I am not, by any stretch, a technologist. Years of work and friendship with techies have left me with the certainty that one becomes a techie through genetic pre-disposition or an early childhood experience. Personally, given what these peopIe must endure, I can't conceive of any adult in his or her right mind actually choosing to do it.

First, an explanation of what I mean by "techie", because not everyone uses the term the same way and, to complicate matters further, many people will occasionally identify themselves as techies when they're not. Like me when I want to make a point in an argument and know I'm wrong -- "I'm a technologist and I know what I'm talking about." Or, in one of my "old dog learns new tricks" spams of baseless bravado, I'll say -- "At my age, I've become a techie...took me a lot time over a lot of years..."

But it's not true. I'm a decent web developer and a passable programmer but I ain't no techie!

Techies are the people who deal with the inner workings of networks and, for my purposes here, the Internet: its file system architecture, its functions, its programs, the incredibly arcane system of ownership and permissions and all the things that pull all that together. They also deal with the physical nuts and bolts -- routers, switches, connections, boxes (what normal people call computers). They are equally adept with a line of code and a screen of indecipherable status reports as they are with a screw-driver and a pair of pliers.

Clearly, these are not normal people. Most of us drive the Internet car, fully confident that it will start, stop, turn and idle pleasantly. Techies keep the motor working.

Hence the techie's plight. People rely on the Internet and expect it to run. In fact, we are often miffed when something doesn't work right. Because most of us have no idea how close to a miracle it is that this fragile, incrementally developed system actually works, we tend to view a system problem as something that should never happen and we turn to the techie to fix it, often with impatience and sometimes with borderline hysteria.

And people seriously disrespect techies. They do it when seeking technical support in a screaming fit. They do it when a technologist graciously offers as explanation of a problem -- how many people reading this have said "I don't care what's wrong, just fix it." And they do it when nothing's wrong and they can conveniently turn their attention to the Internet's explosive potential, completely forgetting about the men and women who make it possible.

If anything demonstates this "invisible techie" syndrome, it's what happened when the Internet industry collapsed a few years ago. Media stories abounded about investors' lost money, owners' lost dreams, communities' lost revenue sources, even people's lost email but very little was written or said about the single greatest casualty: techies' lost jobs.

By some accounts, nearly 70 percent of all technologists in the Internet industry lost their jobs during that collapse as the workforce was cut down and many jobs shipped overseas to cheaper and more mallable labor markets.

Most of these people were left with no pensions, no severance packages, no health care, not even a months' notice. Their years of training and work were repaid only with the spectre of shattered lives. And we lost a major weapon in the fight to protect and expand the Internet: the fact that an army of young workers in this country actually ran it.

We blew it and we blew it out of a combination of ignorance, inflexibility and classist attitudes.

When the bottom fell out, most of the social justice movement was still blinking at the Internet in wonderment, like a child mesmerized by a toy display. We were trying to figure out how to use it...or even if it was useful. In the confusing mosaic, we couldn't see techies.

The labor movement's "dropped ball" is less understandable. There were many of us screaming at the unions to do some organizing of Internet workers. I personally was a particular shrill voice. The response we heard from big labor was that the Internet industry which often relies on consultant contracts and other "short-cuts" for labor exploitation, wasn't amenable to collective bargaining -- the labor movement's paradigm for organizing. "These people work alone," one national official from my own union explained. "Organizing them would take more resources than we can spare."

Big labor specializes in making a fool of itself but this was truly special. It doesn't fit your organizing model (and makes collecting dues much harder, by the way) so you turn your back on hundreds of thousands of the most important workers in this society, neglect their very real health and safety concerns and, when they're fired, shrug your shoulders.

But the deepest and more disturbing obstacle to us noticing techies is attitude. I think there is a class attitude at work because techies are the most physical and nuts and bolts of Internet people. They are our mechanics, our machinists, our repair people and we all know how little respect these people get for the professionalism, skill, talent and commitment required to do their jobs. It's harder to pin down and harder to get people to admit to but I think that classist attitude is part of the problem for our movements, including the labor movement.

The problem we now have is that the importance of technologists in the struggle over the Internet is greater than ever. Without the incorporation and participation of sizeable numbers of technologists, our movement is not going to save the Internet -- forget about expanding it.

What's more, although often working alone, techies work with tools that are the result of extensive and successful collaboration. All software used on the Internet is the result of cooperative work by thousands of people who, for the most part, aren't paid. The Internet is living proof that a society based on collaborative work is possible.

And the techie knows that inherently!

In short, these are critically important people who don't have to be convinced about our view of human labor and so helping them organize themselves should be among our priorities. But that's much more difficult now because the years of political neglect have, logically, produced a backlash among technologists: an entirely justified suspicion of and resentment towards progressive movements.

We are, after all, a society that breeds isolation. It's at the center of much of our culture. That's what makes the Internet so exciting and potentially powerful. Once you're on-line, you're not isolated anymore.

But the techie's Internet experience doesn't follow that pattern. Most of us see the flashy websites, the unprecedented amount of quality information, the ease with which we can communicate with each other and that, for us, is the Internet. The techie sees all that broken down into packets and file systems and cron jobs and aliases -- the things that lurk beneath the surface making it all happen. It's seeing the world differently and when you see the world differently than most people, you feel alone because, in a sense, you are.

This isn't to say that techies don't have a broad view of the Internet's importance. Most of them I've met do. In fact, many are themselves activists and they think a lot about our society and what we should be doing about it. And they do a lot about it.

Still, there's a very large gap between what many of these folks do in their techie work and what they believe and do in their political work. Even those who are trying to mesh the two encounter a problem.

Most activists can join other activists interested in particular issues and the resulting collaboration not only eases our isolation but makes our work more effective, our contribution clearer to us and our lives fuller socially. We have groups and networks that integrate our political work with our talents, skills and social and personal needs.

But progressive techies don't have that to any great or acceptable extent. There is no real progressive techie organization, certainly not one that tries to take on technology issues from a political perspective. And so, isolated politically and still dissed by the progressive movements, the people who actually run this Internet have no way of discussing and organizing their work to save and expand it.

We need to help them create that home. Now.