Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals
theintrinsicperspective.com
theintrinsicperspective.com
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 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.
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/hannah-arendt-making-hu...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes - the former are high-risk actions motivated (at least partially) by a collectivist urge to help other people. The latter is significantly lower risk, and generally individualistically motivated, which is what I think you're pointing towards. I used those examples specifically to highlight that people, especially 'intellectuals', can hold intellectual beliefs very strongly, often at significant risk to themselves, and that those beliefs are often partially sparked by geopolitical events.
The author's implied argument is that the soft gaze of the MCU might either avert beliefs of that strength, or render them impotent. Or indeed prevent the geopolitical events which partially formed those beliefs from being of interest, and of cultural importance (or happening at all, I suppose, like when Superman fights Hitler in the WW2-era DC stuff). This attributes a hell of a lot of power to contemporary "nerd culture" which I simply do not think it has. It's a relatively safe argument to dismiss because it is deeply silly.
Not least because if this imagined intellectual's positions were so flimsy that they'd go weak at the knees after a wink from Wonder Woman or Wolverine, I'd be skeptical of the person's intellectual capacity in the first place. To frame it as something akin to a lost generation of intellectual capacity is laughable - it's nothing at all like, for example, the intellectual work we lost to the AIDs epidemic. We're talking about literal baby movies.
Do you mean that you think "studying political economy, becoming a journalist, joining a political organization" was equivalent in that it was also guilt-motivated, at a time when you think these attributes were seen as of higher cultural virtue, and we have since culturally become more individualistic? I'm not sure I fully followed, but that would perhaps be a more tractable idea, I think.
In the past, this kind of one-dimensional inward-looking person was widely ridiculed as selfish, weak, a moral failure and an embarrassment. Unattractive and uninspiring. Perhaps even a genuine threat to society. Notes from the underground, Ivan Karamazov, Faust, Glass bead game, etc. I was reading 'nerd culture' as the celebration and acceptance of this kind of man in the current zeitgeist.
The point is that the heroes in the MCU stories didn't have to outgrow their nerd phase through virtues like courage, responsibility, duty - instead science made them into men. Peter Parker is bit by a spider, The Hulk got irradiated, Captain America got injected, Tony Stark's invention is a literal shell which superficially turns him into Iron Man and protects him from consequences/reality.
Hemingway travelled to a war zone and got shot - he's the polar opposite of these characters, and a far better example for young men.
RE guilt -> I was actually saying that productivity culture as you describe it has some overlap with nerd culture as OP sees it, and arguing that P.C. is also anti(faux?)-intellectual in the same sense. But yes, I do think that the high esteem those virtues were once held in influenced the lives people chose to live.
Your "science made them men" point feels astute, compact, and one that feels familiar, as if I've come across it before in some form, relating to an older context, but I'm not sure where. If it's not an original take, I'd really like to read whoever you read it in. It's very sharp.
More broadly, "getting MKULTRA'd is an epic path toward maturity" is a deeply / darkly funny message.
Tell us you know nothing of those characters without telling us you know nothing of those characters.
For both brevity and character recognition, I'll stick to Spider-Man. This is a character who starts off as an average person like any one of us, and suddenly, he's granted amazing powers after being bitten by a spider. However, that isn't what makes him a hero.
No, what makes Spider-Man a hero is his underlying theme of responsibility. He recognizes (largely due to his uncle's teachings) that he has a duty to use his powers to help others.
Unfortunately, his hero persona effectively ruins his life -- he regularly loses friends and loved ones, and his constant need to jump to the rescue of others prevents him from ever holding down a reasonable job, leaving him barely scraping by most of the time.
It's not all rainbows and unicorns for his hero persona, either, as the editor/owner of New York's top journalism outlet, the Daily Bugle, spends all of his time and effort portraying Spider-Man as a villain, he has a huge rogues gallery trying to kill him, and it's pretty common for other Marvel heroes to ignore or refuse him help when he needs it.
Leaving his costume behind and blending in with the rest of New York would unquestionably improve his life, and yet, he soldiers on, because he recognizes that should he do so, people will suffer and die for it.
Now, if you're only familiar with the movies, I'll grant that they haven't always done a good job at showing this. Sure, Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man lost his uncle early on, and his failure saving Gwen Stacy was tragic, but we never really see his hero persona impacting his regular day-to-day life. Tom Holland's Spider-Man largely has the same issue: we don't even see his uncle die, and it's not until nearly the end of his third movie that he finally loses someone. His choice to be forgotten at the end only sets up the possibility that he may finally be portrayed correctly in follow-up movies (I haven't seen the newest one yet).
If for some reason you feel the need to stick to films, the ones that come closest to capture how rough things are for Peter Parker trying to balance his private and hero lives, you're best off watching the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films, and in particular, the second one.
But realize that none of the movies get close to how bad Peter has it in the comics. It's somewhat of a meme that the Spider-Man writers hate Peter, given how much punishment they dole out to the character for daring to try and help others. As a result, he's constantly questioning whether he's making a difference and whether he should give it up, and it reaches a point where even the One Above All (i.e., God in the Marvel universe) has to give the guy a pep talk. But, in the end, he always rises to the occasion, no matter how much personal sacrifice he has to make.
That is why Peter Parker is a hero.
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.
And you absolutely should! There is not _the_ nerd archetype and never has been.
Aren’t all of these things mainstream escapism?
But what you're talking about in the first paragraph is what people used to call "geek" culture, and what you're talking about in the second is what people tended to call "nerd" culture.
These are geekisms:
>super heroes
>fantasy books/movies
>Pokemon
>Magic the Gathering
>Star Wars
>Lord Of The Rings
>Narnia
>Harry Potter
>video games
Here you describe nerdisms:
>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.
Geeks consoom, nerds understand and tinker/build.
Most video games are geek (consoom), tools like Siemens NX or Adobe Master Collection CS6 are nerd (should be thought of as extremely open-ended games), simulators wobble between my classifications depending on accuracy/depth (Minecraft, Sims: geek; NX Nastran, flight/train/truck/forklift simulators: nerd).
> 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.
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.
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.
Hopefully there's no island in this fantasy
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.
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.
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.
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.
The word "pretentious" doesn't even make sense in most usages. What does the person have pretentions of? How do you know they do, and aren't being genuine? This isn't even what the word means anymore; it just means either intellectual and/or philosophically idealist.
> Nerd culture used to be a stepping stone for many curious people—they might start with science fiction, fantasy, or comics, then branch into philosophy, literature, history, and art. Now that nerd culture has become mainstream and endlessly rewarding on its own, more people stay immersed in fictional worlds instead of expanding into broader intellectual pursuits.
It’s an interesting idea. I’m skeptical though. And I’m not sure if there’s any way to measure this I would guess there’s more intellectuals than there’s ever been before due to increasing populations and literary literacy rates and access.
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.
The nerds responded by making their own niche of it, via action figures and books.
Everything got weird with the release of the prequels, which were not as popular with mainstream audiences. The nerds really bought into them, for reasons I admit I still don't fully understand. They had kept a flame for the franchise that mainstream audiences had largely dropped, but the nerds loved the new things to obsess about.
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'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.
But honestly, I would dispute the starting quote here; who has any evidence that most intellectuals are nerds? I might more easily accept that most nerds grew into intellectuals, but I’m pretty skeptical that most intellectual always have been nerds.
There's nothing novel about that in the age of smartphones. The afflictions of the socially isolated, overstimulated, detached and anxious nerd have gone mainstream.
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".
But then I start wondering if we are just gatekeeping nerddom?
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.
In any case, I am not sure anything of this has to do with "being a nerd" per se, if I even get to understand how to properly define a category based on a term that has most often than not served as an exonym (or used to). But if I ignore this part, I would say that stuff like eg marvel comics is akin to fast food, and now it goes from being a "nerd's fast food" to being "normie's fast food". In either case, making stuff like "marvel comics" a definitional point of being a nerd seems absurd to me (and I have read tons of marvel comics in my life).
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.
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.
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.
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
To me, it is a strong indicator that advertisers need to be reeled in with advertisement control legislation: make advertisers liable for yanking ads or monetization on speech grounds. Huggies Diapers and Johnson & Johnson should not be able to pull [funding for] their ads from content which could be potentially undesirable without incurring legal risk of civil suit.
Also I want to see all people who are paid to shill a product (like testimonials) be forced to say "$COMPANY paid me $THOUSAND to tell you $MESSAGE," to alleviate the psychological vulnerability of social proofing. It should be a felony to be paid (even by quid pro quo) by someone else to say something which has a commercial or political impact, without disclosing that payment and its value. Things people say should be entirely their opinion shared for no monetary kickback or other kinds of favor (such as discounts, free extras, club memberships, etc). This does not apply for selling the opinion to those receiving it, so lawyers and consultants [and similar] are exempt.
The industry has to be brought to heel for what they have been doing to our language, and how they have spurred the online demonetization/censorship tyranny. No single platform can defect from the current norms due to financial reliance on advertisers, but if it were law then advertisers could not use revocation of their funds to punish protection of free speech.
I'm saying they shouldn't because it is lazy, crass, distasteful and clickbaity.
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.
The article left me with just two questions: what the heck is an "intellectual" and why do we need them?
It's human slop.
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.Most of the nerd culture as described is consumerist shit, and it’s very low hanging fruit. Nobody is getting bothered and hot reading op amp data sheets.
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.