But the alpha-geek development model proposes a revision of a gadget's life cycle: As creative people keep hacking into what a Chumby can be, the device theoretically becomes more useful the longer you own it.
Not long ago in London, flashes of striped tube socks were spotted beneath the cuffs of Balenciaga bell bottoms, and the socks began to be worn unabashedly by models, geek style, pulled up to the knee.
In the Geek Girl series, Harriet combines being a "geek" and a global model, a combination which lots of people might see as unusual.
Yet, in a relatively colorless town, Collins has come to be known as something of a character, a model of geek cool.
They instantly earned the owner geek credibility points and models were coming from nearly every manufacturer between 2000 and 2004.
The romance continues when two nearly identical teenagers -- a glasses-wearing geek and a successful fashion model -- switch places and turn their lives upside down in "Model Behavior," at 8 35, and the children of broken homes set up a dating service for their single parents in "Young Hearts Unlimited,"at 10 15.
Most professional basketball teams employ data geeks, who run models that analyse players by a series of metrics, including foot speed, vertical leap, free-throw percentage, and a host of other variables.
Despite being derided by TV talking heads as a liberal hack, Silver definitively proved that geeks with mathematical models were superior to the gut feelings and pseudo-statistics of so-called political experts.
Have those not always been the accouterments of the geek and not the runway model?
The web has gone from being what geeks call a client-server model to one dominated by what Lanier calls "siren servers" such as Facebook, which hold billions of internet users in thrall without sharing the wealth that they generate with the people who create that wealth in the first place.
