Take a minute, look around you, catalogue your friends and family, notice your fellow commuters. You are surrounded by geeks. This may come as a shock for you to hear. They don't all look like geeks. They aren't wearing trench coats or throwing magical runes at you. But take my word, they are geeks and they are your friends.

Why do I feel so confident in labeling almost everyone you know as a geek? Well, there has been a fairly large mind-shift in our culture over the last decade or so. The rise of Geek Nation is upon us, totally unbeknownst to many and completely missed by the hordes of so-called social trend watchers. This isn't an obvious, externally-projected fashion trend: nothing like hip-hop or grunge or even preppiedom. No, this is a far more subconscious, who-we-are-at-heart type of change, deep-rooted in all of us and slowly taking over. Will we all be wearing Linux shirts, eating Cheetos and drinking Mountain Dew while playing Warcraft 3? Not exactly, but bear with me here.

I should probably preface all this with the disclaimer that I was a real geek. To some degree I still am, but I've managed to cloak it somewhat (no, not with any sort of Invisibility Cloak, wise guy). Back in the day, 7th through 9th grade in fact, circa early 1990's, I was pretty damn geeky. No real friends expect a couple of strange pallid associates, tight black jeans, an occasional wolf sweatshirt, straight A grades, no girls except those in my head, a fresh new CompuServe account, well, you get the picture. Only with an influx of peer pressure and drugs and alcohol did I finally socialize and shed much of my geeky exterior (by no means all), but the geek remains, deeply internalized.

Why do I tell you this? To convince you that I must have a finely-honed sense for geeks. That I can spot one in a crowd and can find geeky tendencies underlying the most extroverted "jock." This 7th sense (don't get me started on my 6th), has shown me over the last few years that the number of geeks in our society is only increasing, rapidly becoming part of who we are as a culture. By "geek" I am not referring to the more hardcore nerds and dorks who we all still make fun of -- and rightfully so! -- but to the type of person who becomes an avid aficionado of something, to the point of a pedantic fetish developing that leads to awkward explanations of his/her particular obsession at parties, heated discussions with other similarly-inclined geeks, newsletters, internet forums and the like. They are blooming up all around us. Think about your father and his strange new hobby, your mother's new group on something minute and all-consuming, your buddy going on and on about something at a bar while everyone listens intently for a while and then goes "Holy shit, this guy is obsessed!"

Yes these are the new geeks, the bordering-on-acceptable geeks, and we are they, they is us.

Sure, you may be saying, that's somewhat geeky. But isn't that just "hobbies and interests?" Well not exactly. Hobbies and interests used to be just time-passing fancies, filling up the empty spaces in our brains and the empty minutes in our day. True geekiness is far more all-consuming and niche-oriented: strange obsessions from the furthest reaches of society.

How did this newfound geek world come about? There are really two primary causes. First is the internet, no real surprise here. While the internet could itself be considered a geek obsession, it is mostly a tool for the masses to find every scrap of prior knowledge on any subject out there. Think about the first time someone you knew got access to the internet. At first they were confused and daunted, but then you started bumping into them and hearing about some obsession of theirs taken to a new level. Look through their bookmarks sometime: all sorts of crazy things. Dolls, fantasy leagues, anime, Kenyan sculpture, backgammon, cheese, something called "plushies," you name it, there is a good chance your friends and family are into it. All this plus the fact that the advent of online communities and forums over the past two years has made it very easy for The Geeks You Know to find other geeks, resulting in a geometrical expansion of knowledge and stupid online bickering. The relative-isolation once common in hobbies and interests has now been blown apart by hundreds of fellow geeks stoking the fires of avidity in those you know.

The second cause of the New Geek (we're counting here, remember?) comes from the general explosion of media and culture that we've seen over the past few years. 200 digital cable channels, 20-screen multiplexes, news everywhere, magazines-about-everything, yes the internet, have all stretched out the cultural spread enough for us to find niches everywhere. No longer does everyone watch the same vanilla Big Three networks or read the same books or watch the same movies. Instead we are all able to go out and find subjects that interest us and "bone up" on them, read about them endlessly, watch things about them, and find others who share the passion.

This has led to the Geekification of America. We don't just go see any old movie that's at the local movie house. Instead we learn everything about movies (well, many of us do) and find ourselves saying things like "Janusz Kaminski never seems to use the same DP style twice, he's an innovator among innovators," or "Did you hear that Aardman's latest film got put into turnaround? Guess it's back to the Wallace and Gromit box set for me!" or "Wes Anderson may be the current darling, but Solondz and LaBute have the dark side covered in a way that Anderson shies away from!" You get the picture.

The same has happened for sports. No longer do we just cheer on our teams and love the players. Instead we delve into statistics like stockbrokers, but even more pathetic. We set up roto leagues, follow salary caps, cheer on defenses (defenses!?!?) and argue the value of sabermetrics in baseball. One could argue that sabermetrics (essentially a whole new set of stats created by number-freaks that more accurately reflect relative performance) were invented just so that we could have something more geeky than simple ERA and batting average to tussle over. This geekification of sports has taken them down from the pantheon of the jocks. No longer do just the athletes become obsessed over teams. Go down to your local bar and you'll see the mouse-y guy with glasses bitching about backup point guards with local steelworkers.

An interesting side-product off all this is that it's alright to be a geek about something. This has made it acceptable for former technology geeks to integrate into society (case in point, ahem). Now that everyone has at least two or three computers and gadgets, talking about wireless networking, MP3s, DVD players, cell phones, TiVo, GPS, infrared this, bitrate that, well it's ok now. The once-pariahed tech geek now fits into any social situation, provided he's wearing deodorant and not wearing a MacWorld shirt of course.

It's gone even further if you think about it. Virtually all aspects of daily life now have a geeky side. This isn't to say that everyone is a geek about everything. Just that every possible topic now has a significant number of aficionados, enough so that publications, myriad web sites, and TV channels have sprung up to cater to them. Food, the most basic of topics, now has many niches in which to get your geek on. Organics your thing? Well, we have entire grocery stores just for you! Perhaps you'd like a glass of vegetable juice? Ok, how do you like your V8: with calcium, low salt, diet, spicy, picante, mild, or perhaps one of our new fruit V8s? Trying to loose weight? No problem. We have Atkins, South Beach, 3-Day Plan, The Zone, Russian Air Force Diet, or just watch your portion size. Too many choices? Want a drink to settle you down? Ok, lager or ale, stout or porter, microbrew or commercial? Liquor? Which of our 12 vodkas do you want? Each one has it's own particular peculiarity. Same with whisky (whoops, "scotch") single or mixed? And that's just the beginning. And that's just food.

So to bring it all back together, it's really quite apparent that we are undergoing a cultural revolution of sorts. We're all becoming geeks to a differing degree. Each one of us now has the full capability and desire to stake out a high ground of knowledge and defend it at all costs. There are very few people who know everything about everything, but it seems now that everyone knows a hell of a lot about something, and isn't afraid to share. You can't really knock it. To a great degree this has led to all of us getting much, much smarter, at least in terms of what we know. You could argue at length that what we're becoming geeky about is just useless junk, but a large number of people learn important things on their Voyage of Knowledge (to sound like a high school science video). In order to become a geek, you have to exercise your brain. You have to build knowledge from scratch and often have to become well-versed in cross-discipline topics. Crazy about cars? Chances are you have to learn something about mechanics and physics to trick-out your Civic. Want to know everything about sexy cell phones? You're going to run into all sorts of technical communications knowledge along the way. Hell, even if you're a music geek (and a non-musician) you'll still have to learn some very basic music theory along the way to effectively compare Hrvatski to Pink Floyd.

Of course, with all this geekiness going on out there, whither the true geeks? Has their time actually come at last? I would argue that to some degree it has. I'm talking about the aforementioned nerds and dorks who once lurked the fringes of society. It would not be a shock if, as technical geekdom and other geekdoms arise, the true nerds are looked to with a little awe and envy. Before you shout me down, consider this. As hip-hop rose to prominence, and everyone and their brotha became a white MC, did they not all look to the true practitioners of hip-hop as role models? You can say the same for pretty much any cultural trend: finding something different that's counterculture, emulating it, expanding it, and beating it to death.
Already the beginnings of this are happening around you. Take a look at hipsters: square-rimmed glasses, unkempt hair, the-paler-you-are-the-better etc. The geekiness of everyone may soon manifest itself in geek-as-cool, the new trend. The obsessive, I'm-always-right-about-my-knowledge mentality of real geeks has been co-opted by the rest of us, resulting in pockets of niche-knowledge in every family and group of friends. Soon we will look to the real geeks for a test of what's really cool. And only then will we all wear wolf sweatshirts.