I suspect it looks cheap simply because culture has changed in the 16 years since this was published. Remember that in 2003, the only way you're going to be reading an essay online is if you're devoting the time to sit down at a desktop to do so.

Do you feel your criticism would still apply with the same force if it was clear that the author was considered to be a geek by himself and others?

*Edited to add a quote from http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/fifteen.html regarding this point:

  > First up is the issue of what "geek" means. It's an ill-
  > defined subculture at the best of times, but I generally
  > see two loose and overlapping superfamilies. On the one 
  > hand, those geeks whose common denominator is a passion 
  > for technical pursuits of all sorts -- OS geeks, coding 
  > geeks, sysadmin geeks, etc.; on the other, those whose 
  > common denominator is a passion for media -- comic book 
  > geeks, film geeks, anime geeks, gaming geeks, etc. I'm a 
  > game designer with a degree in performance studies. You 
  > can probably guess where I fall. I wasn't thinking espe-
  > cially rigorously when I wrote 5GSF (or, for that matter,
  > Why Geeks Like Anime), so while I defined my terms, I
  > used the media-geek definition throughout. This caused
  > problems for some readers coming from the other side of
  > the tracks -- like, say, Metafilter.