I'm just five years older than you and strongly relate to these descriptions of being a nerd, having academic interests not shared by young peers and consequently caring very little for social games. Even in adulthood, unless I carefully choose who I hang out with. And I'm from Europe, not the US, so it's not a thing local to the US either.

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.

I knew many people who fit that description, but with even a little social intelligence it seemed to me their experiences in highschool were pretty great; they weren’t nerds, they were just smart and studious and many were very well liked. Our homecoming king was on the academic decathalon team. Im not saying that smart, introverted folks with underdeveloped social skills don’t exist, just that they don’t exist opposite to bros and jocks and cool kids (and weren’t mercilessly bullied for being themselves).

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.

There is a pretty wide variance from school to school, town to town, and state to state/country to country. Maybe you were in a particularly well-adjusted school, and other schools and communities are still more judgmental of non-blessed interests? Or maybe the nerds remain, but they had different interests from the new main-stream. I'd hardly call Halo a nerd thing, for example.

Maybe it was a well adjusted school, or maybe it was a school in which achievement culture and college application stacking and reverse engineering had fully run their course. After all, 'well rounded' on paper people get into elite colleges, and people from elite colleges have a better shot at becoming rich. Nothing less nerdy than wanting to be rich.

Halo isn't a nerd thing. Pro gaming is.

How old is PG? Born in 1964, so age 56, according to Wiki. I'm from the same era. Being young and nerdy in the '60s and '70s was pretty isolating.

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...

I think that a total disinterest in politicking is why so many people on here complain about how software engineers are treated at non tech companies

I can tell you as someone that graduated college in 92 that being nerdy as a kid in the 70s/80s it was very different from that, at least in my area of the world (Midwest USA).

If you want a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like watch the movie, "Revenge of the Nerds".

In that movie, nerds publicly sexually harass and worst their enemies girlfriend. Yes, girlfriend mocks him at one moment, but the response is ridiculous. Are you sure you want to claim that is how things actually were?

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.

stuff like that happened at my high school, and not that long ago. do you not believe that kind of thing happens/happened, or do you just not believe that "nerds" can be the perpetrators?

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.

I do not think the movie is "a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like".

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.

Where are you (or GP) from? Im also ‘92. I grew up in California, but in a rural part of the state. Nerdy interests absolutely had a stigma. My high school didn’t even have a CS class, no academic decathlon team, and certainly no robotics club. It was the “best” school in my district, too.

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 was in a semi-rural suburb of San Antonio, Texas. We had a CS class, our academic decathalon team team placed 6th in state (I was a C but placed 3rd in individual), and I took a lot of AP science and math so I spent a lot of time with the top people in our class. It was… a great time. Non-AP classes were hit or miss, but AP physics C, calculus B/C, and art history were some of my all time favorite school experiences. I feel very lucky to have had the time I did.

Things have changed a lot since then though. In a positive way.

You're a bit young then. I'm a decade older, and see very clear similarities in my age cohort to what he's describing, particularly when I was in my early 20s and teens. Which is interesting, because a good theory of behavior is not limited that tightly in time.

If there are star QBs that play DND (somehow I doubt there actually are that many) this is just proof that DND has gone mainstream and is therefore being commercialized as nerdy while actually not nerdy any more. This is known in some parlances as 'nerd-chic'.