And the geek will inherit the earth

We need a government of geeks before it is too late...

As a child I used to compile lists. I would meticulously set down the capitals of every country in the world, often ranked by population, latitude or some other secondary characteristic. I could tell you all the English county towns, the world’s lakes ranked by size, and the major exports from Africa in the 1930s. All of this was written onto the green and white striped computer paper my Dad would bring home from work rather than it being thrown away. The geography lists would be joined by stranger things like the most common names in the Bromley telephone directory and the heights of first division football players. Plus election results in imaginary countries.

As I grew older other rankings and listings evolved: a changing list of favourite albums and favourite songs that Ian Hobbs and I would compare over an illicit pint in the Greyhound (the days before everyone demanded ID were so much better), and army lists for ancient wargames or spell lists for Dungeons & Dragons. Ian’s lists overlapped with mine on music and politics but otherwise focused rather more on buses and trains (Ian abandoned a printing apprenticeship to take a job writing timetables for London Transport which showed real dedication to the cause). For me this obsession was helpful as I meandered into jobs involving data analysis and, obviously, the writing of lists.

When I was writing those lists and becoming a subject matter expert on The Lord of the Rings, election results and 1930s commercial geography, the terms ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’ were unheard of in the English school system (although it didn’t prevent us geeks and nerds getting bullied). Today geekdom is notorious as these somewhat obsessive and neurotic personalities provide the bedrock for things beyond obscure parts of engineering or the writing of bus timetables - without geeks and nerds not only would every IT department be half empty but all those other vital functions dependent on databases (which are, when you think about it, just lists) would splutter and fail. It isn’t just your work laptop that depends on the geek but the bus or train you took to work, the bank where your pay gets deposited and the shops where you buy the things you eat and wear. Without the geek you would be lost.

So maybe don’t cringe?

I play Dungeons & Dragons with a load of people in and around Leeds. We have a Discord and it is noteworthy what, other than D&D itself, the players are into. For my generation of players, from way back in the 1970s, the parallel interests were such things as science fiction, board war games, and Space Invaders. Today, my fellow D&D enthusiasts are into Warhammer, superhero films, Star Wars and professional wrestling. When we went away for a weekend in January, the first evening was spent discussing the intricacies and inconsistencies in the ever-expanding list of Star Wars films (I must admit to being lost here as it isn’t my area of nerdism) but we could equally have discussed Avengers, the Final Fantasy series of computers games or Warhammer 40k lore. And, like the Star Wars discussion, we would focus on the specifics and details of the subject - on the lists so to speak - rather than, as regular people would, the generics of good or bad, interesting or not interesting.

While I have a broad interest in a lot of things, when I talk to my son (a thirty-something engineer) we will discuss the tactics of Civ VI, magic systems in fantasy literature and cricket statistics. So when I saw Rishi Sunak doing a little video about a football team nobody had heard of (as a favour for the local MP it seems), I didn’t see cringe but rather a nerdy attempt to do the right thing. Maybe we expect politicians to be super-confident without the slightest bit of geek or nerd showing through? Are politicians really just Flashman, gallivanting around full of self-assurance while having only the shallowest understanding of what they are supposed to administer? Or are we desperately in need of our political leaders to be a load more geek and a lot less jock?

How often do we see an important issue being discussed by politicians without them showing more than the most superficial understanding? I’ve written before about how the housing debate is riddled with misperceptions, presumptions and populist deceptions but the same problem applies to near everything. Ministers and MPs talk about local government without apparently having the first idea about how it is funded, the discussion around the Online Safety Bill rarely gets beyond ‘it’s for the children’, and important concerns about water supply, river pollution and energy policy get summed up by trite and unusually untrue slogans that play well in a focus group or get a thumbs up from campaigners or pressure groups. No government of geeks would allow this to happen.

A geek-led government would, if it had a failing, be too focused on the details of each policy, too obsessed with getting it right, and too fussy about the lists being accurate. Housing policy would get held up because we’d be stuck on whether it was the 1947 Town & Country Planning Act, the 1992 Local Government Act or PPG3 that caused the problem in housing supply. But this is better than the current arrangement where policy is decided on the basis of appeasing pressure groups, creating the best story and focusing on inputs not outcomes.

Outside government, the geeks and nerds are much more powerful for the obvious reason that their obsessiveness results in better decision-making and, importantly, the penchant for accurate lists results in better data management and better outcomes. I remember one housing company chief executive who was completely subsumed in his area of expertise (student housing as it happened) to the point where, as our meeting time ended, he would carry on talking to you about the issue we were discussing as he walked with you to the car park. On occasion, we’d spend 20 minutes or more, half in the car while he explained the financing of a new development or some research into what decor students preferred.

Geeks and geekdom is better regarded than it was but this regard has yet to seep through to the political world. Although some of the aesthetics have shifted, Scott Adams’ observation that the tall one with the good hair will win remains remarkably true (and explains the surprising levels of support for Penny Mordaunt and Ed Miliband). So I guess the search for a tall, good looking geek is on. Does anyone want to talk to Henry Cavill?