My father worked for NACA and NASA for from the 1930s to the 1970s. He started at Lan­g­ley Field in the 30s, and then moved to Cleve­land when the NASA Lewis Research Cen­ter was being built to run the Instru­men­ta­tion Labs. He “ran” them, I should add, not in the bureau­cratic sense of being Top Direc­tor, but in the sense of man­ag­ing and mak­ing them work: he was the second-​​tier direc­tor, who got his peo­ple to do things. He man­aged the wind tun­nel design and con­struc­tion, all the test­ing labs, the model-​​building group, the instal­la­tion of the first com­put­ers installed at NASA Lewis. I was too young (was born just a few years before he retired), but I have the ephemera and keep­sakes and anec­dotes from my Mom here that show me he knew all the famous test pilots, sat in the X-​​13, built cam­era sys­tems for atomic bomb tests. Care­fully packed in a box around the house some­where is a reflec­tor iden­ti­cal to the ones—made in the same lot with—cubic cor­ner reflec­tors sit­ting on the Moon right now. Last I heard, you can still shine a laser on it and see the reflected light.

See: I am nerd, and nerd-​​born.

In the 1930s–70s, the dom­i­nant geek hob­by­ist fields were radio, elec­tron­ics and aero­nau­tics, with a resid­ual speck of the ama­teur pho­tog­ra­phy fad (which held sway among the Real Geeks of the ear­lier 1890s-​​1920s wave) thrown in for good mea­sure. My Dad, my uncle (a ham radio geek), and their net­work of engi­neer­ing bud­dies all had “radio rooms”: old bureaus full of tubes and project boxes, man­u­als and shelves full of QST and Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can, pack­ages ordered from Edmund Sci­en­tific. Lit­tle mag­nets stuck on all the file cab­i­nets. In the 1970s, when they had started to retire, they plat­ted out their hob­by­ist extrav­a­gan­zas in the form of boxes of mys­te­ri­ous sur­plus elec­tron­ica: Niti­nol wire, 0.001 gauge plat­inum wire, pho­to­copier illu­mi­na­tors, rheostats in the orig­i­nal pack­ing, unla­beled test equip­ment, boxes of loose tran­sis­tors, half a liter of mer­cury just in case.

I vividly remem­ber the sum­mer day when my Dad advised me, when I was root­ing around in a drawer in the old beat up bureau in the garage, that the big (big) trans­mit­ter tubes there were all we really needed to put together a 50-​​mile-​​radius radar set. And the 12-​​inch glass lens blanks were all we needed to make a tele­scope with which we would be able to see the bands of Jupiter. And so forth.

All these amaz­ing projects remained undone. We weren’t (surely I don’t seem to be) the kind of peo­ple who fin­ish things; we start them, revel in poten­tial, know the stuff to fin­ish them is there for when we need it. The best laid plans of mice and afi­ciona­dos, as they say. My stint in ele­men­tary school and cub scouts in the ‘70s made us focus our cre­ative ener­gies more on pup­pets and wind­mills and Hal­loween cos­tumes, not radar and telescopes.

About 15 years ago, my Dad died after a dif­fi­cult series of health prob­lems. My Mom now lives with us, her household—including my Dad’s remain­ing lab stuff—is packed in boxes in the base­ment and garage. We root around among it, we think a lot about the house we’re going to build. We plan to sell the things we can­not use… if only we knew which ones those were. My inter­ests, from this stand­point of halfway through my life, are less con­cerned with hard­ware and much more focused on social sys­tems, wet­ware and software.

What I see in those boxes is a broad, lon­gi­tu­di­nal slice of tech­ni­cal hob­by­ists’ prac­tices of the mid-​​20^th Century.

For the last three years I’ve been work­ing, as a Ph.D. stu­dent, in the place where hob­by­ist prac­tices for the Real Geeks of the mid-​​21^st Cen­tury are being devel­oped. A lot of my col­leagues don’t know it yet, of course: they think their work will change the world with­out “falling down” within the reach of mere ama­teurs. They don’t under­stand what grid com­put­ing and social net­work the­ory and high-​​capacity energy sys­tems and nanofab­ri­ca­tion will become; they see only the big prize of New! Tech! Now!, not the eager eyes of the swarms of hob­by­ists who will take this work and inte­grate it into the real world. Noth­ing new there.

Inno­va­tors are often very bad at gen­er­al­iz­ing and pre­dict­ing what will really come of their work. In Acad­e­mia espe­cially, the many uses of an inno­va­tion must be masked and down­played: too general-​​sounding a plan, and you threaten to vio­late the bound­aries of your dis­ci­pline, or at best show sad symp­toms of hubris. To say a thing may become another thing, unplanned-​​for, is to tread dan­ger­ously close to gen­er­al­ism; ‘ware that bound­ary, and stick to your cho­sen well-​​lit path.

In research, in advanced stud­ies of all sorts, we are forced to say what our work is for so often that we come to imag­ine that a project’s suc­cess will only lead to what we have planned. That it will arrive as we expect, all at once, every­where, like Athena from a fore­head. Some sub­set of active researchers imag­ine that they are hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion, and that their work will move on to become the frame­work of fur­ther and bet­ter inno­va­tions in some other high-​​powered lab. But I’ve yet to meet an inven­tor who explic­itly sees the role their work will play for the Mak­ers of the future: How it will play out in the garages of the next three decades. Let alone the other disciplines.

I’ve spent time in garages, real and metaphoric, all my life, shuf­fling through com­po­nents and ideas that have escaped the bounds of their orig­i­na­tors’ plans. By round­about track from moth­balled stor­age or mil­i­tary sur­plus cat­a­log or 1970s Pol­ish com­puter sci­ence jour­nal or human­i­ties paper, things become other than they were orig­i­nally intended. The cut­ting edge dulls but slowly. Exap­ta­tion hap­pens in the garages of the world, not in the hal­lowed work of society’s great minds.

A thing’s proper func­tion is what it is selected for. Design is just one means of selec­tion. Revival, in a new form, another.

In my father’s day, they depended on mag­a­zine arti­cles writ­ten by überhob­by­ists and man­u­als scav­enged from cre­den­tialed sources. They fol­lowed instruc­tions, and made the tuner or the car or the photo set-​​up by hand, and they were pleased enough, and if they saw some­thing dra­matic they sent a let­ter to the edi­tor or wrote their own article.

But now we have Make and the online com­mu­ni­ties, YouTube for demon­stra­tions, Cre­ative Com­mons licens­ing for instruc­tions. We develop com­mu­ni­ties of prac­tice, store and share tacit knowl­edge, dis­trib­ute results hor­i­zon­tally and directly to the best pos­si­ble col­leagues, and archive it for­ever, find­ably on the Internet.

What will change? Will it be better?

Exap­ta­tion is hap­pen­ing, right now, in this garage. This garage where the resid­ual back­bone of the ARPAnet has been reduced to “mere blogs” and ama­teur­ish authority-​​less pseu­doschol­ar­ship and dirty movies.

And maybe some­thing more.

Just glanced at the mar­ket indices on Google finance today, and this is what I saw:

Waves. Hourly waves of price move­ment. Clear as day.

Dis­cuss in light of the Effi­cient Mar­kets Myth.