Nerds were required on the early internet for community building - to run IRC and TS and phpBB. These days everyone has these tools. But as with the media monopoly dying, this is not a strictly better or worse thing, it's just different. And generally I like it when we get rid of gatekeeping.

The hot people are now in charge, just like everywhere else.

Nerds wield potentially vast collective bargaining power if we refused to contribute to the systems that exploit our expertise and labor for the benefit of the ownership class. We could simply drop out and support one another with all our surplus time. Easier said than done, of course, but at this point I have to dream of bold alternatives to keep myself sane. The status quo and its present trajectory are just too unthinkably broken to have faith in incrementalism while the accelerationists are punishing us for our complacency in replacing rotted, unsustainable systems.