{"id":7061,"date":"2011-01-01T17:14:54","date_gmt":"2011-01-01T21:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=7061"},"modified":"2011-01-01T17:14:54","modified_gmt":"2011-01-01T21:14:54","slug":"qotd-the-end-of-nerd-subculture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/01\/01\/qotd-the-end-of-nerd-subculture\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The end of nerd subculture"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

That was the year the final issue of Watchmen<\/em> 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\u2019t seeing the hard line between \u201cnerds\u201d and \u201cnormals\u201d 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward to now: Boba Fett\u2019s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. The Glee<\/em> kids performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show<\/em>. And Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band that took its name from a Monty Python<\/em> riff, joining the permanent soundtrack of a night out at Bennigan\u2019s. Our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed in the noonday sun. The Lord of the Rings<\/em> used to be ours and only ours<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it\u2019s 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\u2019s the mythology of Lost<\/em> or the minor intrigues of Top Chef<\/em>. American Idol<\/em> inspires — if not in depth, at least in length and passion — the same number of conversations as does The Wire<\/em>. There are no more hidden thought-palaces — they\u2019re easily accessed websites, or Facebook pages with thousands of fans. And I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

Patton Oswalt, “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die”, Wired<\/em><\/a>, 2010-12-27<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t seeing the hard line between \u201cnerds\u201d and \u201cnormals\u201d anymore. It was the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,28,41],"tags":[262,58],"class_list":["post-7061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-quotations","tag-culture","tag-internet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1PT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7061","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=7061"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7063,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7061\/revisions\/7063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}