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Is Nerd Culture Dying?

samkriss.substack.com

21–30 of 117 posts

Re: Is Nerd Culture Dying?

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am still tight with my group of 7 guys from school While that's nice and all, it's not super helpful advice for people who are trying to make new friends, as we cannot go back in time and repeat school from younger days...

You appear to have missed my point. My second para is simply an example, not the point I'm making. The point is: your friends don't have to be interested in exactly the same stuff as you, they just need to be interested in you.

Ah, but the parent made the explicit point of trying to find people they have two specific topics in common with. To argue that they shouldn't, doesn't help them in their quest for what they are specifically asking about.

It's ok to want to look for people with common interests, just as it's ok to feel it's enough to spend time with people you don't have a lot of common interests with.

Re: Is Nerd Culture Dying?

#24

I think that nerd culture has just gone mainstream. It's far from dying.

When you have a Dungeons and Dragons movie hitting over 100mil in the box office, and when comic book movies are some of the highest grossing, i think its pretty safe to say nerd culture is incredibly mainstream.

"nerd culture" is not about what but how.

There were popular D&D shows already in the 80s.

Most comic book movies are simply bad, and "real" nerds hate them.

No nerd loved the last Star Wars trilogy or Rings of power or Wonder Woman 1984 or the nth spider-verse repetition, mostly because studios take something popular among nerds and change it to please modern audience which is exactly what's wrong with the so called "nerd culture" today: it's not a culture.

Re: Is Nerd Culture Dying?

#25
Insofar as nerdiness is considered to be gaming, that’s gone mainstream. But I don’t think most of the twitch gamers with the transparent cases and neon case lights have the same appreciation for that aesthetic as us LAN nerds did in the 00s. Like, we built those rigs to show them off in person with our friends. They were custom built by hand, each one unique. Now they are commoditized props, jewels in a pastel room meant for streaming over a webcam. They are tax write offs for professional twitch streamers.

Has something died in all that? Maybe. Honestly we transitioned to board games. The computer scene got too big, the games got too dumb, and we got too old. Board games still get us together, and they’re just as fun as star craft or enemy territory that we used to play back in the day.

Nerd culture is alive and well, it’s just different from when I was a kid.

Re: Is Nerd Culture Dying?

#26

One could hope that what is dying is the idea that there is such a thing as "nerd culture".

There must be one. Countries like america were making moves to attract nerds, by incorporating nerdiness in popular cultuyre. Usually nerdiness is invisible in most cultures, because cultures are dominated by the most extroverted people. Geeks are never 'chic' almost by definition, but they became economically very important for a period of time. Tech has been however stagnating in the post-iphone age , with social media and content dominating again. Now there is going to be another nerdy wave with AI, which is again bringing nerdy-looking people to the economic forefront. Most of the AI nerds are not the ones we see on podcasts currently, but we see their names in publications

Re: Is Nerd Culture Dying?

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has just gone mainstream Care to provide some examples? Most "nerd" interests like SciFi have been neutered if not completely bent out of shape while going mainstream.

The term "MCU" being in the common cultral lexicon.

Mellon Carnegie is a very respectable institute, I don't see what that has to do with nerd culture.

Re: Is Nerd Culture Dying?

#29
The new nerds are the furries posting NSFW inflation art when not writing code, and the transgender extreme Buddhist who writes long essays about attaining the jhanas on her personal blog while writing the code you rely on. Because the stereotypical white western male nerd became completely mainstream and normal

Re: Is Nerd Culture Dying?

#30
Maybe looking into the transhumanism future placed upon us the real hipster and nerds will be born. The fake ones will perish into AI driven oblivion.
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