Geek/Nerd Culture Considered Harmful

(This is a conversation I've had quite a few times. I thought it might be useful to be able to get it down here better fleshed out.

I wrote most of this post before the 2014 Isla Vista killings. I think this tragic event gives this topic a particular relevance, which is why I'm publishing it ahead of schedule, but I think it's been a matter that we as an Internet have needed to examine much more closely for a long time.

Content warning: Some NSFW language.)

I'm aware that using the above title on the Internet is basically signing my own death warrant, but hear me out. I'm not arguing that the terms geek/nerd should be abolished, or disapproving of people identifying with them - identity policing is the last thing that I want to do. My intention is to explore why being occasionally labelled as such by other people makes me feel uncomfortable, and it has to do mainly with the societal attitudes towards such groups.


Origin Story [link]

I doubt it's really necessary for me to explain what geek/nerd culture is for a lot of my audience, but anyway. Basically, after being ostracised and victimised apparently from 80s films onwards, people interested in non sport-related, recreationally intellectual pursuits appear now to have been declared okay by mainstream culture. Partly as a symbol of this, such groups have reclaimed the taunts geek and nerd (there's supposed to be a distinction between the two, but I've never heard a satisfactory or consistent one) as a badge of empowerment. You know, I have no problem with that. I have a lot of sympathy with it, in fact: as a dyspraxic kid (it turns out) I run like someone whose legs have gone to sleep. When I dance it looks like someone's hanging a marionette. As you might have dimly picked up from my ramblings I liked to read and did okay at classwork. If the places I was at had a Homecoming King and Queen (staying in the 80s stereotype zone for the minute) I probably wouldn't have been in the running. I don't mean to imply that my life at school was an unending montage of having my lunch money stolen and being swirlied (I had some great friends that I keep in contact with to this day), but I feel like I was always a little odd until I got to university. And then I decided that normal is a setting on a washing machine and I don't have to interact with people I don't want to interact with. Score!

I don't mean to relate all this to get sympathy from you, dear reader. I've heard some completely horrifying stories about being driven to the verge of suicide by complete arseholes and the people who should have stopped that happening being too overstretched or too uninterested to help. What I mean to say is, I'm not attacking people who are unashamedly in the demographic that geek/nerd traditionally covers, partly because, I'll freely admit, I'm largely there myself.

I feel like in my case the whole mild social ostracism thing was useful to a certain extent - it taught me (a fairly introverted, anti-social person when all's said and done - I'm pretty sure my spirit guide would be a cat) how to get the hell over myself and muck in, as it's termed. Which is useful. It taught me how to tell when no-one's interested in what I've got to say, which is also useful (still working at that one, as you might have noticed...). I could go on, but you get the picture. And I don't mean to come off like I'm saying bullying is character building or any of that toxic bullshit - what I mean is that in my case I feel like I got at least something positive out of the whole experience. I wasn't particularly happy at the time, but then I'm not exactly a little ray of sunshine anyway.

Eech, this is rapidly descending into a LiveJournal entry or something...


Geek Social Fallacies [link]

Anyway, there are some residual problems in a community born of social exclusion, that many more insightful people than me have gone into. There is the danger of having a persistent outsider and victim mentality, meaning that tolerance is extended what I would argue is too far in some cases (humouring people whose behaviour is selfish and harmful long past the point where elsewhere people would have called them on it) and the culture is seen as some kind of secret club that you have really have to have suffered and/or learnt your stuff to get into (viz the appalling treatment of women and girls that show an interest in fields that are deemed to belong to "real" geeks/nerds). As a musician I see just the same types of snobbery and insularity (think of hipsters using their music tastes as an assault weapon), but I think there's an additional, slightly unsavoury element at work that acts to preserve a kind of infantile sense of entitlement.

And again, I don't mean to tar everyone who identifies as geek/nerd with the same brush. But I imagine you can think of a few examples yourself of what I'm talking about. I think it's partly because as a movement it's fairly young (as is the Internet). There are a lot of people who engage in flame wars, thinking that if you shout loudest it makes your opinion more valid. Look at the abhorrently full bloom that the word misandry has come to after taking root in the bowels of the Internet, and geek/nerd culture in particular. (A great quote I saw recently - "In a debate you are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts.") With this sudden onrush of completely democratic free speech (let's try and keep Net Neutrality a thing, shall we?) anyone can pretty much say what they like about anything, and it's a big enough Internet that there'll be someone who agrees with them. There have always been conspiracy theorists, creationists, climate change deniers, Scientologists, people who like The Eagles (That Last One Was A Joke BTW), but the advent of the Internet has meant that previously isolated and disparate subcultures can clump together like a reverse amoeba. And you know what, for the most part that's really great. (I can write and you can read my ponderous meanderings from anywhere in the world for free! Which is good, because I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to pay to be subjected to this stuff...)

My personal pet theory/hope is that as the Internet matures we might grow out of the flame war thing. I mean, I can think of few things more pointless than two people yelling at each other via keyboard for protracted periods of time over a topic that they have opposite views on. I personally find that instead of "YOU'RE WRONG" "NO U" it's more useful to go "I think this" "I think this" "Why do you think that?" "Have you considered this?" (the latter two delivered as genuine questions rather than thinly-veiled put-downs). We already seem to be getting over trolls gradually (I've been seeing a lot more "Obvious troll is obvious" posts in the past few years than people taking the flamebait), so who knows what could go down.


Boxing Matches [link]

But this is aside from my main objection to the current societal presentation of geek/nerd culture. When trying to articulate my point, I've find it useful to draw an analogy with the second wave of feminism. Whoa there. I said an analogy, meaning that in certain aspects I feel the comparison is useful, not that I'm equating the systematic violent and dehumanising oppression of women that has been a mainstay of our society since time immemorial with a group of people with unashamedly intellectual interests getting victimised in childhood and adolescence. I'd like to make that very clear right now.

The aspect I'm comparing is the idea that society accepts members of a formerly marginalised demographic on the condition that they adhere to a particular set of norms. So for instance around the time of the second wave (what most people think of as feminism - broadly, the first wave was women getting the vote, the second was the social and theoretical developments of this, and the third wave the movement's growth away from the idea of one homogeneous way to "do" feminism) it becomes acceptable (well, more acceptable) for a woman to have a career and to take a more active role in her social (including romantic and/or sexual) interactions. However, many have noted that this is still prescribing roles for women, just different ones. The woman is told be tougher than the men to show her dominance, use her sexuality like a weapon, play down any traditionally feminine aspects that can be seen as weakness. And all the while there's this nasty undercurrent of "Isn't it sweet/hot, she's all dressed up like a man, swearing like a man, she thinks she can throw her weight around with the grown-ups".

This isn't even to remotely begin on the fact that a lot of this empowerment mostly left out any woman who wasn't straight, white, middle class and cisgender. My point is, while it was a definite advancement on the submissive, patriarchal housewife box, it was still a box that women were crammed into - my definition of a box in this case is a set of expectations that a person with one attribute (in this case, being a woman) is compelled to meet, which have little to nothing to do with the attribute in itself. Failure to fit in this box incurs shame, mistrust and other sorts of societal foulness; one of the worst aspects of this is that it causes people who have the attribute to use how much they fit into this or another box (and it's very rare for someone to do so without contorting or amputating part of themselves) to attack each other with all the seething viciousness that comes from seeing a part of yourself you've been trained to hate in someone else.

See anything you recognise yet? I mentioned before the idea that one of the best ways to stop a society from becoming troublesome is for its ruling class to make sure that the lower and middle classes are at each other's throats - the classic divide and conquer strategy. If the whole of a society is working together, there isn't really a ruling class per se anymore, and those with interests (financial and otherwise) in avoiding this type of democracy have a variety of ways to accomplish this. The main one, as I just mentioned, is to make sure that there are robust social divisions in place - make sure that the income gap between rich and poor is as wide as possible, and education and healthcare are as expensive as possible. Spout rhetoric of inclusivity for those who try, while doing nothing to counter the institutional forms of bias against people from different backgrounds. If someone tries to call you on this, show them one or two token individuals who've "made good" from said underprivileged backgrounds, so that the rest feel that if they fail then the problem is with them, not with the broken society that they live in. Emphasise that some people are just "born" good at certain things that the ruling caste are trained extensively for from birth, just as a little extra kick in the teeth. After that, let human nature simmer with resentment and you and your descendants should be comfortably in control for a very long time.


This Way Up [link]

The way we fight this is by talking and thinking. Tempting as it is to ascribe it to the evils of one group, fascism and patriarchy are really just a known bug in the human mind. The Internet has meant we have more scope to talk than ever before, so that leaves the thinking part. My real problem with geek/nerd culture is how it turns enjoying thinking (how else do you show you enjoy something and get good at it other than when you're doing it for fun?) into a reductive, fetishised box. You know what? I don't think having an active and inquiring mind should be a labellable thing. If you like to read (or consume media) and analyse and talk about what you've read (or consumed), that should be encouraged if you want every person to be as functional a person and member of society as they can. It shouldn't mean that people will expect you to have no social skills, be unathletic, have (what you deem) childish interests and poor personal hygiene. The geeks/nerds of today are the intellectuals of yesterday, people who have the gall to have wide cultural interests (and yes, judging a demographic by the excesses of some of its members as if that's the group's failing rather than the individuals' is just another form of boxing - ask feminists) in a way that makes people feel insecure. If someone makes you feel insecure deliberately, they're an arsehole. If they're not doing it deliberately, then that might be an indication that the problem is at your end.

There are very few words that I don't use. As you might see from my writing style, I believe in using all the words you can to make your point; for me to blacklist one is a pretty big thing. The words I don't use are mostly slurs, racial, gendered, ableist etc. Another is the word pretentious. At root, the word means laying claim to what you have no right to (like a pretender to the throne). What the fuck gives you the right to tell people what they can and can't like if it isn't harming anyone? I've never yet heard a use of the word that hasn't been small people trying to make others feel small. If someone inadvertently makes you feel insecure, that sounds like it's your problem, not theirs. If you've been societally bullied into policing your own thinking as "pretentious", "geeky"/"nerdy" (the latter when used deprecatingly), then that's even worse. The rise of sites like I Fucking Love Science gives an indication of the worst side of people appropriating the external imagery of traditional geek/nerd culture without actually bothering to engage with the subject matter (as illustrated here), but I don't call that pretentious, I just call it a shame.


TL;DR Version...

Let me say again that I don't have a problem with people identifying as geeks/nerds. Someone's identity is their affair. I choose not to identify as such because I don't think intellectual interests should automatically mean you are a geek/nerd. When having intellectual interests is something to be apologised for or self-deprecatory about (the way society currently treats geek/nerd culture, see The Big Bang Theory) is when I have a problem. Having an active mind shouldn't be a divisive factor - while natural aptitude does affect predisposition to a certain skill, the majority seems to come from practice. All the people called geniuses that I've ever heard of worked really, really hard to get where they were, often from very early ages. Some people take that to mean no-one is ever a genius - why not take it to mean everyone can be?

(We'll be back to our regular scheduling next week. I'm probably going to look at boxing and entitlement in future posts, if you fancy sticking around.)