Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

It's human slop.

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

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.