Is Nerd Culture Dying?

Is it true that we don't have a monoculture, though?

The author argues that algorithms have reintroduced monoculture: there was a period before the year 2000 when we had a monoculture (because of the scarcity of information) and a period after 2012 when we had a monoculture (because of effective information-sorting algorithms). The kind of cultural fragmentation you're talking about only existed 2000-2012, or in what he calls the 'hipster era.'

Post-2012, 'nerdy' things like comic book movies and gaming streams are basically mainstream to the point of being inescapable. People who remember the previous 'pre-nerd' monoculture are primed to think of those things as niche and marginal interests, but they're really not.

I know, right? This line in particular got stuck out at me:

> They are mortally offended by the suggestion that Marvel might be somehow less good than Chris Marker, or that K-pop might be worse than Rimsky-Korasov.

Never heard of Chris Marker or Rimsky-Korasov, had to look those up. Chris Marker looks like an indie French filmmaker who 60 years ago made a 27 minute time travel film called La Jetée, using only still photographs, that William Gibson apparently considered one of his greatest influences. So yeah, this sounds like something that most mainstream people wouldn't be aware of or into and exactly the type of thing a film nerd or film hipster (who he said in the opening paragraphs were all killed because of how annoying they are) would be into.

And Rimsky-Korasov is a Russian classical music composer who's been dead for over 100 years. Someone that only a music nerd would probably be aware of nowadays, or go see a concert for.

If he didn't want to be such a hipster about it, he could have used like Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick and Mozart or Bach or even Debussy or something, a name most people would probably recognize, instead of these less recognizable names, especially in an article where he's making fun of nerds for being into obscure shit (while "their" movies have been dominating the box office for well over a decade at this point).

I'm not trying to defend Marvel here either. I don't think they're the best movies ever made (I thought Everything Everywhere All At Once was the best movie I've seen since Parasite, and considering it pretty much swept the Oscars this year, and Parasite did a few years before that, critics seem to agree with me there).

Another quote that stuck out:

> The culture we produce on Planet Nerd has nothing to do with desire whatsoever. Everything is sterile, mercilessly unsexy; no eroticism, not even visual pleasure.... Nerd culture, meanwhile, is basically quite boring to consume. Instead of the sadistic fantasy of being a superhero, doing fantastic things that ordinary people don’t get to do, the Marvel movies are about nothing more than themselves.

Sounds like someone needs to watch The Boys or Invincible. You'll get your sadistic superhero power fantasy there. (I mean, just watch The Boys episode about 'Herogasm').

Marvel can't do that because it has to get parents to take their children to see them to make all the money they want to make. You don't see sadistic power fantasies about being a wizard in Harry Potter either, or overly sensual things with any Disney movie, barring the hidden 'SEX' in flower petals in Lion King.

In my opinion the author completely mischaracterizes what hipsters and nerds are. Hipster just want to be different, unique, feel that they're not part the mainstream, that is their reason d'être, while nerds are obsessively interested and knowledgeable about a niche topic. The counter-example of someone "obsessive, all-consuming interest in the literature and mysticism of the medieval and early modern eras" would definitely be a nerd of medieval literature. So the definition of nerd as people who love hideous, terrible things, is not only insulting but also inaccurate.

To a degree everything can be subjectively considered bad to the uninitiated.

Also, I believe the reason why book sales are going up except young fiction which is going down is because younger generation have an increasingly shorter attention span, they've grown used to short videos like Tik-Tok, etc so they can't get bother with reading an actual full length book.

I just get chills when I think of the AI generated media (songs, books, movies) in the coming years and decades...

I think counter-culture would maybe be the right-wing nationalist groups that have popped up everywhere. That's being subversive to the mainstream.

Clearly barely anyone here has read far enough into this article to even know what he means by "Nerd Culture". I don't really agree with it, but he makes a specific claim and does so eloquently and emotively. It would be more interesting to discuss that claim than to respond to the title, as most here are doing.

Briefly, he's saying that the explosion in information availability has resulted in a form of hyper-aestheticism he associates with "hipsters", based on an idea that individuals with particularly "good taste" could sort through it all and popularise the good stuff, followed, after that failed and hipsterism came to be seen as unoriginal and conformist, by a surrender to corporate media franchises and manufactured culture, which he associates with "nerds". He claims this too is now failing and bleakly attempts to guess what might come next.

I think it's a huge oversimplification and I don't think "nerd" is a good term to use for what he's describing, but it's entertaining and would be fun to discuss if HN were capable of that.