What happened to nerds?

Imustaskforhelp

I think that the title should be more, what the fuck happened to tech executives as compared to nerds. because previously it was mostly the nerds who were at the forefront of the innovation (they still are), but they now have a playbook where they see all the other people (grifters) who are entering tech for money and the playbook of the attention economy and doing that because its a profitable strategy. It's basically the fact that there are multiple companies where a grift culture is promoted within tech (ironically I am on YC website and YC had a company which you might've heard called delve :D) As people realized that the technology has value and finance people realizing it to pour head over fist money into it. With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook. So I think this is what has happened to nerd culture. It simply became profitable and then commoditized and used by people who could then grift. BUT people are respecting the nerd culture (well the non grift version of it) a lot more For some reason, I wish to recommend Weird Al video song about White & Nerdy[0] and how people within the comments are saying that Nerd culture has its own unique identity and many if not all appreciating the nerd culture [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw&list=RDN9qYF9DZP... So TLDR: people like the previous nerd culture and it still exists, especially on HN but on platforms like twitter and others, as discussed within the article itself, with the attention economy. The grift culture is getting more attention than the nerd culture and because of the overlap in tech, the nerd culture is getting some bad rep but overall people appreciate the actual nerd culture (IMO) as interesting and unique (whereas previously, people wouldn't have appreciated it so much) You don't hear about the actual nerd culture because it isn't algorithmic hungry but it still exists on platforms like Hackernews IMO!

piker

It seems to me the role of venture capital has changed and is somewhat responsible for this. The obsession with MVPs followed by hyper-growth and then moat-building has warped our relationship with technology. It's driven by a desire for VC funds to "return the fund" with each investment, and increasingly, by a SoftBank approach which requires inundating the market leader with capital that forces out all competition. Technology has been financialized.

negergreger

Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning. Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history. Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.

Grimblewald

Great post, and largly captures my own experience. I can only speak for my institution, but eagerness to lock down ip and keep ownership of everything tightly controlled and out of the hands of said nerds/inventors doesnt really incentivise me to do beyond what I'm paid for. The one time I tried, I was hit by the full force of my institutions commercialization goons and lawyers, to a degree that it killed my drive to do anything novel for them. Despite being promised partial ownership, in the end, after federal grant funds were secured and product developed, they took everything using "loopholes" that go against the law and the institutions own rules, but to fight it I need resources I don't have, which the institution no doubt knows. All that despite me initially being fully aligned with my institution, and happy to only take a very minor share of actual profit, in-line with what i'd get anway, only stipulation was veto rights in application (as the tech has very real applications in offline autonomous drones, which I consider an X-treat). If my own institution is a hostile actor, and willing to fuck me over nothing, simply because they can, why do anything? So, current state of Copyright law favours institutions over the very individuals it was meant to protect, and there are no options to protect one self if anything interesting is developed without serious capital and legal might. So, fuck it, im not doing anything except hobby related, GPL licensed stuff. If I can do anything to make it hard to commercialize, I will. If it can be kept in house, it is kept there. Capital interest has become a rather ugly and hostile egregore with interest aligned against that of humanity. All those building cool and novel shit I know hold similar opinions, so it is no surprise to me. I was strongly advised against working with the institution by older folks i look up to, people who have built really powerful tools of their own. Their warnings ended up being proven valid with deafening clarifty. I've always found the statement that capitalism breeds innovation to be a joke, and while it works in the chinese model, the "western" model is sick and suffers a sort of cultural psychosis that makes it rather unttractive to engage with.

OgsyedIE

Same blog from a different URL 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361 Anyway, the answer to the question: 'Nerds', like any cultural grouping, are a product of their environment. The United States of today has developed much higher inequality, debt burdens, rent demands, maintenance cost demands and trade deficits than the same environment had in the past, largely due to the Fed policies of the 21st century, with some help in worsening things by all administrations.

TrackerFF

Money happened. Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple. Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clue existed, has become almost a mainstream ambition. Some of the people that never identified themselves as nerds, will wander from industry to industry, which one that pays the most. But back to the nerds: Some nerds obviously changed. If you throw generational wealth at most people, they will change. Few people are so disinterested in money that it is simply not a thing they care about. What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing. The money and power corrupted them.

Eufrat

Silicon Valley has always had a bit of a libertarian bent, but I really think a lot of people have spent a significant and successful effort at pushing it towards Objectivism. Objectivism is a stupid, angry idea borne out of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. It exists in a vacuum. Eddie Lampert named his yacht the Fountainhead which is amusing since, while I don’t question he has talent, he got millions in seed money to start his own fund from Richard Rainwater. Elon Musk is not some scrappy kid; the vast majority of founders are from comfortable and increasingly upper middle class families where they can tolerate the risk of failing with a reasonable safety margin and then delude themselves that they bootstrapped everything themselves. Curtis Yarvin does not exist in a vacuum. These are awful people and the fact that we’ve allowed them to be taken seriously and control the conversation is…obscene.

comboy

It's simple, marketing dominates everything. With attention being very expensive, appearance is what matters. It doesn't matter if you write fantastic library, nobody is gonna use it because they won't know about it, the one with a gif of the terminal (ffs) will win that has a good page describing what it does (and being the most popular one can even become better than your library because of the following but that's not the point here). It's everywhere, products, hiring, services. We have no network of trust (sigh), we need to trust some heuristics based on a shallow information. If somebody focuses on the shallow he wins, because nobody can ever dive into everything.

mykowebhn

I think the issue boils down to money, lots of it. When I worked in the Bay Area, I noticed the nerd-culture was still more or less predominant in South Bay. The arrogant, shallow types were always there (as witnessed by their fancy cars--"should we take the Jag or the Merc today?"), but I could still tolerate it. San Francisco was a different story. I started a new job at a startup once and remember thinking "I'm surrounded by Ivy Leaguers who look like models--this place is not for me". I think the crazy amounts of money just brought in everyone looking to make a buck, and the nerds no longer were the majority. But then you have the company missions. It seems like most of the companies in the Bay Area are all about advertising or compiling info on individuals and selling it. It's mostly B2B and not so much "cool products". We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.

f4stjack

Nerds became an industry field - that's what it happened. Back in the 90'ies we were doing IT things because it geniunely interested us, not that it would "net us high salaries". I'd do this even if you didn't pay a single centa because it triggered my dopamine receptors. Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking. Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.

KingOfCoders

Nothing, I'm here since the 70s and haven't moved.

juleiie

Nerds were bought out and turned into money and thus wife having chads. Now, the basement dwellers of today are actually tech illiterate and skillless with no charming qualities at all. Blame capitalism.

xlii

You listen to the Radio Channel you picked. I understand the complaint, though it's like a complain that nerds featured in Cosmopolitan aren't as nerdy as they were. Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core. Want to see "the lost nerds"? Here, on HN there are many very high-profile nerds. People who built the internet and the most popular tools exchanging insight and jokes over posts. Many founders who aren't loud, who aren't about PR. So - nothing happened. Author looks for them in wrong places.

watwut

What does any of that have to do with "nerds"? You are complaining about business and management people in tech. None of them is a "nerd" and never was. Or otherwise said, what does the "nerd" even means to you? I thought that nerd means a person who is a person with lower social skills, obsessed over technical details so much they are unable to discuss anything else. People whose whole career always was to manipulate and impress people, to talk well, to convince investors to give them money, to lead companies just are not nerds. Regardless of whether they are narcistic assholes or not.

zhxiaoliang

The nerds era is gone. Welcome to the era of super-villains and self-entitled smartasses.

zhivota

Elon Musk happened. Zuckerberg happened (yes, before the current bro transformation, we had The Social Network showing us). Elon probably most of all, he was the one who took fringe edge lord behavior and elevated to something to be admired.

louwrentius

Nothing happened to the Nerds. They are all showing their true colours. They may have shared a love for technology, what they also shared is a deep immaturity. The immaturity of a person not wanting to acknowledge and cary any responsibility for other people, for the consequences of their work, for any kind of accountability. Just play with their toys without any concern for the external world. 'I'm just here playing with tech and code'. Sure! but that stuff you're building is being weaponised by other (the venn diagram unfortunately overlaps) tech bro's so men can film women with their glasses in public like the little sick creeps they are. Or steal all their data. You can't pretend you are not responsible and complicit. They want "what's theirs" and anything in their way - including people - have to comply or be destroyed.

lukasm

Once tech became glamorous, it started attracting people with narcissistic traits - much like Hollywood did. Expect to see more antisocial behavior as a result.

thenthenthen

“Tech Otakus Save the World!” Yes thats the official corporate motto and philosophy of the huge mobile game company miHoYo (creators of Genshin Impact). I live next to their HQ and had to look twice when seeing guys wearing tshirts with that slogan

parasti

This seems to be a critique of "Can Tech Legends Find the Liar? (Mafia Episode 1)" on Youtube but critiqued from a "nerd subculture" angle, which is a thing in the USA, I guess? As a European, this took me a moment to figure it out.