A girl broke my heart, I dramatically (I was 22) plugged "Why aren't nerds popular," into Google, found PG's essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html), read the other ones, and decided to become a Lisp Jedi.
This is possibly one of the most infamous of all Slashdot threads - it was a collection of emails detailing how it was to be an outsider in the days after Columbine.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from...
If the stories in this post are interesting to you, a book to consider would be Geeks, by Jon Katz.
This group isn't exactly the nerd clique of the 90s. Motivations of this group are driven by status-seeking, both among peers and college admissions officers, unlike the pure passion motivation nerds of the 90s are known for. But this group offers a realistic path of a 90s-style nerd to popularity.
That's not a change. That clique existed in 1990s high schools. They were known as "preps" back then, and were the opposite of "nerds". "Jocks" were preps who played sports.