Is Nerd Culture Dying?
samkriss.substack.com
samkriss.substack.com
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.
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 ;-)
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.
So you yourself acknowledge it's a bad article and the author plays fast and loose with common terms, yet somehow HN is to blame?
> would be fun to discuss if HN were capable of that.
It sure would be, but could we pick a more sophisticated baseline than a multi-page rant about Marvel movies (who are almost universally understood to be pretty bad by adults, and are targeted at a less discerning demographic, e.g. 15-19 male)
> he makes a specific claim and does so eloquently and emotively.
Brevity is the sister of talent. If one has a point to make, it should be made prior to the halfway point of their diatribe. That's the least they could do just out of basic respect to their audience, unless they're just Twitter-shouting into the void.
Therefore, he is an elbow macaroni, and I refuse to read the work of elbow macaroni.
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...
Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h1sHVw5K6w
The fact that mainstream has co-opted many of the past nerdy things doesn't mean they are gone. They have just moved to new not so visible things. And those are hard to see in sea of all the content produced. Independent podcast and comics are a thing. And then there is novels and such from China, Korea and Japan. Some of these more mainstream already lot less.
> In conclusion, the earliest instances of this remark were anonymous. The comedians Rags Ragland and Ukie Sherin employed the quip, as did the writer John McNulty. In addition, there is some evidence that Yogi Berra employed the joke, but in all cases the jest was already in circulation.
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.
Care to provide some examples? Most "nerd" interests like SciFi have been neutered if not completely bent out of shape while going mainstream.
Kudos to Disney that was able to completely ruin it in just a decade.
Most "nerd" interests like SciFi have been neutered if not completely bent out of shape while going mainstream
So no, it's not nerd culture that is dying, it's mainstream "nerdism" that committed suicide.
Nerd culture was never mainstream, MCU wasn't nerd culture becoming mainstream, it was "squeeze the lemon and hope it sticks".
And it did for a while, but not understanding what's the appeal of nerd culture for nerds, they went back to producing blockbusters that kinda resembles marvel if you squint hard enough, but it's actually the same thing of watching independence day set in a World where they replaced Jeff Goldblum with a guy dressed like a superhero.
Nerd are still enjoying their nerdy stuff, while completely ignoring mainstream travesties from multi-billion-dollars corporations.
MCU is not the same MCU nerds were crazy about when they were kids, in the same way kids today consider what we called nerd stuff back then as "old people garbage"
Video games have gone mainstream.
Internet has gone mainstream.
Anime has gone mainstream.
"AI" has gone mainstream.
I think it's fair to say that nerd culture does, has, and always will exist, but what nerd culture is changes with the passing sands of time. The nerds of today are not the nerds of yesteryear (read: us).
For me, a nerd is also someone who sticks to the hole and builds their own labyrinth to some degree.
I've tried in vain to find people at parties who care about my favourite arcane programming languages and obscure political doctrine, it's impossible :(
I am still tight with my group of 7 guys from school and we are all nerds but hardly share a single interest. We are interested in hearing about each other's niche shit and that's what keeps us together.
While that's nice and all, it's not super helpful advice for people who are trying to make new friends, as we cannot go back in time and repeat school from younger days...
The point is: your friends don't have to be interested in exactly the same stuff as you, they just need to be interested in you.
It's ok to want to look for people with common interests, just as it's ok to feel it's enough to spend time with people you don't have a lot of common interests with.
If you wanna find people to talk about finance, you wouldn't attend a football match, for example. So if you wanna find programmers, you're gonna have to attend programming related events, or some related area like hardware hacking, or just generally "makers" meetup.
For political groups, there tend to be groups of those all over the world, for every affiliation, but depending on the ideology and the overall political temperature, sometimes people try to avoid letting those opinions bleed over to other areas of interest.
Eg I wanted to benchmark the CPU inside my Apple Watch last week and I couldn't find any off-the-shelf apps that do this, so I had to learn enough Swift to create a basic UI with a start button and a multiply-and-add loop that pegs a CPU core. I would never learn a new language if I didn't have to.
Another example: I couldn't find any reasonably priced tool chests so I bought a table saw with the intention of building my own tool chests out of plywood next week. When I mentioned this to nerdy/technical friends, they were all interested because they also had a metric fuckton of tools, computer hardware, solvents, etc that they wanted to store efficiently. I think if you worked on more practical projects like this you'd be a lot more popular at parties where most attendees are engineers.
Given you talk about ‘poseurs’ you sound more like a hipster than a geek.
We've seen this many times. Star Trek being probably a very notable example, where the fancy new original Series was a great disappointment for many fans, while the (semi)comedy-version from a fan became the preferred love of this fans.
On video games, even simple games like BSD trek and Super-Star-Trek on Python3 have great designs and still be played. The same with roguelikes like Nethack/Slashem.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Take a tour around the popular subreddits to see if we have a fragmented culture. I’m often blown away how popular some niche subreddit that I’ve literally never heard of will be even though I’ve been on Reddit for 15+ years! The panoply of ideas and interests on there is super cool to see.
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.
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.
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.
Now libraries have conference rooms (where you might play D&D) and computers and movies to check out. Invasion of the geeks!
The process is called recuperation: under modern capitalism, the capitalist will not just sell you the rope to hang him with, he will also sell you the prop guillotine, the Che Guevara shirt and the music and movies that let you safely live out your fantasy from the comfort of your own home. It's impossible to create truly anti-capitalist media because anti-capitalist media has become just another product to consume. The machine will gleefully support you in raging against it as long as you do it in a way that contributes to it.
In the end, this is what killed hipster culture: if you want indie bands, the market will happily provide you with thousands of them, all "unique" but interchangeable. If you want "artisinal" products, the market will happily produce them at scale. By buying a product you directly contribute to its popularity and mass market appeal.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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?
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.