Word: nerds
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...Jerry bars they can eat and organic catering by the guy who used to do meals for the Grateful Dead. The only table in the boardroom is for Ping-Pong. There's pool, shuffleboard, two pianos, twice-weekly hockey games, K'nex models for the nerd set--which is everyone--and even a bedroom, for when you've had too much Ben and Jerry...
...develop sympathy for anyone in director Miguel Arteta's film, it is for this put-upon couple. We have all been driven crazy, sometime or other, by the peculiar persistence of the unshakable nerd who refuses to take the hint of our indifference, even when it escalates to rudeness. This nerd, though, is in a class by himself. He writes and produces what seems to be an expressionistic but childlike play about their former relationship. When it's over, he offers Chuck a deal: one night of grown-up love and then he will leave him alone...
Harry Mendelssohn (Jason Alexander) is the ultimate anticomputer nerd. He is threatening to dynamite the library where he works if its card-catalog system is replaced by PCs. Brian Dickey (Peter Falk) is the police negotiator--Columbo raised to the nth degree--trying to talk him out of anarchy. Lee Kalcheim's play, at Los Angeles' Geffen Playhouse, sets them dueling metaphorically over the fate of modern civilization. Sometimes his targets are too easy (no more Starbucks jokes, please), but he has written fine, funny parts for the edgy, earnest Alexander and canny, counterpunching Falk. And his ending...
Washington and Wall Street are bedeviled by a specter--the specter of dotcom start-ups and the rise of the nerd class. The fantastic wealth of the new economy and the renegade attitude of its Netizens are deeply upsetting to the old order. The result is a cultural battle illustrated most dramatically by the Microsoft case. Surprisingly, the outcome of this conflict has a lot to say about whether we will still turn pages as we read...
Encryption algorithms--the mathematical rules by which secret codes are made and broken--have been at the center of a simmering spy-vs.-nerd war since the early 1990s. The anti-encryption forces, which control the technology through laws originally passed to regulate munitions, are led by a handful of spooky U.S. government agencies (such as the FBI and the National Security Agency) with support from the White House that rises and falls from one election cycle to the next--more on that faction later...