Trevor Burnham

This is the first in a series of posts about Paul Graham’s book Hackers & Painters.

I’m going to be inter­viewed for Y Com­bi­na­tor next weekend. So what better time to finally read through Paul Graham’s 2004 essay col­lec­tion Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age?

When this book came out, I was a college freshman, and Graham was—unbeknownst to him—on the cusp of creating one of the startup world’s most pres­ti­gious (and most imitated) insti­tu­tions. At the time, he was most famous for founding Viaweb, a now-​​forgotten e-​​commerce webapp that was acquired by Yahoo! for ~$45 million back in 1998.

So much has changed over the last six years that I was worried that Hackers & Painters would be irrel­e­vant, a quaint relic from the after­math of the dot-​​com boom. My fears were further stoked by the first sentence of the preface: “This book is an attempt to explain to the world at large what goes on in the world of com­put­ers.” Uh-​​oh, I thought, this isn’t a book for young, ambi­tious coders at all! “The computer world is an intel­lec­tual Wild West,” the preface pro­nounces, “where you can think anything you want, if you’re willing to risk the con­se­quences. And this book, if I’ve done what I intended, is an intel­lec­tual Western.” This was written before Firefly and Deadwood, so I’m afraid the analogy is lost on me.

However, once I started the first chapter, my fears vanished. If I could send one 17-​​page document back in time to my high school self, it would be this chapter, “Why Nerds Are Unpop­u­lar.” Graham asks a simple, obvious question: “Why don’t smart kids make them­selves popular? If they’re so smart, why don’t they figure out how pop­u­lar­ity works and beat the system, just as they do for stan­dard­ized tests?” Suddenly I felt as if Graham knew me! Worse, he knew my future. One of the ques­tions on the Y Com­bi­na­tor appli­ca­tion is: “Please tell us about the time you most suc­cess­fully hacked some (non-​​computer) system to your advan­tage.” And I told the story of how I’d gotten perfect SAT scores and aced a slew of AP exams (some in subjects my school hadn’t even offered), thereby beating the edu­ca­tion system. Now I feel like a cliché.

Graham’s main thesis is that most teenagers in the United States uncon­sciously dedicate every waking moment to the pursuit of pop­u­lar­ity. The reason is that they want nothing more than to be popular. The excep­tions are nerds. But don’t they want to be popular, too? “Of course I wanted to be popular,” Graham (the chess nerd standing in the upper-​​left in the 1981 photo above) writes, “But in fact I didn’t, not enough. There was some­thing else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for some­thing, but to design beau­ti­ful rockets, or to write well, or to under­stand how to program com­put­ers. In general, to make great things.”

This rings true with me. Mind you, I grew up in the era of video games, and (trag­i­cally) spent far more time with them than with either my studies or my ambi­tions. But I was ambi­tious, and I didn’t want to wait for adult­hood to hit it big. Like so many other nerds of my gen­er­a­tion, I set out to create a video game. Obvi­ously that’s much easier said than done, but at least I taught myself (some) pro­gram­ming along the way. So the desire to accom­plish real things was there, and it trumped my desire for Bueller-​​esque cachet. “Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, cer­tainly, but they want even more to be smart. And pop­u­lar­ity is not some­thing you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment of an American sec­ondary school.”

Aren’t there excep­tions, smart people who avoid the social stigma of nerdi­ness? “Unless they also happen to be good-​​looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they’ll tend to become nerds.” Hence the cor­re­la­tion between awk­ward­ness and nerdi­ness: If you’re smart but not awkward, you can be popular with little effort. It’s a com­pelling hypoth­e­sis. And Graham expands it beyond high school to every­where people resort to mean­ing­less com­pe­ti­tion for lack of mean­ing­ful things to do: “Adults in prison cer­tainly pick on one another. And so, appar­ently, do society wives… I think the impor­tant thing about the real world is not that it’s pop­u­lated by adults, but that it’s very large, and the things you do have real effects. That’s what school, prison, and ladies-​​who-​​lunch all lack.” He sums up, “Their crazi­ness is the crazi­ness of the idle everywhere.”

I’m a pretty mellow guy (“soft and nice,” as Max Klein put it on HN in response to my previous post), but I’m 100% behind Graham’s unfor­giv­ing con­dem­na­tion of the prim­i­tive culture of high school: “If you leave a bunch of eleven-​​year-​​olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Pre­sum­ably it was not a coin­ci­dence. Pre­sum­ably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and we had made our­selves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believ­able, I didn’t get the addi­tional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.” Don’t we all, PG. Don’t we all.

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