I think that both hipsters and nerds are still in the fray for cross cultural exchanges. While YouTube and algorithms can see what's effective in your own country, we still rely on the networks of weebs or their country equivalent to filter what is useful for international audiences.
They do blend into one since the need to find what's good requires major filtering of bad content
I think you're overcomplicating the cause of nerd-dom -- I know a lot of people who are definitely classified as nerds, and basically none of look outward for subjects to 'nerd out' over; people become, e.g. Lord of the Rings nerds because they really love Lord of the Rings, not because they imagine they will be seen as 'the LotR person'.
In fact, nerds are stereotyped as generally unaware of / apathetic to social cues and expectations, and developing your identity based on the expectations of others and desire for specific self-perception requires (I would think) an above-average level of social acuity.
This idea also seems to conflict with the fact that nerds group together and bond over shared interests, no? If people became LotR nerds because they wanted to be seen as the Lord of the Rings guy, then surely they would see other LotR nerds as competition instead of allies.
This seems right, but Sam may be identifying anything popular as bad. Anything that the servile herd could possibly like must be execrable. The nerd attempts to make the bad thing good by doing a deep dive on it. And yes, sports ball fans are definitely sports nerds.
(For the record, I think Tolkien and Martin are both overrated.)
If we are going to do depth/breadth, I think you need two more things:
The popularist. The popularist likes things BECAUSE other people like them. I actually would argue that this is the sports guy most of the time - he doesn't necessarily care about sports, he's not necessarily up on every stat. What he wants is to be able to talk to other people about sports. He loves inception. He raved about Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. He thought Mad Max Fury Road was the best thing since Green Day and U2. He owns an Apple Product. He at some point attended a Six Sigma conference. He likes whatever everybody likes in whatever moment he finds himself, and this helps him make conversations.
The Contrarian (the other one). He dislikes everything BECAUSE people like it. I think this is actually some hipsters, in the usual stereotype - they don't and can't like anything that a significant mass of other people like. I don't have to list what they like, because it's irrelevant - they mostly define their personalities by disliking.
I collect coins and I think the description of the hobby (and its putative death) isn't quite right.
1. Rare coins are in fact hard to find, even in today's internet world. They are usually sold in auctions, which might happen online, but still not that frequently. It's not unusual for examples some specific rare coin to be sold only once every few years. If the coin is also obscure, it may not be prohibitively expensive, so this kind of situation isn't the sole province of rich people.
2. One area of collecting is to get all the rare items. Another is to get all the minor varieties of a common item. These varieties may not be very rare, but it still takes a lot of effort to be able to distinguish them and to find them. Some collectors will obtain large numbers of relatively common coins and sort through and scrutinize them to try to identify interesting varieties.
3. An important part of collecting is getting good deals. This is surely a lot harder than it used to be because sellers can more easily figure out what things are worth and you won't find something grossly underpriced in a random antique store as often these days. But filtering through buckets (or online listings) of large numbers of coins can still be fun and lead to spotting good deals.
So I think there is room in the hobby for nerd-like behavior (per your definition). I would argue the decline of the hobby is more due to competition from other similar hobbies (a generation ago you could collect stamps, coins, baseball cards, or rare books/comics - now you can collect beanie babies, Pokemon cards, NFTs, funko pops, action figures, etc.). I think stamps have suffered more than coins because stamp collecting has more of an aesthetic component (which has faced stronger competition) while coins have a historical element that is less well replicated by collecting newer things. This difference isn't obvious in the google trends graphs you posted but I believe is observable from looking at prices of stamps vs coins.
Collecting isn't just about acquiring the rarest items, it's also about acquiring complete sets. I'm not a collector myself, but I've known some (stamps, coins, comic books, hockey cards) and they have all looked for complete sets. This provides added interest since rarity becomes relative, and completing a set isn't just about finding that last piece but about finding the person willing to trade it to you.
I'd guess many coin collectors got their start being patient enough to sort through change to see if they had e.g. a wheat cent or silver dime, but first of all, who pays with cash and gets change, and the chances of finding something collectible are orders of magnitude smaller than, say, the '90s. And stamp collectors would have started saving the stamps on mail sent to their house, but how frequently do you get stamped mail anymore?
My 79-year old father goes to stamp shows, because one of his hobbies is to buy sheets of old but common unused stamps for less than face value. They are still valid postage, and then he uses them to personalize the stamps he puts on letters he sends to various people. And most of the other people at stamp shows are about his age. He does have some stamps he thinks are interesting that he's held onto, but the dealers at the stamp shows think they're common and uninteresting. So there's a decreasing number of stamps that might be "worth something" and a net loss of collectors in the hobby, and then every time a collector dies and his heirs have no interest in his collection and that many more stamps make their way to dealers who now have one less buyer.
Too bad "sending paper letters with vintage but still valid stamps" never caught on with the hipsters.
Collecting has not in the slightest died out. People collect more things than ever, like sneakers, funko pops, vintage cars, guns, antique ceramics, anime figurines, magic cards, etc.
To me, being a nerd requires a degree of swimming against the cultural tide.
It's weird and unpopular to be into trains, so the fact that you are indicates you have a bit of character (or are socially oblivious, which is also kind of endearing).
The problem (and I think Kriss alludes to this) is that nerd stuff went mainstream in the past few decades. Of the 10 highest-grossing movies of the 2010s, 6 are Star Wars or Marvel films. There's no longer any sense that nerds are the underdog.
But what does it say about you when you wear a Star Wars shirt? You're pledging allegiance to the biggest, most popular club imaginable. Is that a brave stance? Those people always make me think "if you lived in the SW universe, you'd be on the side of the Empire".
In general, I am creeped out by effusive public adoration for things that are near-universally loved. Like The Beatles. Or bacon. Or dogs. Or science (Neil DeGrasse Tyson's whole shtick). Regardless of how I feel about those things on the object level, there's no glory in joining a culture war when you're signing on to the winning side.
I love sports, for the same reason I love chess and modern board games, and tire of most serial drama: the moments of unscripted drama that emerge from highly skilled competition feel rewarding in a far more natural way than having my marionette strings pulled by skilled screenwriters.
I remember that as a smart kid with smart friends, we'd typically watch the same things, and I'd hone in on the principles (joke structure or humor premises for Monty Python, ethical dilemmas for Star Trek: TNG, etc), while certain friends would focus on remembering every fact and every line accurately (and frequently correcting each other). That latter behavior mildly annoyed me back then, and I recognized it instantly in Kriss' "nerd" description
"Also, what was up with stamp and coin collectors?" - they do NFTs these days. It's a bit flippant, but very true: the crowd at an NFT convention is filled with the types of people who would have been stamp collectors 30 years ago.
Also, stamp collecting is dying out because nobody cares about mailing things anymore. And when there is a glut of material, it becomes a self-sustaining cycle as resale prices drop and more people lose interest (or die).
Coin collecting isn't quite dying out. Partially, because it is often a form of {investing/hoarding}. It is much easier to keep a coin in good condition for 100 years than a stamp.
I read the original post some time ago. I feel like both the original and this response miss something; I'll try put my finger on why.
Kriss intertwines the deep obsession with a subject and the idea that the subject is bad. The visceral metaphor of the fast food obsessive (relevant Achewood: https://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=02102005) sets the tone for the whole post, and recurred in my mind long after the rest was dismissed. Now, I agree D*sney must be destroyed and the MCU is literally the worst thing to happen to film as a medium, like all sane people do, but I think "D*sney is parodically evil and society-destroying" and "people get hypertrophically interested in subjects" aren't much more related than chance. The chance is just huge. This is the self-deprecating joke about medieval history, but at the wrong target.
Most people are normies. People who are weird in some significant way tend to hope other people weird in similar ways aren't normies, because that would provide them connection they can't find in the general population. People who develop deep, abiding interests in subjects are weird -- find some normal people and talk to them about their hobbies! Hell, ask people who've gone out of their way to watch every MCU film in theatres about stuff like names of recurring characters, you'll be shocked how often they have no clue (running into this IRL was one of the things that really stunned me as to how shallow most people's interests are). However, having deep and abiding interests doesn't inherently come intertwined with the other weird quality of 'looking deep into subcultures'. Many Such People obsess over interminably mainstream subjects, including shit-terrible ones.
This post responds by thinking the deep and abiding interest in subjects is an outgrowth of those subjects being mainstream, which seems implausible. There are, as alluded, many people into mainstream subjects to the point of making up a significant part of their lives and interests who *don't at all* have that. Tons of people play D&D 5E regularly and have no clue what the rules are. Tons of people catch a lot of sports games without having a particularly good understanding of who plays for their favourite team or what the rules of the game are. These are really basic things, well before getting into deep-abiding-interests like "what is the history of this sport" or "are there other, better TTRPGs I could play". You might not necessarily expect an average fan of a popular TV show to look into the show's production and the life stories of all its main cast, and be unsurprised when they don't. But if you assume they at least know the show's plotlines, you're not protecting yourself from surprise.
One thing none of this quite explains is that the quote-unquote 'nerdy' hobbies were 'nerdy' long before they were mainstream. I specifically allude back to tabletop RPGs here. The fifth edition of D&D is really, genuinely mainstream. (It's also shit.) There's a little bit of a generation gap here -- the older you are the less likely you are to realize how thoroughly mainstream it is -- but nonetheless. This is...really not true for tabletop RPGs in all history. Hell, it's not true for any tabletop RPGs that aren't D&D 5E. It should be fairly obvious that the people who developed deep and abiding interests in tabletop RPGs before 5E was mainstream, or the people who have deep and abiding interests in tabletop RPGs and are not interested in 5E, have something different going on to the people who have deep and abiding interests in D&D 5E. Kriss's point kind of simplifies all of this down. It does genuinely seem that people who develop deep and abiding interests in subjects are more likely to get into ones with certain coding around them -- some good, some bad. This probably correlates with what you see in Big Five personality test interest correlates, which if you haven't seen any you should, because they're hilarious. I've seen so many where the whole Introversion line is anime.
(I have made a valiant effort not to say the quiet part loud.)
A more parsimonious explanation for why stamp and coin collecting died out is that we no longer commonly use stamps or coins (as we no longer commonly use physical letters or money). People have shifted to collecting things like gunpla or shoes.
Anyway, while I agree that a key part of subculture identity is a pattern of consumption, I don't think that nerds are particularly unique in this aspect. Every subculture has expensive, specialized products you regularly consume as a way to participate in that culture. After all, a young girl participating in her aesthetic has to buy clothes and makeup and any number of things. A sports fan has to have a big TV and sports memorabilia. None of this is dying. It is fragmenting as increased wealth and communications have created large profusions of subcultures with mini-celebrities and all that. Which ironically means his thesis on mass culture is the opposite of reality. We no longer have mass culture. We have a profusion of subcultures. (Nor do I believe such subcultures are mainly creatures of algorithms.)
‘’Is this bad? I don’t want to say you should never build identity around liking a thing. Most non-enlightened people want to have some distinguishing characteristic, and anything you do - care about a hobby, or a skill, or a political cause - is going to feel kind of cringe. ‘’
At the end of the day the point of both is to fulfill that emotional drive called by Adam smith “the desire to be loved and to be lovely”. When the person trying to be loved is reciprocated they succeed. When we don’t reciprocate we call this cringe.
Other words for this feeling are glory, glamor, beauty, goodness, virtue, worth. It is the most social of all our primal urges. That which is glorified though is hated in equal measure by others; it is how we sort ourselves into tribes.
I am tempted to go on a long rant about how Ethics and Ethos are philosophical and rhetorical schools that focus on this primal agent… but that is off topic so I’ll stop here.
Good on you for critically engaging with a Kriss essay like this. Kriss has found a way to totally bypass my critical reading skills (of which I’m pretty proud and which is a fundamental component of how I make a living). I just take his essays in as works of art, like being taken in by the melody of a song without really engaging with the meaning of the lyrics.
Part of what's going on here is that the term "nerd" has undergone semantic shift in recent decades from having a STEM connotation to meaning something more like "fan, especially of some aspect of pop culture." Scott remembers the older meaning, whereas Kriss is using the newer meaning.
Just as there’s an authentic hipster, who loves searching through obscurity for gems, and would do it even if doing so accrued negative status, so there’s an authentic nerd, who deeply loves the trivia of some artwork, and will dive deep into it even when doing so accrues negative status. Both of these people are, paradoxically, overflowing fountains of status because of their lack of desire for it. They are genuinely useful people, because this hipster is actually a critic, and this nerd is actually an expert. They’ll help you know and love a thing in a really enjoyable way, because there’s no social status games in it for them. The fake hipsters and fake nerds are camouflaging themselves as critics and experts; but their relation to the artwork is less genuine because it’s partly replaced by a relation to status. Both are more genuine than the poser, who doesn’t relate to the artwork itself at all, only to the status connected with it.
Sports fans of the sort that do serious fantasy leagues or memorize stats are obviously nerds. The confusion is that in high school or college some of them were actually jocks, who knew a lot about football or whatever because they actually participated in it, which is less nerdy (you generally don’t call a person a nerd for being an expert in their “professional” field).
My reaction to Kriss's piece was pretty much the same as my reaction to the Last Psychiatrist stuff: "My, what a weird and somewhat unpleasant bizarre alternate universe this person seems to live in." Just thoroughly alien to the world as I perceive it.
I don't think this conversation can really be had without talking about the shifting definition of "nerd." You acknowledge a slight shading, but it's really much bigger than that.
The original mid-20th century prototype for "nerd" is something like my dad: science fiction fan, AD&D player, baseball card collector and statistics memorizer, model rocket builder, chess player, punch-card programmer, grew up to be a geophysical scientist. (Note: yes, the sports statistics people were nerds.)
My dad didn't have to engage in any competitive nerdery to earn his status as the Ur-Nerd. Just doing a lot of "nerd things," no matter how casually, was sufficient.
(What were "nerd things?" I don't have a formal definition, but you can get a pretty decent sorting by looking at the intersection of "masculine-coded" and "intellectual." Better than "things that are bad," anyway.)
That seems to have changed somewhere in the '90s when a bunch of "nerd things" started gaining footholds in pop culture. Suddenly just reading science fiction became unremarkable, nerdy comic book movies turned into blockbuster spectacles, and even anime - one of the last bastions of nerddom when I was a kid - is totally mainstream now.
So yes, the kind of people who get called "nerds" today tend to be the people with intense special interests in things that used to be "nerdy" but are now mainstream pop culture. But I think it's a mistake to view either their intensity or the 'badness' of their special interest as intrinsic to nerddom.
I was obsessed with collecting coins as a kid, and this is 100% what happened to me: “enjoyed the thrill of hunting for a rare piece, but Amazon and eBay have made it trivial to exchange money for whatever coins/stamps you want”
The most fun was trying to get old coins, or $2 bills, from bank tellers, or in change. But going to yard sales or the tiny nearby coin store was also an adventure -- you never knew which coins they’d have, it was always a limited selection.
But when eBay came around, after a couple months of massive excitement, I became no longer interested. Everything was always available -- it was just a matter of budget. Boring. I mean I still appreciate old coins, just because I like history, but I stopped chasing for them or collecting them.
How about this: a hipster gets credit for knowing a rare topic, and a geek gets credit for knowing a rare piece of information about a common topic. Then with material goods like stamps you get a different categorization, because price enters the picture, and you get again, breadth-type (Collector) and depth-type (Connoisseur, ie. expensive items). Maybe Hipster overlaps with information here; the guy who tells you about something he owns that nobody knows of?
But then what's a nerd? I think there's where the "a hipster of something bad" typology comes into its own: a nerd is a "failed geek"; someone who doesn't get credit for knowing a rare piece of information about a common topic, and doesn't care.
>Kriss defines nerds as “someone who likes things that aren’t good”. More specifically, someone who is an obsessive (counting, itemizing, collecting) fan of something bad.
This seems like a weird take to me. The first things that come to mind when I think of "bad things people obsess over" are Transformers and Twilight, and the stereotypical image of both fandoms is pretty much diametrically opposite to that of "nerds".
Kriss argues that nerdism is dying because the MCU is selling fewer tickets. I'm reminded of a line from Community, by Pierce's dad, where he claims that video games are dying because arcades keep closing. No, nerdism isn't going away, it's just that video games have taken control of the media ecosystem. People are saving their money on the movie ticket and staying home either playing Fortnite or watching Elden Ring on twitch. We're replacing one kind of nerdiness with a nerdier nerdiness.
I feel like you're taking very polysemous terms and trying to determine the true meaning of each one. The Hipster type you report Kriss as describing seems like a real category, but "hipster" has taken on connotations for me that I wouldn't apply it to every cultural explorer of the sort you describe. And both "geek" and "nerd" have diffused and migrated so much over the past five decades that I would want to see corpus data before commenting on how they are different.
I will say that *one* sense of the word "nerd" that has grown in frequency over the past thirty years or so is of someone who is into something (irrespective of quality) and expresses that into-ness by knowing a lot about it. You can be an Austen nerd or a Beethoven nerd. (I searched the phrases in quotes and there are hits.) This is a shift of meaning from the nerds of "Revenge of the Nerds", but those people also didn't seem to consistently match your sense. I think they were just generically socially inept.
I guess I understand having a category for the people he describes as nerds; I’m certainly aware of people like that. But it’s completely incompatible with my own ideas of what a nerd is.
I have a better hypothesis for why this pastime has died out: Pokemon.
You know why stamps and coins were popular? Because they were cheap, collectable and fit into little books. Much better than collecting Lego sets or even actual books: Those are collectable, but they are not cheap, and they don't fit into little books.
Pokemon are pretty cheap, and they fit into little cartridges. In fact, nowadays, you don't even need to buy a cartridge. You can just collect Pokemon and put them onto your phone.
(Of course, this isn't just Pokemon. There are literally worse versions of almost every video game with collect-them-all mechanics. Final Fantasy. Fire Emblem. Star Wars. Marvel Smash Smash game. Even Pokemon Go but Harry Potter (???). But Pokemon has the slogan.)
I feel like any model in which nerds like things because it brings them status is wrong -- nerds are the ones who like low-status things despite the fact they're low-status.
Nerd interests are a sticky flypaper trap for a certain kind of mind. I have that kind of mind (if you're reading this you probably do too), and I know that if I let myself go I could wind up in some hole of obsessive interest in planespotting or watching people play video games or something. As a moderately social aware person with something to lose, I feel like I need to steer myself away from these sorts of interests lest they cost me social status.
So, in my model:
a) Nerds like the things they like regardless of whether they're high-status or not.
b) Normies find a sensible balance between liking the things they like and liking things that give them status.
c) Hipsters are the opposite of nerds, they're obsessed with liking high-status things. This is a very tricky status game to play because the cost of "liking" something is so low, so you quicky wind up needing to like things that are really obscure or really bad in order to beat the next guy.
It's a little glib to dismiss sports as bad, isn't it? Athletes display extreme skill, sometimes transcendent. I don't think watching people push the limits of human ability is obviously bad.
Lots of collecting hobbies are still going strong. Record collecting is more popular than it’s been in decades - great news for the surviving hipsters out there. Sneaker collecting is massive. Funko pops, etc.
I don’t think hipsters died, they just diverged as a cohort and became less visible. Some started families or went into business; others went and founded their own subcultures instead of just consuming them. But the ethos of valuing obscurity and subculture is still very much around.
Both Kriss' essay, and Scott's response to it, remind me of the "Evil Cannot Comprehend Good" trope from TV tropes, except replace "Evil" with "Very socially motivated people" and "Good" with "Less socially motivated people" (although honestly both sets have a lot of overlap). Both essays seem obsessed with finding some deep, social reason why hipsters and nerds behave the way they do, like the supervillain who is telling the hero that they are "Not So Different." They literally can't comprehend the idea that someone could actually like something, so they try desperately to find some way that liking things isn't something people actually do. People couldn't actually like Star Wars, sportsball, the MCU, or the Beatles, they must be liking them to achieve some social goal like forming an identity or seeking status!
This is one of the two giant flawed assumptions that invalidates the theses of both articles (the other one, of course, is the assumption the the MCU is bad, when it is, in fact one of the human race's greatest artistic achievements*). If you assume that it is possible to like things for non-social reasons, or even in addition to social reasons, hipsters and nerds make much more sense. The reason that nerds like both popular stuff like the MCU, and less popular stuff like postage stamps is because they don't care about if something is popular, they care about if it fascinates them. Whether that thing is popular is orthogonal to how fascinating it is.
That fascination makes them invest a lot of time and effort in it, which in turn makes it part of their identity. They weren't trying to find something to form and identity first and picking Star Wars, identity formation was just a side effect. Similarly, hipsters probably just get bored with things they see frequently and want to seek out new things to be interested in. Making obscure things part of their identity comes second, if at all.
Scott asks if its ever okay to build your identity around liking a thing. I would ask if it's ever okay not to? What's the alternative, building it around social status games or large nonselective identity groups? It seems to me that liking something isn't just a good thing to build your identity around, it's one of the best things to build it around. After all, unlike social status games, you can like something without forcing other people to not like it.
*I've generally enjoyed Substack so far, but one thing I've found perplexing and annoying is how people on this site are constantly going on about how the MCU is terrible. Why? The best MCU movies are amazing classics and the worst are no worse than a mediocre pre-MCU action movie (and even the bad ones can still be a net positive by introducing characters who shine in later movies). It does a magnificent job of faithfully translating the epic serialized storytelling of superhero comics to the screen. It's also magnificently diverse in the variety of subgenres it has, there are political/espionage thrillers, crime dramas, space opera, fantasy adventure, action comedy, and so on. All the criticisms of it, by contrast, sound like cliches, they are often the same criticisms made of action/superhero movies decades ago, or criticisms that make it clear the critic is unpleasable (i.e. the MCU movies have too much comedy, but back in the 2000s people were complaining that superhero movies were too grim and dark).
Man, the future is weird...Are we really at the point where people can't wrap their heads around why people collected stamps? Please tell me this is satire...I honestly can't tell anymore.
I think stamp collecting has just been out competed by fitter consumers of leisure time, ie social media, video games, dating apps, clickbait news websites, etc. No one spent billions of dollars hyper-optimizing stamp collecting for Engagement.
As a 42 year old none of this resonates much with me.
Nerds were people into books and learning, it didn’t have anything to do with Star Wars (though they also liked Star Wars). And it was something that was mainly in opposition to high status males who competed in the realm of being good at sports and screwing girls.
Now obviously there were overlaps, I was one of them, and could sort of pass a bit in both realms (varsity sports). But the nerds in the 80s/early 90s were into WWII and old cars and Tolkien and 70s music and academic pursuits. People in an alternate status path.
The non-nerds were into drinking and sports and parties, people winning or the riff-raff in the status war.
Hipsters were a later 90s thing in our world about flannel and beards and trying really hard to be seen as cool while effecting a pose of not caring. “I am a rock, I am an island (who desperately wants validation)”.
Fascinating article. I wonder if there aren’t deeper roots to the relatively recent cultural phenomena of nerds, geeks, and hipsters?
Humans have always been engaged in a search for meaning in life. In our post-industrial society where many are involved in mind numbing, disconnected wage labor for a good portion of their waking hours, it’s not all that surprising that people seek meaning, recognition, connection with others, and to some degree distraction and relief through movies, fandom, sports, collecting, fiction, and esoteric knowledge that makes them in some way feel special and involves them in a community. We have precious little else left in our culture and in our lives. Alternatively (or simultaneously) you can turn to drinking and recreational drugs, but gone are the days for most when meaningful connection and purpose were found through your role in the tribe, daily labor, community or civic engagement, or religious affiliation. Welcome to the 21st century
Definitely calls for going back to the basics of sociology of distinction, consumption & identify, e.g. Bourdieu & Passeron and their seminal work on these topics. Whatever identifies people are subscribing to and building up are forms of social & cultural capital, used in strategies of distinction-whether this is ‘conscious’ or ‘sincere’ or not is moot to the sociologist, just like a bird’s plumage is to the ornithologist
The term "nerd" (or "geek", if you prefer) has experienced some semantic drift where it traditionally referred to the math/RPGs/etc cluster but now also refers to fans of franchises historically associated with traditional nerddom. The second kind of nerd loves Game of Thrones (or at least the early seasons), the first kind hates it because it watered down the greatness of the books to appeal to the general public. (I imagine there's a similar dynamic between the MCU and trad Marvel fans.) The traditional nerd's obsessions would never catch on in their original form, and by now they've been burned enough that they hope that the eye of Hollywood and big marketing departments stays far away from their niche interests.
When you're growing up you passionately fixate on characters and images and stories, and they become the containers for your deepest feelings about who your are and what life is about. None of us can help fixating on bits and pieces of our culture, and gluing them onto our backs, like decorator crabs. But I don't think we were ever meant to have as many choices as we do now. I think the process worked better when most of your choices were things everyone you knew was familiar with. Like in, I dunno, feudal times in Europe, maybe, and I'm just making it up, you got to choose between stolid adherence to an attitude of respect and reverence toward the church and the lord whose fields you tilled, or some mild joking and cynicism, or, if you were really reckless, the occasional raunchy joke; and you could be indifferent to music, or play a shepherd's pipe, or memorize the 5 ballads the the troupe who came through your little village played last November. Just a few options. And people fell in love with each other, just the same.
I frequent a lot of sites where people are putting up AI art they made, and it's a mix of pop culture references to any of hundresds or thousands of podcasts, celebrities, movies, etc. , and anguished personal protests obliquely expressed, and dick jokes, and self-referentiality. It's as though the people making AI art have chopped the whole world up into confetti and are throwing it in the air in a sort of is-this-the-end? celebration.
Let's see if I can gather enough thought to say something relevant on this.
I think Sam is drawing somewhat close here, but is off the mark:
>The regime of the hipster was an inefficient way of sorting it; it died. The regime of the nerd was an overefficient way of sorting it; it is dying.
I think the it's more like the hipsters and nerds sort opposite ends of things; the hipsters are all about Supply, the nerds are all about Demand. Because nerds are not defined by liking bad things, they're defined by liking things to excess. They watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail a thousand times, and watch all the variations of the subtitles, and watch the Making Of, and read the reviews, because they have a constant, unending demand for MORE of it. They know the obscure trivia, they break down the timing of the jokes, because they're willing to scrape the very bones of it to get just that little bit MORE. The traditional Nerd Hobbies are the ones with high complexities, that can be pieced out through repeated exposure. They're the ones that provide MORE every time you approach them.
I don't think the average baseball fan is a nerd. The average baseball fan does NOT know every player's ERA, especially not for players on other teams; they know which player on their team is the star player, because they've constantly seen that guy make the big plays. They might know who's the weak link, because the other guys always win when they hit it to that guy. And that's it; they're just watching the game now. The people who crunch the numbers, and who collect the trading cards (Baseball: The Gathering), are the people who constantly want MORE Baseball than the games themselves can provide.
So, if nerds are dying off, there's a simple reason; production has ramped up. Television shows and videogame franchises that have been dead twenty years are suddenly getting new entries. Fans of things are making their own offbrand versions of them, sometimes dozens at a time. They're making Randomizers for the old linear games, to give them exponentially more replayability. You don't have to scrape bones to get more anymore, you can just walk out into popular culture and pick a sequel off the shelf.
You've hit on the right thing about collectors - the difficulty of collecting is an essential part of the fun., I was a coin collector in the wayback. The last set of coins I undertook to collect was the state quarters. (Subsequent issues are too poorly designed to interest me.) I made a rule: I could only collect quarters that I found in my pocket change. No going to a coin store and buying one: that would be cheating. Doing it this way made it a fun challenge. And I got them all, and I put them one by one in a little coin book, and when they were all there, then what? I kind of lost interest. I still have them, somewhere.
Similar to what’s claimed in the piece, I always used the term “nerding out” to be having an in depth knowledge of the technical aspects of a subject. Most sports fans, even the pundits talking about it on TV don’t really nerd out about it. They’re just kind of going off the vibes of what they see, bringing up stats as they suit their argument, and occasionally bringing “advanced stats”. However all sports in the last decade have had something of a revolution of nerdiness, and there are sites such as Pro Football Focus devoted to pouring over game film and using advanced statistical analysis to dissect every individual play from every player in the nfl in an attempt to evaluate their performance objectively. Every team in the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL now has a team of nerds on staff doing that work, which was completely nonexistent until very recently.
I also don’t think “nerd” and “hipster” is an either/or thing. I think we all fall somewhere in the spectrum for both. Most hipsters are also nerds in some regard. That guy going out to the bars in Liverpool to see the Beatles could probably “nerd out” about every band that has come through that scene in the last 5 years. Oh and you should see his record collection.
This is bringing back a memory. I put off reading Lord of the Rings when I was a kid because it was too popular. After a year or two, I read it, and I found it was really good. At least I never hassled anyone for reading it, but where did I get the initial attitude?
The only thing I can think of (I wasn't in a hipster environment) is Mad Magazine. More generally, I think Mad Magazine might have been a bad influence. It was pretty gentle-- certainly by modern standards-- but it had the attitude that if ordinary people liked something, it was ridiculous. Or maybe I was a natural snob, and it's no one else's fault.
I think you've left out a problem with hipsters. They didn't just find and value obscure good things, they also stopped valuing things that were no longer obscure, even those things were good.
Related idea: I think part of what's going on is that we don't have a great vocabulary for talking about what we value about the things we value, so being enthusiastic about LOTR or the MCU turns into fascination with the details.
“Lorien” is a Silmarillion reference? Huh. I always assumed it was named after the Babylon 5 character, because you force your patients to consider the questions “Who are you?” and “What do you want?”
(Either way, reading The Silmarillion or watching Babylon 5 is hipsterish. Naming your business after it (or recognizing someone else’s obscure reference to it) is nerdy.)
Why are these identities not just 'tastemakers' and 'superfans'? On one side, just trying to be first with the New Thing and, on the other, not caring at all about the taste making pecking order.
A good exercise for everyone, maybe as part of some annual spring clean (maybe we could have a day for it?) would be to ask one's self "what do I really like?"
I think this whole post (and topic) is really about the search for authenticity, and how to know when you have it.
Whichever category you fall into, maybe the most important thing is to be able to check periodically, "is this really me?"
You might be on to something about the breadth vs. depth thing of hipsters vs. nerds. But I don't think nerds derive any status from being the "know-it-all". I just think it is a high-risk/high-reward strategy where sometimes being obsessed with something pays off, but most of the time it doesn't. I mean, in general geeking out about things like "what kinds of mushrooms are there?" is probably socially detrimental until someone in your tribe eats the wrong one and now you need to know what to do about it.
Similarly, obsessing about computer programming or comic books is a losing strategy until it turns out you can make a boat load of money in tech or entertainment.
But on an individual level, most geeks aren't thinking about about their geek hobbies in terms of how it helps advance their social status. Indeed, us more socially successful geeks have arrived at our positions precisely because we are able to suppress our obsessions. For instance, we can talk about the weather *without* mentioning the Koppen Climate Classification System. If anything, the nerd activities are an escape from social status games.
But nerds don't obsess over just anything. There are certain patterns to their obsessions, and I think those obsessions are important to their value. The thing obsessed over has to provide sufficient interest for a mind that has a strong need for cognition and absorption. The more intellectually or imaginatively engaging, the better (though still poor) chance that the nerd's obsession will produce a valuable piece of art or technology.
In short, here's the best definition nerd/geek I can come up with:
"Someone who prefers activities that playfully engage the intellect and imagination over social status climbing"
The average Star Wars, MCU, or Yankees fan might *buy* a lot of stuff, but the level of mental engagement with the subject of their obsession is very shallow. They are not geeks, they are just consumers. This much is obvious with the Yankees fan (unless he is also obsessed with the statistics of sports betting) but it might not be as obvious with Star Wars or the MCU because space opera and superheroes used to be the domain of nerds. However, nerds were able to bring those genres to the masses in a way that had important cultural impacts and artistic value (despite what Kriss thinks). Of course, now those two properties are increasingly being abandoned by nerds because their current custodians seem hell bent on destroying anything that was interesting about them.
None of this should be construed as saying that nerds are necessarily more intelligent or creative, nor does it mean they are low status. There is probably some correlation, but what defines an nerd is their interests, not their ability.
From a psychological perspective, I think both nerds and hipsters are high in trait Openness, but different facets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Inventory). In short, nerds tend to be higher on facets Imagination and Intellect, whereas hipsters tend to be higher on facets of Adventurousness and perhaps some combination of Aesthetics and/or Emotionality. Of course, for most people these facets all tend to correlate, but it seems likely to me that you will see greater divergence at the more extreme ends of Openness (just as you tend to see more divergence among the different sub-factors of g among those who score high on IQ tests). That hipsters seek out social status is probably also an indication that they are higher on Extroversion than nerds (who definitely tend toward Introversion).
Love this topic. It's not new though. Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris did a brilliant expose of this in their 2005 series Nathan Barley. Back then in the UK we had a lot of "lad culture" which was actually somewhere in between hipster and nerd as described here. It was a culture that had it's own enthusiasms but also a lot of rejection of the status quo.
For me, part of the urge toward what I called "completionism" was simply that I was interested in something and wanted to know all about it. The world as a whole was just too big, but small things like "all books by X" were doable. Partly, in retrospect, it was a way to exert some control over my life. But the experience was more like, there was more data out there, and I felt a need to acquire it. For meanings of "data" that include all toys in a particular set. (Alternate neural net AI take: my training data was incomplete, the pattern had gaps, and any output I generated from it would be invalid until I'd gotten all the data.)
In social situations, when discussing the subject, it also served as a defense mechanism against people who dragged out obscure trivia to invalidate whatever other people said. I found that *incredibly* annoying.
Why Sam would want to label this "nerd", I couldn't say, unless he just wanted a simple dichotomy that his audience would eat up. It seems like its own thing, a tendency showing up in sports statistics, trainspotting, video games with "achievements", and who knows where else. Maybe it's a sub-clinical version of whatever OCD is.
What explains the difference to me is that Kriss talks specifically about the modern nerdiness-as-a-product. Basically, the "original" nerds Scott is talking about used to be obsessed in all sorts of weird things, very often obviously unpopular. They got "lucky" that one of those things - computers - took off so much that nerds completely dominated the inception of what is arguably the biggest pillar of modern life.
This triggered one of humans fundamental reaction, emulation. But a lot of what nerds like and nerds do is utterly unpalatable to normies, so nerdiness needed to be changed into something more palatable while still retaining what the public perceives as the essence. Along comes MCU/SW/Trekkie/etc. geekery; These were already culturally popular products that were ALSO popular with nerds, and that nerds treated with their signature obsessiveness (Scott correctly points out here that these were often called "geeks" instead, but I think the population at large is correct that they are mostly a subset of the same kind of person as nerds and with considerable overlap to boot).
Now, this offered an easy path for any random person to become a "nerd": Just be a bit more obsessive about a choice of cultural products that you're quite likely to already like at least one of, and the products you consume will often even explicitly label you as a "nerd" positively. You don't even need to get beat up by a Jock! There's many other processes that happened at the same time, like the incorporation of modern-style wokeness into the same products, Science-as-a-product, mainstreaming of college education etc. but they're functionally quite similar and strongly correlated.
By now, this process has become so sucessful that nerdiness-as-a-product is arguably the dominant form of nerdiness and if you randomly run into a self-described nerd, he will be more likely to be the Sam Kriss-version than the Scott-version. I've even started seeing the same kind of person Scott is talking about - the original conception of the nerd - self-label explicitly not as nerds since they don't want to be associated with the modern conception.
I don’t have much experience with the MCU and Star Wars. Haven’t watched it in years, and I also don’t drink alcohol so I don’t have the easiest time following these examples
With respect to nerds and the depth of the Star Wars or MCU, I’m not sure it gets better as you go down the rabbit hole. The rabbit exists as a series of consumerist exit ramps onto diverging roads. It’s merely an extension of the existing Disney ecosystem. This even applies to things that take a lot of effort and are very costly that exist in that ecosystem at a deep level, like going to Disney World.
For the examples of Hipster fixations, I’m no big drinker, but I don’t view Pabst Blue Ribbon as an extension or furthering of some larger system of consumption habit formation. You can like Pabst, you can even become addicted to alcohol, but you fundamentally have to like the taste or not. Is there anywhere deeper to go in just Pabst? Maybe the hipster version of going into depth is to try all sorts of beers.
"But the guy who has figurines of every minor character with two seconds of screentime and has read all 2,000 Extended Universe books and is fluent in Wookie - that’s “the Star Wars guy”."
Minor correction: It's spelled Wookiee, with two e's, and their language is called Shyriiwook. (I wonder if this will make Scott's Mistakes page.)
At some point when I was a teenager I realised that there was a person who was payed to print and sell me these marbles/MTG cards/queen jubilee special edition stamp. Most “collector” items nowadays are a competition between victims who gotta catchem all and greedy capitalists who just print more and more to make sure that you never get to the end.
I see the same thing with Lore-type collections. It was fine to be an expert on the original lord of the rings or the first star wars trilogy ; but then they hired a writer to create an “extended” universe. At this point learning more lore is like trying to remember everything that ChatGPT outputs.
And then there are people for whom "liking certain things" (especially media, especially CONSUMABLE things like art, broadly speaking) is not a major aspect of their identity. "Who" they are is more about what they do or how they are, not the content they consume.
Age might be a factor, certainly was for me. In my 20s the content people consumed was a huge part of them for me. Nowadays is borderline doesn't matter (tho it's good if there's overlap for conversation purposes). And I completely lost the feeling that what I consume says anything about me, and that happened after 35, maybe after 40 even.
I'm a bit torn on the article. It isn't awful, but look! someone said something stupid!* isn't my favorite genre. I'm also kind of cynical because Scott talked about how getting into beefs is a way of driving traffic.
On the other hand, it's led to some decent discussion, and I I might not have remembered putting off reading LOTR if it hadn't been for this post.
"liking things that are bad" as a definition strikes me as stupid, and I'm not a huge fan of MCU movies.
"Also, I notice that by this definition all sports fans must be nerds. Sports is certainly bad: it’s a bunch of sweaty adult men freaking out about who has a ball for two hours, for several hundred almost-identical episodes per season. And man, do people obsess over it."
I don't think this analogy works very well. Just on a structural level it's off. Sports is an entire category of thing, while pop art or MCU movies are a sub-category. There are certainly aspects of sports fandom that could qualify for Kriss' definition of nerdom, like collecting memorabilia or obsessing over statistics. But meeting his somewhat random disdain for Marvel movies with a random disdain for sports doesn't really address his underlying argument, which is that nerd culture is sustained not by quality but by the constant production of new things about which to be nerdy, and eventually that machine is going to break and/or be replaced by a new machine.
That said, I think Kriss weakens his own argument because he wants to get in as many jabs at Marvel movies as he can, which results in him kind of missing his own point. Things like Marvel movies or Warhol's soup cans or Big Macs just aren't made to be critiqued; they're made to be consumed by the fans of those things. Whether they're bad is completely beside the point. They exist in a space where good and bad take on a different meaning. For example, if someone told you that they went to a new hamburger joint, you might ask them if the burger was good or bad. You'd never ask that of someone who just went to McDonald's.
Watching the Indian movie RRR really drove this point home for me. It's really a ridiculous movie that makes absolutely no sense at times, but that doesn't take away from the movie because the movie just is and you either appreciate the experience or you don't. Scorsese got it right when he said that superhero movies are more like amusement park rides than traditional cinema.
tldr: Kriss says nerds, but what he's really talking about is fan culture and the replacement of art with fan service.
I've personally seen "geek" and "nerd" to actually mean the opposite things from the way you define them! To my ears "geeks" specifically sounds techy/STEMy, while "nerd" is broader and can include someone who's really intense about something, like a random work of fiction (from Shakespeare to "Doctor Who" — which is actually good TV, thankyouvery much ;) — to Marvel).
>But aren’t nerds and “sportsball fans” natural enemies?
Most sports fans don't obsess about statistics. In my high school, there was approximately 90% overlap between the people who played fantasy baseball, and the people I would consider "nerds".
Possibly a missing dynamic about nerdery here is about the creation of an in-group culture that people can then express themselves within. Knowledge of the topic becomes a barrier to entry for the uninitiated, but once in, the nerds can use their chosen area of nerdery to express almost anything. Kpop stans are a good example where many will speak of the sense of inclusion and belonging they get from being in the BTS Army, and the "deep" discussions they get into, facilitated by the richness of the subject matter.
Why does it feel like social identity has little to do with it? None of the sport fans or nerds I know need to talk to someone about their hobby to be into it. They do. For hours. But they spent hundreds of hours actually...watching the sport !! And not to be able to talk about it. They actually find it fascinating. Think something fundamental is missing.
Your analysis is not wrong but leaves open the Matt Yglesias response that the right answer is to be neither a hipster nor a nerd but the guy who praises pizza and sex
(1) Who is Sam Kriss? Yes, I'm old and out of touch, so Internet popular whipper-snappers are not even on my radar, since I'm too primitive to have radar 😁
(2) Tsk, tsk, kids these days, does no-one remember the old classifications? Kriss is confusing nerds with dweebs:
"Hold on there, buster, cries another voice from the interwebs. According to OkCupid’s Nerd, Geek, or Dork Test (that one’s gone now, too), these three terms are defined this way:
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions."
A rough'n'ready approxmation is that geeks were on the techie side and nerds on the arts side; so LOTR, Marvel comics/movies and TV shows were the province of the nerds while 'I built this in a cave out of a box of scraps', fancy electronics and the likes were for the geeks. Dweebs and dorks? Well sorry guys, you're just clumsy, awkward weirdoes 😁
(3) And before that, geeks were side-show attractions:
"Geek shows were an act in traveling carnivals and circuses of early America and were often part of a larger sideshow. The billed performer's act consisted of a single geek, who stood in the center ring to chase live chickens. It ended with the performer biting the chickens' heads off and swallowing them. The geek shows were often used as openers for what are commonly known as freak shows. It was a matter of pride among circus and carnival professionals not to have traveled with a troupe that included geeks. Geeks were often alcoholics or drug addicts, and paid with liquor – especially during Prohibition – or with narcotics."
I'd recommend the Tyrone Power movie "Nightmare Alley" for the rise and fall of a schemer from side-show barker to fake medium to geek:
"Sam Kriss makes a self-deprecating joke about how his obsession with medieval mysticism is totally different than nerdery. I think he’s right; not that many people care about medieval mysticism"
Ooh, them's fightin' words! The International Congress on Mediaeval Studies (known informally as "Kalamazoo" since that's where it's held) might like to have a word with you about that, as might Margery Kempe.
I am no scholar so I know of all this only by grace of one Geoffrey Chaucer back in the early Noughties:
"Ther is oon othir enchesoun for the swoteness of Maye: yn this moneth ther ys the gatherynge of Kalamazoo. From alle laundes and regiones of the globe of the erthe, folke do come to talke of tymes of yore, to share akademik werke, and to get rioutouslye dronke on free wine. Yt is, ywis, a jolie paradise ful of pleasaunte and lernede peple and muchel joye. Ther is also a daunce at the ende. Ich wolde haue visited thys yeere, but they rejectede myn papere proposal, the whiche ys a thynge of much ridiculousnesse, for the papere was on myn selfe! Thou woldst thynke that ich was somedeel of an experte on that subiecte."
As for the travails of Dame Margery in the modern world, again thanks to G. Chaucer:
"In the seson of Cristemasse, thys pore creatur and caytyf did fynd herself in a straunge launde. For sche had maad passage to Ba'alt-Ymoor, the which citee she thoghte was yn the launde of the Sarazines ner the citee of Jerusalem. And she had gret compuncion and wepynge for the synfulness of her ignorance of geographie, for Ba'alt-Ymoor was in no wyse close to tho placez wher ower Lorde dyed on cross, but was in sted across a gret see and ytself was a place of passinge foulness wher ffolke did etyn only of the crabbes that walked on the floor of the bay Chesupyk and did watch the filmes of Johannes des Eaux (Pink Flamingoes did frighten her gretly). And thys creatur was sore afreyd of the synneres of that place and so sche went forth northewardes on the heighway XCV. Yet the way was long and her feet ached swich that she threw off her manohlo blahnikes and sat by the syde of the heigh way wepynge. And this was on the feest of Seynt John. As thys creatur lay in contemplacyon, sor wepynge for the peyne of her feet sche prayid to ower lorde for deliverance from this launde. And ower lorde seyde to her, “A, dowter, why wepest thou for the peyne of thy feet for thou knowst how soore my owene feet were woundid on mount calvarie? And therfor to bringe the to spiritual helth and contemplacioun I shal sende thee on a desperaat tryal and a terribil oon amonges devils and hir ministeres and necromanceres. For thou shalt fynde a tan volvo that schal be ful of clerkes and thes clerkes shall taak thee to the moost terribil place on al the erthe.” And the creatur seyde, “A, Lord, what ys this place so terribil?” And the lord seyde to her, “It is callid MLA.” And ther cam gret thundirkrakkys – thogh cleer was the daye – in the maner of a film of James Cameron.
And right so it befel in dede that a volvo did pulle up and a voys from it seyd, “You going to Philadelphia?” And thys creatur seyd, “I go to MLA,” and the voys seyde that MLA was part of Philadelphee and thus sche cam with hem. And in the volvo was a cumpany of thre yonge scolers, to wit I woman and II men. And thys creatur spak to them and seyd, “Tell me what maner ffolk ye aren.” And oon the men seyd, “My dissertation addresses the pressing question of the relation of the Owl and the Nightingale to the paradoxes of materiality and to changing ideas of spirituality at the same time that it questions what I would call outmoded models of allegoresis. Essentially, I propose that this heavily mediated text engages with debate poetry not as a generic exemplar but rather vis-a-vis an interstitial combination of truth claims and bestiary passages about cephalopods.” And thys creatur was soore confusid, and sche prayid to ower lord and wepid gret teares for the passioun of the child Jesu who had been born in a maunger to taak awey the synnes of all ffolke and also to deliver her from MLA. And alle the cumpany did wepe with her vntil the ladye who drof the van schouted at the oothirs and seyd, “Could you please be quiet? I’m trying to listen to the sparknotes for ‘Beloved.’” And thys creatur knewe litel of thes wyse clerkes wyth whom sche travilid and she askid what maner ffolk thei weren. Oon the men was named Genderstudyes and the othir man was named Medievaliste and the woman was named Americaniste-but-really-Faulknerstudyes. And thei were from Bigresearchuniversitee."
"Also, speaking of collectors, are there any, any more?"
Um, yes. So odd ot me that in an otherwise fairly incisive essay, this was a question. The collectibles industry is bigger than ever and growing raster than ever. I suppose the objects that are collected are more diverse than they used to be? Maybe the number of people collecting the most popular thing to collect is smaller than it used to be even while the overall number of collectors is greater.
FWIW, I tend to think of a nerd as someone who accumulates more knowledge about a subject, and devotes more time and effort to it, than its importance or the value of that experience seems to merit.
That captures people who memorize football scores going back donkey's years, and people who can recite the dialog and know all the characters from every Star Wars film ever released. It also includes those who know every Unix command, including all their obscure options, when the rest of us normal people are content to be vaguely aware of roughly which options are available and google these as required.
But I suppose it also includes anyone who spends years studying the history of the Byzantine Church or something. So, to my mind, without wishing to detract from the value of their knowledge, academics by their very devotion to study, are also swept up in my nerd net, whether or not their specialities have practical application.
On another topic, I was gratified to see that graph of interest in stamps declining to a near zero trickle. In a discussion the other week with a friend about his valuable stamp collection, I claimed it is an old man's hobby (and I think it is mostly men) with no long term future, especially once stamps stop being sold (which I imagine won't be long now). I must email him a copy of that graph, before he goes and blows another fortune on some daft little scrap of paper! Hehe!
My mental model of nerds vs geeks was informed a very, very long time ago by this Venn Diagram (https://laughingsquid.com/nerd-venn-diagram-geek-dork-or-dweeb/) that strikes me as fairly accurate representation of common usage. Hipster seem like it adds a "cool" circle to the process and overlaps with obsession.
Maybe hipsters invest in new stuff that other people don't know about, whereas nerds overly-invest in stuff no one else likes (apart from fellow nerds)?
The thrill of the new versus the thrill of the under-appreciated?
Hipsters get stuff wrong all the time and get laughed at. Nerds enjoy things already judged wrong and get laughed at.
I dunno. It's been pretty clear since the late 90s that Gates isn't much of a nerd at all. Like the above-mentioned fake hipsters who do performative things to look like a hipster but show rather clearly that they really don't have the essence of one, Gates is a fake nerd, a thug and a bully, and really always has been. A wolf in geek's clothing, if you will.
'And since the nerds gravitate towards homogeneity and popularity, their extinction will be total.'
'The nerd doesn’t like bad things because of their actual qualities; the nerd likes bad things simply because they’re there.'
A nerd is...someone who undiscriminatingly likes popular things? This bears no relation whatsoever to any meaning of 'nerd' or 'geek' that I'm aware of. This just seems like he made up a kind of person to loathe and randomly chose an existing word to refer to them. Admittedly, as a lifelong nerd and/or geek I'm pretty oblivious to pop culture, so maybe the vernacular has changed in a way I'm unaware of, and the word has undergone inversion and now means something entirely different from (and nearly opposite to) what it used to mean.
Hold on, hipsters *are* the fake avant-garde. They’re essentially cultural bullies. They want to be known as being in the club so that you know they’re better than you. Their motto is “if you know, you know”. They don’t want you in their club, on their level, because in their mind that would destroy their social status. An algorithm like Spotify’s might say “listen to X, they’re new and rad” but a hipster would bamboozle you with coded references to X calculated to prove that you’re in the out group.
Nerds love something cerebrally, that’s about it. A sports nerd might love the facts of the game without caring a bit about being a fan of the action and drama. They (we) probably talk a lot about their nerdy interests, because how can you not talk about what you love? Most nerds want to evangelize the things they love, but can be overwhelming to talk to about it.
It used to be that unironically and unashamedly loving something cerebrally wasn’t cool, but it is now. I want to believe that it became cool by direct artistic victory of nerds making things that were genuinely new and great e.g. Star Wars and Marvel, but also nerds make a lot of money as e.g. engineers so the change could be a lot more mercenary.
This one is going to get a lot of comments for obvious reasons.
I guess there’s a lot of ways to define these things. Just to add to discussion: I always thought of nerds as people who liked obscure things that put most other folks off because it gave them a language with which to communicate to other people who like those things. Basically, nerds are largely socially dysfunctional people who use a shared interest as a substitute for social skills.
Remember, the fundamental stuff at the marvel movies are made of were very much not cool or broadly popular for a very long time.
Whereas geeks might or might not be awkward: they just obsess on something and damn the torpedoes.
I've thought one thing that separates hipster pursuits from geek pursuits is that geek pursuits are often seen as childish. Cartoons? Childish. Foreign artsy movies? Adult. Chiptune music? Childish. Obscure noise bands? Adult. Colorful video game t-shirts? Childish (though, if it's an obscure old video game of the sort current childs would not play, it could be hipster!) Vintage clothing? Adult. Energy drinks? Childish. Unusual beers? Adult. And so on. Of course, what is childish and what is adult is determinded by cultural factors, but usually, if actual children aren't interested, it's not childish. (No, this does not explain the placement of sport fandom, but it's not meant to be an universal theory, just one aspect.)
It particularly forms an annoying (and still unstated) contrast with the idea that the nerd is "too adult" in other facets of life, ie. talking book language, being too smart for his own good and so on.
One of the "death of the hipster" touchstones was when people started associating hipster behavior with people *pretending* to be adults by "doing adult stuff" ("adulting), like going to barcades. This may have brought hipsterdom uncomfortably close to geekdom.
What do we call, then, the person who is deeply but not professionally interested in an academic topic other than STEM?
Say, a fascination with the 17th century metaphysical poets, or the choral works of J.S. Bach, or the role of the body in modern Catholic bioethics? To choose three examples drawn not at all at random lol.
I am accustomed to describing myself almost interchangeably as either a geek or a nerd. DON’T INVALIDATE MY IDENTITY, SCOTT!!!!! 😉
But f’real, what do we call that kind of……personage, then, if not a nerd?
I've wondered about the culture getting nerdier. T think there was a shift in the 80s when there started to be books for the general audience about themes in popular fiction like Star Trek and Stephen King. I don't think anything like that existed earlier, but let me know if I'm missing something.
I was thinking it was the Flynn effect, but for all I know, there was something people always wanted and now it was available.
World-building was fodder for nerdery. So far as I know, there was nothing between The Divine Comedy and LOTR.
It seems like the simplest explanation for the fall of stamp and coin collecting is that we basically don't use stamps or coins anymore. Instead, we send emails and pay by credit card.
What unites the math/computer sense of "nerd" and the Sam Kriss sense of "nerd" is the idea of enthusiasm for something unworthy of enthusiasm; that's why the word was originally pejorative and even now has not been entirely re-appropriated. Of course, this foregrounds the fact that people disagree about what is worthy of enthusiasm; in practice, people rely on the consensus of some actual or imagined social group. We don't generally call pickup artists "sex nerds," even though we can see how such a usage would fit, because most people implicitly understand why "sex with hot babes" is something to be enthusiastic about, while far fewer grok why stamps are. (Note that a stock insult used to belittle nerds for their outbursts of intense interest in weird subjects is "you need to get laid." The more wholesome "you need to touch grass" functions similarly.)
Posts like Kriss's amount to internecine, intra-nerd warfare. MCU and YA fans often come in for vicious disdain at the hands of people who the broader normie world would have a hard time distinguishing from said fans. I think this is because a large subset of smart people really really prize a personal narrative of maturation. They remember being enthusiastic children, obsessed with childish things, but they got older, got interested in sex/drugs/serious matters, and became grown-ups. They then regard those people who have relatively similar abilities and personalities but who *didn't* drop their interest in "childish" things as pathetic and stunted, like alternate versions of themselves who never managed to grow up. Sometimes this is accurate, but not as often as they think.
I would like to push back against this Internet Trend of bloggers responding to Sam Kriss.
You can write an Ode to a Grecian Urn, but you can't write a 1400-word repudiation of its cultural claims. It's a work of art that doesn't really have any information content; responding to it as though it does is maybe not very useful. I feel the same way about Kriss.
Kaitian already mentioned this, but you're defining away the core characteristic of the nerd class: mainstream social failure.
The nerd is the guy with the unfashionable glasses repaired with tape, with the waist of his pants too high, and the cuffs too high, and the unfashionable shirt (if you're REALLY old-fashioned, add a pocket protector for your pens). The NMSC finalist who is on the football team with a hot girlfriend and gets a West Point appointment his senior year in high school is not a nerd. Tom Cruise hand-building a P-51 is not a nerd, no matter how obsessive or obscure his hobbies.
I definitely like the casting of "hipsters" as cultural dumpster divers searching for gold. I used to refer to myself (and my friends) as "intellectual hipsters" just because it felt like a good fit, but now I have a better explanation. Yes we were well-read and knowledgeable, but we were well-read and knowledgeable on things that weren't already known to the general public. Ten years ago this meant things like the multiverse hypothesis (now featured in major motion pictures), machine learning (which no one will shut up about), and catastrophic risks from pandemics/supervolcanoes/etc (one of which we just lived through).
I think canonical nerds and sports fans (sports nerds) being enemies makes perfect sense in this heuristic, because nerds are also fiercely defensive (and critical) over their own sect. Nerds of different MCU vs DC might have some tribalistic rift just the same way nerds of different sports teams have beef, and so it extends logically that nerds of comic books won’t get along with nerds of sports. Only it’s more distinct, because they also can’t effectively debate given how different the spheres of their own nerdoms are.
In my mind, the difference between a hipster and a nerd/geek is how accessible the thing is. Do you have to learn a lot to appreciate it? If not, you're a hipster. The price of admission is finding the thing.
Do you have to read a million word book that describes the history of every rock and tree to appreciate it? You're a geek/nerd.
The further distinction between geek and nerd is all about practically. You can become a nerd about math, edible plants, or photography. If your interest is in obscure characters from Star Trek, Babylon 5, or even English royal succession, you're a geek about that subject. Your knowledge will never be applied to real life.
This framing explains why the uninitiated view geeks/nerds as interested in things that are "bad". If you've not read a million words, you can't appreciate the thing. If you marry a DC comics nerd, you might put in the effort and discover the appeal you'd previously had no interest in.
You probably read a million words about something else (celebrity relationships, numismatics) which would not be appreciated by the uninitiated either. The price of admission is background research, which only a subset is willing to do.
I think the collecting thing is in some ways people just wanting to collect different things. Throughout the 20th century, coins, stamps, records, and cars were part of everyone's daily life and there was a lot of collecting of those things. People today still collect music and cars, but also funko pops, video game trophies, heroes in mobile games, Pokemon and magic cards.
In this respect, isn't "hipster" just a replacement term for "cool hunter"? And, hipster comes after the fact and is applied to those people who are really non-hipster/cool hunters. When the word "hipster" first gets uttered, it's by a cool hunter and the cool hunter in saying the word is basically uttering their own death (not literal, of course). With respect to Baudrillard, hipsters are hyper-real while cool hunters were the real.
I think coin and stamp collecting have declined in popularity because people no longer use coins and stamps so much in their everyday lives. I think that the pipeline for collecting goes something like "be mildly interested in [thing]" -> "acquire, perhaps by chance, somewhat rare and valuable instance of [thing]" -> "learn more about [thing]" -> "intentionally acquire more of [thing]." For stamps and coins, I think the front two steps of that is broken because people don't send that many letters or use that much cash anymore.
Yeah, I'm not a big collector, but I've heard that somewhat counterintuitively, ebay has actually been bad for a lot of collecting. Back in the day, accruing knowledge about a particular thing that was collectible (like which items were rare and valuable) offered the opportunity for one to gain status or respect within that group of collectors and possibly make some money from information asymmetries. There was also the possibility of some exciting discovery in a second hand store or some dude's garage (See the show American Pickers for example), and there was a social aspect of it, too, as people gathered in person to buy/sell/trade. Ebay has ruined all of that to some degree. Info about rare and valuable items is readily available, and the prices are pretty transparent, which means there are fewer information asymmetries to exploit and fewer second hand stores or garages worth exploring. The social aspect of it has been decimated too, now that the trading takes place with mouse clicks on a laptop rather than face to face in some low rent retail space.
>Kriss defines nerds as “someone who likes things that aren’t good”. More specifically, someone who is an obsessive (counting, itemizing, collecting) fan of something bad.
Scott, please stop being a quokka.
That reference is an *attack on nerds*. It's making an uncharitable generalization based on taking some of the worst aspects of his target group.
Treating such an attack as an honest attempt at debate is not a good idea. If someone says "you suck", politely agreeing that you do suck but he's just made some factual mistakes is the wrong response. The correct response is "ths person is not worth taking seriously" and treating it like an attack, not a debate.
This is a subject that I've been interested in lately. I've never seen it broken down exactly this way, and don't completely agree, but I think in the abstract it brings up some good points. My basic model of the world (yes, the world) right now is:
1) The objective of most websites is making marketing more accurate (i.e. converting eyeballs into dollars).
2) Marketing can be made accurate by catering to a niche or by catering to a predictable purchasing pattern
3) People are occasionally weird and multivariate, sometimes their interests change in unpredictable ways.
4) This is a huge pain in the butt for marketers
5) Algorithmic content curation is cheaper and easier than custom content curation, but tends to assume people aren't weird and multivariate and that their interests don't change.
6) Fortunately, people who consume a lot of internet content consume a lot of algorithmically curated content
7) This wasn't some intentional conspiracy, but hey look, now people have predictable consumption patterns
8) People who like Star Wars are now "The Star Wars" guy. As this becomes more and more the norm it gets weirder to be like "Yes, I like Star Wars but I didn't like *this particular* Star Wars and also frankly I'm a little tired of Star Wars at the moment, and have taken up knitting."
9) Social pressure reinforces simplistic, single-interest personalities that aren't very interesting.
10) Deep beneath this veneer of superficiality, we're all getting increasingly fed up with this model of living, especially since content producers are putting less and less effort into the quality of The Thing We Like, hoping we'll be invested enough not to call them on it.
I read Kriss's essay, and you are being waaaay too kind to him. I don't think he has the faintest idea of what a nerd actually is. But it's an interesting question.
I teach computer science, and one question that sometimes comes up is: Who invented the computer? There are two uber-nerds who have a strong claim to the title: Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse.
Alan Turing was an extroverted wierdo who proudly wore his nerdiness on his sleeve. He made up a mathematical model of a computer that was utterly impractical, but he also programmed it to play chess and even predicted AI and arguably chatGPT. Plus he saved the world from the Nazis. He's basically a nerd super-hero.
Konrad Zuse, on the other hand, was the typical introverted nerd - completely oblivious to the outside world. Driven by an all-consuming obsession, he built the worlds first programmable computer from discarded telephone switches in his parents' living room. In the middle of Germany during world war two. With absolutely no practical application in mind. Zuse is an obscure, largely forgotten figure.
So: what actually do these two guys have in common?
This is an unfortunate collision of worlds! Kriss, who I think is a really brilliant writer, specializes in writing in intentionally exaggerated styles; it's a kind of highly-literate gonzo sensibility that's meant to provoke. But it's also, I think, supposed to be understood to be artificially heightened. It's not that I doubt that he hates MCU films, he certainly does, but the people who are taking this very personally are perhaps not seeing the degree to which Kriss's piece works through an intensification designed to prompt a kind of absurdity. This space, I think, is made up of many people who are natural literalists. It's a bit of an awkward combination. #it'smytwocents
One way I'm different from a lot of my friends is that I don't really identify with any properties like that. I have friends where, if you need to get them a gift, you can get always get them a Transformers or Gargoyles or Bambi or TMNT t-shirt, and I have a friend you can always satisfy with quality images of rabbits, birds, or the Marx Bros. I don't have anything like that. I love Miyazaki and I want that to be, like, a private secret love that isn't shared by others, but obviously tons of people love Miyazaki, and why wouldn't they? So the idea of identifying as a Miyazaki person just feels depressing, because I can't actually have a special relationship to it. Yet I'm not industrious enough to be a hipster or to delve deeply into anything truly obscure.
And here I've just got into collecting ancient coins. Can't we just find something intrinsically fascinating that speaks to us? Owning and fiddling with >2000 y/o artwork made by people who truly BELIEVED in Zeus is... I don't know... just kind of awesome.
It does feel a bit backwards to choose an interest in order to get an identity rather than an interest being something that we like and that becomes part of who we are.
Kriss's article really just seemed like an overwrought excuse to dunk on the MCU, which could have been done without making a sweeping generalization of "nerds like bad things; if the thing you like isn't bad, you're not a nerd".
I'm suspect the arrow of causality goes the other way. Nerds are uncool people (I can say that because I count myself as uncool; I am, after all, commenting on a ACX blog). If you're fat and unathletic and socially awkward, you're going to be branded as a nerd, no matter what you like. (I like Rimsky-Korsakoff more than K-Pop, but I was and am fat, unathletic and socially awkward, so I was an Orchestra Nerd in high school.) The things that nerds like are bad because nerds like them. Sports fandom may be indistinguishable from RPG-fandom in the abstract, but because sports are enjoyed on average by a more attractive, higher-status set of people, sports fandom is itself higher status than tabletop gaming.
Talk about a bait post ... anyway of course you are both missing the point!
A nerd is obsessive about some topic which they pursue *alone*, usually through books or computers. A sportsball fan that goes to the games and meets the athletes, maybe plays a bit themselves is not a nerd; one that memorizes the stats in their basement is. Now that computer gaming and comicbooks are not solo escapes but accepted social activities you can be a non-nerd fan of those areas.
It's a question of causation. Nerds are nerdy because they don't have friends to spend time with, so they fill time with books and find some topic that interests them (sterotypically fantasy of some sort). Social people do whatever is popular, which is now fantasy, so they end up being OMG I LOOOVE HARRY POTTER even though they aren't nerds. Both people can be just as truly invested in being a "fantasy fan" but they got there from different angles.
Along the causal lines we can get to the math vs. theater nerd v. geek debate. Nerds are usually considered smarter, tracked into higher class or skip grades, while not being considered attractive or athletic. Hence the reading/computers, and electronics sci-fi and so on being nerd topics. Geeks are more simply "weird" "artsy", IMO coded for LGBTQ. Both are alone but find their comfort zones in different topics.
This is mostly for kids. Once you're an adult, then indeed if one is obsessive about a topic it matters what topic and why. If it's machines that you own; if it's babies or your profession; if it's obscure facts and figures; if it's classical art or if its modern art and if you're creating the art or collecting it; if there is a "fandom" or if you do it yourself; to what degree that fandom is monetized, publicized and corporate-driven. You will be categorized depending on those, but really nerd status is set far earlier on.
I actually have the opposite instinct about nerds and geeks. In my mind, nerds have always been the people who get really into things like DnD or Star Wars - pop-culture obsessions, whether they are actually quite popular or are fairly obscure and often reviled by mainstream culture (like DnD originally was). Whereas geeks, to me, are the people who are interested in technology, science, academic studies (incl. ones in the humanities), or generally topics I consider "serious" or of deep interest, even if they might not have much actual important impact on the world (some might argue, and I would to some extent concede, that much of advanced pure mathematics these days has little real utility, but I'd consider it a geeky subject even if you go so far as to say it has no real value for society other than the enjoyment of the pursuit of knowledge and beauty).
Also, re: your take on collecting hobbies (stamps, coins, etc.): I sent this article to my cousin, who has some old-fashioned hobbies including both stamp and coin collecting, and he said he thought you were a little off-base, probably because you don't pursue those hobbies yourself and so don't actually understand what motivates people's interest in them. He said it's less about the "joy of the hunt" that might lose its meaning via the ease of access to information and sites like ebay or Amazon that let you buy anything from anywhere, and so the only factor in whether you can collect something is you have the $$$ to pay for the rare and expensive collectibles. For one thing, he points out that to some extent that's always been the case: certain things are so rare they are meaningfully expensive and so it's always the case that only rich people can "catch them all." He says the joy is more in the "delight in minutiae, for its own sake," and the detailed knowledge and historical aspects connected to the objects and the process of learning enough about them to collect and appreciate them. He says he'd point to the cause of the decline being (while still technologically related) due more to the instant-gratification aspect of entertainment in the world of video games and the internet "instant porn, instant music, instant entertainment, instant everything" is a near-quote of what he blamed for it. You might think that's a distinction without a difference, but I think it's a meaningful and relevant point about what the actual psychological mechanisms are for the enjoyment of the hobby and why people might pursue enjoyment via other means today. I'd also point out that I've often explained things like this to myself in terms of cyclical patterns like we see in fashion, politics, and intellectual debate: some hobbies or sports become really popular in an almost viral way in a certain time period, in part due to random chance and in part due to historical contingencies, hobbies self-perpetuate to some extent once established, due to their popularity and the social/institutional connections tied to them. Then they fade as generations age out, new fads come into play, historical influences change, and so on. For example, my stepfather is an avid model airplane guy and hang-glider, and he has noted that both these hobbies seem to be less popular among younger generations. He sees this as in part caused by a generational factor: for his generation, aviation (especially advanced aviation/spaceflight) was still a novel, futuristic technology that inspired fascination, even if planes had already been around for a while since their invention around the turn of the century. But for generations growing up today, aviation is de rigueur - they have other fascinations, like computers and video games, tied to more recent technologies.
It seems like both your theory and his alike classify sportsball fans as nerds. There is, after all, literally a competition (fantasy sports) in this fandom. So what became of this notion that nerds and sports fans are opposite?
Well, I'm an old fart now, but in my day hipsters had social skills and were adventurous in trying new things while nerds weren't and didn't (except within the boundaries of their own nerd cliques). The distinction wasn't about taste, per se—the distinction was hipsters were seeing/tasting/hearing a lot of new things by mingling with a variety of other hipsters with diverse tastes and experimental dispositions. In an era previous to mine hipsters were called the avant-garde. On the other end of the spectrum, nerds were obsessed with a single cultural item, often to the detriment of experiencing new things. Hipsters become taste- and trendsetters through their vicarious experimentation and sociality. Nerds became conservators of culturally arcane areas of knowledge.
But now in the post-Modern world, there are no new things under the sun. Fashion is recycled from previous eras. Art is a hodgepodge of all previous styles without any underlying innovation. No new musical genres have swept the world since Rap and Hip Hop. And there's only so much you can do with food for it still to be edible (indeed Guide Michelin has given up on looking for innovative cuisine, and rather focusing on restaurants that can do dishes very well). And being the conservators of arcane areas of cultural knowledge, nerds have come to the forefront of PoMo culture, because they know where to find the interesting tidbits of culture that haven't been picked over in the vast second-hand shop of the 21st Century.
I think that the difference between nerds and hipsters is that nerds deliberately seek out hobbies with high barriers to entry. Virtually anyone can enjoy an obscure rock band in a bar in Liverpool, right away, once a hipster reveals them to the world. But not anyone can enjoy an RPG. It takes a non-trivial amount of time to learn about the very concept of RPGs; once you do, you still cannot enjoy RPGs without reading some books and learning a little bit (however tangentially) about algorithms (for character creation), probability distributions (dice rolls), writing techniques (especially if one is GMing), etc. Sure, one can watch the latest D&D movie without learning any of that stuff; but actually playing something like D&D (or rather, Pathfinder, heh) is a pursuit for nerds.
"Bad" is a subjective term. This all seems like a very strange way to answer "why do people publically enjoy things I don't enjoy and/or wouldn't be seen dead doing?". The pastime is its own reward for pastimes other people enjoy, just as it is with ones you happen to enjoy yourself. There's no need to make up elaborate social climbing schemes to explain why people do things they find fun.
A more relevant question to ponder is perhaps how arbitrary pastimes become divided into socially acceptable and low-status in the first place.
I think it's honestly sort of funny how non-nerds seem to genuinely not understand that a nerd's identity becomes about [thing] because they like it so much, not the other way around.
Sometimes you encounter a thing—let's say it's Minecraft, because why not—and it's just such a positive experience for you that you take every possible opportunity to keep thinking about Minecraft, even when you're not playing. You collect every scrap of information you can find about Minecraft and you compose your own original Minecraft-related songs and you decorate your room with blocky little figurines. You get into a virtuous cycle where talking and thinking about Minecraft is so rewarding that you keep enjoying all these secondary activities long after you're bored of actually playing Minecraft itself. You look out for opportunities to meet people who'd enjoy talking about Minecraft with you and make a bunch of friends with whom you mostly talk about Minecraft, and your friends and family start seeing you as "the Minecraft guy" and they get you a Minecraft hoodie for Christmas cause they know it's a safe pick.
This is the obvious and intuitive explanation! There's no need to get fake-deep about "ah, they got into Minecraft so they'd have something to construct their identity around": it explains nothing, and consistently makes incorrect predictions about the internal experiences of Minecraft nerds. It's only virtue is making people feel better about being annoyed by those weirdos who won't shut up about Minecraft.
It's possibly that I have unusually low social motivation (genuinely, what does it mean to "construct your identity" and why is it something people would be this comically desperate to do?) and am typical-minding, but, uh, I wonder if there's any group closely associated with "nerds" who are also known for having low social motivation? I think it's a tad more likely that people like Kriss are typical-minding, and constructing elaborate social motivations for people who just like stuff regardless of what people like him think.
This is basically quibbling over an aspect of Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point thesis. Gladwell argues that society has "Mavens," the people that know everything about a thing ("nerds") and connectors, people who know everyone and effectively connect people to them ("hipsters"). There are also salesmen, not reflected in the current model (internet mass media has kind of made that role irrelevant at the individual level). Someone can be both a maven and a connector.
I get that Scott and Kriss were getting at something more cultural (maybe even personal) than economic, but this really just seems to be a different application of Gladwell's framework (namely, applying it to popular culture rather than broader economics).
I've been watching sports since Charlie Hough threw the first knuckleball at Joe Robbie stadium in the first ever Marlins game (a strike! - I was 9) and I gotta tell you, after 30 years years and maybe 1,800 Marlins games (60 a year on avg sounds right, and possibly too low), I've never seen the same game twice.
The NBA & NFL can get a bit samesey (I love the Heat & Dolphins too - if my dad chose Cali instead of Florida I wonder what my life would be like - but then he could've chosen to stay in Poland too I guess) but a baseball game is always different, every time. It's magical.
Anyway, I still don't know what the statistics WHIP or WAR are and fear I never will - but boy am I enthralled with a Marlins game.
> The most knowledgeable RPG geek who owns all the expansion books cannot match the fervor of the sports fan who has memorized the RBIs and ERAs of every player in the league and has all their rookie cards and goes to every game. But aren’t nerds and “sportsball fans” natural enemies?
The sports fans who are natural enemies of the nerds are definitely not the ones who memorize the RBIs and ERAs of every player in the league. Those people probably don't know a single player's RBI or what an ERA is.
"How do you get a reputation as (an identity as?) 'the Star Wars guy'? Certainly not by going around and saying 'Hey, have you seen Star Wars yet?'. We have."
I actually did get a reputation (but not an identity) as "the Star Wars guy" by telling people about it before anyone knew what it was. The magazine Starlog published an article about it with some pre-production art by McQuarrie, and I got excited and told everyone I knew about it, showing some of them the magazine. Then I did it again when a comic book serialization started before the (first) movie was released. The ones who ended up seeing the movie repeatedly remembered these things.
Using the taxonomy above, this would make me a "hipster" (following obscure sources and telling people what I found), but I'm pretty sure the excited chattering of childish enthusiasm falls somewhere on the nerd-geek spectrum.
I've read Kriss too, I also disagree, but not quite for the same reason.
First of all, far from dead, some nerds are currently trying to build AGI. This might turn out to be a bigger problem than whether we return to "genuine mass art".
"nerds have always gravitated to the popular" is the kind of thing I'd like to stick a [citation needed] on. Being able to, say, correctly pronounce Quenya or even write it is very much not the kind of thing that tends to make you popular at your local school, but that kind of nerd always existed and still does. And if general internet background chatter is anything to go by, "[man] living with [his] mother" is most of the time a dog-whistle but not for "popular".
I think there's a lot to say for the Chapman model of geeks and MOPs: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths Applied to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it might have been mainly geek territory once but I see the version we have today as completely taken over by sociopaths, watered down for mass-market appeal to squeeze as much money out of the mops as possible. I don't think Marvel ever "thought that most people were nerds", more like they thought there was good money to be made by taking something nerdy and turning it into general mass-market pop culture, and they seem to have been very financially successful at this so far.
I think Freddie deBoer has a valid take on this too: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/your-personality-has-to-be-load-bearing - what Marvel and Disney have really discovered is that they can sell you a substitute for having an identity. If you define yourself as "the Star Wars guy", then someone criticising something in the latest film is not a piece of film critique but a personal attack on your deepest self that justifies going to DEFCON 1 immediately. If being so deeply invested in an aspect of your identity that any criticism justifies lashing out is "nerdy" then nerd culture is very much alive!
I'm also kind of annoyed about the use of "hipster", here. Finding good stuff and sharing them was just what friends do, in my experience. Yeah, there's a bit of a status boost, but mostly it's about finding something that you think is good, and sharing it, so that more people you like have access to this good thing. Bonus points if you know a friend well enough to recommend something that they like but other friends don't. Super bonus points if you know them well enough to point them to stuff they'll like even when you yourself don't like it. Not because it's bad, merely because it's good but not something you're into, because you are an individual human with individual tastes, and so are they.
While "hipsters" were the people who lost sight of objective goodness, and went in for the status thing. Not only would they be seduced by phrases like "artisanal free-range organic carbon-neutral", once they found something like that, they'd embellish it more before passing it on, to increase their status. Everything became about status signals, from what they wore to how they talked. It was all about finding new stuff, making it seem cool, and passing it on to just the right people - not too many, not too few, only the ones that are useful to impress.
It is only among nerds that enthusiasm for something corresponds to learning more and more about it. That's the core element here. Non-nerds who like something do not feel any need to read up on it, to know more and more.
Of course, the producers of content notice when their audience are nerds, and they start to produce content built more for those who obsessively learn every detail. Comics can start "rewarding" readers for noticing some obscure thing. A game series can have an elaborate continuity, or a zillion details to memorize. Content that either "leans into the fandom" or simply naturally has too much for non-nerds to easily pick up, can rapidly become nerd-only, thus solidifying boundaries. And sure, there are the personality correlations, attributes most nerds also have, including being STEM-y and lacking social skills. Combined, a nerd ended up being an unpopular thing to be.
Mainstream culture shifted to accommodate nerd interests after computers launched a lot of nerds into the ranks of the world's richest and most influential people, and we got popular movie series based around Marvel and Lord of the Rings, and video games becoming more mainstream, and so on. This made the borders more ambiguous than they were before, but we still obviously have nerds.
Re: coin and stamp collectors, there are a couple of other possible reasons for the death of those hobbies:
- With the digitization of mail and finance, people generally interact with coins and stamps less now, which gives fewer opportunities for people to develop an interest in them.
- Stamp/coin collecting are, simply put, boring hobbies, and there are so many more engaging ways to spend your time now (video games, social media, etc.)
- The people who were interested in stamp and coin collecting became old, meaning that it became seen as an old person hobby and as such was rejected by younger folk (resulting in a positive feedback loop)
Meanwhile a hipster refers to a particular subculture that developed primarily from 1999 to 2003. Since then it stabilised, ossified, and is slowly dying out. Some aspects broke through to the superculture, which I would identify as men's facial hair and microbrewies, but most aspects did not. This is typical of subcultures throughout time. I think it's important to note that hipsters were middle class.
A hipster could never have discovered The Beetles because hipsters didn't exist yet. (I know there were unrelated groups also called hipsters earlier, that's not the point.) I think you need a better theory for how taste-making works/worked.
Clever theory, but wrong. Dungeons and Dragons has been a nerd activity from the start. So have comic books AFAICT (and that's why MCU nerdery has no traction-- it's derivative of the comics and everyone knows it). And there are whole fields where even the most popular stuff doesn't seem to support nerdery (Taylor Swift has superfans but no one would think to call them nerds). Nerds engage with stuff not because of aesthetics or popularity but because of certain mental experiences that come from in-depth engagement. That's a quality that neither aesthetics nor popularity reliably captures. Nerdy content is prone to be popular these days (in ways that it wasn't even 20 years ago-- nerdery went mainstream during the tech boom) but that's just incidental and the coincidence fooled both you and Kriss.
Also, you're wrong about reversing the nerd-geek distinction. Gates is a geek and not a nerd; someone who obsesses over Tolkien is a nerd but not (necessarily) a geek.
Ben Wyatt : You know, "nerd culture" is mainstream now. So, when you use the word "nerd" derogatorily, it means you're the one that's out of the zeitgeist. Tom Haverford : Yes, that's perfect. Just like that: be incredibly boring.
This comment section is a lot of astrology level personality science... Similar flavour even
I like the definition of nerd versus geek as encapsulated in two photos : on the left, an American man in horn rim glasses reading the newspaper in Chinese; on the right a bearded man cheerfully looking up from his arrayed collection of in-original-package figurines.
By this schema I am a nerd; it's obviously superior to enjoy learning and information about the world, even in a sometimes outsized or slightly absurd way, to collecting childish objects (physical or virtual). Nerds can do things with their knowledge. Geeks are merely prisoners of their enthusiasm(s). And God help you if they engage you in conversation.
Sports *geeks* are what you were talking about ; sports nerds eg create the 'moneyball' system.
I think this makes more sense in the framing of social signalling / the "barber pole" model. If hipsters were really just about data sorting, they would also like popular things. If thing X is popular, hipsters are signalling that they are on a different cultural level by hating X and liking unpopular / not yet popular thing Y.
Nerds are just unaware or indifferent to the barber pole. They like thing Z regardless of whether it is the current trend, or whether it is new and promising. This usually means they are not in sync with popular culture, but as seen with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it is possible for thing Z to become popular. When this happens, nerds don't care and continue to like thing Z, unlike hipsters, who would need a new thing to signal their avant garde status. Of course, nerds will continue to like the MCU if it becomes unpopular again.
Quite a bit of the debate above seems to centre on anxiety about authenticity. In particular, a couples of people are irritatedly denying that nerd or hipster obsessions are for other people. They suggest that these obsessions are *real* - implying that if the obsessions are public-facing or part of a public identity, that make the obsession less real or less authentic.
I think that’s wrong. Having a relationship purely with a thing (like music or the MCU) isn’t better or more authentic than being interested in a thing out of a desire to share it and join its community. They’re just two different ways of engaging with a thing. They both have really obvious failure modes: a public engager might be a poser; a private engager might be a bore. They have obvious success modes, too.
I think a lot of the anxiety in the debate could be neutralised by not taking a negative view of the way other people do [hobby X], and in particular by not succumbing to a belief in a particular kind of authenticity that excludes social sharing.
I think this all misses something important, or perhaps I have different conception of what it means to be a nerd. Nerdy activities are those which require shared participation.
The pinnacle of nerdy activities I think about are things like dungeons and dragons, magic the gathering, comic books, Starcraft (deliberating choosing an old game for reasons that will become clear). These are activities that require a nontrivial investment of time, money or both. It used to be the case that to play Magic, you had to put in a baseline level of investment, and base your social life around it. Nowadays the investment is a lot less with things like magic arena, and FNM drafts but it's not the full experience. With D&D, you need a dedicated group, plan out events in advance, and block off pretty large chunks of time. With comics, shared participation allowed you to actually read all of the comics in chronological order without missing pieces of the story. And with Starcraft, LAN parties required a fair amount of logistics to set up.
I realize this definition places certain sports like tennis and golf into the nerd category. And I would simply bite the bullet. There isn't any different between the social structures of a tennis enthusiast and a chess or Pokemon card enthusiast. And I've known many people who are sports nerds and nerds in the more widely used sense. The label isn't commonly applied simply because sports have been around forever. We already know what sports are - we don't need a new word or concept to describe them.
So how does this apply to the MCU? It doesn't directly - which is why not everyone who watches the MCU is a nerd. But it does apply to people who not just consume it, but discuss it on Discord, go to COMICON, cosplay etc. Those activities require shared participation.
What do we call people who feel empowered to embrace any kind of gnostic, connect-the-dots, sort of discussions? Pizzagate or QAnon or the futility of N95 masks or the efficacy of HorsePaste?
I stopped being a coin collector when it no longer became possible to find interesting (rare) coins in circulation. That started around when they took the silver out of coinage.
A) This is exactly spot on, IMO: “Now there’s no sense that you have to really care about stamps or coins to have a great stamp/coin collection: you just need a higher budget than whoever else typed “stamps and coins” into the eBay search function.”
B) But…are/were coin collectors “nerds” then? No, because coin/stamp collecting weren’t “bad.” But what even, really, does that mean?
It seems that we have a whole constellation of obsessives of various types, who go under different labels and have some similarities and some differences. For instance, there's the "fan" (short for "fanatic," recall) who buys every song from their favorite band, has all the bootlegs, and knows everything about every member. That person isn't a nerd/geek, right? Neither, as you point out, is the sports fan. What's the difference? Simple: Fans are obsessed with something popular. "But Star Wars and the MCU are popular!" Yes, and do we *really* look down on people who like them nowadays? No, because that's nearly everybody.
Nerds and geeks are distinguished by liking *unpopular* things. Nerds like unpopular things which require intelligence (most things requiring intelligence are inherently unpopular, at least until someone finds a way to make tons of money from them). Geeks are—what? I'm not sure. It seems to me that geeks are obsessed with things that require *some* intelligence, but not quite as much as nerds. For instance, where are the Silmarillion geeks? Nowhere. There are only Silmarillion nerds. But there are tons of Dr. Who and Star Trek geeks.
"The most knowledgeable RPG geek who owns all the expansion books cannot match the fervor of the sports fan who has memorized the RBIs and ERAs of every player in the league and has all their rookie cards and goes to every game. But aren’t nerds and “sportsball fans” natural enemies?"
I think you are missing out on the nuances of sports fandom, as there were two camps, the nerds and the traditionalists. The nerds knew all the RBIs and ERAs and stats etc, and the traditionalists liked the eye test and players being tall and fast etc, and there was actually a lot of conflict in between these two groups (Moneyball is kinda about this). But the nerds basically won because teams run by them kept on winning too much.
When I was in High School, I competed in speech and debate. One year there was a guy whose entire speech was about distinguishing the terms Nerd, Geek, and Dork from each other and it's completely framed my outlook on them.
Nerd: This means someone who is intelligent. Nerdy interests are cerebral, but not necessarily outside of the mainstream. Consider, for example, Fantasy Football commissioners in the pre-internet era; they were required to compile and then score all of the relevant player stats for each team in the league, and generally loved doing it.
Geek: The word originates in carnivals as a term for people with unbelievable skills, contrasted with freaks who had unbelievable natures of some sort. Used in the hobbyist sense to describe someone with an intense interest in something abnormal. In Japan the word otaku maintains this idea, with the standard example being a Train Otaku. These are the sort who spend their weekends going to launch parties for new trains, or visiting every station in the country.
Dork: Someone who is socially inept. The speaker claimed that the word originates from Dr. Seuss and I have never fact checked him on this.
Obviously there is plenty of crossover between these categories.
Here in the UK we have anoraks, trainspotters and boffins as well as nerds. I'm not sure of the distinction between them, except to note that 'boffin' is, inter alia, a term of abuse used at school, of pupils who are too keen and knowledgeable.
To be an anorak is to be too interested in something, especially from the point of view of the prevailing British viewpoint that effortless superiority and 'seeing the bigger picture' are always better than working really hard at a speciality, and that the humanities are by nature superior to the sciences.
Also, true anoraks are probably D&D players, and usually work in IT, but are also always keen on SF (never call it sci-fi) and preserved steam railways (hence 'trainspotter'). They (we) are often right-libertarian in politics.
To me, the nerd has an obsessive fascination with something obscure and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks about it - or maybe cares a bit but can’t help him/herself. Math nerds are generally proud of being math nerds, right? Here’s a fun question - is Wes Anderson a nerd, a hipster, or something else?
One can read this comment section as a demonstration of the nerd thesis, albeit in varying shades.
Why the assumption that nerds and hipsters are opposites? I think nerds/geeks in the sense you're gesturing at are defined by a) obsessive interest and b) speculative fiction fandom. Nerds can also be hipsters (as you note yourself, you were into ASoIaF before it was cool.)
A lot of nerds are into very obscure media, and my intuition is that this makes them *more* nerdy, not less.
A friend who managed stamp and coin trading for large antiquities dealers explained the declines over many years. Email made stamps relatively unfamiliar to and unused by younger people. Collectors liked variety, but governments created such vast numbers of issues as to drown collectors under the sheer numbers. The stamp-collecting world created grading systems that were so expansive and esoteric and violable that no one could afford to build a more-or-less definitive collection. Similar occurrences took place in the coin world. As a kid in the 1960s, I could regularly find 19th century coins in the change drawers at my parents' store. As collectors multiplied, the supply dried up. There arose a class of professional coin investors who didn't have the old-time collectors' love for the pieces. They were just collectible investments. They, too, created impossibly esoteric grading systems, with fantastic premiums for minute differences in quality. This led to scandals related to fraudulent grading. The response was to encase collectible coins in plastic sheaths. Collectors could no longer touch their treasures. And as one who had a modest collection in my youth, a great deal of the thrill came from touching a coin that you knew had been spent 2,000 years earlier. With the plastic-sheathed collectible coins of today, they are untouchable, and as a result, unlovable. The passion dried up. In a recent Substack essay (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/whence-fall-snowflakes), I discussed how the loss of spare time and physical mobility sapped youth of many old passions, and there's no doubt that this had its impact on stamp and coin collecting. If you have no spare time and are not allowed to bike a mile away to visit your coin-collector friend, much of the motive for the hobby vanishes. And, of course, electronic devices have distracted kids away from everything else. I read someone comment recently that coins have been around for 2,500 years, and it feels very strange to be alive in the time when this ancient technology is finally disappearing from common usage and our collective conscience.
I feel like my experience of nerds/geeks is very different to Scotts...
As a small child, I didn't watch star trek as some kind of statement of identity or to share it with others, it was just that that kind of story was like a steel trap for someone with my kind of mind and worldview.
Now that I'm older, I feel at home in places like hackspaces. Not because I want to be "that hackspace guy" but rather that it's a room full of people who share the same tendency to get hyper-obsessed with weird little interests and projects.
And social status in geek communities is fuzzy but tends to tie to capability, not just interest. You get respect for actually building that giant spider robot, not just being "that guy really into robotics"
To your question about collectors ("Also, speaking of collectors, are there any, any more? When I was a child, the stamp collector and coin collector were stock cultural figures. Now I realize I haven’t thought about them in years. Where did they go?") - I think the new collections are experiences. The cost of travel and experiences has declined relative to other goods - so people collect marathons or countries visited. They are accomplishment collections, not just physical collections.
There are still some physical collectables - sneakers, baseball cards are having a big moment, NFTs maybe? Stamps and coins are less relevant because people don't use stamps and coins anymore... I think your point about eBay making it less fun might be true, but that hasn't hindered baseball cards, which are at a major peak...
I was reading about the flappers of the 1920s who favoured rail-thin bodies and bound their breasts if they were, by the standards of the time, too well endowed. Seems worse than watching movies and reading comics.
The indiscriminate and often self-serving use of the word "nerd" is one of many malapropisms in the contemporary lexicon. Nerd is nothing more than somebody who is (1) really, really smart (not just somewhat smart, or well-read on a particular issue, or in the middle of their class at an Ivy League or really good university, or somebody who really enjoys consuming particular items like "wine nerds" or "French cinema nerds") and (2) not socially integrated with people other than nerds. Hipsters are wealthy kids who generally have external subsidies to go on endless bourgeois adventures in a never-attempting attempt to find the new new new thing. Kids at the Reefer Barn in 1962 are not hipsters..
They are German working class kids who had nowhere else to go see music. Hipsters and nerds are not remotely related and don't belong in either of these articles together.
Re: coins, it's still quite challenging to find many key dates and mintmarks. I waited for years to buy a 1911-D Barber quarter in mint state with CAC approval. Only five such pieces exist, and two are owned by billionaires. The coin was only $1100, but I had to check the listing every day and run to get my credit card to prevent some other collector from buying it first. Nobody saved coins until the cardboard books came out during the depression, so mint state circulating US denominations from pre~1925 are actually quite tough to find, even with the internet. Many survivors were harshly cleaned and are near worthless. The only reason certain issues can be found in mint state is because a single collector in 1910 or whenever saved a roll: e.g., Pittsburgh resident Augustin Giles saved a roll of quarters of each year in the 1890s-1910s - but he apparently missed the 1911-D.
It's so jarring to read opinions on sport fans by people who actively dislike watching them and the culture around it, although a few made salient points. I am a big fan and watcher of (European) football and I'd categorize the people as:
Fans: normal people who go to games or watch it on TV. Usually they follow their favorite team in their own country/league, based on (usually) their city (a Manchester United fan let's say). Beyond that, there's people who watch all games in that country's league (all Premier League games for that week). Maybe swap a few uniteresting games in that league for a more interesting one in a foreign league.
Superfans: the one's that go to away games and have done so consistelty for years if not decades. The people who are angry/upset the whole day/weekend/week after a loss.
Toxic fans: usually ultras/hooligans.
Nerds: the statisticians who are more into the math/stats part than the actual games or sport. Absent a link to the sport, they would have latched onto something else. Usually employed by clubs or sport betting companies.
Geeks: they would be somewhere between and around fans and superfans. They would not likely be devasted by any random loss, but are more involved in the "lore" of their respective team. Can become toxic but not in the violent way; more like they base their whole life around that team (or sport). The equivalent of Disney adults.
I find it hard to belive in the MCU nerdom/geekdom. There simply isn't enough there to create those communities. Comics themselves as a medium have that and most Marvel nerds/geeks have at least branched out a bit into DC or the indies. To further define the terms, a geek would have read most storylines, know a lot of details about the characters and details about the authors. A nerd would calculate Superman's strength or Flash's speed and have a database-level of knowledge about say the date of publication and first apperances of characters. The irony is not lost on me that when I began writing this comment there were exaclty 616 comments here.
Most MCU fans are the same people who were fans of Pirates of the Carribean or Fast and Furious. A lot of the hype around MCU is because of the deluge of articles and Youtube videos analyzing trailers. Comic fans were never that thrilled with the MCU except for a few movies. Same for Game of Thrones/ASOAIF. Most people who named their children Daenerys and had Dothraki weddings are the same ones who did the same for Pirates of the Carribean. But it's hard to find a ASOAIF nerd/geek (except maybe the GRRM 2 assistants) simply because there isn't sufficient material; any superfan is likely a fantasy nerd/geek first.
I think that both hipsters and nerds are still in the fray for cross cultural exchanges. While YouTube and algorithms can see what's effective in your own country, we still rely on the networks of weebs or their country equivalent to filter what is useful for international audiences.
They do blend into one since the need to find what's good requires major filtering of bad content
I think you're overcomplicating the cause of nerd-dom -- I know a lot of people who are definitely classified as nerds, and basically none of look outward for subjects to 'nerd out' over; people become, e.g. Lord of the Rings nerds because they really love Lord of the Rings, not because they imagine they will be seen as 'the LotR person'.
In fact, nerds are stereotyped as generally unaware of / apathetic to social cues and expectations, and developing your identity based on the expectations of others and desire for specific self-perception requires (I would think) an above-average level of social acuity.
This idea also seems to conflict with the fact that nerds group together and bond over shared interests, no? If people became LotR nerds because they wanted to be seen as the Lord of the Rings guy, then surely they would see other LotR nerds as competition instead of allies.
This seems right, but Sam may be identifying anything popular as bad. Anything that the servile herd could possibly like must be execrable. The nerd attempts to make the bad thing good by doing a deep dive on it. And yes, sports ball fans are definitely sports nerds.
(For the record, I think Tolkien and Martin are both overrated.)
If we are going to do depth/breadth, I think you need two more things:
The popularist. The popularist likes things BECAUSE other people like them. I actually would argue that this is the sports guy most of the time - he doesn't necessarily care about sports, he's not necessarily up on every stat. What he wants is to be able to talk to other people about sports. He loves inception. He raved about Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. He thought Mad Max Fury Road was the best thing since Green Day and U2. He owns an Apple Product. He at some point attended a Six Sigma conference. He likes whatever everybody likes in whatever moment he finds himself, and this helps him make conversations.
The Contrarian (the other one). He dislikes everything BECAUSE people like it. I think this is actually some hipsters, in the usual stereotype - they don't and can't like anything that a significant mass of other people like. I don't have to list what they like, because it's irrelevant - they mostly define their personalities by disliking.
I really enjoyed this.
Damn I feel I just lost a piece of my identity by witnessint Sam Kriss get mainstreamed on Astral Star Codex like this
> Still, surely CTRL+H-ing every mention of “nerds” in Kriss’ post to read “geeks” would be a simple friendly amendment.
Surely the nerds would be more likely to use a sed substitution, like s/nerd/geek/g?
I collect coins and I think the description of the hobby (and its putative death) isn't quite right.
1. Rare coins are in fact hard to find, even in today's internet world. They are usually sold in auctions, which might happen online, but still not that frequently. It's not unusual for examples some specific rare coin to be sold only once every few years. If the coin is also obscure, it may not be prohibitively expensive, so this kind of situation isn't the sole province of rich people.
2. One area of collecting is to get all the rare items. Another is to get all the minor varieties of a common item. These varieties may not be very rare, but it still takes a lot of effort to be able to distinguish them and to find them. Some collectors will obtain large numbers of relatively common coins and sort through and scrutinize them to try to identify interesting varieties.
3. An important part of collecting is getting good deals. This is surely a lot harder than it used to be because sellers can more easily figure out what things are worth and you won't find something grossly underpriced in a random antique store as often these days. But filtering through buckets (or online listings) of large numbers of coins can still be fun and lead to spotting good deals.
So I think there is room in the hobby for nerd-like behavior (per your definition). I would argue the decline of the hobby is more due to competition from other similar hobbies (a generation ago you could collect stamps, coins, baseball cards, or rare books/comics - now you can collect beanie babies, Pokemon cards, NFTs, funko pops, action figures, etc.). I think stamps have suffered more than coins because stamp collecting has more of an aesthetic component (which has faced stronger competition) while coins have a historical element that is less well replicated by collecting newer things. This difference isn't obvious in the google trends graphs you posted but I believe is observable from looking at prices of stamps vs coins.
Collecting isn't just about acquiring the rarest items, it's also about acquiring complete sets. I'm not a collector myself, but I've known some (stamps, coins, comic books, hockey cards) and they have all looked for complete sets. This provides added interest since rarity becomes relative, and completing a set isn't just about finding that last piece but about finding the person willing to trade it to you.
The ebay theory still applies though.
I'd guess many coin collectors got their start being patient enough to sort through change to see if they had e.g. a wheat cent or silver dime, but first of all, who pays with cash and gets change, and the chances of finding something collectible are orders of magnitude smaller than, say, the '90s. And stamp collectors would have started saving the stamps on mail sent to their house, but how frequently do you get stamped mail anymore?
My 79-year old father goes to stamp shows, because one of his hobbies is to buy sheets of old but common unused stamps for less than face value. They are still valid postage, and then he uses them to personalize the stamps he puts on letters he sends to various people. And most of the other people at stamp shows are about his age. He does have some stamps he thinks are interesting that he's held onto, but the dealers at the stamp shows think they're common and uninteresting. So there's a decreasing number of stamps that might be "worth something" and a net loss of collectors in the hobby, and then every time a collector dies and his heirs have no interest in his collection and that many more stamps make their way to dealers who now have one less buyer.
Too bad "sending paper letters with vintage but still valid stamps" never caught on with the hipsters.
Collecting has not in the slightest died out. People collect more things than ever, like sneakers, funko pops, vintage cars, guns, antique ceramics, anime figurines, magic cards, etc.
What about people who like high culture? Or bird watching? Or astronomy? Are they nerds? They often have in depth knowledge about their hobby.
To me, being a nerd requires a degree of swimming against the cultural tide.
It's weird and unpopular to be into trains, so the fact that you are indicates you have a bit of character (or are socially oblivious, which is also kind of endearing).
The problem (and I think Kriss alludes to this) is that nerd stuff went mainstream in the past few decades. Of the 10 highest-grossing movies of the 2010s, 6 are Star Wars or Marvel films. There's no longer any sense that nerds are the underdog.
But what does it say about you when you wear a Star Wars shirt? You're pledging allegiance to the biggest, most popular club imaginable. Is that a brave stance? Those people always make me think "if you lived in the SW universe, you'd be on the side of the Empire".
In general, I am creeped out by effusive public adoration for things that are near-universally loved. Like The Beatles. Or bacon. Or dogs. Or science (Neil DeGrasse Tyson's whole shtick). Regardless of how I feel about those things on the object level, there's no glory in joining a culture war when you're signing on to the winning side.
I love sports, for the same reason I love chess and modern board games, and tire of most serial drama: the moments of unscripted drama that emerge from highly skilled competition feel rewarding in a far more natural way than having my marionette strings pulled by skilled screenwriters.
I remember that as a smart kid with smart friends, we'd typically watch the same things, and I'd hone in on the principles (joke structure or humor premises for Monty Python, ethical dilemmas for Star Trek: TNG, etc), while certain friends would focus on remembering every fact and every line accurately (and frequently correcting each other). That latter behavior mildly annoyed me back then, and I recognized it instantly in Kriss' "nerd" description
“Surely nobody wanted to identify with the US Postal Service” Tell that to my Forever 21 U.S Postal Service Priority Mail tube top
"Also, what was up with stamp and coin collectors?" - they do NFTs these days. It's a bit flippant, but very true: the crowd at an NFT convention is filled with the types of people who would have been stamp collectors 30 years ago.
Also, stamp collecting is dying out because nobody cares about mailing things anymore. And when there is a glut of material, it becomes a self-sustaining cycle as resale prices drop and more people lose interest (or die).
Coin collecting isn't quite dying out. Partially, because it is often a form of {investing/hoarding}. It is much easier to keep a coin in good condition for 100 years than a stamp.
Obviously you name the car Carcharoth.
I read the original post some time ago. I feel like both the original and this response miss something; I'll try put my finger on why.
Kriss intertwines the deep obsession with a subject and the idea that the subject is bad. The visceral metaphor of the fast food obsessive (relevant Achewood: https://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=02102005) sets the tone for the whole post, and recurred in my mind long after the rest was dismissed. Now, I agree D*sney must be destroyed and the MCU is literally the worst thing to happen to film as a medium, like all sane people do, but I think "D*sney is parodically evil and society-destroying" and "people get hypertrophically interested in subjects" aren't much more related than chance. The chance is just huge. This is the self-deprecating joke about medieval history, but at the wrong target.
Most people are normies. People who are weird in some significant way tend to hope other people weird in similar ways aren't normies, because that would provide them connection they can't find in the general population. People who develop deep, abiding interests in subjects are weird -- find some normal people and talk to them about their hobbies! Hell, ask people who've gone out of their way to watch every MCU film in theatres about stuff like names of recurring characters, you'll be shocked how often they have no clue (running into this IRL was one of the things that really stunned me as to how shallow most people's interests are). However, having deep and abiding interests doesn't inherently come intertwined with the other weird quality of 'looking deep into subcultures'. Many Such People obsess over interminably mainstream subjects, including shit-terrible ones.
This post responds by thinking the deep and abiding interest in subjects is an outgrowth of those subjects being mainstream, which seems implausible. There are, as alluded, many people into mainstream subjects to the point of making up a significant part of their lives and interests who *don't at all* have that. Tons of people play D&D 5E regularly and have no clue what the rules are. Tons of people catch a lot of sports games without having a particularly good understanding of who plays for their favourite team or what the rules of the game are. These are really basic things, well before getting into deep-abiding-interests like "what is the history of this sport" or "are there other, better TTRPGs I could play". You might not necessarily expect an average fan of a popular TV show to look into the show's production and the life stories of all its main cast, and be unsurprised when they don't. But if you assume they at least know the show's plotlines, you're not protecting yourself from surprise.
One thing none of this quite explains is that the quote-unquote 'nerdy' hobbies were 'nerdy' long before they were mainstream. I specifically allude back to tabletop RPGs here. The fifth edition of D&D is really, genuinely mainstream. (It's also shit.) There's a little bit of a generation gap here -- the older you are the less likely you are to realize how thoroughly mainstream it is -- but nonetheless. This is...really not true for tabletop RPGs in all history. Hell, it's not true for any tabletop RPGs that aren't D&D 5E. It should be fairly obvious that the people who developed deep and abiding interests in tabletop RPGs before 5E was mainstream, or the people who have deep and abiding interests in tabletop RPGs and are not interested in 5E, have something different going on to the people who have deep and abiding interests in D&D 5E. Kriss's point kind of simplifies all of this down. It does genuinely seem that people who develop deep and abiding interests in subjects are more likely to get into ones with certain coding around them -- some good, some bad. This probably correlates with what you see in Big Five personality test interest correlates, which if you haven't seen any you should, because they're hilarious. I've seen so many where the whole Introversion line is anime.
(I have made a valiant effort not to say the quiet part loud.)
A more parsimonious explanation for why stamp and coin collecting died out is that we no longer commonly use stamps or coins (as we no longer commonly use physical letters or money). People have shifted to collecting things like gunpla or shoes.
Anyway, while I agree that a key part of subculture identity is a pattern of consumption, I don't think that nerds are particularly unique in this aspect. Every subculture has expensive, specialized products you regularly consume as a way to participate in that culture. After all, a young girl participating in her aesthetic has to buy clothes and makeup and any number of things. A sports fan has to have a big TV and sports memorabilia. None of this is dying. It is fragmenting as increased wealth and communications have created large profusions of subcultures with mini-celebrities and all that. Which ironically means his thesis on mass culture is the opposite of reality. We no longer have mass culture. We have a profusion of subcultures. (Nor do I believe such subcultures are mainly creatures of algorithms.)
‘’Is this bad? I don’t want to say you should never build identity around liking a thing. Most non-enlightened people want to have some distinguishing characteristic, and anything you do - care about a hobby, or a skill, or a political cause - is going to feel kind of cringe. ‘’
At the end of the day the point of both is to fulfill that emotional drive called by Adam smith “the desire to be loved and to be lovely”. When the person trying to be loved is reciprocated they succeed. When we don’t reciprocate we call this cringe.
Other words for this feeling are glory, glamor, beauty, goodness, virtue, worth. It is the most social of all our primal urges. That which is glorified though is hated in equal measure by others; it is how we sort ourselves into tribes.
I am tempted to go on a long rant about how Ethics and Ethos are philosophical and rhetorical schools that focus on this primal agent… but that is off topic so I’ll stop here.
Good on you for critically engaging with a Kriss essay like this. Kriss has found a way to totally bypass my critical reading skills (of which I’m pretty proud and which is a fundamental component of how I make a living). I just take his essays in as works of art, like being taken in by the melody of a song without really engaging with the meaning of the lyrics.
Part of what's going on here is that the term "nerd" has undergone semantic shift in recent decades from having a STEM connotation to meaning something more like "fan, especially of some aspect of pop culture." Scott remembers the older meaning, whereas Kriss is using the newer meaning.
Just as there’s an authentic hipster, who loves searching through obscurity for gems, and would do it even if doing so accrued negative status, so there’s an authentic nerd, who deeply loves the trivia of some artwork, and will dive deep into it even when doing so accrues negative status. Both of these people are, paradoxically, overflowing fountains of status because of their lack of desire for it. They are genuinely useful people, because this hipster is actually a critic, and this nerd is actually an expert. They’ll help you know and love a thing in a really enjoyable way, because there’s no social status games in it for them. The fake hipsters and fake nerds are camouflaging themselves as critics and experts; but their relation to the artwork is less genuine because it’s partly replaced by a relation to status. Both are more genuine than the poser, who doesn’t relate to the artwork itself at all, only to the status connected with it.
Sports fans of the sort that do serious fantasy leagues or memorize stats are obviously nerds. The confusion is that in high school or college some of them were actually jocks, who knew a lot about football or whatever because they actually participated in it, which is less nerdy (you generally don’t call a person a nerd for being an expert in their “professional” field).
My reaction to Kriss's piece was pretty much the same as my reaction to the Last Psychiatrist stuff: "My, what a weird and somewhat unpleasant bizarre alternate universe this person seems to live in." Just thoroughly alien to the world as I perceive it.
I don't think this conversation can really be had without talking about the shifting definition of "nerd." You acknowledge a slight shading, but it's really much bigger than that.
The original mid-20th century prototype for "nerd" is something like my dad: science fiction fan, AD&D player, baseball card collector and statistics memorizer, model rocket builder, chess player, punch-card programmer, grew up to be a geophysical scientist. (Note: yes, the sports statistics people were nerds.)
My dad didn't have to engage in any competitive nerdery to earn his status as the Ur-Nerd. Just doing a lot of "nerd things," no matter how casually, was sufficient.
(What were "nerd things?" I don't have a formal definition, but you can get a pretty decent sorting by looking at the intersection of "masculine-coded" and "intellectual." Better than "things that are bad," anyway.)
That seems to have changed somewhere in the '90s when a bunch of "nerd things" started gaining footholds in pop culture. Suddenly just reading science fiction became unremarkable, nerdy comic book movies turned into blockbuster spectacles, and even anime - one of the last bastions of nerddom when I was a kid - is totally mainstream now.
So yes, the kind of people who get called "nerds" today tend to be the people with intense special interests in things that used to be "nerdy" but are now mainstream pop culture. But I think it's a mistake to view either their intensity or the 'badness' of their special interest as intrinsic to nerddom.
I was obsessed with collecting coins as a kid, and this is 100% what happened to me: “enjoyed the thrill of hunting for a rare piece, but Amazon and eBay have made it trivial to exchange money for whatever coins/stamps you want”
The most fun was trying to get old coins, or $2 bills, from bank tellers, or in change. But going to yard sales or the tiny nearby coin store was also an adventure -- you never knew which coins they’d have, it was always a limited selection.
But when eBay came around, after a couple months of massive excitement, I became no longer interested. Everything was always available -- it was just a matter of budget. Boring. I mean I still appreciate old coins, just because I like history, but I stopped chasing for them or collecting them.
How about this: a hipster gets credit for knowing a rare topic, and a geek gets credit for knowing a rare piece of information about a common topic. Then with material goods like stamps you get a different categorization, because price enters the picture, and you get again, breadth-type (Collector) and depth-type (Connoisseur, ie. expensive items). Maybe Hipster overlaps with information here; the guy who tells you about something he owns that nobody knows of?
But then what's a nerd? I think there's where the "a hipster of something bad" typology comes into its own: a nerd is a "failed geek"; someone who doesn't get credit for knowing a rare piece of information about a common topic, and doesn't care.
>Kriss defines nerds as “someone who likes things that aren’t good”. More specifically, someone who is an obsessive (counting, itemizing, collecting) fan of something bad.
This seems like a weird take to me. The first things that come to mind when I think of "bad things people obsess over" are Transformers and Twilight, and the stereotypical image of both fandoms is pretty much diametrically opposite to that of "nerds".
Kriss argues that nerdism is dying because the MCU is selling fewer tickets. I'm reminded of a line from Community, by Pierce's dad, where he claims that video games are dying because arcades keep closing. No, nerdism isn't going away, it's just that video games have taken control of the media ecosystem. People are saving their money on the movie ticket and staying home either playing Fortnite or watching Elden Ring on twitch. We're replacing one kind of nerdiness with a nerdier nerdiness.
I feel like you're taking very polysemous terms and trying to determine the true meaning of each one. The Hipster type you report Kriss as describing seems like a real category, but "hipster" has taken on connotations for me that I wouldn't apply it to every cultural explorer of the sort you describe. And both "geek" and "nerd" have diffused and migrated so much over the past five decades that I would want to see corpus data before commenting on how they are different.
I will say that *one* sense of the word "nerd" that has grown in frequency over the past thirty years or so is of someone who is into something (irrespective of quality) and expresses that into-ness by knowing a lot about it. You can be an Austen nerd or a Beethoven nerd. (I searched the phrases in quotes and there are hits.) This is a shift of meaning from the nerds of "Revenge of the Nerds", but those people also didn't seem to consistently match your sense. I think they were just generically socially inept.
Theory: the stamp and coin collectors switched to collecting digital items in video games.
I guess I understand having a category for the people he describes as nerds; I’m certainly aware of people like that. But it’s completely incompatible with my own ideas of what a nerd is.
https://www.theonion.com/walking-sports-database-scorns-walking-sci-fi-database-1819566197
I have a better hypothesis for why this pastime has died out: Pokemon.
You know why stamps and coins were popular? Because they were cheap, collectable and fit into little books. Much better than collecting Lego sets or even actual books: Those are collectable, but they are not cheap, and they don't fit into little books.
Pokemon are pretty cheap, and they fit into little cartridges. In fact, nowadays, you don't even need to buy a cartridge. You can just collect Pokemon and put them onto your phone.
(Of course, this isn't just Pokemon. There are literally worse versions of almost every video game with collect-them-all mechanics. Final Fantasy. Fire Emblem. Star Wars. Marvel Smash Smash game. Even Pokemon Go but Harry Potter (???). But Pokemon has the slogan.)
I feel like any model in which nerds like things because it brings them status is wrong -- nerds are the ones who like low-status things despite the fact they're low-status.
Nerd interests are a sticky flypaper trap for a certain kind of mind. I have that kind of mind (if you're reading this you probably do too), and I know that if I let myself go I could wind up in some hole of obsessive interest in planespotting or watching people play video games or something. As a moderately social aware person with something to lose, I feel like I need to steer myself away from these sorts of interests lest they cost me social status.
So, in my model:
a) Nerds like the things they like regardless of whether they're high-status or not.
b) Normies find a sensible balance between liking the things they like and liking things that give them status.
c) Hipsters are the opposite of nerds, they're obsessed with liking high-status things. This is a very tricky status game to play because the cost of "liking" something is so low, so you quicky wind up needing to like things that are really obscure or really bad in order to beat the next guy.
It's a little glib to dismiss sports as bad, isn't it? Athletes display extreme skill, sometimes transcendent. I don't think watching people push the limits of human ability is obviously bad.
Lots of collecting hobbies are still going strong. Record collecting is more popular than it’s been in decades - great news for the surviving hipsters out there. Sneaker collecting is massive. Funko pops, etc.
I don’t think hipsters died, they just diverged as a cohort and became less visible. Some started families or went into business; others went and founded their own subcultures instead of just consuming them. But the ethos of valuing obscurity and subculture is still very much around.
Both Kriss' essay, and Scott's response to it, remind me of the "Evil Cannot Comprehend Good" trope from TV tropes, except replace "Evil" with "Very socially motivated people" and "Good" with "Less socially motivated people" (although honestly both sets have a lot of overlap). Both essays seem obsessed with finding some deep, social reason why hipsters and nerds behave the way they do, like the supervillain who is telling the hero that they are "Not So Different." They literally can't comprehend the idea that someone could actually like something, so they try desperately to find some way that liking things isn't something people actually do. People couldn't actually like Star Wars, sportsball, the MCU, or the Beatles, they must be liking them to achieve some social goal like forming an identity or seeking status!
This is one of the two giant flawed assumptions that invalidates the theses of both articles (the other one, of course, is the assumption the the MCU is bad, when it is, in fact one of the human race's greatest artistic achievements*). If you assume that it is possible to like things for non-social reasons, or even in addition to social reasons, hipsters and nerds make much more sense. The reason that nerds like both popular stuff like the MCU, and less popular stuff like postage stamps is because they don't care about if something is popular, they care about if it fascinates them. Whether that thing is popular is orthogonal to how fascinating it is.
That fascination makes them invest a lot of time and effort in it, which in turn makes it part of their identity. They weren't trying to find something to form and identity first and picking Star Wars, identity formation was just a side effect. Similarly, hipsters probably just get bored with things they see frequently and want to seek out new things to be interested in. Making obscure things part of their identity comes second, if at all.
Scott asks if its ever okay to build your identity around liking a thing. I would ask if it's ever okay not to? What's the alternative, building it around social status games or large nonselective identity groups? It seems to me that liking something isn't just a good thing to build your identity around, it's one of the best things to build it around. After all, unlike social status games, you can like something without forcing other people to not like it.
*I've generally enjoyed Substack so far, but one thing I've found perplexing and annoying is how people on this site are constantly going on about how the MCU is terrible. Why? The best MCU movies are amazing classics and the worst are no worse than a mediocre pre-MCU action movie (and even the bad ones can still be a net positive by introducing characters who shine in later movies). It does a magnificent job of faithfully translating the epic serialized storytelling of superhero comics to the screen. It's also magnificently diverse in the variety of subgenres it has, there are political/espionage thrillers, crime dramas, space opera, fantasy adventure, action comedy, and so on. All the criticisms of it, by contrast, sound like cliches, they are often the same criticisms made of action/superhero movies decades ago, or criticisms that make it clear the critic is unpleasable (i.e. the MCU movies have too much comedy, but back in the 2000s people were complaining that superhero movies were too grim and dark).
Why do you keep saying "full stop"? I thought you were American.
Man, the future is weird...Are we really at the point where people can't wrap their heads around why people collected stamps? Please tell me this is satire...I honestly can't tell anymore.
I think stamp collecting has just been out competed by fitter consumers of leisure time, ie social media, video games, dating apps, clickbait news websites, etc. No one spent billions of dollars hyper-optimizing stamp collecting for Engagement.
As a 42 year old none of this resonates much with me.
Nerds were people into books and learning, it didn’t have anything to do with Star Wars (though they also liked Star Wars). And it was something that was mainly in opposition to high status males who competed in the realm of being good at sports and screwing girls.
Now obviously there were overlaps, I was one of them, and could sort of pass a bit in both realms (varsity sports). But the nerds in the 80s/early 90s were into WWII and old cars and Tolkien and 70s music and academic pursuits. People in an alternate status path.
The non-nerds were into drinking and sports and parties, people winning or the riff-raff in the status war.
Hipsters were a later 90s thing in our world about flannel and beards and trying really hard to be seen as cool while effecting a pose of not caring. “I am a rock, I am an island (who desperately wants validation)”.
Fascinating article. I wonder if there aren’t deeper roots to the relatively recent cultural phenomena of nerds, geeks, and hipsters?
Humans have always been engaged in a search for meaning in life. In our post-industrial society where many are involved in mind numbing, disconnected wage labor for a good portion of their waking hours, it’s not all that surprising that people seek meaning, recognition, connection with others, and to some degree distraction and relief through movies, fandom, sports, collecting, fiction, and esoteric knowledge that makes them in some way feel special and involves them in a community. We have precious little else left in our culture and in our lives. Alternatively (or simultaneously) you can turn to drinking and recreational drugs, but gone are the days for most when meaningful connection and purpose were found through your role in the tribe, daily labor, community or civic engagement, or religious affiliation. Welcome to the 21st century
Definitely calls for going back to the basics of sociology of distinction, consumption & identify, e.g. Bourdieu & Passeron and their seminal work on these topics. Whatever identifies people are subscribing to and building up are forms of social & cultural capital, used in strategies of distinction-whether this is ‘conscious’ or ‘sincere’ or not is moot to the sociologist, just like a bird’s plumage is to the ornithologist
The term "nerd" (or "geek", if you prefer) has experienced some semantic drift where it traditionally referred to the math/RPGs/etc cluster but now also refers to fans of franchises historically associated with traditional nerddom. The second kind of nerd loves Game of Thrones (or at least the early seasons), the first kind hates it because it watered down the greatness of the books to appeal to the general public. (I imagine there's a similar dynamic between the MCU and trad Marvel fans.) The traditional nerd's obsessions would never catch on in their original form, and by now they've been burned enough that they hope that the eye of Hollywood and big marketing departments stays far away from their niche interests.
When you're growing up you passionately fixate on characters and images and stories, and they become the containers for your deepest feelings about who your are and what life is about. None of us can help fixating on bits and pieces of our culture, and gluing them onto our backs, like decorator crabs. But I don't think we were ever meant to have as many choices as we do now. I think the process worked better when most of your choices were things everyone you knew was familiar with. Like in, I dunno, feudal times in Europe, maybe, and I'm just making it up, you got to choose between stolid adherence to an attitude of respect and reverence toward the church and the lord whose fields you tilled, or some mild joking and cynicism, or, if you were really reckless, the occasional raunchy joke; and you could be indifferent to music, or play a shepherd's pipe, or memorize the 5 ballads the the troupe who came through your little village played last November. Just a few options. And people fell in love with each other, just the same.
I frequent a lot of sites where people are putting up AI art they made, and it's a mix of pop culture references to any of hundresds or thousands of podcasts, celebrities, movies, etc. , and anguished personal protests obliquely expressed, and dick jokes, and self-referentiality. It's as though the people making AI art have chopped the whole world up into confetti and are throwing it in the air in a sort of is-this-the-end? celebration.
This book discusses a similar area but focuses on the supply side of things more than Scott's focus on the demand side in this write-up.
https://www.amazon.com/Status-Culture-Creates-Identity-Constant/dp/0593296702
Let's see if I can gather enough thought to say something relevant on this.
I think Sam is drawing somewhat close here, but is off the mark:
>The regime of the hipster was an inefficient way of sorting it; it died. The regime of the nerd was an overefficient way of sorting it; it is dying.
I think the it's more like the hipsters and nerds sort opposite ends of things; the hipsters are all about Supply, the nerds are all about Demand. Because nerds are not defined by liking bad things, they're defined by liking things to excess. They watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail a thousand times, and watch all the variations of the subtitles, and watch the Making Of, and read the reviews, because they have a constant, unending demand for MORE of it. They know the obscure trivia, they break down the timing of the jokes, because they're willing to scrape the very bones of it to get just that little bit MORE. The traditional Nerd Hobbies are the ones with high complexities, that can be pieced out through repeated exposure. They're the ones that provide MORE every time you approach them.
I don't think the average baseball fan is a nerd. The average baseball fan does NOT know every player's ERA, especially not for players on other teams; they know which player on their team is the star player, because they've constantly seen that guy make the big plays. They might know who's the weak link, because the other guys always win when they hit it to that guy. And that's it; they're just watching the game now. The people who crunch the numbers, and who collect the trading cards (Baseball: The Gathering), are the people who constantly want MORE Baseball than the games themselves can provide.
So, if nerds are dying off, there's a simple reason; production has ramped up. Television shows and videogame franchises that have been dead twenty years are suddenly getting new entries. Fans of things are making their own offbrand versions of them, sometimes dozens at a time. They're making Randomizers for the old linear games, to give them exponentially more replayability. You don't have to scrape bones to get more anymore, you can just walk out into popular culture and pick a sequel off the shelf.
You've hit on the right thing about collectors - the difficulty of collecting is an essential part of the fun., I was a coin collector in the wayback. The last set of coins I undertook to collect was the state quarters. (Subsequent issues are too poorly designed to interest me.) I made a rule: I could only collect quarters that I found in my pocket change. No going to a coin store and buying one: that would be cheating. Doing it this way made it a fun challenge. And I got them all, and I put them one by one in a little coin book, and when they were all there, then what? I kind of lost interest. I still have them, somewhere.
Similar to what’s claimed in the piece, I always used the term “nerding out” to be having an in depth knowledge of the technical aspects of a subject. Most sports fans, even the pundits talking about it on TV don’t really nerd out about it. They’re just kind of going off the vibes of what they see, bringing up stats as they suit their argument, and occasionally bringing “advanced stats”. However all sports in the last decade have had something of a revolution of nerdiness, and there are sites such as Pro Football Focus devoted to pouring over game film and using advanced statistical analysis to dissect every individual play from every player in the nfl in an attempt to evaluate their performance objectively. Every team in the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL now has a team of nerds on staff doing that work, which was completely nonexistent until very recently.
I also don’t think “nerd” and “hipster” is an either/or thing. I think we all fall somewhere in the spectrum for both. Most hipsters are also nerds in some regard. That guy going out to the bars in Liverpool to see the Beatles could probably “nerd out” about every band that has come through that scene in the last 5 years. Oh and you should see his record collection.
This is bringing back a memory. I put off reading Lord of the Rings when I was a kid because it was too popular. After a year or two, I read it, and I found it was really good. At least I never hassled anyone for reading it, but where did I get the initial attitude?
The only thing I can think of (I wasn't in a hipster environment) is Mad Magazine. More generally, I think Mad Magazine might have been a bad influence. It was pretty gentle-- certainly by modern standards-- but it had the attitude that if ordinary people liked something, it was ridiculous. Or maybe I was a natural snob, and it's no one else's fault.
I think you've left out a problem with hipsters. They didn't just find and value obscure good things, they also stopped valuing things that were no longer obscure, even those things were good.
Related idea: I think part of what's going on is that we don't have a great vocabulary for talking about what we value about the things we value, so being enthusiastic about LOTR or the MCU turns into fascination with the details.
“Lorien” is a Silmarillion reference? Huh. I always assumed it was named after the Babylon 5 character, because you force your patients to consider the questions “Who are you?” and “What do you want?”
(Either way, reading The Silmarillion or watching Babylon 5 is hipsterish. Naming your business after it (or recognizing someone else’s obscure reference to it) is nerdy.)
Why are these identities not just 'tastemakers' and 'superfans'? On one side, just trying to be first with the New Thing and, on the other, not caring at all about the taste making pecking order.
A good exercise for everyone, maybe as part of some annual spring clean (maybe we could have a day for it?) would be to ask one's self "what do I really like?"
I think this whole post (and topic) is really about the search for authenticity, and how to know when you have it.
Whichever category you fall into, maybe the most important thing is to be able to check periodically, "is this really me?"
You might be on to something about the breadth vs. depth thing of hipsters vs. nerds. But I don't think nerds derive any status from being the "know-it-all". I just think it is a high-risk/high-reward strategy where sometimes being obsessed with something pays off, but most of the time it doesn't. I mean, in general geeking out about things like "what kinds of mushrooms are there?" is probably socially detrimental until someone in your tribe eats the wrong one and now you need to know what to do about it.
Similarly, obsessing about computer programming or comic books is a losing strategy until it turns out you can make a boat load of money in tech or entertainment.
But on an individual level, most geeks aren't thinking about about their geek hobbies in terms of how it helps advance their social status. Indeed, us more socially successful geeks have arrived at our positions precisely because we are able to suppress our obsessions. For instance, we can talk about the weather *without* mentioning the Koppen Climate Classification System. If anything, the nerd activities are an escape from social status games.
But nerds don't obsess over just anything. There are certain patterns to their obsessions, and I think those obsessions are important to their value. The thing obsessed over has to provide sufficient interest for a mind that has a strong need for cognition and absorption. The more intellectually or imaginatively engaging, the better (though still poor) chance that the nerd's obsession will produce a valuable piece of art or technology.
In short, here's the best definition nerd/geek I can come up with:
"Someone who prefers activities that playfully engage the intellect and imagination over social status climbing"
The average Star Wars, MCU, or Yankees fan might *buy* a lot of stuff, but the level of mental engagement with the subject of their obsession is very shallow. They are not geeks, they are just consumers. This much is obvious with the Yankees fan (unless he is also obsessed with the statistics of sports betting) but it might not be as obvious with Star Wars or the MCU because space opera and superheroes used to be the domain of nerds. However, nerds were able to bring those genres to the masses in a way that had important cultural impacts and artistic value (despite what Kriss thinks). Of course, now those two properties are increasingly being abandoned by nerds because their current custodians seem hell bent on destroying anything that was interesting about them.
None of this should be construed as saying that nerds are necessarily more intelligent or creative, nor does it mean they are low status. There is probably some correlation, but what defines an nerd is their interests, not their ability.
From a psychological perspective, I think both nerds and hipsters are high in trait Openness, but different facets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Inventory). In short, nerds tend to be higher on facets Imagination and Intellect, whereas hipsters tend to be higher on facets of Adventurousness and perhaps some combination of Aesthetics and/or Emotionality. Of course, for most people these facets all tend to correlate, but it seems likely to me that you will see greater divergence at the more extreme ends of Openness (just as you tend to see more divergence among the different sub-factors of g among those who score high on IQ tests). That hipsters seek out social status is probably also an indication that they are higher on Extroversion than nerds (who definitely tend toward Introversion).
Love this topic. It's not new though. Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris did a brilliant expose of this in their 2005 series Nathan Barley. Back then in the UK we had a lot of "lad culture" which was actually somewhere in between hipster and nerd as described here. It was a culture that had it's own enthusiasms but also a lot of rejection of the status quo.
For me, part of the urge toward what I called "completionism" was simply that I was interested in something and wanted to know all about it. The world as a whole was just too big, but small things like "all books by X" were doable. Partly, in retrospect, it was a way to exert some control over my life. But the experience was more like, there was more data out there, and I felt a need to acquire it. For meanings of "data" that include all toys in a particular set. (Alternate neural net AI take: my training data was incomplete, the pattern had gaps, and any output I generated from it would be invalid until I'd gotten all the data.)
In social situations, when discussing the subject, it also served as a defense mechanism against people who dragged out obscure trivia to invalidate whatever other people said. I found that *incredibly* annoying.
Why Sam would want to label this "nerd", I couldn't say, unless he just wanted a simple dichotomy that his audience would eat up. It seems like its own thing, a tendency showing up in sports statistics, trainspotting, video games with "achievements", and who knows where else. Maybe it's a sub-clinical version of whatever OCD is.
What explains the difference to me is that Kriss talks specifically about the modern nerdiness-as-a-product. Basically, the "original" nerds Scott is talking about used to be obsessed in all sorts of weird things, very often obviously unpopular. They got "lucky" that one of those things - computers - took off so much that nerds completely dominated the inception of what is arguably the biggest pillar of modern life.
This triggered one of humans fundamental reaction, emulation. But a lot of what nerds like and nerds do is utterly unpalatable to normies, so nerdiness needed to be changed into something more palatable while still retaining what the public perceives as the essence. Along comes MCU/SW/Trekkie/etc. geekery; These were already culturally popular products that were ALSO popular with nerds, and that nerds treated with their signature obsessiveness (Scott correctly points out here that these were often called "geeks" instead, but I think the population at large is correct that they are mostly a subset of the same kind of person as nerds and with considerable overlap to boot).
Now, this offered an easy path for any random person to become a "nerd": Just be a bit more obsessive about a choice of cultural products that you're quite likely to already like at least one of, and the products you consume will often even explicitly label you as a "nerd" positively. You don't even need to get beat up by a Jock! There's many other processes that happened at the same time, like the incorporation of modern-style wokeness into the same products, Science-as-a-product, mainstreaming of college education etc. but they're functionally quite similar and strongly correlated.
By now, this process has become so sucessful that nerdiness-as-a-product is arguably the dominant form of nerdiness and if you randomly run into a self-described nerd, he will be more likely to be the Sam Kriss-version than the Scott-version. I've even started seeing the same kind of person Scott is talking about - the original conception of the nerd - self-label explicitly not as nerds since they don't want to be associated with the modern conception.
I don’t have much experience with the MCU and Star Wars. Haven’t watched it in years, and I also don’t drink alcohol so I don’t have the easiest time following these examples
With respect to nerds and the depth of the Star Wars or MCU, I’m not sure it gets better as you go down the rabbit hole. The rabbit exists as a series of consumerist exit ramps onto diverging roads. It’s merely an extension of the existing Disney ecosystem. This even applies to things that take a lot of effort and are very costly that exist in that ecosystem at a deep level, like going to Disney World.
For the examples of Hipster fixations, I’m no big drinker, but I don’t view Pabst Blue Ribbon as an extension or furthering of some larger system of consumption habit formation. You can like Pabst, you can even become addicted to alcohol, but you fundamentally have to like the taste or not. Is there anywhere deeper to go in just Pabst? Maybe the hipster version of going into depth is to try all sorts of beers.
"But the guy who has figurines of every minor character with two seconds of screentime and has read all 2,000 Extended Universe books and is fluent in Wookie - that’s “the Star Wars guy”."
Minor correction: It's spelled Wookiee, with two e's, and their language is called Shyriiwook. (I wonder if this will make Scott's Mistakes page.)
>Also, speaking of collectors, are there any, any more?
Have you heard of Funko Pops?
At some point when I was a teenager I realised that there was a person who was payed to print and sell me these marbles/MTG cards/queen jubilee special edition stamp. Most “collector” items nowadays are a competition between victims who gotta catchem all and greedy capitalists who just print more and more to make sure that you never get to the end.
I see the same thing with Lore-type collections. It was fine to be an expert on the original lord of the rings or the first star wars trilogy ; but then they hired a writer to create an “extended” universe. At this point learning more lore is like trying to remember everything that ChatGPT outputs.
And then there are people for whom "liking certain things" (especially media, especially CONSUMABLE things like art, broadly speaking) is not a major aspect of their identity. "Who" they are is more about what they do or how they are, not the content they consume.
Age might be a factor, certainly was for me. In my 20s the content people consumed was a huge part of them for me. Nowadays is borderline doesn't matter (tho it's good if there's overlap for conversation purposes). And I completely lost the feeling that what I consume says anything about me, and that happened after 35, maybe after 40 even.
I'm a bit torn on the article. It isn't awful, but look! someone said something stupid!* isn't my favorite genre. I'm also kind of cynical because Scott talked about how getting into beefs is a way of driving traffic.
On the other hand, it's led to some decent discussion, and I I might not have remembered putting off reading LOTR if it hadn't been for this post.
"liking things that are bad" as a definition strikes me as stupid, and I'm not a huge fan of MCU movies.
"Also, I notice that by this definition all sports fans must be nerds. Sports is certainly bad: it’s a bunch of sweaty adult men freaking out about who has a ball for two hours, for several hundred almost-identical episodes per season. And man, do people obsess over it."
I don't think this analogy works very well. Just on a structural level it's off. Sports is an entire category of thing, while pop art or MCU movies are a sub-category. There are certainly aspects of sports fandom that could qualify for Kriss' definition of nerdom, like collecting memorabilia or obsessing over statistics. But meeting his somewhat random disdain for Marvel movies with a random disdain for sports doesn't really address his underlying argument, which is that nerd culture is sustained not by quality but by the constant production of new things about which to be nerdy, and eventually that machine is going to break and/or be replaced by a new machine.
That said, I think Kriss weakens his own argument because he wants to get in as many jabs at Marvel movies as he can, which results in him kind of missing his own point. Things like Marvel movies or Warhol's soup cans or Big Macs just aren't made to be critiqued; they're made to be consumed by the fans of those things. Whether they're bad is completely beside the point. They exist in a space where good and bad take on a different meaning. For example, if someone told you that they went to a new hamburger joint, you might ask them if the burger was good or bad. You'd never ask that of someone who just went to McDonald's.
Watching the Indian movie RRR really drove this point home for me. It's really a ridiculous movie that makes absolutely no sense at times, but that doesn't take away from the movie because the movie just is and you either appreciate the experience or you don't. Scorsese got it right when he said that superhero movies are more like amusement park rides than traditional cinema.
tldr: Kriss says nerds, but what he's really talking about is fan culture and the replacement of art with fan service.
I've personally seen "geek" and "nerd" to actually mean the opposite things from the way you define them! To my ears "geeks" specifically sounds techy/STEMy, while "nerd" is broader and can include someone who's really intense about something, like a random work of fiction (from Shakespeare to "Doctor Who" — which is actually good TV, thankyouvery much ;) — to Marvel).
>But aren’t nerds and “sportsball fans” natural enemies?
Most sports fans don't obsess about statistics. In my high school, there was approximately 90% overlap between the people who played fantasy baseball, and the people I would consider "nerds".
Possibly a missing dynamic about nerdery here is about the creation of an in-group culture that people can then express themselves within. Knowledge of the topic becomes a barrier to entry for the uninitiated, but once in, the nerds can use their chosen area of nerdery to express almost anything. Kpop stans are a good example where many will speak of the sense of inclusion and belonging they get from being in the BTS Army, and the "deep" discussions they get into, facilitated by the richness of the subject matter.
Great post Scott, I agree with you that Kriss's post could do with a nerd->geek replacement, and this one as well.
Why does it feel like social identity has little to do with it? None of the sport fans or nerds I know need to talk to someone about their hobby to be into it. They do. For hours. But they spent hundreds of hours actually...watching the sport !! And not to be able to talk about it. They actually find it fascinating. Think something fundamental is missing.
Your analysis is not wrong but leaves open the Matt Yglesias response that the right answer is to be neither a hipster nor a nerd but the guy who praises pizza and sex
(1) Who is Sam Kriss? Yes, I'm old and out of touch, so Internet popular whipper-snappers are not even on my radar, since I'm too primitive to have radar 😁
(2) Tsk, tsk, kids these days, does no-one remember the old classifications? Kriss is confusing nerds with dweebs:
https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/are-you-a-building-science-geek-nerd-dork-or-dweeb/
"Hold on there, buster, cries another voice from the interwebs. According to OkCupid’s Nerd, Geek, or Dork Test (that one’s gone now, too), these three terms are defined this way:
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions."
A rough'n'ready approxmation is that geeks were on the techie side and nerds on the arts side; so LOTR, Marvel comics/movies and TV shows were the province of the nerds while 'I built this in a cave out of a box of scraps', fancy electronics and the likes were for the geeks. Dweebs and dorks? Well sorry guys, you're just clumsy, awkward weirdoes 😁
(3) And before that, geeks were side-show attractions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_show
"Geek shows were an act in traveling carnivals and circuses of early America and were often part of a larger sideshow. The billed performer's act consisted of a single geek, who stood in the center ring to chase live chickens. It ended with the performer biting the chickens' heads off and swallowing them. The geek shows were often used as openers for what are commonly known as freak shows. It was a matter of pride among circus and carnival professionals not to have traveled with a troupe that included geeks. Geeks were often alcoholics or drug addicts, and paid with liquor – especially during Prohibition – or with narcotics."
I'd recommend the Tyrone Power movie "Nightmare Alley" for the rise and fall of a schemer from side-show barker to fake medium to geek:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wMYkQqe8-I
"Sam Kriss makes a self-deprecating joke about how his obsession with medieval mysticism is totally different than nerdery. I think he’s right; not that many people care about medieval mysticism"
Ooh, them's fightin' words! The International Congress on Mediaeval Studies (known informally as "Kalamazoo" since that's where it's held) might like to have a word with you about that, as might Margery Kempe.
I am no scholar so I know of all this only by grace of one Geoffrey Chaucer back in the early Noughties:
https://houseoffame.blogspot.com/2006/05/to-kalamazoo-wyth-love.html
"Ther is oon othir enchesoun for the swoteness of Maye: yn this moneth ther ys the gatherynge of Kalamazoo. From alle laundes and regiones of the globe of the erthe, folke do come to talke of tymes of yore, to share akademik werke, and to get rioutouslye dronke on free wine. Yt is, ywis, a jolie paradise ful of pleasaunte and lernede peple and muchel joye. Ther is also a daunce at the ende. Ich wolde haue visited thys yeere, but they rejectede myn papere proposal, the whiche ys a thynge of much ridiculousnesse, for the papere was on myn selfe! Thou woldst thynke that ich was somedeel of an experte on that subiecte."
As for the travails of Dame Margery in the modern world, again thanks to G. Chaucer:
https://houseoffame.blogspot.com/2007/01/margerye-kempe-at-feest-of-mla.html
"In the seson of Cristemasse, thys pore creatur and caytyf did fynd herself in a straunge launde. For sche had maad passage to Ba'alt-Ymoor, the which citee she thoghte was yn the launde of the Sarazines ner the citee of Jerusalem. And she had gret compuncion and wepynge for the synfulness of her ignorance of geographie, for Ba'alt-Ymoor was in no wyse close to tho placez wher ower Lorde dyed on cross, but was in sted across a gret see and ytself was a place of passinge foulness wher ffolke did etyn only of the crabbes that walked on the floor of the bay Chesupyk and did watch the filmes of Johannes des Eaux (Pink Flamingoes did frighten her gretly). And thys creatur was sore afreyd of the synneres of that place and so sche went forth northewardes on the heighway XCV. Yet the way was long and her feet ached swich that she threw off her manohlo blahnikes and sat by the syde of the heigh way wepynge. And this was on the feest of Seynt John. As thys creatur lay in contemplacyon, sor wepynge for the peyne of her feet sche prayid to ower lorde for deliverance from this launde. And ower lorde seyde to her, “A, dowter, why wepest thou for the peyne of thy feet for thou knowst how soore my owene feet were woundid on mount calvarie? And therfor to bringe the to spiritual helth and contemplacioun I shal sende thee on a desperaat tryal and a terribil oon amonges devils and hir ministeres and necromanceres. For thou shalt fynde a tan volvo that schal be ful of clerkes and thes clerkes shall taak thee to the moost terribil place on al the erthe.” And the creatur seyde, “A, Lord, what ys this place so terribil?” And the lord seyde to her, “It is callid MLA.” And ther cam gret thundirkrakkys – thogh cleer was the daye – in the maner of a film of James Cameron.
And right so it befel in dede that a volvo did pulle up and a voys from it seyd, “You going to Philadelphia?” And thys creatur seyd, “I go to MLA,” and the voys seyde that MLA was part of Philadelphee and thus sche cam with hem. And in the volvo was a cumpany of thre yonge scolers, to wit I woman and II men. And thys creatur spak to them and seyd, “Tell me what maner ffolk ye aren.” And oon the men seyd, “My dissertation addresses the pressing question of the relation of the Owl and the Nightingale to the paradoxes of materiality and to changing ideas of spirituality at the same time that it questions what I would call outmoded models of allegoresis. Essentially, I propose that this heavily mediated text engages with debate poetry not as a generic exemplar but rather vis-a-vis an interstitial combination of truth claims and bestiary passages about cephalopods.” And thys creatur was soore confusid, and sche prayid to ower lord and wepid gret teares for the passioun of the child Jesu who had been born in a maunger to taak awey the synnes of all ffolke and also to deliver her from MLA. And alle the cumpany did wepe with her vntil the ladye who drof the van schouted at the oothirs and seyd, “Could you please be quiet? I’m trying to listen to the sparknotes for ‘Beloved.’” And thys creatur knewe litel of thes wyse clerkes wyth whom sche travilid and she askid what maner ffolk thei weren. Oon the men was named Genderstudyes and the othir man was named Medievaliste and the woman was named Americaniste-but-really-Faulknerstudyes. And thei were from Bigresearchuniversitee."
"Also, speaking of collectors, are there any, any more?"
Um, yes. So odd ot me that in an otherwise fairly incisive essay, this was a question. The collectibles industry is bigger than ever and growing raster than ever. I suppose the objects that are collected are more diverse than they used to be? Maybe the number of people collecting the most popular thing to collect is smaller than it used to be even while the overall number of collectors is greater.
FWIW, I tend to think of a nerd as someone who accumulates more knowledge about a subject, and devotes more time and effort to it, than its importance or the value of that experience seems to merit.
That captures people who memorize football scores going back donkey's years, and people who can recite the dialog and know all the characters from every Star Wars film ever released. It also includes those who know every Unix command, including all their obscure options, when the rest of us normal people are content to be vaguely aware of roughly which options are available and google these as required.
But I suppose it also includes anyone who spends years studying the history of the Byzantine Church or something. So, to my mind, without wishing to detract from the value of their knowledge, academics by their very devotion to study, are also swept up in my nerd net, whether or not their specialities have practical application.
On another topic, I was gratified to see that graph of interest in stamps declining to a near zero trickle. In a discussion the other week with a friend about his valuable stamp collection, I claimed it is an old man's hobby (and I think it is mostly men) with no long term future, especially once stamps stop being sold (which I imagine won't be long now). I must email him a copy of that graph, before he goes and blows another fortune on some daft little scrap of paper! Hehe!
My mental model of nerds vs geeks was informed a very, very long time ago by this Venn Diagram (https://laughingsquid.com/nerd-venn-diagram-geek-dork-or-dweeb/) that strikes me as fairly accurate representation of common usage. Hipster seem like it adds a "cool" circle to the process and overlaps with obsession.
Maybe hipsters invest in new stuff that other people don't know about, whereas nerds overly-invest in stuff no one else likes (apart from fellow nerds)?
The thrill of the new versus the thrill of the under-appreciated?
Hipsters get stuff wrong all the time and get laughed at. Nerds enjoy things already judged wrong and get laughed at.
Take your pick!
Krissy has very different definitions of "hipster" and "nerd" than I do.
I also note that he doesn't use the word "irony", even though that is a defining characteristic of the hipster.
> Bill Gates is the ultimate nerd
I dunno. It's been pretty clear since the late 90s that Gates isn't much of a nerd at all. Like the above-mentioned fake hipsters who do performative things to look like a hipster but show rather clearly that they really don't have the essence of one, Gates is a fake nerd, a thug and a bully, and really always has been. A wolf in geek's clothing, if you will.
From Kriss:
'And since the nerds gravitate towards homogeneity and popularity, their extinction will be total.'
'The nerd doesn’t like bad things because of their actual qualities; the nerd likes bad things simply because they’re there.'
A nerd is...someone who undiscriminatingly likes popular things? This bears no relation whatsoever to any meaning of 'nerd' or 'geek' that I'm aware of. This just seems like he made up a kind of person to loathe and randomly chose an existing word to refer to them. Admittedly, as a lifelong nerd and/or geek I'm pretty oblivious to pop culture, so maybe the vernacular has changed in a way I'm unaware of, and the word has undergone inversion and now means something entirely different from (and nearly opposite to) what it used to mean.
Hold on, hipsters *are* the fake avant-garde. They’re essentially cultural bullies. They want to be known as being in the club so that you know they’re better than you. Their motto is “if you know, you know”. They don’t want you in their club, on their level, because in their mind that would destroy their social status. An algorithm like Spotify’s might say “listen to X, they’re new and rad” but a hipster would bamboozle you with coded references to X calculated to prove that you’re in the out group.
Nerds love something cerebrally, that’s about it. A sports nerd might love the facts of the game without caring a bit about being a fan of the action and drama. They (we) probably talk a lot about their nerdy interests, because how can you not talk about what you love? Most nerds want to evangelize the things they love, but can be overwhelming to talk to about it.
It used to be that unironically and unashamedly loving something cerebrally wasn’t cool, but it is now. I want to believe that it became cool by direct artistic victory of nerds making things that were genuinely new and great e.g. Star Wars and Marvel, but also nerds make a lot of money as e.g. engineers so the change could be a lot more mercenary.
This one is going to get a lot of comments for obvious reasons.
I guess there’s a lot of ways to define these things. Just to add to discussion: I always thought of nerds as people who liked obscure things that put most other folks off because it gave them a language with which to communicate to other people who like those things. Basically, nerds are largely socially dysfunctional people who use a shared interest as a substitute for social skills.
Remember, the fundamental stuff at the marvel movies are made of were very much not cool or broadly popular for a very long time.
Whereas geeks might or might not be awkward: they just obsess on something and damn the torpedoes.
Even in sports fandom there are fans and geeks.
I've thought one thing that separates hipster pursuits from geek pursuits is that geek pursuits are often seen as childish. Cartoons? Childish. Foreign artsy movies? Adult. Chiptune music? Childish. Obscure noise bands? Adult. Colorful video game t-shirts? Childish (though, if it's an obscure old video game of the sort current childs would not play, it could be hipster!) Vintage clothing? Adult. Energy drinks? Childish. Unusual beers? Adult. And so on. Of course, what is childish and what is adult is determinded by cultural factors, but usually, if actual children aren't interested, it's not childish. (No, this does not explain the placement of sport fandom, but it's not meant to be an universal theory, just one aspect.)
It particularly forms an annoying (and still unstated) contrast with the idea that the nerd is "too adult" in other facets of life, ie. talking book language, being too smart for his own good and so on.
One of the "death of the hipster" touchstones was when people started associating hipster behavior with people *pretending* to be adults by "doing adult stuff" ("adulting), like going to barcades. This may have brought hipsterdom uncomfortably close to geekdom.
What do we call, then, the person who is deeply but not professionally interested in an academic topic other than STEM?
Say, a fascination with the 17th century metaphysical poets, or the choral works of J.S. Bach, or the role of the body in modern Catholic bioethics? To choose three examples drawn not at all at random lol.
I am accustomed to describing myself almost interchangeably as either a geek or a nerd. DON’T INVALIDATE MY IDENTITY, SCOTT!!!!! 😉
But f’real, what do we call that kind of……personage, then, if not a nerd?
I've wondered about the culture getting nerdier. T think there was a shift in the 80s when there started to be books for the general audience about themes in popular fiction like Star Trek and Stephen King. I don't think anything like that existed earlier, but let me know if I'm missing something.
I was thinking it was the Flynn effect, but for all I know, there was something people always wanted and now it was available.
World-building was fodder for nerdery. So far as I know, there was nothing between The Divine Comedy and LOTR.
It seems like the simplest explanation for the fall of stamp and coin collecting is that we basically don't use stamps or coins anymore. Instead, we send emails and pay by credit card.
What unites the math/computer sense of "nerd" and the Sam Kriss sense of "nerd" is the idea of enthusiasm for something unworthy of enthusiasm; that's why the word was originally pejorative and even now has not been entirely re-appropriated. Of course, this foregrounds the fact that people disagree about what is worthy of enthusiasm; in practice, people rely on the consensus of some actual or imagined social group. We don't generally call pickup artists "sex nerds," even though we can see how such a usage would fit, because most people implicitly understand why "sex with hot babes" is something to be enthusiastic about, while far fewer grok why stamps are. (Note that a stock insult used to belittle nerds for their outbursts of intense interest in weird subjects is "you need to get laid." The more wholesome "you need to touch grass" functions similarly.)
Posts like Kriss's amount to internecine, intra-nerd warfare. MCU and YA fans often come in for vicious disdain at the hands of people who the broader normie world would have a hard time distinguishing from said fans. I think this is because a large subset of smart people really really prize a personal narrative of maturation. They remember being enthusiastic children, obsessed with childish things, but they got older, got interested in sex/drugs/serious matters, and became grown-ups. They then regard those people who have relatively similar abilities and personalities but who *didn't* drop their interest in "childish" things as pathetic and stunted, like alternate versions of themselves who never managed to grow up. Sometimes this is accurate, but not as often as they think.
I would like to push back against this Internet Trend of bloggers responding to Sam Kriss.
You can write an Ode to a Grecian Urn, but you can't write a 1400-word repudiation of its cultural claims. It's a work of art that doesn't really have any information content; responding to it as though it does is maybe not very useful. I feel the same way about Kriss.
Kaitian already mentioned this, but you're defining away the core characteristic of the nerd class: mainstream social failure.
The nerd is the guy with the unfashionable glasses repaired with tape, with the waist of his pants too high, and the cuffs too high, and the unfashionable shirt (if you're REALLY old-fashioned, add a pocket protector for your pens). The NMSC finalist who is on the football team with a hot girlfriend and gets a West Point appointment his senior year in high school is not a nerd. Tom Cruise hand-building a P-51 is not a nerd, no matter how obsessive or obscure his hobbies.
thanks for this very interesting and engaging critique - my response here: https://substack.com/profile/14289667-sam-kriss/note/c-14931948
I definitely like the casting of "hipsters" as cultural dumpster divers searching for gold. I used to refer to myself (and my friends) as "intellectual hipsters" just because it felt like a good fit, but now I have a better explanation. Yes we were well-read and knowledgeable, but we were well-read and knowledgeable on things that weren't already known to the general public. Ten years ago this meant things like the multiverse hypothesis (now featured in major motion pictures), machine learning (which no one will shut up about), and catastrophic risks from pandemics/supervolcanoes/etc (one of which we just lived through).
I think canonical nerds and sports fans (sports nerds) being enemies makes perfect sense in this heuristic, because nerds are also fiercely defensive (and critical) over their own sect. Nerds of different MCU vs DC might have some tribalistic rift just the same way nerds of different sports teams have beef, and so it extends logically that nerds of comic books won’t get along with nerds of sports. Only it’s more distinct, because they also can’t effectively debate given how different the spheres of their own nerdoms are.
In my mind, the difference between a hipster and a nerd/geek is how accessible the thing is. Do you have to learn a lot to appreciate it? If not, you're a hipster. The price of admission is finding the thing.
Do you have to read a million word book that describes the history of every rock and tree to appreciate it? You're a geek/nerd.
The further distinction between geek and nerd is all about practically. You can become a nerd about math, edible plants, or photography. If your interest is in obscure characters from Star Trek, Babylon 5, or even English royal succession, you're a geek about that subject. Your knowledge will never be applied to real life.
This framing explains why the uninitiated view geeks/nerds as interested in things that are "bad". If you've not read a million words, you can't appreciate the thing. If you marry a DC comics nerd, you might put in the effort and discover the appeal you'd previously had no interest in.
You probably read a million words about something else (celebrity relationships, numismatics) which would not be appreciated by the uninitiated either. The price of admission is background research, which only a subset is willing to do.
eBay/internet/etc. has definitely taken the joy out of the curation of most types of collections for me.
I think the collecting thing is in some ways people just wanting to collect different things. Throughout the 20th century, coins, stamps, records, and cars were part of everyone's daily life and there was a lot of collecting of those things. People today still collect music and cars, but also funko pops, video game trophies, heroes in mobile games, Pokemon and magic cards.
In this respect, isn't "hipster" just a replacement term for "cool hunter"? And, hipster comes after the fact and is applied to those people who are really non-hipster/cool hunters. When the word "hipster" first gets uttered, it's by a cool hunter and the cool hunter in saying the word is basically uttering their own death (not literal, of course). With respect to Baudrillard, hipsters are hyper-real while cool hunters were the real.
I think coin and stamp collecting have declined in popularity because people no longer use coins and stamps so much in their everyday lives. I think that the pipeline for collecting goes something like "be mildly interested in [thing]" -> "acquire, perhaps by chance, somewhat rare and valuable instance of [thing]" -> "learn more about [thing]" -> "intentionally acquire more of [thing]." For stamps and coins, I think the front two steps of that is broken because people don't send that many letters or use that much cash anymore.
Yeah, I'm not a big collector, but I've heard that somewhat counterintuitively, ebay has actually been bad for a lot of collecting. Back in the day, accruing knowledge about a particular thing that was collectible (like which items were rare and valuable) offered the opportunity for one to gain status or respect within that group of collectors and possibly make some money from information asymmetries. There was also the possibility of some exciting discovery in a second hand store or some dude's garage (See the show American Pickers for example), and there was a social aspect of it, too, as people gathered in person to buy/sell/trade. Ebay has ruined all of that to some degree. Info about rare and valuable items is readily available, and the prices are pretty transparent, which means there are fewer information asymmetries to exploit and fewer second hand stores or garages worth exploring. The social aspect of it has been decimated too, now that the trading takes place with mouse clicks on a laptop rather than face to face in some low rent retail space.
>Kriss defines nerds as “someone who likes things that aren’t good”. More specifically, someone who is an obsessive (counting, itemizing, collecting) fan of something bad.
Scott, please stop being a quokka.
That reference is an *attack on nerds*. It's making an uncharitable generalization based on taking some of the worst aspects of his target group.
Treating such an attack as an honest attempt at debate is not a good idea. If someone says "you suck", politely agreeing that you do suck but he's just made some factual mistakes is the wrong response. The correct response is "ths person is not worth taking seriously" and treating it like an attack, not a debate.
This is a subject that I've been interested in lately. I've never seen it broken down exactly this way, and don't completely agree, but I think in the abstract it brings up some good points. My basic model of the world (yes, the world) right now is:
1) The objective of most websites is making marketing more accurate (i.e. converting eyeballs into dollars).
2) Marketing can be made accurate by catering to a niche or by catering to a predictable purchasing pattern
3) People are occasionally weird and multivariate, sometimes their interests change in unpredictable ways.
4) This is a huge pain in the butt for marketers
5) Algorithmic content curation is cheaper and easier than custom content curation, but tends to assume people aren't weird and multivariate and that their interests don't change.
6) Fortunately, people who consume a lot of internet content consume a lot of algorithmically curated content
7) This wasn't some intentional conspiracy, but hey look, now people have predictable consumption patterns
8) People who like Star Wars are now "The Star Wars" guy. As this becomes more and more the norm it gets weirder to be like "Yes, I like Star Wars but I didn't like *this particular* Star Wars and also frankly I'm a little tired of Star Wars at the moment, and have taken up knitting."
9) Social pressure reinforces simplistic, single-interest personalities that aren't very interesting.
10) Deep beneath this veneer of superficiality, we're all getting increasingly fed up with this model of living, especially since content producers are putting less and less effort into the quality of The Thing We Like, hoping we'll be invested enough not to call them on it.
I read Kriss's essay, and you are being waaaay too kind to him. I don't think he has the faintest idea of what a nerd actually is. But it's an interesting question.
I teach computer science, and one question that sometimes comes up is: Who invented the computer? There are two uber-nerds who have a strong claim to the title: Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse.
Alan Turing was an extroverted wierdo who proudly wore his nerdiness on his sleeve. He made up a mathematical model of a computer that was utterly impractical, but he also programmed it to play chess and even predicted AI and arguably chatGPT. Plus he saved the world from the Nazis. He's basically a nerd super-hero.
Konrad Zuse, on the other hand, was the typical introverted nerd - completely oblivious to the outside world. Driven by an all-consuming obsession, he built the worlds first programmable computer from discarded telephone switches in his parents' living room. In the middle of Germany during world war two. With absolutely no practical application in mind. Zuse is an obscure, largely forgotten figure.
So: what actually do these two guys have in common?
This is an unfortunate collision of worlds! Kriss, who I think is a really brilliant writer, specializes in writing in intentionally exaggerated styles; it's a kind of highly-literate gonzo sensibility that's meant to provoke. But it's also, I think, supposed to be understood to be artificially heightened. It's not that I doubt that he hates MCU films, he certainly does, but the people who are taking this very personally are perhaps not seeing the degree to which Kriss's piece works through an intensification designed to prompt a kind of absurdity. This space, I think, is made up of many people who are natural literalists. It's a bit of an awkward combination. #it'smytwocents
One way I'm different from a lot of my friends is that I don't really identify with any properties like that. I have friends where, if you need to get them a gift, you can get always get them a Transformers or Gargoyles or Bambi or TMNT t-shirt, and I have a friend you can always satisfy with quality images of rabbits, birds, or the Marx Bros. I don't have anything like that. I love Miyazaki and I want that to be, like, a private secret love that isn't shared by others, but obviously tons of people love Miyazaki, and why wouldn't they? So the idea of identifying as a Miyazaki person just feels depressing, because I can't actually have a special relationship to it. Yet I'm not industrious enough to be a hipster or to delve deeply into anything truly obscure.
And here I've just got into collecting ancient coins. Can't we just find something intrinsically fascinating that speaks to us? Owning and fiddling with >2000 y/o artwork made by people who truly BELIEVED in Zeus is... I don't know... just kind of awesome.
It does feel a bit backwards to choose an interest in order to get an identity rather than an interest being something that we like and that becomes part of who we are.
Kriss's article really just seemed like an overwrought excuse to dunk on the MCU, which could have been done without making a sweeping generalization of "nerds like bad things; if the thing you like isn't bad, you're not a nerd".
I'm suspect the arrow of causality goes the other way. Nerds are uncool people (I can say that because I count myself as uncool; I am, after all, commenting on a ACX blog). If you're fat and unathletic and socially awkward, you're going to be branded as a nerd, no matter what you like. (I like Rimsky-Korsakoff more than K-Pop, but I was and am fat, unathletic and socially awkward, so I was an Orchestra Nerd in high school.) The things that nerds like are bad because nerds like them. Sports fandom may be indistinguishable from RPG-fandom in the abstract, but because sports are enjoyed on average by a more attractive, higher-status set of people, sports fandom is itself higher status than tabletop gaming.
Talk about a bait post ... anyway of course you are both missing the point!
A nerd is obsessive about some topic which they pursue *alone*, usually through books or computers. A sportsball fan that goes to the games and meets the athletes, maybe plays a bit themselves is not a nerd; one that memorizes the stats in their basement is. Now that computer gaming and comicbooks are not solo escapes but accepted social activities you can be a non-nerd fan of those areas.
It's a question of causation. Nerds are nerdy because they don't have friends to spend time with, so they fill time with books and find some topic that interests them (sterotypically fantasy of some sort). Social people do whatever is popular, which is now fantasy, so they end up being OMG I LOOOVE HARRY POTTER even though they aren't nerds. Both people can be just as truly invested in being a "fantasy fan" but they got there from different angles.
Along the causal lines we can get to the math vs. theater nerd v. geek debate. Nerds are usually considered smarter, tracked into higher class or skip grades, while not being considered attractive or athletic. Hence the reading/computers, and electronics sci-fi and so on being nerd topics. Geeks are more simply "weird" "artsy", IMO coded for LGBTQ. Both are alone but find their comfort zones in different topics.
This is mostly for kids. Once you're an adult, then indeed if one is obsessive about a topic it matters what topic and why. If it's machines that you own; if it's babies or your profession; if it's obscure facts and figures; if it's classical art or if its modern art and if you're creating the art or collecting it; if there is a "fandom" or if you do it yourself; to what degree that fandom is monetized, publicized and corporate-driven. You will be categorized depending on those, but really nerd status is set far earlier on.
A few comments:
I actually have the opposite instinct about nerds and geeks. In my mind, nerds have always been the people who get really into things like DnD or Star Wars - pop-culture obsessions, whether they are actually quite popular or are fairly obscure and often reviled by mainstream culture (like DnD originally was). Whereas geeks, to me, are the people who are interested in technology, science, academic studies (incl. ones in the humanities), or generally topics I consider "serious" or of deep interest, even if they might not have much actual important impact on the world (some might argue, and I would to some extent concede, that much of advanced pure mathematics these days has little real utility, but I'd consider it a geeky subject even if you go so far as to say it has no real value for society other than the enjoyment of the pursuit of knowledge and beauty).
Also, re: your take on collecting hobbies (stamps, coins, etc.): I sent this article to my cousin, who has some old-fashioned hobbies including both stamp and coin collecting, and he said he thought you were a little off-base, probably because you don't pursue those hobbies yourself and so don't actually understand what motivates people's interest in them. He said it's less about the "joy of the hunt" that might lose its meaning via the ease of access to information and sites like ebay or Amazon that let you buy anything from anywhere, and so the only factor in whether you can collect something is you have the $$$ to pay for the rare and expensive collectibles. For one thing, he points out that to some extent that's always been the case: certain things are so rare they are meaningfully expensive and so it's always the case that only rich people can "catch them all." He says the joy is more in the "delight in minutiae, for its own sake," and the detailed knowledge and historical aspects connected to the objects and the process of learning enough about them to collect and appreciate them. He says he'd point to the cause of the decline being (while still technologically related) due more to the instant-gratification aspect of entertainment in the world of video games and the internet "instant porn, instant music, instant entertainment, instant everything" is a near-quote of what he blamed for it. You might think that's a distinction without a difference, but I think it's a meaningful and relevant point about what the actual psychological mechanisms are for the enjoyment of the hobby and why people might pursue enjoyment via other means today. I'd also point out that I've often explained things like this to myself in terms of cyclical patterns like we see in fashion, politics, and intellectual debate: some hobbies or sports become really popular in an almost viral way in a certain time period, in part due to random chance and in part due to historical contingencies, hobbies self-perpetuate to some extent once established, due to their popularity and the social/institutional connections tied to them. Then they fade as generations age out, new fads come into play, historical influences change, and so on. For example, my stepfather is an avid model airplane guy and hang-glider, and he has noted that both these hobbies seem to be less popular among younger generations. He sees this as in part caused by a generational factor: for his generation, aviation (especially advanced aviation/spaceflight) was still a novel, futuristic technology that inspired fascination, even if planes had already been around for a while since their invention around the turn of the century. But for generations growing up today, aviation is de rigueur - they have other fascinations, like computers and video games, tied to more recent technologies.
It seems like both your theory and his alike classify sportsball fans as nerds. There is, after all, literally a competition (fantasy sports) in this fandom. So what became of this notion that nerds and sports fans are opposite?
Well, I'm an old fart now, but in my day hipsters had social skills and were adventurous in trying new things while nerds weren't and didn't (except within the boundaries of their own nerd cliques). The distinction wasn't about taste, per se—the distinction was hipsters were seeing/tasting/hearing a lot of new things by mingling with a variety of other hipsters with diverse tastes and experimental dispositions. In an era previous to mine hipsters were called the avant-garde. On the other end of the spectrum, nerds were obsessed with a single cultural item, often to the detriment of experiencing new things. Hipsters become taste- and trendsetters through their vicarious experimentation and sociality. Nerds became conservators of culturally arcane areas of knowledge.
But now in the post-Modern world, there are no new things under the sun. Fashion is recycled from previous eras. Art is a hodgepodge of all previous styles without any underlying innovation. No new musical genres have swept the world since Rap and Hip Hop. And there's only so much you can do with food for it still to be edible (indeed Guide Michelin has given up on looking for innovative cuisine, and rather focusing on restaurants that can do dishes very well). And being the conservators of arcane areas of cultural knowledge, nerds have come to the forefront of PoMo culture, because they know where to find the interesting tidbits of culture that haven't been picked over in the vast second-hand shop of the 21st Century.
I think that the difference between nerds and hipsters is that nerds deliberately seek out hobbies with high barriers to entry. Virtually anyone can enjoy an obscure rock band in a bar in Liverpool, right away, once a hipster reveals them to the world. But not anyone can enjoy an RPG. It takes a non-trivial amount of time to learn about the very concept of RPGs; once you do, you still cannot enjoy RPGs without reading some books and learning a little bit (however tangentially) about algorithms (for character creation), probability distributions (dice rolls), writing techniques (especially if one is GMing), etc. Sure, one can watch the latest D&D movie without learning any of that stuff; but actually playing something like D&D (or rather, Pathfinder, heh) is a pursuit for nerds.
"Bad" is a subjective term. This all seems like a very strange way to answer "why do people publically enjoy things I don't enjoy and/or wouldn't be seen dead doing?". The pastime is its own reward for pastimes other people enjoy, just as it is with ones you happen to enjoy yourself. There's no need to make up elaborate social climbing schemes to explain why people do things they find fun.
A more relevant question to ponder is perhaps how arbitrary pastimes become divided into socially acceptable and low-status in the first place.
I think it's honestly sort of funny how non-nerds seem to genuinely not understand that a nerd's identity becomes about [thing] because they like it so much, not the other way around.
Sometimes you encounter a thing—let's say it's Minecraft, because why not—and it's just such a positive experience for you that you take every possible opportunity to keep thinking about Minecraft, even when you're not playing. You collect every scrap of information you can find about Minecraft and you compose your own original Minecraft-related songs and you decorate your room with blocky little figurines. You get into a virtuous cycle where talking and thinking about Minecraft is so rewarding that you keep enjoying all these secondary activities long after you're bored of actually playing Minecraft itself. You look out for opportunities to meet people who'd enjoy talking about Minecraft with you and make a bunch of friends with whom you mostly talk about Minecraft, and your friends and family start seeing you as "the Minecraft guy" and they get you a Minecraft hoodie for Christmas cause they know it's a safe pick.
This is the obvious and intuitive explanation! There's no need to get fake-deep about "ah, they got into Minecraft so they'd have something to construct their identity around": it explains nothing, and consistently makes incorrect predictions about the internal experiences of Minecraft nerds. It's only virtue is making people feel better about being annoyed by those weirdos who won't shut up about Minecraft.
It's possibly that I have unusually low social motivation (genuinely, what does it mean to "construct your identity" and why is it something people would be this comically desperate to do?) and am typical-minding, but, uh, I wonder if there's any group closely associated with "nerds" who are also known for having low social motivation? I think it's a tad more likely that people like Kriss are typical-minding, and constructing elaborate social motivations for people who just like stuff regardless of what people like him think.
This is basically quibbling over an aspect of Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point thesis. Gladwell argues that society has "Mavens," the people that know everything about a thing ("nerds") and connectors, people who know everyone and effectively connect people to them ("hipsters"). There are also salesmen, not reflected in the current model (internet mass media has kind of made that role irrelevant at the individual level). Someone can be both a maven and a connector.
I get that Scott and Kriss were getting at something more cultural (maybe even personal) than economic, but this really just seems to be a different application of Gladwell's framework (namely, applying it to popular culture rather than broader economics).
You really went full triggering on sports.
I've been watching sports since Charlie Hough threw the first knuckleball at Joe Robbie stadium in the first ever Marlins game (a strike! - I was 9) and I gotta tell you, after 30 years years and maybe 1,800 Marlins games (60 a year on avg sounds right, and possibly too low), I've never seen the same game twice.
The NBA & NFL can get a bit samesey (I love the Heat & Dolphins too - if my dad chose Cali instead of Florida I wonder what my life would be like - but then he could've chosen to stay in Poland too I guess) but a baseball game is always different, every time. It's magical.
Anyway, I still don't know what the statistics WHIP or WAR are and fear I never will - but boy am I enthralled with a Marlins game.
> The most knowledgeable RPG geek who owns all the expansion books cannot match the fervor of the sports fan who has memorized the RBIs and ERAs of every player in the league and has all their rookie cards and goes to every game. But aren’t nerds and “sportsball fans” natural enemies?
The sports fans who are natural enemies of the nerds are definitely not the ones who memorize the RBIs and ERAs of every player in the league. Those people probably don't know a single player's RBI or what an ERA is.
"How do you get a reputation as (an identity as?) 'the Star Wars guy'? Certainly not by going around and saying 'Hey, have you seen Star Wars yet?'. We have."
I actually did get a reputation (but not an identity) as "the Star Wars guy" by telling people about it before anyone knew what it was. The magazine Starlog published an article about it with some pre-production art by McQuarrie, and I got excited and told everyone I knew about it, showing some of them the magazine. Then I did it again when a comic book serialization started before the (first) movie was released. The ones who ended up seeing the movie repeatedly remembered these things.
Using the taxonomy above, this would make me a "hipster" (following obscure sources and telling people what I found), but I'm pretty sure the excited chattering of childish enthusiasm falls somewhere on the nerd-geek spectrum.
I've read Kriss too, I also disagree, but not quite for the same reason.
First of all, far from dead, some nerds are currently trying to build AGI. This might turn out to be a bigger problem than whether we return to "genuine mass art".
"nerds have always gravitated to the popular" is the kind of thing I'd like to stick a [citation needed] on. Being able to, say, correctly pronounce Quenya or even write it is very much not the kind of thing that tends to make you popular at your local school, but that kind of nerd always existed and still does. And if general internet background chatter is anything to go by, "[man] living with [his] mother" is most of the time a dog-whistle but not for "popular".
I think there's a lot to say for the Chapman model of geeks and MOPs: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths Applied to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it might have been mainly geek territory once but I see the version we have today as completely taken over by sociopaths, watered down for mass-market appeal to squeeze as much money out of the mops as possible. I don't think Marvel ever "thought that most people were nerds", more like they thought there was good money to be made by taking something nerdy and turning it into general mass-market pop culture, and they seem to have been very financially successful at this so far.
I think Freddie deBoer has a valid take on this too: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/your-personality-has-to-be-load-bearing - what Marvel and Disney have really discovered is that they can sell you a substitute for having an identity. If you define yourself as "the Star Wars guy", then someone criticising something in the latest film is not a piece of film critique but a personal attack on your deepest self that justifies going to DEFCON 1 immediately. If being so deeply invested in an aspect of your identity that any criticism justifies lashing out is "nerdy" then nerd culture is very much alive!
I'm also kind of annoyed about the use of "hipster", here. Finding good stuff and sharing them was just what friends do, in my experience. Yeah, there's a bit of a status boost, but mostly it's about finding something that you think is good, and sharing it, so that more people you like have access to this good thing. Bonus points if you know a friend well enough to recommend something that they like but other friends don't. Super bonus points if you know them well enough to point them to stuff they'll like even when you yourself don't like it. Not because it's bad, merely because it's good but not something you're into, because you are an individual human with individual tastes, and so are they.
While "hipsters" were the people who lost sight of objective goodness, and went in for the status thing. Not only would they be seduced by phrases like "artisanal free-range organic carbon-neutral", once they found something like that, they'd embellish it more before passing it on, to increase their status. Everything became about status signals, from what they wore to how they talked. It was all about finding new stuff, making it seem cool, and passing it on to just the right people - not too many, not too few, only the ones that are useful to impress.
It is only among nerds that enthusiasm for something corresponds to learning more and more about it. That's the core element here. Non-nerds who like something do not feel any need to read up on it, to know more and more.
Of course, the producers of content notice when their audience are nerds, and they start to produce content built more for those who obsessively learn every detail. Comics can start "rewarding" readers for noticing some obscure thing. A game series can have an elaborate continuity, or a zillion details to memorize. Content that either "leans into the fandom" or simply naturally has too much for non-nerds to easily pick up, can rapidly become nerd-only, thus solidifying boundaries. And sure, there are the personality correlations, attributes most nerds also have, including being STEM-y and lacking social skills. Combined, a nerd ended up being an unpopular thing to be.
Mainstream culture shifted to accommodate nerd interests after computers launched a lot of nerds into the ranks of the world's richest and most influential people, and we got popular movie series based around Marvel and Lord of the Rings, and video games becoming more mainstream, and so on. This made the borders more ambiguous than they were before, but we still obviously have nerds.
Re: coin and stamp collectors, there are a couple of other possible reasons for the death of those hobbies:
- With the digitization of mail and finance, people generally interact with coins and stamps less now, which gives fewer opportunities for people to develop an interest in them.
- Stamp/coin collecting are, simply put, boring hobbies, and there are so many more engaging ways to spend your time now (video games, social media, etc.)
- The people who were interested in stamp and coin collecting became old, meaning that it became seen as an old person hobby and as such was rejected by younger folk (resulting in a positive feedback loop)
I wonder if Scott and other people opining on the differences between geeks and nerds are just trying to place themselves on this graph:
https://m.xkcd.com/747/
Something tells me Kriss misjudged his fanbase.
He's wrong, too, but everyone else here has said that better than me.
Contra Scott Alexander On Nerds And Hipsters
Nerd: One who has an intense, obsessive interest in something.
Co-ordinate terms for "nerd": geek, stan, otaku, anorak, guru, fan, wonk, -head [suffix], (an) obsessive.
Meanwhile a hipster refers to a particular subculture that developed primarily from 1999 to 2003. Since then it stabilised, ossified, and is slowly dying out. Some aspects broke through to the superculture, which I would identify as men's facial hair and microbrewies, but most aspects did not. This is typical of subcultures throughout time. I think it's important to note that hipsters were middle class.
A hipster could never have discovered The Beetles because hipsters didn't exist yet. (I know there were unrelated groups also called hipsters earlier, that's not the point.) I think you need a better theory for how taste-making works/worked.
Imo all of these concepts are too vaguely defined and over-encompassing to be really useful in building a predictive model of reality.
Clever theory, but wrong. Dungeons and Dragons has been a nerd activity from the start. So have comic books AFAICT (and that's why MCU nerdery has no traction-- it's derivative of the comics and everyone knows it). And there are whole fields where even the most popular stuff doesn't seem to support nerdery (Taylor Swift has superfans but no one would think to call them nerds). Nerds engage with stuff not because of aesthetics or popularity but because of certain mental experiences that come from in-depth engagement. That's a quality that neither aesthetics nor popularity reliably captures. Nerdy content is prone to be popular these days (in ways that it wasn't even 20 years ago-- nerdery went mainstream during the tech boom) but that's just incidental and the coincidence fooled both you and Kriss.
Also, you're wrong about reversing the nerd-geek distinction. Gates is a geek and not a nerd; someone who obsesses over Tolkien is a nerd but not (necessarily) a geek.
From Parks and Recreation:
Ben Wyatt : You know, "nerd culture" is mainstream now. So, when you use the word "nerd" derogatorily, it means you're the one that's out of the zeitgeist. Tom Haverford : Yes, that's perfect. Just like that: be incredibly boring.
This comment section is a lot of astrology level personality science... Similar flavour even
I like the definition of nerd versus geek as encapsulated in two photos : on the left, an American man in horn rim glasses reading the newspaper in Chinese; on the right a bearded man cheerfully looking up from his arrayed collection of in-original-package figurines.
By this schema I am a nerd; it's obviously superior to enjoy learning and information about the world, even in a sometimes outsized or slightly absurd way, to collecting childish objects (physical or virtual). Nerds can do things with their knowledge. Geeks are merely prisoners of their enthusiasm(s). And God help you if they engage you in conversation.
Sports *geeks* are what you were talking about ; sports nerds eg create the 'moneyball' system.
I think this makes more sense in the framing of social signalling / the "barber pole" model. If hipsters were really just about data sorting, they would also like popular things. If thing X is popular, hipsters are signalling that they are on a different cultural level by hating X and liking unpopular / not yet popular thing Y.
Nerds are just unaware or indifferent to the barber pole. They like thing Z regardless of whether it is the current trend, or whether it is new and promising. This usually means they are not in sync with popular culture, but as seen with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it is possible for thing Z to become popular. When this happens, nerds don't care and continue to like thing Z, unlike hipsters, who would need a new thing to signal their avant garde status. Of course, nerds will continue to like the MCU if it becomes unpopular again.
Quite a bit of the debate above seems to centre on anxiety about authenticity. In particular, a couples of people are irritatedly denying that nerd or hipster obsessions are for other people. They suggest that these obsessions are *real* - implying that if the obsessions are public-facing or part of a public identity, that make the obsession less real or less authentic.
I think that’s wrong. Having a relationship purely with a thing (like music or the MCU) isn’t better or more authentic than being interested in a thing out of a desire to share it and join its community. They’re just two different ways of engaging with a thing. They both have really obvious failure modes: a public engager might be a poser; a private engager might be a bore. They have obvious success modes, too.
I think a lot of the anxiety in the debate could be neutralised by not taking a negative view of the way other people do [hobby X], and in particular by not succumbing to a belief in a particular kind of authenticity that excludes social sharing.
I think this all misses something important, or perhaps I have different conception of what it means to be a nerd. Nerdy activities are those which require shared participation.
The pinnacle of nerdy activities I think about are things like dungeons and dragons, magic the gathering, comic books, Starcraft (deliberating choosing an old game for reasons that will become clear). These are activities that require a nontrivial investment of time, money or both. It used to be the case that to play Magic, you had to put in a baseline level of investment, and base your social life around it. Nowadays the investment is a lot less with things like magic arena, and FNM drafts but it's not the full experience. With D&D, you need a dedicated group, plan out events in advance, and block off pretty large chunks of time. With comics, shared participation allowed you to actually read all of the comics in chronological order without missing pieces of the story. And with Starcraft, LAN parties required a fair amount of logistics to set up.
I realize this definition places certain sports like tennis and golf into the nerd category. And I would simply bite the bullet. There isn't any different between the social structures of a tennis enthusiast and a chess or Pokemon card enthusiast. And I've known many people who are sports nerds and nerds in the more widely used sense. The label isn't commonly applied simply because sports have been around forever. We already know what sports are - we don't need a new word or concept to describe them.
So how does this apply to the MCU? It doesn't directly - which is why not everyone who watches the MCU is a nerd. But it does apply to people who not just consume it, but discuss it on Discord, go to COMICON, cosplay etc. Those activities require shared participation.
What do we call people who feel empowered to embrace any kind of gnostic, connect-the-dots, sort of discussions? Pizzagate or QAnon or the futility of N95 masks or the efficacy of HorsePaste?
For coins and stamps, the 'hunt' was to find the items before they found their way into the hands of people who knew their value.
I stopped being a coin collector when it no longer became possible to find interesting (rare) coins in circulation. That started around when they took the silver out of coinage.
A) This is exactly spot on, IMO: “Now there’s no sense that you have to really care about stamps or coins to have a great stamp/coin collection: you just need a higher budget than whoever else typed “stamps and coins” into the eBay search function.”
B) But…are/were coin collectors “nerds” then? No, because coin/stamp collecting weren’t “bad.” But what even, really, does that mean?
It seems that we have a whole constellation of obsessives of various types, who go under different labels and have some similarities and some differences. For instance, there's the "fan" (short for "fanatic," recall) who buys every song from their favorite band, has all the bootlegs, and knows everything about every member. That person isn't a nerd/geek, right? Neither, as you point out, is the sports fan. What's the difference? Simple: Fans are obsessed with something popular. "But Star Wars and the MCU are popular!" Yes, and do we *really* look down on people who like them nowadays? No, because that's nearly everybody.
Nerds and geeks are distinguished by liking *unpopular* things. Nerds like unpopular things which require intelligence (most things requiring intelligence are inherently unpopular, at least until someone finds a way to make tons of money from them). Geeks are—what? I'm not sure. It seems to me that geeks are obsessed with things that require *some* intelligence, but not quite as much as nerds. For instance, where are the Silmarillion geeks? Nowhere. There are only Silmarillion nerds. But there are tons of Dr. Who and Star Trek geeks.
"The most knowledgeable RPG geek who owns all the expansion books cannot match the fervor of the sports fan who has memorized the RBIs and ERAs of every player in the league and has all their rookie cards and goes to every game. But aren’t nerds and “sportsball fans” natural enemies?"
I think you are missing out on the nuances of sports fandom, as there were two camps, the nerds and the traditionalists. The nerds knew all the RBIs and ERAs and stats etc, and the traditionalists liked the eye test and players being tall and fast etc, and there was actually a lot of conflict in between these two groups (Moneyball is kinda about this). But the nerds basically won because teams run by them kept on winning too much.
> self-deprecating joke about how his obsession with medieval mysticism is totally different than nerdery
Huh. I did not notice it was a joke while reading his essay; I was just thinking that this Kriss guy really seems like an a**hole.
When I was in High School, I competed in speech and debate. One year there was a guy whose entire speech was about distinguishing the terms Nerd, Geek, and Dork from each other and it's completely framed my outlook on them.
Nerd: This means someone who is intelligent. Nerdy interests are cerebral, but not necessarily outside of the mainstream. Consider, for example, Fantasy Football commissioners in the pre-internet era; they were required to compile and then score all of the relevant player stats for each team in the league, and generally loved doing it.
Geek: The word originates in carnivals as a term for people with unbelievable skills, contrasted with freaks who had unbelievable natures of some sort. Used in the hobbyist sense to describe someone with an intense interest in something abnormal. In Japan the word otaku maintains this idea, with the standard example being a Train Otaku. These are the sort who spend their weekends going to launch parties for new trains, or visiting every station in the country.
Dork: Someone who is socially inept. The speaker claimed that the word originates from Dr. Seuss and I have never fact checked him on this.
Obviously there is plenty of crossover between these categories.
Yes, sports fan, especially the type of fan who knows every stat, are nerds. Socially accepted nerds.
The definitely are sport nerds. Especially since the analytics revolution.
Here in the UK we have anoraks, trainspotters and boffins as well as nerds. I'm not sure of the distinction between them, except to note that 'boffin' is, inter alia, a term of abuse used at school, of pupils who are too keen and knowledgeable.
To be an anorak is to be too interested in something, especially from the point of view of the prevailing British viewpoint that effortless superiority and 'seeing the bigger picture' are always better than working really hard at a speciality, and that the humanities are by nature superior to the sciences.
Also, true anoraks are probably D&D players, and usually work in IT, but are also always keen on SF (never call it sci-fi) and preserved steam railways (hence 'trainspotter'). They (we) are often right-libertarian in politics.
To me, the nerd has an obsessive fascination with something obscure and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks about it - or maybe cares a bit but can’t help him/herself. Math nerds are generally proud of being math nerds, right? Here’s a fun question - is Wes Anderson a nerd, a hipster, or something else?
One can read this comment section as a demonstration of the nerd thesis, albeit in varying shades.
Why the assumption that nerds and hipsters are opposites? I think nerds/geeks in the sense you're gesturing at are defined by a) obsessive interest and b) speculative fiction fandom. Nerds can also be hipsters (as you note yourself, you were into ASoIaF before it was cool.)
A lot of nerds are into very obscure media, and my intuition is that this makes them *more* nerdy, not less.
A friend who managed stamp and coin trading for large antiquities dealers explained the declines over many years. Email made stamps relatively unfamiliar to and unused by younger people. Collectors liked variety, but governments created such vast numbers of issues as to drown collectors under the sheer numbers. The stamp-collecting world created grading systems that were so expansive and esoteric and violable that no one could afford to build a more-or-less definitive collection. Similar occurrences took place in the coin world. As a kid in the 1960s, I could regularly find 19th century coins in the change drawers at my parents' store. As collectors multiplied, the supply dried up. There arose a class of professional coin investors who didn't have the old-time collectors' love for the pieces. They were just collectible investments. They, too, created impossibly esoteric grading systems, with fantastic premiums for minute differences in quality. This led to scandals related to fraudulent grading. The response was to encase collectible coins in plastic sheaths. Collectors could no longer touch their treasures. And as one who had a modest collection in my youth, a great deal of the thrill came from touching a coin that you knew had been spent 2,000 years earlier. With the plastic-sheathed collectible coins of today, they are untouchable, and as a result, unlovable. The passion dried up. In a recent Substack essay (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/whence-fall-snowflakes), I discussed how the loss of spare time and physical mobility sapped youth of many old passions, and there's no doubt that this had its impact on stamp and coin collecting. If you have no spare time and are not allowed to bike a mile away to visit your coin-collector friend, much of the motive for the hobby vanishes. And, of course, electronic devices have distracted kids away from everything else. I read someone comment recently that coins have been around for 2,500 years, and it feels very strange to be alive in the time when this ancient technology is finally disappearing from common usage and our collective conscience.
I feel like my experience of nerds/geeks is very different to Scotts...
As a small child, I didn't watch star trek as some kind of statement of identity or to share it with others, it was just that that kind of story was like a steel trap for someone with my kind of mind and worldview.
Now that I'm older, I feel at home in places like hackspaces. Not because I want to be "that hackspace guy" but rather that it's a room full of people who share the same tendency to get hyper-obsessed with weird little interests and projects.
And social status in geek communities is fuzzy but tends to tie to capability, not just interest. You get respect for actually building that giant spider robot, not just being "that guy really into robotics"
To your question about collectors ("Also, speaking of collectors, are there any, any more? When I was a child, the stamp collector and coin collector were stock cultural figures. Now I realize I haven’t thought about them in years. Where did they go?") - I think the new collections are experiences. The cost of travel and experiences has declined relative to other goods - so people collect marathons or countries visited. They are accomplishment collections, not just physical collections.
There are still some physical collectables - sneakers, baseball cards are having a big moment, NFTs maybe? Stamps and coins are less relevant because people don't use stamps and coins anymore... I think your point about eBay making it less fun might be true, but that hasn't hindered baseball cards, which are at a major peak...
Lee
I was reading about the flappers of the 1920s who favoured rail-thin bodies and bound their breasts if they were, by the standards of the time, too well endowed. Seems worse than watching movies and reading comics.
The indiscriminate and often self-serving use of the word "nerd" is one of many malapropisms in the contemporary lexicon. Nerd is nothing more than somebody who is (1) really, really smart (not just somewhat smart, or well-read on a particular issue, or in the middle of their class at an Ivy League or really good university, or somebody who really enjoys consuming particular items like "wine nerds" or "French cinema nerds") and (2) not socially integrated with people other than nerds. Hipsters are wealthy kids who generally have external subsidies to go on endless bourgeois adventures in a never-attempting attempt to find the new new new thing. Kids at the Reefer Barn in 1962 are not hipsters..
They are German working class kids who had nowhere else to go see music. Hipsters and nerds are not remotely related and don't belong in either of these articles together.
Re: coins, it's still quite challenging to find many key dates and mintmarks. I waited for years to buy a 1911-D Barber quarter in mint state with CAC approval. Only five such pieces exist, and two are owned by billionaires. The coin was only $1100, but I had to check the listing every day and run to get my credit card to prevent some other collector from buying it first. Nobody saved coins until the cardboard books came out during the depression, so mint state circulating US denominations from pre~1925 are actually quite tough to find, even with the internet. Many survivors were harshly cleaned and are near worthless. The only reason certain issues can be found in mint state is because a single collector in 1910 or whenever saved a roll: e.g., Pittsburgh resident Augustin Giles saved a roll of quarters of each year in the 1890s-1910s - but he apparently missed the 1911-D.
Bitcoin used to be a nerdy hobby.
Now it's a geeky hobby.
It's so jarring to read opinions on sport fans by people who actively dislike watching them and the culture around it, although a few made salient points. I am a big fan and watcher of (European) football and I'd categorize the people as:
Fans: normal people who go to games or watch it on TV. Usually they follow their favorite team in their own country/league, based on (usually) their city (a Manchester United fan let's say). Beyond that, there's people who watch all games in that country's league (all Premier League games for that week). Maybe swap a few uniteresting games in that league for a more interesting one in a foreign league.
Superfans: the one's that go to away games and have done so consistelty for years if not decades. The people who are angry/upset the whole day/weekend/week after a loss.
Toxic fans: usually ultras/hooligans.
Nerds: the statisticians who are more into the math/stats part than the actual games or sport. Absent a link to the sport, they would have latched onto something else. Usually employed by clubs or sport betting companies.
Geeks: they would be somewhere between and around fans and superfans. They would not likely be devasted by any random loss, but are more involved in the "lore" of their respective team. Can become toxic but not in the violent way; more like they base their whole life around that team (or sport). The equivalent of Disney adults.
I find it hard to belive in the MCU nerdom/geekdom. There simply isn't enough there to create those communities. Comics themselves as a medium have that and most Marvel nerds/geeks have at least branched out a bit into DC or the indies. To further define the terms, a geek would have read most storylines, know a lot of details about the characters and details about the authors. A nerd would calculate Superman's strength or Flash's speed and have a database-level of knowledge about say the date of publication and first apperances of characters. The irony is not lost on me that when I began writing this comment there were exaclty 616 comments here.
Most MCU fans are the same people who were fans of Pirates of the Carribean or Fast and Furious. A lot of the hype around MCU is because of the deluge of articles and Youtube videos analyzing trailers. Comic fans were never that thrilled with the MCU except for a few movies. Same for Game of Thrones/ASOAIF. Most people who named their children Daenerys and had Dothraki weddings are the same ones who did the same for Pirates of the Carribean. But it's hard to find a ASOAIF nerd/geek (except maybe the GRRM 2 assistants) simply because there isn't sufficient material; any superfan is likely a fantasy nerd/geek first.