How Geeks Ate the World
Hey, my beloved subscribers—and the rest of you, too, who I hope are about to click that big old subscribe button.
Got a little something different for you this week. I’ve decided to write a book.
More accurately, I’ve decided to finish a book. My oldest subscribers will remember that in 2023 I started posting a series of excerpts from a book I had abandoned writing nearly a decade ago (in this newsletter I was tentatively calling them The Bitter Files, a cheeky nod to the anticlimactic Twitter archives busted out to the world by Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk.
Newer developments in world politics, as well as a couple of years of writing this newsletter, have led me to discover what was missing from it in the first place, the absence of which killed the project the first time—a thesis. You know, an angle, a goddamn point. It turns out that’s pretty important.
Now, I’m going to share it with you as it comes together.
As with The Bitter Files, this series will be released exclusively to paying subscribers as a supplement to my regular weekly piece, episodically, hopefully about once a month. Except for this chapter, which, this week, is my weekly piece.
Thank you for subscribing, as always, and please enjoy this blockbuster version of the S Peter Davis newsletter! Let’s go on a wild adventure as we uncover…
As I write this the United States capitol is being sacked and burned by an army of teenage edgelords. They march under the banner of an internet meme from 2013, their mascot is a cartoon frog in Roman imperial armor, and they’re quite literally moving from door to door, commandeering systems, dismantling entire departments, terminating programs, and subjecting federal employees to humiliating rituals before summarily firing them, all at the direction of a game show host and a car salesman.
Freeze frame, record scratch. You’re probably wondering how we got here.
At the turn of the millennium, the United States was mumbling through the same ritual of business-as-usual politics that had been the standard for decades. It was the same predictable pendulum swing of American liberalism, usually eight years per swing between centre right and centre left (both of which are, you will often hear, slightly to the right of most of the rest of the western world).
There were fierce disagreements, but they played out before a backdrop of respected norms. Nobody suspected that these norms were running out their final few years. To most typical folk—the so-called “normies” (who are big fans of norms)—what was coming would arrive as a shock. But there was a boiling undercurrent playing out online that insisted on ending a tradition that had become stale and boring to them as they became further and further detached from it.
In 2016 the norms collapsed. A joke president, memed into the White House by an unseen collaboration of fringe cultures, each weak by themselves by strong when working together for a shared interest: The end of normality.
This is a story about geeks.
…which is a difficult word to define, and you probably equate it in your mind with something like “nerd,” but the distinction, believe it or not, matters. We need to start by taking some time to define “geek.”
For our very first stop let’s visit the Online Etymology Dictionary, which asserts the word might have Dutch and German origins as gek, geck, or gekken, meaning something like a fool.1 There is a generally accepted mythology that the modern usage of the word refers to carnival performers in the early 19th century who performed depraved acts like biting the heads off live animals. In any case, by the mid-19th century the word was gaining traction to refer to people who were considerably outside the bounds of what you would call normal society.2 Not quite a freak… but a geek.
The origin of the word “nerd” is much harder to track down but it is, in any case, much more recent. There are a dozen theories, one of the most often cited being that it’s of one of the imaginary creatures named in Dr Seuss’ If I Ran the Zoo (though this may be coincidental). Other theories range from it having begun as an acronym for something, or two words mashed together, or “drunk” spelled backward (knurd), or, what is evidently Simon Pegg’s favoured explanation, that it’s phonetic erosion—a compression of the phrase “ne’er-do-well.”3
So what are they, and what’s the difference? Scientist and software engineer Burr Settles actually tried to live up to his name and “settle” the issue (sorry) in 2013 when he collected a whole lot of data from Twitter and used word association stats to figure out the differences in the ways the two words are used. He admits that it’s not his best science, but I think it’s good enough to serve as a starter for us. The conclusion he came up with is that a nerd is:
A studious intellectual, although again of a particular topic or field. Nerds are “achievement” oriented, and focus their efforts on acquiring knowledge and skill over trivia and memorabilia.4
While a geek is:
An enthusiast of a particular topic or field. Geeks are “collection” oriented, gathering facts and mementos related to their subject of interest. They are obsessed with the newest, coolest, trendiest things that their subject has to offer.4
To the extent that there is a difference, for most people, “nerd” tends to invoke an intellectual connotation, whereas “geek” tends to invoke a pop culture connotation. In short, it’s the difference between being more into science or science fiction.
This is a story about geek culture.
Psychology professor David Anderegg, in his 2008 book Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them, goes to great length teasing out the question of what nerds and geeks are and their role in society, with a particular emphasis on young children and their absorption of stereotypes.5 But one thing Anderegg oddly never addresses directly—though it feels like he had to go out of his way to avoid it—is how almost exclusively male these terms are.
That isn’t to say that there’s anything in the definition of geeks and nerds that precludes women or girls from being either of these things. It’s absurd to suggest it. Nevertheless, popular culture rarely touches on the concept of the “female nerd” except as either a novelty or the beginning of a character arc that ends with the character coming out of her shell and becoming beautiful. The “female geek” is rarer still, and often seems to present itself as something to be fetishized.
Environmentalist and tech entrepreneur Tara Tiger Brown caused a stir in 2012 when she penned an article for Forbes titled Dear Fake Geek Girls: Please Go Away, in which she illustrated her frustrations with being a real geek girl in a world awash with girls faking it for male attention.
When I was growing up being a geek wasn't something you wanted advertised but you felt pride in knowing that you were really good at something or were a subject matter expert on something obscure. I spent hours every night listening to Henry Rollins spoken word tapes when most people thought he was just in a band, I knew all the names of the Transformers characters and their backstories, I received all of my Girl Guides badges and I played every Sierra Online Quest game at least twice. I was not cool, I was a geek.6
But now…
Pretentious females who have labeled themselves as a "geek girl" figured out that guys will pay a lot of attention to them if they proclaim they are reading comics or playing video games. Celebrities are dressing up as geeks to reach a larger audience.6
Perhaps ironically, this led to accusations of gatekeeping within a group who were, as a whole, already being kept outside the gate of their greater culture. Associate Professor of Communication Studies Joseph Reagle notes that “nerd and geek identities have typically been understood as white and masculine,” and so “geeks and scholars have wrestled with the question of what it means to be a geek and atypical.”7
What is it, then, that makes girls and women the “other” in geek culture when there is nothing inherent to the definition that should exclude them? Although Anderegg doesn’t directly address the gender issue, he does make a point within his definition of geeks and nerds that, I think, cuts extremely close to the root of this issue:
Another way to understand nerds and geeks is to become aware of what nerds and geeks are not. There is a complementary stereotype that helps us define what nerds and geeks are, because it sums up what they lack: Nerds and geeks are, by definition, not jocks.5
Nerds and geeks are male-coded because their antithesis is male coded. “Jock” being somewhat of an antiquated term now, it has been since supplanted by words like “Chad.” Amusingly, when I searched for an appropriate definition of “Chad” for this book, Google’s auto-definition read “a piece of waste material removed from card or tape by punching.” Whether a Chad can be regarded waste material or how easily it can be removed by punching is a matter of some debate, but we will get to this later. For right now, as we explore the primordial origins of geek culture, we’ll work from first principles: Nerds and geeks, and jocks.
I’m going to be using the word “geek” in a specific way going forward that acknowledges its entanglement with the word “nerd.” A geek, for our purposes, is somewhat of an umbrella term that encompasses some aspects of what it means to be a nerd. If we reduce “nerd” to something like an antisocial or socially stunted brainiac, then there are ways in which that plugs easily into what we’re calling a geek, but for us a geek is something that has a much stronger cultural dimension to it.
And anything that is cultural is inevitably political.
There’s more to being a geek than being smart. A lot of geeks aren’t even that smart, they’ve just associated themselves with a particular culture. That culture is male-coded, but not male-exclusive. That dynamic, and the friction of change within it, is key to a lot of what we’re going to cover.
As science fiction author Kameron Hurley writes in The Geek Feminist Revolution:
Yet women have always been geeks. They have been gamers and writers, comic book readers and passionate fans, from Conan the Barbarian to Star Trek. So why the new backlash? Because the numbers of women in these spaces have indeed grown in the last decade. Women have gone from making up 25 to 50 percent of gaming audiences just ten years ago to over 50 percent of video game players, and 40 to 50 percent of creators. Forty percent of science fiction authors are female, as are 60 percent of readers of speculative genres. Their voices, their presence, cannot be denied or explained away with talks of tokenism and exceptionalism. Women are here.8
When I talk about geeks and geek culture I’m going to be largely referring to its male-coded iteration, not to be exclusionary myself but to be descriptive, because understanding how this culture arose requires some understanding of how it developed out of mainstream American culture’s treatment of male nerds, geeks, and their mutual adversaries, jocks.
Adversaries, until they weren’t anymore.
This is a story about how geek culture went bad.
Popular media tends to lag behind reality when it comes to the portrayal of geeks and nerds. Academic study into fandom culture didn’t really kick off until the 1990s,9 which is a slow start, considering Trekkies (or Trekkers, as many evidently prefer to be called) had been a thing for around two decades. To this day, the stereotype of the geek and nerd, to the extent that they’re considered interchangeable in the media,10 remains pretty narrow and specific: Ordinarily, that means a lack of fashion sense, low social skills, bad hygiene, overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly white or Asian.
The racial aspect of geekdom in media and culture is especially notable – almost all geeks and nerds are white, while at the same time, black people are almost never geeks or nerds, while Jews and Asians are practically geeks or nerds by default. Maybe the standout exceptions are Steve Urkel from Family Matters, Abed from Community, and Raj from The Big Bang Theory. For the latter, it might be notable that most of the jokes surrounding Raj in the show are about him being Indian in an even more explicit way than what got Apu written out of The Simpsons.
According to University of Illinois professor Lori Kendall, the perception of the geek/nerd stereotype probably began to change from generally negative to generally positive in the 1980s when workplaces started adopting computers on a more widespread basis.11 The negative stereotype of the geek/nerd had always been hammered hard in pop culture, particularly in 80s college sex comedies like Porky’s, Animal House, Screwballs, Spring Break, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and anything else John Hughes’ name was attached to that didn’t involve a giant St Bernard. But things began to turn around with 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds.
Rather than cast the reckless and hard-drinking party animals as the stars like most college comedies, it was the nerds who were the heroes, fighting the meaty, dumb, villainous jocks. It was one of the first movies to paint nerds as, not just oppressed, but undeservedly so.
Of course, Revenge of the Nerds didn’t really work to break the nerd stereotype. It heavily reinforced it while reframing it as a positive trait. At the time, this was a subversion of tropes in a similar vein to how modern fiction often challenges and flips classic stereotypes of heroes and villains (see for example Wicked, or Frozen). Much later, The Big Bang Theory attempted to do kind of the same thing. On one hand, the humanization and celebration of nerds and geeks in popular culture—you know, recognizing them as actual people deserving of respect—is kind of a laudable change of pace for pop culture, but on the other hand, there’s still a refusal to give up on the stereotype. On the internet, the term “nerd blackface” is commonly thrown around in reference to The Big Bang Theory.12
Amidst the media’s often inaccurate, often misguided, but nevertheless often well-meaning attempts to figure out what geekdom is actually about, geeks have made a pretty good attempt at forming their own collective identity to counter the one most commonly presented. As Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington describe it, “a collective strategy, a communal effort to form interpretive communities that in their subcultural cohesion evaded the preferred and intended meanings of the ‘power bloc’ represented by popular media.”9 That’s a very academic way of saying they figured out they had to hang together or else they would hang separately (by their underwear).
In what was one of the celebrated landmark moments for geek culture, the December 22, 1986 edition of Newsweek ran a cover story about a Star Trek convention. While it clearly aimed to be endearing, the article did little better than to trot out the same surface level observations we always hear about Star Trek fans – that they walk around wearing pointy plastic Vulcan ears, that they memorize the minutiae of trivia to the point where they know the combination of Kirk’s safe, that they have an ongoing rivalry with Star Wars fans (“The Star Wars people want toys. The Trek people want information,” so says one interviewee). At one point, the writer interviews a guy who had a Star Trek themed wedding. And all the while they throw out “theories” about what it is about the show that makes people this way, one of which, apparently favoured by William Shatner, is “Some of these people are insane.”13
Twenty years ago psychologists started to discover that the terms “geek” and “nerd” were losing their negative stigma among the youth.14 This was the dot-com era. People who used to get their underpants pulled over their head in the 70s and 80s were now in the drivers’ seat of modern society. Those people became Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. They became J. J. Abrams and Joss Whedon. If I may engage in some ominous foreshadowing at this juncture: They became Elon Musk. Science journalist Mark Henderson, in his 2012 book The Geek Manifesto, says:
There has never been a better time to be a geek. Poorly served by the mainstream media and entertainment, we are demanding, and getting, more and more attention – in popular culture if not yet in politics. Proper geeks are becoming proper celebrities, with an impact and reach that stretches well beyond their core audiences. Whisper it, but being a geek is becoming cool.15
Just over ten years hence and Henderson’s whisper has become a scream, or a war cry. The Hollywood dominance of action thrillers is a thing of the past in an age since Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation won best picture at the Oscars and every year a Marvel movie smashes records.
According to comic writer Warren Ellis, best known for the comic Transmetropolitan:
People will call Buffy the Vampire Slayer geek culture and yet it ran for seven years and is one of the most successful TV shows of all time. You could argue that superhero and fantasy movies are modern cinema. Geek hasn't beaten the mainstream, it's the new iteration of the mainstream. You don't have to buy a fanzine on mail order to be part of it any more. You can be part of a digital community that draws you together and keeps building your interest.16
We’re still fairly fresh into an era when we can no longer read “geek” or “nerd” as some kind of insult in the same way as Ogre meant it in Revenge of the Nerds when he screamed “NEEEERRRRRDS!” in abject rage from a balcony. As recently as 2014, the billionaire financier David Harding, after donating £5 million to the Science Museum in London, told a reporter for The Times “I feel these words are as insulting as nigger,” and that scientists had been “lured into” using words like these to refer to themselves. He also went on to throw out words like “yid” and “wop” as other insults from the 20th Century that are apparently comparable to “geek.”17
To be charitable, for a white billionaire in his late 50s, it’s nice just to know he thinks that racial slurs are a bad thing at all. And though comparing a high school insult to a slur used as part of an institutionalised effort to brutally subjugate and literally enslave a race of people is, you know, a stretch, it’s nice for an old guy to come out openly in defence of kids who like to learn stuff.
It’s probably a fair assumption that most geeks and nerds would prefer not to get beaten up, hung off a balcony, or have their underwear stretched over their head, and to that end, the popular acceptance of geek culture is a good thing. But, having established that geek culture is mainstream, the question is how mainstream do geeks really want to be?
David Anderegg, like Harding, believes that the reappropriation of labels like “nerd” and “geek,” and wider society’s assimilation and acceptance of geek culture, still hasn’t done geeks any favours. In 2010, during a lecture for TEDx, Anderegg described the situation thus:
Nerds and geeks have moved from a sort of a territory of being vilified to being our mascots. Right? They’re cute. They’re almost like us. They even have nerdy girlfriends. They don’t have hot girlfriends, they have nerdy girlfriends, but they’re almost like us.18
In 2000, Rolling Stone journalist Jon Katz wrote a book about geeks – two in particular, Jesse Dailey and Eric Twilegar, who felt isolated and outcast in their rural Idaho town.19 According to Dailey, “There is a lot of pain in being a geek. When I first started using the name, it started to fit and at the same time empower. Calling myself a geek was saying to all the people who sometimes made me feel tortured, or isolated, or defeated, ‘I don't care if you think I'm a two-headed freak. I think I'm better than you and smarter than you, and that's all that matters’."20
In Katz’s own investigation into what it is to be a geek, he concluded that geeks “aren’t like other people. They’ve grown up in the freest media environment ever. They talk openly about sex and politics, debate the future of technology, dump on revered leaders, challenge the existence of God, and are viscerally libertarian.”19
The introduction of the word libertarian is where our allegories of discriminated classes begin to diverge from the progressivist implications of such labels. 2000 was back in a time when geeks had yet to become fully mainstream, but given the rise of the internet and the steadily increasing demand for IT jobs while workplaces moved away from paper and rubber stamps, the process was underway. Katz calls it the “Geek Ascension.” He marks the beginning of the Geek Ascension with the foundation of Wired magazine in 1993, a publication that everyone expected to fail because nobody outside of a small fringe group of bespectacled nerds with pocket protectors was ever going to buy a computer. Whoops.
Louis Rossetto, the founder of Wired, has himself been described as a radical libertarian. In 1971, long before Wired, he co-authored an article in the New York Times in which he claimed to have been inspired by Ayn Rand and blasted both the New Left (as it was known at the time, though it’s better known today as the hippie movement) and traditional conservatism, for the crime of both embracing a form of statism. Rossetto and his co-author Stan Lehr embrace the “New Right” – as they also call it, libertarianism, laissez-fair capitalism, and anarcho-capitalism, insisting that “laissez-faire capitalism – as it really is, rather than as it is generally and mistakenly understood to be – is demonstrably superior to accepted statist economics.”21 During his time at Wired, he reportedly urged staff not to vote, so as not to support the “useless, outdated, two-party political system.”19
In 2008 and 2012, the internet lit up in support of presidential candidate Ron Paul, a Republican candidate, but one with strong libertarian values, and who had previously campaigned for the Libertarian Party. Given that only a member of one of the two major parties has any chance of winning the presidency, libertarians turned out en masse to support Paul in his two primary campaigns to enter the race against Barack Obama, and many of the strongest supporters were from Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the tech community. A good deal of Paul’s fundraisers were organized by internet fans. Prominent psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz explained the geek support for the apparently superior candidate by saying that “People in the technology industry tend to be more educated, and more intelligent.”22
Many Paul supporters, like Rossetto, had never voted, but nevertheless cast ballots for the first candidate to really speak to their politics, and those politics were, in this case, Republican. But not Republican in the neoconservative flavour of George W. Bush or any of the candidates competing with Paul in the primary. They wanted something fresher and more fundamentalist.23
I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that two of the greatest geek heroes of our era, whistleblowers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, identify as libertarians. Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, who won his freedom with a plea deal in 2024 after many years as a fugitive for violations of the US Espionage Act, expressed support in 2013 for the Republican party, and Ron Paul in particular, as opposed to the establishment Democrats who he saw as the ringleaders of a large-scale surveillance operation by the American government against its own people.24
Assange would later go on to attempt to help sway the 2016 presidential election against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton through selective leaks of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee servers. He seemed proud of his role in Trump’s election, saying “Americans extensively engaged with our publications. According to Facebook statistics, Wikileaks was the most referenced political topic during October.”25
Snowden, the former NSA agent who in 2010 leaked reams of top secret intelligence documents before fleeing overseas, has conducted lectures to major libertarian societies such as International Students for Liberty, with whom he’s been honoured as an honorary alumnus.26
It’s perhaps unsurprising that a lot of geeks would be fans of laissez-faire capitalism—much of the culture is, after all, based on consumerism. Whether your thing is comics, video games, movies, books, television, or whatever else, your real love is media consumption, and in the western world as it stands, consumption is a capitalist activity.
What might be less immediately obvious is why geeks would reject progressivism, an ideology that seeks to help the underprivileged, particularly those geeks who see themselves as being a part of that category. Perhaps that’s just the issue—the paradox of being a class of people who, on one hand, ticks all the boxes for privilege in the eyes of the underrepresented and systemically oppressed, but who, at the same time, is so often bullied and mocked for being on the lowest rung of the privilege hierarchy.
Put simply, it’s a hard lesson when you’re told you have all the privilege in the world and you still have depression.
A notable example of this effect is Markus Persson, the Swedish video game developer who goes by the nickname “Notch,” and who was primarily responsible for the video game sensation that is Minecraft. Persson’s experiment, a sandbox game in which the player can mine the environment for resources, collect them, and then use them as building materials in a fully open world (that is, naturally, just lousy with skeleton archers, zombies, ghosts, and bog monsters) is one of the greatest successes in gaming history.
Persson, who did not come from a wealthy background, conceived the idea for Minecraft while working for King, the company behind such insidious “freemium” mobile games as Candy Crush. He left King in 2009 to start his own company, Mojang, dedicated to developing his dumb cube-mining idea full-time.27
In late 2014, Mojang was sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, which you’ll note is a slight profit upon the $Buggerall that the company was worth when he started it. Overnight, Notch found himself catapulted onto the lists of the world’s richest people, bumping shoulders with Zuckerberg, Gates, and the Koch brothers.
So you would imagine that Persson’s life is pretty sweet, the dream of every geek who has ever imagined having a pretty good idea, but it turns out that granting a socially awkward geek effectively infinite money doesn’t suddenly award him equally infinite social capital. According to the media and interviews, Markus Persson is absolutely miserable. Since a 2012 documentary on Persson, which reported on his success and featured interviews with his then fiancée, Persson has been married and divorced, and now spends his time ruminating within his $70 million Beverly Hills mansion,28 a house that he competed with Beyonce Knowles and Jay Z to purchase.
According to Persson on Twitter:29
Unsurprisingly, Persson hasn’t exactly received a tidal wave of sympathy for his emotionally vulnerable tweets. The standard sentiment is something like this response by the late Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of the widely popular comedy website Something Awful:30
Persson’s story might be one of the more striking examples of a nerdy guy discovering that money doesn’t buy happiness, but it’s hardly the only one. Steve Jobs, founder of the world’s most famous fruit-themed technology company, suffered from bullying at school, to the point where he eventually asked his parents to take a mulligan and move him to a different school, and spent his life battling with often severe depression, throwing himself into his work at the cost of alienating the people around him.31
According to Mitch Altman, a high-profile hacker and motivational speaker who runs seminars on geeks and depression, social isolation, depression, and esteem issues are rife among geek and tech communities, and there haven’t been sufficient studies done to get to the heart of why, though intense bullying during childhood seems to be a good place to start looking for root causes.32
Search the internet for sympathy toward geeks and their problems, and you’ll find a whole lot of articles about how those problems don’t really exist, often drenched in sarcasm, like Dean Burnett’s Guardian article, The brutal oppression of the Nerds and the Geeks, in which he weaves a fictional tale about the history of geeks with his tongue so far in his cheek that he can taste his own tonsils:
Despite their abilities, Nerds and Geeks could regularly expect to have their pants pulled up over their heads, or be made to sit on their own in the lunch room.
This continued for some considerable time, until societal changes led to Geeks and Nerds being recognised as individuals, with rights and some measure of dignity. Despite this, considerable prejudice remained. Geeks and Nerds were barred from holding high-level jobs or from marrying outside their communities. They were regularly ghettoised, forced to live in unhygienic but surprisingly efficient slums. Given their marginalised position in society, Geeks and Nerds regularly fell inwards and turned on each other, leading to lasting and bloody disputes over minor details in celebrated works of science fiction.
Maybe these days the terms nerd and geek have been reclaimed and can be used affectionately, but they still stem from the terrible legacy of what the Geeks and the Nerds went through to get to this point.33
And whenever it’s admitted that geeks do have it hard, it’s usually with the caveat that such problems still do not meet the standard required for geeks to be regarded an underprivileged group. When the extent of progressivism’s acknowledgement of geek suffering ranges somewhere between “oh come on” and “okay, but let’s discuss misogyny instead,” it’s not that hard to understand why geeks, if they are white, male, and miserable, might turn against progressivism.
Obviously, not all geeks do turn their backs on progressivism. Many of the icons of geek media such as Joss Whedon and most of the people associated with Marvel properties are firmly in the camp of feminism. Still others chose another route, one that took the typical male-coded nature of geek culture and followed it into the abyss.
In December of 2014, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) fired the popular physics lecturer and minor internet personality Walter Lewin, who had been an MIT celebrity for his unconventional style and garish clothing since 1974, after it was determined that he’d been really skeezy with his female students. Not just that, but they banned him so hard that they removed the videos of his lectures and other course materials from the MIT website, as part of the institute’s “complete separation” from the professor.34
In response, fellow MIT professor Scott Aaronson wrote an entry on his blog stating that, while he wouldn’t speculate about the case itself, he strongly disagreed with the institution’s decision to remove Lewin’s lectures from student access.35
The heated comment section of the blog entry quickly moved on to discussions between both male and female readers about women’s experiences in education and the professional fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Inevitably, feminism was brought up, an extremely polarizing topic in geek culture by this point.
A few days into the discussion, to which Aaronson had been a regular participant, he responded to a commenter who went by the handle “Amy.” Amy wrote about her experiences in STEM and speculated that a world dominated by the “shy and nerdy” would actually be worse for women as a whole, due to the predominance in that culture of what she characterised as “old-fashioned grab-assery.” Aaronson’s response was long, vulnerable, and carefully drafted, but it was one that blew up on social media to the extent that he continued adding supplemental notes to it until he finally closed the comment section lest it actually burst into flames somehow.
Aaronson’s comment documented his struggles with retaining feminist values despite its apparent war against all men no matter how awkward, shy, or socially disadvantaged. According to Aaronson, “as much as I try to understand other people’s perspectives, the first reference to my ‘male privilege’—my privilege!—is approximately where I get off the train, because it’s so alien to my actual lived experience.”36
He went on to explain how his experience during school was “not ‘entitled,’ not ‘privileged,’ but terrified.” Terrified that his biological attraction to women was, itself, some form of sexual assault, and he was a bad person, even perhaps a criminal, for having those desires. He cited sexual harassment workshops, with their “endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that ‘might be’ sexual harassment or assault” as contributing to his anxiety with women, and how he wished that he’d been born gay, female, or asexual. He reported that he’d been suicidal, and even begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically castrate him, thus ridding him of any sexual desire.
The kicker, as he then revealed, was that those men who were socially privileged, and who did engage in what Amy termed “old-fashioned grab-assery” (the “jocks,” as society terms them, or the “Neanderthals,” as Aaronson prefers) do tend to have much more success with women than nerdy guys. This statement, he clarified, was not intended to shame women for their choices, but was merely a factual observation.
Aaronson’s admission erupted into a firestorm across the internet, with respondents on both sides of the fence either criticizing or applauding him for, variously, holding anti-feminist views; holding pro-feminist views; being ignorant about feminism; being educated about feminism; or just for saying what most geeks are afraid to say in polite company.
Semi-prominent feminists in the mainstream media wrote their own responses to Aaronson’s emotional comment, either sympathetically or otherwise. On one side is Laurie Penny with New Statesman, who wrote a measured response stating that “Maybe [geek oppression is] not a vector of oppression in the same way, but it’s not nothing. It burns. It takes a long time to heal. Feminism, however, is not to blame for making life hell for ‘shy, nerdy men.’ Patriarchy is to blame for that.” Later, “Hi there, shy, nerdy boys. Your suffering was and is real. I really fucking hope it got better, or at least is getting better. At the same time, I want you to understand that that very real suffering does not cancel out male privilege, or make it somehow alright. Privilege doesn’t mean you don’t suffer, which, I know, totally blows.”37
On the other side, there’s Amanda Marcotte with Raw Story, who leans toward Aaronson being a total shit, in her article titled “MIT professor explains: The real oppression is having to learn to talk to women.” She says: “I thought that his lengthy diatribe must be nuanced and humane on some level. Much to my surprise, however, it was just a yalp of entitlement combined with an aggressive unwillingness to accept that women are human beings just like men. So, unlike Penny, I feel no need to be gracious about it. On the contrary, I think it’s time for a good, old-fashioned blog fisking.” She proceeds to serve Aaronson a good plate of the promised fisking with all the sides, “translating” his comment by suggesting his real thesis is “That fear of rejection is a male-only experience, and one that is so awful that any suffering women have endured through history is a mere pittance compared to it. The possibility that women want love and attention and worry about being humiliated and denied simply has never occurred to him.” She concludes that Aaronson’s only real concern during his pubescent years was “how to get someone to touch my cock without making me work at it.”38
Finally, San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander Siskind (not to be confused with the similarly named Scott Aaronson) weighed in with a gargantuan 13,000 word response to both Aaronson and his critics, lambasting feminism for not acknowledging geeks among the hierarchy of the acceptably-oppressed. He cites studies about how women, even extremely unattractive women, still have more success on dating websites than men, and points out that even hideous women will still manage to get laid if they randomly ask men for sex, while hideous men will probably not. He cites the fact that Aaronson’s admission—including the fact that he begged for castration to escape the hell of geek heterosexuality—still earned him plenty of scorn on the internet, while a similar admission by a woman such as Laurie Penny earned her sympathy and praise.
According to Alexander, “When feminists write about this issue, they nearly always assume that the men involved are bitter about all the women who won’t sleep with them. In my experience and the experience of everyone I’ve ever talked to, we’re bitter about all the women who told us we were disgusting rapists when we opened up about our near-suicidal depression.”
Alexander concludes his critique of Aaronson’s feminist responders by saying he suspects Amanda Marcotte is really “a Vogon spy in a skin suit,” and Laurie Penny is, at best, “Probably not the literal worst.”39
Aaronson made a follow-up blog post in which he highlighted the fact that his intention with the blog comment was to discuss some issues that he had with feminism while (importantly) noting that he still considered himself a feminist. Indeed, the fact that he said in the original post that he was still “97% on board” with feminism was either lost on people or misinterpreted as an admission that he was completely opposed to feminism.
Despite Aaronson’s attempt to “get people to see [him] as [he] was, rather than according to some preexisting mental template of a ‘privileged, entitled, elite male scientist,” critics responded by, in Aaronson’s words, “pressing down the template all the more firmly, twisting my words until they fit, and then congratulating each other for their bravery in doing so.”40
Arthur Chu for Salon responded to Scott Aaronson’s blog comment, like Laurie Penny, with a message of full emphatic agreement, which ended with the note that “meanwhile, women are getting stalked and raped and killed. That’s something that men are doing and that men can stop other men from doing. And, with apologies to my fellow emotionally tortured guys, that really ought to be our priority.”41
There is a true misconception when it comes to the concept of “privilege” in progressive social discourse that it implies those who possess privilege don’t experience hardship. There is a degree to which everybody experiences some form of hardship by virtue of being human. There is no dollar amount that can protect you from congenital hardships both mental and physical (you cannot spend your way out of clinical depression no matter how much it might feel like more money would do the trick, and there are plenty of celebrities dead from suicide who could attest to this if they could speak). On top of that you have the distribution of circumstantial hardships that doesn’t care much for race or identity. There are plenty of very poor white men and plenty of very wealthy women of colour, an observation that can very easily lead people of the so-called privileged classes to demand “where is my privilege?”
The answer, if you ask a sociologist, is that there are many axes of privilege and oppression that interact with one another even as they exist separately, and existing on the privileged side of any particular axis doesn’t mean you’ll have an advantage over all people on the opposite side of that axis at all times. A white man might have some advantages in society so far as race and gender are concerned but there is nothing preventing him from falling terribly afoul of the rich-poor axis. Or the abled-disabled axis, or the straight-gay axis, or any one of dozens of others.
On this point though, we have to ask: To what extent is geek-jock an axis of oppression versus privilege? In a world in which video games are one of the most powerful and profitable entertainment industries and eight out of ten feature films are an adaptation of a comic book, can geeks, as a class, actually claim any societal disadvantage? Geeks and nerds aren’t getting their underwear pulled over their heads anymore, they’re dismantling government agencies before the horrified eyes of a helpless United States congress. They’re pulling the underwear over the head of the President.
Loadbearing cultural artifacts like Revenge of the Nerds pit the jock against the nerd or geek as though they are opposites or adversaries, but it is my contention that they are not. The relationship that geek culture has with masculinity is complex and you will often actually find that, in reality, the jock archetype is the ideal, rather than the enemy.
Much of geek media is invested in celebrating traditionally masculine tropes, if not outright stepping into them. Fandom is escapism. Very few comic book superheroes are out of shape. A disproportionate number of them (especially the males) are geeks and nerds themselves in their private lives—think of how many superhero “secret identities” are scientists or engineers, rather than artists, office managers, or long haul truckers. But rarely are comic book conflicts resolved with nerd solutions rather than brawn.
There’s no superhero (that I’m aware of) who is a football player, construction worker, or Navy SEAL by day, and by night dons a mask and cape and transforms into a physicist. Superheroes are frequently super-nerds who transform into ultra-muscular meat-towers when shit gets real. Geekdom is celebrated, not condemned, but it ascends to the masculine ideal when evil inevitably just needs to be punched. The mild-mannered journalist Clark Kent rarely solves problems as a bespectacled nerd.
Maybe the most egregious example is The Hulk – the genius scientist who literally turns into a brainless, shirtless, towering brute when evil is afoot.
Brains without brawn is almost exclusively a villain trope. Think of Lex Luthor, the Joker, Brainiac, Mr Freeze, Ozymandias, The Thinker, Atomic Skull, The Lizard, the High Evolutionary, Mechanicles, Professor Nimnul, Professor Pyg, Doctor Octopus, Doctor Doom, Doctor Death, Doctor Light, Doctor Poison, Doctor No, Doctor Claw, Doctor Robotnik, and almost everyone else with a STEM degree.
Physically gigantic brains are another well-worn trope of comic villainy. Hulk’s nemesis Samuel Sterns was bombarded with the same gamma radiation that created Bruce Banner’s muscular alter-ego, but instead of turning Sterns into another punch-monster, it grew his brain to enormous size and turned him into evil super-genius The Leader. Green Lantern’s nemesis Hector Hammond contacted an alien force that grew his brain to such an absurd size that he can’t keep his head upright. Krang, the enemy of the Ninja Turtles, is a brain.
Geek hobbies that involve roleplay also usually involve the suspension of one’s lived reality in favour of more normative expressions of traditional gender roles, masculinity in particular. Tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons are games of imagination in which, for the duration of play, you step into the shoes of a fictional character of your own creation, a character who is often but not always something like a knight, a warrior, a paladin, an archer, a barbarian, a ninja, or a berserker.
If you’re a video gamer, you can relax after work by stepping into the shoes of any number of masculine-coded superheroes such as Master Chief, Marcus Fenix, John Price, Duke Nukem, Agent 47, Sam Fisher, Desmond Miles, Max Payne, Gordon Freeman, Nathan Drake, Solid Snake, Kratos, Sonic, Link, or Batman.
Hell, even Revenge of the Nerds isn’t about the nerds rejecting the general philosophy of the jocks. The titular nerds don’t win by proving nerdhood superior to jockhood, they win by masquerading as jocks and taking what the jocks have a monopoly on—sex.
All these examples predate the internet and emerge from an era when geeks and nerds really could likely be said to suffer some form of oppression at the hands of the jock class. We hadn’t yet linked the whole globe to a whopping great network of computers, and as Jon Katz describes, this is likely the turning point at which culture began to flip and allow geeks to rise to the top.19 For the first time, in the very late 80s and most of the 90s, the geeks of the world were connected in cyberspace and could spend those initial crucial years of the internet building their own worldwide culture while the jocks were away sneering at their silly nerd shit from the midfield line, never suspecting that an internet connection would soon become central to the lives of practically everyone in the western world.
This is where our story begins.
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