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
Also while the algorithm will recommend "How to clean an oven quick and easy" because it knows I'll click it, it's my hipster friend who'll send me "This house has people in it" or "Heck" or "My house walk-through" or any of the artsy things he knows I'll enjoy a lot more.
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.
A nerd is just a fan of above average obsessiveness. Or perhaps a fan who builds an identity around their fandom. If you watch the game on a Sunday and maybe go in person once or twice a year and check the scores on Monday, you’re a fan. If you have season tickets and show up every week in costume to tailgate for three hours, you’re a nerd.
Disagree that a nerd is just a particularly obsessive fan of anything: there is definitely a component of bad taste/low status/generally perceived uncoolness of the thing you care about that's required to make you a nerd. Maybe someone who cares passionately about their sports team or their favorite rapper is a *stan*, but not a *nerd*.
Being overly obsessed with something is itself uncool.
And you can definitely be a nerd about things that are cool - Star Wars is cool now, and yet Star Wars nerds are a thing (in fact they get dumped on in popular media for being too critical of perceived flaws in new Star Wars). On the flip side, I don’t think people think “guy who has memorized the stats of everyone on the 1995 Dodgers” is in any way “cool”. He’s a nerd.
That said I think there is something to the idea that being obsessed with something perceived as “high class” would not make you a nerd.
Perhaps a better way to put it would be that a nerd is someone who obsessively engages with low or middle brow things as if they are high brow.
"Being overly obsessed with something is itself uncool."
And you can see this in action in online fandom spaces, particularly old-school fandom message boards, where there's a divide between the unselfconsciously obsessed, and the very self-conscious who compete amongst themselves over who can most effectively dunk on the obsessed and thus have higher status.
(The irony of trying to appear unobsessed by relentlessly dunking on people online is lost on everyone involved.)
People obsess over whatever they like and got branded nerds if that thing is currently uncool. It's not that they're looking for something uncool to like on purpose. The people who don't stop liking things they enjoy after learning it's low status might be a distinct group, but this behaviour is not at all mysterious.
All this is so different from when I was a kid. I was a nerd because I was intellectually curious, bad at and disinterested in sports, socially awkward, and had a computer hobby (owning hardware C64 ->8088 ->286, writing programs in Basic, being a BBS SysOp). Cultural interests were irrelevant to my nerd status.
You’re right. The article in question here is using “nerd” where I would say “geek” is the appropriate term. But I’m using them interchangeably here since our host is doing so.
When I was a kid, "nerd" was a Happy Days reference, and using "geek" meant you listened to Dr. Demento. There was no need for any special term for "computer hobbiest", and I don't even remember if there was jargon generally characterizing people dedicated to specific hobbies or genres of fiction.
Theory: If you are talking about a man, and you judge him to be sexually successful, he's not a nerd. In particular, most "nerd" interests are coded to some degree as child's interests, and adult women don't want to have sex with children.
There's definitely an element of "nerd" that implies that the person is pursuing their obsession despite that other people - especially women - think less of them for it.
No, football fans, even the obsessive ones, are categorically not 'nerds'. People who obsess over football stats in a nerdy way are not obsessive football fans, though. They're not the sort of people, typically, who build their identity around a football team etc.
It's difficult. I was quite interested in not computers, exactly, but computer languages. To anyone who wasn't in the field, this would be incomprehensible. (Would have been?) But I was called a "computer nerd", a "nerd", and a "geek". Now a geek used to be someone in the carnival sideshow who was paid to do something repulsive, like eat a raw chicken. I don't know the history of nerd. And I have no theory at all as to what "hipster" means, but a quick search seems to sort of agree with the post.
Fan is short or "fanatic", which once just meant insane.
I don't think the justifications for the usage can be correct. I think they describe proper subsets of the folks to whom the term is applied to. The usages sound useful, but you're going to need to define them each time you use them if you want to be properly understood.
I think that, unlike an average fan, a nerd spends a lot of time on studying the subject of his obsession. Anyone can watch the LotR trilogy; but a Tolkien nerd would've read all the books, committed the genealogies to memory, and learned to speak Sindarin and Quenya.
I agree. I'm definitely a nerd around computers, but it's because I genuinely enjoy thinking about and working with them, not because I want other people to identify me as a computer person. Maybe there's some evo psych explanation for the desire that drives my behavior, like wanting to appear useful to my tribe, but that's like saying "she had sex with him because she thought he had good genes" rather than "he was attractive"
Yes, this was my feeling. Most nerds I've known, by the extrinsic definition Scott uses here of someone who gets really deeply into the esoteric lore of whatever, aren't doing it for social signalling purposes; they're doing it because they really like the thing. Indeed, their eagerness to talk about the thing is traditionally socially detrimental unless they find someone similarly keen. See also Shadow One-Boxing https://shadowoneboxing.wordpress.com/2023/03/05/geeking-out-about-your-interests/ .
It's possible, but I think that other behaviors associated with nerds (e.g. low social perception, formation of nerd communities) are opposite what I would expect if this theory was correct.
Nerds are deeply into things that are uncool, because they like them enough not to care (frequently can't help themselves), and also because there's an identify there. You can haggle over what's uncool, but there are all sorts of things that seem uncool to most, things that have the potential to swing to cooldom, etc. I say this as someone who got my first D&D set in 78 or so, but wasn't overly into D&D, despite having every TSR product (because I had other interests like music, computers, girls, etc.). Note you need the interplay between deeply into, to the extent that's your identify, and uncool (even if only somewhat uncool, you can be so deeply into something somewhat relatively OK/cool-adjacent (and if you're being honest, stories about space wizards and superheroes aren't cool, even if they create good screen spectacle)).
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.)
"The Hobbit" was an excellent children's story (for the proper children). "The Lord of the Rings" is a truly classic work of fantasy. "The Simarillion", however, was not nearly of the same quality. It was important back story and enriched "The Lord of the Rings", but on second reading it left a bad taste in my mouth. I think it was the metaphysics. There are may others that are a lot worse, but that was foul. Everybody was doomed because some guy centuries ago made a stupid, not even evil, statement. (The evil actions that follow are claimed to be caused by the statement.) It's "the sins of the fathers" writ large, exaggerated, and not terminated after the 7th generation.
"Everybody was doomed because some guy centuries ago made a stupid, not even evil, statement. (The evil actions that follow are claimed to be caused by the statement.)"
Do you mean Feanor and his rebellion? What doomed him was (1) his pride and (2) the oath he swore and made his children swear. When you invoke God to witness that you and yours will take back your stolen jewels even if you have to fight everyone in the world up to and including the gods, then that oath will make you stick to it, even if you want to stop.
The first fruits of Feanor's insane pride was the First Kin-Slaying, and the subsequent other kin-slayings were the harvest reaped from the seeds sown. Even when the last survivors, Maedhros and Maglor, wanted to give up, they couldn't; the oath drove them. And even though they did eventually get back the Silmarils, they couldn't keep them because all the blood they had shed in the pursuit of what Feanor bound them to do had made them unworthy.
The "Silmarillion" is depressing if you look at it in one way, but it is a genuine pagan metaphysics. Words have real power, and actions have consequences down the generations. You can be doomed by something some guy centuries ago said or did. The tale of Kullvero, which is one of Tolkien's inspirations for the Children of Hurin, isn't a chuckle-fest by any means:
Think of Oedipus and the trap he was ensnared in, literally from birth, and how the attempts to avoid the prophecy only served to make it happen. Pagan metaphysics of the Northern variety are particularly grim and harsh.
I want to stick up for Feanor a little. Yes, the kin-slaying was inexcusable; but recall that his initial speech to the Elves in Valinor was so powerful that even Manwe's messenger was forced to step aside to let Feanor pass. And his speech had power because it was *true*. The Elves were not put on Arda to just sit there in Valinor doing nothing. They had their own work to do, and Manwe was directly preventing them from doing that work; he was forcing them to act against their nature in a foolish attempt to secure their safety. As Feanor pointed out, a gilded cage is still a cage. And, unlike Manwe, Feanor was calling for volunteers, not conscripts.
Feanor's downfall was caused by his blind zeal and rage, not by his desire for freedom of choice. In fact, I would argue that if Feanor had lost his argument, and the Elves stayed in Valinor forever, then Arda would've been lost to Melkor -- also forever.
Feanor did have virtues, and part of what he said was true - *but* his motives were corrupted, he had already been influenced by Melkor (e.g. drawing his sword on Fingolfin because he did believe he was trying to supplant him and because of a mix of issues around his mother and father) and he was driving on out of pride, grief, anger, and vanity.
The Valar did not handle things well, but on the other hand - Manwe is the rightful King of Arda. He can issue orders to Feanor by virtue of that authority.
Feanor refused to heed any advice, and when you have Namo telling you "Look, this is not going to end well" then you should listen. But he wouldn't, because of his own blindness. And the first act he does is to shed blood by attacking the Teleri when they wouldn't give up their ships. His second act, when he arrives in Middle-earth, is to burn the ships and ignore the Noldor still following behind and waiting for those ships to bring then over to Middle-earth.
He manages to get himself killed in (what amounts to) half an hour after arriving in Middle-earth, again because of his hubris. I agree that the Valar protected the Elves in Valinor, and indeed over-protected them, so he had no real idea of what he was going up against when he challenged Melkor, but ultimately Feanor both claimed that he was being enchained and enslaved and wanted to be free, and put chains on his own sons by making them swear the Oath.
I have some sympathy for him, but not very much. I know there are those totally devoted to the Feanorians, but really the best you can say is "And some of them are not as murderously psychopathic as the rest of them".
Turin is similar, in a way, because again his own pride and grief drives him onward to disastrous choices, but he has the excuse that Morgoth cursed his entire family.
In the end, it comes down to "who's your favourite Elf?" and I am a complete Finrod stan (so I can't forgive Rings of Power for what they did to his character) 😁
> The Valar did not handle things well, but on the other hand - Manwe is the rightful King of Arda.
He is the rightful king, yes, but that's the problem with monarchy: when your leadership is utterly incompetent, your only option is revolution. This is the path that Feanor took (yes, Ulmo managed to sneak a few positive developments under the radar, but Ulmo is a Vala himself, he has options that Feanor did not). And I would argue that Manwe started out as a moderately competent by-the-book bureaucrat, and then fell to pieces completely once Melkor rewrote the book. There's a reason that the Elves revere Varda far above Manwe; she did more for them (and for Middle-Earth) than he ever did.
Yes, Feanor refuses to take advice, but can you really blame him ? Would *you* take advice from your jailers ? Perhaps he would've been content to live in Valinor and practice his craft; but Manwe gives him zero reasons to trust his kingly authority -- by making it very clear that, to Manwe, Feanor and all the Elves are subjects (or even slaves) whose duty is to obey, not to think.
That said, yes, Feanor turns into a murderhobo psychopath the instant he leaves Valinor. But personally, I have always felt that Feanor's face-heel-turn was too abrupt, from the storytelling point of view. I suppose you could argue that the oath he took instantly corrupted him, but this feels like a bit of a magical cop-out (and is never explicitly stated). Don't get me wrong, I think that Feanor would've gone full psycho *eventually* (he sadly is that kind of guy); I just find it difficult to believe that his fall was as abrupt as the official chronicles say...
Overrated compared to what? They're definitely better than average fantasy, and better than average prestigious award-winning "literary fiction". They're more popular than Tolstoy or Dickens, but I don't think that many people who actually read those claim that they're in the same "weight class".
This is exactly the right question, and Matthias was also alluding to it. Tolkien, (like football, automotive racing, or netflix shows about competitive baking) is the entertainment version of something else (myth, war, bread, whatever). Entertainment is inherently overrated, arguably inherently even bad (overrated and bad both in comparison with something more genuine).
The nerd of whatever kind likes entertainments. Scott calls them 'cultural products', which is the over-category. I'm not disagreeing with him, I'm uniting his point with Sam's.
Football's ratings are higher by how many OOM? Nobody has to claim that war is good to note that football is vastly more overrated, at least these days. Presumably there was a crossover point when sport was still recognized to be a safe-to-use-on-your-own-team training for war and also war was rated highly (glorious, etc).
I don't think that entertainment is inherently bad, just like I don't think that junk food is inherently bad. They're contingently bad, exploits found out by adverse optimization, implicit in the design of humans. Of course, if we'll ever become able to truly redesign humans, it's unclear where the objective vision of "perfect" design comes from, or even whether that concept makes sense at all.
I think this gets to an important distinction and I think food is the right analogy. Whether or not a food is good or bad is an incredibly complex question, in which you have to consider:
1. Short term nutritional needs
2. Long term nutritional needs
3. The amount of similar foods consumed in the short and long term
4. Short term psychological needs
5. Long term psychological needs
6. Even more esoteric concerns like economics or moral ethics
That candy bar may be bad for you as far as long term nutrition goes, but in moderation sometimes the short term psychological need for something tasty is more important to satisfy.
This raises the question of whether or not you would self-identify as a 'nerd'. The fact that it's still ambiguous this far into the conversation is excellent and I salute you.
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.
Nah, there's plenty of contrarian ways to like things. You just need to like things that other people rarely like. You can like them because other people hate them (pure spite) or because enjoying them requires a lot of effort or background knowledge (snobby variant) or (in the best case IMO) because most people would like if it they gave it a chance, but something about the premise or marketing makes most people falsely assume they would dislike it, in which case contrarianism wraps back around into the useful kind of hipsterism.
Or you can be a meta-contrarian who likes mainstream things to spite the snobby, spiteful contrarians who seem to make up most of your social circle (while also enjoying the good stuff that mainstream culture rejects).
> because most people would like if it they gave it a chance, but something about the premise or marketing makes most people falsely assume they would dislike it
You’ve just nailed my love for old and/or obscure country music. I mean maybe it’s gotten less obscure in recent years, but I liked it before it was cool!
I've got a weird variant of that. I prefer folk songs that are in a foreign language that I can't understand. BECAUSE I can't understand it. Most folk songs have a meaning that I find distasteful, if only because it ends up cycling around in my brain when I've trying to think of something else. And many of them are a lot worse. (I'm thinking specifically of "Banks of the Ohio", but it's merely an example of a huge number.)
I don't have any problem with this. I'm more thinking, like, what's motivating a person to do these things. I think on Scott's level he's doing it as "Product > interactions" where a person gloms onto a product and has various interpersonal reactions thereby. Like the nerd comes to like star trek, pins his identity on it, then ends up competing with other nerds because that's what the product demands he do if he wants status.
I think some other people come at it from the opposite direction - "Desired personal interactions > Product", or something like that. So, something like "everyone likes inception, so I can't" or "everyone likes inception, so I must" are contrarian and popularist. I think like you said the contrarian often goes "nobody likes this so I must". My gut feeling is the popularist doesn't usually go "nobody likes this, so I can't" - it's just functionally outside of how he selects things in general.
I like your populist/contrarian dualism, but I don't think the underlying drivers are that different. Both the groups you identify are still trying to fit into tribes, but perhaps their enthusiasms are governed more by the culture they have been exposed to. Some people only have the Disney/Marvel etc option because that's all they know. You have to have an education, or at least be curious before you can start to eschew these huge cultural constructions in favour of something more esoteric, but these cultural aesthetes who proudly wear their disdain for more popular culture still seem mainly to be looking for an audience.
Real contrarians, if they exist at all, must all be living out in the woods in off-grid cabins, listening to Wagner and communing with nature. You'd never meet one unless you got lost on a hike and had to ask directions to the nearest town.
Yeah, I was definitely thinking about this while reading this article itself as well. It's way of thinking about things which I had kind of already come up with independently before I read Scott's post and which he clarified and crystallized quite nicely, and which has shaped my worldview of regarding how I interpret most cultural phenomena.
LOL. I am your definition of a popularist in every way except for owning an Apple product.
At the same time, I and those around me would likely define me as a rabid contrarian, because I hold many passionate positions on things that are not held by others and I enjoy many hobbies and invest my time and money in things other commonly regard as odd or socially defiant.
I like what I like, and I don't care of you like it or some consensus defines that like as socially acceptable / pro-social or not. I am willing to consider all sides of an argument, even if some of those sides are socially frowned upon and censored.
Yes - this is an important part of the psychological aspect here, I think. Another example, driven by similar tendencies: I know a number of genuinely very intelligent people who fall into what I believe to be "conspiracy theories" frequently (setting aside for the moment Scott's distaste of that term). For these people in my life, one of the root causes of this tendency seems to me to be their psychological need to be the Contrarian and also The Smartest Person In The Room. They need to Know Something That No One Else Does. This, combined with clever reasoning and misuse of data by other conspiracy theorists, and all the usual mental biases that every human falls into, lead them into wildly incorrect conclusions that they, unfortunately, can defend quite well to a lay-person who knows nothing about the topic with seeming intelligence, reinforced by the fact that they *are* genuinely intelligent, in general.
I get that some people don't get live/TV sports, but basically, there's no better entertainment available for almost everyone (the numbers back it up). If you're not into sport ball, you don't get this. But the world really, really loves sports. In contrast, star wars or LOTR films are this summer's blockbuster soon forgotten. Because let's be honest, they're pretty mediocre. Have you watched new hope recently? It's boring! (Empire strikes back is the only one that really stands up.) And 16 hours or whatever of hobbits just isn't that exciting, particularly without the big screen. Don't get me wrong, I agree sports provide a common touch point, like the weather. But people really, really love and care about sports, even if some think that's stupid (and weather is inherently meaningful/interesting).
you have to go through extra steps to get SED to work in a browser blog context, so it starts to become a split perspective between the command-line maximalists and the browser-extension-installation crowd.
Unrelatedly, Schoen, I immediately thought of you when I saw this: :D
> "Also, what was up with stamp and coin collectors? This seems like a different phenomenon: surely nobody wanted to identify with the US Postal Service."
Also, I pressed Command+H (since I'm on a mac) and my browser windows immediately disappeared ...for a second, I thought Scott had done like the typical 1990s "To fix that problem, press Alt+F4" prank and I fell for it. (except nicer, because it's just "hide windows.")
Other also, for what software and/or OS does Ctrl+H open search-and-replace setup?
> "Surely the nerds would be more likely to use a sed substitution, like s/nerd/geek/g?"
I think that the definition of "nerd" being defended here is a much more wide-ranging and all-embracing definition. (Besides, I notice that when I'm composing a Substack post, I settle for the web-based editor; I'll only use vim and/or CML for the occasional word count. So it's in my interests for that to count within the scope of "being a true nerd.")
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.
People do still collect those. If you have a huge jar of those quarters in your attic, most of them are still worth a quarter, but maybe a few are worth more?
I’m a big fan of those. Since the state Quarter series completed in 2008 or so, there was a National Park/Monuments/Historical Sites series and now there is a Notable US Women series. I don’t consider myself a coin collector but I do love looking through my loose change to see if I can turn up one I don’t already have and add it to the book.
What level of coin collection are you doing? I used to collect at the level of "try to get pennies from every year and every mint", I thought that became trivial at some point, and a Google search suggests it's still trivial. Can you give an example of a not-absurdly-expensive coin you would have to wait for the right auction to get?
Here's an example of a coin missing from my collection. China - Yuan Dynasty - 2 cash coin dated 1353. I haven't been specifically trying to buy this coin but I am trying to collect all the dated Yuan Dynasty coins and I haven't gotten that one yet. I got the 1352 in 2014 for $280 and the 1354 in 2016 for $700 and I don't think the 1353 is more rare. I guess it's debatable whether $700 is an absurd amount of money to spend on a coin (it is not the most I've spent on a coin), but at least it's accessible to many people.
Well, for my usage you established yourself as a serious fan. To be a nerd you'd need to talk about the way the coins were minted or how the metal was refined or some such.
I don't think there's an agreed upon usage that specifies this kind of detail.
I used to collect US coins from every denomination, year, mint, and variety (such as large and small date 1960 pennies). It was kind of like a treasure hunt, knowing you could find something in circulation that was actually more valuable than most people thought it was.
I lost interest in the late 1980s sometime, when I found the volume of new coins dwarfed older coins. For example, for Lincoln pennies, they used to make a few million per year, then a few tens of millions. In the 80s, they started making about 5 BILLION each, and it started drowning out all of the old coins, which basically stayed the same value.
I still pull coins from circulation if I find them valuable. I stopped spending pennies made of copper (pre-1982) for their inherent metal value. I have on occasion pulled a silver or proof coin from circulation. But so rarely, for so long, that I seldom get the thrill of the treasure find.
Not to mention that the US Mint caught on and instead of issuing one quarter a year they issued one "collectible" quarter for each state. It's not collectible if it's made to be collected.
I'm not sure the google trends graph works as intended here. If stamp and coin collecting are nerd activities (which is assumed) and if the internet has become less populated by nerds since 2004 with the arrival of everyone else (which I think is reasonable) then we would see the same declining interest in all searches even if nerds never stopped caring about stamps or coins any less.
I also think that stamps, coins, and dinosaurs appeal disproportionately more to children than adults, so your own experience can also be tricky.
I don't know a ton about coins, but I can tell you there are 100s of sports cards from fairly obscure regional issues (like cards that were inserted in a bag of potato chips from a regional chip chain, etc), that wouldn't sell for more than $100 but which people can spend years and years trying to acquire.
Also, WRT to collecting: This is definitely not dead. I believe that sports cards are one of the top five selling categories on Ebay, and two years ago a company that grades sports cards and coins-- Collectors Universe-- was bought out for just under a billion dollars (I think $870m, or somewhere in that range). That same company is currently grossing around $500k a day in grading fees. Also, one of my good friends buys/sells Funko Pops, and his business grosses eight figures a year. There is still a ton of money that gets spent annually on physical collectibles.
And this is basically just hunting/gathering, tying directly into what makes people hunt mushrooms and birds. Basically, we've mapped hunter/gatherer ability to understand terrain/ecosystem/etc. to pursuits like sports stats, coins, stamps, etc. Hunter gatherer may not have had the same sort of numerical stats, but were doing very much the same thing.
I think you're vmissing the economic angle: coins and stamps were readily available, and relatively cheap (in fact, they were money!). You'd occasionally get exotic money from elsewhere, a letter from elsewhere, you start a collection. That's basically a poor person/society hobby. Same with collecting sports cards that came with gum, that's very, very humble. People collect other things now, in part because they've got the money to do so. E.g., there's an enormous community of guitar pedal nerds spending outrageous amounts of money on enormous pedal collections they really don't need or use, and without the resources that you would think would support the habit. (The weird question is why it shifts from hi-fi equipment to, e.g., MTB, even before advent of digital music/streaming, perhaps just fashion, people buying guitar pedals now rather than used cars, or people spending (wasting) money on high end coffee rather than cigarettes) And also obviously because mail has died, as has cash (who would carry around a penny these days, let alone look at what year it might be, etc.?).
I think your point 3 really nails it. The chance of finding a good deal at the "expense" of a layperson is much smaller than it used to be since it is trivial for them to do some basic due diligence. This is further evidence of Scott's point of the internet disrupting traditional sorting roles, but from a slightly different angle.
I'd qualify this by saying that it's harder to do if your plan is to sell the collectible without adding any value to it. But if you're buying collectibles that can be submitted for third party grading (sports cards, Pokemon/Magic/Yugioh/anime cards, coins, action figures, factory sealed video games, comic books etc) it's not all that hard to make six figures a year buying 'raw' collectibles, grading them, and then selling them for a sizeable mark-up.
one area where collecting is still thriving is around pinball/arcade machines. a fair number of people might stock a few of these in their garage at any time and watch local listings, swapping out their machines whenever they spot a deal. there’s still enough listings along the lines of “my grandfather passed away and left this Adams Family pinball machine nobody uses: free to anyone who can haul it away” that you can have some edge by being “an insider”.
go further into the gray market of “these arcade machines aren’t licensed for sale in the US but somehow still made it into the country” and this becomes doubly so. i know one person who started as an enthusiast collector and wants to open an actual arcade, but in the process has discovered it’s far more profitable to just operate a warehousing/marketplace operation.
i can’t say for certain why this area of collecting has lasted longer than the others, except to point out that the transaction costs are higher due to a combination of transport costs and in some places gray-market overhead — both of which scale with distance.
It's actually just about the good deal, not the "at the expense of." Back when you could frequently find unbelievable (e.g.) guitars at pawn shops, the joy wasn't putting one over on the poor pawn shop owner, but getting some incredible pre-CBS strat you could never, ever afford. And there was the lottery aspect, because pre-internet, you were never really sure what you had.
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.
And once you completed the set you can just expand it. I've known a video game collector who wanted all the LucasArts (or maybe it was Sierra) adventures as part of his collection and started with just wanting to get one PC version of each, then expanded to other platforms, then expanded to other language versions, then expanded to....
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.
The widespread adoption of email created a world where a letter is almost certainly junk mail or a bill. Nobody looks forward to hearing from a good friend from across the country now when picking up the day’s mail. If letters are not interesting why would stamps? The same for coins. Nobody uses cash, and getting a pile of coins with no significant value (inflation) is just an annoyance. These objects have passed into irrelevance. Still, it seems like some little pieces of joy and wonder have passed from our lives.
I think this is definitely part of it: when I was a kid (the 90's), you could kick-start a collection by just taking the stamps off the mail; but this is not the case any more.
Also, probably not relevant, but the decline on the graph also corresponds to when the USPS changed the glue on stamps so that you couldn't easily remove them from the envelope. At least in my case, this took much of the charm out of the hobby (although probably having less free time as I became an adult was the main necessary and sufficient cause of my abandoning the hobby).
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.
Right?!? I found that part of the analysis bizarre.
I never know whether such blindspots are due to social milieu - our author seems to run in a social circle that, indeed, might have so much money to make collecting irrelevant, but that's not the case for the cast majority if folks, at all! - or individual proclivity - if he never liked collecting, posits spurious reasons why others do, and erroneously concludes from their deterioration that it must have fallen out of favor.
Regardless, Scott's confident assertion of an uninformed and wrong proposition always throws me off when I encounter it here. I think because I usually find him to be such a careful, observant, and thoughtful cultural critic - it flies in the face of many reasons I enjoy his analysis and find it unique and worthwhile.
Many very easy examples like music gear, where the focus of collecting has shifted (because, e.g., old guitars got too expensive), but is still going on like crazy (from boutique pedals, to old synths, drum machines, etc.). Lots of gear these days have small runs, companies go out of business, you can't find an X to buy, but X remains affordable (because there's not too much demand, either).
I agree ... as someone with a medium sized (~2000pc) record collection (I guess this makes me a hipster as well as a nerd?), I’ve seen a few boom busy cycles since the 80s but there are certainly still plenty of places to get records and various ways to nerd about about them - the level of detail on discogs’ database is certainly proof of that! Although it myy also add some weight to Scott’s point since discogs definitely made collecting rare or valuable albums both much easier and much less fun.
I think being a nerd requires being a bit socially clumsy about your interest, and talking or signalling about it in situations where most people don't expect it. So being a nerd about completely mainstream stuff like pop music or football is not possible, that's just fandom. Being a nerd about very well known and relatively well-respected stuff like classical music or birdwatching is rare, because most people who are classy enough to care about the thing in the first place are also classy enough to know when to shut up about it. But comics? Star trek? Power metal? They have fairly low barriers to entry *and* most people don't care about them, so there's plenty of opportunities to bring it up to people who don't want to hear about it.
So that's why I think nerdery usually attaches itself to the typical targets.
Huh, I'm mostly socially adept, but think of myself as a nerd. I guess nerd for me means; loves reading books. And I want to talk about favorite books with my nerd friends to find new books to read.
IDK about that...what about people who are really interested in Music in general, especially in the technology behind music production etc., and who can name lots of obscure stats about music, but they are not fans of a specific band? Would they be considered "Music Nerds"?
Being a nerd comes from obsessive interest in low-status things. People who are naturally obsessively interested in high-status things are lucky enough to be able to obsess over their hobby without losing status. If you're obsessed with collecting wine then you're sophisticated; if you're obsessed with collecting Dr Pepper then you're a nerd.
Yeah - I guess the commenters above think everyone who likes classical music is a billionaire opera lover, but as someone who's musical preferences are mainly dominated by 20th century classical music, I think the social costs are considerably higher than they are for liking any particular popular group or style a bit too much or too earnestly
Yeah, I read about a study once (unfortunately I can’t find it) where people who were told that someone likes opera generally reacted that they thought this person was high status but it reduced their desire to talk with that person.
The social costs may be as high but I would need to be persuaded that they were "higher." I feel like if people want to avoid you because you talk about boring stuff then they don't care if that boring stuff is Prokofiev or MCU - they just don't want to talk to you. So I would think a low-status MCU bore is still worse off than a high-status Prokofiev bore, because at least you've got the high status part.
Ah but this is part of the signalling too. High-status hobbies only seem boring or snobbish to lower-status people. So by bragging about your high-status hobby you're fully committing to "I don't care about the opinions of low-status people anyway, my peers are all high-status".
I think that's true in part, but I also think there's the degree and specificity of interest. I'm also going to use "geek" instead of "nerd" here, because, like Scott, that seems to me more in keeping with definitions like "obsessive interest in low-status things."
So, my dad was a hobbyist and an obsessive learner. He taught a college course in science fiction literature, he had thousands of opera records, he loved astronomy, he spent lots of time watching sports. And in each case he learned a *lot* about the subject. He read the periodicals, he knew the backgrounds of the important people, he learned the history, he studied the techniques. And while I don't know what he was like socially, he certainly conveyed every last detail to his children.
But I would not consider him a geek, not because opera isn't a geeky interest, but because he was focused on what was actually relevant. That is, he could tell you Maria Callas' greatest recordings, but he couldn't tell you which notes she'd gone slightly off on in a famous aria. He could go on at length on the themes in Stapledon's Last and First Men, but he wouldn't write fan fiction on it (or read it, unless written by one of his students who chose writing a short story over taking a final exam - that resulted in a lot of fan fiction).
So, if he were interested in a tree, he would study the trunk, the roots, the branches, the leaves. But a geek would learn who planted the tree, who landscaped the forest, and how many leaves the tree had each day from 1975-2011. And he would go to conventions devoted to discussing all these aspects of the tree and more, with a main speaker who had pruned it 10 years ago. And he would argue about which season had the best leaves until his face turned red.
So I think someone can be an opera *geek,* where they know a tremendous amount of extraneous opera trivia. At the same time, if you're not an opera fan you might not be able to differentiate an opera enthusiast from an opera geek because you don't know what's important and what's not in the world of opera. So from the *outside*, you don't think anyone's an opera geek. But within that community I suspect there are recognizable geeks.
I have an obsessive interest in Classical Greek literature. It's certainly high-status, but I do it in a rather low-status, nerdy way, and certainly talk about it too much.
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.
That swimming against the tide though could be either due to not caring what people think, or being completely oblivious to that other people can't and won't share in the emotional experience. If it is the first they usually don't broadcast; the latter case is the one people usually see, which the other humans find pitiful, rather than glamourous (The opposite of what was intended).
I also think politics got involved here and the sort of person who wears a Star Wars shirt is often judged as an alt-right weirdo who thinks that Kathleen Kennedy is genuinely evil for hiring Rian Johnson, whether or not that judgment is correct.
Is that the case? I don’t think I’d assign any particular political valence to someone wearing a Star Wars shirt, but if I had to, I’d be more likely to assign a leftward one.
Yes. As far as I can judge, Star Wars has always been pretty solidly inside the typical american moderate left consensus position and its fans also seem to be around there politically. Trekkies as well. It's the military scifi types that can arguably be described as rightish in some sense, but from everything I've heard even those tend to skew strongly left in voting patterns (just not quite as strongly as other nerd groups).
Interesting. I never associated Star Wars with anything political. I guess I grew up with TOS, in a time and place where kids weren't especially political about anything.
It's quite weird. Star Wars is about the heirs of the true king rightfully overthrowing his supplanter and reestablishing the true monarchy. I.e., it SHOULD be an extreme right position, in favor of inherited monarchy. But most of the fans that I know are left of center. (This may be selection bias. Even so it's pretty strange.)
Well, OK, I only saw the first two films, and after that studiously ignored it. So this may be wrong. But that's definitely my impression of what it's theme is.
Yeah, you're way off. Original trilogy Star Wars is about a farm boy that answers the call to adventure and overthrows space Nazis to establish a republic. You might have been thrown off because one of the characters is a princess, but she never rules anything. Princess is a ceremonial title, so the hero can rescue a princess, in line with old fantasy.
The prequel trilogy is about how democracy can turn into fascism. The sequel trilogy is the original trilogy, except with a girl, and a poorly received middle movie.
What you described is closer to Lord of the Rings, especially Return of the King, whose fans do tend to be right leaning.
Mmmm, the rebels' full name is literally the Alliance To Restore The Republic, there was never a king in any meaningful position of authority. Lea is a princess because her mother was a queen (and that would technically mean Luke is a king, but he's never called that. He's a Jedi Master, and the mastery is that of knowledge not authority). Lea's mother was a queen of a single planet (which is Star War's equivalent of a small locale) who served her people and was beloved by them.
Leia is a princess because the hero has to rescue a princess (and then marry her, which they seem to have been aiming for before swerving to "no, they're actually brother and sister").
It has nothing to do with real monarchy and all to do with spectacle. You can't have a Saturday morning serial SF movie without a Space Princess!
Star Wars' politics is all over the place, and "its politics" can be either the implied politics of its heros, or the politics of its makers.
In the originals, the implied politics is pure fantasy-style medieval morality : There is Good, there is Evil, the Empire and most everybody who fights for it is Evil, the Emperor is the raw personification of Evil and Immorality, the Rebel Alliance and most everybody who fights for it is Good, so Good in fact that they can transform indifferent or chaotics semi-evil individuals like Han Solo into Good, Luke Skywalker is the personification of Good, and he triumphs over Evil by first refusing to fight it on its terms, then converting his most important aide into Good. The material victory of destroyed death stars and tie fighters serve merely to underlie and accentuate the moral/spiritual victory of Luke over the Emperor, with the possible exception of the first movie where the material victory is the whole deal. There is a God in the universe, not personal and with sides, but a God nonetheless, and it's on the side of the Rebel and specifically Luke. Despite the medieval vibe, things are vaguely (sane) lefty and civil righty, Aliens and Droids fight side by side next to humans (and that, as we will know later, is a huge deal after the Clone Wars), the Rebel Alliance is always the friend of the natives, the Empire is always the oppressive jerks, which also hate Aliens because they are different.
In the prequels, things are a lot more morally gray. First, the good guys are winning, the Republic is in control, and its good... on paper ? In reality, the Republic is a bloated ancient mess, full of corruption, and it's core-centric, meaning the rich worlds of the core are given more attention and resources than the backwaters of the outer rim. This sounds like libertarianism 101, a government that has lost its way and is now jerking off the money of its tax payers over less than nothing, while corruption and crime rages over its territories. There is several sub-plots of mega corporations being bad and enforcing their nonsense with violence, but that's not necessarily counter to libertarianism. A central figure is the Jedi Order, which we used to unconditionally revere in the originals, now we get to see how it's an utter failure in its final days. Taking children from their families, imposing draconian emotional codes, letting the Republic go astray, using a slave army they don't even know who commissioned it, letting a horny oblivious cocky entitled teenager next to a mastermind manipulator, etc.... The prequels sometimes imply that it's ultimately good the Jedi was destroyed, that this was the Prophesy of the Chosen One all along and it was the Jedi who just misinterpreted it in their typical self-centeredness, the Force feels much more impersonal and amoral, much more aloof. We witness the rise of the pure raw Evil, he's a politician (how libertarian), he also nominally belongs to some ancient order opposed to the Jedi and he uses this to his advantage sometimes but he's really just obsessed with power and zero-sum control. He's so devoid of anything human except the raw nietzschean hunger for power, that he laughs and rejoices when he is disfigured in a fight because it ultimately gained him power, whereas the former horny teenager with a heart of gold screamed in agony despite being the second most powerful man in the galaxy, because he lost his youth and his woman.
All in all, the prequels are very libertarian. The fact that the antagonists in the entire later 2/3 of the trilogy are separatists doesn't undermine this, they are only bad because they are controlled by mega corporations and ultimately Sidious, and fought for by ruthless machines, but the people of CIS were defnitely good freedom-loving folks who were just sick of the Republic's bullshit. The prequels are more topical, the originals' only connection to reality was perhaps the vietnam-inspired Endor land fight, a war that ended ~10 or more years before the movie was made. The prequels meanwhile was concurrent with Iraq's invasions by a coalition that thought of itself as democratic. The prequels features on-the-nose themes like Manufacturing Consent and a weary public that has been lied to in the process of trading freedom for security. It's also necessarily more rushed and contrained in its artistic freedom : it needs to set things up for the chronologically-later trilogy.
The sequels are..... I don't know. I would say woke, but even wokism has a bit more consistency and coherence than the most coherent and consistent sub plot in the later 2/3 of the sequels. The first movie is a bad rehash of A New Hope, because woman protagonist now. The later 2 are probably not even human writing, but maybe the ramblings of GPT-1. If I had to put a name on its politics, it's greedy individualistic "Jerk off now and fuck what happens later", it's new-agey, "Be yourself, follow your passions, insist on your opinions and be stubborn even with people who you yourself admit know much better than you" are its prime commandments. Just, be yourself bro, do whatever you feel like. It's preferable if you can be a woman or black while being yourself, but don't bother, be yourself bro, bro ? be yourself, just be yourself and give us money, we don't actually, like, get this whole Star Wars things, here are some space lazers, here are a kinda-gay-but-we-will-never-actually-say-this-outloud-because-dude-china-will-fuck-us-up couple, now give us some money, here is a purple-haired chick doing some pointless gesture involving a space ship, now give us some money. Here is C3PO losing his memory in a very sombre moment whoooooops IT'S A JOKE HAHA GET IT ? now give us some money, here is chewbacca dying in a very sombre moment, oh my god chewbacca he's one of the original band of heros he's dead now WHOOOOOPS IT'S A RELIEF MOMENT, GET IT ? now give us some money. Etc, etc, et-fucking-c.
Rogue One is probably my best movie in this entire Star Wars category, right up there or exceeding The Empire Strikes Back. It's extremly dark, it has a WW2-in-1940 atmosphere. No one is good, but one side is murdering like there is no tomorrow and discussing insane unhinged plans for everyone else, and everyone else is just being flawed humans trying to do their best. Everyone dies, for something that they probably thought was futile in their final moment. The Evil is really fighting this one while yawning and with one hand tied behind their back, it's inconceivable that this fractured opposition is going to do anything interesting.
And I haven't even touched the Expanded Universe yet, every work of which is written by a different author, sometimes several. Star Wars is very big and very messy.
Nice reply! I never gave anywhere remotely this much thought to star wars. TOS were great childhood movies for me, the other 6 I mostly dismissed as stuff I couldn't get into due to bad writing but somehow thought I should watch, and I haven't seen or read the rest. I enjoyed your deeper analysis.
Who were the maybe gay but not expressly gay characters in the sequels?
I think the "socially oblivious" part is actually important to identify someone as a nerd; it's not just that they have eccentric hobbies, it's that *we know* they have eccentric hobbies because they don't realize how boring that stuff is to normal people.
This depends on whether you're talking about the person's friends, or those passed on the street. I suspect that those passed on the street judge a person purely on "socially oblivious" without knowing what their interests are. (Except for folks who blatantly advertise it, of course. But I suspect that is a small percentage.) But being "socially oblivious" tends to have lots of signs that seem to be readily noticeable to those who aren't "socially oblivious". And that, I think, is the primary meaning usually assigned to either "geek" or "nerd". I don't know about "hipster". Only those who know most such people have any idea what their particular obsession is, and they generally don't care, either.
Populism is always creepy but a lot of what becomes hip becomes a creepy fetish. Coins, stamps, hummels, Rambo guns, IPAs, fantasy sports leagues, disco…
There are cool hunters who keep their mouths shut (for selfish reasons, or just because they know they lucked out) and then there are those who cant keep their mouths shut. Something becoming hip is just enough of the latter (or enough social spin) to create enough inertia and then the herd makes it all creepy. When something you like becomes popular, it’s time to move on.
I was lucky to know NdGT well before he was publically cool, and I knew he would one day become that - once Sagan was out of the way.
I don't think it's fair to say that things nerds like going mainstream somehow makes nerds no longer the underdog. It's totally possible for nerds themselves to be disliked, but stuff they like to be widely enjoyed (the obvious analogy would be someone arguing that racism is over because hip-hop is so widely enjoyed).
I also wouldn't say that nerd stuff only went mainstream in the last decade, it's not like the first 3 Star Wars movies were obscure arthouse pictures. I think the reason Marvel took off is just innovations in storytelling: movie producers finally figured out a way to adapt the gloriously arcane and convoluted lore of superhero comics in a way that could appeal to mainstream audiences in addition to nerds (much how George Lucas figured out how to get mainstream audiences to love the space operas nerds had been enjoying for decades before 1977).
Personally, I wear Star Wars shirts from time to time. What it says about me is that I like Star Wars. I don't like Star Wars to be brave, I like it because it's good (except for the sequel trilogy, obviously, which is terrible). I actually did notice a while ago that even though I liked the Star Wars movies a lot I rarely wore Star Wars shirts or listed them among my favorite movies. I realized this was probably because I didn't feel like it said anything about me that I liked Star Wars since so many other people did. I then realized that was dumb, if I liked something I should celebrate that I like it regardless of how many other people do. So I bought some Star Wars shirts.
Superman was the top grossing movie of 1979 despite coming out in 1978. Superman 2 was the second top grossing movie of 1981. Batman was the second top grossing movie of 1989. Batman Returns was the top grossing movie of 1992. Batman Forever was the top grossing movie of 1995. Spider-man was the third top grossing movie of 2002 (behind Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies).
That's about all I can be bothered looking up right now but you get the idea, superhero movies have been popular since the 1970s.
I feel like the only innovation of the MCU was to get people to feel the same way about less well-known characters, and to maintain this long-term. It's not particularly novel that superhero films are popular, it is notable that it's been over a decade with new films every year and they're still doing well at the box office. Interest will inevitably decline, but for now at least people seem to be on board with it running indefinitely without any reboots - can't really say the same for Superman, Batman or Spiderman.
I also think it helps that we're at a time where the CGI is good enough to enable the more spectacular scenes from comic books, certainly films like the Avengers and Dr Strange would have been hard to pull off 20 years earlier.
I'm not sure there is any innovation of the MCU. It seems to me that the filmmakers are just good at making mass-market films that connect to each other.
I consider that a useful and important innovation. The comics these movies are based on run for years and are deeply immersive. The movies we've gotten for the preceding 40 years were often okay standalone films or short series, but did nothing for those long term stories. A quick trilogy followed by a reboot and another set that covers a lot of the same content (origin story + some main villain of that series) is not the same thing.
And not even getting deep into the bench. Leaving serials aside, Batman took thirty years (and a TV sensation) to get a theatrical release. Superman took forty. Marvel's most popular character and team had to wait till the 2000s. (Though somehow Blade beat them by a few years, possibly because he didn't really read as "superhero".) Superman still hasn't fought Brainiac on the big screen, let alone most of his second-tier villains. They'd routinely come up with "new" ideas that did the same thing as established comic book devices (e.g., the molecule chamber in Superman II for gold kryptonite) because Hollywood screenwriters didn't *read* that stuff.
The MCU (leaving the Hulk aside, since that's kind of incorporated after the fact) started with a B-tier hero (perforce, since they'd licensed all their A-tier characters to other companies). They started by making people care about Iron Man fighting Ironmonger, and pretty soon were making Groot a household name. And they routinely distilled pretty uneven or actively bad comics storylines (e.g., Civil War) into coherent and effective narratives.
That's qualitatively different from previous successful superhero films and franchises. It won't last forever because nothing does, and there are arguments that the cracks are beginning to show. (Though they've had duds in the past and bounced back from it.) But it's a heck of a run.
The oddest thing given their source material is how weak their villain game is. For every Loki or Killmonger, they've probably got three Ronan the Accusers or Malekiths who barely exist except as vague antagonists. (Again, they've been prevented from using a lot of Marvel's real heavy hitters like Doctor Doom, but still.) Despite that, they've created the sort of superhero shared world that Marvel pioneered in the 60s and DC ran with in the 70s and 80s, which no one had ever even really tried to do on a Hollywood scale. And they've (mostly) made it work.
Seriously, putting huge amounts of money into superhero movies is pretty new, for values of "pretty new" that don't apply to everyone here. Special effects needed to become good enough.
Well...the Tarzan movies were pretty popular all through the Depression, if we want to consider Tarzan an early superhero. But there's definitely a sea change in the 90s when it becomes much more plausible to add amazing superpower effects with CG. "Superman" was according to Wikipedia the most expensive film ever, and spent a huge amount on stunts, but the falling price (and increased safety) of doing stuff in post-production probably became a big factor in the 90s, which might have caused people to reach for superhero movies featuring stuff that would've been absurdly expensive in the days when it had to be done with models, wires, and stunts.
>Well...the Tarzan movies were pretty popular all through the Depression, if we want to consider Tarzan an early superhero
By that standard, Robin Hood could be considered an even earlier superhero, and his movies have been hits as far as back as 1922. But I think the nerdy part of comic-book superhero movies comes from the "comic book" part rather than the "superhero".
Hmm, I dunno. I wouldn't call Robin Hood a superhero, because he's an ordinary man, but with abilities that can be acquired by superb training. Tarzan was supposedly extraordinary, possessed of abilities no human not similarly raised by apes could achieve. I agree it's a thin distinction, but it holds for me -- the one anyone can do, the other is "built in" somehow by one's birth and rearing, and cannot be duplicated by any amount of training. One could readily argue John Carter is a superhero, but no movies were made of him in the old days, and I don't think he was ever as popular as Tarzan.
I'm not sure I agree with your second distinction either, because Scrooge McDuck and Richie Rich were also very popular comic books, but haven't made it to techno-fantasy CG movies, because while making a walking-talking duck, or a Richie Rich car that's 100 yards long and has its own swimming pool are certainly challenges for CG, I feel like they wouldn't really appeal to the techno-fantasy nerd. Conversely, the reason the techno-fantasy heroes were found in comic books in the first place is because comic books are the earliest form of "CG". You can draw stuff that is visually compelling but completely impossible to photograph because it can't be found in the real world. Which is why I think the comic books are where you find the kind of superhero that appeals to nerdy types, and its the superhero archtype that is the appealing aspect.
I liked Star Wars before it was cool.* As a kid I was reading EU books and the SW Encyclopedia, and I loved talking about it. Back in the 90s this was still really obscure stuff. Sure, people knew the three movies and loved them, but anything else was considered nerdy, which I was fine with. My family knows that I love Star Wars, so I sometimes get SW shirts as gifts, which is fine. But it's lacking what it would have said about me in the 90s, when I was both much more into SW and also far fewer people were. Wearing SW apparel feels very different than it did before, to the point where I actually changed my preferences for when I would wear it - always okay around my family who buys them for me, but less often in public places with people who don't already know me.
*-if not obvious, this is tongue-in-cheek given the topic.
It was very hard to like "Star Wars" before it was cool, because it was an immediate success. But for what it's worth I liked it before it was very cool, because I saw it the first week it came out, and then went back to see it twice more the same week.
Something that may never be repeatable again, given the way movies now work, and the Internet, is that as far as I know nobody in the theater expected that amazing initial scene, with the star destroyer passing overhead from behind and above. I think this was the debut of THX, also, so there was some very special sound processing that nobody had ever seen before. You heard the star destroyer from behind and above, first, a huge noise, and most people in the theater turned around and looked, alarmed. Then this enormous thing went overhead on the screen and people were just blown away -- there were spontaneous hoots and yells, cheers, applause. Nobody had ever seen or heard something like that before.
My view is that both basic tastes and hipsters have their merits. Setting aside status questions for the moment, I view "basic" tastes as simply making good use of current best options and I view hipsters as both Scott and Sam did, as "They discover things, then place them on the altar of Fame so everyone else can enjoy them." Early adopters are useful! I contrast this with an old pieces of advice from Alexander Pope:
"Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."
but _everyone_ can't be the median adopter. If everyone tried to follow this advice, there would be no early adopters and no way for good innovations to work their way into the mainstream.
( I am skeptical of the claim that current algorithms can substitute for the role of early adopter. They _can_ find obscure works that share categories with works one already likes. As to judging whether a novel work is good or not ... _Maybe_ GPT-4 can give useful advice - I don't want to rely on it till at least the hallucination problem is solidly solved. )
Re status:
Leo Abstract wrote: "Sam may be identifying anything popular as bad. Anything that the servile herd could possibly like must be execrable." My view is that this is a terrible heuristic. Many choices are popular for perfectly good reasons. Avoiding them sounds like an echo of the nobility doing everything they could to distinguish themselves from the peasantry, or the rich doing everything they could to distinguish themselves from the poor. When the poor worked in the fields and got tan, the rich tried to stay pale (going so far as to eat arsenic). When the poor worked in factories and got pale, the rich tanned (and courted melanoma and other photodamage). Not a good way to make choices!
>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".
I'm going to defend myself on this by saying I own Star Wars shirts not out of my own purchasing decisions, but because they're the kind of safe and reliable present your dad gets you for birthdays and Christmas, and I'm not going to refuse to wear a perfectly servicable shirt because its branding might make me basic. I *am* one of those weirdos that sympathizes with the Empire, but I think that's a separate matter.
"I'm not going to refuse to wear a perfectly serviceable shirt because its branding might make me basic" - I have the opposite instinct, and it annoys me on a meta level that I have it, because it also extends to T-shirt sayings, some of which I find genuinely funny. Hipster-ness may not be wholly voluntary.
Science is not near universally loved. It's actually hated by an awful lot of people - far more than love it.
We who live in nerdland think science is near-universally loved because we don't deal with Those People too much.
But the reality is that they exist and they grossly outnumber us.
All brands of populists hate science because it can say whether or not something is correct. And that's hugely damaging because all of populism are based on falsehoods that you can dispel in like five minutes of basic research.
There's people who claim to like science, but the moment science says something that they don't like, they get extremely angry and defensive.
Why must it be a war? Maybe I really, truly enjoy the music of the Beatles? Or like bacon? (Liking *all* dogs is over the top, but there are certainly some great dogs out there.)
I know this is going off on a tangent, but I think there's virtue in enjoying things at a basic object level. Being able to exist in the moment, enjoying things for what they are. Which helps with being able to put aside hype, and opinion, and pressure, and just like something for what it is (or not like it for what it is). And yeah, sometimes this leads to forming contrarian opinions, if you're looking at raw data while other people are making decisions based on whatever a nutty politician did while drunk on twitter likes.
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.
Do other collects cling to the vain hope that their collection might increase in value by a hundred or a thousandfold in the future? I'm pretty sure that's the hallmark of an NFT bro.
I was thinking that Aldarion's ships might serve. Númerrámar (West-wing) seems appropriate for a car in the Bay Area, or maybe Palarran (Far Wanderer) if you plan a lot of road trips.
If I had an all-black massive SUV with reinforced roll bars, I would totally name it "Alcarondas". And I would paint its hubcaps in gold. And then I'd drive it to Area 51. Hubris ? What's that ?
If Musk ever gets off his backside/off Twitter and sorts out the CYBERTRUCK, there is an entire generation just *panting* to buy one and name it this 😁
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.)
Yeah I found Kriss's whole discussion of nerds pretty bizarre and divorced from anything I've experienced in real life as a self-identified nerdy person.
I think what's missing is that Kriss uses "nerds" as his foil, but what he's talking about would better be described as fan culture.
If you want a less histrionic version of this conversation, A.O. Scott, formerly the head film critic at the NYTimes, did a Times podcast where he talks about why he left film criticism. He basically says that Hollywood and fan culture have formed a kind of symbiotic relationship where the role of the critic has basically gone away. Fans want what they want. Hollywood gives it to them. And any attempt to interrogate these movies is dismissed as hate.
I dunno, critical reception and box office performance is still strongly correlated, even for superhero movies, with blatant outliers like Venom being rare. And to claim that Hollywood is not attentive to woke "interrogation" is patently absurd, no big-budget movie remotely challenging NYT-style orthodoxy is going to be made these days.
I think A.O. Scott makes a valid point. I think it is a shame - he was on my short list of critics whose opinion I cared for. I seek critic's opinion, because I watch about 3-4 movies per year, and 0-1 TV series per year. If I'm going to spend that time, I want to select something really good, and critics help me do that.
Though there is a problem that critics for obvious reasons tend to value novelty *much* more than typical consumers. If you watch dozens of romantic comedies or action movies, the tropes start to look obvious and samey and formulaic. If you watch one of those a year, then those things *are* the story, and there's no reason that you're likely to be bored of them.
Eventually maybe you've seen enough, and move on to a different genre whose tropes are less familiar. Or maybe you don't-- mystery and romance enthusiasts aren't in doubt about how the story is going to end. Engaging with material to analyze and report on it is fundamentally different.
Which doesn't mean it isn't valuable. But contra the old saying, everyone isn't a critic.
>"People who develop deep, abiding interests in subjects are weird..."
Very this. There are a lot of hobbies that friends recommend to me (insightfully!) that I have to demur from lest it suck me in; Warhammer 40k looks *fascinating*, but I dasn't risk letting it consume my every waking thought.
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.)
An even more parsimonious explanation is that trends come and go. Even weird nerdy people aren't interested in being weird and nerdy in the same way that their fathers were, they'll find a new way to be weird and nerdy that they can share with their peers.
‘’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.
Sam Kriss always seemed to have a Jekyll & Hyde thing going on to me, but he seems to maybe have mellowed out after an epiphany about social media ruining everything
He strikes me as an intolerable person who I wouldn’t want to spend time with. And I fundamentally don’t share his worldview or politics. But I’m an unabashed superfan of his essays. A geek, some might say. Or maybe a hipster? Nerd? I’m thoroughly confused now.
Kriss and The Last Psychiatrist both give me a similar vibe where it's like, they're writing with such confidence and style but the world they're describing is just utterly bizarre and unlike real life as I'm familiar with it.
I haven't read the Kriss essay and I don't know whether I want to, but The Last Psychiatrist came off to me as collecting people to despise. I admit I read a moderate amount of his stuff.
Right, but this essay by Kriss uncharacteristically has non-negligible overlap with reality. Scott's response is good, but I'd say that Chapman's Geeks-MOPs-Sociopaths dynamic is still the best overview of this topic.
Kriss's essays are aesthetically beautiful and emotionally resonant to me but after reading his Wakanda piece I can no longer bring myself to trust whether anything he says is even true or if the whole thing is just a giant troll post. I *think* this is purposeful on his part, but...I also don't have the time to fact-check every confident assertion on Substack.
They’re both very acerbic, but I find Kriss’ work to be borderline fiction, owing to his tendency to blend discussion of things that never happened with things that did. It makes it hard to pin a particular thesis about reality to his work, and I find it best to take it as impressions and images. By contrast, I’ve always found TLP pretty grounded, though I notice he differentiates only very slightly between cherry-picking examples and constructing general models (which comes across as unfairly insulting if you aren’t paying attention to the distinction).
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.
Sports geek is a thing too. Though maybe it means someone is overly obsessed with the stats and numbers of sport rather than the sport itself, so it could fit in your first category.
In my (somewhat of an otaku) understanding, it's the Japanese word for nerd as in 'people who are obsessively engaged with various art forms (often niche)'. If you already have the word 'nerd' to mean 'people who are obsessively engaged with various art forms (often niche)', then it's the specific word for 'people who are obsessively engaged with various Japanese (or east Asian) art forms (often niche)'. If you're the sort to randomly substitute Japanese words for their English equivalents (likely because you're obsessively engaged with Japanese niche art forms) you can substitute it for the general 'nerd' as long as you specify what they are engaged in other than Japanese / East Asian niche art forms (ie, a 'Marvel otaku').
I see your point. I was using Johan Larson's phrasing specifically without worrying about how complete the definition was. I think the rest of my point stands... if you're talking about a 'train otaku' (instead of a train nerd) you're either speaking Japanese or an otaku that's using otaku in place of nerd.
You could make the point though that creating functional technology is in itself an art, and thus train nerds are obsessively engaged with an art form. Certainly there is an aesthetic sense to a well-designed piece of machinery.
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.
Well said. What I actively hate about Kriss' article and Scott's response is that they both seem to be working under the assumption that everyone is a poser to some extent and no one is relating to the artwork itself.
I don't exactly think I'm thinking that. Even if we posit a person who feels deep and genuine emotion for MCU, I think we need an additional explanation for why that expresses itself in buying action figures for every MCU character and keeping them in the original box. My claim is that deep genuine emotion can get channeled into desiring to identify the thing, a sort of (though not entirely) status-related emotion.
The question is, would the person who buys all the action figures be happy with their collection even if nobody knew about it at all? And I think in many cases the answer is yes. They're even happier if they do find someone else who shares that interest, but I think that's because of the simple joy of finding someone to enthuse about a common interest with.
One of my favorite Mark Hamill stories is that he somehow got it put into his contract that he gets "one of everything", before anyone had any idea what this would mean. And that instead of treating his attic full of toys as an investment, he let his kids play with them.
Right, there has to be more to it. The expert is content with knowing a thing completely. An expert might hoard catalogues so as to master every detail of every action figure ever made, but wouldn't need to actually own them.
I think there's a way that a work of art creates a kind of atmosphere around it, or "mood", "vibe" or "ambience". Separately from expertise or status, somebody who passionately loves a work of art will want to be surrounded by its ambience. And the impulse toward completeness is because the work of art isn't just some individual action figure; the work of art is all of everything that the creators made and branded "Star Wars" and released into the market. You don't actually have the true Star Wars ambience without the whole set. Maybe?
I don't like trying to reduce it to identity, because it's so hard to separate identity from status, since both relations reflect themselves through other people--you need people to recognize your identity to really have it, and status is nothing but other people's recognition of status. But it could very well be that the desire to dwell in the ambience of a work of art is just as reducible to establishing identity as every other aspect of nerddom and hipsterism. And in that case, there may be no genuine nerd at all.
It seems to me there is a human desire to excel at your hobbies, that's pretty unrelated to why you have the hobbies in the first place, and has both status motivations and also motivations unrelated to status. That's pretty universal, right? If you're a hobby singer, you like to sound good; if you birdwatch, you like to expand the range of species you can identify; if you make little clay sculptures, you like to detail them and make them beautiful. Or maybe you just like to succeed with no wasted motion. People love setting arbitrary little goals for themselves to feel this kind of satisfaction.
And at the risk of inappropriately evopsychologizing, it seems like if you're carving a spear for your tribe, excellence is important both because you get to be the beloved and respected spear-maker in your community, and because the sharper your spears are the less likely you'll starve.
That's my best guess as to why people want one pristine figurine for every character who's ever existed. On the other hand, I think collecting the figurines *at all* is motivated by the fact that you like the MCU and like to surround yourself with MCU things, not necessarily any perfectionist/completionist motivations.
And I think viewing nerd status as socially motivated would make a lot of bad predictions. For example, I used to go to social events for [thing], where a bunch of strangers would meet in a park or whatever, talk about [thing] for a few hours, and then go our separate ways, generally never see each other again. Despite being an explicitly social activity, this seems to me to fit poorly into the identity-construction framework. I certainly wasn't going off in a park for hours for the sake of presenting myself a certain way to my family and friends, nor was I making an investment in social status with strangers who I never expected to see again. Seems more sensible to say I probably liked [thing] and wanted to talk about it with people.
I also haven't seen it mentioned at all how nerds will "secretly" try to experience aspects of the thing they're a nerd about. E.g. if I was really into Star Wars, I might like going to a zoo and seeing the bears, because they remind me of Wookees. Crucially, I'll tell no one that I'm enjoying it for that reason, because I recognize that I generally experience negative social consequences from revealing myself to be a nerd. I'm not actually into Star Wars, but I do the equivalent of this all the friggin time, and I don't really see how the "being a nerd is about constructing a social identity" perspective makes any sense of this behavior.
It is a recurring motif (of the part of the rational-sphere that I know of) that nobody does anything for the reason they say, or even think. Think how many times you see the word "status".
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 know. I don't know if these people are really unlucky and have horrible peer groups, or if they just project the most venal motives onto everything. I rarely feel disgust in the moral sense rather than the physical sense, but being thrust into the headspaces of people with that kind of worldview is one of the things that can make me do 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.
A lot of those nerdy activities still exist under the layer of popular “nerd” activities. Who plays any TTRPG but D&D 5e? Who actually reads Marvel comics instead of just watching the movies? Who has actually read any of the deep backlog of mass market sci-fi paperbacks? The nerdy things still exist, just a popular version sits among them.
Sure. But in my experience, having a more-than-surface-level interest in science fiction or TTRPGs is no longer treated as categorically different from having a more-than-surface-level interest in mysteries or improv theatre. "Nerd" in common usage today tends to describe *how* someone relates to their interests, not *what* the interests are.
I think you VASTLY overestimate the number of actual people who play any TTRPG. People in general know what D&D IS, but actually playing? You point about comics seems correct though.
It was weird seeing people on the internet talk about how it's nice nerdy things are accepted now, because big video game titles and huge sci-fi franchises were popular. And because popular kids played sport games on consoles.
Meanwhile if I would talk about liking a rouglike game that was super difficult and hard to get into, because it had more depth than popular big titles, I risked social shunning.
Same with lots of things like this. Coding - if you could do a cool website or game, it was great. But if you focused on algorithms you sucked. And making beautiful fractals didn't count as being an artist.
Now if you work on AI and do deep fakes, even if you don't have much knowledge, you're cool. If you have deep knowledge and work on memory optimization during model training, you might be told "wow, you're smart" but most people will awkwardly avoid talking to you after learning this fact. At a random party it's better to say "I work on some obscure IT things, I like it and it pays very well".
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I don't care that people changed use of "geek" or "nerd", but I wish people understood that those who were nerds didn't become popular. It's just false. People can say "haha, I'm such a nerd and I love it" while shunning others for having unpopular or harder to get interest, even though those others are not flashy or pushy with those interests.
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.
Yes. I never thought of it before, but this frictionlessness wrought by the internet destroyed something cool, and we never even noticed while it was going on.
True, though the positive angle is that it maybe frees us up to look for unusual things that are more difficult problems, that weren’t “solved” by the internet.
A bit similar to solving a material want — people no longer get meaning out of expending effort to meet that want, but they move on to new frontiers of wants.
I also hit the same problem in my coin collecting. Eventually I solved the problem for myself by just never shopping for coins online. I find cool stuff sifting through loose change, at local coin shops or flea markets, or sometimes from yard sales and other oddball locations. It kept the thrill of the hunt alive, and tends to be far less expensive.
My tastes in coins did change around that time, though, where I no longer cared as much for full sets but got much more into interesting historical pieces. I particularly love coins from important historic dates in countries that no longer exist. Like a 1914-1918 Austrian-Hungarian coin would be a great example. These coins tend to be in very low demand, and can often be found for cheap - though they are also pretty rare to find at all, which makes it even better for the hunt enjoyment.
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".
Two distinctions on Transformers. Into the 1980s version - probably quite nerdy. Into the Michael Bay version - doesn't seem nerdy at all, maybe the same type of viewer as wants to watch The Fast and The Furious movies?
Right, but I'm not sure if the recent Transformers movies really have that sort of obsessive fandom, any more than (say) the Mission Impossible movies... or the Fast and Furious movies for that matter. There are people who like them, sure, but for whatever reason these sorts of movies don't attract the obsessive nerd crowd to wank over them; the lore is too shallow to invite obsessive interest.
If there _are_ obsessive Transformers (2008+) fans out there, then they are definitely nerds though.
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.
It's funny how quickly the new normal gets established in the public consciousness. Before MCU, having a franchise where the fourth installment is about as successful as the original was an extreme success. Whereas now that MCU is (maybe) finally running out of steam at the fortieth or whatever sequel it's everybody's laughing stock.
Are they sequels though? Originally a sequel would be "the same thing, just different enough to get you to buy another ticket" (Jaws/other disaster movies). This has limitations of course - there's a tension between resolving the situation in one movie and still having enough unresolved stuff for the next one.
There's also "a similar situation with the same character", e.g. Bond - although that was helped by a successful set of novels of course.
MCU is a "shared universe", which has a rotating set of main characters - any given character is not in most of the movies.
As far as I can tell this started with the comics (Justice League/Avengers/etc.) and then moved to books (Thieves World, Wild Cards).
Marvel did make it work with movies, but I think there was some heavy lifting done in TV first (ST: TNG, B5, etc.) to allow more continuity.
The numbers are more comparable if you look at e.g. Jaws 1/2/3 with say Iron Man 1/2/3. And there the numbers generally go down even with MCU characters.
Yes, that previous franchises were usually unsuccessful had much to do with their sequels generally being progressively worse and limited in scope. I'm still unsure why it took so long to zero in on the MCU-like idea, when comics had been doing crossovers and shared universes for decades. The likeliest explanation seems to be that Kevin Feige-caliber producers are extremely rare, and DC's continued failure to emulate Marvel's success provides good evidence for it.
I think it has to do with this being pretty much the opposite of the way movies are made.
A movie generally requires a lot of money backing, so you need to gather that. You also need the right actors, etc. Each movie is made by its own company. That has a lot to do with accounting (moving the losses around to the people who aren't in the know), but it also has to do with a movie being a large number of people gathered together to do one project.
Some of the secret was getting the money people to e.g. sign Downey to a long contract. From what I remember he wasn't huge back then, so that must have taken some persuasion.
DC was impatient - they saw Marvel getting $$$ and thought they could catch up, without doing all the background work. I'm not sure it was actually possible though - getting the right people to sign the right contracts and execute when you have Marvel already making all the money is very different from doing this when you only have e.g. Spiderman and Fantastic Four on the ground.
Warner was even more impatient with the Mummy, and they failed even harder. I suspect that getting Cruise and Crowe in to star was the wrong move (if it takes off how are you getting them back?), but it's an understandable shortcut attempt (see the first attempt at Casino Royale. Lots of stars, and it bombed partly because of having lots of stars - and their attempts at getting more screen time).
Even Disney has had trouble replicating it. That was clearly where they wanted to take Star Wars, and things like the lukewarm response to Solo led them to retrench and rethink a bit. They're still doing it with some success, but more variably and with more reliance on TV as they plot another return to the big screen.
If the MCU peters out in the later phases as they try to build on (or at least repeat) their success, the Iron Man to Endgame run is still going to be a signal accomplishment, whether one considers it a stirring example or a horrible warning.
(Personally I think it's great. My comics nerddom is very much DC focused, but the MCU gave me more of the sort of things I liked about the comics that shaped my tastes than anything DC has done on the big screen since Christopher Reeve was active.)
Well, the glaring feature of Disney-era Star Wars is the total lack of overall vision for the franchise, so I think it's fair to say that they themselves don't appreciate the importance of Feige-style leadership.
I'd also suggest that Marvel is one of the world leaders at doing shared-universe stories with multiple protagonists. It's a very small field, to be fair, but it's difficult to do crossovers while keeping the story appealing for fans of each of the protagonists.
Not that I'd say Marvel is objectively good at it; it's more like the proverbial tap-dancing elephant. And I think we might be reaching the limits of that approach. "Crossover fatigue" is a thing. And one of the reasons that there are a lot of superheroes is that they tend to appeal to different people. Gating the enjoyment of media that someone wants to watch, behind media that they don't care about, eventually produces burnout. But if one's business model is to strip-mine an IP and then move on to the next one, that's not a problem.
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.
In the 80s I came to understand a "nerd" was someone with some kind of avid interest and/or technical ability, but lacked social skills. A "geek" simply had a nerd's social skills.
This seems no longer to be true, partly because nerds, especially computer people, got lucrative jobs and people admired the money they could earn. Best Buy has a "geek squad" to show how their people have great technical ability.
Definitions change over time, but these seem to have changed pretty quickly over a few decades.
I blame the dudes who started using "sociopath" in 3-type taxonomies, a decade or two ago. It seemed like those usages got into the groundwater of the rationalist sphere, and then everyone wanted to crudely hijack terms that already have established meaning.
I don't inherently object to the phenomenon, but it's got to be done well, with multiple layers of meaning that all line up correctly. Software engineers and Confucians agree on the important of proper naming. I get really annoyed by people who do half-assed jobs that are only as good as I can manage most days. ;-)
Or Pokemon/Magic/etc. cards, or one of a thousand specifically-made-to-be-collectible-toys that are available. Matchbox cars, Lego minifigs, those eggs with random collectible toys in them.
There seems to be a lot more to collect now than there used to be. My memory of actually collectible items from when I was a kid was coins, stamps, and sports cards. Sports cards seemed bigger to me than the other two, but seems to have been hurt as much as stamps and more than coins. You can find big boxes of sports cards in antique stores or resale shops for cheap. You can't similarly find that kind of volume for coins or stamps - which seems to me that less people are dumping and leaving the hobby.
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.)
Pokemon are also similar to those classic collectables because in practice it's impossible to "catch them all". The games were from the start "sadistically" designed with many sources of artificial scarcity, from different sets of mons available in different versions (Red vs Blue etc.), to exclusives tied to IRL events attendance, to difficulties of trading and transferring your collections to newer games and consoles. I remember reading an article detailing all of this, and it made me pity those naive kids who bought into the slogan and actually tried to do it.
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.
Hipsters bring status to obscure things by liking them. They like the obscurity as well as (I hope) high quality.
Just to be nerdy, they remind me of Lord Gro from _The Worm Ouroboros. He would side with the underdog, but he was so competent that having Lord Gro on their side meant the underdog would win. So then he'd go find another underdog. He was killed for being a traitor.
> Hipsters bring status to obscure things by liking them. They like the obscurity as well as (I hope) high quality
Yeah that's kinda what I was getting at; it's a complicated game where you need to like something that is obscure but not _too_ obscure. To be a hipster you have to start by liking all the same things that hipsters like (so you count as one of the in crowd) and then you branch out into liking something that's just the right sort of obscure so that you can show it to other hipsters and they'll be impressed by your unique tastes.
I think we both agree on the core feature of a hipster though -- an obsession with "liking things" as a means to gathering social status.
Let's Talk About Love, in which a rock snob figures out what there is to love about Celine Dion's music. It was originally written in 2007-- this edition is a ten-year retrospective and talks about the culture becoming less harsh.
Oh, Lord Gro! I don't know *how* Eddison managed it, but he managed to create a character that you *know* is a no-good dirty lowdown backstabber and yet you still love him.
Even Gorice, King of Witchland, sometimes rebukes him with "No, that's *too* evil" (e.g. his plans for disposing of their enemies by secretly poisoning them at peace talks).
And yet everybody loves Lord Gro. He's brave, he is quixotic - he never switches sides to gain advantage or power or status - and he's capable and just wonderful. You should never trust him for a split second, but he's wonderful 😁
“Not enemies, if I may,” said he.
But she cried, “And thou Lord Gro of Witchland?”
“That one sickened long since,” he answered, “of a mortal sickness; and ’tis now a day and a night since he is dead thereof.”
“What art thou, then?” said she.
He answered, “If your grace would so receive me, Lord Gro of Demonland.”
“A very practised turncoat,” said she. “Belike they also are wearied of thee and thy ways. Alas,” she said in an altered voice, “thy gentle pardon! when doubtless it was for thy generous deeds to me-ward they fell out with thee, when thou didst so nobly befriend me.”
“I will tell your highness,” answered he, “the pure truth. Never stood matters better ’twixt me and all of them than when yesternight I resolved to leave them.”
The Lady Mevrian was silent, a cloud in her face. Then, “I am alone,” she said. “Therefore think it not little-hearted in me, nor forgetful of past benefits, if I will be further certified of thee ere I suffer thee to rise. Swear to me thou wilt not betray me.”
But Gro said, “How should an oath from me avail thee, madam? Oaths bind not an ill man. Were I minded to do thee wrong, lightly should I swear thee all oaths thou mightest require, and lightly o’ the next instant be forsworn.”
“That is not well said,” said Mevrian. “Nor helpeth not thy safety. You men do say that women’s hearts be faint and feeble, but I shall show thee the contrary is in me. Study to satisfy me. Else will I assuredly smite thee to death with thine own sword.”
The Lord Gro lay back, clasping his slender hands behind his head. “Stand, I pray thee,” said he, “o’ the other side of me, that I may see thy face.”
She did so, still threatening him with the sword. And he said smiling, “Divine lady, all my days have I had danger for my bedfellow, and peril of death for my familiar friend; whilom leading a delicate life in princely court, where murther sitteth in the wine-cup and in the alcove; whilom journeying alone in more perilous lands than this, as witness the Moruna, where the country is full of venomous beasts and crawling poisoned serpents, and the divels be as abundant there as grasshoppers on a hot hillside in summer. He that feareth is a slave, were he never so rich, were he never so powerful. But he that is without fear is king of all the world. Thou hast my sword. Strike. Death shall be a sweet rest to me. Thraldom, not death, should terrify me.”
...Lord Gro was in that battle with the Demons. He ran Didarus through the neck with his sword, so that he fell down and was dead.
Corund, when he saw it, heaved up his axe, but changed his intention in the manage, saying, “O landskip of iniquity, shalt thou kill beside me the men of mine household? But my friendship sitteth not on a weather vane. Live, and be a traitor.”
But Gro, being mightily moved with these words, and staring at great Corund wide-eyed like a man roused from a dream, answered, “Have I done amiss? ’Tis easy remedied.” Therewith he turned about and slew a man of Demonland. Which Spitfire seeing, he cried out upon Gro in a great rage for a most filthy traitor, and bloodily rushing in thrust him through the buckler into the brain.
In such wise and by such a sudden vengeance did the Lord Gro most miserably end his life-days. Who, being a philosopher and a man of peace, careless of particular things of earth, had followed and observed all his days steadfastly one heavenly star; yet now in the bloody battle before Carcë died in the common opinion of men a manifold perjured traitor, that had at length gotten the guerdon of his guile."
Though it's always weird to me that a man whose personal names ran in the direction of "Brandoch Daha" and "Corund" called his warring countries "Witchland" and "Demonland", which feels like a completely different register. Especially since they're not really very witchy or demonic.
Eddison (forgive me if you knew this already) started making up the stories that eventually became _The Worm Ouroboros_ at the age of ten, and kept the original names when he wrote them down at forty. I think it's pretty understandable that a 10-year-old boy's linguistic sensibilities would be eclectic.
Your conception of nerdery resonates with me a lot more than Scott's, as someone who (1) can't help but obsess over certain esoteric topics (2) knows that in my non-nerdy social circles I will be (and have repeatedly been) made fun of for signaling my interest in these topics, so I learned to hide them.
This definition of "nerd" fits the scholastic type of nerd (AKA Poindexter), but not the geeks that Sam Kriss seems to be talking about (Comic Book Guy types). Among those, taste-related status games are very much present. See the reappraisal of the Star Wars prequels in light of the Disney sequels, the negative reevaluation of A Song of Ice and Fire in light of the show's late seasons (and GRRM neglecting the series), or how disdain towards MCU spread into disdain towards "capeshit" in all of its forms, on the screen and in comics.
To me "hipster" also has the connotation that if an obscure thing the hipster likes becomes popular, the hipster must then move away from the thing. If the thing comes up in conversation afterwards, the canonical thing is to say "Yeah I liked the thing, but then it became popular/sold out/got bad."
"...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."
See, this is exactly what I plan to do once I retire and other people's opinions cease mattering at all to me.
In unrelated news, I am looking for a list of "cringiest isekai anime."
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.
Sports isn’t bad at all. It is a good outlet for the male desire for tribal warfare, and most male humans love physical competition unless they are terrible at it.
They're gambling their long-term health for a chance at a eight-figure career/Olympic medal. You might think that it's a bad gamble, but that's not the same as "no reason". (And many people otherwise ruin their health without any potential upside at all.)
People have a capacity for bloodthirstiness, like it or not. Literal gladiatorial fights to the death were considered perfectly respectable entertainment in the high antiquity, and public executions are still social gathering occasions in parts of the world. Of course, the pampered West does its collective best to increasingly repudiate such uncouth displays in all forms, e.g. with the ascendancy of e-sports over actual sports these days (not to say that those are healthier on average).
It’s not about this at all. People don’t play sports for the tiny chance of becoming a professional athlete, not many of them.
Most play for the competition and teamwork and just plain fun. It is one of the most fun things you can do. One of the only thing that is even remotely close to competing with sex.
EDIT: To put it more simply this would be like complaining people only get into coding to become Mark Zuckerberg, or only get into literature so they can become famous authors. By age 10-12 most kids participating in team sorts have some awareness they aren't making a career of it, maybe 80% of them? BY 16 I would say 90% of them.
My old enemy the extreme imprecision of language strikes again. Yes, the word "sport" covers a huge swath of concept-space, from unambiguously beneficial physical exercise/teamwork on the amateur level to the aforementioned gamble implicit in the attempt to make it to the very top. I though that it would be obvious from the context which subset of meaning was deployed here, but the illusion of transparency is also never to be underestimated.
Sorry it was meant to be a response to Nancy, not you. I was trying to get across to her that this "gambling" has nothing to do with the vast majority of sports participation. You could magically evaporate all college and professional sports tomorrow, and make everyone collectively forget them, and tons of people would still play hockey/soccer/basketball/etc. because it is fun. Most kids get into sports before they even have an awareness about what professionalism in sports is or means.
They figure that out at 9-10 maybe. And within a pretty short time understand the relative chance for success for themselves.
In what world does every sport involve significantly increasing the chance of being long-term crippled?
Most people who play sports are healthier than those who don’t; people who participate in very dangerous contact sports such as competitive cheerleading and American football are outliers. The chance of becoming permanently crippled or disfigured through being a track star, cyclist, swimmer, rower, player of soccer/tennis/volleyball, etc. is negligible.
I think you hear ‘sports’ and think ‘NFL,’ but even most American money sports don’t conform to this model. E.g., baseball only poses risks to pitchers really, aside from freak accidents that can occur in any occupation. There are many more options in the sports world that do not involve high-speed contact, and rather famously the positive health impacts of strenuous physical activity like athletes participate in are quite robust if you don’t get that activity through one of the outlier high-risk activities.
And at the same time, rock climbers and sky divers are doing what they love for more risk without the chance at fame or fortune. People choosing to push the human limits is not necessarily a bad thing, even with the risks.
We're off topic here, but a friend of mine started struggling with CTE from being knocked about too much in combat sports. I am unsure of my position there. Fighting is very fine, I think. And the CTE risk is not much compared to early death which the whole endeavour usually implied. We need intact brains but we also need intact souls.
Yeah, one of the classic problems in combat sports is being able to combine competition with safety. Practice without an adversary only gets one so far, but too often the rules required for safety drain the usefulness out of competitive practice, in ways that aren't obvious. And if safety is sacrificed, we get stuff like this. :-(
I'm guessing you're mainly focusing on 'crippling' in the sense of American Football-derived brain concussions, or similar effects in boxing.
I'd venture that in other sports such as the Track and Field space, Tennis and Association Football, the swimming sports, so forth, there is rather less of this lasting injury effect.
Right. We have three outlets for tribal violence in modern society: war, politics, and sport.
War and politics are horrible, so I try to get all my tribalism jollies from sport. Sport is great because you can enjoy the thrill of cheering for your tribe to beat the other tribe, but it only lasts three hours and afterwards you can go back to being friends with the other tribe... until next week.
Yes, it is glib (for rhetorical effect, I think), but his description of team sports is accurate from the perspective of those of us that don't like watching them: it's a lot of sweaty men trying to control a ball over an endless series of nearly identical episodes.
I think the response here is in the interest of charity, which Scott is usually quite good about. Does obsessing over the types of things nerds like (even the aforementioned coins and stamps) any more useful or healthy? Is the MCU more or less healthy/useful/beneficial than getting into a "better" show or movie? If you find someone still obsessed with the original SW trilogy, are they doing something more important than someone watching game six of the Yankees Vs. the White Sox? Though I have clear preferences that make sense in my own mind, there's nothing objectively different.
It feels like Scott taking a moment to coddle his audience more than seeking pure truth. I think I read him for his pure truth search, at least as much as because he has more similar tastes to mine than most writers. A lot hit like that reduces his brand.
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).
Agree with most of this, except for the MCU movies. I definitely don't dislike them, and some are genuinely great action movies, but the lack of any "real stakes" combined with a style that is constantly trying to impress upon the viewer how important the stakes are (through music, cinematic language and dialogue) creates a disconnect that just makes me lose interest, especially during the action scenes. If this disconnect was pushed even further, I expect I'd enjoy the end product even more - shounen manga and anime have a similar thing going on, and I never mind it there, possibly because it's pushed to the point of absurdity, possibly for cultural reasons... or it could just be one of those accidents of taste and aesthetics.
I'm not sure if by lack of real stakes you mean you know the villain will ever completely win, or that some movies have low stakes. I think the second one is more of a preference, some of my favorite MCU movies had fairly low stakes, I thought Spider-Man fighting a high-tech robber was more interesting than watching Doctor Strange try to stop an evil god from eating the universe, just because of how it was executed.
Maybe because I read the comics themselves fairly regularly the stakes seem more "real" to me because they are a little more "real" than in the comics (for example, they will sometimes kill popular characters for real in the movies, if only because the actor has gotten too expensive). One example of stakes that really impressed me was in Endgame: because I had read the Infinity Gauntlet storyline I assumed they would just reset everything with the gauntlet like they did in the comics. I was impressed that instead they allowed half the universe to be dead for 5 years, have everyone who survived remember those five years, and address the impact it had on the world and on relationships.
It's more about how even if someone dies, there's a big chance they'll come back somehow. Sure, maybe in another timeline or in another shape or form, but all in all it's the whole "Nobody's ever really gone" thing. Another thing is long-lasting fight scenes where the outcome is clear but the choreography and logistics aren't exciting enough to keep me invested.
Low stakes/high stakes is definitely a preference thing and I actually also prefer some of the low stakes MCU films... and probably in general as well.
Totally makes sense! I never read any of the comics growing up, but from what little I've heard about the multitude of timelines, alternate histories and reboots it does seem like the film series has been better at having consequences that matter. The Endgame fallout you mention is also interesting in the sense that it's closer to what makes low stakes stories appealing, at least to me.
I think low nominal stakes is good because then the nominal stakes match the actual stakes. If Spiderman is trying to stop a bank robbery, he might actually fail! If Thor is trying to stop the destruction of the universe, he might get injured or lose something along the way but he will definitely 100% succeed at the thing that's nominally in question.
MCU Thor did actually fail to stop the destruction first of Asgard, and then half the universe. The latter got better, albeit with many more consequences than I was expecting after watching Infinity War. (The subsequent treatment of the Snap impressed me coming from superhero comics where that sort of thing tends to get shrugged off pretty quickly.) But Asgard is still gone, as are the people Thor lost in the process.
(A different version of Loki is running around the multiverse, but Thor doesn't know about that, and the brother he feuded and reconciled with is still dead.)
I've actually been impressed at the extent to which the MCU managed to avoid the death-as-revolving-door trap of its comics antecedent. Multiverse shenanigans notwithstanding, characters who die (with the exception of the Snap) generally stay dead, in ways that matter to the survivors.
If you watch the final fight in Endgame, you see the Asgardians coming back. Apparently Banner added them returning to what he did when reversing the Snap. I did appreciate that this change was subtle and didn't negate the five year gap. It also made Thor giving up his title at the end of the movie more meaningful, since he wasn't handing over virtually *nothing* which might otherwise be implied.
> 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.
Here I disagree. Build your identity around what you do, not what you like. We don't remember [insert famous historical figure here] for the things they liked to do in their spare time, we remember the things they actually did.
Even if you're just an ordinary person and not a famous historical figure, your kids and grandkids will remember you for the things you actually did that had an impact on their lives, not for what you liked to watch on TV.
My grandmother's taste in books had a much greater impact on me than any of the things she "did". And this is kind of a weird dichotomy anyway, what you like doing is probably going to impact the kind of art you enjoy, one way or the other, and the kind of art you enjoy can have a profound impact on what you decide to "do".
Yeah. What art you like shouldn't *be* who you are, it should *derive from* who you are and (if it's got any depth to it) *influence* who you become.
But then, I generally don't like the current practice of defining oneself by a bunch of labels. Maybe this is one of those times where we need to ask ourselves, "who benefits?" when people define themselves as a "Star Wars fan".
As others have pointed out, I think its a bit of a false dichotomy. People often use entertainment and hobbies to relate to one another. There are definitely many people in my life that I do remember for what they liked to watch on TV or otherwise do in their spare time. One of my last conversations with my grandmother before her death was about the Fu Manchu novels and movies, which she had read/seen when they came out and which I had read/seen when I did one of my periodic deep dives into media history. It's still a conversation that I remember with incredible fondness because we connected so well over that topic.
I have similar media-related memories of other people in my life, like going to Rocky Horror screenings with my wife, watching "The Agony and the Ecstasy" with my mom, and talking for hours about Godzilla with my brother. So I don't think there is a clear line between what you like and what you do, because what you like is one way by which you relate to the world and to others.
As it happens, I also actually do enjoy reading about what famous historical people do in their spare time. I thought it was incredibly charming that a lot of ancient Greek philosophers got into a ship war over whether Achilles and Patroclus were lovers or not. I was also recently amused to discover that Saddam Hussein loved "Scarface." And while they may not be famous to the larger world, there are a lot of famous superfans of various entertainment media, although they are often more famous for their involvement in fan communities than just being famous for loving something.
Yes, I agree. I've got the sense from a couple of things Scott's written recently that he can't quite imagine just liking something, without any consideration for how that will affect your social standing. But in my experience people who just like what they like, and don't care what that does to their social standing, are some of the most genuine and fun people to be with.
I sort of share the attitude of the articles but "people couldn't possibly like Star Wars" or "people couldn't possibly like Star Wars that much" is not what I assume. What I assume (rightly or wrongly) is more along the lines of "no level of enjoying the experience of watching Star Wars could explain doing *that*." It feels like there's something more going on.
I enjoy, let's say "Groundhog Day". The way it manifests is that from time to time I'll say to myself: "ah, that's a fun movie". Then maybe I'll watch it and have a good time. That's it. I can not imagine myself ever 1) dressing up as characters 2) buying merchandise 3) buying real props 4) memorizing the name of the second assistant janitor who worked on the set 5) camping to be first in line to buy tickets to the premier of "Groundhog Day 2".
I think even if I enjoyed the movie way, way more than I actually do, even if every second of it filled me with unimaginable ecstasy, delight and purest bliss, I still wouldn't bother to memorize the name of the second assistant janitor or camp. (Buying merch? ...maybe a poster. Possibly.) In fact, if I enjoyed the movie that much, I might try to preserve the enjoyment and not watch it or think about it too much, so the pleasure doesn't wear thin with repetition. That's why when people do do some of those things, it makes me suspect this is not completely explainable by liking the movie itself, not directly, there must be something else there. Not something malignant, but something else.
At the very least it feels like there's some kind of spill-over effect where all the pleasure you associate with the movie attaches itself to everything that surrounds it (like the name of the second assistant janitor). And it may be fun to hang around other fans. It may still be fun even if you happen to grow bored with the movie and lose a lot of love for it. And if you're hanging around, it may be fun to also be a know-it-all, or have people envy you. And... whatever effects the articles try to outline.
I will posit to you the possibility that you haven't ever enjoyed something so thoroughly that you could spend far more hours submerged in it than you have available. Like someone who watches the same movie hundreds of times and never grows tired of it. There are multiple people with over a thousand days played on WoW - 24 hour days, so more like 2-3,000 days spent doing little else. That kind of time sink obsession makes your SW obsessive seem pretty small time.
I think you're on the right track in a lot of ways, actually. The scenario you're imagining, where Groundhog Day fills you with such bliss that it spills over to anything you associate with Groundhog Day (like the name of the second assistant janitor), but at the same time just watching the movie over and over would make it lose its magic, so you need to find all these other Groundhog-Day-adjacent activities to fuel your passion—that's pretty spot on, I would say!
For niche enough things, like early Star Trek, I can see how this actually could be good. If only a handful of people like it, then that indicates that those people have something in common. And that group might be the only place where someone could express that part of themself and have it be understood. So it becomes a small community of people who have more in common than just an interest in the particular piece of art. And all the dressing up, and conventions, and other stuff, are more fundamentally expressions of support for the community, and exuberance over finding someplace where one belongs.
And then there's negative side, where people mistake the map for the territory. Where they project their feelings for the community (the people and the pattern of interactions) onto what the community is organized around. It's an easy trap to fall into.
People in the cluster called "autistic" tend to prefer to do the things they enjoy over and over again, rather than having the instinct to preserve the enjoyment by not repeating it too much.
They also tend to enjoy things by doing some kind of systematizing task around them, like collecting or memorizing or sorting.
But there's also a very materialistic aspect to many contemporary expressions of fandom that seems to go beyond the systematizing urge, which I also don't understand. Funko Pops are to me the ultimate expression of it - they are more their own thing than a part of whatever fandom they purport to be part of, they don't do anything, and they aren't (IMO) especially aesthetically pleasing - they are just hunks of plastic designed to appeal to every single fanbase, and it grosses me out. It's like seeing slot machines in Vegas that are themed after popular TV shows.
I think one strain of MCU hatred arises from genuine cognitive dissonance: a large set of smart people encounter MCU stuff -- which I personally enjoy but which certainly contains a lot of (superficially?) silly and childish elements (costumes, explosions, unrealistic fight scenes, "good guys" and "bad guys"...) -- and find it all totally ridiculous. They see morons enjoying it, which doesn't surprise them, but then they also see some non-morons enjoying it! How could non-morons possibly enjoy such a thing?! It's maddening! In fact, I have a good friend who once berated me for like an hour about how I could possibly be interested in (IIRC) Avengers: Endgame. It really made no sense to him. Similarly, my father-in-law has repeatedly grumbled about the positive critical reception of Game of Thrones, which he won't watch because it contains dragons -- silly, embarrassing, impossible to suspend disbelief for, according to him.
In a way the haters are right -- strongly enjoying things with "childish" elements probably *is* associated with a set of undesirable traits, like stupidity. It's just not that *strong* of a predictor, while the haters speak as if it's incontrovertible evidence.
I suppose in defence of liking "childish" things, I'll quote:
(1) A review of an Indian action-adventure movie:
"I think everyone should see this, ideally in theaters.
Unless you think you’d spend whole thing thinking things like:
“You can’t pull a trident through two guys handle first!”
“How can he be lifting someone off the ground who has already been shown to be taller than he is?”
“You can’t punch a motorcycle out of the air!” with a slight frown on your face.
In which case, I’m sorry you hate fun. That must be really hard for you."
(2) C.S. Lewis on growing out of being grown-up:
"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
Agreed. While I, personally, haven't gotten interested in the MCU films etc., I can't see disparaging people who are interested in them. People develop interests in all sorts of specialized things. ( I think there was a line about professors content to study the fuzz on a bee, but I failed at trying to find it. )
The reason I don't like MCU stuff is the opposite. I feel like they're not going all the way, even if it might end up being cheesy/even more ridiculous. If I want my fill of costumes, explosions and things like that I would rather just watch Kamen Rider. MCU stuff doesn't make me feel any intense emotions.
Fair enough -- I'm not really claiming that there's some deeper level to the MCU that people who don't enjoy it are failing to see. But I don't think your complaint is the modal one among a broader "educated" population. "I liked that superhero movie" is still something you're expected to say shamefacedly in polite society, and this wouldn't change if the MCU movies were 35% cheesier.
I dunno, Guardians of the Galaxy seems to be the Marvel movie that gets the most respect from people who generally look down on Marvel movies (myself included), and it's also probably the most unashamedly ridiculous.
Guardians of the Galaxy is also the one that, while nominally derived from a superhero comic book, really fits the genre of Space Opera Sci-Fi more than it does superhero comics. And Space Opera has been respectable since Star Wars.
I have no problem whatsoever with people enjoying silly things, if anything I think it's kinda cruel and ridiculous when people berate others because their entertainment isn't "serious enough", it's entertainment eh?, it's not a job, it's not a social service, it's not a mission, it's just a bunch of random cravings. I remember in my childhood when I reflected on my why I like cars, it's hard to describe my reasoning then but I didn't find any objective reason, there is nothing I can say to somebody who doesn't already like cars to get them to like it. As a grownup I can dress up my love for cars in plenty of fancy motivations, like the fact that they are massive piles of metal that can outrun most anything that Nature has managed to produce in 4 billion years while sounding angry as heck, the raw feeling of power they give you when you're in one's driver seat and you press the acceleration and hear the engine roaring as the metal beast lunges forward, but this won't attract anybody who isn't already into transhumanism-ish things or transcending biology, and might even fail to attract lots of those people. Reason is but a slave for Passion, Passion doesn't bother to explain itself in words or premises or priors, it has hormones and chemical transmitters to do its Reasoning for it (and even this is too much of a Reason-centric way to view Passion).
What I really hate about the MCU though, besides my general dislike for Fantasy and non-plausible stories, is how nakedly the corporation behind it treats it as a cash grab. The merchandise, the constant injokes and callbacks in movies to other movies, it all feels very forced. The stories are too non-original, every story is like "This old villian that we thought was dead or irrelevant is now back with a new idea and possibly new villians in league", and that's it, no other twist. Now I never saw MCU other than Iron Man, which I thought was awesome (at least part 1 and 2), but this is the general impression I have based on the flood of chatter that the MCU generates on the internet and general social life, it's just a corporation desperately milking what comic artists and writers have done 40 years ago for all its worth. Look at how they talk about it : "IP", it's not Art or Writing or Storytelling or Screenplaying for them, it's "Property".
Then again, there is no objective reason to like cars, but I'm infatuated. So you do you.
Yes, I think your car point is right on (and personally I have no interest in cars!). The bullet that I find most people unwilling to bite, though, is that (almost?) all interest in high "art" is *also* just a fancy form of entertainment. Maybe the first sprawling "novel of ideas" you read makes you a better person in some hard-to-articulate way, but does the 10th? The 100th? No, at that point you're just amusing yourself. And god bless ya if that's what you like. But, despite how philistine the elite now is, there is still a surprisingly strong resistance to just admitting this.
Re: MCU, I actually think you're a bit off-target. The reason the MCU has been as successful as it has, globally and across time (Iron Man came out 15 years ago!), is that it's always been at least a bit *less* of a myopic cash grab than it could have been. Like, they hire "real" actors (starting with Robert Downey Jr.) and "real" directors. In contrast, many other superhero/action movies have not really bothered, and I think it's no coincidence that they have failed to build long-running franchises. I understand how that extra little smidgen of quality might not seem like much, but I think it is real.
I would say that rather than your identity being built around your liking a thing, the things you like and groups you identify with should orbit around your identity. Thus you should be able to discard those things and groups at will if they somehow diverge from what’s good for you or the qualities you desire. That identity and the desires that emanate from it ultimately should derive from your axiomatic principles. It’s a cart before the horse thing.
My objection to the MCU is prior to its implementation in film; superhero comic books and many other genre comics are largely a medium that coddles and tolerates emotionally and intellectually immaturity. The superhero comics that are put forward as the most revolutionary or extraordinary in quality are frankly IMO pretty bad and jejune (“Watchmen,” for example, is a great example of a comic celebrated for merely possessing incipient characteristics that are minimally required by other works of art so as not to be outright pablum; that doesn’t make it smart or sophisticated, just a little more nuanced than the very clumsy other comics of its time). Far from considering any MCU titles ‘classics’ in any sense, I have yet to encounter any that have much at all to say: as you point out they’re just retreading the repetitive serialized storytelling of a genre that never had a lot to give, and when it did examine things often stopped far short of real reflection and insight. There are many niches and sub-sub-genres within the domain of e.g. schlock-horror, and aficionados believe that certain schlock-horror films are classics, but largely I dismiss the whole category on quality and aesthetic grounds and the same goes for superhero stuff, where it doesn’t for, say, SF&F literature because there are actual examples of nature, insightful, and creatively and intellectually stimulating works within that domain that can stand with other classics of literature writ large.
With regards to your second, I somewhat agree, but I'd also say that a lot of the appeal of the better superhero stuff (and other similar genres) is finding that someone has taken something you liked as a child, and made something more sophisticated out of it, something which appeals to your older self on levels which the the earlier iterations can't. And I think that appeal is absent for someone who never experienced the schlocky earlier versions when they were young enough to not mind.
(And it doesn't help that a lot of mainstream sophisticated art has become un-moored from a basic grounding in being fun to read. All books should be "page-turners", dammit, and I'm not talking about plot here. I should have some reason why I keep wanting to read more, whether that's the beauty of the language, the continual elaboration of metaphor, or anything else.)
I second this strongly. A lot of times I remember my child self liking some childhood entertainment media, but wishing it was more sophisticated. For instance, I kept wishing "Power Rangers" would incorporate more hard sf elements into its story (you can imagine my delight when I discovered "Gundam").
Your comment seems reasonable. My counterpoints are two: while surfing on consumers’ irrepressible nostalgia for the stories of their childhood is likely to be successful, it doesn’t make those stories very good: the MCU doesn’t seem obviously more sophisticated or nuanced than comics to me, just better-funded. I can fully admit that such things that I like are pretty poor quality and often deserve harsh criticism when I revisit them later. I’ve let go of childish things where I can, and with my own children I try to make sure that they’re mostly exposed to cultural artifacts of better quality so they don’t end up being sentimentally attached to (and influenced by) dreck.
Your later paragraph I agree with, no qualification necessary. I’ll give as an example Count of Monte Cristo, an extremely high-quality and nuanced work which is a ripping good yarn that keeps you turning pages till the end. I think this is about plotting, too: as ‘literary fiction’ becomes a genre, a lot of it has abandoned plot. Meaning that for solid, intellectually and emotionally mature fiction of adventure and fun, you really have to look carefully.
Ah, I wasn't talking about the MCU there, more about things like "Watchmen", "Sandman", and "Kingdom Come", in their original forms. The MCU feels like distilling decades worth of comics down to the most popular and iconic stories, which are solid and straightforward (as opposed to bottom-of-the-barrel filler). I wouldn't call the individual stories of the MCU themselves particularly impressive; what impresses me about the MCU is the scale, the production values, and the way they kept their quality consistent for so long without losing touch with their source material. They're very well done, for what they are.
And heh, I just picked up a copy of Count of Monte Cristo (one of the abridged ones, though).
Out of curiosity, have you read any Steven Brust? He's been writing a fantasy series (short tightly-plotted books, not sprawling flaccid epics) since the early 80s. And since Dumas is one of his favorite writers, he's done a set of "prequels" as a loving homage to Dumas. "The Phoenix Guards", "Five Hundred Years After", the 3 parts of "The Viscount of Adrilankha", and most lately "The Baron of Magister Valley". ;-) They're in-universe historical novels (or "popular history", as the fictional author would have it) written in the near future of the fantasy world, about the near past, meshing the beats of Dumas' respective works with the established history of the fantasy world, involving multiple layers of authorial unreliability, and the fictional author's style is something of a cross between Dumas and Tom Stoppard. Like Dumas, they're long but easy to read, but more than half the people I've tried to get to read them have bounced hard off the style.
I think for me the best equivalent to comics would be myths and legends. They're usually fairly simple stories, but they tell something about the people who wrote them and passed them on. What traits do we value, what situations do we fear, what types of behavior do we consider admirable or despicable, and so forth. ("Who'd win in a fight, Ares or Athena?" "Marry, kill, fuck - Hera, Athena, Aphrodite?" That sort of thing.)
Interesting that you choose Count of Monte Cristo for the example here. Maybe I didn’t pick up on all the nuance when I read it as a teenager. I definitely remember enjoying the book a ton, so no arguments on the page-turner aspect, but I also remember thinking that the count was suuuuuch a Gary Stu and it felt like the superhero equivalent of the time period. I mean, he’s basically Batman for the 1840s. Guy with a traumatic past and a ton of money uses that money to train in a faraway land and obtain equipment for the sake of righting the injustice that was done to him while using a false identity.
I don’t object to comics because they have plots with false identities, implausible fortunes, ultra-competent heroes, etc. Those elements are fun, and I’m not against fun.
What I’m against is lack of emotional and literary nuance. The failure of Batman is a failure to grapple with the emotional content of what you’re writing: although Dumas writes a ripping good yarn, he also immediately explores the emotional and even spiritual implications of a ridiculously single-minded hunt for revenge. Most comics do not even attempt this; when they do they grasp at it clumsily and in a way that weirdly idolizes and romanticizes Batman for being insane, or exploits this for the shock value of subversion of tropes rather than exploring in an interested way what actually lays in his heart as a fully realized person. Where is the Batman story about personal forgiveness and letting go of revenge after it’s warped you? Doesn’t exist, at least not in a form that’s more than a rudimentary gesture.
I tend to think of works of art as being good in terms of what they are trying to accomplish. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's 1960s "Thor" comics are really good, Shakespeare and Tolstoy are also really good, but they aren't really trying to tell the same kind of story.
I don't tend to think of "Watchmen" as being good because it meets the bare minimum from another genre, I think of it as being good because it incorporates some elements from other genres and combines them with elements of its own to make something new. It's not good because it's a pale imitation of literary fiction, which is better than superhero comics, it's good because it combines the two genres, which are both good in their own way. The best superhero comics that came out at the same time as "Watchmen," like Wolfman and Perez's "Teen Titans," are also very good, but they are good because they are doing superhero tropes superbly well, rather than combining different tropes in unique ways like "Watchmen" does.
The best MCU movies are classics, but the best is long behind the MCU now. Since the first "Avengers", it's been not *quite* monotonically downhill, but mostly so. The focus is increasingly on less well-developed characters, the villains are less interesting, the plots more pedestrian(*) and the action more repetitive. It is genuinely hard for me to understand how MCU fans can be satisfied with the latest mediocrities; my working model is that they have built part of their identity around Being an MCU fan and won't allow themselves to see the rot.
As for "no worse than a mediocre pre-MCU action movie", that's setting the bar pretty low and I'm OK with just calling that "bad". Action movies at least allow for some diversity in the action; matters can be settled with fistfights, swordfights, gunfights, car chases, fighter-plane dogfights, even clever tricks. The superhero comic format pretty much demands that everything ultimately turn into a fistfight with extra FX, and that predictability is a strike against it.
* And even when the plots start with an interesting premise, like "Endgame" and "Multiverse of Madness", the execution is pedestrian.
My comment about mediocre pre-MCU action movies was mostly about 2 things. First, I think that in general blockbuster mainstream movies went through a low in the late 90s and early 2000s where their average quality went down a bit. There were still good movies, but it felt like there were a lot of stupid, terrible blockbusters. I think the Marvel movies, along with other big, smart action movies like LOTR turned it around. There are still terrible blockbusters, like Transformers 2-5, but I think the bar has been raised a bit. In the 90s it felt like every other movie was as bad as Transformers 3.
The other point I was trying to make is that critics of the MCU often act like bad Marvel movies are crowding smarter movies out of theaters. I think if bad Marvel movies didn't get made their place would be taken not by smarter movies, but by other bad blockbusters. The 2010s might have had their own versions of terrible 90s action flicks like "Lost in Space," "The Phantom," or "Battlefield Earth."
In the metaphorical sense that Scott uses it here, I think Americans use both "period" and "full stop" interchangeably. But we never use "full stop" to describe the literal period at the end of a sentence - I didn't even realize that's what it means until now.
As an American, my impression is that in American usage, "full stop" is a bit more intellectual - it means "...without qualification", probably in response to someone else saying the thing with qualifications.
Whereas "period" tends to be more about strength of emotion - it means "...and I don't want any more discussion about it."
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.
Rarities, scraps of foreign lands, wanting to have the full set of something, getting the new commemorative issue (post offices still do this one) - the usual reasons. Something both kids *and* adults could get into. Before cigarette cards or baseball cards.
I mean, I'm old enough to remember the analog Before Times pretty well, and I can't wrap my head around why people collected stamps either. I think there are probably multiple possible reasons for the disconnect, only one of which is time-related.
(I imagine you could probably distinguish them by asking the person if they understand why people collect Pokemon.)
I think stamp collecting works well with the model of nerdy interests as a massive mind trap.
You get letters, they mostly have boring stamps on them. Once in a while you notice a new or interesting stamp. You start to wonder what other interesting stamps might be out there.
At this point you stand on the precipice of madness. What you _should_ do is think about something else instead, like cars or sex or money. But instead you carefully remove the interesting stamp and put it aside.
Time passes, and you find more stamps. That first interesting stamp is no longer interesting, you've got a dozen of them, plus you've got a couple of really rare ones. The more time you spend thinking about stamps, the more interesting they seem. Maybe instead of waiting for interesting stamps to come in the mail, you could visit a stamp store. Maybe they'd have something really interesting there. Maybe you could own one of every stamp in the world. Maybe you could find a stamp worth millions. Failing that, maybe you can have every Hungarian bird-themed stamp issued between 1976 and 1979 because you've already got twelve of those and you just need four more.
Somehow your brain has pieced together a whole lot of slightly-interesting stuff into a massive obsession.
I think I'm just fundamentally missing the "complete the collection" drive. I enjoy collecting specific things that I like, but I have never ever in my life felt the urge to go out of my way to collect things that I don't specifically like/care about just to complete a set.
I'm very nerdy and diagnosed autistic, so it's not like I'm missing the "get very interested in some obscure topic" capacity - I just don't get the completionist attitude.
I think this has to do with people liking having accomplished something and disliking uncertainty. With completionism you have a definite goal and a plan that will likely achieve it. Whereas if you just do whatever interests you in the moment it can be hard to pinpoint the definite evidence that you didn't just waste time with nothing to show for it.
I think one of the components of a successful hobby is it gives people something to think about unrelated to work and the pressing concerns of life. So having lots of detail and patterns helps with that
Yes, this is the curse of the mildly interesting. If stamps were totally uninteresting then nobody would be obsessed with them. If they were really obviously fascinating then collecting them wouldn't be low-status. But since stamps are just mildly interesting, it gives the nerdy mind _just_ enough to latch onto.
I think it's probably harder to imagine stamp-collecting being fun if you grew up in an internet age where you can do it with google+money, rather than having to search in the real world.
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
Finding meaning through my "role in the tribe" or "daily labor" sounds hellish! I'll take finding meaning through creating and appreciating art (mass-produced or otherwise) and drinking and eating with friends any day.
Summa Theologiae was so obviously written by a nerd, there is no way to deny that. More generally, before general literacy, the people who could read were usually nerds.
My definition would be that nerd is someone who cares about some obscure topic too much. Even when religion was considered the most important and high-status topic, only the nerds wondered how many angels would fit on the tip of the needle. The normies were probably more like "tell me what to say so that I get in Heaven", plus they did what they saw their neighbors doing, and that was it.
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.
The chaff to wheat ratio has definitely increased. You used to be able to sort it by just throwing it up in the air.
There's a lot to be said for curation, but finding curators you trust is still an issue. I guess in some of the discussion above, hipsters are just unpaid curators, but I prefer to trust the professionals.
The professionals have their own disadvantages, though. Each has staked out a slightly different position, and is an expert at making other positions look lame. I once read an expert's critique of some abstract expressionist painter: "He doesn't blow you away with his talent, he. just knocks you flat with his arbitrariness." Devastating.
"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"
On that last bit, have I got news for you about mediaeval mystery plays 😁 Chaucer could include in his "Canterbury Tales" the stock figures of the manipulative, money-hunting purveyor of fake relics and the tales of how everyone knows the friars and monks are banging all the wives of the citizens, as well as the proud bastards (male and female) of the parish priest who may be born out of wedlock but they demand respect due to their father's status.
There was a *lot* more raunchiness and anti-clericalism going on, living side-by-side with fervent devotion to local saints and belief in the intercessory power of the Virgin Mary.
See this 80s version of a mystery play, where there's an entire section about the shepherds keeping watch in the fields for the Nativity, and the long comic interlude about one of them being a sheep-stealer:
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.
I was into Dragonlance books, when they started coming out, after I saw a cousin pick one up at a bookstore. I hadn't read much classic sword-and-sorcery, and had no experience of D&D, so they were an amazing new type of story that I devoured. But eventually I noticed the quality dropping off. :-/ But it taught me some valuable lessons about becoming invested in corporate IP.
IMO... Chronicles, the original 3, were like a novelization of a fun campaign. Legends, the next 3 (also by Weis and Hickman) were the pinnacle, taking a handful of characters, putting them through the wringer, and grappling with big questions like "who are you", "what do you want", "what are you willing to sacrifice to get what you want", and so forth. Tales, the next 3, were a shared-universe collection like "Thieves' World". But after that the quality began to drop off.
Wow, I can't get my head around being around anyone else who'd read it, as a kid. But now that I think about it, that's how things are for the kids these days, for everything.
For me, not reading LotR was never an option. We had my father's old hardback copies with the giant fold-out maps.
As I recall, LOTR was fairly popular when I was a kid-- I'm talking about the 1960s and the Ballentine editions, though I think I'd also seen an Ace cover. When I say popular, it was more like a number of kids had read it, but it wasn't as though everyone had.
I saw Star Wars in a theatre, back when it was Star Wars because there were no other Star Wars movies. I'd heard something about it being good, but no more than that.
This is not as cool as someone who wandered in to a showing only because they wanted to see an Alec Guinness movie.
When the space ship went by overhead and kept going and going, I knew I was seeing something new. I believe it was a big artistic change. I haven't seen anything else as major since, and I'm not expecting to see another.
"When the space ship went by overhead and kept going and going, I knew I was seeing something new."
Yeah, that was *amazing*. I was slightly too old to get into Star Wars since I was in my mid-teens and already a Trekkie by then, but that opening scene was genuinely original. I'd never seen anything like it. For all the flak Lucas took, and for all the mess that the later sequels and Disney's heavy hand made of the entire property, that was something he should get credit for as a real artist.
Agreed, absolutely; but I think he also deserves a lot of credit for his attention to detail. He didn't take the easy way out and make all of his scenes look shiny-clean, like they're set in a clean room at a chip plant. Instead, every surface of every object is worn, rusted, or patched-up; every building looks lived-in, and we see people going about their daily chores -- cooking food, drying clothes, patching droids, whatever. The Empire is a stark exception: every Imperial installation is squeaky-clean, sterile, and outlined in stark black and white -- so the viewer can instinctively understand what kind of an organization they are, in contrast to the ordinary people (whom they oppress). This is the kind of visual storytelling that no longer exists in modern films, IMO.
Yeah. I appreciate how we got to see ordinary people going about their lives, and how all of the "used" stuff hinted at an entire universe that had existed before the movie and would continue to exist afterwards.
I feel like nowadays, when they try differentiating groups, it winds up being like a multi-player video game, where each faction has a Style, and everything about that faction reinforces that Style. And it's lifeless, as if an artist set down a vision at a single point in time, and it didn't exist before or after.
I feel like that was Doug Trumbull who invented that look. He radically changed the way spaceships looked in "2001" (from sleek and shiny to complicated with all the plumbing visible), and it just took over almost immediately.
That is a good point about the spaceships; but Lucas managed to carry over that look into an entire coherent aesthetic that encompasses entire worlds. Or at least cantinas. :-)
Ah, I'd guessed that that you were a few years older than I. I'm fairly sure I didn't see Star Wars in the theater, but it wouldn't have been impossible. We did have early videotapes without the "Episode IV", though. :-)
There was definitely a quality and coolness gap between Star Wars movies and every other sci-fi I'd seen, up until Star Trek II and Blade Runner. Even Star Trek TMP resembled an ungainly hybrid between 2001 and the Buck Rogers movie. There was something different in the sci-fi aesthetic, that I think can be seen in the difference between "Alien" and "Aliens" (putting aside that one is a horror movie and the other is an action movie). If I had to guess, it was something about not just using special effects to look cool or instill "the awe and majesty of space", but using special effects in service of the story. (A lesson I think Hollywood may have to re-learn every time there's a technical advance.)
For me, I think "Pulp Fiction" was another turning point like that, stylistically speaking. And in a way, Jackson's "The Fellowship of the Ring": it wasn't my "perfect" adaptation, but I simply hadn't believed that a movie would be capable of doing it so well. I'd resigned myself to it probably being horrible, but I'd enjoyed the two previous Jackson films I'd seen - "Heavenly Creatures" and "Meet the Feebles", so I knew he had range.
I only saw Star Wars in its first theatrical run because my uncle took my brother and me.
(My parents still haven't seen a single Star War. My dad was able to successfully identify the Millennium Falcon when asked - which puts him ahead of Harrison Ford's wife - but my mom could not.)
I remember being reluctant to go, because "I didn't like war movies". Of course I loved it. Though as a young written SF snob, I never became a true Star Wars fan. (Even if for various reasons I can now tell my Shryiiwook from my Aurabesh.)
I did have friends reading Tolkien when I did: our middle school science teacher knew that we were playing D&D, and recommended it to a bunch of us. It was definitely a small group reading it (and then due to fortuitous timing seeing the Rankin Bass Return of the King on TV and hearing the BBC radio series on NPR) rather than something everyone around knew or cared about. We were well past "Frodo Lives", and long before Peter Jackson.
And I think I'm the only one among us who got deep into the world beyond TLotR itself. Or as deep as you could when the only posthumous Middle Earth publication was The Silmarillion." I promise that knowing the name of Turin Turambar's sword did not gain me status among even my nerdier friends, let alone anyone else.
(Though my last year trick or treating I'm sure I confused a lot of neighbors by announcing I was dressed as Fingolfin.)
“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.)
And where do you think JMS got his references from? There's a ton of Arthurian mythology stuffed into the show, but also little touches like the name "Lorien".
"reading The Silmarillion or watching Babylon 5 is hipsterish"
I resent that implication! I have never in my entire life been anything remotely approaching hipster, and besides those wannabes only got into the HoME after it was cool 😁 And you will tear from my cold, dead hands my devotion to the tragic end of the Rogue Telepaths in the Massive Hairspray Explosion Inferno.
Back when B5 first aired, I tuned into one episode to see what it was about. Season 1, "Believers". It felt like a particularly cheesy ST:TNG episode, and I never bothered watching more. Decades later I watched the full thing with a friend, and it became apparent that I'd tuned in for what I personally think was the single worst episode of the entire show.
That said, in retrospect it had a prophetic quote:
> Doctor Franklin: "You're gonna have to stay in bed for a while. It's gonna be boring, but the station has over a thousand educational and entertainment channels and you can watch -"
> Mother: "No. We have seen some of that material. Those channels demonstrate false belief systems. We do not want our child exposed to inappropriate information."
Though I'd say the resolution of that episode was one of B5's more explicit "We're not Star Trek" moments.
That's somewhat blurred by Trek itself getting somewhat darker since then, starting with B5's reflection and competitor DS9. But the entire main plot up to the climax is very much (and I wouldn't be surprised if that were intentional) a Trek episode, except that no TOS or TNG-era Trek show would have ended like that.
(Most other Trek runs still wouldn't, I think. But Enterprise's execrable "Dear Doctor" is at least in the ballpark.)
Yeah, that's what JMS said in the Lurker's Guide, but I don't see it...
For me the significant parts are that it was a stand-alone episode, with aliens-of-the-week, in a morality play that directly criticizes specific real-world religions, and what I'll call meaningful religion in general. (And the arc B-plot was forgettable.) My general impression of Star Trek is that yes, most of these little morality plays had a happy, tidy resolution, but there were plenty with bittersweet or tragic ends, and plenty where there was no clean end at all. (TNG's "The Wounded" is a good example of that, IMO.) Would you mind going into more detail about how you think "Believers" was different? There seems to be something here that I just don't get.
IIRC, JMS seems to think that "TKO" was the worst episode. I agree that it was weak, but I liked the background it gave on how humans and aliens interacted, and the nuances of humanity's relationships with other alien races who'd been starfaring for longer and had to watch as Earth gained a tiny empire of its own. To each their own, I guess.
After our rational identification figure uses superior science to show the aliens that their superstitions are just that, I don't think a Trek episode (at least in the 20th century) ends with the parents saying "Great, thanks" and then murdering their child.
Trek had plenty of tragedy (City on the Edge of Forever) and moral ambiguity (A Private Little War). And it had rules like the Prime Directive to prevent the heroes from short-circuiting the drama. But when it comes down to it and you show the people that their god is just a computer or that they can't have clean warfare anymore and have to get their hands bloody or make peace, they'll mostly make the right choice.
And in the rare event they make the wrong choice, it's generally not going to be something as visceral as child-murder.
(I don't remember reading that in the Lurker's Guide. But I was on the B5 Usenet group when JMS was there and certainly looked at the Lurker's Guide in the 90s, so it's absolutely possible I got the idea from JMS.)
Perhaps it's that it felt like one of the "this is why we have the Prime Directive" episodes. Franklin committed the original sin of interference, and after that it was always going to end badly, with only the particulars of the tragedy in doubt.
Or maybe the child felt like too much of a cardboard cutout to empathize with, no different from any of the faceless people who die when a ship blows up. Maybe if he'd had more development, and not been ...
Just to check, my read of the story is that the parents talked the child into acquiescing to his own death. Is that your read? (It's been a while since I've seen it.)
I don't think TKO is a great story (I was annoyed at the framing of "the Mutai is for aliens, not Earthers", as if they actually identified generically as "aliens"). But I kind of love it regardless, not least for Soon-Teck Oh's voice as he intones "Into the sands of blood steps [name], BRAAAAVEST of his race!"
And the Ivanova plotline is kind of maudlin and formulaic, and Theodore Bikel plays the rabbi as a stereotype (a 20th century American stereotype!)... and I like it anyway. :-)
I got the impression that it was a sort of hazing ritual, right? New species aren't allowed in until some individual pushes their way in past all the resistance. So my headcanon was that the translation into "alien" was from a word that meant "species who can participate".
And yeah, the Ivanova plotline was by the numbers, but I also liked it anyway. I suppose part of me was hoping for a serious treatment of Jews In Space, but oh well. Maybe there's a sect that's decided that the 20th century was the ideal time to preserve.
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.
"Why are these identities not just 'tastemakers' and 'superfans'?"
For one thing, Amazon's dire attempt at ginning up enthusiasm for the Rings of Power with their very own "superfans" was a hilarious disaster; the only genuine superfan in the bunch was a superfan of Harry Potter and skipped watching Rings of Power when it aired in favour of House of the Dragon 😁
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.
Not to nerdsplain your own culture to you, but it seems to me that Nathan Barley was a (superb) satire of upper-middle-class "new media" types; the show was even based around a thinly-veiled parody of Vice Magazine at its worst. The source material makes this clear:
Appreciation for Pabst Blue Ribbon, meanwhile, is absolutely a Stateside manifestation of lad culture: PBR as a beer offers nothing to reward the epicurean hipster, but it does afford an ironic affectation of authenticity.
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.
The hint to OCD is valuable. Badly OC people are too busy with basic stuff to become nerdy, but a trace of those traits may well contribute to nerdicity (nerdism?)
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.
No nerd has to be beaten up by jocks if he chooses his topics wisely and seriously digs into them. There even is a guy calling himself "karate nerd" on youtube.
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.
There are no real beer nerds, I agree with you here. Serious beer drinkers may prefer different flavors, but the main aspects are availability and toxicity. The latter has two aspects. The alcohol content and the hangover potential.
Disagree on the lack of beer nerds. Watch any Michael Jackson video (not that one, the other one) for instance to see what beer nerdism is like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x8lXo5xjoQ
And that's from the 1980s when the beer scene was very different indeed. Nowadays there's a microbrewery in every disused sewing machine factory in the world, and American beer can actually be good.
The Pabst thing was never a beer nerd thing, it was an "irony" thing. Some hipsters started drinking the lowest-status beer they could think of because irony and then they decided they actually liked it (because these were people who never really liked beer to begin with).
That Michael Jackson did write about whisky before he got into beers, didn't he? Like with wine connaisseurs I doubt the honesty of people drinking like that. As far as nerd is an acronym for "not emotionally reacting dude" those academic-aleck drinkers who like to talk enthusiastically about nuances of taste are not nerds. If nerd means something else to you, it's fine by me.
"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.)
According to Wookieepedia, the word Shyriiwook itself is a Basic* transliteration of Wookiee growls. Those growls translate to "tongue of the tree people," which is what actual Wookiees call their language.
*Basic is the common tongue of the Republic and the language spoken by most humans, near-humans, and core worlders. Whenever we hear people in Star Wars speaking "English" (or whatever language you happen to be watching the movies in), they're actually speaking the Galactic Standard dialect of Basic.
Does this imply that "Shyrii-" is the one true Basic word we know, since all other Basic words have been translated into English? Why would Shyrii- be the only Basic word left untranslated?
Wouldn't this imply that "Wookie" just means "person" in Basic? Isn't it weird that most Galactic citizens are calling this one alien race "People"?
It seems that "Wookiee" (or to be more specific, whatever growl is onomatopoeically transliterated into Basic as "Wookiee") means person in Shyriiwook, not in Basic. It makes perfect sense that Wookiees would call their own species "people," since the word probably originated before they had contact with Humans and other races.
Was there an in-universe explanation for why the Imperials had British accents and everyone else mostly had American? I could see a core-vs-colonies distinction, but that didn't always match the backgrounds of various characters...
That upper class British accent was the accent of the mostly-human aristocracy of the Core Worlds, which is why it was very common among Imperials. Aliens, humans from the rim worlds, and lower class Core Worlders all had different accents. (This was often some type of American accent, though the Twi'leks were given French accents in the Clone Wars show, and plenty of aliens have weird-sounding accents that are hard to place.)
Interesting, Grand Moff Tarkin from A New Hope was from the Outer Rim world of Eriadu, and the accent there was said to be "more Core than Core," which might explain why his British accent was especially thick - it's literally a form of cultural overcompensation.
I have personally been inside an apartment in which an entire wall of the living room was taken up by a glass display case for storing two of the tenants' shared Funko Pop collection. At a cursory glance, I'd estimate the total value in the high four figures. "Funko Pop collection" is not just a meme with no basis in fact, there are really people like this.
I worked at Target in high school, maybe 5 or 6 years ago now. When we got a new Funko pop in that people knew was about to come out, you would often notice a few people hanging around the shelves so they could be there the moment we put it out. We were specifically instructed not to confirm we had it in the store. So yeah, they exist.
I had never heard of Funko Pops Until I read the comments here. I had to Google it, and the second non-advert hit was a GameStop link. This strikes me as being profoundly meaningful, though I have not yet discerned the actual meaning.
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.
Right, and I don't think Scott is trying to start a beef. This piece read as a friendly disagreement with Sam's piece. When Scott is actually angry about something, it's hard to miss.
"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."
I don't know exactly where I fit into Mr. Kriss' Linnaean classification, but I am unabashed that an early 00s joke blog written in the parlance of Geoffrey Chaucer was something I found genuinely funny and enjoyable (especially when someone in the comments would chime in with Real Old Anglo-Saxon and not this fancy Frenchified Norman-English of today, Chaucer!).
Here, have a bit from Chesterton's biography of Chaucer that has always tickled me, about the more severe and grave poet Gower and his attitude:
"Gower was thoroughly friendly; entirely affable. He says that Chaucer is his poet; but he also says that Chaucer is his disciple and even 'his own clerk', who has taken down many of his thoughts, perhaps in somewhat lighter language. And in his doubtless sincere compliment to Chaucer's verse, we have exactly the same suggestion as that made by many graver poets about Shakespeare and his warbling of wood-notes:
Of dytees and of songes glade
The whiche he for my sake made.
One would not say that the graver poets disapprove of cheerfulness in the minor poets; but they mention it. Chaucer, like Matthew Arnold in Max's caricature, was not at all times wholly serious. "
"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.
Yeah that one's weird. All the comp sci nerds I knew in the 80s and 90s loathed the man as an unimaginative troglodyte. They never stopped requoting his famous (although he denies ever saying it) statement that "640k ought to be enough for anybody." Maybe he wins through just being the last man standing, now that Jobs is long dead, Woz and Linus aren't showmen, and RMS needs a shower and shave.
> They never stopped requoting his famous (although he denies ever saying it) statement that "640k ought to be enough for anybody."
Meh. That's not honestly all that bad; IBM's Thomas Watson once said that there was a market for "maybe five computers" in the entire world. Thinking through the ramifications of exponential growth is hard and always has been.
The more serious objection to Gates has always been that he's a thug and a bully. His entire career was built on plagiarizing other people's/business' ideas and then driving them out of business with legal trickery and flashy marketing.
Microsoft started out with a BASIC implementation (created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, re-implemented by Bill Gates) and a CP/M knockoff they called MS-DOS. When the creator of CP/M happened to be unavailable on the day IBM came calling, Microsoft presented their version as an operating system for the PC. When IBM clones started coming out and people started developing MS-DOS alternatives, Microsoft set up blatantly illegal licensing restrictions with hardware OEMs that made it effectively impossible for end-users to buy a PC with anything but MS-DOS preinstalled.
When Apple revolutionized the world of operating systems with the Mac, Microsoft ripped off their interface and very carefully stayed *just* on the right side of copyright law so they could get the inevitable lawsuit shut down. And then they deployed the "AARD Code" to lie to users and make them think that if they were using anything other than MS-DOS, it would cause Windows to break, further undermining the competition.
They released Visual Basic, and it did OK until Borland came out with Delphi and started blowing them away at every turn. So they kneecapped Borland by hiring the guy behind Delphi out from under them and having him create their own knockoff version rewritten to look like Java rather than Pascal. Netscape Navigator was taking the world of web browsers by storm, so they bought an inferior browser called Spyglass that no one was using, rebranded it as "Microsoft Internet Explorer," and started giving it away to squeeze Netscape out of the market.
And so on and so forth. The entire history of Bill Gates' Microsoft is that same story over and over: rip off other people's work, use underhanded and often illegal tricks to destroy the competition, do anything and everything except actually create good software. It wasn't until Gates stepped down as CEO that the company started actually innovating.
Well, and there was the whole SCO fiasco. But what I meant was just that the idea that MSFT had been innovative and forward-thinking under Gates's leadership -- rather than reactive, clumsy, and much better at PR and marketing than technical innovation -- was for most of those people I knew laughable. So calling him an uber-nerd would be (for them) an insult to genuine nerds.
'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.
Exactly! Kriss is clueless. If you want to see a true nerd, go to a math conference. The people you see there are all nerds to some extent, but the uber-nerd is the person who is sitting alone at lunch, unable even to make small-talk with the other nerds.
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.
Yes -- I have another comment above mentioning this. And its associated trait, that it desexualizes the people interested in these things, because adults want to have sex with adults.
Ah, that's what I get for not reading all the comments.
Then again, reading all the comments often is a powerful impediment against posting your own take, since you'll be guaranteed to find someone said the same anyway.
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.
In the 1970s there was a major nerd preoccupation with Lord of the Rings and Hobbitry of various kinds, with people actually trying to learn Elvish or some other language Tolkein had invented. But I see you mentioned that in passing. There were also Dungeon and Dragon nerds (still are probably).
For many decades prior to that there were train spotters and even bus spotters. In Thomas Hughes's novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, set in the 1830s, I think he mentions stagecoach spotters, hanging around near inns from where the coaches arrived and set off each day.
Edit: Oh and let's not forget twitchers, obsessive bird watchers! They've always been around. Perhaps any kind of "spotter" is driven by the same instinct that prompted our hunter distant ancestors to take a keen interest in the habits and movements of large edible animals!
You had writers like Lord Dunsany who created the world of "Pegāna, with its own gods, history and geography" and whose Dreamlands so heavily influenced Lovecraft; Lovecraft himself, with his Mythos (scattered and fragmentary as it is); William Morris and his mediaeval fantasy lands and others.
Kriss' article has helped me understand why I could never get into James Branch Cabell and his writing. "Jurgen" was (is?) a critical darling, but it's hipster writing; I don't say Cabell smirks, but you can tell that on the side of his face turned away from you, there's a smile curling up the corner of his lip.
Tolkien, on the other hand, is a nerd. ONE OF US, ONE OF US! In a letter to his son Christopher he explains:
"An enquirer (among many) asked what the L.R. was all about, and whether it was an 'allegory'. And I said it was an effort to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn' omentieimo, and that the phase long antedated the book."
Tolkien may not be a Great Writer in the literary sense (he's never going to be published in the likes of Granta, and his poetry extremely rarely rises above the level of competent verse), but he's not nodding and winking at us (or rather, the self-declared sophisticates) like Cabell is.
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.
> If your interest is in .. English royal succession, you're a geek about that subject.
> Your knowledge will never be applied to real life.
I take your general point, but that particular example has been applied successfully several times by me in real life, helping to win prizes for our quiz night team! Same applies to US presidents, state capitals, country flags. Nerdy trivia like that can reap kudos and at times physical rewards! But I draw the line at trying to stuff my head full of useless and boring trivia about sport.
I don't think "I won a trivia prize" counts as a real-life application. Trivia is, by definition, knowledge for its own sake. I could go to a weekly sportsbar trivia night and make use of useless sports knowledge to win prizes. Unless I'm a player or team manager (or involved in the plot of Moneyball) my knowledge will not be practically useful at solving any real-world problems.
The question of knowing stuff for its own sake reminds me of an old anecdote (joke? paradox?) about a club calling itself "The Useless Information Society." To join, you had to share a piece of information that was truly useless. But if the information allows you to join the club, it's not useless after all....
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.
That's how uncharitable generalizations work. Uncharitable generalizations that match how people think of themselves would be charitable generalizations.
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
Hi Sam, this is the first exposure I've had to your writing, and I'm curious about it. Any comments on Freddie's characterization of your style here? Anything you think a potential new reader should know to read your stuff in the manner it's intended to be read?
i'm afraid i can't answer this, since if freddie's account were accurate, then talking too much about it would ruin the effect, and if it weren't accurate, then insisting that i genuinely mean everything i write would be to protest too much. i can say that the way my stuff is intended to be read is however you want. i just write things down; how people receive them is entirely up to them
"This space, I think, is made up of many people who are natural literalists."
That's true, I'm as concretely literal as a rock to the head, which complicates my life at times. But I think this article has spurred a lot of interesting discussion on here, and we're not *all* thumbing our noses at Mr. Kriss.
And besides, where else am I going to find discussion ranging from Lord Gro to the wonders of a good axe collection? Where else makes me go MY PEOPLE, MY TRIBE, MY ILK?
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.
"“You are quite right. And yet the thing is very simple.”
“They always are — when you know,” soliloquized the other. “That’s what makes them so confoundedly difficult when you don’t.”
“Here is this one then. In Padua, which seems to be regaining its old reputation as the birthplace of spurious antiques, by the way, there lives an ingenious craftsman named Pietro Stelli. This simple soul, who possesses a talent not inferior to that of Cavino at his best, has for many years turned his hand to the not unprofitable occupation of forging rare Greek and Roman coins. As a collector and student of certain Greek colonials and a specialist in forgeries I have been familiar with Stelli’s workmanship for years. Latterly he seems to have come under the influence of an international crook called — at the moment — Dompierre, who soon saw a way of utilizing Stelli’s genius on a royal scale. Helene Brunesi, who in private life is — and really is, I believe —Madame Dompierre, readily lent her services to the enterprise.”
“Quite so,” nodded Mr Carlyle, as his host paused.
“You see the whole sequence, of course?”
“Not exactly — not in detail,” confessed Mr Carlyle.
“Dompierre’s idea was to gain access to some of the most celebrated cabinets of Europe and substitute Stelli’s fabrications for the genuine coins. The princely collection of rarities that he would thus amass might be difficult to dispose of safely but I have no doubt that he had matured his plans. Helene, in the person of Nina Brun, an Anglicised French parlourmaid — a part which she fills to perfection — was to obtain wax impressions of the most valuable pieces and to make the exchange when the counterfeits reached her. In this way it was obviously hoped that the fraud would not come to light until long after the real coins had been sold, and I gather that she has already done her work successfully in several houses. Then, impressed by her excellent references and capable manner, my housekeeper engaged her, and for a few weeks she went about her duties here. It was fatal to this detail of the scheme, however, that I have the misfortune to be blind. I am told that Helene has so innocently angelic a face as to disarm suspicion, but I was incapable of being impressed and that good material was thrown away. But one morning my material fingers — which, of course, knew nothing of Helene’s angelic face —discovered an unfamiliar touch about the surface of my favourite Euclideas, and, although there was doubtless nothing to be seen, my critical sense of smell reported that wax had been recently pressed against it. I began to make discreet inquiries and in the meantime my cabinets went to the local bank for safety. Helene countered by receiving a telegram from Angiers, calling her to the death-bed of her aged mother. The aged mother succumbed; duty compelled Helene to remain at the side of her stricken patriarchal father, and doubtless The Turrets was written off the syndicate’s operations as a bad debt.”
“Very interesting,” admitted Mr Carlyle; “but at the risk of seeming obtuse” — his manner had become delicately chastened —“I must say that I fail to trace the inevitable connexion between Nina Brun and this particular forgery — assuming that it is a forgery.”
“Set your mind at rest about that, Louis,” replied Carrados. “It is a forgery, and it is a forgery that none but Pietro Stelli could have achieved. That is the essential connexion. Of course, there are accessories. A private detective coming urgently to see me with a notable tetradrachm in his pocket, which he announces to be the clue to a remarkable fraud — well, really, Louis, one scarcely needs to be blind to see through that.”
“And Lord Seastoke? I suppose you happened to discover that Nina Brun had gone there?”
“No, I cannot claim to have discovered that, or I should certainly have warned him at once when I found out — only recently — about the gang. As a matter of fact, the last information I had of Lord Seastoke was a line in yesterday’s Morning Post to the effect that he was still at Cairo. But many of these pieces ——” He brushed his finger almost lovingly across the vivid chariot race that embellished the reverse of the coin, and broke off to remark: “You really ought to take up the subject, Louis. You have no idea how useful it might prove to you some day.”
“I really think I must,” replied Carlyle grimly. “Two hundred and fifty pounds the original of this cost, I believe.”
“Cheap, too; it would make five hundred pounds in New York to-day. As I was saying, many are literally unique. This gem by Kimon is — here is his signature, you see; Peter is particularly good at lettering — and as I handled the genuine tetradrachm about two years ago, when Lord Seastoke exhibited it at a meeting of our society in Albemarle Street, there is nothing at all wonderful in my being able to fix the locale of your mystery. Indeed, I feel that I ought to apologize for it all being so simple.”"
I'm glad you like his writing! He's really famous because of his Kai Lung stories, which are fake-Chinese fables recited by a wandering storyteller named Kai Lung. I first encountered mentions of them as quoted in Dorothy Sayers' detective stories, and later encountered Max Carrados as one of the many detectives who were popular around the same time as Sherlock Holmes, overlapping the late Victorian to Edwardian periods.
I tried the Kai Lung stories and although I have a tolerance for that style, I just could not get on with it. It's better in small doses than in entire stories. Example:
""It has been said there are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice on a dark night".
He had an interesting life, though, and it really was the creation of this character that launched his career:
You might also be interested in the anthology series "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" by Hugh Greene, who edited collections of detective stories which were later made into a British TV series:
I enjoyed them; some of the characters are more villainous than heroic, such as Arthur Morrison's Horace Dorrington. Or Grant Allen's Colonel Clay, a gentleman rogue who often has runs-in with a South African millionaire and successfully swindles him (and the guy does deserve it, more or less, because it's the same bait all con men use: appeal to the greed and let the pigeon tumble into the trap of their own accord).
There are also the Raffles stories by E. W. Hornung, brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle, about a criminal partnership (criminal in many senses, as they are pretty much gay, if not overtly presented as such). They're good stories, but they're also fascinating in social commentary; Raffles' plans often go astray and while that might be the conventional need of an author to show that "crime does not pay", it also is meta in a way - it undercuts the main character as someone who is not *quite* as smart as he thinks he is. Raffles has one main gimmick that he relies on heavily - he's a gentleman who plays amateur cricket, so no-one (especially those of his own class) would ever suspect him of being a thief. And it works - until he runs into a Scottish policeman who doesn't care a straw about social niceties but goes where the evidence leads, as well as the other members of the criminal classes who aren't as stupid as he assumes and can figure out what his real identity is.
So, yeah - I don't know if it's hipster or just tragically obscure, but thank the second-hand bookshops of my youth for getting me into Golden Age detective fiction!
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.
Is most of the time they spend being Medieval enthusiasts in a social group context, or do they do a lot of independent nerding and only an occasional gathering?
Nerd hobbies are the hobbies that people without normal social skills (nerds) tend to do, rather than being unpopular things that turn normal well-adjusted people into nerds for liking them (as was the hypothesis in the blogs). There are selection effects, but the main reason the nerd hobbies are nerdy (done mostly by nerds) is that they can be effectively pursued alone reading books and they are escapist rather than directly relevant to real life.
There are a bunch of craft projects people do at home and then bring to meetings, but mostly people seem to go to hang out with friends, and certainly nobody's practicing fencing alone. Some families also use the organization as something for their kids to be involved in as well.
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?
Sports fan nerds: The Jewish kid with a million baseball cards, attending games filling out scoresheets, (eventually sports journalists/actuaries).
Sports fan jocks: The kids who played baseball and were athletic/popular and eventually play beer league softball and coach youth sports.
Sports fans normies: Normies who latch onto sports because it is a big deal at their school and they don't have much personal identity (Bob at work who talks about baseball at the water cooler but doesn't seem to understand much of it, and who in the 80s/90s watch 50 baseball games a year because he doesn't have much of a personality or interests and it is what is on).
Hmm I guess I'm closest to the sports fan jock, but my jockish part has nothing to do with the sports fan part. Sports is totally orthogonal to my nerd axis. Sports is totally an emotional ride. My team playing against this other team, and I don't know the outcome. I need to write a post; Happiness is a .500 sports team. (that squeaks into the playoffs.)
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.
Interesting framing! I wonder if the death of hipsters has led to the decrease in revolutionary art. It seems really unlikely to me that we’re just running up against the limits of what looks/tastes/sounds good, that we’ve found all the degrees of freedom left to vary seems like a very strong claim.
Or maybe the death of revolutionary art has led to a decrease in hipsters, and the death of revolutionary art was caused by decreasing slack for creators? That doesn’t seem to fit, I’m pretty sure creators nowadays have far greater slack than previously.
Also a note: I do think that the vlog format should count as a revolutionary new genera. I wonder who first found someone doing a vlog and popularized it. Maybe they were the last hipster.
In the 19th and early 20th Centuries artists would write manifestos and get into fistfights about the meaning and purpose of Art. You don't see that behavior anymore!
Likewise with music. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring caused a riot the first time it was performed. Now if we don't like the music we'd just sneak out at the intermission. And it's hard for parents to wince at their children's choice of music nowadays since parents grew up on the music that their kids are listening to.
Political theory hasn't evolved much since the early 20th Century, either. We're stuck with a bipolar spectrum of choices between left-leaning (with Marxism on the far left) and right-leaning (with Facism on the far right)—with anarchism is a third choice. Why can't there be different political models than we have today? I can't think of any other way to organize things, though. But that may be a failure of my imagination.
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.
A fun example of what you're talking about, with content that rewards the nerds: There's a puzzle in the DLC package for Horizon: Forbidden West which just came out a week or so ago. You encounter a set of strikable bells. If you're the sort of person that actually listens to the soundtrack of the game, you may notice that the minor scale the bells make up is suitable for playing the main character's theme, and doing so unlocks a chest with a substantial chunk of crafting resources.
The devs here have correctly matched their product to its audience -- they put this puzzle _in the DLC_, which is only going to get downloaded by people who are pretty intense fans of the game. If they'd put it in the main game, a lot fewer of the players encountering it would've had any sense what to do with it.
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.
"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."
This was my first reaction too. I've sometimes seen people describe tech wizards as nerds, but never before in my life seen anybody call a cheeto-impregnated collectible card game/warham man a geek.
Interesting reactions! With such a range of conflicting intuitions there may be some dialect-like regional / generational variation at work here. My (Midwestern, Boomer) high school math teacher liked to assert that "geek" meant someone with both technical and social skills, "nerd" meant someone with technical skills only, and "dork" meant someone with neither-- not quite the same definition, but directionally similar.
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.
Except computer nerds, space nerds, science nerds, etc. are attracted to things which are not inherently participatory, and indeed are often seen as very solitary.
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.
"Simple: Fans are obsessed with something popular[;] Nerds and geeks are distinguished by liking *unpopular* things."
Spot on IMO. Coin collecting is actually a great example of this: it used to be a rich-guy hobby, your Vanderbilts and Rockefellers would try to dunk on each other by having the largest and best-condition collection of pre-1800 American coins or whatever, just as they did with their art collections. For complex social reasons art retained its cachet and coins didn't; now Bezos and Musk try to dunk on each other with space programs instead, and coins are dork stuff for nerds. (Early colonial silver and pewter had a similar trajectory IIRC.)
"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.
They are, but there has always been sports fans who are nerds. I think the culture among fans and managers shifted at similar times because of the winning, but even if you don't, there were always stereotypical nerd fans (especially in baseball)
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.
"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"
In the pre-widespread Internet times, in the UK, the term for this was "anorak" from the item of clothing such enthusiasts would wear, because of standing on cold and windy and rainy stations waiting for the trains to pass by:
"The first use of the term to describe an obsessive fan has been credited to the radio presenter Andy Archer, who used the term in the early 1970s for fans of offshore radio, who would charter boats to come out to sea to visit the radio ships.
In 1983, the first edition of the Anoraks UK Weekly Report was published, featuring news of pirate radio broadcasts. In 1984 the Observer newspaper used the term as a metonym for the prototype group interested in detailed trivia, the trainspotters, as members of this group often wore unfashionable but warm cagoules or parkas called "anoraks" when standing for hours on station platforms or along railway tracks, noting down details of passing trains."
Well, I like this a lot better. I'm dismayed by how many definitions above of "nerd" start with being out of shape, unathletic, socially awkward, or alone. I mean, I considered myself a "nerd' in high school because I liked math and science, did well enough in them to get 5s on the relevant AP Exams, liked computers and radio, read "Scientific American", watched "Star Trek", and speculated about black holes. But I was none of the first four things! I was pretty fit for a kid, ran track, wasn't any more socially awkward than average. I'm kind of horrified that I might be thrown out of the Nerd Club just because I had a date to the prom and could run a 5:30 mile.
My very belated comment is that I found the definition of nerd is the original Kriss piece almost incomprehensible. Nerd meant very smart, particularly in math and science, and therefore also liking fiction set in the science world (albeit both Star Trek and Star Wars are very far from what they used to call hard sf). No one is a nerd for K-pop, to take a very strange example from Kriss.
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
Also while the algorithm will recommend "How to clean an oven quick and easy" because it knows I'll click it, it's my hipster friend who'll send me "This house has people in it" or "Heck" or "My house walk-through" or any of the artsy things he knows I'll enjoy a lot more.
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.
That's sounds to me more like a "fan?" Do you take "nerd" to be a synonym for "fan?"
A nerd is just a fan of above average obsessiveness. Or perhaps a fan who builds an identity around their fandom. If you watch the game on a Sunday and maybe go in person once or twice a year and check the scores on Monday, you’re a fan. If you have season tickets and show up every week in costume to tailgate for three hours, you’re a nerd.
Disagree that a nerd is just a particularly obsessive fan of anything: there is definitely a component of bad taste/low status/generally perceived uncoolness of the thing you care about that's required to make you a nerd. Maybe someone who cares passionately about their sports team or their favorite rapper is a *stan*, but not a *nerd*.
Being overly obsessed with something is itself uncool.
And you can definitely be a nerd about things that are cool - Star Wars is cool now, and yet Star Wars nerds are a thing (in fact they get dumped on in popular media for being too critical of perceived flaws in new Star Wars). On the flip side, I don’t think people think “guy who has memorized the stats of everyone on the 1995 Dodgers” is in any way “cool”. He’s a nerd.
That said I think there is something to the idea that being obsessed with something perceived as “high class” would not make you a nerd.
Perhaps a better way to put it would be that a nerd is someone who obsessively engages with low or middle brow things as if they are high brow.
Counterpoint: 'math nerds' are a common type of nerd, but mathematics is relatively 'high-class' I would think (though it's pretty un-cool).
High school math is not high-class. Being a mathematician / college professor might be.
"Being overly obsessed with something is itself uncool."
And you can see this in action in online fandom spaces, particularly old-school fandom message boards, where there's a divide between the unselfconsciously obsessed, and the very self-conscious who compete amongst themselves over who can most effectively dunk on the obsessed and thus have higher status.
(The irony of trying to appear unobsessed by relentlessly dunking on people online is lost on everyone involved.)
People obsess over whatever they like and got branded nerds if that thing is currently uncool. It's not that they're looking for something uncool to like on purpose. The people who don't stop liking things they enjoy after learning it's low status might be a distinct group, but this behaviour is not at all mysterious.
All this is so different from when I was a kid. I was a nerd because I was intellectually curious, bad at and disinterested in sports, socially awkward, and had a computer hobby (owning hardware C64 ->8088 ->286, writing programs in Basic, being a BBS SysOp). Cultural interests were irrelevant to my nerd status.
You’re right. The article in question here is using “nerd” where I would say “geek” is the appropriate term. But I’m using them interchangeably here since our host is doing so.
You were a nerd but not a geek.
When I was a kid, "nerd" was a Happy Days reference, and using "geek" meant you listened to Dr. Demento. There was no need for any special term for "computer hobbiest", and I don't even remember if there was jargon generally characterizing people dedicated to specific hobbies or genres of fiction.
Ditto
Theory: If you are talking about a man, and you judge him to be sexually successful, he's not a nerd. In particular, most "nerd" interests are coded to some degree as child's interests, and adult women don't want to have sex with children.
There's definitely an element of "nerd" that implies that the person is pursuing their obsession despite that other people - especially women - think less of them for it.
No, football fans, even the obsessive ones, are categorically not 'nerds'. People who obsess over football stats in a nerdy way are not obsessive football fans, though. They're not the sort of people, typically, who build their identity around a football team etc.
Then where do you think “Superfan” fits in the hipster-nerd model?
It's difficult. I was quite interested in not computers, exactly, but computer languages. To anyone who wasn't in the field, this would be incomprehensible. (Would have been?) But I was called a "computer nerd", a "nerd", and a "geek". Now a geek used to be someone in the carnival sideshow who was paid to do something repulsive, like eat a raw chicken. I don't know the history of nerd. And I have no theory at all as to what "hipster" means, but a quick search seems to sort of agree with the post.
Fan is short or "fanatic", which once just meant insane.
I don't think the justifications for the usage can be correct. I think they describe proper subsets of the folks to whom the term is applied to. The usages sound useful, but you're going to need to define them each time you use them if you want to be properly understood.
I think that, unlike an average fan, a nerd spends a lot of time on studying the subject of his obsession. Anyone can watch the LotR trilogy; but a Tolkien nerd would've read all the books, committed the genealogies to memory, and learned to speak Sindarin and Quenya.
I agree. I'm definitely a nerd around computers, but it's because I genuinely enjoy thinking about and working with them, not because I want other people to identify me as a computer person. Maybe there's some evo psych explanation for the desire that drives my behavior, like wanting to appear useful to my tribe, but that's like saying "she had sex with him because she thought he had good genes" rather than "he was attractive"
Yes, this was my feeling. Most nerds I've known, by the extrinsic definition Scott uses here of someone who gets really deeply into the esoteric lore of whatever, aren't doing it for social signalling purposes; they're doing it because they really like the thing. Indeed, their eagerness to talk about the thing is traditionally socially detrimental unless they find someone similarly keen. See also Shadow One-Boxing https://shadowoneboxing.wordpress.com/2023/03/05/geeking-out-about-your-interests/ .
Someone like Hanson might argue that the calculation is not consciously accessible but still takes place somewhere.
It's possible, but I think that other behaviors associated with nerds (e.g. low social perception, formation of nerd communities) are opposite what I would expect if this theory was correct.
Nerds are deeply into things that are uncool, because they like them enough not to care (frequently can't help themselves), and also because there's an identify there. You can haggle over what's uncool, but there are all sorts of things that seem uncool to most, things that have the potential to swing to cooldom, etc. I say this as someone who got my first D&D set in 78 or so, but wasn't overly into D&D, despite having every TSR product (because I had other interests like music, computers, girls, etc.). Note you need the interplay between deeply into, to the extent that's your identify, and uncool (even if only somewhat uncool, you can be so deeply into something somewhat relatively OK/cool-adjacent (and if you're being honest, stories about space wizards and superheroes aren't cool, even if they create good screen spectacle)).
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.)
Tolkien might be overrated, but his work is still pretty good in an absolute sense.
"The Hobbit" was an excellent children's story (for the proper children). "The Lord of the Rings" is a truly classic work of fantasy. "The Simarillion", however, was not nearly of the same quality. It was important back story and enriched "The Lord of the Rings", but on second reading it left a bad taste in my mouth. I think it was the metaphysics. There are may others that are a lot worse, but that was foul. Everybody was doomed because some guy centuries ago made a stupid, not even evil, statement. (The evil actions that follow are claimed to be caused by the statement.) It's "the sins of the fathers" writ large, exaggerated, and not terminated after the 7th generation.
I tried reading the Simarillion, but never finished the slog. The more popular works of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings are indeed better.
I think we should judge artists by their best work, not by the average or even worst work. As we can safely ignore them as an audience.
"Everybody was doomed because some guy centuries ago made a stupid, not even evil, statement. (The evil actions that follow are claimed to be caused by the statement.)"
Do you mean Feanor and his rebellion? What doomed him was (1) his pride and (2) the oath he swore and made his children swear. When you invoke God to witness that you and yours will take back your stolen jewels even if you have to fight everyone in the world up to and including the gods, then that oath will make you stick to it, even if you want to stop.
The first fruits of Feanor's insane pride was the First Kin-Slaying, and the subsequent other kin-slayings were the harvest reaped from the seeds sown. Even when the last survivors, Maedhros and Maglor, wanted to give up, they couldn't; the oath drove them. And even though they did eventually get back the Silmarils, they couldn't keep them because all the blood they had shed in the pursuit of what Feanor bound them to do had made them unworthy.
The "Silmarillion" is depressing if you look at it in one way, but it is a genuine pagan metaphysics. Words have real power, and actions have consequences down the generations. You can be doomed by something some guy centuries ago said or did. The tale of Kullvero, which is one of Tolkien's inspirations for the Children of Hurin, isn't a chuckle-fest by any means:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullervo
Think of Oedipus and the trap he was ensnared in, literally from birth, and how the attempts to avoid the prophecy only served to make it happen. Pagan metaphysics of the Northern variety are particularly grim and harsh.
I want to stick up for Feanor a little. Yes, the kin-slaying was inexcusable; but recall that his initial speech to the Elves in Valinor was so powerful that even Manwe's messenger was forced to step aside to let Feanor pass. And his speech had power because it was *true*. The Elves were not put on Arda to just sit there in Valinor doing nothing. They had their own work to do, and Manwe was directly preventing them from doing that work; he was forcing them to act against their nature in a foolish attempt to secure their safety. As Feanor pointed out, a gilded cage is still a cage. And, unlike Manwe, Feanor was calling for volunteers, not conscripts.
Feanor's downfall was caused by his blind zeal and rage, not by his desire for freedom of choice. In fact, I would argue that if Feanor had lost his argument, and the Elves stayed in Valinor forever, then Arda would've been lost to Melkor -- also forever.
Feanor did have virtues, and part of what he said was true - *but* his motives were corrupted, he had already been influenced by Melkor (e.g. drawing his sword on Fingolfin because he did believe he was trying to supplant him and because of a mix of issues around his mother and father) and he was driving on out of pride, grief, anger, and vanity.
The Valar did not handle things well, but on the other hand - Manwe is the rightful King of Arda. He can issue orders to Feanor by virtue of that authority.
Feanor refused to heed any advice, and when you have Namo telling you "Look, this is not going to end well" then you should listen. But he wouldn't, because of his own blindness. And the first act he does is to shed blood by attacking the Teleri when they wouldn't give up their ships. His second act, when he arrives in Middle-earth, is to burn the ships and ignore the Noldor still following behind and waiting for those ships to bring then over to Middle-earth.
He manages to get himself killed in (what amounts to) half an hour after arriving in Middle-earth, again because of his hubris. I agree that the Valar protected the Elves in Valinor, and indeed over-protected them, so he had no real idea of what he was going up against when he challenged Melkor, but ultimately Feanor both claimed that he was being enchained and enslaved and wanted to be free, and put chains on his own sons by making them swear the Oath.
I have some sympathy for him, but not very much. I know there are those totally devoted to the Feanorians, but really the best you can say is "And some of them are not as murderously psychopathic as the rest of them".
Turin is similar, in a way, because again his own pride and grief drives him onward to disastrous choices, but he has the excuse that Morgoth cursed his entire family.
In the end, it comes down to "who's your favourite Elf?" and I am a complete Finrod stan (so I can't forgive Rings of Power for what they did to his character) 😁
> The Valar did not handle things well, but on the other hand - Manwe is the rightful King of Arda.
He is the rightful king, yes, but that's the problem with monarchy: when your leadership is utterly incompetent, your only option is revolution. This is the path that Feanor took (yes, Ulmo managed to sneak a few positive developments under the radar, but Ulmo is a Vala himself, he has options that Feanor did not). And I would argue that Manwe started out as a moderately competent by-the-book bureaucrat, and then fell to pieces completely once Melkor rewrote the book. There's a reason that the Elves revere Varda far above Manwe; she did more for them (and for Middle-Earth) than he ever did.
Yes, Feanor refuses to take advice, but can you really blame him ? Would *you* take advice from your jailers ? Perhaps he would've been content to live in Valinor and practice his craft; but Manwe gives him zero reasons to trust his kingly authority -- by making it very clear that, to Manwe, Feanor and all the Elves are subjects (or even slaves) whose duty is to obey, not to think.
That said, yes, Feanor turns into a murderhobo psychopath the instant he leaves Valinor. But personally, I have always felt that Feanor's face-heel-turn was too abrupt, from the storytelling point of view. I suppose you could argue that the oath he took instantly corrupted him, but this feels like a bit of a magical cop-out (and is never explicitly stated). Don't get me wrong, I think that Feanor would've gone full psycho *eventually* (he sadly is that kind of guy); I just find it difficult to believe that his fall was as abrupt as the official chronicles say...
I should also add that I haven't watched *Rings of Power*, nor am I planning on ever watching it. A pox upon them !
Simarillion was just boring.
Overrated compared to what? They're definitely better than average fantasy, and better than average prestigious award-winning "literary fiction". They're more popular than Tolstoy or Dickens, but I don't think that many people who actually read those claim that they're in the same "weight class".
This is exactly the right question, and Matthias was also alluding to it. Tolkien, (like football, automotive racing, or netflix shows about competitive baking) is the entertainment version of something else (myth, war, bread, whatever). Entertainment is inherently overrated, arguably inherently even bad (overrated and bad both in comparison with something more genuine).
The nerd of whatever kind likes entertainments. Scott calls them 'cultural products', which is the over-category. I'm not disagreeing with him, I'm uniting his point with Sam's.
Are you saying that football is overrated and bad compared to war ???????
The US Army has a better historical win-loss record than the Cleveland Browns, so....
Football's ratings are higher by how many OOM? Nobody has to claim that war is good to note that football is vastly more overrated, at least these days. Presumably there was a crossover point when sport was still recognized to be a safe-to-use-on-your-own-team training for war and also war was rated highly (glorious, etc).
I don't think that entertainment is inherently bad, just like I don't think that junk food is inherently bad. They're contingently bad, exploits found out by adverse optimization, implicit in the design of humans. Of course, if we'll ever become able to truly redesign humans, it's unclear where the objective vision of "perfect" design comes from, or even whether that concept makes sense at all.
I think this gets to an important distinction and I think food is the right analogy. Whether or not a food is good or bad is an incredibly complex question, in which you have to consider:
1. Short term nutritional needs
2. Long term nutritional needs
3. The amount of similar foods consumed in the short and long term
4. Short term psychological needs
5. Long term psychological needs
6. Even more esoteric concerns like economics or moral ethics
That candy bar may be bad for you as far as long term nutrition goes, but in moderation sometimes the short term psychological need for something tasty is more important to satisfy.
This raises the question of whether or not you would self-identify as a 'nerd'. The fact that it's still ambiguous this far into the conversation is excellent and I salute you.
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.
Nah, there's plenty of contrarian ways to like things. You just need to like things that other people rarely like. You can like them because other people hate them (pure spite) or because enjoying them requires a lot of effort or background knowledge (snobby variant) or (in the best case IMO) because most people would like if it they gave it a chance, but something about the premise or marketing makes most people falsely assume they would dislike it, in which case contrarianism wraps back around into the useful kind of hipsterism.
Or you can be a meta-contrarian who likes mainstream things to spite the snobby, spiteful contrarians who seem to make up most of your social circle (while also enjoying the good stuff that mainstream culture rejects).
I like The Fugs. Top that!
Captain Beefheart?
Incredible String Band? And what band was it with a song containing the way-too-stoned line "I hunger for your porpoise mouth"?
Country Joe and the Fish. (Not a need, just old.)
Nerd, I meant.
> because most people would like if it they gave it a chance, but something about the premise or marketing makes most people falsely assume they would dislike it
You’ve just nailed my love for old and/or obscure country music. I mean maybe it’s gotten less obscure in recent years, but I liked it before it was cool!
I've got a weird variant of that. I prefer folk songs that are in a foreign language that I can't understand. BECAUSE I can't understand it. Most folk songs have a meaning that I find distasteful, if only because it ends up cycling around in my brain when I've trying to think of something else. And many of them are a lot worse. (I'm thinking specifically of "Banks of the Ohio", but it's merely an example of a huge number.)
I don't have any problem with this. I'm more thinking, like, what's motivating a person to do these things. I think on Scott's level he's doing it as "Product > interactions" where a person gloms onto a product and has various interpersonal reactions thereby. Like the nerd comes to like star trek, pins his identity on it, then ends up competing with other nerds because that's what the product demands he do if he wants status.
I think some other people come at it from the opposite direction - "Desired personal interactions > Product", or something like that. So, something like "everyone likes inception, so I can't" or "everyone likes inception, so I must" are contrarian and popularist. I think like you said the contrarian often goes "nobody likes this so I must". My gut feeling is the popularist doesn't usually go "nobody likes this, so I can't" - it's just functionally outside of how he selects things in general.
I like your populist/contrarian dualism, but I don't think the underlying drivers are that different. Both the groups you identify are still trying to fit into tribes, but perhaps their enthusiasms are governed more by the culture they have been exposed to. Some people only have the Disney/Marvel etc option because that's all they know. You have to have an education, or at least be curious before you can start to eschew these huge cultural constructions in favour of something more esoteric, but these cultural aesthetes who proudly wear their disdain for more popular culture still seem mainly to be looking for an audience.
Real contrarians, if they exist at all, must all be living out in the woods in off-grid cabins, listening to Wagner and communing with nature. You'd never meet one unless you got lost on a hike and had to ask directions to the nearest town.
You reminded me of a very old Scott post, on hipsters and meta-contrarianism: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
Yeah, I was definitely thinking about this while reading this article itself as well. It's way of thinking about things which I had kind of already come up with independently before I read Scott's post and which he clarified and crystallized quite nicely, and which has shaped my worldview of regarding how I interpret most cultural phenomena.
“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”
Said by a proto-hipster character in the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.
Oh, _that_ Anna Karenina.
In the movie at least. The book didn’t do much for me.
LOL. I am your definition of a popularist in every way except for owning an Apple product.
At the same time, I and those around me would likely define me as a rabid contrarian, because I hold many passionate positions on things that are not held by others and I enjoy many hobbies and invest my time and money in things other commonly regard as odd or socially defiant.
I like what I like, and I don't care of you like it or some consensus defines that like as socially acceptable / pro-social or not. I am willing to consider all sides of an argument, even if some of those sides are socially frowned upon and censored.
Does that make me a popularist or a contrarian?
Yes - this is an important part of the psychological aspect here, I think. Another example, driven by similar tendencies: I know a number of genuinely very intelligent people who fall into what I believe to be "conspiracy theories" frequently (setting aside for the moment Scott's distaste of that term). For these people in my life, one of the root causes of this tendency seems to me to be their psychological need to be the Contrarian and also The Smartest Person In The Room. They need to Know Something That No One Else Does. This, combined with clever reasoning and misuse of data by other conspiracy theorists, and all the usual mental biases that every human falls into, lead them into wildly incorrect conclusions that they, unfortunately, can defend quite well to a lay-person who knows nothing about the topic with seeming intelligence, reinforced by the fact that they *are* genuinely intelligent, in general.
I get that some people don't get live/TV sports, but basically, there's no better entertainment available for almost everyone (the numbers back it up). If you're not into sport ball, you don't get this. But the world really, really loves sports. In contrast, star wars or LOTR films are this summer's blockbuster soon forgotten. Because let's be honest, they're pretty mediocre. Have you watched new hope recently? It's boring! (Empire strikes back is the only one that really stands up.) And 16 hours or whatever of hobbits just isn't that exciting, particularly without the big screen. Don't get me wrong, I agree sports provide a common touch point, like the weather. But people really, really love and care about sports, even if some think that's stupid (and weather is inherently meaningful/interesting).
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
seriously
Would you... would you identify as a hipster by chance?
At least we can say we liked him before...
Yeah... (I didn't know him before but I wanna be a part of this group)
> 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?
you have to go through extra steps to get SED to work in a browser blog context, so it starts to become a split perspective between the command-line maximalists and the browser-extension-installation crowd.
Unrelatedly, Schoen, I immediately thought of you when I saw this: :D
> "Also, what was up with stamp and coin collectors? This seems like a different phenomenon: surely nobody wanted to identify with the US Postal Service."
Also, I pressed Command+H (since I'm on a mac) and my browser windows immediately disappeared ...for a second, I thought Scott had done like the typical 1990s "To fix that problem, press Alt+F4" prank and I fell for it. (except nicer, because it's just "hide windows.")
Other also, for what software and/or OS does Ctrl+H open search-and-replace setup?
> "Surely the nerds would be more likely to use a sed substitution, like s/nerd/geek/g?"
I think that the definition of "nerd" being defended here is a much more wide-ranging and all-embracing definition. (Besides, I notice that when I'm composing a Substack post, I settle for the web-based editor; I'll only use vim and/or CML for the occasional word count. So it's in my interests for that to count within the scope of "being a true nerd.")
Hi Theodicy!
> Other also, for what software and/or OS does Ctrl+H open search-and-replace setup?
Some word processors (I'm not sure where it was introduced first), including Microsoft Word and LibreOffice.
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.
What happened with those made-to-be-collectible coins with state designs?
People do still collect those. If you have a huge jar of those quarters in your attic, most of them are still worth a quarter, but maybe a few are worth more?
I’m a big fan of those. Since the state Quarter series completed in 2008 or so, there was a National Park/Monuments/Historical Sites series and now there is a Notable US Women series. I don’t consider myself a coin collector but I do love looking through my loose change to see if I can turn up one I don’t already have and add it to the book.
What level of coin collection are you doing? I used to collect at the level of "try to get pennies from every year and every mint", I thought that became trivial at some point, and a Google search suggests it's still trivial. Can you give an example of a not-absurdly-expensive coin you would have to wait for the right auction to get?
I'm a fairly advanced collector.
Here's an example of a coin missing from my collection. China - Yuan Dynasty - 2 cash coin dated 1353. I haven't been specifically trying to buy this coin but I am trying to collect all the dated Yuan Dynasty coins and I haven't gotten that one yet. I got the 1352 in 2014 for $280 and the 1354 in 2016 for $700 and I don't think the 1353 is more rare. I guess it's debatable whether $700 is an absurd amount of money to spend on a coin (it is not the most I've spent on a coin), but at least it's accessible to many people.
I spent like 2min googling and found one auction listing, Noble 2021: https://www.invaluable.com/v2/auction-lot/world-silver-bronze-coins-2956-c-6b14e8f958
(fwiw, I wouldn't buy a coin like this from Noble anyway because I don't think they do a good job of authenticating ancient Chinese coins)
I didn't search in Chinese and there were probably more sales of this coin in Chinese auctions in the last 10 years but I guess not many.
Ah sorry, that Noble coin is actually 3 cash dated 1350, I did a bad job reading/searching. I actually couldn't find any 2 cash 1353.
I don't have a 3 cash from 1350 either though. I did find another example of the 1350 3 Cash sold in a 2016 auction: https://www.numisbids.com/n.php?p=lot&sid=1359&lot=896
Wow, good luck.
Thanks! I hope I've now successfully established myself as a coin nerd too :)
Well, for my usage you established yourself as a serious fan. To be a nerd you'd need to talk about the way the coins were minted or how the metal was refined or some such.
I don't think there's an agreed upon usage that specifies this kind of detail.
I used to collect US coins from every denomination, year, mint, and variety (such as large and small date 1960 pennies). It was kind of like a treasure hunt, knowing you could find something in circulation that was actually more valuable than most people thought it was.
I lost interest in the late 1980s sometime, when I found the volume of new coins dwarfed older coins. For example, for Lincoln pennies, they used to make a few million per year, then a few tens of millions. In the 80s, they started making about 5 BILLION each, and it started drowning out all of the old coins, which basically stayed the same value.
I still pull coins from circulation if I find them valuable. I stopped spending pennies made of copper (pre-1982) for their inherent metal value. I have on occasion pulled a silver or proof coin from circulation. But so rarely, for so long, that I seldom get the thrill of the treasure find.
Not to mention that the US Mint caught on and instead of issuing one quarter a year they issued one "collectible" quarter for each state. It's not collectible if it's made to be collected.
Exactly. At that point, you're letting someone else pull your strings.
I'm not sure the google trends graph works as intended here. If stamp and coin collecting are nerd activities (which is assumed) and if the internet has become less populated by nerds since 2004 with the arrival of everyone else (which I think is reasonable) then we would see the same declining interest in all searches even if nerds never stopped caring about stamps or coins any less.
I also think that stamps, coins, and dinosaurs appeal disproportionately more to children than adults, so your own experience can also be tricky.
I don't know a ton about coins, but I can tell you there are 100s of sports cards from fairly obscure regional issues (like cards that were inserted in a bag of potato chips from a regional chip chain, etc), that wouldn't sell for more than $100 but which people can spend years and years trying to acquire.
Also, WRT to collecting: This is definitely not dead. I believe that sports cards are one of the top five selling categories on Ebay, and two years ago a company that grades sports cards and coins-- Collectors Universe-- was bought out for just under a billion dollars (I think $870m, or somewhere in that range). That same company is currently grossing around $500k a day in grading fees. Also, one of my good friends buys/sells Funko Pops, and his business grosses eight figures a year. There is still a ton of money that gets spent annually on physical collectibles.
And this is basically just hunting/gathering, tying directly into what makes people hunt mushrooms and birds. Basically, we've mapped hunter/gatherer ability to understand terrain/ecosystem/etc. to pursuits like sports stats, coins, stamps, etc. Hunter gatherer may not have had the same sort of numerical stats, but were doing very much the same thing.
I think you're vmissing the economic angle: coins and stamps were readily available, and relatively cheap (in fact, they were money!). You'd occasionally get exotic money from elsewhere, a letter from elsewhere, you start a collection. That's basically a poor person/society hobby. Same with collecting sports cards that came with gum, that's very, very humble. People collect other things now, in part because they've got the money to do so. E.g., there's an enormous community of guitar pedal nerds spending outrageous amounts of money on enormous pedal collections they really don't need or use, and without the resources that you would think would support the habit. (The weird question is why it shifts from hi-fi equipment to, e.g., MTB, even before advent of digital music/streaming, perhaps just fashion, people buying guitar pedals now rather than used cars, or people spending (wasting) money on high end coffee rather than cigarettes) And also obviously because mail has died, as has cash (who would carry around a penny these days, let alone look at what year it might be, etc.?).
I think your point 3 really nails it. The chance of finding a good deal at the "expense" of a layperson is much smaller than it used to be since it is trivial for them to do some basic due diligence. This is further evidence of Scott's point of the internet disrupting traditional sorting roles, but from a slightly different angle.
I'd qualify this by saying that it's harder to do if your plan is to sell the collectible without adding any value to it. But if you're buying collectibles that can be submitted for third party grading (sports cards, Pokemon/Magic/Yugioh/anime cards, coins, action figures, factory sealed video games, comic books etc) it's not all that hard to make six figures a year buying 'raw' collectibles, grading them, and then selling them for a sizeable mark-up.
one area where collecting is still thriving is around pinball/arcade machines. a fair number of people might stock a few of these in their garage at any time and watch local listings, swapping out their machines whenever they spot a deal. there’s still enough listings along the lines of “my grandfather passed away and left this Adams Family pinball machine nobody uses: free to anyone who can haul it away” that you can have some edge by being “an insider”.
go further into the gray market of “these arcade machines aren’t licensed for sale in the US but somehow still made it into the country” and this becomes doubly so. i know one person who started as an enthusiast collector and wants to open an actual arcade, but in the process has discovered it’s far more profitable to just operate a warehousing/marketplace operation.
i can’t say for certain why this area of collecting has lasted longer than the others, except to point out that the transaction costs are higher due to a combination of transport costs and in some places gray-market overhead — both of which scale with distance.
It's actually just about the good deal, not the "at the expense of." Back when you could frequently find unbelievable (e.g.) guitars at pawn shops, the joy wasn't putting one over on the poor pawn shop owner, but getting some incredible pre-CBS strat you could never, ever afford. And there was the lottery aspect, because pre-internet, you were never really sure what you had.
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.
And once you completed the set you can just expand it. I've known a video game collector who wanted all the LucasArts (or maybe it was Sierra) adventures as part of his collection and started with just wanting to get one PC version of each, then expanded to other platforms, then expanded to other language versions, then expanded to....
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.
The widespread adoption of email created a world where a letter is almost certainly junk mail or a bill. Nobody looks forward to hearing from a good friend from across the country now when picking up the day’s mail. If letters are not interesting why would stamps? The same for coins. Nobody uses cash, and getting a pile of coins with no significant value (inflation) is just an annoyance. These objects have passed into irrelevance. Still, it seems like some little pieces of joy and wonder have passed from our lives.
I think this is definitely part of it: when I was a kid (the 90's), you could kick-start a collection by just taking the stamps off the mail; but this is not the case any more.
Also, probably not relevant, but the decline on the graph also corresponds to when the USPS changed the glue on stamps so that you couldn't easily remove them from the envelope. At least in my case, this took much of the charm out of the hobby (although probably having less free time as I became an adult was the main necessary and sufficient cause of my abandoning the hobby).
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.
Right?!? I found that part of the analysis bizarre.
I never know whether such blindspots are due to social milieu - our author seems to run in a social circle that, indeed, might have so much money to make collecting irrelevant, but that's not the case for the cast majority if folks, at all! - or individual proclivity - if he never liked collecting, posits spurious reasons why others do, and erroneously concludes from their deterioration that it must have fallen out of favor.
Regardless, Scott's confident assertion of an uninformed and wrong proposition always throws me off when I encounter it here. I think because I usually find him to be such a careful, observant, and thoughtful cultural critic - it flies in the face of many reasons I enjoy his analysis and find it unique and worthwhile.
Many very easy examples like music gear, where the focus of collecting has shifted (because, e.g., old guitars got too expensive), but is still going on like crazy (from boutique pedals, to old synths, drum machines, etc.). Lots of gear these days have small runs, companies go out of business, you can't find an X to buy, but X remains affordable (because there's not too much demand, either).
I agree ... as someone with a medium sized (~2000pc) record collection (I guess this makes me a hipster as well as a nerd?), I’ve seen a few boom busy cycles since the 80s but there are certainly still plenty of places to get records and various ways to nerd about about them - the level of detail on discogs’ database is certainly proof of that! Although it myy also add some weight to Scott’s point since discogs definitely made collecting rare or valuable albums both much easier and much less fun.
Yep. https://gwern.net/collecting
What about people who like high culture? Or bird watching? Or astronomy? Are they nerds? They often have in depth knowledge about their hobby.
I think being a nerd requires being a bit socially clumsy about your interest, and talking or signalling about it in situations where most people don't expect it. So being a nerd about completely mainstream stuff like pop music or football is not possible, that's just fandom. Being a nerd about very well known and relatively well-respected stuff like classical music or birdwatching is rare, because most people who are classy enough to care about the thing in the first place are also classy enough to know when to shut up about it. But comics? Star trek? Power metal? They have fairly low barriers to entry *and* most people don't care about them, so there's plenty of opportunities to bring it up to people who don't want to hear about it.
So that's why I think nerdery usually attaches itself to the typical targets.
Huh, I'm mostly socially adept, but think of myself as a nerd. I guess nerd for me means; loves reading books. And I want to talk about favorite books with my nerd friends to find new books to read.
IDK about that...what about people who are really interested in Music in general, especially in the technology behind music production etc., and who can name lots of obscure stats about music, but they are not fans of a specific band? Would they be considered "Music Nerds"?
Being a nerd comes from obsessive interest in low-status things. People who are naturally obsessively interested in high-status things are lucky enough to be able to obsess over their hobby without losing status. If you're obsessed with collecting wine then you're sophisticated; if you're obsessed with collecting Dr Pepper then you're a nerd.
There can be a perception that people interested in high status things are boring though, or snobbish. So there is a social cost potentially.
Yeah - I guess the commenters above think everyone who likes classical music is a billionaire opera lover, but as someone who's musical preferences are mainly dominated by 20th century classical music, I think the social costs are considerably higher than they are for liking any particular popular group or style a bit too much or too earnestly
Yeah, I read about a study once (unfortunately I can’t find it) where people who were told that someone likes opera generally reacted that they thought this person was high status but it reduced their desire to talk with that person.
The social costs may be as high but I would need to be persuaded that they were "higher." I feel like if people want to avoid you because you talk about boring stuff then they don't care if that boring stuff is Prokofiev or MCU - they just don't want to talk to you. So I would think a low-status MCU bore is still worse off than a high-status Prokofiev bore, because at least you've got the high status part.
Ah but this is part of the signalling too. High-status hobbies only seem boring or snobbish to lower-status people. So by bragging about your high-status hobby you're fully committing to "I don't care about the opinions of low-status people anyway, my peers are all high-status".
You seem to be assuming that people who like high brow things have a high status social milieu that they share these interests with.
I think that's true in part, but I also think there's the degree and specificity of interest. I'm also going to use "geek" instead of "nerd" here, because, like Scott, that seems to me more in keeping with definitions like "obsessive interest in low-status things."
So, my dad was a hobbyist and an obsessive learner. He taught a college course in science fiction literature, he had thousands of opera records, he loved astronomy, he spent lots of time watching sports. And in each case he learned a *lot* about the subject. He read the periodicals, he knew the backgrounds of the important people, he learned the history, he studied the techniques. And while I don't know what he was like socially, he certainly conveyed every last detail to his children.
But I would not consider him a geek, not because opera isn't a geeky interest, but because he was focused on what was actually relevant. That is, he could tell you Maria Callas' greatest recordings, but he couldn't tell you which notes she'd gone slightly off on in a famous aria. He could go on at length on the themes in Stapledon's Last and First Men, but he wouldn't write fan fiction on it (or read it, unless written by one of his students who chose writing a short story over taking a final exam - that resulted in a lot of fan fiction).
So, if he were interested in a tree, he would study the trunk, the roots, the branches, the leaves. But a geek would learn who planted the tree, who landscaped the forest, and how many leaves the tree had each day from 1975-2011. And he would go to conventions devoted to discussing all these aspects of the tree and more, with a main speaker who had pruned it 10 years ago. And he would argue about which season had the best leaves until his face turned red.
So I think someone can be an opera *geek,* where they know a tremendous amount of extraneous opera trivia. At the same time, if you're not an opera fan you might not be able to differentiate an opera enthusiast from an opera geek because you don't know what's important and what's not in the world of opera. So from the *outside*, you don't think anyone's an opera geek. But within that community I suspect there are recognizable geeks.
Well, that's a different type of nerd than me. nerd = loves reading, (to me)
I have an obsessive interest in Classical Greek literature. It's certainly high-status, but I do it in a rather low-status, nerdy way, and certainly talk about it too much.
Wow, why is that high culture? I love those things and consider myself a nerd? I also love sports.
Why is what high culture?
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.
That swimming against the tide though could be either due to not caring what people think, or being completely oblivious to that other people can't and won't share in the emotional experience. If it is the first they usually don't broadcast; the latter case is the one people usually see, which the other humans find pitiful, rather than glamourous (The opposite of what was intended).
I also think politics got involved here and the sort of person who wears a Star Wars shirt is often judged as an alt-right weirdo who thinks that Kathleen Kennedy is genuinely evil for hiring Rian Johnson, whether or not that judgment is correct.
Is that the case? I don’t think I’d assign any particular political valence to someone wearing a Star Wars shirt, but if I had to, I’d be more likely to assign a leftward one.
Yes. As far as I can judge, Star Wars has always been pretty solidly inside the typical american moderate left consensus position and its fans also seem to be around there politically. Trekkies as well. It's the military scifi types that can arguably be described as rightish in some sense, but from everything I've heard even those tend to skew strongly left in voting patterns (just not quite as strongly as other nerd groups).
Interesting. I never associated Star Wars with anything political. I guess I grew up with TOS, in a time and place where kids weren't especially political about anything.
It's quite weird. Star Wars is about the heirs of the true king rightfully overthrowing his supplanter and reestablishing the true monarchy. I.e., it SHOULD be an extreme right position, in favor of inherited monarchy. But most of the fans that I know are left of center. (This may be selection bias. Even so it's pretty strange.)
Well, OK, I only saw the first two films, and after that studiously ignored it. So this may be wrong. But that's definitely my impression of what it's theme is.
Yeah, you're way off. Original trilogy Star Wars is about a farm boy that answers the call to adventure and overthrows space Nazis to establish a republic. You might have been thrown off because one of the characters is a princess, but she never rules anything. Princess is a ceremonial title, so the hero can rescue a princess, in line with old fantasy.
The prequel trilogy is about how democracy can turn into fascism. The sequel trilogy is the original trilogy, except with a girl, and a poorly received middle movie.
What you described is closer to Lord of the Rings, especially Return of the King, whose fans do tend to be right leaning.
Mmmm, the rebels' full name is literally the Alliance To Restore The Republic, there was never a king in any meaningful position of authority. Lea is a princess because her mother was a queen (and that would technically mean Luke is a king, but he's never called that. He's a Jedi Master, and the mastery is that of knowledge not authority). Lea's mother was a queen of a single planet (which is Star War's equivalent of a small locale) who served her people and was beloved by them.
Leia is a princess because the hero has to rescue a princess (and then marry her, which they seem to have been aiming for before swerving to "no, they're actually brother and sister").
It has nothing to do with real monarchy and all to do with spectacle. You can't have a Saturday morning serial SF movie without a Space Princess!
Star Wars' politics is all over the place, and "its politics" can be either the implied politics of its heros, or the politics of its makers.
In the originals, the implied politics is pure fantasy-style medieval morality : There is Good, there is Evil, the Empire and most everybody who fights for it is Evil, the Emperor is the raw personification of Evil and Immorality, the Rebel Alliance and most everybody who fights for it is Good, so Good in fact that they can transform indifferent or chaotics semi-evil individuals like Han Solo into Good, Luke Skywalker is the personification of Good, and he triumphs over Evil by first refusing to fight it on its terms, then converting his most important aide into Good. The material victory of destroyed death stars and tie fighters serve merely to underlie and accentuate the moral/spiritual victory of Luke over the Emperor, with the possible exception of the first movie where the material victory is the whole deal. There is a God in the universe, not personal and with sides, but a God nonetheless, and it's on the side of the Rebel and specifically Luke. Despite the medieval vibe, things are vaguely (sane) lefty and civil righty, Aliens and Droids fight side by side next to humans (and that, as we will know later, is a huge deal after the Clone Wars), the Rebel Alliance is always the friend of the natives, the Empire is always the oppressive jerks, which also hate Aliens because they are different.
In the prequels, things are a lot more morally gray. First, the good guys are winning, the Republic is in control, and its good... on paper ? In reality, the Republic is a bloated ancient mess, full of corruption, and it's core-centric, meaning the rich worlds of the core are given more attention and resources than the backwaters of the outer rim. This sounds like libertarianism 101, a government that has lost its way and is now jerking off the money of its tax payers over less than nothing, while corruption and crime rages over its territories. There is several sub-plots of mega corporations being bad and enforcing their nonsense with violence, but that's not necessarily counter to libertarianism. A central figure is the Jedi Order, which we used to unconditionally revere in the originals, now we get to see how it's an utter failure in its final days. Taking children from their families, imposing draconian emotional codes, letting the Republic go astray, using a slave army they don't even know who commissioned it, letting a horny oblivious cocky entitled teenager next to a mastermind manipulator, etc.... The prequels sometimes imply that it's ultimately good the Jedi was destroyed, that this was the Prophesy of the Chosen One all along and it was the Jedi who just misinterpreted it in their typical self-centeredness, the Force feels much more impersonal and amoral, much more aloof. We witness the rise of the pure raw Evil, he's a politician (how libertarian), he also nominally belongs to some ancient order opposed to the Jedi and he uses this to his advantage sometimes but he's really just obsessed with power and zero-sum control. He's so devoid of anything human except the raw nietzschean hunger for power, that he laughs and rejoices when he is disfigured in a fight because it ultimately gained him power, whereas the former horny teenager with a heart of gold screamed in agony despite being the second most powerful man in the galaxy, because he lost his youth and his woman.
All in all, the prequels are very libertarian. The fact that the antagonists in the entire later 2/3 of the trilogy are separatists doesn't undermine this, they are only bad because they are controlled by mega corporations and ultimately Sidious, and fought for by ruthless machines, but the people of CIS were defnitely good freedom-loving folks who were just sick of the Republic's bullshit. The prequels are more topical, the originals' only connection to reality was perhaps the vietnam-inspired Endor land fight, a war that ended ~10 or more years before the movie was made. The prequels meanwhile was concurrent with Iraq's invasions by a coalition that thought of itself as democratic. The prequels features on-the-nose themes like Manufacturing Consent and a weary public that has been lied to in the process of trading freedom for security. It's also necessarily more rushed and contrained in its artistic freedom : it needs to set things up for the chronologically-later trilogy.
The sequels are..... I don't know. I would say woke, but even wokism has a bit more consistency and coherence than the most coherent and consistent sub plot in the later 2/3 of the sequels. The first movie is a bad rehash of A New Hope, because woman protagonist now. The later 2 are probably not even human writing, but maybe the ramblings of GPT-1. If I had to put a name on its politics, it's greedy individualistic "Jerk off now and fuck what happens later", it's new-agey, "Be yourself, follow your passions, insist on your opinions and be stubborn even with people who you yourself admit know much better than you" are its prime commandments. Just, be yourself bro, do whatever you feel like. It's preferable if you can be a woman or black while being yourself, but don't bother, be yourself bro, bro ? be yourself, just be yourself and give us money, we don't actually, like, get this whole Star Wars things, here are some space lazers, here are a kinda-gay-but-we-will-never-actually-say-this-outloud-because-dude-china-will-fuck-us-up couple, now give us some money, here is a purple-haired chick doing some pointless gesture involving a space ship, now give us some money. Here is C3PO losing his memory in a very sombre moment whoooooops IT'S A JOKE HAHA GET IT ? now give us some money, here is chewbacca dying in a very sombre moment, oh my god chewbacca he's one of the original band of heros he's dead now WHOOOOOPS IT'S A RELIEF MOMENT, GET IT ? now give us some money. Etc, etc, et-fucking-c.
Rogue One is probably my best movie in this entire Star Wars category, right up there or exceeding The Empire Strikes Back. It's extremly dark, it has a WW2-in-1940 atmosphere. No one is good, but one side is murdering like there is no tomorrow and discussing insane unhinged plans for everyone else, and everyone else is just being flawed humans trying to do their best. Everyone dies, for something that they probably thought was futile in their final moment. The Evil is really fighting this one while yawning and with one hand tied behind their back, it's inconceivable that this fractured opposition is going to do anything interesting.
And I haven't even touched the Expanded Universe yet, every work of which is written by a different author, sometimes several. Star Wars is very big and very messy.
Nice reply! I never gave anywhere remotely this much thought to star wars. TOS were great childhood movies for me, the other 6 I mostly dismissed as stuff I couldn't get into due to bad writing but somehow thought I should watch, and I haven't seen or read the rest. I enjoyed your deeper analysis.
Who were the maybe gay but not expressly gay characters in the sequels?
I think the "socially oblivious" part is actually important to identify someone as a nerd; it's not just that they have eccentric hobbies, it's that *we know* they have eccentric hobbies because they don't realize how boring that stuff is to normal people.
This depends on whether you're talking about the person's friends, or those passed on the street. I suspect that those passed on the street judge a person purely on "socially oblivious" without knowing what their interests are. (Except for folks who blatantly advertise it, of course. But I suspect that is a small percentage.) But being "socially oblivious" tends to have lots of signs that seem to be readily noticeable to those who aren't "socially oblivious". And that, I think, is the primary meaning usually assigned to either "geek" or "nerd". I don't know about "hipster". Only those who know most such people have any idea what their particular obsession is, and they generally don't care, either.
Populism is always creepy but a lot of what becomes hip becomes a creepy fetish. Coins, stamps, hummels, Rambo guns, IPAs, fantasy sports leagues, disco…
There are cool hunters who keep their mouths shut (for selfish reasons, or just because they know they lucked out) and then there are those who cant keep their mouths shut. Something becoming hip is just enough of the latter (or enough social spin) to create enough inertia and then the herd makes it all creepy. When something you like becomes popular, it’s time to move on.
I was lucky to know NdGT well before he was publically cool, and I knew he would one day become that - once Sagan was out of the way.
I don't think it's fair to say that things nerds like going mainstream somehow makes nerds no longer the underdog. It's totally possible for nerds themselves to be disliked, but stuff they like to be widely enjoyed (the obvious analogy would be someone arguing that racism is over because hip-hop is so widely enjoyed).
I also wouldn't say that nerd stuff only went mainstream in the last decade, it's not like the first 3 Star Wars movies were obscure arthouse pictures. I think the reason Marvel took off is just innovations in storytelling: movie producers finally figured out a way to adapt the gloriously arcane and convoluted lore of superhero comics in a way that could appeal to mainstream audiences in addition to nerds (much how George Lucas figured out how to get mainstream audiences to love the space operas nerds had been enjoying for decades before 1977).
Personally, I wear Star Wars shirts from time to time. What it says about me is that I like Star Wars. I don't like Star Wars to be brave, I like it because it's good (except for the sequel trilogy, obviously, which is terrible). I actually did notice a while ago that even though I liked the Star Wars movies a lot I rarely wore Star Wars shirts or listed them among my favorite movies. I realized this was probably because I didn't feel like it said anything about me that I liked Star Wars since so many other people did. I then realized that was dumb, if I liked something I should celebrate that I like it regardless of how many other people do. So I bought some Star Wars shirts.
Comic book movies had always been pretty popular.
Superman was the top grossing movie of 1979 despite coming out in 1978. Superman 2 was the second top grossing movie of 1981. Batman was the second top grossing movie of 1989. Batman Returns was the top grossing movie of 1992. Batman Forever was the top grossing movie of 1995. Spider-man was the third top grossing movie of 2002 (behind Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies).
That's about all I can be bothered looking up right now but you get the idea, superhero movies have been popular since the 1970s.
I feel like the only innovation of the MCU was to get people to feel the same way about less well-known characters, and to maintain this long-term. It's not particularly novel that superhero films are popular, it is notable that it's been over a decade with new films every year and they're still doing well at the box office. Interest will inevitably decline, but for now at least people seem to be on board with it running indefinitely without any reboots - can't really say the same for Superman, Batman or Spiderman.
I also think it helps that we're at a time where the CGI is good enough to enable the more spectacular scenes from comic books, certainly films like the Avengers and Dr Strange would have been hard to pull off 20 years earlier.
I'm not sure there is any innovation of the MCU. It seems to me that the filmmakers are just good at making mass-market films that connect to each other.
I consider that a useful and important innovation. The comics these movies are based on run for years and are deeply immersive. The movies we've gotten for the preceding 40 years were often okay standalone films or short series, but did nothing for those long term stories. A quick trilogy followed by a reboot and another set that covers a lot of the same content (origin story + some main villain of that series) is not the same thing.
And not even getting deep into the bench. Leaving serials aside, Batman took thirty years (and a TV sensation) to get a theatrical release. Superman took forty. Marvel's most popular character and team had to wait till the 2000s. (Though somehow Blade beat them by a few years, possibly because he didn't really read as "superhero".) Superman still hasn't fought Brainiac on the big screen, let alone most of his second-tier villains. They'd routinely come up with "new" ideas that did the same thing as established comic book devices (e.g., the molecule chamber in Superman II for gold kryptonite) because Hollywood screenwriters didn't *read* that stuff.
The MCU (leaving the Hulk aside, since that's kind of incorporated after the fact) started with a B-tier hero (perforce, since they'd licensed all their A-tier characters to other companies). They started by making people care about Iron Man fighting Ironmonger, and pretty soon were making Groot a household name. And they routinely distilled pretty uneven or actively bad comics storylines (e.g., Civil War) into coherent and effective narratives.
That's qualitatively different from previous successful superhero films and franchises. It won't last forever because nothing does, and there are arguments that the cracks are beginning to show. (Though they've had duds in the past and bounced back from it.) But it's a heck of a run.
The oddest thing given their source material is how weak their villain game is. For every Loki or Killmonger, they've probably got three Ronan the Accusers or Malekiths who barely exist except as vague antagonists. (Again, they've been prevented from using a lot of Marvel's real heavy hitters like Doctor Doom, but still.) Despite that, they've created the sort of superhero shared world that Marvel pioneered in the 60s and DC ran with in the 70s and 80s, which no one had ever even really tried to do on a Hollywood scale. And they've (mostly) made it work.
Always? There was a long time before 1979.
Seriously, putting huge amounts of money into superhero movies is pretty new, for values of "pretty new" that don't apply to everyone here. Special effects needed to become good enough.
Well...the Tarzan movies were pretty popular all through the Depression, if we want to consider Tarzan an early superhero. But there's definitely a sea change in the 90s when it becomes much more plausible to add amazing superpower effects with CG. "Superman" was according to Wikipedia the most expensive film ever, and spent a huge amount on stunts, but the falling price (and increased safety) of doing stuff in post-production probably became a big factor in the 90s, which might have caused people to reach for superhero movies featuring stuff that would've been absurdly expensive in the days when it had to be done with models, wires, and stunts.
>Well...the Tarzan movies were pretty popular all through the Depression, if we want to consider Tarzan an early superhero
By that standard, Robin Hood could be considered an even earlier superhero, and his movies have been hits as far as back as 1922. But I think the nerdy part of comic-book superhero movies comes from the "comic book" part rather than the "superhero".
Hmm, I dunno. I wouldn't call Robin Hood a superhero, because he's an ordinary man, but with abilities that can be acquired by superb training. Tarzan was supposedly extraordinary, possessed of abilities no human not similarly raised by apes could achieve. I agree it's a thin distinction, but it holds for me -- the one anyone can do, the other is "built in" somehow by one's birth and rearing, and cannot be duplicated by any amount of training. One could readily argue John Carter is a superhero, but no movies were made of him in the old days, and I don't think he was ever as popular as Tarzan.
I'm not sure I agree with your second distinction either, because Scrooge McDuck and Richie Rich were also very popular comic books, but haven't made it to techno-fantasy CG movies, because while making a walking-talking duck, or a Richie Rich car that's 100 yards long and has its own swimming pool are certainly challenges for CG, I feel like they wouldn't really appeal to the techno-fantasy nerd. Conversely, the reason the techno-fantasy heroes were found in comic books in the first place is because comic books are the earliest form of "CG". You can draw stuff that is visually compelling but completely impossible to photograph because it can't be found in the real world. Which is why I think the comic books are where you find the kind of superhero that appeals to nerdy types, and its the superhero archtype that is the appealing aspect.
I liked Star Wars before it was cool.* As a kid I was reading EU books and the SW Encyclopedia, and I loved talking about it. Back in the 90s this was still really obscure stuff. Sure, people knew the three movies and loved them, but anything else was considered nerdy, which I was fine with. My family knows that I love Star Wars, so I sometimes get SW shirts as gifts, which is fine. But it's lacking what it would have said about me in the 90s, when I was both much more into SW and also far fewer people were. Wearing SW apparel feels very different than it did before, to the point where I actually changed my preferences for when I would wear it - always okay around my family who buys them for me, but less often in public places with people who don't already know me.
*-if not obvious, this is tongue-in-cheek given the topic.
It was very hard to like "Star Wars" before it was cool, because it was an immediate success. But for what it's worth I liked it before it was very cool, because I saw it the first week it came out, and then went back to see it twice more the same week.
Something that may never be repeatable again, given the way movies now work, and the Internet, is that as far as I know nobody in the theater expected that amazing initial scene, with the star destroyer passing overhead from behind and above. I think this was the debut of THX, also, so there was some very special sound processing that nobody had ever seen before. You heard the star destroyer from behind and above, first, a huge noise, and most people in the theater turned around and looked, alarmed. Then this enormous thing went overhead on the screen and people were just blown away -- there were spontaneous hoots and yells, cheers, applause. Nobody had ever seen or heard something like that before.
I'd like to like things in peace, with no glory about it.
Agreed. I really liked your https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-272/comment/14849819
My view is that both basic tastes and hipsters have their merits. Setting aside status questions for the moment, I view "basic" tastes as simply making good use of current best options and I view hipsters as both Scott and Sam did, as "They discover things, then place them on the altar of Fame so everyone else can enjoy them." Early adopters are useful! I contrast this with an old pieces of advice from Alexander Pope:
"Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."
but _everyone_ can't be the median adopter. If everyone tried to follow this advice, there would be no early adopters and no way for good innovations to work their way into the mainstream.
( I am skeptical of the claim that current algorithms can substitute for the role of early adopter. They _can_ find obscure works that share categories with works one already likes. As to judging whether a novel work is good or not ... _Maybe_ GPT-4 can give useful advice - I don't want to rely on it till at least the hallucination problem is solidly solved. )
Re status:
Leo Abstract wrote: "Sam may be identifying anything popular as bad. Anything that the servile herd could possibly like must be execrable." My view is that this is a terrible heuristic. Many choices are popular for perfectly good reasons. Avoiding them sounds like an echo of the nobility doing everything they could to distinguish themselves from the peasantry, or the rich doing everything they could to distinguish themselves from the poor. When the poor worked in the fields and got tan, the rich tried to stay pale (going so far as to eat arsenic). When the poor worked in factories and got pale, the rich tanned (and courted melanoma and other photodamage). Not a good way to make choices!
>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".
I'm going to defend myself on this by saying I own Star Wars shirts not out of my own purchasing decisions, but because they're the kind of safe and reliable present your dad gets you for birthdays and Christmas, and I'm not going to refuse to wear a perfectly servicable shirt because its branding might make me basic. I *am* one of those weirdos that sympathizes with the Empire, but I think that's a separate matter.
"I'm not going to refuse to wear a perfectly serviceable shirt because its branding might make me basic" - I have the opposite instinct, and it annoys me on a meta level that I have it, because it also extends to T-shirt sayings, some of which I find genuinely funny. Hipster-ness may not be wholly voluntary.
Did you ever play the old space flight simulator "TIE Fighter"? :-)
Science is not near universally loved. It's actually hated by an awful lot of people - far more than love it.
We who live in nerdland think science is near-universally loved because we don't deal with Those People too much.
But the reality is that they exist and they grossly outnumber us.
All brands of populists hate science because it can say whether or not something is correct. And that's hugely damaging because all of populism are based on falsehoods that you can dispel in like five minutes of basic research.
There's people who claim to like science, but the moment science says something that they don't like, they get extremely angry and defensive.
Why must it be a war? Maybe I really, truly enjoy the music of the Beatles? Or like bacon? (Liking *all* dogs is over the top, but there are certainly some great dogs out there.)
I know this is going off on a tangent, but I think there's virtue in enjoying things at a basic object level. Being able to exist in the moment, enjoying things for what they are. Which helps with being able to put aside hype, and opinion, and pressure, and just like something for what it is (or not like it for what it is). And yeah, sometimes this leads to forming contrarian opinions, if you're looking at raw data while other people are making decisions based on whatever a nutty politician did while drunk on twitter likes.
So the true "Nerds" these days are MAGA contrarians?
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
Wow!
https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/forever-21-usps-postal-service-collection.html
"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.
Do other collects cling to the vain hope that their collection might increase in value by a hundred or a thousandfold in the future? I'm pretty sure that's the hallmark of an NFT bro.
Obviously you name the car Carcharoth.
Maybe Huan, if it is nice and serviceable.
Melkor, if you liked it when you bought it, but now it is corrupt and evil.
Elros, if it works well now, but you just know it's going to die someday.
Eönwë if it's loud enough to announce your arrival wherever you go.
Huan could be good for a Honda.
If Scott wants car names based on Silmarillion ship names, then I nominated Earrame:
"Eärrámë was a ship built by Tuor in the latter half of the First Age.
When Tuor grew old and yearned for the Sea, he and his wife Idril sailed in it to the West. It was probably built at the Havens of Sirion.
Etymology
Eärrámë means "Sea-wing" in Quenya, from eär ("sea") and rama ("wing")."
There are a few others, though I imagine he'd want to avoid the name of Ar-Pharazon's ship 😁
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Ships
I was thinking that Aldarion's ships might serve. Númerrámar (West-wing) seems appropriate for a car in the Bay Area, or maybe Palarran (Far Wanderer) if you plan a lot of road trips.
If I had an all-black massive SUV with reinforced roll bars, I would totally name it "Alcarondas". And I would paint its hubcaps in gold. And then I'd drive it to Area 51. Hubris ? What's that ?
Wouldn't we all?
If Musk ever gets off his backside/off Twitter and sorts out the CYBERTRUCK, there is an entire generation just *panting* to buy one and name it this 😁
For a used car, Bill.
+1
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.)
Yeah I found Kriss's whole discussion of nerds pretty bizarre and divorced from anything I've experienced in real life as a self-identified nerdy person.
I think what's missing is that Kriss uses "nerds" as his foil, but what he's talking about would better be described as fan culture.
If you want a less histrionic version of this conversation, A.O. Scott, formerly the head film critic at the NYTimes, did a Times podcast where he talks about why he left film criticism. He basically says that Hollywood and fan culture have formed a kind of symbiotic relationship where the role of the critic has basically gone away. Fans want what they want. Hollywood gives it to them. And any attempt to interrogate these movies is dismissed as hate.
I dunno, critical reception and box office performance is still strongly correlated, even for superhero movies, with blatant outliers like Venom being rare. And to claim that Hollywood is not attentive to woke "interrogation" is patently absurd, no big-budget movie remotely challenging NYT-style orthodoxy is going to be made these days.
> He basically says that Hollywood and fan culture have formed a kind of symbiotic relationship where the role of the critic has basically gone away.
Indie movies, critics and festivals have a symbiotic relationship where mass appeal is irrelevant.
I think A.O. Scott makes a valid point. I think it is a shame - he was on my short list of critics whose opinion I cared for. I seek critic's opinion, because I watch about 3-4 movies per year, and 0-1 TV series per year. If I'm going to spend that time, I want to select something really good, and critics help me do that.
Though there is a problem that critics for obvious reasons tend to value novelty *much* more than typical consumers. If you watch dozens of romantic comedies or action movies, the tropes start to look obvious and samey and formulaic. If you watch one of those a year, then those things *are* the story, and there's no reason that you're likely to be bored of them.
Eventually maybe you've seen enough, and move on to a different genre whose tropes are less familiar. Or maybe you don't-- mystery and romance enthusiasts aren't in doubt about how the story is going to end. Engaging with material to analyze and report on it is fundamentally different.
Which doesn't mean it isn't valuable. But contra the old saying, everyone isn't a critic.
>"People who develop deep, abiding interests in subjects are weird..."
Very this. There are a lot of hobbies that friends recommend to me (insightfully!) that I have to demur from lest it suck me in; Warhammer 40k looks *fascinating*, but I dasn't risk letting it consume my every waking thought.
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.)
An even more parsimonious explanation is that trends come and go. Even weird nerdy people aren't interested in being weird and nerdy in the same way that their fathers were, they'll find a new way to be weird and nerdy that they can share with their peers.
I love it when people use the word "parsimonious."
‘’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.
Sam Kriss always seemed to have a Jekyll & Hyde thing going on to me, but he seems to maybe have mellowed out after an epiphany about social media ruining everything
He strikes me as an intolerable person who I wouldn’t want to spend time with. And I fundamentally don’t share his worldview or politics. But I’m an unabashed superfan of his essays. A geek, some might say. Or maybe a hipster? Nerd? I’m thoroughly confused now.
Kriss and The Last Psychiatrist both give me a similar vibe where it's like, they're writing with such confidence and style but the world they're describing is just utterly bizarre and unlike real life as I'm familiar with it.
Exactly!
I haven't read the Kriss essay and I don't know whether I want to, but The Last Psychiatrist came off to me as collecting people to despise. I admit I read a moderate amount of his stuff.
Right, but this essay by Kriss uncharacteristically has non-negligible overlap with reality. Scott's response is good, but I'd say that Chapman's Geeks-MOPs-Sociopaths dynamic is still the best overview of this topic.
Kriss's essays are aesthetically beautiful and emotionally resonant to me but after reading his Wakanda piece I can no longer bring myself to trust whether anything he says is even true or if the whole thing is just a giant troll post. I *think* this is purposeful on his part, but...I also don't have the time to fact-check every confident assertion on Substack.
They’re both very acerbic, but I find Kriss’ work to be borderline fiction, owing to his tendency to blend discussion of things that never happened with things that did. It makes it hard to pin a particular thesis about reality to his work, and I find it best to take it as impressions and images. By contrast, I’ve always found TLP pretty grounded, though I notice he differentiates only very slightly between cherry-picking examples and constructing general models (which comes across as unfairly insulting if you aren’t paying attention to the distinction).
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.
Yeah I agree, geek allows a clearer message.
It would be useful if we distinguished between three related concepts that often have the same words applied to them:
geeks - people who are good at math/computers/tech stuff
nerds - people who are obsessively engaged with various art forms (often niche)
dweebs - people who have poor social skills
Sports geek is a thing too. Though maybe it means someone is overly obsessed with the stats and numbers of sport rather than the sport itself, so it could fit in your first category.
I wonder where "otaku" fits in there. Is it just a trendy foreign word for nerd?
In my (somewhat of an otaku) understanding, it's the Japanese word for nerd as in 'people who are obsessively engaged with various art forms (often niche)'. If you already have the word 'nerd' to mean 'people who are obsessively engaged with various art forms (often niche)', then it's the specific word for 'people who are obsessively engaged with various Japanese (or east Asian) art forms (often niche)'. If you're the sort to randomly substitute Japanese words for their English equivalents (likely because you're obsessively engaged with Japanese niche art forms) you can substitute it for the general 'nerd' as long as you specify what they are engaged in other than Japanese / East Asian niche art forms (ie, a 'Marvel otaku').
"otaku" covers more than art forms, for example train otakus.
I see your point. I was using Johan Larson's phrasing specifically without worrying about how complete the definition was. I think the rest of my point stands... if you're talking about a 'train otaku' (instead of a train nerd) you're either speaking Japanese or an otaku that's using otaku in place of nerd.
You could make the point though that creating functional technology is in itself an art, and thus train nerds are obsessively engaged with an art form. Certainly there is an aesthetic sense to a well-designed piece of machinery.
Your point is valid, I just wanted to add some context.
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.
Well said. What I actively hate about Kriss' article and Scott's response is that they both seem to be working under the assumption that everyone is a poser to some extent and no one is relating to the artwork itself.
I don't exactly think I'm thinking that. Even if we posit a person who feels deep and genuine emotion for MCU, I think we need an additional explanation for why that expresses itself in buying action figures for every MCU character and keeping them in the original box. My claim is that deep genuine emotion can get channeled into desiring to identify the thing, a sort of (though not entirely) status-related emotion.
The question is, would the person who buys all the action figures be happy with their collection even if nobody knew about it at all? And I think in many cases the answer is yes. They're even happier if they do find someone else who shares that interest, but I think that's because of the simple joy of finding someone to enthuse about a common interest with.
I tend to think that keeping toys in the actual box on purpose is for the hope of reselling them.
One of my favorite Mark Hamill stories is that he somehow got it put into his contract that he gets "one of everything", before anyone had any idea what this would mean. And that instead of treating his attic full of toys as an investment, he let his kids play with them.
But does he have the Boba Fett action figure with real missile launching action?
Right, there has to be more to it. The expert is content with knowing a thing completely. An expert might hoard catalogues so as to master every detail of every action figure ever made, but wouldn't need to actually own them.
I think there's a way that a work of art creates a kind of atmosphere around it, or "mood", "vibe" or "ambience". Separately from expertise or status, somebody who passionately loves a work of art will want to be surrounded by its ambience. And the impulse toward completeness is because the work of art isn't just some individual action figure; the work of art is all of everything that the creators made and branded "Star Wars" and released into the market. You don't actually have the true Star Wars ambience without the whole set. Maybe?
I don't like trying to reduce it to identity, because it's so hard to separate identity from status, since both relations reflect themselves through other people--you need people to recognize your identity to really have it, and status is nothing but other people's recognition of status. But it could very well be that the desire to dwell in the ambience of a work of art is just as reducible to establishing identity as every other aspect of nerddom and hipsterism. And in that case, there may be no genuine nerd at all.
It seems to me there is a human desire to excel at your hobbies, that's pretty unrelated to why you have the hobbies in the first place, and has both status motivations and also motivations unrelated to status. That's pretty universal, right? If you're a hobby singer, you like to sound good; if you birdwatch, you like to expand the range of species you can identify; if you make little clay sculptures, you like to detail them and make them beautiful. Or maybe you just like to succeed with no wasted motion. People love setting arbitrary little goals for themselves to feel this kind of satisfaction.
And at the risk of inappropriately evopsychologizing, it seems like if you're carving a spear for your tribe, excellence is important both because you get to be the beloved and respected spear-maker in your community, and because the sharper your spears are the less likely you'll starve.
That's my best guess as to why people want one pristine figurine for every character who's ever existed. On the other hand, I think collecting the figurines *at all* is motivated by the fact that you like the MCU and like to surround yourself with MCU things, not necessarily any perfectionist/completionist motivations.
And I think viewing nerd status as socially motivated would make a lot of bad predictions. For example, I used to go to social events for [thing], where a bunch of strangers would meet in a park or whatever, talk about [thing] for a few hours, and then go our separate ways, generally never see each other again. Despite being an explicitly social activity, this seems to me to fit poorly into the identity-construction framework. I certainly wasn't going off in a park for hours for the sake of presenting myself a certain way to my family and friends, nor was I making an investment in social status with strangers who I never expected to see again. Seems more sensible to say I probably liked [thing] and wanted to talk about it with people.
I also haven't seen it mentioned at all how nerds will "secretly" try to experience aspects of the thing they're a nerd about. E.g. if I was really into Star Wars, I might like going to a zoo and seeing the bears, because they remind me of Wookees. Crucially, I'll tell no one that I'm enjoying it for that reason, because I recognize that I generally experience negative social consequences from revealing myself to be a nerd. I'm not actually into Star Wars, but I do the equivalent of this all the friggin time, and I don't really see how the "being a nerd is about constructing a social identity" perspective makes any sense of this behavior.
It is a recurring motif (of the part of the rational-sphere that I know of) that nobody does anything for the reason they say, or even think. Think how many times you see the word "status".
An insightful criticism.
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 know. I don't know if these people are really unlucky and have horrible peer groups, or if they just project the most venal motives onto everything. I rarely feel disgust in the moral sense rather than the physical sense, but being thrust into the headspaces of people with that kind of worldview is one of the things that can make me do 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.
It's like nerddom in its original form sort of squirmed out from under people.
A lot of those nerdy activities still exist under the layer of popular “nerd” activities. Who plays any TTRPG but D&D 5e? Who actually reads Marvel comics instead of just watching the movies? Who has actually read any of the deep backlog of mass market sci-fi paperbacks? The nerdy things still exist, just a popular version sits among them.
Sure. But in my experience, having a more-than-surface-level interest in science fiction or TTRPGs is no longer treated as categorically different from having a more-than-surface-level interest in mysteries or improv theatre. "Nerd" in common usage today tends to describe *how* someone relates to their interests, not *what* the interests are.
I think you VASTLY overestimate the number of actual people who play any TTRPG. People in general know what D&D IS, but actually playing? You point about comics seems correct though.
It was weird seeing people on the internet talk about how it's nice nerdy things are accepted now, because big video game titles and huge sci-fi franchises were popular. And because popular kids played sport games on consoles.
Meanwhile if I would talk about liking a rouglike game that was super difficult and hard to get into, because it had more depth than popular big titles, I risked social shunning.
Same with lots of things like this. Coding - if you could do a cool website or game, it was great. But if you focused on algorithms you sucked. And making beautiful fractals didn't count as being an artist.
Now if you work on AI and do deep fakes, even if you don't have much knowledge, you're cool. If you have deep knowledge and work on memory optimization during model training, you might be told "wow, you're smart" but most people will awkwardly avoid talking to you after learning this fact. At a random party it's better to say "I work on some obscure IT things, I like it and it pays very well".
___
I don't care that people changed use of "geek" or "nerd", but I wish people understood that those who were nerds didn't become popular. It's just false. People can say "haha, I'm such a nerd and I love it" while shunning others for having unpopular or harder to get interest, even though those others are not flashy or pushy with those interests.
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.
This is a lesson in less is more, right?
Yes. I never thought of it before, but this frictionlessness wrought by the internet destroyed something cool, and we never even noticed while it was going on.
True, though the positive angle is that it maybe frees us up to look for unusual things that are more difficult problems, that weren’t “solved” by the internet.
A bit similar to solving a material want — people no longer get meaning out of expending effort to meet that want, but they move on to new frontiers of wants.
I also hit the same problem in my coin collecting. Eventually I solved the problem for myself by just never shopping for coins online. I find cool stuff sifting through loose change, at local coin shops or flea markets, or sometimes from yard sales and other oddball locations. It kept the thrill of the hunt alive, and tends to be far less expensive.
My tastes in coins did change around that time, though, where I no longer cared as much for full sets but got much more into interesting historical pieces. I particularly love coins from important historic dates in countries that no longer exist. Like a 1914-1918 Austrian-Hungarian coin would be a great example. These coins tend to be in very low demand, and can often be found for cheap - though they are also pretty rare to find at all, which makes it even better for the hunt enjoyment.
This sounds like the "thrill of the chase"...
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".
Being a Transformers obsessive seems pretty nerdy to me. What kind of person do you think is obsessively interested in Transformers, if not a nerd?
Two distinctions on Transformers. Into the 1980s version - probably quite nerdy. Into the Michael Bay version - doesn't seem nerdy at all, maybe the same type of viewer as wants to watch The Fast and The Furious movies?
Right, but I'm not sure if the recent Transformers movies really have that sort of obsessive fandom, any more than (say) the Mission Impossible movies... or the Fast and Furious movies for that matter. There are people who like them, sure, but for whatever reason these sorts of movies don't attract the obsessive nerd crowd to wank over them; the lore is too shallow to invite obsessive interest.
If there _are_ obsessive Transformers (2008+) fans out there, then they are definitely nerds though.
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.
It's funny how quickly the new normal gets established in the public consciousness. Before MCU, having a franchise where the fourth installment is about as successful as the original was an extreme success. Whereas now that MCU is (maybe) finally running out of steam at the fortieth or whatever sequel it's everybody's laughing stock.
Are they sequels though? Originally a sequel would be "the same thing, just different enough to get you to buy another ticket" (Jaws/other disaster movies). This has limitations of course - there's a tension between resolving the situation in one movie and still having enough unresolved stuff for the next one.
There's also "a similar situation with the same character", e.g. Bond - although that was helped by a successful set of novels of course.
MCU is a "shared universe", which has a rotating set of main characters - any given character is not in most of the movies.
As far as I can tell this started with the comics (Justice League/Avengers/etc.) and then moved to books (Thieves World, Wild Cards).
Marvel did make it work with movies, but I think there was some heavy lifting done in TV first (ST: TNG, B5, etc.) to allow more continuity.
The numbers are more comparable if you look at e.g. Jaws 1/2/3 with say Iron Man 1/2/3. And there the numbers generally go down even with MCU characters.
Yes, that previous franchises were usually unsuccessful had much to do with their sequels generally being progressively worse and limited in scope. I'm still unsure why it took so long to zero in on the MCU-like idea, when comics had been doing crossovers and shared universes for decades. The likeliest explanation seems to be that Kevin Feige-caliber producers are extremely rare, and DC's continued failure to emulate Marvel's success provides good evidence for it.
I think it has to do with this being pretty much the opposite of the way movies are made.
A movie generally requires a lot of money backing, so you need to gather that. You also need the right actors, etc. Each movie is made by its own company. That has a lot to do with accounting (moving the losses around to the people who aren't in the know), but it also has to do with a movie being a large number of people gathered together to do one project.
Some of the secret was getting the money people to e.g. sign Downey to a long contract. From what I remember he wasn't huge back then, so that must have taken some persuasion.
DC was impatient - they saw Marvel getting $$$ and thought they could catch up, without doing all the background work. I'm not sure it was actually possible though - getting the right people to sign the right contracts and execute when you have Marvel already making all the money is very different from doing this when you only have e.g. Spiderman and Fantastic Four on the ground.
Warner was even more impatient with the Mummy, and they failed even harder. I suspect that getting Cruise and Crowe in to star was the wrong move (if it takes off how are you getting them back?), but it's an understandable shortcut attempt (see the first attempt at Casino Royale. Lots of stars, and it bombed partly because of having lots of stars - and their attempts at getting more screen time).
Even Disney has had trouble replicating it. That was clearly where they wanted to take Star Wars, and things like the lukewarm response to Solo led them to retrench and rethink a bit. They're still doing it with some success, but more variably and with more reliance on TV as they plot another return to the big screen.
If the MCU peters out in the later phases as they try to build on (or at least repeat) their success, the Iron Man to Endgame run is still going to be a signal accomplishment, whether one considers it a stirring example or a horrible warning.
(Personally I think it's great. My comics nerddom is very much DC focused, but the MCU gave me more of the sort of things I liked about the comics that shaped my tastes than anything DC has done on the big screen since Christopher Reeve was active.)
Well, the glaring feature of Disney-era Star Wars is the total lack of overall vision for the franchise, so I think it's fair to say that they themselves don't appreciate the importance of Feige-style leadership.
I'd also suggest that Marvel is one of the world leaders at doing shared-universe stories with multiple protagonists. It's a very small field, to be fair, but it's difficult to do crossovers while keeping the story appealing for fans of each of the protagonists.
Not that I'd say Marvel is objectively good at it; it's more like the proverbial tap-dancing elephant. And I think we might be reaching the limits of that approach. "Crossover fatigue" is a thing. And one of the reasons that there are a lot of superheroes is that they tend to appeal to different people. Gating the enjoyment of media that someone wants to watch, behind media that they don't care about, eventually produces burnout. But if one's business model is to strip-mine an IP and then move on to the next one, that's not a problem.
I don't think it particularly matters if they're technically sequels, what matters is that they are very much an extension of the same brand.
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.
polysemous is an excellent word
In the 80s I came to understand a "nerd" was someone with some kind of avid interest and/or technical ability, but lacked social skills. A "geek" simply had a nerd's social skills.
This seems no longer to be true, partly because nerds, especially computer people, got lucrative jobs and people admired the money they could earn. Best Buy has a "geek squad" to show how their people have great technical ability.
Definitions change over time, but these seem to have changed pretty quickly over a few decades.
I blame the dudes who started using "sociopath" in 3-type taxonomies, a decade or two ago. It seemed like those usages got into the groundwater of the rationalist sphere, and then everyone wanted to crudely hijack terms that already have established meaning.
I don't inherently object to the phenomenon, but it's got to be done well, with multiple layers of meaning that all line up correctly. Software engineers and Confucians agree on the important of proper naming. I get really annoyed by people who do half-assed jobs that are only as good as I can manage most days. ;-)
Theory: the stamp and coin collectors switched to collecting digital items in video games.
Or Pokemon/Magic/etc. cards, or one of a thousand specifically-made-to-be-collectible-toys that are available. Matchbox cars, Lego minifigs, those eggs with random collectible toys in them.
There seems to be a lot more to collect now than there used to be. My memory of actually collectible items from when I was a kid was coins, stamps, and sports cards. Sports cards seemed bigger to me than the other two, but seems to have been hurt as much as stamps and more than coins. You can find big boxes of sports cards in antique stores or resale shops for cheap. You can't similarly find that kind of volume for coins or stamps - which seems to me that less people are dumping and leaving the hobby.
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.)
(Personally, I collect hotel cards. They're cheap, collectable, and fit into little books.)
Pokemon are also similar to those classic collectables because in practice it's impossible to "catch them all". The games were from the start "sadistically" designed with many sources of artificial scarcity, from different sets of mons available in different versions (Red vs Blue etc.), to exclusives tied to IRL events attendance, to difficulties of trading and transferring your collections to newer games and consoles. I remember reading an article detailing all of this, and it made me pity those naive kids who bought into the slogan and actually tried to do it.
This is why I never got into Magic:the Gathering.
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.
That's not quite hipsters as I understand them.
Hipsters bring status to obscure things by liking them. They like the obscurity as well as (I hope) high quality.
Just to be nerdy, they remind me of Lord Gro from _The Worm Ouroboros. He would side with the underdog, but he was so competent that having Lord Gro on their side meant the underdog would win. So then he'd go find another underdog. He was killed for being a traitor.
Fortunately, taste is played for lower stakes.
> Hipsters bring status to obscure things by liking them. They like the obscurity as well as (I hope) high quality
Yeah that's kinda what I was getting at; it's a complicated game where you need to like something that is obscure but not _too_ obscure. To be a hipster you have to start by liking all the same things that hipsters like (so you count as one of the in crowd) and then you branch out into liking something that's just the right sort of obscure so that you can show it to other hipsters and they'll be impressed by your unique tastes.
I think we both agree on the core feature of a hipster though -- an obsession with "liking things" as a means to gathering social status.
Let's Talk About Love, in which a rock snob figures out what there is to love about Celine Dion's music. It was originally written in 2007-- this edition is a ten-year retrospective and talks about the culture becoming less harsh.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125802364-let-s-talk-about-love?ref=nav_sb_ss_3_18
Oh, Lord Gro! I don't know *how* Eddison managed it, but he managed to create a character that you *know* is a no-good dirty lowdown backstabber and yet you still love him.
Even Gorice, King of Witchland, sometimes rebukes him with "No, that's *too* evil" (e.g. his plans for disposing of their enemies by secretly poisoning them at peace talks).
And yet everybody loves Lord Gro. He's brave, he is quixotic - he never switches sides to gain advantage or power or status - and he's capable and just wonderful. You should never trust him for a split second, but he's wonderful 😁
“Not enemies, if I may,” said he.
But she cried, “And thou Lord Gro of Witchland?”
“That one sickened long since,” he answered, “of a mortal sickness; and ’tis now a day and a night since he is dead thereof.”
“What art thou, then?” said she.
He answered, “If your grace would so receive me, Lord Gro of Demonland.”
“A very practised turncoat,” said she. “Belike they also are wearied of thee and thy ways. Alas,” she said in an altered voice, “thy gentle pardon! when doubtless it was for thy generous deeds to me-ward they fell out with thee, when thou didst so nobly befriend me.”
“I will tell your highness,” answered he, “the pure truth. Never stood matters better ’twixt me and all of them than when yesternight I resolved to leave them.”
The Lady Mevrian was silent, a cloud in her face. Then, “I am alone,” she said. “Therefore think it not little-hearted in me, nor forgetful of past benefits, if I will be further certified of thee ere I suffer thee to rise. Swear to me thou wilt not betray me.”
But Gro said, “How should an oath from me avail thee, madam? Oaths bind not an ill man. Were I minded to do thee wrong, lightly should I swear thee all oaths thou mightest require, and lightly o’ the next instant be forsworn.”
“That is not well said,” said Mevrian. “Nor helpeth not thy safety. You men do say that women’s hearts be faint and feeble, but I shall show thee the contrary is in me. Study to satisfy me. Else will I assuredly smite thee to death with thine own sword.”
The Lord Gro lay back, clasping his slender hands behind his head. “Stand, I pray thee,” said he, “o’ the other side of me, that I may see thy face.”
She did so, still threatening him with the sword. And he said smiling, “Divine lady, all my days have I had danger for my bedfellow, and peril of death for my familiar friend; whilom leading a delicate life in princely court, where murther sitteth in the wine-cup and in the alcove; whilom journeying alone in more perilous lands than this, as witness the Moruna, where the country is full of venomous beasts and crawling poisoned serpents, and the divels be as abundant there as grasshoppers on a hot hillside in summer. He that feareth is a slave, were he never so rich, were he never so powerful. But he that is without fear is king of all the world. Thou hast my sword. Strike. Death shall be a sweet rest to me. Thraldom, not death, should terrify me.”
...Lord Gro was in that battle with the Demons. He ran Didarus through the neck with his sword, so that he fell down and was dead.
Corund, when he saw it, heaved up his axe, but changed his intention in the manage, saying, “O landskip of iniquity, shalt thou kill beside me the men of mine household? But my friendship sitteth not on a weather vane. Live, and be a traitor.”
But Gro, being mightily moved with these words, and staring at great Corund wide-eyed like a man roused from a dream, answered, “Have I done amiss? ’Tis easy remedied.” Therewith he turned about and slew a man of Demonland. Which Spitfire seeing, he cried out upon Gro in a great rage for a most filthy traitor, and bloodily rushing in thrust him through the buckler into the brain.
In such wise and by such a sudden vengeance did the Lord Gro most miserably end his life-days. Who, being a philosopher and a man of peace, careless of particular things of earth, had followed and observed all his days steadfastly one heavenly star; yet now in the bloody battle before Carcë died in the common opinion of men a manifold perjured traitor, that had at length gotten the guerdon of his guile."
Though it's always weird to me that a man whose personal names ran in the direction of "Brandoch Daha" and "Corund" called his warring countries "Witchland" and "Demonland", which feels like a completely different register. Especially since they're not really very witchy or demonic.
Eddison (forgive me if you knew this already) started making up the stories that eventually became _The Worm Ouroboros_ at the age of ten, and kept the original names when he wrote them down at forty. I think it's pretty understandable that a 10-year-old boy's linguistic sensibilities would be eclectic.
I didn't know that. Thanks!
Your conception of nerdery resonates with me a lot more than Scott's, as someone who (1) can't help but obsess over certain esoteric topics (2) knows that in my non-nerdy social circles I will be (and have repeatedly been) made fun of for signaling my interest in these topics, so I learned to hide them.
This definition of "nerd" fits the scholastic type of nerd (AKA Poindexter), but not the geeks that Sam Kriss seems to be talking about (Comic Book Guy types). Among those, taste-related status games are very much present. See the reappraisal of the Star Wars prequels in light of the Disney sequels, the negative reevaluation of A Song of Ice and Fire in light of the show's late seasons (and GRRM neglecting the series), or how disdain towards MCU spread into disdain towards "capeshit" in all of its forms, on the screen and in comics.
To me "hipster" also has the connotation that if an obscure thing the hipster likes becomes popular, the hipster must then move away from the thing. If the thing comes up in conversation afterwards, the canonical thing is to say "Yeah I liked the thing, but then it became popular/sold out/got bad."
Otherwise the hipster loses hipster cred.
"...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."
See, this is exactly what I plan to do once I retire and other people's opinions cease mattering at all to me.
In unrelated news, I am looking for a list of "cringiest isekai anime."
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.
Sports isn’t bad at all. It is a good outlet for the male desire for tribal warfare, and most male humans love physical competition unless they are terrible at it.
It looks to me like crippling people for no good reason, but I'm not athletic myself so there may be something I'm not appreciating.
Maybe David Foster Wallace's writings on tennis might persuade you otherwise, at least for tennis?
I had that essay in mind as I was writing the comment!
They're gambling their long-term health for a chance at a eight-figure career/Olympic medal. You might think that it's a bad gamble, but that's not the same as "no reason". (And many people otherwise ruin their health without any potential upside at all.)
I was thinking about the people who support sports-- they're part of the process that cripples people.
People have a capacity for bloodthirstiness, like it or not. Literal gladiatorial fights to the death were considered perfectly respectable entertainment in the high antiquity, and public executions are still social gathering occasions in parts of the world. Of course, the pampered West does its collective best to increasingly repudiate such uncouth displays in all forms, e.g. with the ascendancy of e-sports over actual sports these days (not to say that those are healthier on average).
Not to mention that most athletes are not crippled and in fact live very healthy lifestyles.
It’s not about this at all. People don’t play sports for the tiny chance of becoming a professional athlete, not many of them.
Most play for the competition and teamwork and just plain fun. It is one of the most fun things you can do. One of the only thing that is even remotely close to competing with sex.
EDIT: To put it more simply this would be like complaining people only get into coding to become Mark Zuckerberg, or only get into literature so they can become famous authors. By age 10-12 most kids participating in team sorts have some awareness they aren't making a career of it, maybe 80% of them? BY 16 I would say 90% of them.
My old enemy the extreme imprecision of language strikes again. Yes, the word "sport" covers a huge swath of concept-space, from unambiguously beneficial physical exercise/teamwork on the amateur level to the aforementioned gamble implicit in the attempt to make it to the very top. I though that it would be obvious from the context which subset of meaning was deployed here, but the illusion of transparency is also never to be underestimated.
Sorry it was meant to be a response to Nancy, not you. I was trying to get across to her that this "gambling" has nothing to do with the vast majority of sports participation. You could magically evaporate all college and professional sports tomorrow, and make everyone collectively forget them, and tons of people would still play hockey/soccer/basketball/etc. because it is fun. Most kids get into sports before they even have an awareness about what professionalism in sports is or means.
They figure that out at 9-10 maybe. And within a pretty short time understand the relative chance for success for themselves.
In what world does every sport involve significantly increasing the chance of being long-term crippled?
Most people who play sports are healthier than those who don’t; people who participate in very dangerous contact sports such as competitive cheerleading and American football are outliers. The chance of becoming permanently crippled or disfigured through being a track star, cyclist, swimmer, rower, player of soccer/tennis/volleyball, etc. is negligible.
I think you hear ‘sports’ and think ‘NFL,’ but even most American money sports don’t conform to this model. E.g., baseball only poses risks to pitchers really, aside from freak accidents that can occur in any occupation. There are many more options in the sports world that do not involve high-speed contact, and rather famously the positive health impacts of strenuous physical activity like athletes participate in are quite robust if you don’t get that activity through one of the outlier high-risk activities.
And at the same time, rock climbers and sky divers are doing what they love for more risk without the chance at fame or fortune. People choosing to push the human limits is not necessarily a bad thing, even with the risks.
We're off topic here, but a friend of mine started struggling with CTE from being knocked about too much in combat sports. I am unsure of my position there. Fighting is very fine, I think. And the CTE risk is not much compared to early death which the whole endeavour usually implied. We need intact brains but we also need intact souls.
Yeah, one of the classic problems in combat sports is being able to combine competition with safety. Practice without an adversary only gets one so far, but too often the rules required for safety drain the usefulness out of competitive practice, in ways that aren't obvious. And if safety is sacrificed, we get stuff like this. :-(
I'm guessing you're mainly focusing on 'crippling' in the sense of American Football-derived brain concussions, or similar effects in boxing.
I'd venture that in other sports such as the Track and Field space, Tennis and Association Football, the swimming sports, so forth, there is rather less of this lasting injury effect.
Right. We have three outlets for tribal violence in modern society: war, politics, and sport.
War and politics are horrible, so I try to get all my tribalism jollies from sport. Sport is great because you can enjoy the thrill of cheering for your tribe to beat the other tribe, but it only lasts three hours and afterwards you can go back to being friends with the other tribe... until next week.
Yes, it is glib (for rhetorical effect, I think), but his description of team sports is accurate from the perspective of those of us that don't like watching them: it's a lot of sweaty men trying to control a ball over an endless series of nearly identical episodes.
I think the response here is in the interest of charity, which Scott is usually quite good about. Does obsessing over the types of things nerds like (even the aforementioned coins and stamps) any more useful or healthy? Is the MCU more or less healthy/useful/beneficial than getting into a "better" show or movie? If you find someone still obsessed with the original SW trilogy, are they doing something more important than someone watching game six of the Yankees Vs. the White Sox? Though I have clear preferences that make sense in my own mind, there's nothing objectively different.
It feels like Scott taking a moment to coddle his audience more than seeking pure truth. I think I read him for his pure truth search, at least as much as because he has more similar tastes to mine than most writers. A lot hit like that reduces his brand.
Scott's example isn't about people playing sports, but about people watching sports being played.
And I'm saying that watching something good is in itself good, just as watching something bad is in itself 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).
Agree with most of this, except for the MCU movies. I definitely don't dislike them, and some are genuinely great action movies, but the lack of any "real stakes" combined with a style that is constantly trying to impress upon the viewer how important the stakes are (through music, cinematic language and dialogue) creates a disconnect that just makes me lose interest, especially during the action scenes. If this disconnect was pushed even further, I expect I'd enjoy the end product even more - shounen manga and anime have a similar thing going on, and I never mind it there, possibly because it's pushed to the point of absurdity, possibly for cultural reasons... or it could just be one of those accidents of taste and aesthetics.
I'm not sure if by lack of real stakes you mean you know the villain will ever completely win, or that some movies have low stakes. I think the second one is more of a preference, some of my favorite MCU movies had fairly low stakes, I thought Spider-Man fighting a high-tech robber was more interesting than watching Doctor Strange try to stop an evil god from eating the universe, just because of how it was executed.
Maybe because I read the comics themselves fairly regularly the stakes seem more "real" to me because they are a little more "real" than in the comics (for example, they will sometimes kill popular characters for real in the movies, if only because the actor has gotten too expensive). One example of stakes that really impressed me was in Endgame: because I had read the Infinity Gauntlet storyline I assumed they would just reset everything with the gauntlet like they did in the comics. I was impressed that instead they allowed half the universe to be dead for 5 years, have everyone who survived remember those five years, and address the impact it had on the world and on relationships.
It's more about how even if someone dies, there's a big chance they'll come back somehow. Sure, maybe in another timeline or in another shape or form, but all in all it's the whole "Nobody's ever really gone" thing. Another thing is long-lasting fight scenes where the outcome is clear but the choreography and logistics aren't exciting enough to keep me invested.
Low stakes/high stakes is definitely a preference thing and I actually also prefer some of the low stakes MCU films... and probably in general as well.
Totally makes sense! I never read any of the comics growing up, but from what little I've heard about the multitude of timelines, alternate histories and reboots it does seem like the film series has been better at having consequences that matter. The Endgame fallout you mention is also interesting in the sense that it's closer to what makes low stakes stories appealing, at least to me.
I think low nominal stakes is good because then the nominal stakes match the actual stakes. If Spiderman is trying to stop a bank robbery, he might actually fail! If Thor is trying to stop the destruction of the universe, he might get injured or lose something along the way but he will definitely 100% succeed at the thing that's nominally in question.
MCU Thor did actually fail to stop the destruction first of Asgard, and then half the universe. The latter got better, albeit with many more consequences than I was expecting after watching Infinity War. (The subsequent treatment of the Snap impressed me coming from superhero comics where that sort of thing tends to get shrugged off pretty quickly.) But Asgard is still gone, as are the people Thor lost in the process.
(A different version of Loki is running around the multiverse, but Thor doesn't know about that, and the brother he feuded and reconciled with is still dead.)
I've actually been impressed at the extent to which the MCU managed to avoid the death-as-revolving-door trap of its comics antecedent. Multiverse shenanigans notwithstanding, characters who die (with the exception of the Snap) generally stay dead, in ways that matter to the survivors.
If you watch the final fight in Endgame, you see the Asgardians coming back. Apparently Banner added them returning to what he did when reversing the Snap. I did appreciate that this change was subtle and didn't negate the five year gap. It also made Thor giving up his title at the end of the movie more meaningful, since he wasn't handing over virtually *nothing* which might otherwise be implied.
Very good point that I think I've noticed before in the general discourse, but missed here.
> 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.
Here I disagree. Build your identity around what you do, not what you like. We don't remember [insert famous historical figure here] for the things they liked to do in their spare time, we remember the things they actually did.
Even if you're just an ordinary person and not a famous historical figure, your kids and grandkids will remember you for the things you actually did that had an impact on their lives, not for what you liked to watch on TV.
My grandmother's taste in books had a much greater impact on me than any of the things she "did". And this is kind of a weird dichotomy anyway, what you like doing is probably going to impact the kind of art you enjoy, one way or the other, and the kind of art you enjoy can have a profound impact on what you decide to "do".
Very well said.
Yeah. What art you like shouldn't *be* who you are, it should *derive from* who you are and (if it's got any depth to it) *influence* who you become.
But then, I generally don't like the current practice of defining oneself by a bunch of labels. Maybe this is one of those times where we need to ask ourselves, "who benefits?" when people define themselves as a "Star Wars fan".
As others have pointed out, I think its a bit of a false dichotomy. People often use entertainment and hobbies to relate to one another. There are definitely many people in my life that I do remember for what they liked to watch on TV or otherwise do in their spare time. One of my last conversations with my grandmother before her death was about the Fu Manchu novels and movies, which she had read/seen when they came out and which I had read/seen when I did one of my periodic deep dives into media history. It's still a conversation that I remember with incredible fondness because we connected so well over that topic.
I have similar media-related memories of other people in my life, like going to Rocky Horror screenings with my wife, watching "The Agony and the Ecstasy" with my mom, and talking for hours about Godzilla with my brother. So I don't think there is a clear line between what you like and what you do, because what you like is one way by which you relate to the world and to others.
As it happens, I also actually do enjoy reading about what famous historical people do in their spare time. I thought it was incredibly charming that a lot of ancient Greek philosophers got into a ship war over whether Achilles and Patroclus were lovers or not. I was also recently amused to discover that Saddam Hussein loved "Scarface." And while they may not be famous to the larger world, there are a lot of famous superfans of various entertainment media, although they are often more famous for their involvement in fan communities than just being famous for loving something.
Yes, I agree. I've got the sense from a couple of things Scott's written recently that he can't quite imagine just liking something, without any consideration for how that will affect your social standing. But in my experience people who just like what they like, and don't care what that does to their social standing, are some of the most genuine and fun people to be with.
I sort of share the attitude of the articles but "people couldn't possibly like Star Wars" or "people couldn't possibly like Star Wars that much" is not what I assume. What I assume (rightly or wrongly) is more along the lines of "no level of enjoying the experience of watching Star Wars could explain doing *that*." It feels like there's something more going on.
I enjoy, let's say "Groundhog Day". The way it manifests is that from time to time I'll say to myself: "ah, that's a fun movie". Then maybe I'll watch it and have a good time. That's it. I can not imagine myself ever 1) dressing up as characters 2) buying merchandise 3) buying real props 4) memorizing the name of the second assistant janitor who worked on the set 5) camping to be first in line to buy tickets to the premier of "Groundhog Day 2".
I think even if I enjoyed the movie way, way more than I actually do, even if every second of it filled me with unimaginable ecstasy, delight and purest bliss, I still wouldn't bother to memorize the name of the second assistant janitor or camp. (Buying merch? ...maybe a poster. Possibly.) In fact, if I enjoyed the movie that much, I might try to preserve the enjoyment and not watch it or think about it too much, so the pleasure doesn't wear thin with repetition. That's why when people do do some of those things, it makes me suspect this is not completely explainable by liking the movie itself, not directly, there must be something else there. Not something malignant, but something else.
At the very least it feels like there's some kind of spill-over effect where all the pleasure you associate with the movie attaches itself to everything that surrounds it (like the name of the second assistant janitor). And it may be fun to hang around other fans. It may still be fun even if you happen to grow bored with the movie and lose a lot of love for it. And if you're hanging around, it may be fun to also be a know-it-all, or have people envy you. And... whatever effects the articles try to outline.
I will posit to you the possibility that you haven't ever enjoyed something so thoroughly that you could spend far more hours submerged in it than you have available. Like someone who watches the same movie hundreds of times and never grows tired of it. There are multiple people with over a thousand days played on WoW - 24 hour days, so more like 2-3,000 days spent doing little else. That kind of time sink obsession makes your SW obsessive seem pretty small time.
I think you're on the right track in a lot of ways, actually. The scenario you're imagining, where Groundhog Day fills you with such bliss that it spills over to anything you associate with Groundhog Day (like the name of the second assistant janitor), but at the same time just watching the movie over and over would make it lose its magic, so you need to find all these other Groundhog-Day-adjacent activities to fuel your passion—that's pretty spot on, I would say!
For niche enough things, like early Star Trek, I can see how this actually could be good. If only a handful of people like it, then that indicates that those people have something in common. And that group might be the only place where someone could express that part of themself and have it be understood. So it becomes a small community of people who have more in common than just an interest in the particular piece of art. And all the dressing up, and conventions, and other stuff, are more fundamentally expressions of support for the community, and exuberance over finding someplace where one belongs.
And then there's negative side, where people mistake the map for the territory. Where they project their feelings for the community (the people and the pattern of interactions) onto what the community is organized around. It's an easy trap to fall into.
People in the cluster called "autistic" tend to prefer to do the things they enjoy over and over again, rather than having the instinct to preserve the enjoyment by not repeating it too much.
They also tend to enjoy things by doing some kind of systematizing task around them, like collecting or memorizing or sorting.
But there's also a very materialistic aspect to many contemporary expressions of fandom that seems to go beyond the systematizing urge, which I also don't understand. Funko Pops are to me the ultimate expression of it - they are more their own thing than a part of whatever fandom they purport to be part of, they don't do anything, and they aren't (IMO) especially aesthetically pleasing - they are just hunks of plastic designed to appeal to every single fanbase, and it grosses me out. It's like seeing slot machines in Vegas that are themed after popular TV shows.
I think one strain of MCU hatred arises from genuine cognitive dissonance: a large set of smart people encounter MCU stuff -- which I personally enjoy but which certainly contains a lot of (superficially?) silly and childish elements (costumes, explosions, unrealistic fight scenes, "good guys" and "bad guys"...) -- and find it all totally ridiculous. They see morons enjoying it, which doesn't surprise them, but then they also see some non-morons enjoying it! How could non-morons possibly enjoy such a thing?! It's maddening! In fact, I have a good friend who once berated me for like an hour about how I could possibly be interested in (IIRC) Avengers: Endgame. It really made no sense to him. Similarly, my father-in-law has repeatedly grumbled about the positive critical reception of Game of Thrones, which he won't watch because it contains dragons -- silly, embarrassing, impossible to suspend disbelief for, according to him.
In a way the haters are right -- strongly enjoying things with "childish" elements probably *is* associated with a set of undesirable traits, like stupidity. It's just not that *strong* of a predictor, while the haters speak as if it's incontrovertible evidence.
I suppose in defence of liking "childish" things, I'll quote:
(1) A review of an Indian action-adventure movie:
"I think everyone should see this, ideally in theaters.
Unless you think you’d spend whole thing thinking things like:
“You can’t pull a trident through two guys handle first!”
“How can he be lifting someone off the ground who has already been shown to be taller than he is?”
“You can’t punch a motorcycle out of the air!” with a slight frown on your face.
In which case, I’m sorry you hate fun. That must be really hard for you."
(2) C.S. Lewis on growing out of being grown-up:
"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
Yes, I find that Lewis quote quite appealing. I personally think the hyper-fixation on anti-childishness is tiresome.
Agreed. While I, personally, haven't gotten interested in the MCU films etc., I can't see disparaging people who are interested in them. People develop interests in all sorts of specialized things. ( I think there was a line about professors content to study the fuzz on a bee, but I failed at trying to find it. )
I like those quotes, thanks!
Nice.
The reason I don't like MCU stuff is the opposite. I feel like they're not going all the way, even if it might end up being cheesy/even more ridiculous. If I want my fill of costumes, explosions and things like that I would rather just watch Kamen Rider. MCU stuff doesn't make me feel any intense emotions.
Fair enough -- I'm not really claiming that there's some deeper level to the MCU that people who don't enjoy it are failing to see. But I don't think your complaint is the modal one among a broader "educated" population. "I liked that superhero movie" is still something you're expected to say shamefacedly in polite society, and this wouldn't change if the MCU movies were 35% cheesier.
I dunno, Guardians of the Galaxy seems to be the Marvel movie that gets the most respect from people who generally look down on Marvel movies (myself included), and it's also probably the most unashamedly ridiculous.
Guardians of the Galaxy is also the one that, while nominally derived from a superhero comic book, really fits the genre of Space Opera Sci-Fi more than it does superhero comics. And Space Opera has been respectable since Star Wars.
Yeah, I agree that my complaint isn't the most common one, I just wanted to add a data point.
I have no problem whatsoever with people enjoying silly things, if anything I think it's kinda cruel and ridiculous when people berate others because their entertainment isn't "serious enough", it's entertainment eh?, it's not a job, it's not a social service, it's not a mission, it's just a bunch of random cravings. I remember in my childhood when I reflected on my why I like cars, it's hard to describe my reasoning then but I didn't find any objective reason, there is nothing I can say to somebody who doesn't already like cars to get them to like it. As a grownup I can dress up my love for cars in plenty of fancy motivations, like the fact that they are massive piles of metal that can outrun most anything that Nature has managed to produce in 4 billion years while sounding angry as heck, the raw feeling of power they give you when you're in one's driver seat and you press the acceleration and hear the engine roaring as the metal beast lunges forward, but this won't attract anybody who isn't already into transhumanism-ish things or transcending biology, and might even fail to attract lots of those people. Reason is but a slave for Passion, Passion doesn't bother to explain itself in words or premises or priors, it has hormones and chemical transmitters to do its Reasoning for it (and even this is too much of a Reason-centric way to view Passion).
What I really hate about the MCU though, besides my general dislike for Fantasy and non-plausible stories, is how nakedly the corporation behind it treats it as a cash grab. The merchandise, the constant injokes and callbacks in movies to other movies, it all feels very forced. The stories are too non-original, every story is like "This old villian that we thought was dead or irrelevant is now back with a new idea and possibly new villians in league", and that's it, no other twist. Now I never saw MCU other than Iron Man, which I thought was awesome (at least part 1 and 2), but this is the general impression I have based on the flood of chatter that the MCU generates on the internet and general social life, it's just a corporation desperately milking what comic artists and writers have done 40 years ago for all its worth. Look at how they talk about it : "IP", it's not Art or Writing or Storytelling or Screenplaying for them, it's "Property".
Then again, there is no objective reason to like cars, but I'm infatuated. So you do you.
Yes, I think your car point is right on (and personally I have no interest in cars!). The bullet that I find most people unwilling to bite, though, is that (almost?) all interest in high "art" is *also* just a fancy form of entertainment. Maybe the first sprawling "novel of ideas" you read makes you a better person in some hard-to-articulate way, but does the 10th? The 100th? No, at that point you're just amusing yourself. And god bless ya if that's what you like. But, despite how philistine the elite now is, there is still a surprisingly strong resistance to just admitting this.
Re: MCU, I actually think you're a bit off-target. The reason the MCU has been as successful as it has, globally and across time (Iron Man came out 15 years ago!), is that it's always been at least a bit *less* of a myopic cash grab than it could have been. Like, they hire "real" actors (starting with Robert Downey Jr.) and "real" directors. In contrast, many other superhero/action movies have not really bothered, and I think it's no coincidence that they have failed to build long-running franchises. I understand how that extra little smidgen of quality might not seem like much, but I think it is real.
I would say that rather than your identity being built around your liking a thing, the things you like and groups you identify with should orbit around your identity. Thus you should be able to discard those things and groups at will if they somehow diverge from what’s good for you or the qualities you desire. That identity and the desires that emanate from it ultimately should derive from your axiomatic principles. It’s a cart before the horse thing.
My objection to the MCU is prior to its implementation in film; superhero comic books and many other genre comics are largely a medium that coddles and tolerates emotionally and intellectually immaturity. The superhero comics that are put forward as the most revolutionary or extraordinary in quality are frankly IMO pretty bad and jejune (“Watchmen,” for example, is a great example of a comic celebrated for merely possessing incipient characteristics that are minimally required by other works of art so as not to be outright pablum; that doesn’t make it smart or sophisticated, just a little more nuanced than the very clumsy other comics of its time). Far from considering any MCU titles ‘classics’ in any sense, I have yet to encounter any that have much at all to say: as you point out they’re just retreading the repetitive serialized storytelling of a genre that never had a lot to give, and when it did examine things often stopped far short of real reflection and insight. There are many niches and sub-sub-genres within the domain of e.g. schlock-horror, and aficionados believe that certain schlock-horror films are classics, but largely I dismiss the whole category on quality and aesthetic grounds and the same goes for superhero stuff, where it doesn’t for, say, SF&F literature because there are actual examples of nature, insightful, and creatively and intellectually stimulating works within that domain that can stand with other classics of literature writ large.
I completely agree with your first paragraph.
With regards to your second, I somewhat agree, but I'd also say that a lot of the appeal of the better superhero stuff (and other similar genres) is finding that someone has taken something you liked as a child, and made something more sophisticated out of it, something which appeals to your older self on levels which the the earlier iterations can't. And I think that appeal is absent for someone who never experienced the schlocky earlier versions when they were young enough to not mind.
(And it doesn't help that a lot of mainstream sophisticated art has become un-moored from a basic grounding in being fun to read. All books should be "page-turners", dammit, and I'm not talking about plot here. I should have some reason why I keep wanting to read more, whether that's the beauty of the language, the continual elaboration of metaphor, or anything else.)
I second this strongly. A lot of times I remember my child self liking some childhood entertainment media, but wishing it was more sophisticated. For instance, I kept wishing "Power Rangers" would incorporate more hard sf elements into its story (you can imagine my delight when I discovered "Gundam").
Your comment seems reasonable. My counterpoints are two: while surfing on consumers’ irrepressible nostalgia for the stories of their childhood is likely to be successful, it doesn’t make those stories very good: the MCU doesn’t seem obviously more sophisticated or nuanced than comics to me, just better-funded. I can fully admit that such things that I like are pretty poor quality and often deserve harsh criticism when I revisit them later. I’ve let go of childish things where I can, and with my own children I try to make sure that they’re mostly exposed to cultural artifacts of better quality so they don’t end up being sentimentally attached to (and influenced by) dreck.
Your later paragraph I agree with, no qualification necessary. I’ll give as an example Count of Monte Cristo, an extremely high-quality and nuanced work which is a ripping good yarn that keeps you turning pages till the end. I think this is about plotting, too: as ‘literary fiction’ becomes a genre, a lot of it has abandoned plot. Meaning that for solid, intellectually and emotionally mature fiction of adventure and fun, you really have to look carefully.
Ah, I wasn't talking about the MCU there, more about things like "Watchmen", "Sandman", and "Kingdom Come", in their original forms. The MCU feels like distilling decades worth of comics down to the most popular and iconic stories, which are solid and straightforward (as opposed to bottom-of-the-barrel filler). I wouldn't call the individual stories of the MCU themselves particularly impressive; what impresses me about the MCU is the scale, the production values, and the way they kept their quality consistent for so long without losing touch with their source material. They're very well done, for what they are.
And heh, I just picked up a copy of Count of Monte Cristo (one of the abridged ones, though).
Out of curiosity, have you read any Steven Brust? He's been writing a fantasy series (short tightly-plotted books, not sprawling flaccid epics) since the early 80s. And since Dumas is one of his favorite writers, he's done a set of "prequels" as a loving homage to Dumas. "The Phoenix Guards", "Five Hundred Years After", the 3 parts of "The Viscount of Adrilankha", and most lately "The Baron of Magister Valley". ;-) They're in-universe historical novels (or "popular history", as the fictional author would have it) written in the near future of the fantasy world, about the near past, meshing the beats of Dumas' respective works with the established history of the fantasy world, involving multiple layers of authorial unreliability, and the fictional author's style is something of a cross between Dumas and Tom Stoppard. Like Dumas, they're long but easy to read, but more than half the people I've tried to get to read them have bounced hard off the style.
Well, hmm, agree to disagree on comics and superhero flicks; I honestly just don’t see a lot there that’s redeeming.
As for Brust, no I haven’t read him but that sounds fascinating and you’ve sold me on at least trying him out.
Perhaps it's one of those "tap-dancing elephant" things - it's not that the elephant is particularly *good* at tap-dancing...
I think for me the best equivalent to comics would be myths and legends. They're usually fairly simple stories, but they tell something about the people who wrote them and passed them on. What traits do we value, what situations do we fear, what types of behavior do we consider admirable or despicable, and so forth. ("Who'd win in a fight, Ares or Athena?" "Marry, kill, fuck - Hera, Athena, Aphrodite?" That sort of thing.)
Interesting that you choose Count of Monte Cristo for the example here. Maybe I didn’t pick up on all the nuance when I read it as a teenager. I definitely remember enjoying the book a ton, so no arguments on the page-turner aspect, but I also remember thinking that the count was suuuuuch a Gary Stu and it felt like the superhero equivalent of the time period. I mean, he’s basically Batman for the 1840s. Guy with a traumatic past and a ton of money uses that money to train in a faraway land and obtain equipment for the sake of righting the injustice that was done to him while using a false identity.
I don’t object to comics because they have plots with false identities, implausible fortunes, ultra-competent heroes, etc. Those elements are fun, and I’m not against fun.
What I’m against is lack of emotional and literary nuance. The failure of Batman is a failure to grapple with the emotional content of what you’re writing: although Dumas writes a ripping good yarn, he also immediately explores the emotional and even spiritual implications of a ridiculously single-minded hunt for revenge. Most comics do not even attempt this; when they do they grasp at it clumsily and in a way that weirdly idolizes and romanticizes Batman for being insane, or exploits this for the shock value of subversion of tropes rather than exploring in an interested way what actually lays in his heart as a fully realized person. Where is the Batman story about personal forgiveness and letting go of revenge after it’s warped you? Doesn’t exist, at least not in a form that’s more than a rudimentary gesture.
I tend to think of works of art as being good in terms of what they are trying to accomplish. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's 1960s "Thor" comics are really good, Shakespeare and Tolstoy are also really good, but they aren't really trying to tell the same kind of story.
I don't tend to think of "Watchmen" as being good because it meets the bare minimum from another genre, I think of it as being good because it incorporates some elements from other genres and combines them with elements of its own to make something new. It's not good because it's a pale imitation of literary fiction, which is better than superhero comics, it's good because it combines the two genres, which are both good in their own way. The best superhero comics that came out at the same time as "Watchmen," like Wolfman and Perez's "Teen Titans," are also very good, but they are good because they are doing superhero tropes superbly well, rather than combining different tropes in unique ways like "Watchmen" does.
The MCU movies are at best good blockbusters. None of it is art.
The best MCU movies are classics, but the best is long behind the MCU now. Since the first "Avengers", it's been not *quite* monotonically downhill, but mostly so. The focus is increasingly on less well-developed characters, the villains are less interesting, the plots more pedestrian(*) and the action more repetitive. It is genuinely hard for me to understand how MCU fans can be satisfied with the latest mediocrities; my working model is that they have built part of their identity around Being an MCU fan and won't allow themselves to see the rot.
As for "no worse than a mediocre pre-MCU action movie", that's setting the bar pretty low and I'm OK with just calling that "bad". Action movies at least allow for some diversity in the action; matters can be settled with fistfights, swordfights, gunfights, car chases, fighter-plane dogfights, even clever tricks. The superhero comic format pretty much demands that everything ultimately turn into a fistfight with extra FX, and that predictability is a strike against it.
* And even when the plots start with an interesting premise, like "Endgame" and "Multiverse of Madness", the execution is pedestrian.
My comment about mediocre pre-MCU action movies was mostly about 2 things. First, I think that in general blockbuster mainstream movies went through a low in the late 90s and early 2000s where their average quality went down a bit. There were still good movies, but it felt like there were a lot of stupid, terrible blockbusters. I think the Marvel movies, along with other big, smart action movies like LOTR turned it around. There are still terrible blockbusters, like Transformers 2-5, but I think the bar has been raised a bit. In the 90s it felt like every other movie was as bad as Transformers 3.
The other point I was trying to make is that critics of the MCU often act like bad Marvel movies are crowding smarter movies out of theaters. I think if bad Marvel movies didn't get made their place would be taken not by smarter movies, but by other bad blockbusters. The 2010s might have had their own versions of terrible 90s action flicks like "Lost in Space," "The Phantom," or "Battlefield Earth."
This. Just... this. (Both on MCU and in general.)
Why do you keep saying "full stop"? I thought you were American.
In the metaphorical sense that Scott uses it here, I think Americans use both "period" and "full stop" interchangeably. But we never use "full stop" to describe the literal period at the end of a sentence - I didn't even realize that's what it means until now.
Whereas non-American English speakers avoid "period" because (a) it sounds American and (b) it sounds like menstruation, which is icky.
As an American, my impression is that in American usage, "full stop" is a bit more intellectual - it means "...without qualification", probably in response to someone else saying the thing with qualifications.
Whereas "period" tends to be more about strength of emotion - it means "...and I don't want any more discussion about it."
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.
Rarities, scraps of foreign lands, wanting to have the full set of something, getting the new commemorative issue (post offices still do this one) - the usual reasons. Something both kids *and* adults could get into. Before cigarette cards or baseball cards.
I think the simple answer is people like collecting things and people were bored compared to today.
I mean, I'm old enough to remember the analog Before Times pretty well, and I can't wrap my head around why people collected stamps either. I think there are probably multiple possible reasons for the disconnect, only one of which is time-related.
(I imagine you could probably distinguish them by asking the person if they understand why people collect Pokemon.)
I think stamp collecting works well with the model of nerdy interests as a massive mind trap.
You get letters, they mostly have boring stamps on them. Once in a while you notice a new or interesting stamp. You start to wonder what other interesting stamps might be out there.
At this point you stand on the precipice of madness. What you _should_ do is think about something else instead, like cars or sex or money. But instead you carefully remove the interesting stamp and put it aside.
Time passes, and you find more stamps. That first interesting stamp is no longer interesting, you've got a dozen of them, plus you've got a couple of really rare ones. The more time you spend thinking about stamps, the more interesting they seem. Maybe instead of waiting for interesting stamps to come in the mail, you could visit a stamp store. Maybe they'd have something really interesting there. Maybe you could own one of every stamp in the world. Maybe you could find a stamp worth millions. Failing that, maybe you can have every Hungarian bird-themed stamp issued between 1976 and 1979 because you've already got twelve of those and you just need four more.
Somehow your brain has pieced together a whole lot of slightly-interesting stuff into a massive obsession.
I think I'm just fundamentally missing the "complete the collection" drive. I enjoy collecting specific things that I like, but I have never ever in my life felt the urge to go out of my way to collect things that I don't specifically like/care about just to complete a set.
I'm very nerdy and diagnosed autistic, so it's not like I'm missing the "get very interested in some obscure topic" capacity - I just don't get the completionist attitude.
I think this has to do with people liking having accomplished something and disliking uncertainty. With completionism you have a definite goal and a plan that will likely achieve it. Whereas if you just do whatever interests you in the moment it can be hard to pinpoint the definite evidence that you didn't just waste time with nothing to show for it.
I think one of the components of a successful hobby is it gives people something to think about unrelated to work and the pressing concerns of life. So having lots of detail and patterns helps with that
Also, stamps can teach/indicate a lot about the nations of the world and about history.
Yes, this is the curse of the mildly interesting. If stamps were totally uninteresting then nobody would be obsessed with them. If they were really obviously fascinating then collecting them wouldn't be low-status. But since stamps are just mildly interesting, it gives the nerdy mind _just_ enough to latch onto.
No, Val, your original sad take is right. The future is weird.
I think it's probably harder to imagine stamp-collecting being fun if you grew up in an internet age where you can do it with google+money, rather than having to search in the real world.
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
Finding meaning through my "role in the tribe" or "daily labor" sounds hellish! I'll take finding meaning through creating and appreciating art (mass-produced or otherwise) and drinking and eating with friends any day.
Nerds are the new priests and monks. Jocks are the knights and soldier
New? Has it ever been different?
Summa Theologiae was so obviously written by a nerd, there is no way to deny that. More generally, before general literacy, the people who could read were usually nerds.
My definition would be that nerd is someone who cares about some obscure topic too much. Even when religion was considered the most important and high-status topic, only the nerds wondered how many angels would fit on the tip of the needle. The normies were probably more like "tell me what to say so that I get in Heaven", plus they did what they saw their neighbors doing, and that was it.
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.
The chaff to wheat ratio has definitely increased. You used to be able to sort it by just throwing it up in the air.
There's a lot to be said for curation, but finding curators you trust is still an issue. I guess in some of the discussion above, hipsters are just unpaid curators, but I prefer to trust the professionals.
The professionals have their own disadvantages, though. Each has staked out a slightly different position, and is an expert at making other positions look lame. I once read an expert's critique of some abstract expressionist painter: "He doesn't blow you away with his talent, he. just knocks you flat with his arbitrariness." Devastating.
"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"
On that last bit, have I got news for you about mediaeval mystery plays 😁 Chaucer could include in his "Canterbury Tales" the stock figures of the manipulative, money-hunting purveyor of fake relics and the tales of how everyone knows the friars and monks are banging all the wives of the citizens, as well as the proud bastards (male and female) of the parish priest who may be born out of wedlock but they demand respect due to their father's status.
There was a *lot* more raunchiness and anti-clericalism going on, living side-by-side with fervent devotion to local saints and belief in the intercessory power of the Virgin Mary.
See this 80s version of a mystery play, where there's an entire section about the shepherds keeping watch in the fields for the Nativity, and the long comic interlude about one of them being a sheep-stealer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk7HSLE9Qz8
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.
I guess that Moneyball and other popularisation of behavioural economics had a big part in that.
Once it was just a party trick to know all the stats, but now it's been made respectable.
Nerdiness has been given an air of professionalism in many areas.
" Most sports fans, even the pundits talking about it on TV don’t really nerd out about it."
Saturday afternoon is football:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f2-Hw8ukqc
Fathers and sons (and daughters):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWJ5D16hX3U
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.
I was into Dragonlance books, when they started coming out, after I saw a cousin pick one up at a bookstore. I hadn't read much classic sword-and-sorcery, and had no experience of D&D, so they were an amazing new type of story that I devoured. But eventually I noticed the quality dropping off. :-/ But it taught me some valuable lessons about becoming invested in corporate IP.
IMO... Chronicles, the original 3, were like a novelization of a fun campaign. Legends, the next 3 (also by Weis and Hickman) were the pinnacle, taking a handful of characters, putting them through the wringer, and grappling with big questions like "who are you", "what do you want", "what are you willing to sacrifice to get what you want", and so forth. Tales, the next 3, were a shared-universe collection like "Thieves' World". But after that the quality began to drop off.
Wow, I can't get my head around being around anyone else who'd read it, as a kid. But now that I think about it, that's how things are for the kids these days, for everything.
For me, not reading LotR was never an option. We had my father's old hardback copies with the giant fold-out maps.
As I recall, LOTR was fairly popular when I was a kid-- I'm talking about the 1960s and the Ballentine editions, though I think I'd also seen an Ace cover. When I say popular, it was more like a number of kids had read it, but it wasn't as though everyone had.
I saw Star Wars in a theatre, back when it was Star Wars because there were no other Star Wars movies. I'd heard something about it being good, but no more than that.
This is not as cool as someone who wandered in to a showing only because they wanted to see an Alec Guinness movie.
When the space ship went by overhead and kept going and going, I knew I was seeing something new. I believe it was a big artistic change. I haven't seen anything else as major since, and I'm not expecting to see another.
"When the space ship went by overhead and kept going and going, I knew I was seeing something new."
Yeah, that was *amazing*. I was slightly too old to get into Star Wars since I was in my mid-teens and already a Trekkie by then, but that opening scene was genuinely original. I'd never seen anything like it. For all the flak Lucas took, and for all the mess that the later sequels and Disney's heavy hand made of the entire property, that was something he should get credit for as a real artist.
I was too old for imprinting on Star Wars, too, but see Duane's _High Wizardry_ for a story about a kid who gets ethics as well as fun from Star Wars.
Agreed, absolutely; but I think he also deserves a lot of credit for his attention to detail. He didn't take the easy way out and make all of his scenes look shiny-clean, like they're set in a clean room at a chip plant. Instead, every surface of every object is worn, rusted, or patched-up; every building looks lived-in, and we see people going about their daily chores -- cooking food, drying clothes, patching droids, whatever. The Empire is a stark exception: every Imperial installation is squeaky-clean, sterile, and outlined in stark black and white -- so the viewer can instinctively understand what kind of an organization they are, in contrast to the ordinary people (whom they oppress). This is the kind of visual storytelling that no longer exists in modern films, IMO.
Yeah. I appreciate how we got to see ordinary people going about their lives, and how all of the "used" stuff hinted at an entire universe that had existed before the movie and would continue to exist afterwards.
I feel like nowadays, when they try differentiating groups, it winds up being like a multi-player video game, where each faction has a Style, and everything about that faction reinforces that Style. And it's lifeless, as if an artist set down a vision at a single point in time, and it didn't exist before or after.
I feel like that was Doug Trumbull who invented that look. He radically changed the way spaceships looked in "2001" (from sleek and shiny to complicated with all the plumbing visible), and it just took over almost immediately.
That is a good point about the spaceships; but Lucas managed to carry over that look into an entire coherent aesthetic that encompasses entire worlds. Or at least cantinas. :-)
Ah, I'd guessed that that you were a few years older than I. I'm fairly sure I didn't see Star Wars in the theater, but it wouldn't have been impossible. We did have early videotapes without the "Episode IV", though. :-)
There was definitely a quality and coolness gap between Star Wars movies and every other sci-fi I'd seen, up until Star Trek II and Blade Runner. Even Star Trek TMP resembled an ungainly hybrid between 2001 and the Buck Rogers movie. There was something different in the sci-fi aesthetic, that I think can be seen in the difference between "Alien" and "Aliens" (putting aside that one is a horror movie and the other is an action movie). If I had to guess, it was something about not just using special effects to look cool or instill "the awe and majesty of space", but using special effects in service of the story. (A lesson I think Hollywood may have to re-learn every time there's a technical advance.)
For me, I think "Pulp Fiction" was another turning point like that, stylistically speaking. And in a way, Jackson's "The Fellowship of the Ring": it wasn't my "perfect" adaptation, but I simply hadn't believed that a movie would be capable of doing it so well. I'd resigned myself to it probably being horrible, but I'd enjoyed the two previous Jackson films I'd seen - "Heavenly Creatures" and "Meet the Feebles", so I knew he had range.
I only saw Star Wars in its first theatrical run because my uncle took my brother and me.
(My parents still haven't seen a single Star War. My dad was able to successfully identify the Millennium Falcon when asked - which puts him ahead of Harrison Ford's wife - but my mom could not.)
I remember being reluctant to go, because "I didn't like war movies". Of course I loved it. Though as a young written SF snob, I never became a true Star Wars fan. (Even if for various reasons I can now tell my Shryiiwook from my Aurabesh.)
I did have friends reading Tolkien when I did: our middle school science teacher knew that we were playing D&D, and recommended it to a bunch of us. It was definitely a small group reading it (and then due to fortuitous timing seeing the Rankin Bass Return of the King on TV and hearing the BBC radio series on NPR) rather than something everyone around knew or cared about. We were well past "Frodo Lives", and long before Peter Jackson.
And I think I'm the only one among us who got deep into the world beyond TLotR itself. Or as deep as you could when the only posthumous Middle Earth publication was The Silmarillion." I promise that knowing the name of Turin Turambar's sword did not gain me status among even my nerdier friends, let alone anyone else.
(Though my last year trick or treating I'm sure I confused a lot of neighbors by announcing I was dressed as Fingolfin.)
“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.)
"Do you have anything worth living for?"
And where do you think JMS got his references from? There's a ton of Arthurian mythology stuffed into the show, but also little touches like the name "Lorien".
"reading The Silmarillion or watching Babylon 5 is hipsterish"
I resent that implication! I have never in my entire life been anything remotely approaching hipster, and besides those wannabes only got into the HoME after it was cool 😁 And you will tear from my cold, dead hands my devotion to the tragic end of the Rogue Telepaths in the Massive Hairspray Explosion Inferno.
Back when B5 first aired, I tuned into one episode to see what it was about. Season 1, "Believers". It felt like a particularly cheesy ST:TNG episode, and I never bothered watching more. Decades later I watched the full thing with a friend, and it became apparent that I'd tuned in for what I personally think was the single worst episode of the entire show.
That said, in retrospect it had a prophetic quote:
> Doctor Franklin: "You're gonna have to stay in bed for a while. It's gonna be boring, but the station has over a thousand educational and entertainment channels and you can watch -"
> Mother: "No. We have seen some of that material. Those channels demonstrate false belief systems. We do not want our child exposed to inappropriate information."
Though I'd say the resolution of that episode was one of B5's more explicit "We're not Star Trek" moments.
That's somewhat blurred by Trek itself getting somewhat darker since then, starting with B5's reflection and competitor DS9. But the entire main plot up to the climax is very much (and I wouldn't be surprised if that were intentional) a Trek episode, except that no TOS or TNG-era Trek show would have ended like that.
(Most other Trek runs still wouldn't, I think. But Enterprise's execrable "Dear Doctor" is at least in the ballpark.)
Yeah, that's what JMS said in the Lurker's Guide, but I don't see it...
For me the significant parts are that it was a stand-alone episode, with aliens-of-the-week, in a morality play that directly criticizes specific real-world religions, and what I'll call meaningful religion in general. (And the arc B-plot was forgettable.) My general impression of Star Trek is that yes, most of these little morality plays had a happy, tidy resolution, but there were plenty with bittersweet or tragic ends, and plenty where there was no clean end at all. (TNG's "The Wounded" is a good example of that, IMO.) Would you mind going into more detail about how you think "Believers" was different? There seems to be something here that I just don't get.
IIRC, JMS seems to think that "TKO" was the worst episode. I agree that it was weak, but I liked the background it gave on how humans and aliens interacted, and the nuances of humanity's relationships with other alien races who'd been starfaring for longer and had to watch as Earth gained a tiny empire of its own. To each their own, I guess.
After our rational identification figure uses superior science to show the aliens that their superstitions are just that, I don't think a Trek episode (at least in the 20th century) ends with the parents saying "Great, thanks" and then murdering their child.
Trek had plenty of tragedy (City on the Edge of Forever) and moral ambiguity (A Private Little War). And it had rules like the Prime Directive to prevent the heroes from short-circuiting the drama. But when it comes down to it and you show the people that their god is just a computer or that they can't have clean warfare anymore and have to get their hands bloody or make peace, they'll mostly make the right choice.
And in the rare event they make the wrong choice, it's generally not going to be something as visceral as child-murder.
(I don't remember reading that in the Lurker's Guide. But I was on the B5 Usenet group when JMS was there and certainly looked at the Lurker's Guide in the 90s, so it's absolutely possible I got the idea from JMS.)
Not saying you got it from there, just that you have solid company in your opinion. :-)
Perhaps it's that it felt like one of the "this is why we have the Prime Directive" episodes. Franklin committed the original sin of interference, and after that it was always going to end badly, with only the particulars of the tragedy in doubt.
Or maybe the child felt like too much of a cardboard cutout to empathize with, no different from any of the faceless people who die when a ship blows up. Maybe if he'd had more development, and not been ...
Just to check, my read of the story is that the parents talked the child into acquiescing to his own death. Is that your read? (It's been a while since I've seen it.)
I don't think TKO is a great story (I was annoyed at the framing of "the Mutai is for aliens, not Earthers", as if they actually identified generically as "aliens"). But I kind of love it regardless, not least for Soon-Teck Oh's voice as he intones "Into the sands of blood steps [name], BRAAAAVEST of his race!"
And the Ivanova plotline is kind of maudlin and formulaic, and Theodore Bikel plays the rabbi as a stereotype (a 20th century American stereotype!)... and I like it anyway. :-)
I got the impression that it was a sort of hazing ritual, right? New species aren't allowed in until some individual pushes their way in past all the resistance. So my headcanon was that the translation into "alien" was from a word that meant "species who can participate".
And yeah, the Ivanova plotline was by the numbers, but I also liked it anyway. I suppose part of me was hoping for a serious treatment of Jews In Space, but oh well. Maybe there's a sect that's decided that the 20th century was the ideal time to preserve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAZhtT-dUyo
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.
"Why are these identities not just 'tastemakers' and 'superfans'?"
For one thing, Amazon's dire attempt at ginning up enthusiasm for the Rings of Power with their very own "superfans" was a hilarious disaster; the only genuine superfan in the bunch was a superfan of Harry Potter and skipped watching Rings of Power when it aired in favour of House of the Dragon 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQuy_mB1dw&t=1s
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?"
Yeah, Ramana Maharshi had something with his "Who are you" approach.
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.
Not to nerdsplain your own culture to you, but it seems to me that Nathan Barley was a (superb) satire of upper-middle-class "new media" types; the show was even based around a thinly-veiled parody of Vice Magazine at its worst. The source material makes this clear:
http://thegestalt.org/simon/cunt/
Appreciation for Pabst Blue Ribbon, meanwhile, is absolutely a Stateside manifestation of lad culture: PBR as a beer offers nothing to reward the epicurean hipster, but it does afford an ironic affectation of authenticity.
Well, THAT'S certainly a url...
(Yes, I know, it's less offensive in the UK.)
I'm pretty sure Nathan is now living in Hoxton and riding a fixie.
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.
The hint to OCD is valuable. Badly OC people are too busy with basic stuff to become nerdy, but a trace of those traits may well contribute to nerdicity (nerdism?)
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.
No nerd has to be beaten up by jocks if he chooses his topics wisely and seriously digs into them. There even is a guy calling himself "karate nerd" on youtube.
Wild theory: anybody who calls themselves an "X nerd", is not an actual nerd. It means "applies nerd-like behavior/interest to a non-nerd thing".
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.
There are no real beer nerds, I agree with you here. Serious beer drinkers may prefer different flavors, but the main aspects are availability and toxicity. The latter has two aspects. The alcohol content and the hangover potential.
Disagree on the lack of beer nerds. Watch any Michael Jackson video (not that one, the other one) for instance to see what beer nerdism is like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x8lXo5xjoQ
And that's from the 1980s when the beer scene was very different indeed. Nowadays there's a microbrewery in every disused sewing machine factory in the world, and American beer can actually be good.
The Pabst thing was never a beer nerd thing, it was an "irony" thing. Some hipsters started drinking the lowest-status beer they could think of because irony and then they decided they actually liked it (because these were people who never really liked beer to begin with).
That Michael Jackson did write about whisky before he got into beers, didn't he? Like with wine connaisseurs I doubt the honesty of people drinking like that. As far as nerd is an acronym for "not emotionally reacting dude" those academic-aleck drinkers who like to talk enthusiastically about nuances of taste are not nerds. If nerd means something else to you, it's fine by me.
"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.)
Ha, not a chance!
I feel certain, deep in my heart, that this so-called "typo" was in fact a trap designed to expose people like you and me.
In what sense is it called Shyriiwook? Surely the Wookiees themselves don't call it that, since they can only speak in growls.
According to Wookieepedia, the word Shyriiwook itself is a Basic* transliteration of Wookiee growls. Those growls translate to "tongue of the tree people," which is what actual Wookiees call their language.
*Basic is the common tongue of the Republic and the language spoken by most humans, near-humans, and core worlders. Whenever we hear people in Star Wars speaking "English" (or whatever language you happen to be watching the movies in), they're actually speaking the Galactic Standard dialect of Basic.
Does this imply that "Shyrii-" is the one true Basic word we know, since all other Basic words have been translated into English? Why would Shyrii- be the only Basic word left untranslated?
Wouldn't this imply that "Wookie" just means "person" in Basic? Isn't it weird that most Galactic citizens are calling this one alien race "People"?
It seems that "Wookiee" (or to be more specific, whatever growl is onomatopoeically transliterated into Basic as "Wookiee") means person in Shyriiwook, not in Basic. It makes perfect sense that Wookiees would call their own species "people," since the word probably originated before they had contact with Humans and other races.
Was there an in-universe explanation for why the Imperials had British accents and everyone else mostly had American? I could see a core-vs-colonies distinction, but that didn't always match the backgrounds of various characters...
That upper class British accent was the accent of the mostly-human aristocracy of the Core Worlds, which is why it was very common among Imperials. Aliens, humans from the rim worlds, and lower class Core Worlders all had different accents. (This was often some type of American accent, though the Twi'leks were given French accents in the Clone Wars show, and plenty of aliens have weird-sounding accents that are hard to place.)
Interesting, Grand Moff Tarkin from A New Hope was from the Outer Rim world of Eriadu, and the accent there was said to be "more Core than Core," which might explain why his British accent was especially thick - it's literally a form of cultural overcompensation.
Thanks!
>Also, speaking of collectors, are there any, any more?
Have you heard of Funko Pops?
I've never actually heard of anyone talking about collecting funko pops unironically. It seems to just be a cultural trope for insulting p
I have personally been inside an apartment in which an entire wall of the living room was taken up by a glass display case for storing two of the tenants' shared Funko Pop collection. At a cursory glance, I'd estimate the total value in the high four figures. "Funko Pop collection" is not just a meme with no basis in fact, there are really people like this.
The least surprising token in this story is "tenant".
I worked at Target in high school, maybe 5 or 6 years ago now. When we got a new Funko pop in that people knew was about to come out, you would often notice a few people hanging around the shelves so they could be there the moment we put it out. We were specifically instructed not to confirm we had it in the store. So yeah, they exist.
I had never heard of Funko Pops Until I read the comments here. I had to Google it, and the second non-advert hit was a GameStop link. This strikes me as being profoundly meaningful, though I have not yet discerned the actual meaning.
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.
I think Scott and Sam are on pretty good terms, and this is more of a friendly disagreement than an attempt to start a beef.
I probably don't understand what a beef is. I assumed is was something like a heated quarrel.
Right, and I don't think Scott is trying to start a beef. This piece read as a friendly disagreement with Sam's piece. When Scott is actually angry about something, it's hard to miss.
"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".
Yep, stattos are the sportsball version of nerds:
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/statto
"informal Brit a person who is preoccupied with the facts and figures of a particular subject, esp a sport [C20: from statistics]"
As a person who knows nothing about sports, baseball is clearly the nerdiest sport.
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
Congrats D, you got a big namecheck in Scott's latest post - you uber-Geek so hip it hurts!
"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."
Uh, thanks a lot. This place would be much poorer without you.
I don't know exactly where I fit into Mr. Kriss' Linnaean classification, but I am unabashed that an early 00s joke blog written in the parlance of Geoffrey Chaucer was something I found genuinely funny and enjoyable (especially when someone in the comments would chime in with Real Old Anglo-Saxon and not this fancy Frenchified Norman-English of today, Chaucer!).
Here, have a bit from Chesterton's biography of Chaucer that has always tickled me, about the more severe and grave poet Gower and his attitude:
"Gower was thoroughly friendly; entirely affable. He says that Chaucer is his poet; but he also says that Chaucer is his disciple and even 'his own clerk', who has taken down many of his thoughts, perhaps in somewhat lighter language. And in his doubtless sincere compliment to Chaucer's verse, we have exactly the same suggestion as that made by many graver poets about Shakespeare and his warbling of wood-notes:
Of dytees and of songes glade
The whiche he for my sake made.
One would not say that the graver poets disapprove of cheerfulness in the minor poets; but they mention it. Chaucer, like Matthew Arnold in Max's caricature, was not at all times wholly serious. "
> I don't know exactly where I fit into Mr. Kriss' Linnaean classification...
You are the nerdiest nerd of all the nerds :-)
"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.
Yeah that one's weird. All the comp sci nerds I knew in the 80s and 90s loathed the man as an unimaginative troglodyte. They never stopped requoting his famous (although he denies ever saying it) statement that "640k ought to be enough for anybody." Maybe he wins through just being the last man standing, now that Jobs is long dead, Woz and Linus aren't showmen, and RMS needs a shower and shave.
> They never stopped requoting his famous (although he denies ever saying it) statement that "640k ought to be enough for anybody."
Meh. That's not honestly all that bad; IBM's Thomas Watson once said that there was a market for "maybe five computers" in the entire world. Thinking through the ramifications of exponential growth is hard and always has been.
The more serious objection to Gates has always been that he's a thug and a bully. His entire career was built on plagiarizing other people's/business' ideas and then driving them out of business with legal trickery and flashy marketing.
Microsoft started out with a BASIC implementation (created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, re-implemented by Bill Gates) and a CP/M knockoff they called MS-DOS. When the creator of CP/M happened to be unavailable on the day IBM came calling, Microsoft presented their version as an operating system for the PC. When IBM clones started coming out and people started developing MS-DOS alternatives, Microsoft set up blatantly illegal licensing restrictions with hardware OEMs that made it effectively impossible for end-users to buy a PC with anything but MS-DOS preinstalled.
When Apple revolutionized the world of operating systems with the Mac, Microsoft ripped off their interface and very carefully stayed *just* on the right side of copyright law so they could get the inevitable lawsuit shut down. And then they deployed the "AARD Code" to lie to users and make them think that if they were using anything other than MS-DOS, it would cause Windows to break, further undermining the competition.
They released Visual Basic, and it did OK until Borland came out with Delphi and started blowing them away at every turn. So they kneecapped Borland by hiring the guy behind Delphi out from under them and having him create their own knockoff version rewritten to look like Java rather than Pascal. Netscape Navigator was taking the world of web browsers by storm, so they bought an inferior browser called Spyglass that no one was using, rebranded it as "Microsoft Internet Explorer," and started giving it away to squeeze Netscape out of the market.
And so on and so forth. The entire history of Bill Gates' Microsoft is that same story over and over: rip off other people's work, use underhanded and often illegal tricks to destroy the competition, do anything and everything except actually create good software. It wasn't until Gates stepped down as CEO that the company started actually innovating.
Well, and there was the whole SCO fiasco. But what I meant was just that the idea that MSFT had been innovative and forward-thinking under Gates's leadership -- rather than reactive, clumsy, and much better at PR and marketing than technical innovation -- was for most of those people I knew laughable. So calling him an uber-nerd would be (for them) an insult to genuine nerds.
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.
Exactly! Kriss is clueless. If you want to see a true nerd, go to a math conference. The people you see there are all nerds to some extent, but the uber-nerd is the person who is sitting alone at lunch, unable even to make small-talk with the other nerds.
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.
MLP -- so childish, other geeks look down on it.
Yes -- I have another comment above mentioning this. And its associated trait, that it desexualizes the people interested in these things, because adults want to have sex with adults.
Ah, that's what I get for not reading all the comments.
Then again, reading all the comments often is a powerful impediment against posting your own take, since you'll be guaranteed to find someone said the same anyway.
"Read all the comments?" What are you, a comment nerd?
Seriously -- no criticism intended, I was just blowing my own horn/agreeing.
A comments hipster, of course, reads only the most obscure comments no-one else has noticed.
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?
"What do we call, then, the person who is deeply but not professionally interested in an academic topic"
In the old days, it would have been an amateur, because you did it for love of the subject.
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.
In the 1970s there was a major nerd preoccupation with Lord of the Rings and Hobbitry of various kinds, with people actually trying to learn Elvish or some other language Tolkein had invented. But I see you mentioned that in passing. There were also Dungeon and Dragon nerds (still are probably).
For many decades prior to that there were train spotters and even bus spotters. In Thomas Hughes's novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, set in the 1830s, I think he mentions stagecoach spotters, hanging around near inns from where the coaches arrived and set off each day.
Edit: Oh and let's not forget twitchers, obsessive bird watchers! They've always been around. Perhaps any kind of "spotter" is driven by the same instinct that prompted our hunter distant ancestors to take a keen interest in the habits and movements of large edible animals!
"So far as I know, there was nothing between The Divine Comedy and LOTR."
The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series would like you to peruse its back catalogue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballantine_Adult_Fantasy_series
You had writers like Lord Dunsany who created the world of "Pegāna, with its own gods, history and geography" and whose Dreamlands so heavily influenced Lovecraft; Lovecraft himself, with his Mythos (scattered and fragmentary as it is); William Morris and his mediaeval fantasy lands and others.
Kriss' article has helped me understand why I could never get into James Branch Cabell and his writing. "Jurgen" was (is?) a critical darling, but it's hipster writing; I don't say Cabell smirks, but you can tell that on the side of his face turned away from you, there's a smile curling up the corner of his lip.
Tolkien, on the other hand, is a nerd. ONE OF US, ONE OF US! In a letter to his son Christopher he explains:
"An enquirer (among many) asked what the L.R. was all about, and whether it was an 'allegory'. And I said it was an effort to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn' omentieimo, and that the phase long antedated the book."
Tolkien may not be a Great Writer in the literary sense (he's never going to be published in the likes of Granta, and his poetry extremely rarely rises above the level of competent verse), but he's not nodding and winking at us (or rather, the self-declared sophisticates) like Cabell is.
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
Thanks, I'll respond to it in a few days when I write a Highlights From The Comments post.
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.
> If your interest is in .. English royal succession, you're a geek about that subject.
> Your knowledge will never be applied to real life.
I take your general point, but that particular example has been applied successfully several times by me in real life, helping to win prizes for our quiz night team! Same applies to US presidents, state capitals, country flags. Nerdy trivia like that can reap kudos and at times physical rewards! But I draw the line at trying to stuff my head full of useless and boring trivia about sport.
I don't think "I won a trivia prize" counts as a real-life application. Trivia is, by definition, knowledge for its own sake. I could go to a weekly sportsbar trivia night and make use of useless sports knowledge to win prizes. Unless I'm a player or team manager (or involved in the plot of Moneyball) my knowledge will not be practically useful at solving any real-world problems.
The question of knowing stuff for its own sake reminds me of an old anecdote (joke? paradox?) about a club calling itself "The Useless Information Society." To join, you had to share a piece of information that was truly useless. But if the information allows you to join the club, it's not useless after all....
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.
And axes. Nothing beats a good axe collection. They all have to be used now and then, of course. That's why I reduced my motorcycle collection.
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 dunno, "hip" meaning "to be in the possession of knowledge about" is a pretty ancient term. Possibly predating "cool."
And "Hippie" was a derogatory term beatniks used for kids faking hipness. The wheel keeps turning.
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.
Not sure who is getting upset here, or why. Very few people, maybe nobody, would fit that criterion in their own minds.
That's how uncharitable generalizations work. Uncharitable generalizations that match how people think of themselves would be charitable generalizations.
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
i'm enjoying it tbh
Hi Sam, this is the first exposure I've had to your writing, and I'm curious about it. Any comments on Freddie's characterization of your style here? Anything you think a potential new reader should know to read your stuff in the manner it's intended to be read?
i'm afraid i can't answer this, since if freddie's account were accurate, then talking too much about it would ruin the effect, and if it weren't accurate, then insisting that i genuinely mean everything i write would be to protest too much. i can say that the way my stuff is intended to be read is however you want. i just write things down; how people receive them is entirely up to them
i.e. "yes." Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
Ok, thanks, I'll check it out.
"This space, I think, is made up of many people who are natural literalists."
That's true, I'm as concretely literal as a rock to the head, which complicates my life at times. But I think this article has spurred a lot of interesting discussion on here, and we're not *all* thumbing our noses at Mr. Kriss.
And besides, where else am I going to find discussion ranging from Lord Gro to the wonders of a good axe collection? Where else makes me go MY PEOPLE, MY TRIBE, MY ILK?
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.
That moment when I realized that the background muzak in a sushi restaurant was all easy-listening versions of Joe Hisaishi tunes. :-(
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.
If you like ancient coins, you *might* be interested in this story about the blind detective Max Carrados (Edwardian era fiction by Ernest Bramah):
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/34732/pg34732-images.html#THE_COIN_OF_DIONYSIUS
"“You are quite right. And yet the thing is very simple.”
“They always are — when you know,” soliloquized the other. “That’s what makes them so confoundedly difficult when you don’t.”
“Here is this one then. In Padua, which seems to be regaining its old reputation as the birthplace of spurious antiques, by the way, there lives an ingenious craftsman named Pietro Stelli. This simple soul, who possesses a talent not inferior to that of Cavino at his best, has for many years turned his hand to the not unprofitable occupation of forging rare Greek and Roman coins. As a collector and student of certain Greek colonials and a specialist in forgeries I have been familiar with Stelli’s workmanship for years. Latterly he seems to have come under the influence of an international crook called — at the moment — Dompierre, who soon saw a way of utilizing Stelli’s genius on a royal scale. Helene Brunesi, who in private life is — and really is, I believe —Madame Dompierre, readily lent her services to the enterprise.”
“Quite so,” nodded Mr Carlyle, as his host paused.
“You see the whole sequence, of course?”
“Not exactly — not in detail,” confessed Mr Carlyle.
“Dompierre’s idea was to gain access to some of the most celebrated cabinets of Europe and substitute Stelli’s fabrications for the genuine coins. The princely collection of rarities that he would thus amass might be difficult to dispose of safely but I have no doubt that he had matured his plans. Helene, in the person of Nina Brun, an Anglicised French parlourmaid — a part which she fills to perfection — was to obtain wax impressions of the most valuable pieces and to make the exchange when the counterfeits reached her. In this way it was obviously hoped that the fraud would not come to light until long after the real coins had been sold, and I gather that she has already done her work successfully in several houses. Then, impressed by her excellent references and capable manner, my housekeeper engaged her, and for a few weeks she went about her duties here. It was fatal to this detail of the scheme, however, that I have the misfortune to be blind. I am told that Helene has so innocently angelic a face as to disarm suspicion, but I was incapable of being impressed and that good material was thrown away. But one morning my material fingers — which, of course, knew nothing of Helene’s angelic face —discovered an unfamiliar touch about the surface of my favourite Euclideas, and, although there was doubtless nothing to be seen, my critical sense of smell reported that wax had been recently pressed against it. I began to make discreet inquiries and in the meantime my cabinets went to the local bank for safety. Helene countered by receiving a telegram from Angiers, calling her to the death-bed of her aged mother. The aged mother succumbed; duty compelled Helene to remain at the side of her stricken patriarchal father, and doubtless The Turrets was written off the syndicate’s operations as a bad debt.”
“Very interesting,” admitted Mr Carlyle; “but at the risk of seeming obtuse” — his manner had become delicately chastened —“I must say that I fail to trace the inevitable connexion between Nina Brun and this particular forgery — assuming that it is a forgery.”
“Set your mind at rest about that, Louis,” replied Carrados. “It is a forgery, and it is a forgery that none but Pietro Stelli could have achieved. That is the essential connexion. Of course, there are accessories. A private detective coming urgently to see me with a notable tetradrachm in his pocket, which he announces to be the clue to a remarkable fraud — well, really, Louis, one scarcely needs to be blind to see through that.”
“And Lord Seastoke? I suppose you happened to discover that Nina Brun had gone there?”
“No, I cannot claim to have discovered that, or I should certainly have warned him at once when I found out — only recently — about the gang. As a matter of fact, the last information I had of Lord Seastoke was a line in yesterday’s Morning Post to the effect that he was still at Cairo. But many of these pieces ——” He brushed his finger almost lovingly across the vivid chariot race that embellished the reverse of the coin, and broke off to remark: “You really ought to take up the subject, Louis. You have no idea how useful it might prove to you some day.”
“I really think I must,” replied Carlyle grimly. “Two hundred and fifty pounds the original of this cost, I believe.”
“Cheap, too; it would make five hundred pounds in New York to-day. As I was saying, many are literally unique. This gem by Kimon is — here is his signature, you see; Peter is particularly good at lettering — and as I handled the genuine tetradrachm about two years ago, when Lord Seastoke exhibited it at a meeting of our society in Albemarle Street, there is nothing at all wonderful in my being able to fix the locale of your mystery. Indeed, I feel that I ought to apologize for it all being so simple.”"
Thanks for the rec! I have a Tetradrachm (the coin type in question) being delivered today!
Just be careful it doesn't come from Padua 😂
FYI: You've recommended to me an excellent author I've never heard of from the turn of the 20th century.
I hereby dub you a hipster.
I'm glad you like his writing! He's really famous because of his Kai Lung stories, which are fake-Chinese fables recited by a wandering storyteller named Kai Lung. I first encountered mentions of them as quoted in Dorothy Sayers' detective stories, and later encountered Max Carrados as one of the many detectives who were popular around the same time as Sherlock Holmes, overlapping the late Victorian to Edwardian periods.
I tried the Kai Lung stories and although I have a tolerance for that style, I just could not get on with it. It's better in small doses than in entire stories. Example:
""It has been said there are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice on a dark night".
He had an interesting life, though, and it really was the creation of this character that launched his career:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Bramah
You might also be interested in the anthology series "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" by Hugh Greene, who edited collections of detective stories which were later made into a British TV series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rivals_of_Sherlock_Holmes_(book_series)
I enjoyed them; some of the characters are more villainous than heroic, such as Arthur Morrison's Horace Dorrington. Or Grant Allen's Colonel Clay, a gentleman rogue who often has runs-in with a South African millionaire and successfully swindles him (and the guy does deserve it, more or less, because it's the same bait all con men use: appeal to the greed and let the pigeon tumble into the trap of their own accord).
There are also the Raffles stories by E. W. Hornung, brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle, about a criminal partnership (criminal in many senses, as they are pretty much gay, if not overtly presented as such). They're good stories, but they're also fascinating in social commentary; Raffles' plans often go astray and while that might be the conventional need of an author to show that "crime does not pay", it also is meta in a way - it undercuts the main character as someone who is not *quite* as smart as he thinks he is. Raffles has one main gimmick that he relies on heavily - he's a gentleman who plays amateur cricket, so no-one (especially those of his own class) would ever suspect him of being a thief. And it works - until he runs into a Scottish policeman who doesn't care a straw about social niceties but goes where the evidence leads, as well as the other members of the criminal classes who aren't as stupid as he assumes and can figure out what his real identity is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Raffles_(character)
So, yeah - I don't know if it's hipster or just tragically obscure, but thank the second-hand bookshops of my youth for getting me into Golden Age detective fiction!
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.
I agree with this.
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.
There is a local group that meets every weekend to practice Medieval swordfighting. They don't pursue it alone, but they are *definitely* nerds.
Is most of the time they spend being Medieval enthusiasts in a social group context, or do they do a lot of independent nerding and only an occasional gathering?
Nerd hobbies are the hobbies that people without normal social skills (nerds) tend to do, rather than being unpopular things that turn normal well-adjusted people into nerds for liking them (as was the hypothesis in the blogs). There are selection effects, but the main reason the nerd hobbies are nerdy (done mostly by nerds) is that they can be effectively pursued alone reading books and they are escapist rather than directly relevant to real life.
There are a bunch of craft projects people do at home and then bring to meetings, but mostly people seem to go to hang out with friends, and certainly nobody's practicing fencing alone. Some families also use the organization as something for their kids to be involved in as well.
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?
I think there have always been:
Sports fan nerds: The Jewish kid with a million baseball cards, attending games filling out scoresheets, (eventually sports journalists/actuaries).
Sports fan jocks: The kids who played baseball and were athletic/popular and eventually play beer league softball and coach youth sports.
Sports fans normies: Normies who latch onto sports because it is a big deal at their school and they don't have much personal identity (Bob at work who talks about baseball at the water cooler but doesn't seem to understand much of it, and who in the 80s/90s watch 50 baseball games a year because he doesn't have much of a personality or interests and it is what is on).
Hmm I guess I'm closest to the sports fan jock, but my jockish part has nothing to do with the sports fan part. Sports is totally orthogonal to my nerd axis. Sports is totally an emotional ride. My team playing against this other team, and I don't know the outcome. I need to write a post; Happiness is a .500 sports team. (that squeaks into the playoffs.)
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.
Interesting framing! I wonder if the death of hipsters has led to the decrease in revolutionary art. It seems really unlikely to me that we’re just running up against the limits of what looks/tastes/sounds good, that we’ve found all the degrees of freedom left to vary seems like a very strong claim.
Or maybe the death of revolutionary art has led to a decrease in hipsters, and the death of revolutionary art was caused by decreasing slack for creators? That doesn’t seem to fit, I’m pretty sure creators nowadays have far greater slack than previously.
Also a note: I do think that the vlog format should count as a revolutionary new genera. I wonder who first found someone doing a vlog and popularized it. Maybe they were the last hipster.
Apparently vlogs were in youtube since the beginning https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw
In the 19th and early 20th Centuries artists would write manifestos and get into fistfights about the meaning and purpose of Art. You don't see that behavior anymore!
Likewise with music. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring caused a riot the first time it was performed. Now if we don't like the music we'd just sneak out at the intermission. And it's hard for parents to wince at their children's choice of music nowadays since parents grew up on the music that their kids are listening to.
Political theory hasn't evolved much since the early 20th Century, either. We're stuck with a bipolar spectrum of choices between left-leaning (with Marxism on the far left) and right-leaning (with Facism on the far right)—with anarchism is a third choice. Why can't there be different political models than we have today? I can't think of any other way to organize things, though. But that may be a failure of my imagination.
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.
Thank you, this explained a point several other people were trying to make very well.
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.
A fun example of what you're talking about, with content that rewards the nerds: There's a puzzle in the DLC package for Horizon: Forbidden West which just came out a week or so ago. You encounter a set of strikable bells. If you're the sort of person that actually listens to the soundtrack of the game, you may notice that the minor scale the bells make up is suitable for playing the main character's theme, and doing so unlocks a chest with a substantial chunk of crafting resources.
The devs here have correctly matched their product to its audience -- they put this puzzle _in the DLC_, which is only going to get downloaded by people who are pretty intense fans of the game. If they'd put it in the main game, a lot fewer of the players encountering it would've had any sense what to do with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4uTW2h8Dd0
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/
Graphs you say?! The Geek Hierarchy:
https://fanlore.org/w/images/0/0e/Geekhierarchy.gif
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.
"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."
This was my first reaction too. I've sometimes seen people describe tech wizards as nerds, but never before in my life seen anybody call a cheeto-impregnated collectible card game/warham man a geek.
Nope, he's spot-on about the nerd/geek distinction. Remember, a nerd is a guy with a pocket protector and a slide-rule.
Interesting reactions! With such a range of conflicting intuitions there may be some dialect-like regional / generational variation at work here. My (Midwestern, Boomer) high school math teacher liked to assert that "geek" meant someone with both technical and social skills, "nerd" meant someone with technical skills only, and "dork" meant someone with neither-- not quite the same definition, but directionally similar.
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.
Was the MCU *ever* really a nerd thing? Comics, yes. But the MCU was pop culture almost from the get-go.
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.
Except computer nerds, space nerds, science nerds, etc. are attracted to things which are not inherently participatory, and indeed are often seen as very solitary.
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.
So it was a hobby grift? Scamming suckers out of their money because they didn't know any better?
I think they mean more like an investor buying into something before the value of that thing is widely known.
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.
"Simple: Fans are obsessed with something popular[;] Nerds and geeks are distinguished by liking *unpopular* things."
Spot on IMO. Coin collecting is actually a great example of this: it used to be a rich-guy hobby, your Vanderbilts and Rockefellers would try to dunk on each other by having the largest and best-condition collection of pre-1800 American coins or whatever, just as they did with their art collections. For complex social reasons art retained its cachet and coins didn't; now Bezos and Musk try to dunk on each other with space programs instead, and coins are dork stuff for nerds. (Early colonial silver and pewter had a similar trajectory IIRC.)
"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.
You seem to be conflating *fans* with *managers.* I submit that these are almost entirely different sets of people.
They are, but there has always been sports fans who are nerds. I think the culture among fans and managers shifted at similar times because of the winning, but even if you don't, there were always stereotypical nerd fans (especially in baseball)
But were they seen as nerds? Or just especially obsessed?
> 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.
"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"
In the pre-widespread Internet times, in the UK, the term for this was "anorak" from the item of clothing such enthusiasts would wear, because of standing on cold and windy and rainy stations waiting for the trains to pass by:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorak_(slang)
"The first use of the term to describe an obsessive fan has been credited to the radio presenter Andy Archer, who used the term in the early 1970s for fans of offshore radio, who would charter boats to come out to sea to visit the radio ships.
In 1983, the first edition of the Anoraks UK Weekly Report was published, featuring news of pirate radio broadcasts. In 1984 the Observer newspaper used the term as a metonym for the prototype group interested in detailed trivia, the trainspotters, as members of this group often wore unfashionable but warm cagoules or parkas called "anoraks" when standing for hours on station platforms or along railway tracks, noting down details of passing trains."
Well, I like this a lot better. I'm dismayed by how many definitions above of "nerd" start with being out of shape, unathletic, socially awkward, or alone. I mean, I considered myself a "nerd' in high school because I liked math and science, did well enough in them to get 5s on the relevant AP Exams, liked computers and radio, read "Scientific American", watched "Star Trek", and speculated about black holes. But I was none of the first four things! I was pretty fit for a kid, ran track, wasn't any more socially awkward than average. I'm kind of horrified that I might be thrown out of the Nerd Club just because I had a date to the prom and could run a 5:30 mile.
My very belated comment is that I found the definition of nerd is the original Kriss piece almost incomprehensible. Nerd meant very smart, particularly in math and science, and therefore also liking fiction set in the science world (albeit both Star Trek and Star Wars are very far from what they used to call hard sf). No one is a nerd for K-pop, to take a very strange example from Kriss.
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.
Btw, thx ACX for the post and the pointer to Kriss - hot find on a Sat am!
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.