7 ms·

Is Nerd Culture Dying?

36 points by lengomango 3y ago

QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
Frat star whining about nerds liking things, and its front page of hacker news. Did the upvoters have a little too much unsweetened 30 proof cranberry juice?
- lengomango 3y ago
  I don't think most frat boys are in the habit of quoting Adorno. And with this particular author, it's not always advisable to take everything at face value...
  - jsnell 3y ago
    I don't know anything about this particular author, and it's a good guess that most HN readers don't either. I gather from your comment that the article is performative bullshit, and it is up to the reader to decide which parts are fiction, which parts are lies presented as facts, which parts are opinions that the author doesn't actually hold, and which parts they actually believe? That kind of thing can work if the author is writing to some insular audience who understands that it is bullshit. But it will not make for a good discussion when posted to a general audience. How can you have a discussion about anything except the unbearable style, if the text is not to be taken at face value?
lamontcg 3y ago
Well, I definitely lost interest in all the superhero movies ages ago. I'm just sitting here curating a list of hundreds of 80s songs, wondering why I can't get all the videos to play on my TV like my own custom MTV playlist. Something definitely seems wrong with popular culture these days, but I'm not going to be able to help you sort it out...
tezza 3y ago
I see overlong thinkpieces are not dying off and that humble-braggadocio is alive and kicking
- JackFr 3y ago
  [flagged]
- cableshaft 3y ago
  I know, right? This line in particular got stuck out at me: > They are mortally offended by the suggestion that Marvel might be somehow less good than Chris Marker, or that K-pop might be worse than Rimsky-Korasov. Never heard of Chris Marker or Rimsky-Korasov, had to look those up. Chris Marker looks like an indie French filmmaker who 60 years ago made a 27 minute time travel film called La Jetée, using only still photographs, that William Gibson apparently considered one of his greatest influences. So yeah, this sounds like something that most mainstream people wouldn't be aware of or into and exactly the type of thing a film nerd or film hipster (who he said in the opening paragraphs were all killed because of how annoying they are) would be into. And Rimsky-Korasov is a Russian classical music composer who's been dead for over 100 years. Someone that only a music nerd would probably be aware of nowadays, or go see a concert for. If he didn't want to be such a hipster about it, he could have used like Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick and Mozart or Bach or even Debussy or something, a name most people would probably recognize, instead of these less recognizable names, especially in an article where he's making fun of nerds for being into obscure shit (while "their" movies have been dominating the box office for well over a decade at this point). I'm not trying to defend Marvel here either. I don't think they're the best movies ever made (I thought Everything Everywhere All At Once was the best movie I've seen since Parasite, and considering it pretty much swept the Oscars this year, and Parasite did a few years before that, critics seem to agree with me there). Another quote that stuck out: > The culture we produce on Planet Nerd has nothing to do with desire whatsoever. Everything is sterile, mercilessly unsexy; no eroticism, not even visual pleasure.... Nerd culture, meanwhile, is basically quite boring to consume. Instead of the sadistic fantasy of being a superhero, doing fantastic things that ordinary people don’t get to do, the Marvel movies are about nothing more than themselves. Sounds like someone needs to watch The Boys or Invincible. You'll get your sadistic superhero power fantasy there. (I mean, just watch The Boys episode about 'Herogasm'). Marvel can't do that because it has to get parents to take their children to see them to make all the money they want to make. You don't see sadistic power fantasies about being a wizard in Harry Potter either, or overly sensual things with any Disney movie, barring the hidden 'SEX' in flower petals in Lion King.
foreveris 3y ago
I think that nerd culture has just gone mainstream. It's far from dying.
- localplume 3y ago
  When you have a Dungeons and Dragons movie hitting over 100mil in the box office, and when comic book movies are some of the highest grossing, i think its pretty safe to say nerd culture is incredibly mainstream.
  - peoplefromibiza 3y ago
    "nerd culture" is not about what but how. There were popular D&D shows already in the 80s. Most comic book movies are simply bad, and "real" nerds hate them. No nerd loved the last Star Wars trilogy or Rings of power or Wonder Woman 1984 or the nth spider-verse repetition, mostly because studios take something popular among nerds and change it to please modern audience which is exactly what's wrong with the so called "nerd culture" today: it's not a culture.
    - anthk 3y ago
      This. Also, the term "roguelike" for action-adventure games. FFS, if you play a roguelike like Slashem you will know all of these "roguelike" wannabe's have nothing to do with the genre. There are just rehased Zelda-likes with permadeath.
- capableweb 3y ago
  Indeed. And "real" nerd culture has just became deeper, and more specialized. Back in the day, a lot of the nerds were into the same type of things, while now there are sub-groups. Some nerds are anime-nerds, others are programming-nerds, and not every programming-nerd is an anime-nerd, and vice-versa. And the amount of nerd-sub groups is huge, every quarter or so I encounter a nerdy topic and sub-group I had no idea about before.
  - ehnto 3y ago
ergonaught 3y ago
One could hope that what is dying is the idea that there is such a thing as "nerd culture".
- seydor 3y ago
  There must be one. Countries like america were making moves to attract nerds, by incorporating nerdiness in popular cultuyre. Usually nerdiness is invisible in most cultures, because cultures are dominated by the most extroverted people. Geeks are never 'chic' almost by definition, but they became economically very important for a period of time. Tech has been however stagnating in the post-iphone age , with social media and content dominating again. Now there is going to be another nerdy wave with AI, which is again bringing nerdy-looking people to the economic forefront. Most of the AI nerds are not the ones we see on podcasts currently, but we see their names in publications
- barry-cotter 3y ago
  Can you be more transparent about who you’re insulting and how you hope to thus raise your own status? It’s difficult to figure out anything from what you’ve written except that you hold someone in contempt.
  - ergonaught 3y ago
    Are you well? I am criticizing the idea that "nerd culture" is a thing which exists. The presumption that an overgeneralized stereotype conveys some form of meaning. That there there is some monoculture common to "nerds" that can be said to be "dying". All of this is clear from my written words.
    - barry-cotter 3y ago
      Ah, do you hold the people who identity with and find meaning in “nerd culture” in contempt and are insulting them? Thank you for clarifying.
Eumenes 3y ago
Nerd and hacker culture aren't the same ... I think hacker culture is alive and well, albeit less so than in the past. Some posts here on HN give me hope - people are still breaking things and figuring out how stuff works under the hood, but nerd culture seems to have developed into rampant consumerism. The article touches on that a bit. It's prob a result of the 20-30 somethings of today being advertised to super heavily. Corporations realized that nerds have quite a bit of spending power, and with the rise of silicon valley/the internet, its become a big market.
jimnotgym 3y ago
Wait, hipsters have...gone? They missed my town
froidpink 3y ago
> If there is any one person who still tries to consider things by some measure of quality, it’s like a needle sticking sharp in their side While Sam's articles are quite enjoyable to read, I'm not sure this argument holds. If nerds don't care about quality they wouldn't spend hours complaining about how bad the new Star Wars films are
- capableweb 3y ago
  Many nerds don't really care about the outcome of the complaining/arguing, but merely uses their position as an excuse to connect with people, to have discussions with fellow human beings. Not wrong or right, just trying to fulfill a human need.
- andrepd 3y ago
  Exactly, it's like a person comparing the subtle taste of poly-saturated trans fats in a big mac and a quarterpounder with cheese. It's all slop, that's the point.
fsloth 3y ago
A plamipsest diatribe drenched in nihilistic snobbery, but very, very entertaining one.
jacknews 3y ago
wha? so nerds are enthusiastic detail oriented people, but for bad stuff, but the same attitude toward good stuff is not nerdy? or something. 'dreck' indeed.
- ehnto 3y ago
  Yeah I love applying nerd to people who think they aren't nerds. Car nerds, gym nerds, bike nerds, wine nerds, beer nerds etc. Passion and depth is all it takes to nerd out on something in my opinion.
jsemrau 3y ago
I recently removed Reddit, Imgur, Twitter from my life and realized there is so much more interesting and edgier content out there.
- flappyeagle 3y ago
  Where
- ehnto 3y ago
  Hm, dare I ask what you mean? I also removed those things from my life but it has just made more time for active participation in some of the things I do. I found I had essentially replaced actively nerding out on stuff with passively viewing streams of nerd"ish" stuff.
- cableshaft 3y ago
  Such as?
ModernMech 3y ago
Insofar as nerdiness is considered to be gaming, that’s gone mainstream. But I don’t think most of the twitch gamers with the transparent cases and neon case lights have the same appreciation for that aesthetic as us LAN nerds did in the 00s. Like, we built those rigs to show them off in person with our friends. They were custom built by hand, each one unique. Now they are commoditized props, jewels in a pastel room meant for streaming over a webcam. They are tax write offs for professional twitch streamers. Has something died in all that? Maybe. Honestly we transitioned to board games. The computer scene got too big, the games got too dumb, and we got too old. Board games still get us together, and they’re just as fun as star craft or enemy territory that we used to play back in the day. Nerd culture is alive and well, it’s just different from when I was a kid.
- cableshaft 3y ago
  Board games are definitely more interesting now, for the most part (with some exceptions...like I do think The Witness is more interesting than just about any board game I've played or designed). Most of the big video games now are just movies that let you walk or drive around, jump on or climb things, and shoot or swing weapons periodically. Indie games have a bit more experimentation, but most still follow this formula, but with simpler graphics. Board games still experiment with different and interesting mechanisms, like different takes on set collection, drafting, cooperative play, engine building, worker placement, auctions, logic and deduction, etc.
bowsamic 3y ago
The new nerds are the furries posting NSFW inflation art when not writing code, and the transgender extreme Buddhist who writes long essays about attaining the jhanas on her personal blog while writing the code you rely on. Because the stereotypical white western male nerd became completely mainstream and normal
osigurdson 3y ago
I think nerd simply means "has interests".
nbzso 3y ago
Maybe looking into the transhumanism future placed upon us the real hipster and nerds will be born. The fake ones will perish into AI driven oblivion.
jl6 3y ago
Geek culture is things like comic books, video games and Star Wars. Nerd culture is things like recreational mathematics, model trains, and editing Wikipedia.
- bradleyjg 3y ago
  I don’t like the term nerd, because when I was growing up it was a very hurtful epithet, but exactly this. There’s nothing inherently connecting liking math or computers, on the one hand, and super hero comics on the other. It was just an accident of history.
- andrepd 3y ago
  Exactly. A nerd is someone who implements emulators for extinct 70s minicomputers, or is deep into niche music. A "geek" (for lack of better word) is the target of this article.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Oddly I thought it was the exact opposite. Geeks are really into things that are considered uncool but are really useful, like computers and maths. Nerds are really into things that are uncool but not useful, like comics and video games. It's the latter that went mainstream because it's easy. Anyone can do it. But being a geek requires one to be a bit "special".
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    It used to have a lot more to do with time spent at the library. Nerds are bookish. Now libraries have conference rooms (where you might play D&D) and computers and movies to check out. Invasion of the geeks!
shortrounddev 3y ago
I believe there is no counter culture in the west anymore. It is mainstream to be subversive, and so there is little to no subversiveness left
- LudwigNagasena 3y ago
  There are so many ways to be subversive. But it’s becoming more and more socially costly to be subversive.
  - shortrounddev 3y ago
    Can you give an example?
    - LudwigNagasena 3y ago
      Well, planting a bomb or misgendering someone surely will get you in trouble in many places.
- thicknavyrain 3y ago
  This was already being talked about in the mid-naughties in "The Rebel Sell: How The Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture" by Heath and Potter. Had a big influence on me as a teenager.
- russnes 3y ago
  counter culture these days is returning to conservative traditions and monotheistic and other long lasting religions
  - anthk 3y ago
    Don Quixote did that first at the Enlightenment era, but as a joke from the author, were people was less idealistic/religious like Sancho Panza.
- andrepd 3y ago
  Unfortunately, as things like irreligion, tolerance for sexual minorities, or left-wing economics became more mainstream, it is now, among the youth, incredible as it may sound, counter-culture to be reactionary. A reverse 1960s of sorts.
apolymath 3y ago
[dead]
davidgerard 3y ago
actual title: All the nerds are dead
v4dok 3y ago
Nerds of the 90s grew up and became a nice (more often than not) affluent market. Industry shifted to accomodate for that. I for one, enjoy it while it lasts. Because of this, a lot of cultural products made sure that the "nerds" felt the heroes of their own stories, making them cool in pop culture. That being said, I always considered a crucial characteristic of a nerd the inability to interact fluently with the social environment, instead focusing their energy online or in very specific niches that shielded them from this social "anxiety". This very much remains, cool kids do "cool" stuff and eloquently interact with their social environment. "Cool stuff" now is probably more "nerdy" than it was 20y ago but the divide is there, I think the author (and me probably) are too old to really see what "nerds" to today.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
littlelady 3y ago
Nerd culture has been mainstream since The Big Bang Theory; le geek c'est chic. D&D, Comic books, nerdy plastic-framed glasses, etc... are all "having a moment". So is nerd culture dying? No, it's just being sold now, too. Nerds will never die, as witnessed by anyone who has ever played D&D with a "rules lawyer". Nerds, the people, who are--according to my own mushy definition: socially awkward people who obsessively pursue a niche interest/hobby that is outside of the mainstream. If their hobby/interest is in the mainstream, they know all the lore, such that, if there is an argument to be had about some small detail, they will be prepared. Legend has it, they are in their basements right at this very moment, studying, reading, preparing, for that argument about whether or not the DM was right about encumbrance...
SkipperCat 3y ago
First define something that doesn't exist. Then, say its dead. Voila!, now you're an astute critic of culture. I never really liked the term "nerd". I always felt it was something used to denigrate people who had interest of passion about something. Maybe people started to fetishize it recently. But either way, can't people just let people enjoy things without classificaiton.
viridian 3y ago
It's sort of like rap music. In a way, the more popular bits have essentially become a part of the commodified dominant monoculture, insofar as we still have a monoculture left. On the other hand, the niche has become significantly more niche after a messy de facto divorce from the 'poppy' parts of rap/nerd culture. The barrier to entry to these subcultures in a way are higher than ever, because the monoculture bits capture and hold the vast majority of people with a more casual interest. This natural schism and reification that develops is something I think David Chapman's "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths"[1] fails to identify, but we have the advantage of over a decade of evolution and hindsight since it was written. [1] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
jeremymcanally 3y ago
He almost hits on what's changed in my brain, but then kind of wanders into this weird criticism of...things people enjoy. I think the shift is that we don't have a monoculture anymore (thanks to the Internet and especially social media) so what seems like we're losing nerd culture and these niche interests in "bad" things really just means that everyone can find them now and likewise folks who are into these niche interests can find each other. This change is creating the (for lack of a better term?) "illusion" of mainstreaming. The people who would be interested were always there. It was just the means of mass cultural communication and spread to reach them with whatever interest weren't. The main "stream" is now the main "lake" and everyone's jumped in. Things you think are "bad" can now reach enough "nerds" who think they're good to reach a modicum of popularity. I view this as maybe a good thing? Of course, the other edge of this sword is that it allows folks who have unhealthy interests and ideas to find each other as well. That's why we've seen an uptick in radical ideologies of all sorts and things like the incel movement take such deep root. Those weren't part of the normalized zeitgeist before, but now that everything's in the pool and given equal cultural footing, it again creates a bubble of popularity that sometimes has an outsized impact. We have decided that algorithms are the answer to this problem, and maybe that's a good answer. But I think we've also decided that commercial driven, ad laden algorithms are not the answer. So I'm not sure we have a good solution currently. Maybe if we spread some AI on it (and throw some ML and heck a few blockchains in for good measure) we can generate something useful.
- lengomango 3y ago
  Is it true that we don't have a monoculture, though? The author argues that algorithms have reintroduced monoculture: there was a period before the year 2000 when we had a monoculture (because of the scarcity of information) and a period after 2012 when we had a monoculture (because of effective information-sorting algorithms). The kind of cultural fragmentation you're talking about only existed 2000-2012, or in what he calls the 'hipster era.' Post-2012, 'nerdy' things like comic book movies and gaming streams are basically mainstream to the point of being inescapable. People who remember the previous 'pre-nerd' monoculture are primed to think of those things as niche and marginal interests, but they're really not.
andrepd 3y ago
What an incredible article > But imagine a person who collects the boxes from every McDonald’s order he’s ever made, who’s yapping with excitement about the new McDonald’s partially hydrogenated soybean-canola oil blend, who can’t wait for them to release the McBento in Japan so he can watch video reviews all day, and who acts incredibly smug every time McDonald’s posts its quarterly earnings and they’re growing faster than Burger King’s. You know exactly what this person looks like. A total failure of an adult human being.
surgical_fire 3y ago
It died when it became mainstream. Nerd culture nowadays is horribly lame. When I was a kid I loved being a nerd and finding people who shared my hobbies. Now I avoid talking about them.
hnbad 3y ago
Yes and good riddance. There was never such a thing as "nerd culture". It was always exclusionary and toxic, pretending to exist in rebellion against the mainstream while perpetuating the same stereotypes. It was also always defined by consumerism and consumption, just as a "niche" (but still fed by the same large corporations as the mainstream) no different from "artisanal" hipster goods or "underground" grunge merchandise. Nerds have always existed and will continue to exist. "Nerd culture" isn't necessary for that. The Marvel movies weren't a turning point, the rise of the Internet was. Widespread access to the Internet allowed various fandoms to expand, mutate and merge (especially in fanfic and on sites like Tumblr), it also allowed people to find peers in their specific special interest communities rather than having to vaguely seek out "other nerds" and hope they're compatible. People like to posture about "real nerds" versus "geek chic poseurs" but the distinction is arbitrary. Yes, someone wearing a Nirvana shirt who never even heard of the band but likes the grunge aesthetic can easily be dismissed as a "poseur" but most often that distinction just exists to arbitrarily exclude people just as passionate who don't fit your biases. Heck, for most of the 80s and 90s you could have believed women were biologically incapable of being nerds as even that girl wearing glasses and a nerd shirt who could recite every Ferengi rule of acquisition and speak fluent Klingon was clearly just a "poseur", especially if she was conventionally attractive. On a related note I think we've also simply culturally come to understand that the "jock vs nerd" binary is really more of a spectrum and not even a good fit for most people. At least in programming the idea was on its last breath when people ironically (and then unironically) adopted the gymrat "brogrammer" aesthetic, which was luckily shortlived but clearly an act of rebellion against and recuperation of "jock" culture. We've also become more aware that neurodivergence is not simply a lifestyle choice even when it may manifest as such, whereas nerd culture would often ("ironically") replicate the same ableism neurodivergent nerds were subjected to in the mainstream. So in another way, no, nerd "culture" isn't dying, you're just getting old and out of touch.
drKarl 3y ago
In my opinion the author completely mischaracterizes what hipsters and nerds are. Hipster just want to be different, unique, feel that they're not part the mainstream, that is their reason d'être, while nerds are obsessively interested and knowledgeable about a niche topic. The counter-example of someone "obsessive, all-consuming interest in the literature and mysticism of the medieval and early modern eras" would definitely be a nerd of medieval literature. So the definition of nerd as people who love hideous, terrible things, is not only insulting but also inaccurate. To a degree everything can be subjectively considered bad to the uninitiated. Also, I believe the reason why book sales are going up except young fiction which is going down is because younger generation have an increasingly shorter attention span, they've grown used to short videos like Tik-Tok, etc so they can't get bother with reading an actual full length book. I just get chills when I think of the AI generated media (songs, books, movies) in the coming years and decades...
- RichardCA 3y ago
  AI generated Techno is already a thing, and I can't tell it apart from actual Techno, as per the xkcd cartoon. https://xkcd.com/411/ https://xkcd.com/411/ Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h1sHVw5K6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h1sHVw5K6w
omnicognate 3y ago
Clearly barely anyone here has read far enough into this article to even know what he means by "Nerd Culture". I don't really agree with it, but he makes a specific claim and does so eloquently and emotively. It would be more interesting to discuss that claim than to respond to the title, as most here are doing. Briefly, he's saying that the explosion in information availability has resulted in a form of hyper-aestheticism he associates with "hipsters", based on an idea that individuals with particularly "good taste" could sort through it all and popularise the good stuff, followed, after that failed and hipsterism came to be seen as unoriginal and conformist, by a surrender to corporate media franchises and manufactured culture, which he associates with "nerds". He claims this too is now failing and bleakly attempts to guess what might come next. I think it's a huge oversimplification and I don't think "nerd" is a good term to use for what he's describing, but it's entertaining and would be fun to discuss if HN were capable of that.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  Fortunately it doesn't take much reading to figure out that this joker redefines words however he likes. Therefore, he is an elbow macaroni, and I refuse to read the work of elbow macaroni.
- auggierose 3y ago
  Hahaha, I read the article first for some reason (I usually don't), but was then expecting exactly that: everybody discussing the title, not the article itself. I should probably always read the article first, if I don't find the title interesting enough to do that, then reading the comments is probably just a waste of time as well. Yes, his definition of nerd is unusual, but I like it ;-)
- viridian 3y ago
  Author's quite the judgmental bastard with a strange definition of nerd, but yeah most people ITT are just riffing on the title. It's a bit too prosaic to expect most people to read it in full though, but you get the gist after the first minute or so. That said I get the reason for the title, "Hipster watches as the consoooomers meets the same fate his people did many moons ago" is far less catchy.
liampulles 3y ago
Increasingly I think we are over-connected. I'm not sure human beings are meant to be voicing their opinions with hundreds or thousands of people constantly. But it is addictive enough to be a blatant hypocrite.
jollyllama 3y ago
When I think of nerd culture, I think of people "geeking out" over Star Trek, videogames, tabletop games, etc. Basically, I think of comic book guy from the Simpsons. During my lifetime, a lot of it was saturated with pretension, self-aware or otherwise; it was always kind of a minstrel show. I would agree that many elements of it have gone mainstream.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  Pretentious . . . like a minstrel show? Do tell, Mr. Interlocutor!
JanneVee 3y ago
I find the analysis flawed. In the article "Marvel is failing because they thought that most people were nerds: that mass audiences would actually want to delve deep into their joyless multiverse and slog through all its lore". Marvel is failing for the simple reason that it has become "content" for an audience that doesn't exist instead of an entertaining movie/series for the masses. And anyone who has tried to point out that the audience doesn't exist is being called all the things that are bad.
- the_only_law 3y ago
  I have a feeling the same is going to happen with Star Wars films here soon.
  - mmvora 3y ago
    To be honest, I think the level of effort that Star Wars (and ig now Disney) has put in to really expand the universe (and add more details to the same story with series' like Bad Batch or Kenobi) can be sufficient to satisfy the hunger of the true fans. Especially when compared to Marvel that basically runs the same characters / stories again in different universes as an excuse for lack of detailed writing....
    - mmvora 3y ago
      But that being said I am not a fan of the token diversity quota characters being added...
  - viridian 3y ago
    > soon As a casual observer, I saw people being labelled as sexists basically the minute feedback and viewership numbers started dropping for the middle film in the new trilogy. And the same thing happened for the last one.
  - JanneVee 3y ago
    It already happened! The new trilogy and the recent series had this happen to it, the Mandalorian the two first seasons where entertaining but they are back to failing to find an audience.
recursivedoubts 3y ago
A wonderful article, all the more so because I disagree with a lot of it.

36 points by lengomango 3y ago

Frat star whining about nerds liking things, and its front page of hacker news. Did the upvoters have a little too much unsweetened 30 proof cranberry juice?

lengomango 3y ago
I don't think most frat boys are in the habit of quoting Adorno. And with this particular author, it's not always advisable to take everything at face value...
- jsnell 3y ago
  I don't know anything about this particular author, and it's a good guess that most HN readers don't either. I gather from your comment that the article is performative bullshit, and it is up to the reader to decide which parts are fiction, which parts are lies presented as facts, which parts are opinions that the author doesn't actually hold, and which parts they actually believe? That kind of thing can work if the author is writing to some insular audience who understands that it is bullshit. But it will not make for a good discussion when posted to a general audience. How can you have a discussion about anything except the unbearable style, if the text is not to be taken at face value?

lamontcg 3y ago

Well, I definitely lost interest in all the superhero movies ages ago. I'm just sitting here curating a list of hundreds of 80s songs, wondering why I can't get all the videos to play on my TV like my own custom MTV playlist. Something definitely seems wrong with popular culture these days, but I'm not going to be able to help you sort it out...

tezza 3y ago

I see overlong thinkpieces are not dying off and that humble-braggadocio is alive and kicking

JackFr 3y ago
[flagged]
cableshaft 3y ago
I know, right? This line in particular got stuck out at me: > They are mortally offended by the suggestion that Marvel might be somehow less good than Chris Marker, or that K-pop might be worse than Rimsky-Korasov. Never heard of Chris Marker or Rimsky-Korasov, had to look those up. Chris Marker looks like an indie French filmmaker who 60 years ago made a 27 minute time travel film called La Jetée, using only still photographs, that William Gibson apparently considered one of his greatest influences. So yeah, this sounds like something that most mainstream people wouldn't be aware of or into and exactly the type of thing a film nerd or film hipster (who he said in the opening paragraphs were all killed because of how annoying they are) would be into. And Rimsky-Korasov is a Russian classical music composer who's been dead for over 100 years. Someone that only a music nerd would probably be aware of nowadays, or go see a concert for. If he didn't want to be such a hipster about it, he could have used like Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick and Mozart or Bach or even Debussy or something, a name most people would probably recognize, instead of these less recognizable names, especially in an article where he's making fun of nerds for being into obscure shit (while "their" movies have been dominating the box office for well over a decade at this point). I'm not trying to defend Marvel here either. I don't think they're the best movies ever made (I thought Everything Everywhere All At Once was the best movie I've seen since Parasite, and considering it pretty much swept the Oscars this year, and Parasite did a few years before that, critics seem to agree with me there). Another quote that stuck out: > The culture we produce on Planet Nerd has nothing to do with desire whatsoever. Everything is sterile, mercilessly unsexy; no eroticism, not even visual pleasure.... Nerd culture, meanwhile, is basically quite boring to consume. Instead of the sadistic fantasy of being a superhero, doing fantastic things that ordinary people don’t get to do, the Marvel movies are about nothing more than themselves. Sounds like someone needs to watch The Boys or Invincible. You'll get your sadistic superhero power fantasy there. (I mean, just watch The Boys episode about 'Herogasm'). Marvel can't do that because it has to get parents to take their children to see them to make all the money they want to make. You don't see sadistic power fantasies about being a wizard in Harry Potter either, or overly sensual things with any Disney movie, barring the hidden 'SEX' in flower petals in Lion King.

foreveris 3y ago

I think that nerd culture has just gone mainstream. It's far from dying.

localplume 3y ago
When you have a Dungeons and Dragons movie hitting over 100mil in the box office, and when comic book movies are some of the highest grossing, i think its pretty safe to say nerd culture is incredibly mainstream.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  "nerd culture" is not about what but how. There were popular D&D shows already in the 80s. Most comic book movies are simply bad, and "real" nerds hate them. No nerd loved the last Star Wars trilogy or Rings of power or Wonder Woman 1984 or the nth spider-verse repetition, mostly because studios take something popular among nerds and change it to please modern audience which is exactly what's wrong with the so called "nerd culture" today: it's not a culture.
  - anthk 3y ago
    This. Also, the term "roguelike" for action-adventure games. FFS, if you play a roguelike like Slashem you will know all of these "roguelike" wannabe's have nothing to do with the genre. There are just rehased Zelda-likes with permadeath.
capableweb 3y ago
Indeed. And "real" nerd culture has just became deeper, and more specialized. Back in the day, a lot of the nerds were into the same type of things, while now there are sub-groups. Some nerds are anime-nerds, others are programming-nerds, and not every programming-nerd is an anime-nerd, and vice-versa. And the amount of nerd-sub groups is huge, every quarter or so I encounter a nerdy topic and sub-group I had no idea about before.
- ehnto 3y ago

ergonaught 3y ago

One could hope that what is dying is the idea that there is such a thing as "nerd culture".

seydor 3y ago
There must be one. Countries like america were making moves to attract nerds, by incorporating nerdiness in popular cultuyre. Usually nerdiness is invisible in most cultures, because cultures are dominated by the most extroverted people. Geeks are never 'chic' almost by definition, but they became economically very important for a period of time. Tech has been however stagnating in the post-iphone age , with social media and content dominating again. Now there is going to be another nerdy wave with AI, which is again bringing nerdy-looking people to the economic forefront. Most of the AI nerds are not the ones we see on podcasts currently, but we see their names in publications
barry-cotter 3y ago
Can you be more transparent about who you’re insulting and how you hope to thus raise your own status? It’s difficult to figure out anything from what you’ve written except that you hold someone in contempt.
- ergonaught 3y ago
  Are you well? I am criticizing the idea that "nerd culture" is a thing which exists. The presumption that an overgeneralized stereotype conveys some form of meaning. That there there is some monoculture common to "nerds" that can be said to be "dying". All of this is clear from my written words.
  - barry-cotter 3y ago
    Ah, do you hold the people who identity with and find meaning in “nerd culture” in contempt and are insulting them? Thank you for clarifying.

Eumenes 3y ago

Nerd and hacker culture aren't the same ... I think hacker culture is alive and well, albeit less so than in the past. Some posts here on HN give me hope - people are still breaking things and figuring out how stuff works under the hood, but nerd culture seems to have developed into rampant consumerism. The article touches on that a bit. It's prob a result of the 20-30 somethings of today being advertised to super heavily. Corporations realized that nerds have quite a bit of spending power, and with the rise of silicon valley/the internet, its become a big market.

jimnotgym 3y ago

Wait, hipsters have...gone? They missed my town

froidpink 3y ago

> If there is any one person who still tries to consider things by some measure of quality, it’s like a needle sticking sharp in their side While Sam's articles are quite enjoyable to read, I'm not sure this argument holds. If nerds don't care about quality they wouldn't spend hours complaining about how bad the new Star Wars films are

capableweb 3y ago
Many nerds don't really care about the outcome of the complaining/arguing, but merely uses their position as an excuse to connect with people, to have discussions with fellow human beings. Not wrong or right, just trying to fulfill a human need.
andrepd 3y ago
Exactly, it's like a person comparing the subtle taste of poly-saturated trans fats in a big mac and a quarterpounder with cheese. It's all slop, that's the point.

fsloth 3y ago

A plamipsest diatribe drenched in nihilistic snobbery, but very, very entertaining one.

jacknews 3y ago

wha? so nerds are enthusiastic detail oriented people, but for bad stuff, but the same attitude toward good stuff is not nerdy? or something. 'dreck' indeed.

ehnto 3y ago
Yeah I love applying nerd to people who think they aren't nerds. Car nerds, gym nerds, bike nerds, wine nerds, beer nerds etc. Passion and depth is all it takes to nerd out on something in my opinion.

jsemrau 3y ago

I recently removed Reddit, Imgur, Twitter from my life and realized there is so much more interesting and edgier content out there.

flappyeagle 3y ago
Where
ehnto 3y ago
Hm, dare I ask what you mean? I also removed those things from my life but it has just made more time for active participation in some of the things I do. I found I had essentially replaced actively nerding out on stuff with passively viewing streams of nerd"ish" stuff.
cableshaft 3y ago
Such as?

ModernMech 3y ago

Insofar as nerdiness is considered to be gaming, that’s gone mainstream. But I don’t think most of the twitch gamers with the transparent cases and neon case lights have the same appreciation for that aesthetic as us LAN nerds did in the 00s. Like, we built those rigs to show them off in person with our friends. They were custom built by hand, each one unique. Now they are commoditized props, jewels in a pastel room meant for streaming over a webcam. They are tax write offs for professional twitch streamers. Has something died in all that? Maybe. Honestly we transitioned to board games. The computer scene got too big, the games got too dumb, and we got too old. Board games still get us together, and they’re just as fun as star craft or enemy territory that we used to play back in the day. Nerd culture is alive and well, it’s just different from when I was a kid.

cableshaft 3y ago
Board games are definitely more interesting now, for the most part (with some exceptions...like I do think The Witness is more interesting than just about any board game I've played or designed). Most of the big video games now are just movies that let you walk or drive around, jump on or climb things, and shoot or swing weapons periodically. Indie games have a bit more experimentation, but most still follow this formula, but with simpler graphics. Board games still experiment with different and interesting mechanisms, like different takes on set collection, drafting, cooperative play, engine building, worker placement, auctions, logic and deduction, etc.

bowsamic 3y ago

The new nerds are the furries posting NSFW inflation art when not writing code, and the transgender extreme Buddhist who writes long essays about attaining the jhanas on her personal blog while writing the code you rely on. Because the stereotypical white western male nerd became completely mainstream and normal

osigurdson 3y ago

I think nerd simply means "has interests".

nbzso 3y ago

Maybe looking into the transhumanism future placed upon us the real hipster and nerds will be born. The fake ones will perish into AI driven oblivion.

jl6 3y ago

Geek culture is things like comic books, video games and Star Wars. Nerd culture is things like recreational mathematics, model trains, and editing Wikipedia.

bradleyjg 3y ago
I don’t like the term nerd, because when I was growing up it was a very hurtful epithet, but exactly this. There’s nothing inherently connecting liking math or computers, on the one hand, and super hero comics on the other. It was just an accident of history.
andrepd 3y ago
Exactly. A nerd is someone who implements emulators for extinct 70s minicomputers, or is deep into niche music. A "geek" (for lack of better word) is the target of this article.
globular-toast 3y ago
Oddly I thought it was the exact opposite. Geeks are really into things that are considered uncool but are really useful, like computers and maths. Nerds are really into things that are uncool but not useful, like comics and video games. It's the latter that went mainstream because it's easy. Anyone can do it. But being a geek requires one to be a bit "special".
- drewcoo 3y ago
  It used to have a lot more to do with time spent at the library. Nerds are bookish. Now libraries have conference rooms (where you might play D&D) and computers and movies to check out. Invasion of the geeks!

shortrounddev 3y ago

I believe there is no counter culture in the west anymore. It is mainstream to be subversive, and so there is little to no subversiveness left

LudwigNagasena 3y ago
There are so many ways to be subversive. But it’s becoming more and more socially costly to be subversive.
- shortrounddev 3y ago
  Can you give an example?
  - LudwigNagasena 3y ago
    Well, planting a bomb or misgendering someone surely will get you in trouble in many places.
thicknavyrain 3y ago
This was already being talked about in the mid-naughties in "The Rebel Sell: How The Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture" by Heath and Potter. Had a big influence on me as a teenager.
russnes 3y ago
counter culture these days is returning to conservative traditions and monotheistic and other long lasting religions
- anthk 3y ago
  Don Quixote did that first at the Enlightenment era, but as a joke from the author, were people was less idealistic/religious like Sancho Panza.
andrepd 3y ago
Unfortunately, as things like irreligion, tolerance for sexual minorities, or left-wing economics became more mainstream, it is now, among the youth, incredible as it may sound, counter-culture to be reactionary. A reverse 1960s of sorts.

apolymath 3y ago

[dead]

davidgerard 3y ago

actual title: All the nerds are dead

v4dok 3y ago

Nerds of the 90s grew up and became a nice (more often than not) affluent market. Industry shifted to accomodate for that. I for one, enjoy it while it lasts. Because of this, a lot of cultural products made sure that the "nerds" felt the heroes of their own stories, making them cool in pop culture. That being said, I always considered a crucial characteristic of a nerd the inability to interact fluently with the social environment, instead focusing their energy online or in very specific niches that shielded them from this social "anxiety". This very much remains, cool kids do "cool" stuff and eloquently interact with their social environment. "Cool stuff" now is probably more "nerdy" than it was 20y ago but the divide is there, I think the author (and me probably) are too old to really see what "nerds" to today.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

littlelady 3y ago

Nerd culture has been mainstream since The Big Bang Theory; le geek c'est chic. D&D, Comic books, nerdy plastic-framed glasses, etc... are all "having a moment". So is nerd culture dying? No, it's just being sold now, too. Nerds will never die, as witnessed by anyone who has ever played D&D with a "rules lawyer". Nerds, the people, who are--according to my own mushy definition: socially awkward people who obsessively pursue a niche interest/hobby that is outside of the mainstream. If their hobby/interest is in the mainstream, they know all the lore, such that, if there is an argument to be had about some small detail, they will be prepared. Legend has it, they are in their basements right at this very moment, studying, reading, preparing, for that argument about whether or not the DM was right about encumbrance...

SkipperCat 3y ago

First define something that doesn't exist. Then, say its dead. Voila!, now you're an astute critic of culture. I never really liked the term "nerd". I always felt it was something used to denigrate people who had interest of passion about something. Maybe people started to fetishize it recently. But either way, can't people just let people enjoy things without classificaiton.

viridian 3y ago

It's sort of like rap music. In a way, the more popular bits have essentially become a part of the commodified dominant monoculture, insofar as we still have a monoculture left. On the other hand, the niche has become significantly more niche after a messy de facto divorce from the 'poppy' parts of rap/nerd culture. The barrier to entry to these subcultures in a way are higher than ever, because the monoculture bits capture and hold the vast majority of people with a more casual interest. This natural schism and reification that develops is something I think David Chapman's "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths"[1] fails to identify, but we have the advantage of over a decade of evolution and hindsight since it was written. [1] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

jeremymcanally 3y ago

He almost hits on what's changed in my brain, but then kind of wanders into this weird criticism of...things people enjoy. I think the shift is that we don't have a monoculture anymore (thanks to the Internet and especially social media) so what seems like we're losing nerd culture and these niche interests in "bad" things really just means that everyone can find them now and likewise folks who are into these niche interests can find each other. This change is creating the (for lack of a better term?) "illusion" of mainstreaming. The people who would be interested were always there. It was just the means of mass cultural communication and spread to reach them with whatever interest weren't. The main "stream" is now the main "lake" and everyone's jumped in. Things you think are "bad" can now reach enough "nerds" who think they're good to reach a modicum of popularity. I view this as maybe a good thing? Of course, the other edge of this sword is that it allows folks who have unhealthy interests and ideas to find each other as well. That's why we've seen an uptick in radical ideologies of all sorts and things like the incel movement take such deep root. Those weren't part of the normalized zeitgeist before, but now that everything's in the pool and given equal cultural footing, it again creates a bubble of popularity that sometimes has an outsized impact. We have decided that algorithms are the answer to this problem, and maybe that's a good answer. But I think we've also decided that commercial driven, ad laden algorithms are not the answer. So I'm not sure we have a good solution currently. Maybe if we spread some AI on it (and throw some ML and heck a few blockchains in for good measure) we can generate something useful.

lengomango 3y ago
Is it true that we don't have a monoculture, though? The author argues that algorithms have reintroduced monoculture: there was a period before the year 2000 when we had a monoculture (because of the scarcity of information) and a period after 2012 when we had a monoculture (because of effective information-sorting algorithms). The kind of cultural fragmentation you're talking about only existed 2000-2012, or in what he calls the 'hipster era.' Post-2012, 'nerdy' things like comic book movies and gaming streams are basically mainstream to the point of being inescapable. People who remember the previous 'pre-nerd' monoculture are primed to think of those things as niche and marginal interests, but they're really not.

andrepd 3y ago

What an incredible article > But imagine a person who collects the boxes from every McDonald’s order he’s ever made, who’s yapping with excitement about the new McDonald’s partially hydrogenated soybean-canola oil blend, who can’t wait for them to release the McBento in Japan so he can watch video reviews all day, and who acts incredibly smug every time McDonald’s posts its quarterly earnings and they’re growing faster than Burger King’s. You know exactly what this person looks like. A total failure of an adult human being.

surgical_fire 3y ago

It died when it became mainstream. Nerd culture nowadays is horribly lame. When I was a kid I loved being a nerd and finding people who shared my hobbies. Now I avoid talking about them.

hnbad 3y ago

Yes and good riddance. There was never such a thing as "nerd culture". It was always exclusionary and toxic, pretending to exist in rebellion against the mainstream while perpetuating the same stereotypes. It was also always defined by consumerism and consumption, just as a "niche" (but still fed by the same large corporations as the mainstream) no different from "artisanal" hipster goods or "underground" grunge merchandise. Nerds have always existed and will continue to exist. "Nerd culture" isn't necessary for that. The Marvel movies weren't a turning point, the rise of the Internet was. Widespread access to the Internet allowed various fandoms to expand, mutate and merge (especially in fanfic and on sites like Tumblr), it also allowed people to find peers in their specific special interest communities rather than having to vaguely seek out "other nerds" and hope they're compatible. People like to posture about "real nerds" versus "geek chic poseurs" but the distinction is arbitrary. Yes, someone wearing a Nirvana shirt who never even heard of the band but likes the grunge aesthetic can easily be dismissed as a "poseur" but most often that distinction just exists to arbitrarily exclude people just as passionate who don't fit your biases. Heck, for most of the 80s and 90s you could have believed women were biologically incapable of being nerds as even that girl wearing glasses and a nerd shirt who could recite every Ferengi rule of acquisition and speak fluent Klingon was clearly just a "poseur", especially if she was conventionally attractive. On a related note I think we've also simply culturally come to understand that the "jock vs nerd" binary is really more of a spectrum and not even a good fit for most people. At least in programming the idea was on its last breath when people ironically (and then unironically) adopted the gymrat "brogrammer" aesthetic, which was luckily shortlived but clearly an act of rebellion against and recuperation of "jock" culture. We've also become more aware that neurodivergence is not simply a lifestyle choice even when it may manifest as such, whereas nerd culture would often ("ironically") replicate the same ableism neurodivergent nerds were subjected to in the mainstream. So in another way, no, nerd "culture" isn't dying, you're just getting old and out of touch.

drKarl 3y ago

In my opinion the author completely mischaracterizes what hipsters and nerds are. Hipster just want to be different, unique, feel that they're not part the mainstream, that is their reason d'être, while nerds are obsessively interested and knowledgeable about a niche topic. The counter-example of someone "obsessive, all-consuming interest in the literature and mysticism of the medieval and early modern eras" would definitely be a nerd of medieval literature. So the definition of nerd as people who love hideous, terrible things, is not only insulting but also inaccurate. To a degree everything can be subjectively considered bad to the uninitiated. Also, I believe the reason why book sales are going up except young fiction which is going down is because younger generation have an increasingly shorter attention span, they've grown used to short videos like Tik-Tok, etc so they can't get bother with reading an actual full length book. I just get chills when I think of the AI generated media (songs, books, movies) in the coming years and decades...

RichardCA 3y ago
AI generated Techno is already a thing, and I can't tell it apart from actual Techno, as per the xkcd cartoon. https://xkcd.com/411/ https://xkcd.com/411/ Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h1sHVw5K6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h1sHVw5K6w

omnicognate 3y ago

Clearly barely anyone here has read far enough into this article to even know what he means by "Nerd Culture". I don't really agree with it, but he makes a specific claim and does so eloquently and emotively. It would be more interesting to discuss that claim than to respond to the title, as most here are doing. Briefly, he's saying that the explosion in information availability has resulted in a form of hyper-aestheticism he associates with "hipsters", based on an idea that individuals with particularly "good taste" could sort through it all and popularise the good stuff, followed, after that failed and hipsterism came to be seen as unoriginal and conformist, by a surrender to corporate media franchises and manufactured culture, which he associates with "nerds". He claims this too is now failing and bleakly attempts to guess what might come next. I think it's a huge oversimplification and I don't think "nerd" is a good term to use for what he's describing, but it's entertaining and would be fun to discuss if HN were capable of that.

drewcoo 3y ago
Fortunately it doesn't take much reading to figure out that this joker redefines words however he likes. Therefore, he is an elbow macaroni, and I refuse to read the work of elbow macaroni.
auggierose 3y ago
Hahaha, I read the article first for some reason (I usually don't), but was then expecting exactly that: everybody discussing the title, not the article itself. I should probably always read the article first, if I don't find the title interesting enough to do that, then reading the comments is probably just a waste of time as well. Yes, his definition of nerd is unusual, but I like it ;-)
viridian 3y ago
Author's quite the judgmental bastard with a strange definition of nerd, but yeah most people ITT are just riffing on the title. It's a bit too prosaic to expect most people to read it in full though, but you get the gist after the first minute or so. That said I get the reason for the title, "Hipster watches as the consoooomers meets the same fate his people did many moons ago" is far less catchy.

liampulles 3y ago

Increasingly I think we are over-connected. I'm not sure human beings are meant to be voicing their opinions with hundreds or thousands of people constantly. But it is addictive enough to be a blatant hypocrite.

jollyllama 3y ago

When I think of nerd culture, I think of people "geeking out" over Star Trek, videogames, tabletop games, etc. Basically, I think of comic book guy from the Simpsons. During my lifetime, a lot of it was saturated with pretension, self-aware or otherwise; it was always kind of a minstrel show. I would agree that many elements of it have gone mainstream.

drewcoo 3y ago
Pretentious . . . like a minstrel show? Do tell, Mr. Interlocutor!

JanneVee 3y ago

I find the analysis flawed. In the article "Marvel is failing because they thought that most people were nerds: that mass audiences would actually want to delve deep into their joyless multiverse and slog through all its lore". Marvel is failing for the simple reason that it has become "content" for an audience that doesn't exist instead of an entertaining movie/series for the masses. And anyone who has tried to point out that the audience doesn't exist is being called all the things that are bad.

the_only_law 3y ago
I have a feeling the same is going to happen with Star Wars films here soon.
- mmvora 3y ago
  To be honest, I think the level of effort that Star Wars (and ig now Disney) has put in to really expand the universe (and add more details to the same story with series' like Bad Batch or Kenobi) can be sufficient to satisfy the hunger of the true fans. Especially when compared to Marvel that basically runs the same characters / stories again in different universes as an excuse for lack of detailed writing....
  - mmvora 3y ago
    But that being said I am not a fan of the token diversity quota characters being added...
- viridian 3y ago
  > soon As a casual observer, I saw people being labelled as sexists basically the minute feedback and viewership numbers started dropping for the middle film in the new trilogy. And the same thing happened for the last one.
- JanneVee 3y ago
  It already happened! The new trilogy and the recent series had this happen to it, the Mandalorian the two first seasons where entertaining but they are back to failing to find an audience.

recursivedoubts 3y ago

A wonderful article, all the more so because I disagree with a lot of it.