That was the year the final issue of Watchmen came out, in October. After that, it seemed like everything that was part of my otaku world was out in the open and up for grabs, if only out of context. I wasn’t seeing the hard line between “nerds” and “normals” anymore. It was the last year that a T-shirt or music preference or pastime (Dungeons & Dragons had long since lost its dangerous, Satanic, suicide-inducing street cred) could set you apart from the surface dwellers. Pretty soon, being the only person who was into something didn’t make you outcast; it made you ahead of the curve and someone people were quicker to befriend than shun. Ironically, surface dwellers began repurposing the symbols and phrases and tokens of the erstwhile outcast underground.
Fast-forward to now: Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. The Glee kids performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band that took its name from a Monty Python riff, joining the permanent soundtrack of a night out at Bennigan’s. Our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed in the noonday sun. The Lord of the Rings used to be ours and only ours simply because of the sheer goddamn thickness of the books. Twenty years later, the entire cast and crew would be trooping onstage at the Oscars to collect their statuettes, and replicas of the One Ring would be sold as bling.
The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it’s been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the Internet. Everyone considers themselves otaku about something — whether it’s the mythology of Lost or the minor intrigues of Top Chef. American Idol inspires — if not in depth, at least in length and passion — the same number of conversations as does The Wire. There are no more hidden thought-palaces — they’re easily accessed websites, or Facebook pages with thousands of fans. And I’m not going to bore you with the step-by-step specifics of how it happened. In the timeline of the upheaval, part of the graph should be interrupted by the words the Internet. And now here we are.
Patton Oswalt, “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die”, Wired, 2010-12-27
January 1, 2011
QotD: The end of nerd subculture
3 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Well, I’m doing my part to preserve nerd culture and isolation.
Kirby’s Epic Yarn for Wii totally rocks. If being in to that game at my age does not do something for nerd-dom, then the geeks are well and truly dead.
Comment by Lickmuffin — January 3, 2011 @ 11:53
I have to admit never having heard of Kirby’s Epic Yarn. But we don’t have a Wii, so perhaps that’s easy to explain. The only Wii game I’ve heard of is this one (NSFW).
Comment by Nicholas — January 3, 2011 @ 12:57
The three-way play mode on the Shii is pretty awesome, from what I’ve heard.
Not that I will ever know from personal experience, sadly.
Comment by Lickmuffin — January 3, 2011 @ 17:06