> but instead [the potential intellectuals] are drawn to the easy honeypot of modern middlebrow culture because it is too nerdy, too attractive, too omnipresent, to ever leave.
What a strange conclusion. Ignoring auteur theory (the idea that you might bring artistic or intellectual value to an otherwise bland commercial work) entirely, all the author’s hypothesised potential intellectuals are simply making too much money doing Marvel movies…? And finding this intellectually and artistically stimulating enough…?
I don’t think that really tracks at all. It’s very hard to imagine Camus pieing off fighting for the French resistance or Hemingway staying home from the Spanish Civil War because they were satiated by their Funko Pop collections.
I think, generally, people who want to make meaningful contributions to a field are more driven than that, and there are tonnes of excellent critics and theorists - ‘intellectuals’ - working, unmurdered, in the arts today. They are less visible culturally partially because, with the decline of print media, they are not as profitable for media orgs as they previously were.
I do think that our puritanical cultural view of productivity-as-maximally-virtuous has created a lot of guilt in the middle classes about whether they spend their leisure time ‘intellectually enough’, which - though seductive in a masochistic way - is a completely absurd frame once broken down.
I wonder if the author might not be projecting their own anxieties, in this sense, onto their imagined peers.
It's interesting that your two examples are of men whose early adulthoods were shaped by large scale global conflicts, yet you totally dismiss the author's idea that the easy rewards of high status and pay in tech could lure young thinkers into a kind of permanent adolescent 'nerd culture' bubble (reminiscent of a kind of a nightmare glass bead game, centered around the subset of mass media that smart kids enjoyed in the 70s/80s/90s - endless remakes, merchandise, collectables, conventions).
Camus/Hemingway were 'intellectual' in the sense that they sort to engage with the wider world, to explore and to understand and to improve it. 'Productivity' culture gurus are usually not 'intellectual' in that sense at all - and they are often caricatured as having a narrow focus in their work, reductive worldviews, social difficulties, and little compassion for other people. I'd argue that productivity culture is actually tied to nerd culture (both are rooted in the huge rewards that big tech has paid for insect-like specialization) and therefore just as anti-intellectual. People are 'guilted' into learning to code, side hustles, day trading, open-source software, streaming, extra-curriculars, making an app, creating content, etc - not studying political economy, becoming a journalist, joining a political organization.
potential intellectuals are simply making too much money optimising ads on the internet…? And finding this intellectually and artistically stimulating enough…?
isnt this forum where potential intellectuals of this nature gather?
If the author's argument had been: "Gabriel Smith specifically is wasting some of his finite life commenting on this post on HN - which is for nerds" then it would at least have been partially accurate, if a little circular.
It’s very hard to imagine Camus pieing off fighting for the French resistance or Hemingway staying home from the Spanish Civil War because they were satiated by their Funko Pop collections.
It's a lot less hard to imagine a person with the potential to be the next Hemingway staying home because they're satiated by diving headfirst into the MCU though.
Intelligent people throwing their potential away because they've been distracted by some utterly trivial nonsense is not a new story, and it's not really anything society needs to worry about (it's their choice; society has no claim on their potential) but I reckon there's a fair few people who'll be lying on their deathbed with deep regrets about how they made becoming an expert in the canon and lore of a media franchise was a huge waste of time that only really served to funnel money to George Lucas or Marvel.
> It's a lot less hard to imagine a person with the potential to be the next Hemingway staying home because they're satiated by diving headfirst into the MCU
I disagree - I don’t think the MCU and its ilk are satiating enough intellectually if you’re a person who has latent capability for a certain level of contribution.
You’d hope they’d intuit that they were missing something important, and discover - for example - Alan Moore, and continue from there toward slightly more nutritious content, as I suspect most people in this thread did.
But that opinion - though one I hold very strongly - is an opinion I hold because I find that it’s much more beneficial to believe that culture you do not aspire to cannot satiate you. Kind of Pascal’s Wager, but for baby movies. The placebo effect is very strong.
> lying on their deathbed with deep regrets about how they made becoming an expert in the canon and lore of a media franchise
What a heartbreaking image! You’d hope they would be thinking about - for example - their loved ones, or at least reflecting on how they had a lot of fun.
I simply don't buy it. I'm nowhere near 'the next Hemingway', but even someone as mildly creative as myself can not possibly be satisfied with merely consuming, no matter how large the torrent of content before me. I have an overwhelming drive to create. Whether I see good content or slop, both spur me on harder to create -- good content because it inspires me, slop because it enrages me with its waste of its own potential, driving me with a sense of "I can do so much better than that". I can't imagine someone lacking that drive and yet still having the potential to achieve great creative results if only they didn't get distracted.
It seems like the author's point (which would have been easier to parse out had it not been placed at the end of the piece) is directed "nerd" culture's storytelling, which I would describe as being the kind of genre fiction that children consumed in the 50s (limited to comics and pulp novels), that teens consumed later in the century, and that, for the first time over the past couple of decades, is now viewed as entertainment for adults. "Intellectual" here would be someone who is well read and engages with challenging material.
The argument seems to be that this stuff, whose elevation into adult consumption involves situating itself firmly in the realm of middlebrow, lures intelligent and curious young people growing up. But, because there's very little outright critique of it as ultimately a fairly puerile type of content, these young people are never really pushed to try for more challenging stuff that aims at something higher than telling a titillating story. Why? Well for one, it's a self perpetuating situation. Everyone who reads YA fiction knows it's intended for children, but whenever that's said about these middlebrow works, people get defensive and react with insecurity ("You're just pretentious!", "Let people enjoy things!", etc.) I've found that readers of Sanderson's work are shocked when they first hear that people outside of the doorstop fantasy genre often think of it as childish and unremarkable. MCU fans were extremely upset when people like Scorsese leveled these critiques at those films. So people often just avoid pissing off the mob (which usually results in censure-by-vote on sites like reddit where the "Let people enjoy things" mindset not coincidentally has the strongest hold) and keep their opinion to themselves.
I can't disagree too much about the decline of literate intellectuals, but I'm not sure how much this is due to this nerd culture. I think the average person has always consumed primarily escapist slop, or, at best, middlebrow staples like Hemingway. The collapse of education in the US, in which students are often given as many chances to avoid reading as they could want, is likely far more responsible in most books being read belonging to a few low brow genres (romantasy porn for women, lengthslop fantasy novels for men, ghost written political memoirs, etc.) than anything else. The days of books like Naked Lunch being well known enough to cause major controversy are long past, as are the days of concert audiences critical enough to boo Glenn Gould's torpid tempo on Brahms 1 or cause a ruckus at the outrageously novelty of Rite of Spring.
I always thought I was a nerd, but I was never into super heroes or fantasy books/movies and I was never into playing Pokemon or Magic the Gathering. Star Wars didn't appeal to me and neither did Lord Of The Rings nor Narnia nor Harry Potter. I wasn't even that big into video games, although I did spend quite a lot of time playing some of the big titles (Vice City for example) but I spent way more time flying in MS Flight Simulator and FlightGear.
When I was little I was fascinated by big engines and in general driven by the curiosity of wanting to know how everything worked. I would disassemble every piece of electronics in the household. I was into model airplanes and gliders. I was obsessed with building electric motors. I was also really big into steam machines. Everything steam was just cool. Then computers took over my life. Today I find myself nerding out about wood working and back garden agriculture when I'm not doing AI stuff.
> super heroes or fantasy books/movies and I was never into playing Pokemon or Magic the Gathering. Star Wars didn't appeal to me and neither did Lord Of The Rings nor Narnia nor Harry Potter. I wasn't even that big into video games
Some are more mainstream than they were (anything now owned by Disney certainly is) but all of them have been a part of "nerd" culture for a long time.
Some part of it - sure, but (perhaps with an exception of MTG if we stretch it) none of the things listed were even close to being defining or exclusive to that culture. They were a part of everyone's culture in certain demographics.
> it felt like there was not a teenage girl in a hundred miles who had read A Game of Thrones
> I feel a certain lack, an empty space where a particular kind of person should be—all those who used to read comic books
The author describes how there are so few nerds in their ideal, nostalgic time, yet there is somehow a void where there should now be a bountiful amount of nerds in the modern times?
Anecdata tells me the nerds are there. They're just in their own spaces. Out of the public eye.
With the internet the way it is now (bots, scams, AI, overrun of nerd spaces, clamping down of internet speech) I don't blame any of them. You can't be on the public internet anymore and have a good time. The platforms got too big, the rules so impersonal. The interesting people went elsewhere. Left with this hallow "majority". Or as the author says
> it’s problematic that the taste of the majority is swamping out the minority
The "intellectual nerd", the minority, is just elsewhere. If you want to find them, you have to put in the time and the effort to move your eyes or your self there. Cultivate your social surroundings.
The issue with current day "nerd culture" is that it's extremely self-referential. There's no space for anything outside of extremely codified artistic norms and genres. Techno-feudalistic art for a techno-feudalistic age.
We had artists like Sun Ra, Antonioni or Joffè who when asked about their artistic inspirations they would tell you it came from a photograph, from the sound of a specific tree in a park, the way a couple of unknowns they met everyday would talk to each other. If nowadays anyone, director or musician or artist, said anything like that he would be immediately labeled as a pretentious asshole.
All of that has been replaced in favor of an extremely rigid canon made out of permutations of themes found in marvel and dc comics, zombie books, Amblin-like '80s movies, anything strictly fantasy related from J. R. R. Tolkien (seriously, has anyone ever read anything not LoR related from this guy?) and a few other anime and scifi works.
I don’t think the author’s thesis is right, and actually his first inclination is correct. No one starts liking nerdy stuff because Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos does, because no one really wants to be them. They want their money, success, etc. but not to be them, in the way you’d want to be a movie star or athlete.
So I think it’s an under-discussed thing that the art forms which lend themselves to the most profitable “ecosystem” are ones that get pushed in a commercial-driven culture. You can only make so much money by selling people a book or an individual print / painting. Much better to sell merch for your media franchise, which includes books movies toys, etc.
>No one starts liking nerdy stuff because Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos does, because no one really wants to be them
Hmmm, as someone that entered high school around the time Bill Gates left Microsoft and began working at the foundation full time, I actually did genuinely idolize Bill Gates for much of the 2010s. The giving pledge, the focus on global health, the effort spent improving the lives of millions of people. This was also around the time I was regularly reading the GiveWell blog. I have genuinely spent more time fantasizing about philanthropy than I ever have fantasizing about being an athlete or movie star.
That still sounds like you idolized his wealth and ability to use it for philanthropy. Not that you started liking nerdy things because Bill Gates liked them.
It's sad watching Magic: the Gathering shift away from nerds towards mainstream profits. I wasn't a fan of Marvel growing up, but I wonder if there is a similar sense of loss.
MTG started with a metaphor of wizards casting spells at each other, often with dark overtones, and it was heavily game-play focused. The fantasy elements kept most mainstream audiences away. I was drawn to the fringe aspects of both as an adolescent. So were my best friends.
The culture of magic (and nerd-dom in general) has definitely changed, I won't argue that. But when you use an example like this, it kinda undercuts your entire point.
I think that the author is focusing on the symptom rather than the cause.
The current nerd bro culture isn't much different from the jock bro or wall street bro or adventurer bro cultures that preceded it. That it wears clothing familiar to nerds is merely a reflection of the circles in which the power currently lies.
The masses will always emulate the powerful, because that's how you identify yourself as a member (or wannabe) of the power caste. Football quarterback, League of Legends champ, hostile takeover hotshot, first to plant the flag in Antarctica... It's all the same thing: power, and the beahvior of the powerful.
Power is most efficiently (short-term) wielded by the unscrupulous and Machiavellian as they claw the majority of the wealth from the rest. This was true before, and it's true now. You don't have to look too far to see power abuse by a significant segment of the "power nerds", or the virtue signaling to cleanse themselves afterwards. Same shit, different pile.
The "nerd culture" of today is merely a reflection, like every popular wave before it. It won't be "intellectual" because those people were never going to be intellectual. That remains a Platonic dream, unrealized.
i think this has more to do with the innate tendency of a capitalist media machine: getting people into an addictive hype cycle of merchandisable content is profitable, having them read at home isn’t. content that makes one think and question takes time and effort to process and raises the bar for the audience, lowering the profit potential. making stuff that seems clever without being so is even better, the audience feels good about themselves.
Adorno reasoned this decades ago. it’s not difficult to understand why media industries in modern states produce such little thought provoking material. some of it has to do with the fact that it’ll never be popular anyway, but a difference in complexity of material is observable over time and also between countries with more and less capitalist economies.
> when it received its mandate of heaven, can be traced to when The Fellowship of the Ring premiered.
I remember as a 11 year old, the newspaper photo of Frodo looking at Rivendell from the balcony. Knew nothing about LOTR at the time. Instantly knew this was magical.
>> while most intellectuals are nerds, not all nerds are intellectuals. In fact, the majority of nerds aren’t intellectuals.
I'd argue that this is a recent phenomenon that started at exactly the same time the author claims nerd culture finally became dominant, which he associated with the LoTR films.
Nothing mainstream is ever intellectual, and anything that reaches vast audiences simply ends up with a lot of people on the bandwagon trying to imitate it.
Nerd culture is no different from hippie culture or jazz culture, in that 99% of the people who want to claim it are followers. They're incurious, largely cowards who feel safe in numbers, who would've been afraid of those cultures or laughed at them when they were still underground, until peer pressure made them adopt them. Or rather, co-opt them. Because nothing true about those cultures remains once they've been co-opted. Unlike original nerds, hippies or jazz musicians, anyone flaunting those styles now is a conformist. The exact opposite of the nonconformists who pioneered those mentalities. An attention seeker instead of one at odds with society. A people pleaser instead of a rebel.
That being said: Because I'm a nerd from the 80s, I don't care so much about wannabe hippies or jazz snobs. But it's especially galling to watch 20 year old idiots wearing nerd culture like a skin suit.
It's not nerdism, it's just a general infantilism. It suits anyone with power as the plebs now don't have the ability to reason about policy when they're infinitely doom-scrolling 15 second cat videos.
Back in my day, "nerd" meant actually being an intellectual. You know, reading books, doing math, being interested in physics, etc. How did consuming comic book slop become false signaling for what Nerdom once was?
I always thought that "geek" described all those things, and with some level of intellectual accomplishment. Wheras "nerd" was a more obsessive, less self-aware form - like people who know all the stats about a particular comics character.
But apparently I have them reversed in my head, for reasons that unsure of. Perhaps growing-up in a country that was not then saturated with US pop-culture is to blame. Etymology references arent particularly revealing in this case, as they just tell me what I already know.
That’s not really what the word intellectual has meant for the last century. Intellectual is more akin to “liberal arts major” in modern language: philosophers, writers, art critics, etc.
Yeah I have understood intellectuals are more so on the soft end. Where as nerds would be more so on hard end. Engineering, physics, math and such. Where numbers or at least trivia reign supreme.
Correct. Not to say that intellectuals can’t be interested in physics, but it has always been more associated with culture and politics rather than technical subjects.
I was never into comics, but the impression I get is that many "actual nerds" were. And that's something that was clearly visible from the outside.
And since everything nowadays seems to be about surface-level signaling, cultures get represented by whatever is most visible.
So, for "actual nerds", that is comic books, I guess. Nobody will pay attention to what those comic books were (no idea if there were any of the "non-slop" kind). People spending hours poring over some math/physics/other textbook in their homes or libraries weren't exactly visible to the others. They were just the "pasty weirdos".
All of it was "being a nerd" back in your day. "Comic book nerd" was a stereotype that predated the internet by a generation.
People forget that "nerd" was just an insult, it wasn't an identity. It's was something people called you when they were beating the shit out of you for violating social and physical norms, and like the f slur it could be very loosely applied.
> Since when was being a nerd about consumer preferences?
Being a nerd has almost always been about consumer preferences. Everything from baseball cards to anime, comics, D&D, video games, all of the staples of nerd culture are also consumer culture.
The punchline is that it's version 2.0 after some years of turning over in the back of the authors head:
Years ago I published a part of this text in an essay. I was never happy with the original (artistically speaking) so I cannibalised parts for this new essay and memory-holed the original.
I don't buy the article's thesis because tech bros are neither spending on the sector nor are they popular.
I have a simpler explanation, also applies to the 'Otaku-fication' of anime. Miyazaki complained that the people making anime now do nothing but watch anime. Try making Patlabor II now. Same for comic adaptions, upside to them is you can do them if all you ever did was watch TV and read comics. Many games now exclusively deal with the tropes of games.
In a culture where the dominant activity is media consumption you get a Baudrillard-like media-on-media ouroboros without any reference to base reality
> the rise of science fiction or the prominence of science popularizers in the culture
Nothing has done more damage to science and education than science fiction and the heavy handed politics usually injected into it. People are rarely into scifi for the science at all. It's a mostly pretentious and anti-intellectual group. Look at all the dogshit we step in every day about "AI", "the technological singularity", or "living in a simulation". Where do you think the terms came from, and who do you think are the biggest believers in those delusions?
> Now I’m one of the adults and suddenly everyone is a nerd. In fact, nerdom is one of our last uniting cultural forces.
It's a very low effort means of finding acceptance and recognition through trivia and groupthink. Some of the most sociopathic, lowbrow, petty, and generally horrible people I've ever met refer to themselves as "nerds". A cursory glance at reddit would demonstrate this all on its own.
Talented people don't go around putting a label on themselves or promoting ideologies.
> but instead [the potential intellectuals] are drawn to the easy honeypot of modern middlebrow culture because it is too nerdy, too attractive, too omnipresent, to ever leave.
What a strange conclusion. Ignoring auteur theory (the idea that you might bring artistic or intellectual value to an otherwise bland commercial work) entirely, all the author’s hypothesised potential intellectuals are simply making too much money doing Marvel movies…? And finding this intellectually and artistically stimulating enough…?
I don’t think that really tracks at all. It’s very hard to imagine Camus pieing off fighting for the French resistance or Hemingway staying home from the Spanish Civil War because they were satiated by their Funko Pop collections.
I think, generally, people who want to make meaningful contributions to a field are more driven than that, and there are tonnes of excellent critics and theorists - ‘intellectuals’ - working, unmurdered, in the arts today. They are less visible culturally partially because, with the decline of print media, they are not as profitable for media orgs as they previously were.
I do think that our puritanical cultural view of productivity-as-maximally-virtuous has created a lot of guilt in the middle classes about whether they spend their leisure time ‘intellectually enough’, which - though seductive in a masochistic way - is a completely absurd frame once broken down.
I wonder if the author might not be projecting their own anxieties, in this sense, onto their imagined peers.
It's interesting that your two examples are of men whose early adulthoods were shaped by large scale global conflicts, yet you totally dismiss the author's idea that the easy rewards of high status and pay in tech could lure young thinkers into a kind of permanent adolescent 'nerd culture' bubble (reminiscent of a kind of a nightmare glass bead game, centered around the subset of mass media that smart kids enjoyed in the 70s/80s/90s - endless remakes, merchandise, collectables, conventions).
Camus/Hemingway were 'intellectual' in the sense that they sort to engage with the wider world, to explore and to understand and to improve it. 'Productivity' culture gurus are usually not 'intellectual' in that sense at all - and they are often caricatured as having a narrow focus in their work, reductive worldviews, social difficulties, and little compassion for other people. I'd argue that productivity culture is actually tied to nerd culture (both are rooted in the huge rewards that big tech has paid for insect-like specialization) and therefore just as anti-intellectual. People are 'guilted' into learning to code, side hustles, day trading, open-source software, streaming, extra-curriculars, making an app, creating content, etc - not studying political economy, becoming a journalist, joining a political organization.
potential intellectuals are simply making too much money optimising ads on the internet…? And finding this intellectually and artistically stimulating enough…?
isnt this forum where potential intellectuals of this nature gather?
Quite.
If the author's argument had been: "Gabriel Smith specifically is wasting some of his finite life commenting on this post on HN - which is for nerds" then it would at least have been partially accurate, if a little circular.
It’s very hard to imagine Camus pieing off fighting for the French resistance or Hemingway staying home from the Spanish Civil War because they were satiated by their Funko Pop collections.
It's a lot less hard to imagine a person with the potential to be the next Hemingway staying home because they're satiated by diving headfirst into the MCU though.
Intelligent people throwing their potential away because they've been distracted by some utterly trivial nonsense is not a new story, and it's not really anything society needs to worry about (it's their choice; society has no claim on their potential) but I reckon there's a fair few people who'll be lying on their deathbed with deep regrets about how they made becoming an expert in the canon and lore of a media franchise was a huge waste of time that only really served to funnel money to George Lucas or Marvel.
> It's a lot less hard to imagine a person with the potential to be the next Hemingway staying home because they're satiated by diving headfirst into the MCU
I disagree - I don’t think the MCU and its ilk are satiating enough intellectually if you’re a person who has latent capability for a certain level of contribution.
You’d hope they’d intuit that they were missing something important, and discover - for example - Alan Moore, and continue from there toward slightly more nutritious content, as I suspect most people in this thread did.
But that opinion - though one I hold very strongly - is an opinion I hold because I find that it’s much more beneficial to believe that culture you do not aspire to cannot satiate you. Kind of Pascal’s Wager, but for baby movies. The placebo effect is very strong.
> lying on their deathbed with deep regrets about how they made becoming an expert in the canon and lore of a media franchise
What a heartbreaking image! You’d hope they would be thinking about - for example - their loved ones, or at least reflecting on how they had a lot of fun.
Oh but it is something society needs to worry about.
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/hannah-arendt-making-hu...
I simply don't buy it. I'm nowhere near 'the next Hemingway', but even someone as mildly creative as myself can not possibly be satisfied with merely consuming, no matter how large the torrent of content before me. I have an overwhelming drive to create. Whether I see good content or slop, both spur me on harder to create -- good content because it inspires me, slop because it enrages me with its waste of its own potential, driving me with a sense of "I can do so much better than that". I can't imagine someone lacking that drive and yet still having the potential to achieve great creative results if only they didn't get distracted.
It seems like the author's point (which would have been easier to parse out had it not been placed at the end of the piece) is directed "nerd" culture's storytelling, which I would describe as being the kind of genre fiction that children consumed in the 50s (limited to comics and pulp novels), that teens consumed later in the century, and that, for the first time over the past couple of decades, is now viewed as entertainment for adults. "Intellectual" here would be someone who is well read and engages with challenging material.
The argument seems to be that this stuff, whose elevation into adult consumption involves situating itself firmly in the realm of middlebrow, lures intelligent and curious young people growing up. But, because there's very little outright critique of it as ultimately a fairly puerile type of content, these young people are never really pushed to try for more challenging stuff that aims at something higher than telling a titillating story. Why? Well for one, it's a self perpetuating situation. Everyone who reads YA fiction knows it's intended for children, but whenever that's said about these middlebrow works, people get defensive and react with insecurity ("You're just pretentious!", "Let people enjoy things!", etc.) I've found that readers of Sanderson's work are shocked when they first hear that people outside of the doorstop fantasy genre often think of it as childish and unremarkable. MCU fans were extremely upset when people like Scorsese leveled these critiques at those films. So people often just avoid pissing off the mob (which usually results in censure-by-vote on sites like reddit where the "Let people enjoy things" mindset not coincidentally has the strongest hold) and keep their opinion to themselves.
I can't disagree too much about the decline of literate intellectuals, but I'm not sure how much this is due to this nerd culture. I think the average person has always consumed primarily escapist slop, or, at best, middlebrow staples like Hemingway. The collapse of education in the US, in which students are often given as many chances to avoid reading as they could want, is likely far more responsible in most books being read belonging to a few low brow genres (romantasy porn for women, lengthslop fantasy novels for men, ghost written political memoirs, etc.) than anything else. The days of books like Naked Lunch being well known enough to cause major controversy are long past, as are the days of concert audiences critical enough to boo Glenn Gould's torpid tempo on Brahms 1 or cause a ruckus at the outrageously novelty of Rite of Spring.
I always thought I was a nerd, but I was never into super heroes or fantasy books/movies and I was never into playing Pokemon or Magic the Gathering. Star Wars didn't appeal to me and neither did Lord Of The Rings nor Narnia nor Harry Potter. I wasn't even that big into video games, although I did spend quite a lot of time playing some of the big titles (Vice City for example) but I spent way more time flying in MS Flight Simulator and FlightGear.
When I was little I was fascinated by big engines and in general driven by the curiosity of wanting to know how everything worked. I would disassemble every piece of electronics in the household. I was into model airplanes and gliders. I was obsessed with building electric motors. I was also really big into steam machines. Everything steam was just cool. Then computers took over my life. Today I find myself nerding out about wood working and back garden agriculture when I'm not doing AI stuff.
I still believe I qualify as a nerd.
> I still believe I qualify as a nerd.
And you absolutely should! There is not _the_ nerd archetype and never has been.
> super heroes or fantasy books/movies and I was never into playing Pokemon or Magic the Gathering. Star Wars didn't appeal to me and neither did Lord Of The Rings nor Narnia nor Harry Potter. I wasn't even that big into video games
Aren’t all of these things mainstream escapism?
Some are more mainstream than they were (anything now owned by Disney certainly is) but all of them have been a part of "nerd" culture for a long time.
Some part of it - sure, but (perhaps with an exception of MTG if we stretch it) none of the things listed were even close to being defining or exclusive to that culture. They were a part of everyone's culture in certain demographics.
> it felt like there was not a teenage girl in a hundred miles who had read A Game of Thrones
> I feel a certain lack, an empty space where a particular kind of person should be—all those who used to read comic books
The author describes how there are so few nerds in their ideal, nostalgic time, yet there is somehow a void where there should now be a bountiful amount of nerds in the modern times?
Anecdata tells me the nerds are there. They're just in their own spaces. Out of the public eye.
With the internet the way it is now (bots, scams, AI, overrun of nerd spaces, clamping down of internet speech) I don't blame any of them. You can't be on the public internet anymore and have a good time. The platforms got too big, the rules so impersonal. The interesting people went elsewhere. Left with this hallow "majority". Or as the author says
> it’s problematic that the taste of the majority is swamping out the minority
The "intellectual nerd", the minority, is just elsewhere. If you want to find them, you have to put in the time and the effort to move your eyes or your self there. Cultivate your social surroundings.
Not sure I would, in the 2026 culture, sling around the words "murdering intellectuals", even just for title clout.
The issue with current day "nerd culture" is that it's extremely self-referential. There's no space for anything outside of extremely codified artistic norms and genres. Techno-feudalistic art for a techno-feudalistic age.
We had artists like Sun Ra, Antonioni or Joffè who when asked about their artistic inspirations they would tell you it came from a photograph, from the sound of a specific tree in a park, the way a couple of unknowns they met everyday would talk to each other. If nowadays anyone, director or musician or artist, said anything like that he would be immediately labeled as a pretentious asshole.
All of that has been replaced in favor of an extremely rigid canon made out of permutations of themes found in marvel and dc comics, zombie books, Amblin-like '80s movies, anything strictly fantasy related from J. R. R. Tolkien (seriously, has anyone ever read anything not LoR related from this guy?) and a few other anime and scifi works.
I don’t think the author’s thesis is right, and actually his first inclination is correct. No one starts liking nerdy stuff because Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos does, because no one really wants to be them. They want their money, success, etc. but not to be them, in the way you’d want to be a movie star or athlete.
So I think it’s an under-discussed thing that the art forms which lend themselves to the most profitable “ecosystem” are ones that get pushed in a commercial-driven culture. You can only make so much money by selling people a book or an individual print / painting. Much better to sell merch for your media franchise, which includes books movies toys, etc.
>No one starts liking nerdy stuff because Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos does, because no one really wants to be them
Hmmm, as someone that entered high school around the time Bill Gates left Microsoft and began working at the foundation full time, I actually did genuinely idolize Bill Gates for much of the 2010s. The giving pledge, the focus on global health, the effort spent improving the lives of millions of people. This was also around the time I was regularly reading the GiveWell blog. I have genuinely spent more time fantasizing about philanthropy than I ever have fantasizing about being an athlete or movie star.
That still sounds like you idolized his wealth and ability to use it for philanthropy. Not that you started liking nerdy things because Bill Gates liked them.
It's sad watching Magic: the Gathering shift away from nerds towards mainstream profits. I wasn't a fan of Marvel growing up, but I wonder if there is a similar sense of loss.
MTG started with a metaphor of wizards casting spells at each other, often with dark overtones, and it was heavily game-play focused. The fantasy elements kept most mainstream audiences away. I was drawn to the fringe aspects of both as an adolescent. So were my best friends.
Now, it's basically aiming to be Pokemon with game mechanics almost a second thought. Compare an early magic staple, "Demonic Tutor" with https://bossminis.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/881e5922-b464-4a1a... with just the box of one of the latest sets: https://unicorncards.co.uk/images/thumbs/0246004.jpeg to get a sense of the vector.
This makes sense financially, and Wizards of the Coast (MTG producers) is having its best year ever, but capitalism definitely has its downsides.
> Compare an early magic staple, "Demonic Tutor" with https://bossminis.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/881e5922-b464-4a1a... with just the box of one of the latest sets: https://unicorncards.co.uk/images/thumbs/0246004.jpeg to get a sense of the vector.
I mean, you're comparing a black card to the set as a whole? And you think that's fair?
Here are 3 of the top 6 black commanders:
https://cards.scryfall.io/display/front/d/6/d67be074-cdd4-41...
https://cards.scryfall.io/display/front/4/f/4f087b1c-97e0-43...
https://cards.scryfall.io/display/front/7/2/72e4548b-c171-4f...
The culture of magic (and nerd-dom in general) has definitely changed, I won't argue that. But when you use an example like this, it kinda undercuts your entire point.
Only one of those cards was printed in the last 4 years (and it was planned 3 years ago). The shift is somewhat more recent than that.
If they had printed a Ninja Turtles set for MTG in 1997, that would have been the end of the game and most people wouldn’t have ever heard of it.
I think that the author is focusing on the symptom rather than the cause.
The current nerd bro culture isn't much different from the jock bro or wall street bro or adventurer bro cultures that preceded it. That it wears clothing familiar to nerds is merely a reflection of the circles in which the power currently lies.
The masses will always emulate the powerful, because that's how you identify yourself as a member (or wannabe) of the power caste. Football quarterback, League of Legends champ, hostile takeover hotshot, first to plant the flag in Antarctica... It's all the same thing: power, and the beahvior of the powerful.
Power is most efficiently (short-term) wielded by the unscrupulous and Machiavellian as they claw the majority of the wealth from the rest. This was true before, and it's true now. You don't have to look too far to see power abuse by a significant segment of the "power nerds", or the virtue signaling to cleanse themselves afterwards. Same shit, different pile.
The "nerd culture" of today is merely a reflection, like every popular wave before it. It won't be "intellectual" because those people were never going to be intellectual. That remains a Platonic dream, unrealized.
Could have been put in a few short sentences, most of which would be wrong.
Wouldn't be a substack article without some waddling around to make sure subscribers feel they get their money's worth.
i think this has more to do with the innate tendency of a capitalist media machine: getting people into an addictive hype cycle of merchandisable content is profitable, having them read at home isn’t. content that makes one think and question takes time and effort to process and raises the bar for the audience, lowering the profit potential. making stuff that seems clever without being so is even better, the audience feels good about themselves.
Adorno reasoned this decades ago. it’s not difficult to understand why media industries in modern states produce such little thought provoking material. some of it has to do with the fact that it’ll never be popular anyway, but a difference in complexity of material is observable over time and also between countries with more and less capitalist economies.
> when it received its mandate of heaven, can be traced to when The Fellowship of the Ring premiered.
I remember as a 11 year old, the newspaper photo of Frodo looking at Rivendell from the balcony. Knew nothing about LOTR at the time. Instantly knew this was magical.
there used to be a distinction between nerds and geeks
>> while most intellectuals are nerds, not all nerds are intellectuals. In fact, the majority of nerds aren’t intellectuals.
I'd argue that this is a recent phenomenon that started at exactly the same time the author claims nerd culture finally became dominant, which he associated with the LoTR films.
Nothing mainstream is ever intellectual, and anything that reaches vast audiences simply ends up with a lot of people on the bandwagon trying to imitate it.
Nerd culture is no different from hippie culture or jazz culture, in that 99% of the people who want to claim it are followers. They're incurious, largely cowards who feel safe in numbers, who would've been afraid of those cultures or laughed at them when they were still underground, until peer pressure made them adopt them. Or rather, co-opt them. Because nothing true about those cultures remains once they've been co-opted. Unlike original nerds, hippies or jazz musicians, anyone flaunting those styles now is a conformist. The exact opposite of the nonconformists who pioneered those mentalities. An attention seeker instead of one at odds with society. A people pleaser instead of a rebel.
That being said: Because I'm a nerd from the 80s, I don't care so much about wannabe hippies or jazz snobs. But it's especially galling to watch 20 year old idiots wearing nerd culture like a skin suit.
Agreed
It's not nerdism, it's just a general infantilism. It suits anyone with power as the plebs now don't have the ability to reason about policy when they're infinitely doom-scrolling 15 second cat videos.
Back in my day, "nerd" meant actually being an intellectual. You know, reading books, doing math, being interested in physics, etc. How did consuming comic book slop become false signaling for what Nerdom once was?
I always thought that "geek" described all those things, and with some level of intellectual accomplishment. Wheras "nerd" was a more obsessive, less self-aware form - like people who know all the stats about a particular comics character.
But apparently I have them reversed in my head, for reasons that unsure of. Perhaps growing-up in a country that was not then saturated with US pop-culture is to blame. Etymology references arent particularly revealing in this case, as they just tell me what I already know.
Yeah, growing up in New York it was the reverse of these.
That’s not really what the word intellectual has meant for the last century. Intellectual is more akin to “liberal arts major” in modern language: philosophers, writers, art critics, etc.
Yeah I have understood intellectuals are more so on the soft end. Where as nerds would be more so on hard end. Engineering, physics, math and such. Where numbers or at least trivia reign supreme.
Correct. Not to say that intellectuals can’t be interested in physics, but it has always been more associated with culture and politics rather than technical subjects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual
I was never into comics, but the impression I get is that many "actual nerds" were. And that's something that was clearly visible from the outside.
And since everything nowadays seems to be about surface-level signaling, cultures get represented by whatever is most visible.
So, for "actual nerds", that is comic books, I guess. Nobody will pay attention to what those comic books were (no idea if there were any of the "non-slop" kind). People spending hours poring over some math/physics/other textbook in their homes or libraries weren't exactly visible to the others. They were just the "pasty weirdos".
All of it was "being a nerd" back in your day. "Comic book nerd" was a stereotype that predated the internet by a generation.
People forget that "nerd" was just an insult, it wasn't an identity. It's was something people called you when they were beating the shit out of you for violating social and physical norms, and like the f slur it could be very loosely applied.
Came here to say exactly this. Since when was being a nerd about consumer preferences?
But then I start wondering if we are just gatekeeping nerddom?
> Since when was being a nerd about consumer preferences?
Being a nerd has almost always been about consumer preferences. Everything from baseball cards to anime, comics, D&D, video games, all of the staples of nerd culture are also consumer culture.
The article’s length planning and argumentative process are too bad to feel like AI slop.
It's human slop.
Warms the heart to see it
The punchline is that it's version 2.0 after some years of turning over in the back of the authors head:
I don't buy the article's thesis because tech bros are neither spending on the sector nor are they popular.
I have a simpler explanation, also applies to the 'Otaku-fication' of anime. Miyazaki complained that the people making anime now do nothing but watch anime. Try making Patlabor II now. Same for comic adaptions, upside to them is you can do them if all you ever did was watch TV and read comics. Many games now exclusively deal with the tropes of games.
In a culture where the dominant activity is media consumption you get a Baudrillard-like media-on-media ouroboros without any reference to base reality
Yes. The whole premise seems shoehorned and based on the author neither liking the Marvel Universe nor billionaires.
> the rise of science fiction or the prominence of science popularizers in the culture
Nothing has done more damage to science and education than science fiction and the heavy handed politics usually injected into it. People are rarely into scifi for the science at all. It's a mostly pretentious and anti-intellectual group. Look at all the dogshit we step in every day about "AI", "the technological singularity", or "living in a simulation". Where do you think the terms came from, and who do you think are the biggest believers in those delusions?
> Now I’m one of the adults and suddenly everyone is a nerd. In fact, nerdom is one of our last uniting cultural forces.
It's a very low effort means of finding acceptance and recognition through trivia and groupthink. Some of the most sociopathic, lowbrow, petty, and generally horrible people I've ever met refer to themselves as "nerds". A cursory glance at reddit would demonstrate this all on its own.
Talented people don't go around putting a label on themselves or promoting ideologies.