Geeks?

Welcome to The Freak Show!

1894, somewhere in the United States, Tod Browning is buried deep underground, breathing through a straw and eating candy, while on the surface a group of paying spectators are wondering how he survives.

Not yet the director of Dracula and Freaks, Tod is just a Kentucky teenager who ran away from home a few years earlier to become a circus performer. In that new family composed of clowns, dwarves, “chicken women” and pinheads, he meets men who devour insects and bite the heads off of poor squawking chickens.

They are called Geeks and in at least three different languages this word indicates the lunatic, the weird, the fool, because who would ever think of eating live animals for the delight of others?

BUG Bounty

"Eating bugs for a living".

A century has passed and the geek has left the circus, the cheap shows and the horror of splattering blood, to stand in front of a computer, but even there is as he was still under a worn-out tent full of "bugs", insects that must first be found first and then ingested. A legend that combines the magic of the end of the nineteenth century with the technological wonder of the twenty-first century.

The geek is now a fixer in search of error, a pacman hungry for code. Legend has it that the engineers of Cape Canaveral chose that name for themselves, because in that strangeness they could recognize and distinguish themselves from the rest of the mere mortals. So a geek is no longer the village idiot who gets paid in cheap bottles of bourbon, he is the genius of numbers, the technology expert, the professional.

News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters

Imagine you're in an American high school in the late '50s: there's the beautiful blonde girl, the dashing football team captain, the bully with greased hair and a studded leather jacket and there is also, head bent over the books, glasses glued on his face, high-waisted pants, the nerd.

A word that already in its etymology, perhaps more mythological than real, expresses the heavy judgment of others: knurd (drunk spelled backwards) is used to indicate those who don’t drink at parties, don’t socialize, a "loser" lost among comics, movies and technology.

For decades nerd has been synonymous with loser, the guy or girl no one wanted to date. Then, things changed...

Geeks Wannabe

"All the people like us are we, and everyone else is They" wrote Kipling

The Geeks in the 80s are already very cool, they are the glamorous and worldly version of the nerds, intellectuals who go to parties and talk about computers, comics, music, cinema, chemistry, astronomy and every branch of human knowledge that has them obsessing over.

There is pride in being crazy and hungry (wait, someone already said that!), in the intensity of learning and love for knowledge, in the recklessness of experimentation, in sharing with a community, potentially as big as the world.

What you think is a Geek

Stereotypes are like Soap Opera characters, they're hard to die:
a haker wanted by the FBI, wearing a hood (which could always be, if you think about it), or maybe a the shy girl, who, because she doesn't have a boyfriend, kills everyone with her gaze (don't forget Carrie), in anycase someone who is neither handsome nor charming (have you ever seen Evan Spiegel, co-founder of Snapchat?), a loser (this is very funny if you've read even just an issue of Forbes), a nerd (we like nerds very much!).

Geek Power

Pittsburgh, March 2012, the David Lawrence Convention Center hosts more than 1500 young people, engineers, computer scientists, microbiologists and mathematicians from around the world for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

On stage a bald guy interrupts the rapper who is warming up the crowd, calls for silence, then shouts "I'm a geek! Geeks rock!"

The crowd inflames as if it was a Rolling Stones concert on the beach of Rio. It's Brian David Johnson, an Intel futurist and a young millionaire. Yes, Geek is definitely rocking and - according to Forbes - the new rock stars are called Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Larry Page. Geeks are rock, rich and cool!

Geek is Cool

This story started from afar, inside a circus tent with animals eaten alive. (What a freak!) The Geeks today are people with extraordinary talent and gifted with a curiosity that is often out of the ordinary.

They are not surfers, but explorers of the deep, for which you need strong lungs and legs. They go deep into things, they dig, applying a scientific method to every subject, be it cooking, gardening, wine, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, sport or technology.

It takes rigor and discipline, but also a considerable dose of flair and pep, because "A revolution without a dance is a revolution that is not worth doing".