Angry Geek returns... one last time?

Hello, readers. It’s been quite a while. I’m still a part of Imperial, just hanging onto the edges here, but it’s been years since I last graced these pages. New writers have to come in, and old ones have to shrivel up and quietly die in the corner under a pile of back issues – it’s the way it’s always been. It also helps that you’re all a fucking disgrace and I probably would’ve burned several key departments to the ground by now in complete disbelief at the pathetic and cynical way they’re run. But mostly it’s the new writer thing.

It’s Felix’s 1600th and so we’re reflecting on the past of the publication. Felix has always been a mix of good and bad: it’s a place where people can go to be creative in a shitstorm of “I Fucking Love Science” fetishism and coiffured arseholes reading the Financial Times and pretending to be intelligent. On the other hand, it can also give people the opportunity to air harmful views in the name of ‘comment’ or being a contrarian arsehole. I’ve seen people defend sexism, spit on the poor and laud the financial sector in columns on the Comment pages over my years – and I’ve also been part of the problem myself, especially in my early days.

You might not know this, but Angry Geek started off as a way to revitalise Felix Comment. We wanted to encourage people to write in, and I figured that a mysterious, polemic writer might help. The first few columns were more or less entirely nonsense trying to get a rise out of people, and looking back on them now I’m a little sad at how far I went: I joked that the economic inequality in South America at least led to my coffee being cheap, for instance. Fortunately, after a few weeks of not actually getting a rise out of anyone, I took the column over properly. Angry Geek wasn’t a character any more: it was me, and I realised just how angry I was. I imagine anyone who remembers those pieces is long gone from Imperial now, but I’m genuinely sorry if I offended anyone. Only for the first three articles, obviously. If you think I give a shit about offending someone’s feelings about Canary Wharf then we’re clearly on the wrong page.

Imperial is a nasty place, and the longer I wrote this column, it became more obvious to me how nasty it is. After those first few, ill-advised pieces were out of the way, I wrote about the shady influence of the financial sector over graduate employment, the toxic attitudes of superiority among the rich and privileged students, and the uncomfortable state of student loans. Some things don’t change, it seems – years may have passed, but Imperial remains the same. I’ve since become a postgraduate, still working at Imperial, and am still uncovering things I dislike about this place with each day that goes by. Mindblowing elitism, short-sighted obsessions with money and rank, and a more blinkered view of the world than a particularly narrow-minded horse who’s just fallen down a ditch. Imperial’s sickening obsession with being the richest and the most respected, at the expense of anyone else: it’s an obsession that its students tend to pick up.

Mrs. Geek (yes, we’re still happily together, holding hands as we bitterly hate the world) still has fondness for Imperial, mind you. She reminds me that it still has lovely people inside, and it still does great things. She’s actually what spurred me to write this anniversary piece, because for all the hate I’ve built up about this godforsaken University, I am reminded that Felix was always a place where good things had the potential for happening. A lot of talented people, working long nights after all their degree work, to do something creative and push out entertainment for thousands of students. Coming back to it now, after a long hiatus, it’s heartening to see the state of Felix Comment today – full of pieces talking about domestic violence, climate change and denouncing GamerGate. It makes me ashamed that I tried to get cheap shock responses, but very happy that there are good people writing for such a great paper.

I’m also happy that many of these new writers are angry. Anger, as I eventually learned, can be a very good thing. Imperial is an unjust place, full of privileged bottom-feeders who could not care less about anyone else. More than this, it is shaping a generation that will run the world one day, pumping out future politicians, business leaders, scientists and policymakers. This is happening in an environment where rampant sexism is considered funny, where the working class are talked about as pathetic subhumans, and where Islamophobia is treated as acceptable japes. It’s tempting to be reasonable, to talk and explain your objections, or perhaps to simply say nothing at all. Unfortunately this often doesn’t send the correct message, and in a place as set in its ways as Imperial, it never will. Getting angry, shouting loud and passionately about things that aren’t right, protesting and disrupting and making yourself heard – this is what people need. I hope there are lots of angry geeks among you.

I’m sorry this column wasn’t very angry on my behalf; I barely invented any insulting similes. I’ve not mellowed, but my anger is displaced now: I’m angry at the field I now work in, the companies I interact with, the horrific diversity problems that plagues every organisation and event I go to see. The world hasn’t gotten any less ugly, and I haven’t gotten any less angry, but unfortunately Felix’s seventeenth century of issues isn’t my time or place any more. I might pop in from time to time, like now, and I’ll always be reading from a distance, but it’s time for new people to take my place. To lash out at everything wrong with this University, this city, and the rest of this planet. I hope you’ll be as angry as I am, and I hope you’ll continue to support Felix along the way – keep the cat free, its claws sharp, and firmly latched onto the nether regions of everything wrong in the world. Thanks, everyone.