I have a new favorite word: geekerati.
I read it yesterday in a New York Times book review by Dwight Gardner about Ben Macintyre's new book, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory. The review was glowing. But what truly made me want to read the book was in Gardner's last paragraph:
Among the lessons of “Operation Mincemeat” is this: during wartime, brawn helps. But wars are won, too, by passionate oddballs and nerds, the patriotic geekerati that help an army to live by its wits.
Which made me immediately think of this article by Jim Dwyer, Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook.
Tired of Facebook's mining of users' personal information, these N.Y.U. students (Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, and Raphael Sofaer) and self described "talented young nerds," plan to create a new social network called Diaspora* where users will be able to set up their own personal servers, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share.
Yes!
Hurrah for the geekerati!
