Two teenage boys in rural Idaho find, through computers and online networks, a form of escape and self-fashioning unavailable to them offline.

Published at the turn of the millennium, Geeks captures the early internet before it hardened into platform capitalism. What might now read as ordinary—message boards, anonymity, technical fluency—felt at the time like social shifting.

Katz writes as a journalist documenting it, suddenly “geek” as stigma becomes identity, then it becomes leverage. The book sits squarely in late-90s techno-optimism, but it also preserves something more fragile—the sense that the internet once functioned as refuge for the socially exiled.

For readers interested in early digital culture, pre-social media utopianism, or the genealogy of online subculture, it’s a useful period document.