{"id":32252,"date":"2017-01-23T01:00:43","date_gmt":"2017-01-23T06:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32252"},"modified":"2018-09-18T14:09:31","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T18:09:31","slug":"qotd-when-nerd-culture-became-kind-of-normal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/01\/23\/qotd-when-nerd-culture-became-kind-of-normal\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: When “nerd culture” became (kind of) normal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interestingly, the dot.com bust does not seem to have slowed down or discredited the geek subculture at all. Websites like http:\/\/geekculture.com<\/a> and http:\/\/thinkgeek.com<\/a> do a flourishing business, successfully betting investment capital on the theory that there is in fact a common subculture or community embracing computer hackers, SF fans, strategy gamers, aficionados of logic puzzles, radio hams, and technology hobbyists of all sorts. Just the fact that a website can advertise “The World\u2019s Coolest Propeller Beanies!” is indication of how far we\u2019ve come.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve previously observed about one large and important geek subtribe, the Internet hackers, that when people join it they tend to retrospectively re-interpret their past and after a while find it difficult to remember that they weren\u2019t always part of this tribe. I think something similar is true of geeks in general; even those of us who lived through the emergence of geek culture have to struggle a bit to remember what it was like back when we were genuinely atomized outcasts in a culture that was dismissive and hostile.<\/p>\n

There are even beginning to be geek families with evidence of generational transmission. I know three generations of one, starting when two computer scientists married in the late 1960s, and had four kids in the 1970s; the kids have since produced a first grandchild who at age five shows every sign of becoming just as avid a gamer\/hacker\/SF-fan as his parents and grandparents.<\/p>\n

Little Isaac, bless him, will grow up in a culture that, in its plenitude, offers lots of artifacts and events designed by and for people like him. He will take the World Wide Web and the Sci-Fi Channel and Yugio <\/em>and the Lord of the Rings<\/em> movies and personal computers for granted. He\u2019ll probably never be spat on by a jock, and if he can\u2019t find a girlfriend it will be because the geekgirls and geek groupies are dating other guys like him, rather than being nonexistent.<\/p>\n

For Isaac, Revenge of the Nerds<\/em> will be a quaint period piece with very little more relevance to the social circumstances of his life than a Regency romance. And that is how we know that the nerds indeed got their revenge.<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “The Revenge of the Nerds is Living Well”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2004-12-20.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interestingly, the dot.com bust does not seem to have slowed down or discredited the geek subculture at all. Websites like http:\/\/geekculture.com and http:\/\/thinkgeek.com do a flourishing business, successfully betting investment capital on the theory that there is in fact a common subculture or community embracing computer hackers, SF fans, strategy gamers, aficionados of logic puzzles, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,10,28,41,15],"tags":[262,1235,129,122,45,85],"class_list":["post-32252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming","category-liberty","category-media","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-culture","tag-esr","tag-hack","tag-movies","tag-nostalgia","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8oc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32253,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32252\/revisions\/32253"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}