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Geek Code, we hardly knew ye.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the Old Internet, pre-Web 2.0 (hell, probably pre-HTML 4.0), back when nothing was particularly standardized and the web was still novel enough that we thought of it as a destination. For a decade or more before the rise of monolithic social networks, the consumer internet was full of disperate little communities and enclaves that were largely separated from each other, and developed their own tools to attract new members and facilitate connections. Things like web rings were popular, along with IRC channels and even ambitious repositories of information like Project Galactic Guide. Some of those tools are still chugging along in obscurity, but most were forgotten as their users embraced newer, bigger networks (or they got co-opted by those large networks, fell into disuse, and were gradually shut down).

One of the tools that I remember seeing a lot Back in the Day was Geek Code, a simple system of codes used to distill your existence to a few data points, each represented by a letter, and one or more plus or minus signs representing the degree to which it applies to you. You can read about it on Wikipedia if you're unfamiliar.

I never got around to generating my own Geek Code, but I was thinking about it tonight and decided to try it out. I can't remember when I last saw Geek Code referenced, but it may have been as much as a decade ago. Thanks to Google, however, I was able to determine that nostalgia for Geek Code is alive and well, even if Geek Code itself is a no-longer-relevant artifact of simpler times.

I did not get very far.

No, that's not true. I generated a full Geek Code, answering all of the standard questions, but I had to fudge a lot of them because the world has changed a lot since the last version was described in 1996. Parts of it are quite straightforward: housing status, marital status, kids?, education, age, etc. Parts of it, however, are difficult to apply to online life in 2024. Your participation in pop culture, for example, is a big part of your Geek Code, but the entire spectrum is distilled into your opinion of three TV shows (Star Trek, The X-Files, and Babylon 5), the comic strip Dilbert, and the video game Doom. I was in high school in 1996 and I had opinions on all of those things. Most of my friends did, too, because we were all white, midwestern teenagers and chronically online. Outside of that demographic these data points become less and less helpful. Not everybody likes sci-fi. Certain people get motion sickness from 3D games. Some people boycotted Dilbert because they thought its visual simplicity was bleeding into other comics and ruining the artistic quality of the funnies. People like me cared about this stuff in 1996, but if I were 10 years younger I might not know Babylon 5, might not care about The X-Files, and only know Dilbert as the mental diarrhea of a right-wing troll.

The other problem with Geek Code (actually, it's a different facet of the same problem) is that the range of pluses and minuses for each data point is represented by several statements, and those statements no longer reflect the range of average opinions. My personal dress code—which doesn't get a lot of consideration, frankly—isn't represented here:

Technically, the original documentation for Geek Code allows for any value to fit on the spectrum of pluses and minuses, but the range of statements is severely limiting, stuck firmly in the mid-'90s, and reveals a lot of the author's own biases.

Anyway, I muddled through putting together my own Geek Code (25 years too late), but it's hard to see myself in that block of symbols and letters. Who the hell is Kibo? Are people still on UseNet?. OS/2 is dead, I don't have an opinion about Babylon 5, and the spectrum of political opinions seems idealistic and naive. Geek Code could use an update, but why bother maintaining it when Facebook allows you unlimited granularity by giving you free text fields to input all your stats?

I don't really miss Geek Code. Like The Purity Test (another relic of the early Internet) it tells us more about who we used to be, culturally speaking, than it tells us about ourselves right now. I feel a little twinge of sadness every time I see Geek Code referenced because it represents a time when the internet was weirder and more experimental, but through modern eyes it's dated and small.