If it's truly a generational change, that would be a very interesting development. Especially if it happened in just the five years between when we were teenagers - I had no impression that people a few years younger than me had a wildly different experience than me. But I could certainly be mistaken.
Do you find no familiarity at all in these descriptions? Meaning some of the following - Being more interested in reading than gossiping, liking technical projects more than team sports, being uninterested in popularity contests and social status games to such a degree that you barely care about losing them, prioritizing learning over number of superficial acquaintances, having ideas and thoughts that you assume to be true but for which you experience lashback for stating out loud. Potentially experiencing some loneliness or hostility over this, not necessarily making that part of your identity, eventually seeking a small number of like-minded folks...
Has the world really changed this much? From my perspective, it seems likely that you're just not the target demographic for this essay.
On the other end, nerd-culture had permeated all levels of the social strata, and my very popular friends who partied every weekend were also semi-pro halo players and avid anime fans and didn’t hide either of those facts.
It’s only six years, but it could have been wide exposure to the internet? Also very possible I’m seeing the past through rose colored glasses.
Computers weren't available until the early '80s, and weren't affordable for another decade, so few kids had easy access to them, and networks didn't arise until about 1990. So if you were born before '80-'85, you had a tough time rallying around tech toys with other nerds/geeks to share your enlightened world view.
Stewing nerds in their own juices through adolescence tends to foment fierceness, which is just another word for not understanding or tolerating non-nerds very well. With today's omnipresent social connectivity, isolation should be less a problem in 2021, since tech content and cool devices are everywhere today.
What I would have given to play around with RPi or robots in my teens...
If you want a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like watch the movie, "Revenge of the Nerds".
Edit: in the movie nerds sell secretly taken naked pictures of said girlfriend to earn money. The movie is old and ridiculous, but when you start to claim this is how things were, I want to know wtf was going on in your school.
these kinds of events can fly under the radar if you aren't involved. I only know of the situation I'm thinking of because the girl found out and complained to the school, which ended up expelling the others involved.
More importantly, if movie is accurate, then nerds are no better then evil jocks. They are just two groups of bullies and assholes locked in a fight where everybody who avoids them is doing something smart.
In your school, did the girl that got her nudes public got together with the dude that took them and sold them? You can peel levels of that movie how much you want, you won't get meaningfull image of reality.
In challenging or AP classes you had essentially two groups, the jocks, who were trying to follow a college track, for which sports were essentially requisite in our district, and the nerds who just liked learning stuff. The jocks(male and female) did their homework as a group, complained loudly about difficult tests/assignments and consistently used their relative influence to affect their grades. The nerds brought in their own lessons, asked questions that lead the class off topic, consistently read the textbook and stayed late to ask questions rather than negotiate.
Anyway, thought I’d throw this anecdote out there for variety.
I'd probably go as far as saying that technology (or at least practical technical skills) has become far less relevant as a 'nerd' marker.
Many of the self identifying 'nerds' I meet might be avid technophiles, but it's not like most of them know how to code better than anybody else (or at all in many cases).
Xist versus Yist, and he showed us with some pretty basic math.
Now two groups is all we need to understand the world?
So perhaps the way to understand it is PG believes people fit in these two groups, but those are not the only two groups you fit in, and they are by no means all-encompassing.
It's kind of like, you are either a member of team red, or team blue. You may be a blue type of person, another is a red, but that by no means defines the entirety of your being.
Let's try to have a little more good faith here, when trying to understand people's musings. The reality is, most of us here wouldn't have the courage to put our thoughts and opinions out there on the internet for the whole world to see, at least not to the extent PG does.
The reason that 4 quadrant divisions of the world seem like they always work is because any two vectors chosen at random in a high dimensional space are nearly orthogonal with high probability.
I’ve been rummaging around the human experience for 41 years, applying technology to problems at public uni and big corp, building houses, growing food, hunting, earned degrees in electrical engineering and math.
To me that’s all there is, to go do directly.
All this feels like is someone who is riding off that lottery ticket.
That is, I’m not seeing an information advantage. Just a political capital advantage.
I thought we did away with allegiance to unelected political agents?
Graham's characterizations of nerds reminds me of the "They don't know" meme[1] guy.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristatorres/they-dont-know-twitter
Maybe it's a generational thing (born in '92), but Graham often seems to paint a picture of nerds similar to what you might see in movies and TV shows depicting the 80s, like the kids in Stranger Things.
Even this article, while I can certainly conjure which of my friends growing up were the "fierce nerd", it still feels a little disconnected from my reality.
For example, Graham begins by explaining that the concept of a fierce nerd is one unknown to the general public. But I'm not sure I agree. In the era I grew up, there was not so much social distinction between who is a nerd, but there was a lot of social distinction for those who were argumentative, or "fierce". In my experience, everyone knew who the "fierce nerds" were (although not by that name), because they were known for their awkwardness and combativeness - not for their nerdiness. Indeed, my own nerdy friend circle in high school spanned a wide range of popularities and I would say "fierceness" (or rather, lack thereof) was probably the best indicator of popularity.
I see these themes spanning Graham's other musings on nerds, typically trying to characterize a class of kids who are hated for their interests and passions, but that's just never been my experience. I think it's a generational thing.