By his own account, you wouldn’t know that Katz is, in fact, a lightning rod. The media critic and author of numerous works, including Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho, is often flamed by readers who call for his ouster every time one of his stories appears on Slashdot, the site he calls home. Katz gets accused of everything from self-aggrandizement to Faith-Popcorn-style trend mongering to — worst of all — not being a real geek.

He’s maligned and even dissed by members of his own constituency who fail to recognize him for what he is: a leader of one of the important social movements of the Internet Age.

Or was. Katz has more or less stepped down from his role as lead scribe of the “anti-bullying movement” — a loose coalition of students, parents, commentators and educators who argue that to write off school harassment as “kids being kids’ is to ignore a very real threat to students’ physical and mental health.

Now, the one-time crusader for the geek underclass has decided to concentrate on writing more general technology articles and media commentary. And the efforts of Peter Yarrow from Peter, Paul and Mary aside, no one’s really picked up where he left off.

Katz cites burnout as one of the reasons for his recent decision to branch out beyond tales of grief. "I was actually close to getting obsessed about it," he says during a phone interview. "A bunch of my friends said, ‘You’ve got to stop doing it, or you’re just going to become — I mean, your whole life’s work is just basically being a transmitter of all this misery.’"

All this misery. An electronic river of pain. That’s how Katz variously refers to the torrent of messages that he says crashed three of his computers and hasn’t completely subsided yet: messages from kids ostracized by their peers; teenagers alienated from both fellow students and authorities; thirty-somethings who still haven’t forgotten the pain of being different. All of them reached out to Katz because he had the temerity to suggest in a 1999 article entitled  "Why Kids Kill" that there was something wrong with schools that treated disaffected geeks as potential killers in the wake of Columbine.

"As a writer, I’ve never in my life touched a deeper chord," he says of the article, and the many-part Slashdot series, “Voices from the Hellmouth,” that was based on the e-mail messages “Why Kids Kill” provoked. For almost two years, Katz wrote of geeks beaten up, threatened, and sexually harassed by their peers. And ignored, disciplined, and sent into counseling by school administrators.

"Why Kids Kill" may not have been the most likely starting point for a revolution. Published on Slashdot, it was more of a media think piece than a report from the front lines. In it, Katz takes journalists to task for concentrating on computer games and the Internet as possible causes for Columbine.

“It was the final break between me and the media,” Katz says now. “I never got over the coverage of ” the Columbine shooting."

Despite having worked for venerable old-media outlets like The New York Times and Rolling Stone, as well as Wired, Katz more or less left print journalism for the in-your-face world of Slashdot, which bills itself as, simply, “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.” Stories are posted and immediately analyzed and dissected by users. Katz describes it as "the best job I’ve ever had in my life."

When asked why he doesn’t try to spread the geek-movement word with a well-placed op-ed in The New York Times, or maybe a longer piece in The New Yorker, Katz dismisses the idea. "People like me tend to be attacked, trivialized, marginalized," he says. "To write a token op-ed piece is not going to change anything."

And how have Slashdotters repaid him for joining their ranks, both as a chronicler of their stories and as a technology columnist? Katz seems generally happy with the feedback he gets. "I get probably two to five hundred e-mail messages per column, and of those, I probably get one or two flames a week," he says.

But read the comments posted on Slashdot after any Katz story, and you can see the hostility he inspires in some of the Slashdot faithful. Consider some of the attacks that followed "Is Open Source the New Jerusalem?" which, perhaps a bit ambitiously, compares the open source movement to god’s kingdom on earth. "[D]oes anyone give a crap what katz thinks? Does he post this article to boost his own ego?" "I’m beginning to wonder if JK is the ubertroll. I mean, I used to be able [to] handle the highfalutin pop psych, but this is just silly." "[O]h wise Jon Katz, why don’t you define revolution for us?"

Of course, Katz has already defined, catalyzed and guided a revolution: the geek revolution, for lack of a better term. And it’s geeks themselves who view him with the most suspicion.

After exchanging e-mails with some of the Slashdotters who flame Katz, it’s evident that their complaints are as varied as Katz’s articles. They grumble about long, windy, unpolished pieces that don’t fit into Slashdot’s paragraph-link weblog format, and a style that sometimes glosses over key distinctions.

"Katz comes blazing in without any understanding of … shared references, and makes statements which people find embarrassingly naive. [It's] like you were discussing the finer points of characterization in Romeo and Juliet in the bar and Katz would come over and say ‘Don’t you think their suicides were so tragic?’" writes poster Eddie Edwards in an e-mail.

While Timothy Lee and Elijah Sarver both supported the “Hellmouth” series, Lee complains about "fluff pieces in which [Katz] makes broad, unsupported statements about the future, technology, the internet, etc." And Sarver writes, "[H]is writing style is not edited, which hurts him greatly."

But most of the flames his stories receive aren’t just about the stories; they’re about him. Katz is a big-name writer using his own name at a place where most of the monikers are more along the lines of "Hemos" and "CmdrTaco." He’s writing about technology from the perspective of a journalist. Some of what makes Katz distrust big media might make Slashdot readers distrust Katz.

"They’re an extraordinarily sensitive culture," he says. "Especially when an outsider writes about them, they often resent it quite a bit."

The "Hellmouth" series was generally well-received, but not everyone bought Katz’s concerns. The Village Voice published a piece by Jane Dark, "Suffer the (White, Middle-Class) Children," that criticized the self-identification of geeks as an oppressed group, similar to racial and ethnic minorities that have been persecuted.

Katz, however, rejects the notion that the problems teenagers described were superficial and/or overblown. "I think one can easily differentiate between whining and misery … I don’t think they were faking it,” he says. "There are just many, many thousands of really bright and creative kids who are suffering quite acutely and whose problems are not being addressed."  

Most of the criticism, though, came from Slashdot readers themselves. "People got sick of it. There were people who said, ‘What’s it doing on a technology site?’" he recalls. The vein he tapped with "Hellmouth" poured out not only in the form of anguished, confessional, personal e-mails but also outward hostility.

Related Sites
Does school sports culture lead to violence? Julian Borger of The Guardian writes that the godlike status afforded to student athletes in America has left the so-called "nerds" and "dweebs" feeling isolated and angry. Time magazine looks at new school initiatives to combat bullying.
Gavin McNett of Feed reports on Jon Katz’s stand against Pinkerton for creating a Web site encouraging teens to turn in other teens exhibiting "warning signs" of school violence — in exchange for free stuff from sponsors.
In 1997, Brian Lamb of C-SPAN’s Booknotes interviewed Katz about his book Virtuous Reality: How America Surrendered Discussion of Moral Values to Opportunists, Nitwits & Blockheads Like William Bennett. Here is the transcript of the hour-long discussion.