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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3271 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 28, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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https://samkriss.substack.com/p/all-the-nerds-are-dead

For the last decade, mass culture has been nerd culture, and a nerd is someone who likes things that aren’t good. This is not to say that everyone who likes things that aren’t good is a nerd. Fast food is bad food: cheap, tasteless, unhealthy, and unsatisfying. But if you grew up eating frozen burgers as an occasional treat, and you still find it nice to sometimes stumble drunk into a McDonald’s late at night and wolf down a Big Mac—because it reminds you of something, because it’s the sign for a certain vanished pleasure—then you are not necessarily a nerd. But imagine a person who collects the boxes from every McDonald’s order he’s ever made, who’s yapping with excitement about the new McDonald’s partially hydrogenated soybean-canola oil blend, who can’t wait for them to release the McBento in Japan so he can watch video reviews all day, and who acts incredibly smug every time McDonald’s posts its quarterly earnings and they’re growing faster than Burger King’s. You know exactly what this person looks like. A total failure of an adult human being. Fat clammy hands; eyes popping in innocent wonder at every new disc of machine-extruded beef derivatives. An unbearable, ungodly enthusiasm. Does he actually like eating the stuff? Maybe not. It hardly matters. His enjoyment is perverse, abstracted far beyond any ordinary pleasure. It signifies nothing. This person is a nerd.

I found this essay on hipster culture and nerd culture to be interesting and enjoyable to read. I'm linking it because it seems relevant to some of the topics discussed here. It raises questions about what effect AI will have on art and cultural production.

But imagine a person who collects the boxes from every McDonald’s order he’s ever made, who’s yapping with excitement about the new McDonald’s partially hydrogenated soybean-canola oil blend, who can’t wait for them to release the McBento in Japan so he can watch video reviews all day, and who acts incredibly smug every time McDonald’s posts its quarterly earnings and they’re growing faster than Burger King’s. You know exactly what this person looks like. A total failure of an adult human being.

Sounds more like a soyboy to me, literally in this case with the soybean-canola oil blend. He says nerd but the meaning is soyboy - the image right at the front is exactly that with the gaping, cavernous mouths in those twisted facsimiles of a grin. Again, the meanings are sort of adjacent but there is a distinction. It's definitely worse to be a soyboy than a nerd. You might be really into very nerdy things - calculations of the yields of nuclear weapons in ingame cinematics, assessing 'high-end' vs 'low-end' of franchises that are incredibly ill-thought out and inconsistent like Doctor Who or whatever. But there's another axis, people who post videos of themselves reacting orgasmically, waving their hands excitedly to Marvel movie trailers. That's the core of what he's talking about.

Reminds me of this short-ish essay from 2005 (?):

https://web.archive.org/web/20140508105717/http://plover.net/~bonds/objects.html

[...] My theory is that for something to attract fans, it must have an aspect of truly monumental badness about it.

[...] Once a work passes a certain basic all-round level of competence, it doesn't need the defence of fandom. It's impossible to imagine a fan of Animal Farm, the Well-Tempered Clavier, or the theory of gravity. Such works can defend themselves. But badness, especially badness of an obvious, monumental variety, inspires devotion. The quality of the work, in the face of such glaring shortcomings, becomes a matter of faith -- and faith is a much stronger bond than mere appreciation. It drives fans together, gives them strength against those who sneer. The sneers make their faith even stronger; the awfulness of the work reassures them of their belief. And so the fan groups of Tolkien, Star Trek, Spider-man, Japanese kiddie-cartoons etc. develop an almost cult-like character.

I need to stress that I'm just talking about aspects of badness; the above works all have their many admirable qualities which attract people in the first place (though in the case of Anime I'd be hard-pressed to tell you what they were).

If Bach did not have fans when he was alive that seems to have more to do with when he lived than anything, I know Beethoven had fans. Or is he specifically talking about The Well-Tempered Clavier and not including more general fans of Bach's work, or for that matter modern fans of classical music? Because it seems like there are better factors than "badness" to explain the distinction: one or more of whether a work is serialized, whether a work is long, and whether a work is well-suited to additions by fans and other third-parties. Factors like those mean there is more to discuss on an ongoing basis, rather than just reading a book or listening to a specific piece, saying it's good, and that's it. Notice how elsewhere he has to group together "Japanese kiddie-cartoons" - because anime and manga are mostly a lot of different creator-written works, rather than a handful of continually reused IPs, most individual anime don't have a fandom, or only have a miniature fandom/discussion-group in the form of some /a/ and /r/anime threads during the season they air. Anime movies have even less. Similarly in the era of sci-fi short-stories there was a sci-fi fandom but not fandoms for individual short stories and little for individual novels.

I saw this when Scott Alexander responded to it, and read the follow-up comments with interest.

It has probably been 20 years since I last "updated" my sense of "nerd versus geek," and I have to say--I was until this week thoroughly under the impression that "nerd" referred to the academically inclined (narrow and idiosyncratic, but challenging, interests) and "geek" mostly meant pop-culture inclined (narrow and idiosyncratic, but unchallenging, or at least more artistic, interests). People could be either; people could be neither; people could be both. A Shakespeare geek loves Shakespeare; a Shakespeare nerd writes academic journal articles about how Ophelia was a proto-feminist. A science geek "Fucking Loves Science," but a science nerd actually knows things like Maxwell's equations and how to apply them. A sports geek collects memorabilia, but a sports nerd can quote you statistics, obscure rules, and probably kick your ass at fantasy football. In other words, it was never about what was "good"--you could be a geek or a nerd about things other people valued, or not. It was just about the level and quality of your interest in narrow and idiosyncratic things.

I cannot overemphasize just how much I really thought this was something my linguistic community (i.e. the Anglophone internet) had pretty well settled no later than, say, 2010.

Of course, in the 1970s and 1980s, these were both mostly words with a pejorative connotation; between "Revenge of the Nerds" (1984) and Bill Gates becoming a billionaire (1987) by the 1990s "nerd" had been pretty well rehabilitated, and by "The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001) "geek" had mostly come to cover pop culture afficionados, perhaps as part of the rise of the "geek girl." A lot of this kind of tapers off post-Awokening (circa 2014), possibly because the most relevant pop culture properties prior to 2014 was clearly dominated by "problematic" (i.e. white, male) creators and fans.

So the idea of nerds as people who like things that aren't good is just totally alien to me. This article talks about some interesting phenomena, but I think it butchers several otherwise-useful words to get there.

I would say your definition of nerd and geek is spot on. I have no idea WTF the author here is on about with saying nerds are people who like things that aren't good. That's not what it means, nor has it ever been what it means.

The only thing I take away from that essay is the overwhelming desire to do bodily harm on the person whom wrote it.

Why I would take anything in good faith from someone whom hates me and mine and gleefully spends hours of his time writing about how much he hates me and mine is baffling to consider. This doesn't belong in the friday fun thread - this is pure rage bait and culture warring.

Well, you’re here, aren’t you? The motte is full of people writing wordswordswords about people and groups they despise.

Yeah. And if this had been in the main thread(or even it's own thread), I'd probably just minimize and go about my way.

Here, though? I don't mind pointing out how tone-deaf posting this comes across for where it's at.

Maybe I'm tone-deaf, or maybe we just have different taste. I enjoyed the essay because of the author's colorful prose, and I thought it raised interesting questions about art and culture. I didn't think the purpose of the essay was to attack any specific group of people, despite the fact that it is written in the style of an attack. I'm sort of a Quokka in that I perceive these sorts of essays charitably as being directed against abstract ideals rather than being targeted against specific people.

You’ll probably be interested in Scott Alexander’s interpretation.

Thanks for that. I enjoyed some of the comments, but I feel Scott got hung up on Kriss' use of the word nerd instead of geek or fan. Kriss responded to Scott to clarify that he is primarily describing a person who likes things for reasons orthogonal to quality. Scott interpreted this to mean a person who pretends to like things to achieve social status. I disagree with that interpretation. I think what Kriss is describing is a soy boy. Soy boys do not compete to achieve higher social status. The very concept of competing for status is painful and anxiety-inducing to soy boys. Soy boys are extremely emotionally sensitive and oversocialized. They want to live in a bubble where social status and superior artistic quality do not exist. They like things for the sake of liking them as a pure expression of positivity and agreeableness. That type of person definitely exists, and they fit with the quotes from Warhol and Baudrillard about liking-machines that respond the same way to every input given to them. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is pertinent because it serves up content in a way optimized for consumption by such liking-machines, who use it to socially bond with other liking-machines over shared positive vibes.

He’s definitely taking shots at a weird, extreme subset of the social landscape. But it’s not the conflict-averse passive existence you describe. Despite the actual inclusion of hydrogenated soy, Kriss’ McDonalds example is not a soyboy. He is a fan-as-in-fanatic. He has chosen an objectively bad hill on which to die, probably of heart disease rather than enemy action. This isn’t optimized for conflict avoidance at all. Instead it will get him into fights over the dumbest, lowest-status thing.

It’s the difference between a fetishist and a herbivore man. Yeah, they’re both going to have a hard time engaging with normal relationships, but for pretty different reasons. Kriss’ nerd has fetishized McDonalds or Shakespeare.

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