I, too, would like to write (very belatedly) about Sam Kriss’ All the nerds are dead. I don’t think nerds are merely dead or dying, they’ve been turned into zombies, mindless and trying to infect everything they can touch into their own consumptive image.
I’ve written in a previous blog:
I’ve always hated the term “gamer” but I’ve always fancied myself an “old guard” nerd. I’ve written before how the idea of “nerddom” being an expanding culture is anathema because it is, at its core, a holy haven of escapism. That is to say, there could be said to be two factions: “orthodox nerds” who gravitated to traditionally nerdy subjects and media because that was the only way we could really understand the world around us; the people who were ostracized and marginalized, who argue about plot minutiae in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation because it’s legitimately important to us that that world be as tangible as possible. Then there’s the “pop nerds”; the ones who I would say are in it because it’s cool or trendy.
In the past I refused to identify as a “gamer” because I thought the term ought to be reserved for the nerd orthodoxy in gaming, so I sort of viewed the label as derisively misappropriated. I’ve always been quietly of the opinion that the media favored by the nerd orthodoxy should remain in their control as a sort of petulant impractical exclusivity—or at the very least they ought to be what drives those media. While I don’t fancy them on a conceptual level, I’ve never bothered to discriminate between people I meet in games that might fall into the latter camp, I might only pass benign silent judgment. After all, a quiet accusation that an individual is “not a true nerd” is really nothing more than an appeasement of one’s own ego anyways.
But here’s where I’m going with this: my idea of the “nerd orthodoxy” excluded women as a rule. Now don’t get me wrong, I love women (married to one) and I love female nerds (married to one) and I’ve played with many many many women in games over the years. When I say “excluded women as a rule” it goes unsaid that I believe there are plenty of exceptions to that rule.
Here’s what I mean. My wife is rather introverted (she’s warm and personable and not antisocial but she prefers small company if any) and to her life is perfect with a bowl full of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and a browser overflowing with tabs to FanFiction.net on her laptop. To me, even before I met her, that’s what the quintessential female nerd looks like. There’s millions of women out there like this.
But there’s still more women and girls (and men etc.) who don’t really meet that description who nonetheless enjoy video games, so while I would get along with most people who play games just fine I maintained a sort of smug detachment from many of them.
I’ve had to cut a lot of the source of this down because WOW it’s pedantic and pretentious, also it’s mostly about GG which is now cringe and not quite relevant here. Actually wait, it’s extremely funny in the context of reacting to “nerds are dead”.
Anyways, this isn’t quite getting across what I was looking for but it’s the most recent surviving example (from 2015) of an older take I would have had on “nerd”, that it was a form of hobbyism that was somehow more pure and good than most others, that it was something being invaded by outsiders and worth defending though maybe there was value in spreading the good word.
Nowadays I would kind of nod along with Sam.
For the last decade, mass culture has been nerd culture, and a nerd is someone who likes things that aren’t good.
I hate Sam’s dry, trying-too-hard-to-be-ironic contrarianism that wants to be high-cultured and historically literate but can’t correctly spell “Rimsky-Korsakov”1, yet this is just so right I feel it in my bones.
You may or may not be surprised to learn I would no longer voluntarily self-describe as a nerd (or gamer, yuck). Don’t get me wrong, I still think I’m cooler than the sorts of people who like every new cultural zeitgeist, I’ve just stopped believing there’s a difference between the orthodoxy and anything else.
Marvel is failing because they thought that most people were nerds: that mass audiences would actually want to delve deep into their joyless multiverse and slog through all its lore. Nerds like that sort of activity; nerds don’t need to actually like the things they like. But not everyone has the good fortune to be a machine: most people are not nerds.
Ah but here is where I depart. If we’re deriding nerds as the people who like things that are not good you’re all-but-tautologically incorrect when you go on to say the average living human is not a nerd. By this token the average person, far from cultured and discriminating, is more of a nerd than Gygax in his basement in the 70s.
Let’s back up just a little bit to do a little more of a critique on the base material. A lot of this groundwork has already been done for me by Scott Alexander.
Scott notes that Sam calls nerds people who like things that are “bad” and then goes on to equivocate between bad and the MCU, which is, fairly or unfairly, the popular whipping boy for these kinds of discussions. So much so, I wonder if invoking the MCU as a post-ironic critique of pop culture has been bitten by the zombie of the thing it’s criticizing inasmuch as hating Marvel is a thing people get weirdly passionate about now.
Scott also think’s Sam’s description of nerd is unfair to the sort of traditional bookish math/computer trope. He suggests that hipsters and nerds are different sides of the same coin, sorted by how much competition there is in investing in a particular identity, which I think makes for a good narrative to explain my zombie metaphor.
Investing in nerd preference identities is the virus. Nerd preferences used to be obscure. The traditional-bookish-math/computer-trope nerd was more of a hipster subgenre, a pathogen sequestered. At some critical mass of mainstream culture tapping into nerd culture, the virus was let loose and the outbreak took hold.
The thing is nerds weren’t hyperprotective of their preferences, which was part of what I as a fringe-nerd in 2015 was arguing for way up at the top and, contra to the stereotype, generic nerds were too welcoming. Any nerd preference that was at all accessible became blood in the water, the car alarm letting the horde know where the nearest survivors were.
Where the zombie metaphor sort of falls apart is in arguing over who had poor taste first, whether it was nerd preferences that infected normie preferences or vice-versa, whether people who already had poor taste were clamoring to be infected by the specific nerd brand of having poor taste. Either way, having poor taste and being invested in the accessible identity of having poor taste hit its critical mass. You didn’t just get to like bad things anymore, you got to be a fan of bad things—you got to gather in throngs to celebrate the bad things secure in the euphoria of common-bad-thing-liking. Having poor taste is now a status marker.
So if all the normies are nerds now why is Marvel failing? Simple: it’s not bad enough. Not for a lack of trying, but think about it, everything Marvel you’ve heard about in the last few years have been the lucky gems that Marvel Studios has put out that were genuinely exceptionally bad. Nobody gives a shit about half the streaming series they put out because they aren’t good enough at being bad for anyone to care.
Also there’s a more intense competition in the bad things market these days. I swore off TV and the streaming equivalent partly because the zeitgeist was so frequently wrong on quality that it was easier to just filter out the entire morass. There’s so much bad that if I wanted to find anything good it’s impossible to know where to start—I’d to go track down a genuine hipster to get good leads, and even they probably can’t be trusted.
Psh if you’re so smug and highbrow what are you into that’s so great? You’re not even asking the right question, the things I like are neither things that confer status for claiming to like2 nor things that I treat as central to my identity. My identity is more wrapped up in smug quasi-post-ironic soft-contrarian internet centrism, thus this dumb ass blog post. LOL that’s not good either NERD yeah okay but it’s not even something I like when other people do it, I don’t go looking for other smug quasi-post-ironic soft-contrarian internet centrists to form our own smug quasi-post-ironic soft-contrarian internet centrism fangroups, I’m not joining the SQISCIC Discord and organizing SQISCIC meetups and conventions. I haven’t thrown away money to own the t-shirts.
The modern nerd-as-zombie tends to be obnoxious not just because they build their identities out of the most inane stuff they can grab on to, it’s because they get defensive over the idea that someone else wouldn’t do that. I don’t have an obsession with validation that hinges on my identity, like look at this Substack, I’m all but literally shouting into the void and yet I promise you I’ll sleep fine tonight.
To be clear, I’m not saying I don’t understand the impulse to share the things you like with other people. My closest and longest friends have been found through the things I like. But those are relationships built and sustained on more than liking the same things.
So why am I writing this? Am I just some bitter ex-nerd who’s buttmad all the normies now like what I like? Well, no. There’s a two-part answer here.
First, while there was definitely a point where part of me really much wanted to identify as an old school nerd, I’m not very confident I ever properly deserved the title. I was a bespectacled introvert who read a lot of books as a kid but that was it. If anything I was an early poser; I tried to get into stuff like Star Trek and the older series of Doctor Who but they never really quite stuck as persistent interests. D&D was never really even on my radar growing up.
Second, while the things I do like are much more popular than they used to be, the manner in which I consume them is esoteric. Nothing about what I like hinges on other people liking it or on the things I like conferring the most status or being financially successful. One of the fortunate things about nerd culture being mainstream is that there’s very few hobbies now that are in danger of being unenjoyable as an individual, because either the means exist to build the thing yourself to your own specifications or there’s so much content generation that things you like are almost guaranteed to exist by accident if not by design. The Thing I Like is both of these. I genuinely do not have to care that people are liking what I like wrong or whatever.
There’s a certain genre of person who is both obsessed with validation and doesn’t seem to understand that not everyone else is obsessed with validation. I’m not sure this isn’t most people. If you’re not sure what I mean (which is the ideal situation here), my go-to quasi-arthouse suggestion here is to check out any game made by Davey Wreden, especially The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide, and realize that they’re absolutely not being ironic or facetious, he really is that way.
I don’t know why this is, but it’s something I think about frequently; why it seems to be so central to some people but not me, whether it’s common or automatic. Naively, this is a humanities problem, something where Sam Kriss would scoff at me and have a snide comment about how I don’t understand the human condition or something, yet somehow I doubt listening to Scheherazade would quite give me the answer, no sense of how happiness so sharply evades people who can’t live without identifying themselves as their consumptive habits, as some flavor of nerd.
So, in the end, this is an admonishment against seeking validation. This isn’t just a “wake up sheeple row row fight the powah think for yourself escape the Matrix” soft implication that you need to live up to something greater. It’s the humble opposite. Be okay with liking things but be skeptical of the need to have to like a thing or to have the thing you like be everyone’s thing they like. Don’t be a goddamn zombie, or a Marvel fan.
Hipsters clearly aren’t as dead he thinks either.
More specifically, the things I like don’t confer status relative to the most mainstream-friendly things in the same category.