Is Nerd Culture Dying?

Clearly barely anyone here has read far enough into this article to even know what he means by &quot;Nerd Culture&quot;. I don&#x27;t really agree with it, but he makes a specific claim and does so eloquently and emotively. It would be more interesting to discuss that claim than to respond to the title, as most here are doing.<p>Briefly, he&#x27;s saying that the explosion in information availability has resulted in a form of hyper-aestheticism he associates with &quot;hipsters&quot;, based on an idea that individuals with particularly &quot;good taste&quot; 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 &quot;nerds&quot;. He claims this too is now failing and bleakly attempts to guess what might come next.<p>I think it&#x27;s a huge oversimplification and I don&#x27;t think &quot;nerd&quot; is a good term to use for what he&#x27;s describing, but it&#x27;s entertaining and would be fun to discuss if HN were capable of that.

In my opinion the author completely mischaracterizes what hipsters and nerds are. Hipster just want to be different, unique, feel that they&#x27;re not part the mainstream, that is their reason d&#x27;être, while nerds are obsessively interested and knowledgeable about a niche topic. The counter-example of someone &quot;obsessive, all-consuming interest in the literature and mysticism of the medieval and early modern eras&quot; would definitely be a nerd of medieval literature. So the definition of nerd as people who love hideous, terrible things, is not only insulting but also inaccurate.<p>To a degree everything can be subjectively considered bad to the uninitiated.<p>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&#x27;ve grown used to short videos like Tik-Tok, etc so they can&#x27;t get bother with reading an actual full length book.<p>I just get chills when I think of the AI generated media (songs, books, movies) in the coming years and decades...

I think that nerd culture has just gone mainstream. It&#x27;s far from dying.

One could hope that what is dying is the idea that there is such a thing as &quot;nerd culture&quot;.

What an incredible article<p>&gt; 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.

He almost hits on what&#x27;s changed in my brain, but then kind of wanders into this weird criticism of...things people enjoy.<p>I think the shift is that we don&#x27;t have a monoculture anymore (thanks to the Internet and especially social media) so what seems like we&#x27;re losing nerd culture and these niche interests in &quot;bad&quot; 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?) &quot;illusion&quot; 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&#x27;t. The main &quot;stream&quot; is now the main &quot;lake&quot; and everyone&#x27;s jumped in. Things you think are &quot;bad&quot; can now reach enough &quot;nerds&quot; who think they&#x27;re good to reach a modicum of popularity. I view this as maybe a good thing?<p>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&#x27;s why we&#x27;ve seen an uptick in radical ideologies of all sorts and things like the incel movement take such deep root. Those weren&#x27;t part of the normalized zeitgeist before, but now that everything&#x27;s in the pool and given equal cultural footing, it again creates a bubble of popularity that sometimes has an outsized impact.<p>We have decided that algorithms are the answer to this problem, and maybe that&#x27;s a good answer. But I think we&#x27;ve also decided that commercial driven, ad laden algorithms are not the answer. So I&#x27;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.

Nerds of the 90s grew up and became a nice (more often than not) affluent market. Industry shifted to accomodate for that. I for one, enjoy it while it lasts.<p>Because of this, a lot of cultural products made sure that the &quot;nerds&quot; felt the heroes of their own stories, making them cool in pop culture.<p>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 &quot;anxiety&quot;.<p>This very much remains, cool kids do &quot;cool&quot; stuff and eloquently interact with their social environment. &quot;Cool stuff&quot; now is probably more &quot;nerdy&quot; than it was 20y ago but the divide is there, I think the author (and me probably) are too old to really see what &quot;nerds&quot; to today.

I find the analysis flawed. In the article &quot;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&quot;.<p>Marvel is failing for the simple reason that it has become &quot;content&quot; for an audience that doesn&#x27;t exist instead of an entertaining movie&#x2F;series for the masses. And anyone who has tried to point out that the audience doesn&#x27;t exist is being called all the things that are bad.

Geek culture is things like comic books, video games and Star Wars. Nerd culture is things like recreational mathematics, model trains, and editing Wikipedia.

I believe there is no counter culture in the west anymore. It is mainstream to be subversive, and so there is little to no subversiveness left

&gt; If there is any one person who still tries to consider things by some measure of quality, it’s like a needle sticking sharp in their side<p>While Sam&#x27;s articles are quite enjoyable to read, I&#x27;m not sure this argument holds. If nerds don&#x27;t care about quality they wouldn&#x27;t spend hours complaining about how bad the new Star Wars films are

Insofar as nerdiness is considered to be gaming, that’s gone mainstream. But I don’t think most of the twitch gamers with the transparent cases and neon case lights have the same appreciation for that aesthetic as us LAN nerds did in the 00s. Like, we built those rigs to show them off in person with our friends. They were custom built by hand, each one unique. Now they are commoditized props, jewels in a pastel room meant for streaming over a webcam. They are tax write offs for professional twitch streamers.<p>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.<p>Nerd culture is alive and well, it’s just different from when I was a kid.

Nerd culture has been mainstream since <i>The Big Bang Theory</i>; le geek c&#x27;est chic. D&amp;D, Comic books, nerdy plastic-framed glasses, etc... are all &quot;having a moment&quot;.<p>So is nerd culture dying? No, it&#x27;s just being sold now, too. Nerds will never die, as witnessed by anyone who has ever played D&amp;D with a &quot;rules lawyer&quot;.<p>Nerds, the people, who are--according to my own mushy definition: socially awkward people who obsessively pursue a niche interest&#x2F;hobby that is outside of the mainstream. If their hobby&#x2F;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.<p>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...

A plamipsest diatribe drenched in nihilistic snobbery, but very, very entertaining one.

Nerd and hacker culture aren&#x27;t the same ... I think hacker culture is alive and well, albeit less so than in the past. Some posts here on HN give me hope - people are still breaking things and figuring out how stuff works under the hood, but nerd culture seems to have developed into rampant consumerism. The article touches on that a bit. It&#x27;s prob a result of the 20-30 somethings of today being advertised to super heavily. Corporations realized that nerds have quite a bit of spending power, and with the rise of silicon valley&#x2F;the internet, its become a big market.

First define something that doesn&#x27;t exist. Then, say its dead. Voila!, now you&#x27;re an astute critic of culture.<p>I never really liked the term &quot;nerd&quot;. 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&#x27;t people just let people enjoy things without classificaiton.

When I think of nerd culture, I think of people &quot;geeking out&quot; over Star Trek, videogames, tabletop games, etc. Basically, I think of comic book guy from the Simpsons. During my lifetime, a lot of it was saturated with pretension, self-aware or otherwise; it was always kind of a minstrel show. I would agree that many elements of it have gone mainstream.

Yes and good riddance.<p>There was never such a thing as &quot;nerd culture&quot;. 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 &quot;niche&quot; (but still fed by the same large corporations as the mainstream) no different from &quot;artisanal&quot; hipster goods or &quot;underground&quot; grunge merchandise.<p>Nerds have always existed and will continue to exist. &quot;Nerd culture&quot; isn&#x27;t necessary for that. The Marvel movies weren&#x27;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 &quot;other nerds&quot; and hope they&#x27;re compatible.<p>People like to posture about &quot;real nerds&quot; versus &quot;geek chic poseurs&quot; 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 &quot;poseur&quot; but most often that distinction just exists to arbitrarily exclude people just as passionate who don&#x27;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 &quot;poseur&quot;, especially if she was conventionally attractive.<p>On a related note I think we&#x27;ve also simply culturally come to understand that the &quot;jock vs nerd&quot; 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 &quot;brogrammer&quot; aesthetic, which was luckily shortlived but clearly an act of rebellion against and recuperation of &quot;jock&quot; culture. We&#x27;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 (&quot;ironically&quot;) replicate the same ableism neurodivergent nerds were subjected to in the mainstream.<p>So in another way, no, nerd &quot;culture&quot; isn&#x27;t dying, you&#x27;re just getting old and out of touch.

I recently removed Reddit, Imgur, Twitter from my life and realized there is so much more interesting and edgier content out there.

wha?<p>so nerds are enthusiastic detail oriented people, but for <i>bad</i> stuff, but the same attitude toward <i>good</i> stuff is not nerdy?<p>or something.<p>&#x27;dreck&#x27; indeed.

Wait, hipsters have...gone? They missed my town

Well, I definitely lost interest in all the superhero movies ages ago.<p>I&#x27;m just sitting here curating a list of hundreds of 80s songs, wondering why I can&#x27;t get all the videos to play on my TV like my own custom MTV playlist.<p>Something definitely seems wrong with popular culture these days, but I&#x27;m not going to be able to help you sort it out...

The new nerds are the furries posting NSFW inflation art when not writing code, and the transgender extreme Buddhist who writes long essays about attaining the jhanas on her personal blog while writing the code you rely on. Because the stereotypical white western male nerd became completely mainstream and normal

I see overlong thinkpieces are not dying off and that humble-braggadocio is alive and kicking

Increasingly I think we are over-connected. I&#x27;m not sure human beings are meant to be voicing their opinions with hundreds or thousands of people constantly. But it is addictive enough to be a blatant hypocrite.

It died when it became mainstream.<p>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.

Frat star whining about nerds liking things, and its front page of hacker news. Did the upvoters have a little too much unsweetened 30 proof cranberry juice?

I think nerd simply means &quot;has interests&quot;.

A wonderful article, all the more so because I disagree with a lot of it.

It&#x27;s sort of like rap music. In a way, the more popular bits have essentially become a part of the commodified dominant monoculture, insofar as we still have a monoculture left.<p>On the other hand, the niche has become significantly more niche after a messy de facto divorce from the &#x27;poppy&#x27; parts of rap&#x2F;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.<p>This natural schism and reification that develops is something I think David Chapman&#x27;s &quot;Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths&quot;[1] fails to identify, but we have the advantage of over a decade of evolution and hindsight since it was written.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meaningness.com&#x2F;geeks-mops-sociopaths" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meaningness.com&#x2F;geeks-mops-sociopaths</a>

actual title: All the nerds are dead

Maybe looking into the transhumanism future placed upon us the real hipster and nerds will be born. The fake ones will perish into AI driven oblivion.