Nerd culture is killing intellectualism
Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals
The author reflects on how nerd culture, once a niche interest, has become mainstream, thanks in part to the tech industry's rise and the wealth of its founders. While this has brought benefits like the popularity of sci-fi, it also has downsides: blockbuster movies are now CGI-heavy, and the dominance of nerd tastes may be stifling high culture. The author argues that many nerds, instead of evolving into intellectuals, are drawn to middlebrow entertainment, leaving a gap in serious artistic and intellectual pursuits.
Nerdom ascended because it was the nerds themselves who got rich. Really rich. Like Bill Gates rich.
- gabriel666smith
> 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 sens […]
- dachworker
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.
- cobertos
> 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.
- tavavex
I disagree with the way the author describes nerds. What makes something nerdy isn't inherent to the work. There's nothing about Star Wars that would always be 'weird'. Nerdiness in my opinion is the enjoyment of something niche that the surrounding society views as disproportionate obsession or an unusual interest that goes against the cultural norm. It's not that everyone has turned into nerds, it's that things that were once nerdy have broken into the mainstream. It makes sense because many of these words are good, many of them are visual to appeal to our increasingly non-reading societies, and because these works can become societal anchor points that everyone can reference and anyone will understand. We only needed to wait out until society got over itself and integrated these things into the social fabric.
While there are still superfans of Star Wars and Marvel, nerds in the sense of the word from 20 years ago are elsewhere, enjoying other niche things. Many people see the enjoyment of the over-commercialized, endless streams of content of the once-nerdy IPs as a bit passé. The nerds still exist, just not necessarily there.