The death of the nerd

I lied. I know. There have not, in fact, been more of the promised blog entries. And I'm sure that you all are absolutely withering on the vine without my insightful commentary about aspects of a life you don't live. But after a week of creative resurgence, my writer's block has set in again. So rather than stare at my manuscript and demand it to write itself already, here I am. Today, I'm going to briefly examine nerditry, and why it has largely become extinct.

You wouldn't know it from the outside looking in, but nerdhood is an exclusive club.¹ It takes all manner of forbidden knowledge and shibboleths just to gain membership and acceptance, and even then there's a pecking order depending on what your nerdy fixation is, and how in-depth your knowledge of the subject is. Being so closed off socially makes for miserable times in high school, but speaking as one of their number I also felt a bizarre sense of belonging. I didn't belong to the student body at large, but fuck those guys. If they didn't understand why comic books and ironic enjoyment of awful movies were so much fun, then they were the ones missing out, not me.²

But in recent years, something's happened. The trend has reversed. The nerd has come into vogue, and suddenly everyone's trying to put their nerd cred forward as proof of cool. It's superficial at best--beyond the thick framed glasses, most people just lack the obsession with detail that the garden variety nerd has in droves--but the problem is that it's watered down an entire subculture.

Don't get me wrong. To an extent, I'm happy to see nerds more widely accepted. The fewer kids finding themselves turned into locker stuffing because they kept their Star Wars bedspread past age eight, the better. But some of what made it special is gone now. There was a brief time when it was something of a badge of pride to call oneself a nerd, just as pop culture was starting to come around to the ways of the basement dweller. But now, like Hot Topic did to goth and punk fashion, nerd has become something to be sanitized for public consumption and marketed accordingly.³ Make everything sleek, cool, and assembly line.

Take the example of Comic Con. It's long been a nerd touchstone event, a place where fans could gather and discuss, meet the creators of the things they enjoyed, and have a good time. Hollywood studios, however, saw it as a way to increase their cred with a potential target audience, whose high number of Sailor Moon figurines on their shelves told the studios there was money to be had. Suddenly, Comic Con is being used as a platform for studios to parade out their geek-friendly franchise movies with a crocodile smile and a hearty clap on the shoulder. "Isn't this cool, everyone?" they ask you, expecting you to trip over yourself while delivering your emphatic agreement. And true to form, nerds rise to the occasion wonderfully.

I'm not against bringing people into the fold. But the nerd is rapidly becoming just another unique snowflake getting caught up in the rampaging snowball of pop cultural homogeneity. SciFi, a stalwart on the frequently watched channel button of many a nerd's remote, was sanitized last year into the somehow more mainstream-acceptable entity, SyFy. Poorly made comic book adaptations flood our movie screens like fresh crack on the streets of the Bronx.⁴ Nerd has become a curio instead of a way of life, either a fashion novelty or a potential media cash cow. And as it becomes further co-opted, the people cease to matter. And without those people, those special obsessives who stuck by what they cared about even in the face of social suicide, all we're left with are grown men and women sticking to their childhood hobbies because people told them to.

-PK


¹ No girls allowed.
² This was not without cost; I did miss the crucial high school experiences of Homecomings, football games, females, and sunlight.
³ I have infinite respect for marketing people for making loneliness and obsession commercially viable.
⁴ The crack is cheaper, of higher quality, and unlike the movies, made by people who care about the end product.

Radio silence

We're eight days into the month, and I haven't blogged for any of them. It's not like my life's gotten any busier; I had an active holiday weekend but that was really about it. No, I've found, to my great pleasure, that I've started writing again. I don't know why I'm suddenly able to do it right during what's usually one of my blank months, but I think the existence of this blog helps a good deal. It keeps the muscles in shape, so to speak. Whenever I sat back down in front of the keyboard every fall when my muse woke up, I always felt like I was shaking off a few layers of rust as I started banging out sentences. Not so this time around.

Everyone's got their creative process. Some people exhaustively outline every detail before they write word one. It's like they will a skeleton into being, and then it's just a simple matter of packing meat on top of it. I fall into the opposite camp, where everything is on the fly. No outlines. Random bits of dialogue and description scribbled into the margins of my notebooks. Concepts getting filed away for months, years at a time, only to spontaneously show up in stories I never even thought to put them into.

I like the spontaneity. I like being able to surprise myself. If I know everything in advance, there's no discovery in it for me. And if there's discovery, there's no point.

I'll blog more regularly now. And I promise there will be footnotes next time.

-PK