Geek: a person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance.
(The Jargon File)

I prepare the altar in the quiet of early morning, before my day becomes cluttered with tasks and appointments and obligations. I lay aside my cup of ginger tea, adjust my posture on the polished walnut seat, and clear away the accumulated detritus of yesterday. With the heel of my hand I sweep dust from the base of the lamp. I reposition an errant cord and wipe a smudge from the screen. I reach forward, in the attitude of supplication and expectation shared by devotees the world over, and gently grasp the hand of the oracle.

Click.

There is a slight pause, then a distant grumbling as the oracle awakens. Lights flicker in the darkness beneath the altar. The divine machine weighs my prayer, turns invisibly within itself -- as do the heavens. I wait, hoping I have been heard, my heart rate rising and my pupils widening in the pre-dawn dark. The longer the oracle pauses, the more likely my prayer is to be answered. Like all oracles, this one is quick to anger and slow to judge. But then it comes: my deliverance from anonymity, from obscurity, from meaninglessness:

You have 9 new messages.

This is how I know I am a Person. These missives, delivered from beyond, sometimes in frugal numbers and at other times with abundance, indicate my place in the great chain of being. I am affirmed by them. I am a modern mendicant; the oracle defines the orbit of my wandering.

Like a shaman inspecting shadows cast by firelight, I must sift through the indications, decoding and interpreting them. Of today's 9 messages, 3 are obscure, single-phrased declarations -- here is your document, I found this about you, you earn money -- with zip file attachments. I interpret these as I do fortune cookies, as random haiku. Spam messages are the tricksters of email; they make sense if you look close enough, if you gaze at them sideways. After viewing each spam message, I click on the icon -- a religious term so easily adaptable to the new theocracy -- for Junk. The messages are withdrawn, marked, held in purgatory, eventually erased.

I continue reading: a friend wants to reschedule a meeting, a student requests a letter of reference, a relative sends pictures. I peruse the messages, scanning and sorting, mentally postponing some and carefully reviewing others. I enact the same morning ritual as millions of others, landscapers and baristas and yoga instructors who all are downloading messages and digital music and porn. In a bright arc of online activity that stretches all the way down the coast, people are checking their eBay bids and reading Slashdot and streaming the latest Jon Stewart clips. Morning prayers are well underway, jagging across the network, delivering countless imprecations with the same urgent imperative of the right now. The faithful come to the altar, replete with their text-messaging abbreviations and cappuccino and Java, AAS and ready for the OMG. They click and are redeemed.

The morning rituals of the computer literate are versions of religious fervor. The surfer and the email aficionado glide through networks in which the underlying dynamic -- the machinery, the voice of Oz, the agency behind the rendered page -- is essentially invisible. The philosopher of religion Rudolf Otto defined the religious experience as one of mysterium tremendum, a feeling of vast mystery, overwhelming and powerful and compassionate all at once. This, noob, is the World Wide Web: a faith for the post-postmodern, a devotion worthy of the alms of the carpal tunnel.

And, like every great religious tradition, the web delivers magic and mystery the old-fashioned way: devoid of visible indication of its inner workings, without the need to explain itself, with unpredictable vigor and skittishness and generosity. “Any sufficiently advanced technology,” said Arthur C. Clarke, “is indistinguishable from magic.”

Geeks are the high priests of this new calling. They have inherited the earth. They know the secret words -- DHCP, HTML, IMAP -- the new tetragrammatons. They chatter, using the back channels, typing from command prompts, reading the code that underlies the edifice. They are privy. The faithful use hymn books that came with the pew: Outlook and Explorer. But the priests employ illuminated manuscripts, annotated, suffused with special corrections and mythological cues: Firefox, Gnome, KDE, Thunderbird, Apache. The initiated are intimates and familiars of Linux. They have been born again into the Open Source. They evangelize, they blog.

Anthropologies have evolved. The decreed paths of high school -- in which jocks become salesmen and kids from the debating club go to Oxford -- have been redrawn. The nerds were first to break out; now it's geeks who wield the power.

The entire backbone of the contemporary western world -- commerce, communication, politics, reality TV -- depends on legions of geeks living in their parents' basements, writing web page scripts, and idly cracking into voting machines (average time: under 60 minutes).

As with any theocracy, the priests who run the networks -- who attend to Unix and Linux and Windows servers (the new Orthodox, Protestants, and Catholic, respectively) -- protect and nurture systems in which the reputation of mystery far exceeds the reality. The air of the arcane hangs about the geek; thick incense hides the workings of the oracle. But Dorothy's little dog Toto was right: it's just a trick with glasses and a thick curtain. And the curtain can be pulled aside with a good growl and a single bite.

I continue reading my mail. Nine messages is a reasonable amount. When the list grows to around 60 or 80 in a single scan -- after a weekend, say, or during a busy day with four or five seminars on the go -- responding to each personal post can consume several hours. In such situations, the demands of email etiquette can be a major hassle. But infinitely worse is a day with no mail.

Click.

“There are no new messages on the server.”

Click. Click. Pause. Click. Pause. Click.

I look for diversions in such situations, for problems with the server, for unread blogs or news feeds, for ways to further tweak my already obsessively tweaked system. I seek out the latest security patches. I check for Debian updates. I eat chocolate. I download torrent files of Farscape episodes.

I return to the inbox window and click again on the icon with the caption “Get Mail.” Get it, goddammit, stop stalling, quit freaking me out. No mail? WTF? Come on. Click click click click click.

Recently, the computer system of a friend went down hard: no net access, no offline functionality, no dice. Three days. And in that period, my friend -- a mental health counsellor, a well-adjusted professional -- fell apart. He was deprived of his appointment schedule, cut off from the scores of instant messages and emails he receives from friends each day, was exiled from the website that runs his business. He was shut out, locked down, cast out of the sacred circle. He called me perhaps a dozen times, lamenting, trying to preserve his faith, relating to me his appeals to tech support, his rising panic, his consideration of the wisdom of cracking open the damn machine with a sledgehammer. He wondered what he had done to anger the invisible gods of the web.

Sometimes, like a rebel angel, the technology takes over and discards even the faithful. Bugs, bottlenecks, black holes. Yo-yo mode, to use the technical term. Behind the curtain, the great and powerful Oz manages billions of emails every day, serves the pages of fifty million websites, delivers countless images and code snippets and search engine results for “Paris Hilton sex video.” Frequently -- though infrequently for the average user -- there are glitches. The sheer volume of information, the haphazard architecture of the web, the inherent vulnerability of hardware and software: these and many other factors, all of which derive from human error, cause the empty click. Page not found. Server error. No new mail.

The average computer user has no idea how glitches are caused, nor how the technology works in general. This seems odd. After all, even the techno-Amish -- the anti-geeks, people who avoid all forms of technology -- know how a car works (gas, pistons, bang). They know about the geometry of heat tiles on the space shuttle. They know the difference between cellular and radio communications. But the patois of the geek, like all religious dialects, has been engineered for exclusivity. Geek-speak employs abbreviations, recursive acronyms (GNU) backronyms (PHP) and many types of jargon (-- kluge, cruft, foo) used by crackers, phreaks, larpers and lamers.

The insularity of the geek world is the response of rebellious young men who feel disenfranchised by a society that does not sufficiently reward intellect or imagination. Geeks engineer the technological baubles in the upscale catalogs, they shape the web, they design the safety features on your new car. Geeks have come a long way from the original usage of their rubric: a carnival performer who bites the heads off chickens.

Yet their technological world remains hidden behind the smooth gradients and sharp, spare designs of the software interface (the Mac interface is more spare than that of the PC, and Linux tends to be more minimalist then either). As I read messages on my computer screen, as I browse the fresh pages over at BBSpot, as I search Google for “how to make Cracker Jack,” I am several levels removed from the underlying processes that connect me to the network.

Wondering about the topology of the web today -- it changes every day -- I run a small program (traceroute) that shows the connection between my desktop and my website. I type the name of my website, hit enter, and watch as the route unfolds. The small packet of testing data generated by the program first travels out of my computer and along the path of the television cable. It crosses above (or perhaps beneath) the Fraser river, probably by way of optical fibre, makes its way to the cable company, is bumped across town -- passing through three separate servers -- and arrives in Burnaby. At each hub on this jaunt, software reads the destination address marked inside the packet, compares this with known routes through the Internet, and passes the data on. From Burnaby, the packet skips across the border to Seattle, then takes a long run -- leapfrogging a satellite, probably -- and arrives in San Jose. Two more jostles take it to Los Angeles, and two more direct it to the main server (the domain, in geek-speak) where my website resides. Finally, the packet migrates from one machine to another -- probably, these last two are in the same room -- and finds its destination. All told, the journey requires thirteen hops. Total elapsed time: less than one tenth of a second.

Yesterday the trip also required thirteen hops. But the list of servers, of machines that relayed the packet, was slightly different. Every day, as new services come on stream, as network traffic swells and slows, as hardware fails and software chokes, the route changes. All routes change. But the heuristic is always the same, whether I'm surfing the web or sending email or downloading files: software routes the traffic, using destination addresses to route packets through the labyrinth. But because routes change, and any given machine possesses only a smattering of knowledge about the entire network, sometimes odd things happen.

Geeks are used to dealing with people in full panic. They know how to tune out the hysteria of the muggle searching for lost mail, the chainik who can't access a crucial website, the newbie wondering how to setup a groupware account. Frequently the solutions to such problems are straightforward, and the geek earns an easily-won reputation as a miracle worker. (Mark 1:27. “The people were all so amazed... He even gives orders to evil spirits and they obey him.”) In the geek age, as in the history of all religions, the priest earns his aura by way of intimate knowledge of the scriptures, of the inner workings of the hidden worlds.

Most of the remaining emails in my inbox (two online newsletters, a movie recommendation from a student, an invitation to a meditation retreat) have made their way to me by hopping at least a dozen times across routing machines. The messages are all more than a smattering of lines long, and therefore too large to fit into single data packets. Each would have been split into several smaller packets, on the user's machine but without the user's intervention, and sent out like small, disconnected train cars into the network.

Because the topology of the network changes constantly, separate packets from the same email may take different routes to the destination. Usually this is not a problem: mail software restructures the packets at the destination (using the equivalent of serial numbers stored in the packets) and delivers the message to the user. Imagine a shotgun capable of firing cartridges that spread out through the air but come together again at the target: whole, undisturbed, good as new. Every email is a cartridge fired from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

But if a route through the network goes down, or a packet is bounced around too many times, or a guy in Orillia cuts through a data cable while digging a fencepost hole -- the packet is lost. Corrupted, devnulled, sent into the bin bucket. More often than not, the entire email goes down with it: undeliverable, returned with permanent error, kaput. Sometimes the user is informed by way of a return email message from the server; sometimes not. If a routing machine is dead, but is still being sent packets (because it still shows up in the routing maps of other machines), countless emails and web page packets and attachments of the Star Wars Kid video will simply vanish.

Normally, if all the packets of a given email message do not arrive at the destination within sixty seconds of being sent, the sender is notified. Even a complex route through the system shouldn't take that long, and mail software at the receiving end will assume that some packets have been lost or corrupted. They have, to use the geek vernacular, timed out. This is also the cause of the occasional long pauses that web surfers experience in trying to load a page: the browser just sits there, the progress bar stalls or moves incrementally, and the annoying little hourglass spins interminably. Timeout means that the network route is temporarily broken, or bottlenecked, or mis-configured somewhere between the user and the network destination.

These network negotiations and protocols and error checking routines occur far behind the scenes, invisible to the user who clicks languidly on the Send Mail button or a web page link. A total of six interconnected layers of software and hardware (in the OSI model) lie behind the user's desktop. Only the most superficial of these -- the application layer -- is visible to the user. The user chooses some nice new spring wallpaper and moves along. But geeks go deeper into the system, like the uber-geek Neo of the Matrix movies. They delve, they dig, they gaze at the magic codes.

And this is the reason for Neo's status as the most popular geek ever: access to the code is equivalent to glimpsing underlying reality. The geek pushes beyond what the Hindu tradition calls Maya, the illusion of reality. The geek glimpses underlying Truth.

Sometimes geeks can find holes or blocks in the network, or recover lost email and other network data. This raising-of-the-dead is the ultimate skill of the priesthood. Using the cryptic iconography of the command-line, easing behind the veil of the desktop, an accomplished geek is capable of sifting through vast amounts of data to discover one essential and missing component. The geek wanders the desert, searching for illumination, employing the software of familiars: ping, netstat, grep, whois.

And herein lies Toto's curtain. For in many ways, geeks are like the rest of us: they simply use the tools at their disposal. Sure, they've learned a few tricks that take them out of the mainstream. They grok the byzantine syntax of the console. But mostly, they're just smart young men (a few women, but not many) with uncertain futures living in a society almost irredeemably dumbed-down. Every religious revolution begins this way: disillusioned youth, dedicated to an idea, time on their hands.

Becoming a geek is not difficult. Just follow the bandwidth: to Linux websites, to tech sites like The Register and Slashdot and SourceForge. Buy a copy of the geek New Testament (you don't have to read it; just put it on your coffee table). Participate in forum discussions about website design. Geeks learn by immersion, by way of the experiential, the epiphenal, by breaking open the systems they're trying to understand. “If you break it,” as the Debian folks say, “you get to keep both pieces.” Geeks bootstrap, learning by way of accidents and mistakes. They enumerate with pride the number of times their experiments have rendered their systems inoperable (hosed, to use the correct term). The geek puts in time, takes risks, and hopes for a glimpse of the divine.

I click on Get Mail again. Nothing new. I check my website connection and the average time it takes for a packet to make a round trip from my desktop (0.65 seconds). I take a sip of my ginger tea, now cold, and wonder about the morning prayers of all the others. What websites are they loading? Which versions of the Nigerian spam scam are they receiving? I try to envision the billions (trillions?) of data packets coursing through the leviathan Internet within the dark sheaths of wires and black boxes. I think of an old Jewish midrash: "The Lord has said He shall dwell in thick darkness". And I imagine all the geeks, finding God in the details, trying to deliver answers to all the online prayers.