Patton Oswalt writes about the demise of nerd culture in Wired...

30th December 2010

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Patton Oswalt writes about the demise of nerd culture in Wired... →

…and I, of course, have some thoughts of my own.

Nerds suck. They do. They are self-pitying exclusionists with poor social skills. The reason they complain about the mainstreaming of nerd culture is not that it means you can’t tell a nerd anymore—it’s that you still can. For years, nerds have been able to hide behind their nerdy interests, to use them as a straw man upon which to pin their frustrations about being displaced from the mainstream. They could always insist that people didn’t like them because people don’t appreciate D&D, comics, Star Trek, etc.

And I should know! I was the kid who by middle school knew the names of every ancillary character in the Star Wars movies, who could recite entire Monty Python sketches by heart, whose idea of a social life was to call one of her only two friends every afternoon and watch Batman Beyond over the phone. Was I a nerd because of those things? No. I was a nerd because I was annoying, I was unattractive, I was weird, I was snobbish, I was desperate, I was bereft of self-awareness, and nobody liked me. The esoteric interests were just the window dressing.

If nerds thought that the only thing keeping them down was the fact that their interests were unappreciated by the mainstream, they would be celebrating the rise of nerd culture. But the fact of the matter is that, even waiting in line for the same movie, the cool kids will always be the cool kids, and the nerds will always be the nerds. Nerd culture was a way for nerds to practice the same exclusion that the cool kids visited upon them, to implicitly say “You aren’t rejecting us, we’re rejecting you.” But that’s not the case anymore. The hot girl or guy who is down to talk about Battlestar Galactica for an hour with you is still probably out of your league, even on your own turf. And of course that’s galling.

But, tough luck. People are more than their interests. Nerds will still be nerds, and trust me, their adolescences will still be awful enough to provide fodder for a lifetime of creativity and humor, if they’re lucky. The thing that everyone seems to forget is that nerddom, in its purest form, is a teenage affliction, something that many, if not most, people grow out of. They figure out how to be passionate about their interests without being smug and humorless about them. They learn to laugh at their past humiliations, and to celebrate this newfound comfort in their own skins, they proudly take on the epithet so long slung in their direction: they call themselves nerds. And that’s it. If done in the true spirit of awareness and goodnatured self-deprecation, the day you call yourself a nerd is the day you become an ex-nerd.

So let the real nerds keep whining. It’s what they do; it’s what they’ve always done; it’s what they must do, and rightly so. But you ex-nerds, you who still wear the mantle but not the burden of nerddom, you chill the hell out and enjoy your moment.

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Patton Oswalt writes about the demise of nerd culture in Wired... →