Why Nerd Culture DIED...

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For all the redditors out there: Collecting Funko Pops, playing video games and watching infotainment videos on YouTube doesn't make you smart for the record.

in history on the bookworm topic, the nerd and the jock were the same person. You were expected to both develop yourself physically and mentally. Especially so in ancient Greece where the gym was were you worked out and talked about intellectual topics like philosophy. The modern ascendency of nerds merging with the gym bro culture could be viewed as a return to the historical norm.

Nerd culture really is the case study on why it's sometimes better to let things be uncool...By trying to make people see how fun our stuff was, we brought about our own downfall.

It's not the nerds/geeks that changed. The jocks and the cool kids just found their way into the nerd and geek culture and made it popular.

I grew up in the 80's. As a nerd myself I was bullied growing up. The public image of "nerds" really started to change between 95-2000. I think the main contributing factor was the mainstream popularity of video games and the internet.

Nerds have gone all the way from being the underdogs on media to be the new villains: more and more movies nowadays have the bad guy be a tech billionaire, like Upgrade, Free Guy and some others i won't spoil.

It's not that the awkward old-school nerd or geek took over. It was the cool and charismatic types co-opted the nerd and geek culture. They still have the same bluster, the same bravado, the same obnoxiousness. It's the tools and the battlefield for success that's changed. So where's the nerdy types now? In the arts and actual sciences. We lost pop culture.

Steve Jobs wasn't the nerd, nor the one that knew much about anything related to computers on a technical level for a long time, that was his friend Steve Wozniak initially who in a fair reality would we be the one we praise along with all the nameless people that actually invented all that stuff Jobs is still being credited for. Jobs was the "brains" as far as he would tell people what he wanted and for a long time he did so without even having a grasp of what was really possible or not, it's fair to credit him as far as being a visionary but in reality it was more a skill of knowing how to read trends as soon as they started happening and also QoL improvements for needs that people had already developed. Much like Elon Musk really, people give him credit for so much but his only achievement ever has been paying actual smart "nerds" to invent stuff for him so he can claim it as his, never gets credited with the far bigger amount of failures though.

Honestly, as a nerd that was bullied horrendously growing up, I’m wary of us being popular. I’m reminded of the line from MacBeth, “There’s daggers in [people’s] smiles.” We may be “cool” now, but that can change on a dime. I still somewhat expect people to treat me the way I was treated growing up. Color me skeptical of the mainstream, y’all.

In the 60s and 70s being called a "nerd" carried no pride in it. It didn't mean you were smart as much as that you were socially inept and ugly. It was a label others gave you, to hurt you. A consequence of it was that nerds were fairly gregarious. A nerd sought the company of other nerds. A nerd was defined, often, by communal projects. Apple came to exist because the Steves were close friends. Microsoft is a product of the Gates/Allen friendship too. Regardless of what happened after, many of the awesome things that happened in the 60s and 70s were the product of a close friendship between two intelligent, rather isolated guys: UNIX (Ritchie and Thompson), the Internet (Cerf and Kahn), etc. Nerd culture was gregarious. What computers did was turn that into a culture of individuals, now truly isolated. Younger generations try to convince themselves than having 10 online nerd friends is better than having one real life nerd friend you can actually visit and talk to while looking in the eye. No, it's not the same. An isolated nerd grows bitter. His productive ideas lack the back and forth with a similarly gifted friend. He gets stuck, he enters loops, and wastes energy on dead ends. That's what killed nerd culture. Not its popularization, but the isolation. And I tell you this as an old nerd, who was online back in the early 80s, when Usenet was brand new.

I personally don't think that nerd stereotype has become more acceptable. A wide variety of nerd hobbies did become mainstream. However, personality types of those who originally formed nerd communities still looked down upon. Personality traits popular back in the 80s are merged with new nerd archetypes, which resulted in mentioned in the video Tony Stark, Sherlock, Dr Strange and etc., where "jock"-traits like assertiveness, charisma, masculine confidence are still present in combination with observancy, sharp mind and sophisticated language of "nerd"-traits

I think this also changed how people view what is and is not nerdy. While before it was video games and comic books, now we view very niche and specific things like sciences and history as being more nerdy and uncool.

Nerd culture today is practically just pop culture that rewards corporations.

Just want to point out, that the people playing cod and are social media influencers are not actually nerds. They're rich suburb kids who just happened to get on the right train to fame by joining at the right time in dong vlogs. They are not passionate gamers. If gaming dies, they will be the first ones to get off that train. They are not gamers, they are hype beasts who are doing the popular thing at the right time. Playing cod does not make one a gamer. I know loads of people who only play cod and battle field but could not name any other game out there.

I'd argue nerds were financially successful throughout the 1900s to now. Their rung on the social ladder has increased since the rise of the Internet

As a nerd: "Nerd culture" came over us, we were never really part of it. Arround 2010 or so somehow everyone tried to look like a nerd, without being it. I am kind of happy about the "death" of it. Now we can do our thing again, which never has been only DnD ;)

As a kid growing up through 2000-2010, runescape was also so popular because we could play it on our school computers. It was just soooooo accessible.

I think another aspect people overlook is the death of "jocks" or "popular kids." They still exist to some degree, but nothing like how it seemed back then. Most kids nowadays mind their own business, schools are so big that there are multiple "popular kids" groups, and (to their limited credit) schools have also cracked down on bullying more. My dad also used to say "it's not uncool anymore to get good grades," which is definitely another contributor. No one makes fun of you just for getting good grades anymore. Back then, some would.

Ohh I so lived this. Born in 1977 I recall the late 90's you see I joined the Marines but was still a nerd however technology was quickly advancing. I remember learning how to operate marksmanship simulators, digital radios, early GPS units, etc.. And I was getting respect from the other Marines cause I was able to quickly learn how to use all this stuff. Then after I exited and 1st person shooters were becoming popular in the early 2000s I had street creed because I had physically done all the cool stuff in the games. Kicking down doors, helicopter assaults, tossing hand grenades, calling in air strikes. All culminating in my Engineering Degree and companies throwing money at me to come work for them.