The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth
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Sara Davies was one of the Ignite speakers recently at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle. Her talk, “The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth”, received some of the best feedback from our live chatters out of all speakers. Her talk was funny, insightful and left us wanting more. Here, written by Sara herself, is the transcript of her talk.
This presentation is dedicated to the Public Domain. It may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.
So, last week I donated $8.34 some guy running for state congress in Kansas. I’ve never been to Kansas. I don’t much care about what happens in Kansas, but this guy, Sean Tevis made a webcomic that got carried on a blog that I read. You might have heard of it. It’s called BoingBoing. When I read the comic, I knew that it could only have been made by a geek; it was clear that Sean Tevis and I shared common sacred knowledge as citizens of cyberspace. I knew he must be part of my tribe, and if he shares the values of my tribe, then by god, that man is qualified to fix Kansas. Sean Tevis raised nearly $100,000 from more than 5,000 people (only about 6,000 people voted in his district last year). And this made me think that we as geeks need to own our buying power, we need to own our political and technological power, and we need to take over the world.
We must employ Tevisian economics throughout the square states and the bible belt, infiltrating decision-making bodies nationwide with our gold-farming, youtube making kin. The economic power of the tech-savvy coasts will woo the votes of the advertising-addicted drones in the middle states. It is common geek knowledge that lotteries are merely a tax on those who can’t do math. So once we have a geek majority firmly in place, we must repeal all gambling laws and drain the wallets of all statistics challenged Americans, of whom I have been informed there are a large number. This will provide a huge budget surplus for our new geektatorship, our glorious geekocracy. With these enormous piles of cash, we will wage a global battle, an epic game of risk, pitting luddite against linux programmer, corn farmer against gold farmer. Human casualties are a very serious matter, so the first step in the plan is to pick select non-geeky cities across the globe and send in an army of remote controlled lego robots. Each robot will have a spy cam and gps for remote navigation, as well as multiple processor-motor nodes throughout their body, so that even if they are dismantled, the individual parts can still be controlled autonomously.
Toward the end of this phase, we are basically expecting a swarm of various robot parts, which even if unarmed, will be able to climb to tall heights and then land on unsuspecting and now unconscious passers-by. We are confident that this will cause all people incapable of reprogramming the robots to flee for their lives. With the people gone, we will need to clear a large flat area. This can be accomplished by printing out thousands of copies of the DMCA and using them as kindling to burn down the city. This has the added benefit of obscuring our location in smoke. Infrared googles will be provided.
Once we have cleared a secure a base, we’ll bring in Jimmy Wales to build wiki-barracks that can be quickly put up and taken down. Any buildings not considered “notable” or suspected of being built based on original research will have to be demolished. Communications between bases must be dual key encrypted. Public keys will be projected onto the copious clouds of smoke via big green lasers. Disclosure of private keys will be punishable by a 24-hour suspension from both Twitter and GMail, certainly not something to be attempted by the faint of heart. We will need Adrian from the RepRap project to create self replicating wifi routers which will spread themselves over the earth, providing infinite high bandwidth internet. We’ll have to lock down the network of course, SSID:fabulousbitches password:pwning your town.
Dan Kaminsky will be a double agent, pretending to secure enemy networks while in actuality causing all of their DNS information to point to a fail whale.Then it’s time for the attack! Ariana Huffington will swing into the enemy camp from the north on a cat5 cable and blog to death as many enemy combatants as possible, but we’ll need some diversions so they don’t see her coming. To the east will be a text-message coordinated flashmob of cosplayers, to the south will be Randall Monroe publicly performing acts from his mistranslated Kama Sutra, and to the west will be Sarah Lacy in hot pants.
Now if this mission should fail because someone is too busy flirting with Mark Zuckerberg, Ted Stevens will be on hand to lead us through the underground tubes. At the end of the tubes will be Ron Paul’s blimp. It should have sufficient fuel on board, but in an emergency, we can fill it with Michael Arrington’s ego and escape unharmed. There are always casualties associated with battle, and death from over-blogging is tragic. To ease the trauma, we will have chaplains available from the church of Richard Stallman. Burial expenses will be covered, or the family may opt to have a sculpture created from the ashes in the shape of Wil Wheaton’s head. Compensation for bereaved loved ones will consist of free passes to Foo Camp and a linkback from Slashdot. You may not voluntarily sacrifice family members. You may however, sacrifice yourself for the pagerank of others. Once we have captured the enemy, we will place them in a humane Matrix-like environment, where they will be under the impression that they have a larger SUV than all their neighbors. And THEN the geeks will inherit the earth.
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