Yesterday I found myself explaining a curious thing to my son. He was wondering why H.P. Lovecraft wasn’t the most famous horror-writer ever, and I explained that he was a little too “out there” to ever garner a larger readership, until recently (admittedly, I suspect his readership is still not huge, but it’s growing). My son asked me why more people were reading him now. And so I told the tale of How Geeks Took Over The World.
Long ago, I told my son, when I was growing up, Geeks were forced to desperately cling to the lowest rung of the social strata. “Really?” my son asked, horror showing plainly on his face. Yes my love, I told him, it was a very hard time to be a Geek. And I reminded him of several nightmarish episodes from my youth. I then proceeded to explain to him how we took over. How, with the advent of the Internet and computer games, suddenly we were the ones holding the keys to the kingdom. You see, I continued, no one but the Geeks had ever bothered to learn how to write computer programs or play with hardware. And so they found themselves coming to Us.