I may have talked about this before, but the term “nerd” has evolved such that it can refer to two distinct groups of people, and the fact that we don’t recognize this causes a lot of misunderstandings.
I like to call the two groups “hipster nerds” and “nerdy nerds”.
Both groups have similar sets of interests: video and board games, data and math, comic books and movies, tabletop RPGs, philosophy, and so on. This is why they’re both nerdy groups.
The big difference between them has to do with personality. Hipster nerds have nerdy interests, yes, but they are also “normal” in their social lives. They dress normally, like going out to bars and clubs, are generally socially skilled, and generally seem like a non-nerd when not talking about their interests.
Meanwhile, nerdy nerds are the group that “nerd” exclusively referred to 10-20 years ago. They are generally more socially awkward, and more likely to have mental illness or not be neurotypical. Their preferences for socializing may not be as conventional, for example they would rather have a quiet evening obsessively discussing a topic than go out to a bar. They’re more introverted, and more obviously quirky or weird in the way they interact with others, even if they don’t necessarily come off badly or as being awkward.
The boundaries between these two groups are blurry, and some people switch between them over the course of their lives, or exist somewhere between them. For example, Dr. Nerdlove is someone who was a nerdy nerd in his teens and twenties, but is now clearly a hipster nerd.
Neither group is better than the other, or more deserving of a claim to nerdy interests. However, I feel like a problem in our discourse is sometimes people will talk about how nerds don’t struggle, how nerds don’t face social difficulties or hardships that aren’t their fault, and it becomes clear that these people are thinking about hipster nerds, not nerdy nerds.
In some ways I do think it is coherent to think of nerdy nerds as a minority group or subculture, whereas hipster nerds are just normal people with a particular set of interests and it doesn’t seem correct to think of them that way.
Yeeeeaaaaaaaah…
I sincerely believe that this dynamic, and its history, are crucial to any coherent understanding of the cultural moment in which we find ourselves. That’s especially true if you’re any sort of nerd with any personal stake in nerdery, but there’s relevance even if you’re not.
For decades, there was a strong correlation between having “nerdy interests” and having a “nerdy personality.” This wasn’t a coincidence. There were strong cultural forces pushing Nerd Types into Nerd Shit and pulling everyone else out. On the one hand, well, there was good old stigma. Nerd Shit was childish nonsense for losers who couldn’t get laid; everyone knew it, even most of the nerds themselves, however much they might yell and scream otherwise; and you didn’t want to be associated with that if you could possibly be cool, whether it was average-Joe cool or smart-set worldly-intellectual cool. On the other hand, the world of Nerd Shit was really good to its captive inmates, if they were the right sort of people. It provided a large number of lovely little ghettoized communities where nerds could find friendship and love with those who shared their predilections, sealing themselves away from the cold cruel world beyond. Its scriptures pandered endlessly to the nerd taste for things like complexity and finicky detail, and an awful lot of them were crafted to be soothing ego-boosters for a reliably nerdy audience (”people like you are the real chosen heroes,” etc.).
Then, over the course of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, the stigma disappeared and normies came flooding into nerdland. The reasons for this are complicated, but it’s worth pointing out that a lot of nerds pushed very hard for it to happened. They wanted respect, they wanted mainstream acceptance, they wanted the kind of budget and audience for their Nerd Shit that only normies could provide.
What you ended up with, almost immediately, was a macro-scale Geeks/MOPs/Sociopaths kind of situation. The average-Joe normies didn’t like the Nerd Shit being so complicated and finicky, and because they had money and numbers, content creators catered to them. The smart-set worldly-intellectual normies didn’t like the Nerd Shit being so thematically retrograde and out-of-touch (in the ‘10s they would add “problematic” to their list of complaints), and because they were prestigious culture-definers, the content creators catered to them too. All the normies were annoyed by the old-style nerds – who were distinctly unfashionable, and (let’s be fair) in many cases deeply unpleasant people who had managed to avoid being housebroken in the way that normal unpleasant people usually are – and, when possible, endeavored to push them out of events and infrastructural venues, or at least to make them less culturally central.
Unsurprisingly, there was a strong and widespread sense of displacement. But it was all sufficiently diffuse that in most contexts it was hard for anyone to put a finger on what had happened, let alone to do anything about it. The “hipster nerds” flooding in didn’t label themselves as invaders, and mostly didn’t act like invaders; they were content enthusiasts calling themselves nerds, and often were nicer to be around than your average old-style nerd.
There have been many flailing, fumbling attempts to recreate the ghettoized-feeling communities-that-were, the ones that really were havens for the “nerdy nerds.” Mostly they’ve failed, because once the stigma is gone there’s no more barrier-to-entry, and it’s very difficult to create a Cool Thing that can attract followers at all without getting the kind of culturally-foreign followers who will colonize it. A lot of the weird cultural signaling that I’ve seen from the geekiest sectors of the populace, in recent years, seems (to me) to amount to “please go away unless you are actually going to like me, don’t just latch onto my stuff.”
One of the few things that can actually reliably drive off normies, at least smart-set worldly-intellectual normies, is crude right-wing politics. And so here we are.