In his article “On Geek Culture,” Ian Williams writes, “ . . .  what is Superman in the twenty-first century but a corporate mascot, albeit one with a lavish backstory?” This sets the tone for a fundamentally reductionist approach to geek culture and the various cultural products that populate its mediascape, from Star Trek to Battlestar Galactica. Indeed, Williams goes even further in his project of reducing works of art to their commodity form asking the reader to imagine a scenario in which the usual costumed superheroes and other genre characters are replaced by “Geico geckos or Progressive Insurance Flos.”

The article is not without its merits, particularly in its call for more creator-ownership over the cultural products of geek culture. Williams’ definition of what constitutes a “geeky” approach to material also echoes the definitions of such notably commentators (and participants) in the sub-culture as Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day. Essentially what makes a geek is not what material is loved — sports, role-playing games, the Star Wars expanded universe — but how it is loved. A true “geek” approach to such material involves a passionate engagement and a serious concern for un-serious material, a practice which echoes the childhood act of playing.

Where Williams’ argument breaks down is his next step of reducing this engagement to a passive act of consumption, “[t]he tie that binds geeks of a given strain together is what they choose to buy.” The error in this line of thinking lies in assuming that the only form of engagement in geek culture involves passive consumption of media produced by corporate monoliths.