Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals

I had a more generous reading of the article. Let's say a nerd is an intelligent but introverted person who shies away from the world, focusing their energy on a narrow range of self-centered interests. At the office they work hard decreasing page load speed by 10%, then they go home and play videos games, watch MCU movies, etc.

In the past, this kind of one-dimensional inward-looking person was widely ridiculed as selfish, weak, a moral failure and an embarrassment. Unattractive and uninspiring. Perhaps even a genuine threat to society. Notes from the underground, Ivan Karamazov, Faust, Glass bead game, etc. I was reading 'nerd culture' as the celebration and acceptance of this kind of man in the current zeitgeist.

The point is that the heroes in the MCU stories didn't have to outgrow their nerd phase through virtues like courage, responsibility, duty - instead science made them into men. Peter Parker is bit by a spider, The Hulk got irradiated, Captain America got injected, Tony Stark's invention is a literal shell which superficially turns him into Iron Man and protects him from consequences/reality.

Hemingway travelled to a war zone and got shot - he's the polar opposite of these characters, and a far better example for young men.

RE guilt -> I was actually saying that productivity culture as you describe it has some overlap with nerd culture as OP sees it, and arguing that P.C. is also anti(faux?)-intellectual in the same sense. But yes, I do think that the high esteem those virtues were once held in influenced the lives people chose to live.

I disagree with the way the author describes nerds. What makes something nerdy isn't inherent to the work. There's nothing about Star Wars that would always be 'weird'. Nerdiness in my opinion is the enjoyment of something niche that the surrounding society views as disproportionate obsession or an unusual interest that goes against the cultural norm. It's not that everyone has turned into nerds, it's that things that were once nerdy have broken into the mainstream. It makes sense because many of these words are good, many of them are visual to appeal to our increasingly non-reading societies, and because these works can become societal anchor points that everyone can reference and anyone will understand. We only needed to wait out until society got over itself and integrated these things into the social fabric.

While there are still superfans of Star Wars and Marvel, nerds in the sense of the word from 20 years ago are elsewhere, enjoying other niche things. Many people see the enjoyment of the over-commercialized, endless streams of content of the once-nerdy IPs as a bit passé. The nerds still exist, just not necessarily there.

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> The point is that the heroes in the MCU stories didn't have to outgrow their nerd phase through virtues like courage, responsibility, duty - instead science made them into men. Peter Parker is bit by a spider, The Hulk got irradiated, Captain America got injected, Tony Stark's invention is a literal shell which superficially turns him into Iron Man and protects him from consequences/reality.

Tell us you know nothing of those characters without telling us you know nothing of those characters.

For both brevity and character recognition, I'll stick to Spider-Man. This is a character who starts off as an average person like any one of us, and suddenly, he's granted amazing powers after being bitten by a spider. However, that isn't what makes him a hero.

No, what makes Spider-Man a hero is his underlying theme of responsibility. He recognizes (largely due to his uncle's teachings) that he has a duty to use his powers to help others.

Unfortunately, his hero persona effectively ruins his life -- he regularly loses friends and loved ones, and his constant need to jump to the rescue of others prevents him from ever holding down a reasonable job, leaving him barely scraping by most of the time.

It's not all rainbows and unicorns for his hero persona, either, as the editor/owner of New York's top journalism outlet, the Daily Bugle, spends all of his time and effort portraying Spider-Man as a villain, he has a huge rogues gallery trying to kill him, and it's pretty common for other Marvel heroes to ignore or refuse him help when he needs it.

Leaving his costume behind and blending in with the rest of New York would unquestionably improve his life, and yet, he soldiers on, because he recognizes that should he do so, people will suffer and die for it.

Now, if you're only familiar with the movies, I'll grant that they haven't always done a good job at showing this. Sure, Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man lost his uncle early on, and his failure saving Gwen Stacy was tragic, but we never really see his hero persona impacting his regular day-to-day life. Tom Holland's Spider-Man largely has the same issue: we don't even see his uncle die, and it's not until nearly the end of his third movie that he finally loses someone. His choice to be forgotten at the end only sets up the possibility that he may finally be portrayed correctly in follow-up movies (I haven't seen the newest one yet).

If for some reason you feel the need to stick to films, the ones that come closest to capture how rough things are for Peter Parker trying to balance his private and hero lives, you're best off watching the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films, and in particular, the second one.

But realize that none of the movies get close to how bad Peter has it in the comics. It's somewhat of a meme that the Spider-Man writers hate Peter, given how much punishment they dole out to the character for daring to try and help others. As a result, he's constantly questioning whether he's making a difference and whether he should give it up, and it reaches a point where even the One Above All (i.e., God in the Marvel universe) has to give the guy a pep talk. But, in the end, he always rises to the occasion, no matter how much personal sacrifice he has to make.

That is why Peter Parker is a hero.

I differentiate nerd from geek as a heirarchy, geek to me being a sub-nerd.

These are geekisms:

>super heroes

>fantasy books/movies

>Pokemon

>Magic the Gathering

>Star Wars

>Lord Of The Rings

>Narnia

>Harry Potter

>video games

Here you describe nerdisms:

>When I was little I was fascinated by big engines and in general driven by the curiosity of wanting to know how everything worked. I would disassemble every piece of electronics in the household. I was into model airplanes and gliders. I was obsessed with building electric motors. I was also really big into steam machines. Everything steam was just cool. Then computers took over my life. Today I find myself nerding out about wood working and back garden agriculture when I'm not doing AI stuff.

Geeks consoom, nerds understand and tinker/build.

Most video games are geek (consoom), tools like Siemens NX or Adobe Master Collection CS6 are nerd (should be thought of as extremely open-ended games), simulators wobble between my classifications depending on accuracy/depth (Minecraft, Sims: geek; NX Nastran, flight/train/truck/forklift simulators: nerd).