert, 1994). Therein
lies the fundamental contradiction at the heart of social and cultural iden-
tity. Everybody has several identities, but not everybody has the same set
of identities. And identities are structured unequally. Gender and age are
the two most fundamental differentiating social identities; and to these,
we can add others such as class, nation, ethnic group, and sexuality, among
others. We can usefully think of social identity as a network of different
social positions along axes of, say, gender and class (but not only these). In
so doing, we should bear in mind that identities are not abstract ideas on
theoretical axes with smooth planes of objective difference, but instead, an
actual identity lies somewhere on a continuum along which many identi-
ties are positioned, and these positions will take up points that have dif-
ferential value, power, and prestige. Even though many people like to
think of identities as given and fixed, from a sociological perspective they
are anything but, and they have histories that have been extensively stud-
ied (Lawler, 2013). I have gone into some detail about sociological think-
ing about identity because I want from the outset to counter some of the
simplistic and naive ideas of identity that are recurrent in geek storytelling.
One of the guiding principles of this work is that it is possible, indeed
desirable, to take both computer code and social theory seriously.
My focus is on storytelling aspects of geek culture. In sociology and
anthropology, debates around culture are at least as lively as geek debates
around programming or software licences. Culture is notoriously difficult
to define (Williams, 1990, pp. 87–92), yet ideas about it are ubiquitous.
People make culture; it also makes them. Most of us would accept that
culture is what separates humans from everything else in the living world:
to be human is to have culture (Carrithers, 1992). Culture is both univer-
sal and particular: all humans have culture, and at the same time, humans
have a huge variety of different cultures; this duality of culture may appear
to be paradoxical at first glance. If we draw a parallel to language, then the
seeming paradox becomes insignificant: all humans have a general capacity
for language, and that universal human capacity is made manifest in
­hundreds of actual languages, which are mostly mutually unintelligible.
The resolution of the seeming paradox of language lies in the fact of
 INITIALISE (KEY IDEAS) 5

t­ ranslation—given time and effort any human language can be translated

into any other human language. So, integral to being human is the capa-
bility, possessed by all humans, to learn actual languages. The parallel
surely holds for culture: for there to be cultural variation among humans;
there must be some underpinning universal cultural capacity in all humans:
you need not be a social/cultural anthropologist or a sociologist to
acknowledge that humans can and do learn to function in unfamiliar
cultures.
But what is culture? To offer a full answer would take us too deeply into
ongoing debates across the humanities and social sciences. As a working
concept let us take culture to include one or more of:

1. the process of becoming a full-fledged member of a given society;

2. the complex collection of mental ‘stuff’ that we hold in our heads
about what it is to be a living human being;
3. the shared symbolic resources of a defined group of people;
4. the products of human endeavour in art and industry;
5. the way of life and customs of a group of humans;
6. knowledge about and knowledge of how-to-do.

I could easily extend this list, but as it is here, it will serve our purposes.2
Sociologists are interested in understanding human life in its social
and collective aspects. A key question for the sociologist is: what are the
structures and processes that enable and constrain social life? Sociologists
(almost all of what I say here also applies to social and cultural anthro-
pologists) take all aspects of social life as potential material for investi-
gation, from language and culture to technology and politics. We use a
wide range of methods to generate sociological knowledge, from social
surveys to participant observation, from textual analysis to statistical
analysis. We treat everyday life as if it were strange, and we show how
the seemingly strange for us is often everyday life for others. People
who do not understand or like what sociologists do often accuse us of
writing long articles on trivial matters. This criticism is misguided. The
everyday social world as we experience it is far from trivial: it is much
more than its surface appearance. When we seek to integrate history,
biography, and social issues into our research, we are engaging in

2
There is an extensive theoretical literature on culture (Eagleton, 2016; Oswell, 2010;
Smith & Riley, 2008).
6 B. ALLEYNE

‘­sociological imagination’ (Mills, 2000). Such an imagination encom-

passes a sense of combining the big picture of a society with the indi-
vidual life story as a way of understanding a social issue; it is what
motivates this work. Geek culture is the social and cultural issue, and I
draw on a range of stories to render an account of geek culture.

What Is Geek Culture?

I use ‘geek’ as an umbrella term, with the usual connotation of being
obsessively interested in computer-related matters. So, when I write geek I
always mean computer geek, unless I state otherwise; when I write geek, I
include hacker unless I state otherwise. Geek is the encompassing category,
or in computer geek-speak, the parent class, which is a formal model or
template from which actual objects are derived.3 Within the broad geek
category, there are distinct subcategories or subclasses of which hacker is
one. All hackers are geeks, but not every geek is a hacker. Unlike the pre-
cise specification of classes and subclasses in object-oriented computer
programming, when I use the terms geek or hacker, I am working with
social and cultural categories and identities that do not map as neatly into
a classification scheme as would formal techniques of modelling classes
and their members. While it might have been simpler to use the term geek
exclusively, I have chosen to use both geek and hacker for two main rea-
sons: first, much of the literature I analyse is aimed at a general readership,
and in the mainstream public discourses on tech from which I draw story
materials for study, geek and hacker are not carefully distinguished; sec-
ond, in popular biographies and dramas about founders and in stories
about start-ups both geek and hacker are used without careful
differentiation.
Geek and hacker are identities that are encompassed by a broadly con-
ceived digital culture, which is underpinned and enabled by software
(Fuller, 2017; Manovich, 2013). Software is a defining object in geek
­culture. Software exists in two forms: as code written in a human-readable
language that is specifically designed for programming computers—source
code; and as code converted from human-readable source code into the
binary code of 0s and 1s that can be executed or performed on computer

3
The concept of ‘parent class’ comes from object-oriented software design and program-
ming; for an accessible tutorial on object orientation, see: https://www.codeproject.com/
Articles/1137299/Object-Oriented-Analysis-and-Design
 INITIALISE (KEY IDEAS) 7

hardware. While source code has meaning for anyone who understands
how to read the language in which that code is written, the intended
meaning of that code in action is only realised when it is executed on an
actual computer. Writing and editing computer code, and reading and
reviewing code, all together constitute a core practice—an element of cul-
ture—among those geeks who are hackers. Though the writing of code is
generally a solitary activity pursued in often anti-social hours and environ-
ments, it is through adding that code to a wider software project (nowa-
days, few software projects of any size are the result of the work of a single
programmer) that the creativity and skill of the computer geek are actual-
ised and recognised. I am not writing here about hacker movements, on
which there is a large and growing body of literature (e.g. Alberts &
Oldenziel, 2014; Coleman, 2012; Jordan, 2017; Kelty, 2008; Söderberg,
2008), but about stories told by and about geeks and hackers.
Geek culture includes but is not defined by a general technophilia; it
encompasses different political imaginaries, different kinds of hacker iden-
tities and hacking activities, different platforms and genres, and different
media practices (Coleman, 2012; Kelty, 2005). Geek cultural identity
emerges from the subject position of being a technically skilled actor
knowing, playing, contesting, and making in a world of ubiquitous digital
technologies. Before we spoke and wrote of computer geeks, we had tin-
kerers, autodidacts, savants, inventors, and amateur scientists, all of whom
I would count as geeks in a generic sense.4 Intense curiosity about tech-
nology (especially the digital kind) is a distinguishing geek trait, but since
curiosity is a universal human trait, we cannot define geeks solely in terms
of curiosity. The history that lies behind the tinkering and curiosity that
typifies the geek goes back a long way and touches every society and cul-
ture, but real geeks are not found in all ages and all places. Geeks as we
know them emerge as a social type at a time and in quite specific social
settings in the late twentieth century (Woo, 2018).
For anthropologist Christopher Kelty, geeks are members of a ‘recursive
public’, which he defines as ‘a group constituted by a shared, profound
concern for the technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own
association’ (Kelty, 2005, p. 185). The Internet lies at the core of computer
geek culture. Geeks are not just people whose curiosity is satisfied by the

4
It is tempting to project geeks and hackers back in time: pre-print textual culture could
be viewed as a form of hacking, according to Kennedy (2015), in a work on ‘medieval
hackers’.
8 B. ALLEYNE

Web in a way that was not possible before; geeks are especially interested in,
and indeed some build and maintain, the information technology that
underlies and enables the World Wide Web. Wikipedia is the ultimate geek
artefact: a commons-based global open access knowledge store that allows
(almost) anyone anywhere to contribute, but where expert knowledge
tends to filter up through the rounds of scrutiny and open editing.
Wikipedia, like geek culture, is potentially universal but is not actually so:
most of the content is created in the major languages, with English pre-
dominating, and what counts as important is what matters to a demo-
graphic of mainly Western, male, formally educated users. Information
networks in the real world display a tendency to concentrate power and
influence at a few strategic nodes; most people who contribute to online
culture are part of a long tail with little influence or audience (Galloway &
Thacker, 2007; Lovink, 2011).
Most of what I asserted about geek culture applies to hacker culture,
which comprises identities, artefacts, practices, and relationships that
revolve around computing. Hackers are a kind of geek. While taking
hacker culture to be a substantial subset or a subclass of the more generic
geek culture I mapped earlier, I remain aware that hacking has evolved its
own distinct character. Hacking involves computer programming, com-
bining hardware and software in often unconventional ways, and building
and modifying and re-purposing digital object. Hacking involves a range
of material practices, from the clandestine to the openly shared, ranging
across software, hardware, culture, and politics (Jordan, 2008). The pio-
neering hackers who emerged from the counterculture of the late 1960s
and early 1970s were motivated by a desire to wrest the computer away
from the exclusive control of big corporations and the state and transform
it into a tool for individual creativity and learning (Turner, 2006). The
1980s saw the emergence of new kinds of hackers, who operated clandes-
tinely with the aim of cracking computer networks for reputation, to do
sabotage, or for personal gain.
There is a distinctive political aspect to many kinds of hacking, for
which hacktivism is a good term. Hacktivism involves using the skills and
technologies developed in hacker cultures—Free Software, hardware, and
sometimes clandestine—to advance political aims (Jordan, 2004; Sorell,
2015; Tanczer, 2016). As the term implies, ‘hacktivist’ combines ‘hacker’
with ‘activist’. In this case, the hacker is using his or her hacking skills
towards clearly defined political ends that cannot always be reduced to the
politics of either clandestine or open hacking. Given the varied political
 INITIALISE (KEY IDEAS) 9

motivations of hackers, we should not expect in all cases to make a tidy

distinction between hackers and hacktivists. Depending on the circum-
stances, perspective, or project, the same person may shift between both
types; moreover, when a game mod or a mashup is built to achieve a politi-
cal end, then the work can be classed as hacktivist. Many free and open
source hackers see themselves as activists and argue that a focus on infor-
mation freedom is a fundamental aspect of democratic freedom in today’s
world, but while many Free Software hackers are hacktivists, not all hack-
tivists are Free Software hackers. Under the broad umbrella of hacktivism,
we find civic hackers, who put hacking knowledge and skill to work on
trying to ameliorate social problems ranging from humanitarian projects
(Haywood, 2013) to advocacy around public access to data and citizens’
rights to privacy (Schrock, 2016). Hacktivism as a form of action has lines
of descent that reach back to the pirate radio of the 1970s, even earlier to
samizdat and indeed the pamphleteering traditions that are as old as social
movements themselves (Downing, 2001). The aims of hacktivism are sim-
ilar to many new social movements: articulating, packaging, and interpret-
ing/re-interpreting knowledge; organising to bring about social and
political change; contesting existing political subjects and social relations
and imagining and seeking to realise new ones. What distinguishes hacktiv-
ism is the terrain that is contested and the techniques employed in such
contestation (Kahn & Kellner, 2004). But even the comparatively new
terrain and techniques of hacktivism have lines of continuity that reach
back to established forms of media activism (Downey & Fenton, 2003).

Methodology
Storytelling is an area of geek culture that is under-explored. Several
researchers have used story material in their work on geek and hacker cul-
tures (e.g. Coleman, 2012; Levy, 2010; Lin, 2004; Woo, 2018), but none
have done the kind of sociological analysis of geek narrative that I essay
here. Perhaps not surprisingly, given that anthropology has long had an
interest in narrative methodology, we find that it is two ethnographers
who have made extensive use of narrative material in their research on
geek/hacker culture (even though narrative was not their central con-
cern): Coleman (2012, chapter 1) used hackers’ personal narratives to
construct a composite life history of a generic Free Software hacker, while
Kelty (2008) used geeks’ stories to illuminate geeks’ social imaginary and
politics. In sociological narrative approaches, we work with an explicit
10 B. ALLEYNE

model of narrative that encompasses authorship, plotting, characterisa-

tion, story presentation, and story reception in a social context (Alleyne,
2015; Elliott, 2005; Polkinghorne, 1988; Richardson, 1990a). In this
book, I use narrative methodology to explore several questions: What sto-
ries are found in geek culture? What can we learn about geek culture
through stories? What are the main plots and characters of geek storytell-
ing? Are there recurrent themes in geek storytelling?
This is a good point to specify several key terms for my methodological
approach (Alleyne, 2015). Narrative refers both to a story and to how
that story is presented. A narration is a delivery of a story to an audience,
real or implied. A narrator is a real or imagined person who is telling the
story. Discourse is language in use, above the level of the sentence; dis-
course is language at work in the world. A discourse can be viewed as a
sense-making story. You can analyse a discourse using many of the same
tools as you would analyse a sentence because discourse is comprised of
sentences. But discourse rises to a level above the sentence and as such that
requires a distinct set of analytical tools and schema for interpretation.
Narrative discourse is a story packaged up for delivery, as it were. I will
often refer to the master plot in later chapters: Abbott (2008, p. 236)
defines master plots as recurrent skeletal stories that are widely circulated
in a culture and used to craft identities and histories in that culture; the
skeletal story is a guide to arrange events into an actual story, a framework
to plot these events. Character and type will recur in much of what follows.
Characters are humans or other living beings whether real or imagined.
The action in a story revolves around one or more characters. Types are
recurrent characters that enable easy recognition based on shared cultural
codes; we all recognise fundamental types such as hero, villain, and seeker.
Archetypes are fundamental character types in a culture, while the stereo-
type is an oversimplified character type.
The model of narrative I will be using throughout is built on the two
fundamental elements of story and narrative discourse. Story is the con-
tent, comprising events, real or imagined, living beings, objects and set-
tings. The narrative discourse is the story as expressed in a structure and
medium (Chatman, 1978, pp. 19–34). Narrative methodology divides
into two distinct yet overlapping branches: analysis of narrative and nar-
rative analysis (Bruner, 1991; Polkinghorne, 1988). In analysis of narra-
tive we begin our work with the narrative text, which we read to arrive at
a generalised basis of comparison to other narratives. In this mode of
working, we treat individual narratives as cases that we fit into a wider
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