Scene But Not Nerd

Geeks in Philadelphia make their mark.

by Steven Wells

Writing about Philadelphia’s ongoing geek revolution is like trying to take a snapshot of an avalanche. Two years ago Philly geekdom was out-of-date and atomized. And then something out of the ordinary happened: The geeks got social. Today the city has so many geek firms, websites, talking shops, clubhouses, organizations, glee clubs, workspaces, campaigns and projects, even the keenest Phillygeek scenesters have trouble keeping track.

Geeks in other supposedly more glamorous cities fantasize about living here. Other towns—Boston, San Francisco, New York—have bigger, slicker, more famous geek hives, but Philly’s scene is unique and, apparently, the envy of the geekosphere.

“Geeks in Philly are more rockstar than rockstars,” says self-described information addict and data geek Alex Hillman, 25, citing an SRO event at Johnny Brenda’s where the Philly hipsterati redefined cool by thronging Ignite Philly, a hyperactive series of five-minute geek lectures/slideshows.

Hillman is co-founder of the “for profit but without the emphasis on profit” working space Independents Hall, a geek clubhouse where formerly isolated and stir-crazy freelancers pay between $25 per day to $275 a month to work in an environment where they’re likely to strike sparks with other Philly braniacs.

In the lobby of IndyHall’s Old City headquarters, wizards, orcs and demons slaughter one another on the screen of an old-school computer arcade console. There’s a crazy painting of pissed aliens ripping a Victorian city apart, created by the only woman present—22-year-old Dana Vachon, co-founder of the geek cake company Open Source Cupcakes. Various thin, intense, shorthaired and neatly bearded young men sit at computers, including some of the co-creators of iSepta, an online schedule for iPhone users.

“This is a very DIY city,” says Hillman. “The attitude is that we’d love to wait for you to come on board and help us, but fuck it, we’re gonna do it anyway.”

Hillman, who dropped out of a business degree at Drexel because he felt “frustrated and stifled,” says that two years ago the Philly geek scene was “extremely fragmented and totally underground.”

So he started going to every meetup and startup group he could find, making the rounds to two or three a night, five or six nights a week for four months. And all the time the geeks he met kept telling him—there is no geek scene in Philadelphia.

Hillman decided to challenge that notion. “I wondered, ‘What happens if you pop all these bubbles? If you break down the neighborhoods? If you start getting all these groups to meet at the same place?’”

In March 2007 Hillman’s fevered networking attracted the attention of 37-year-old Geoff DiMasi, punk rocker, community activist, accordion player, professor at the University of the Arts and founder of P’unk Avenue, a website and software design company based on Passyunk Avenue.

In Hillman’s version of the story, DiMasi wrote him demanding: “Who are you and what the hell are your trying to do?” The end result was a collaboration and the founding of Independents Hall.

Before DiMasi met Hillman he held himself aloof from Philly geekdom, regarding it as mired in out-of-date technologies and practices. But now when he goes to geek conferences in other cities, DiMasi says, “I’m constantly being told, ‘Oh, I wish I lived in Philly. It’s amazing what you’re doing. There’s so much cool stuff going on there. It’s such an awesome place,’” he says. “I mean, the first time I heard that—I was like floored. That’s when I knew things had really changed.”

Avenue of the parts: Geoff DiMasi, founder of a website and software design company, has witnessed two prior eruptions of DIY culture. (photo by jeff fusco)

DiMasi is the elder statesman of Philly geekdom. He’s witnessed and taken part in two previous eruptions of empowering DIY culture—the rise of hardcore punk in the ’80s and Philadelphia’s ongoing home art gallery explosion. He says the passion and the energy are very similar. When asked if today’s geek wave is the emergence of the first non-music-related mass subculture (though Philly has a vibrant geek music scene), DiMasi says it might be. He even agrees Philly ’09 bears comparison with the legendary punk music scenes of yore: Manchester ’77, Leeds ’78, Akron ’78, Seattle ’84.

Being one of the older, wiser heads on the Philly geek scene (a serene Yoda to Hillman’s impulsive Luke Skywalker), DiMasi knows how such scenes have imploded in the past. So he builds bridges and soothes egos. And he stresses again and again that the real strength of the Philly geek scene isn’t the vainglorious heroics of one or two self-appointed leaders, but its ethos. “It’s nurturing and fostering and amazingly inclusive. There really is something of the DIY punk-rock approach.”

If you know your Philly geek history, the city’s reemergence as a major geek hub isn’t that surprising. Benjamin Franklin, the city’s favorite son and top tourist-dollar whore, was the prototype tech-geek.

The first science fiction convention was held in Philly in 1936, when a half-dozen fans from New York took the train into town to hang out with a half-dozen Philly dorks. This would later grow into Philcon, one of the world’s largest science fiction gatherings.

In 1941 a bunch of Philly geeks relaunched Junto, Benjamin Franklin’s legendary mutual self-improvement society comprised of “ingenious acquaintances.” Time magazine reported that 2,000 Philadelphians turned up at the Academy of Music, while “stripteasers” performed in an almost empty burlesque theater next door. (In 2007 Junto was relaunched. It attracts 50 to 60 people on a monthly basis.)

The area still attracts way more than its share of culture geek conventions, including Wizard World and Nerdcon.

If you take any Regional Rail train north out of Center City, you’ll pass through the rusted wreckage of Philadelphia’s once flourishing light manufacturing workshops, many built by, run by and employing old-school analog geekery.

Now, just in time for the total collapse of the notion that America can survive on thin air, magic moonbeams, the plundered labor of developing-world wage slaves and the deranged fantasies of right-wing economists, the geek is back: a screwdriver in one hand, a circuit board in the other and a head full of what-ifs, wiring diagrams and computer code.

The question being: Does the geek get to save the city? Or maybe even the world?

This rowhome used to be a halfway house for pregnant teenagers who were notorious locally for ordering pizza and then answering the door naked. Now it’s called the House of the Future.

“It’s called that because we used to live in another house when we were the Philadelphia Radical Surrealist Front,” says 29-year-old Hannah Sassaman, explaining the distinctly lo-tech surroundings. “And we were always talking about what we were going to do in the ‘house of the future.’”

In HOtF, bikes hang from the living room ceiling. String puppets hang from the mantelpiece. In the kitchen a communally bought and cooked late breakfast of tofu, veggies and deliciously fatty lamb sizzles on the cooker. On the counter there’s an under-repair $2,000 espresso machine that HotF resident and Ph.D. student Dave Arney bought at a yard sale for $25.

In the incredibly cold basement, amid a scrabble of junk, there’s an impressive assortment of mid-tech drills, lathes and other hardcore, polished steel, DIY geek tools. Arney talks about a loose-knit West Philly geek community that includes both a nearby house called the No-Squat and the self-described geeks who run the mock swordfights for kids in Clark Park.

Arney and his housemates expound and practice a hands-on, what-if, locally active and globally conscious artisanal have-a-go geekdom. Arney talks about a fellow West Philly geek who was straddling his illegal whiskey home distillery (“They called it Glen Philly”) when the kettle exploded, blowing a hole in the dude’s basement ceiling, spitting hot shrapnel through the wall into the street and sending the would-be booze-geek to the hospital with second- and third-degree burns.

Arney has the lean build and studious, bespectacled, physically hesitant demeanor of the stereotypical geek obsessive. He’s anything but. Among his many hobbies he’s also a skilled lock picker, watchmaker and mountain climber.

Arney is one of the links between the West Philly radical geeks (they bridle with horror when I use the world “liberal”) and the less overtly ideological Philly geek mainstream.

Arney, Sassaman and Sowell talk enthusiastically about how new geek-driven technologies might enable the world’s poor to operate outside the neo-feudalism favored by the global corporations. Arney says the partly Philly-based “fabber” technology might make this possible.

A fabber (a 3-D printer or a rapid prototyping machine) employs liquids like plastic or chocolate to create unique items using design software downloaded from the Internet. Say you need a new part for a refrigerator, a custom cake decoration or the latest Obama bobblehead doll. Point, click, download, wait a few hours and voilà.

Independents day: Alex Hillman, co-founder of working space/clubhouse IndyHall, believes Philadelphia’s geeks are having their moment. (photo by jeff fusco)

There are probably less than 250 fabbers on the entire planet and at least three of them are in Philadelphia. Two are in the Rittenhouse home of 38-year-old Evan Malone, who helped develop the technology at Cornell University and is the founder of the fab@home project, dedicated to turning the amazing machines into household objects.

Malone is enthusiastic about the idea that fabbers “could help impoverished areas bootstrap themselves out of poverty.” And he says that could work just as well in Philly as in the developing world.

There’s another fabber in the Hacktory—the nonprofit workspace that’s yet another nexus in Philly’s constantly growing geek network. And there are plans to start both a real-space FabLab in Philly in 2009 and an open-source project that lets anybody put together a 3-D printer.

All you’d need then, says Malone, is a “a syringe and some goop.”

This would be perfect for the House of the Future, whose residents would be happy to take advantage of technology to make change. Sassaman says she was politicized by the Republican National Convention in 2000, where she witnessed cops beating up cyclists “and the chief of police waling on a young dude.” She was called as a witness when she was spotted in the background of a video.

As a result, she got involved in various independent media projects, including the community radio project Radio Prometheus. In fact, as she talks about the RNC, housemate Josh Marcus is upstairs engaged in an online “barnraising”—the term used to describe people all over the world pitching in to set up a radio station via the Internet.

Given work like this, the denizens of the House of the Future are proud to call themselves geeks. Some of them were involved in Philly’s almost legendary Geek Nights—workshops in which skills were shared so that work on Prometheus wouldn’t be monopolized by hardcore radio geeks—who, says Sassaman, “tend to be dudes.” The Geek Nights also took the pressure off those techies who were “so fucking pissed-off with constantly being asked to fix stuff that either everybody was going to learn those skills or they were going to burn out and fucking kill everyone,” says Sassaman.

But that was back before the Philly geek explosion, back when the city’s geeks were still on the margins. Today the calendar creaks under the weight of fun geek events.

For instance, last October in Washington Square Park, there were two guys in giant cartoon-cat costumes extolling the virtues of punk physics, “which is basically the creation of energy by getting really angry about stuff.”

The cats were an entry in Philly’s premier geek-art event, the Art Buggy Derby. They’d built a rotating wheel with handles they called “Kat Klix’s Feline Fun Factory.” A Barbie doll, a plastic shark and dice were covered in glue and placed in the cat-hair-filled drum and, after the cats raced around the park against their deadly rival—a bespectacled teenage boy called the Crayonator, who used an adapted manual lawn mower to “color outside the lines”—the doll, shark and dice emerged “furred.”

The panel of judges narrowly awarded the $500 first prize to crowd favorite Crayonator, provoking one of the cats to howl (in the best cartoon villain tradition) that next year revenge would be theirs because “engineers are going down to punk physics.”

“The inspiration for the event was basically to bring the left- and right-brain folks together,” says race organizer Harris Romanoff. Romanoff is also one of the brains behind Make: Philly—a regular event that describes itself as “a collaboration of artists and engineers; DIYers and DIY wannabes; geeks and visionaries” and might best be described as Robot Wars meets Project Runway.

A typical Make: Philly event: In a room at the University of the Arts on Broad Street, around 60 real–life MacGyver “deeks” (DIY geeks) listen to a lecture about research into snakelike self-reassembling robots from Penn professor Mark Yim. Then a deek takes the stage to show off his own borderline-insane invention: a body board nailed to an office chair.

Next the audience splits into random teams that grab handfuls of technical junk and race each other to build a robot that can draw. The results are amazing.

But it’s not all fun and games. Alongside the tech geeks, the agit-geeks, the art-geeks and the sci-fi geeks are the entrepreneurial geeks (not that these are mutually exclusive categories).

“Philly’s tech industry is growing like crazy. We have cheap rent and it makes it easier to do a bootstrapped startup,” says 32-year-old Sol Young, “software development sherpa” and founder of the Philly Geek Dinner, during which the city’s tech eggheads meet at the grooviest restaurants. Young moved to Philly from Silicon Valley when the dotcom bubble burst in 2001.

“We are a nutrient-rich technology startup location,” says Young. “Philadelphia is in a state of rapid geek emergence and we all feel like we’re building something wonderful.”

Philadelphia is home to a Dorkbot chapter, a blogging convention, a thriving Harry Potter community, the annual Beer Geek competition, the Book Geek website and geekadelphia.com—the website that gleefully celebrates both the dafter excesses of geek-driven pop culture and the hardcore grit of Philly’s DIY tech scene.

On TV the pop geek and the tech geek are still shown as two distinct types: the unwashed, unshaven, totally out-of-date D&D/SF-obsessed pop-geek bears on The Sarah Silverman Show vs. the awesomely socially unskilled and possibly Asperger’s-stricken computer genius Chloe O’Brian from 24.

In reality, says geekadelphia.com’s Eric Smith, the tech geek and the pop geek are often one and the same. He reckons there’s a 65 percent crossover. Other Philly geeks put the percentage way higher.

The word “geek”—originally meaning a circus freak that bit the head off chickens—is now a badge of cool, so much so that there are dark mutterings about dilution, about faux-geeks who hover on the fringes of the scene, leaching credibility.

But most Philly geeks have no time for such paranoid snobbery.

“The scene is really inclusive,” says Geoff DiMasi, “photographers, writers, engineers, people who just like to make stuff—and the software ties things together. There’s a real mash-up going on.”

“A geek,” says Hannah Sassaman, “is someone who is totally stoked. Someone who is fearless in his or her love. What is more exciting than someone who, without pretence and without shame, is really excited about something?”

Philly is totally a geek town, she adds. “The Roots used to be called the Square Roots. Did you know that? They came out of the Philly school system. Talk about Philly pride? Then you’ve got to talk about Philly geek pride.”

But as for the widely held perception that Michael Nutter is the ultimate geek mayor, Sassaman has her doubts.

“Right now a lot of people think City Hall is more interested in fixing breaks for big corporations than in helping the real dens of creativity in this city. They’re destroying the libraries that made Michael Nutter a super-geek in the first place.”

If there’s a philosophical fault line in Philly geekdom, it might be personified by the activist Sassaman and the entrepreneur DiMasi.

But it’s not ideological.

“More power to them, what the fuck ever,” says Sassaman, when asked about the bootstrap capitalist geeks.

And DiMasi is a political progressive (most Philly geeks seem to be) who was active in his South Philly community association until he decided that encouraging startups was a more effective way to change the world.

Despite his experiences with punk rock, DiMasi hopes the new wave of geek somehow avoids being co-opted, diluted and effectively trashed by the big bad corporations and that the successful fruits of this wave of bootstrap capitalist enterprises will remember their roots and nourish the culture that gave them life.

“I think Philly geek has two meanings,” says Sassaman. “We as Philly geeks really love Philly too, and the communities here and the work that has to be done here. And I think there’s a huge community of people in Philadelphia who’ll hold a meeting at their house about saving the farm at 48th and Brown and then, like, crochet a dot matrix Super Mario character. I mean that’s the sort of person I want to talk to.”