Jon Udell’s anti-geek manifesto

Jon Udell, perhaps the geek I admire more than any other, doesn’t like being labeled a geek anymore. In A Geek Anti-Manifesto he asks

Why is it geeky to marshal the best available data? Why is it geeky to use that data to improve your interaction with people and processes?

To recast those questions, Jon is essentially talking about the labels and the types of people who do things like that. Jon wonders why “fluency with digital tools and techniques” labels you as this other kind of “geeky” person. Shouldn’t these traits, computational thinking, be a more general trait. I might even extend his thinking a little, by adding scientific thinking to the list (i.e. the ability to formulate and test hypotheses), although that is a little less generalizable.

Jon points to an example of needing to interact with a data process and interact with a business process and then mash them up together as an example of the kind of computational thinking we should all be capable of. One could argue that these are soon going to be necessary skills, however well we design systems to try and abstract out some of these interactions and I think that’s what Jon is saying. In a comment in his blog post he essentially says that we don’t label someone who meets basic standards of reading, writing and arithmetic (although one could argue about that last one), and basic “geeky” stuff should be falling into that level of expectation.

For years I’ve wondered why the “average” person is not interested or aware of basic scientific principles. I wonder if I would be pleasantly surprised if I randomly asked people on the street what would fall faster from the top of a building, an orange or a melon and if they understood why. Or even if they’d be curious about the answer if I told them the correct one. I would love to live in an anti-geek world, one where being a geek or an intellectual has a higher bar.