Star Wars and Offshoring

OK, I can’t resist.  My old friend from business school, Mike Massey, pointed me to a column on "Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out" written for the New York Times by Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite science fiction writers.  Neal makes an interesting case that Star Wars reflects some broader social trends that ought to give us pause. His key comments:

Modern English has given us two terms we need to explain this phenomenon: "geeking out" and "vegging out." To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal – and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means.

And then later on,

Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.

If the "Star Wars" movies are remembered a century from now, it’ll be because they are such exact parables for this state of affairs. Young people in other countries will watch them in classrooms as an answer to the question: Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic.

Neal is on to something big here, although he makes a mistake by confining geeks to scientists and technologists.  In fact, geeks can be found in a broad array of endeavors, ranging from crafts and extreme sports to the remix music culture and the hot rod car culture.  If we broaden the notion of geeks to anyone who pursues their passion in creating things or perfecting their skills, we might find a new lens to view the growing culture gap in the U.S. (and elsewhere).  Maybe the real division is not between "Red State" and "Blue State" , but between geeks and veggers.

For those of you who are not familiar with Neal Stephenson, he is the author of, among many other books, the cult classic in Silicon Valley – Snow Crash. Besides being a really funny book, Neal’s description of the Metaverse, a three dimensional virtual world where people spend a good deal of their time, captured the imagination of a whole generation of geeks and inspired them to push the frontiers of computer technology.  There’s a whole lot of Neal behind the flourishing massive multiplayer online role-playing game culture.

By the way, even though I didn’t like Star Wars III, I will forever be indebted to George Lucas for the early Star Wars movies and, most importantly, for one of the best movies of all time – American Graffiti – another parable about geeks and exploration (and hot rods).