Nerds have closer relationships with memes than with people.
This is why they are on the ascendant. From Bill
Gates and Steve Jobs on down to, well, pretty much everyone
I know, it's never been a better time to be a nerd. I met
the woman of my dreams on the Internet, a knockout gourmet
chef who reads books and watches Family
Guy. I'm trying to imagine to any of my late grandparents
how I'd describe the way I met Anna. It's like David Sedaris
says in Me
Talk Pretty One Day:
It was my father's dream that one day the people of the
world would be connected to one another through a network
of blocky, refrigerator-size computers, much like those
he was helping develop at IBM. He envisioned families of
the future gathered around their mammoth terminals, ordering
groceries and paying their taxes from the comfort of their
own homes. A person could compose music, design a doghouse,
and...something more, something even better. "A person
could...he could..."
When predicting this utopia, he would eventually reach
a point where words failed him. His eyes would widen and
sparkle at the thought of this indescribable something more.
"I mean, my God," he'd say, "just think about
it."
My sisters and I preferred not to. I didn't know about
them, but I was hoping the people of the world might be
united by something more interesting, like drugs or an armed
struggle against the undead. Unfortunately, my father's
team won, so computers it is.
There's strong pressure on people to be close with their
memes. Right now, the world is more congenial to the well-being
of mp3s than humans. We're united in our conviction that allegiance
to some set of the memes will ensure us access to money, fame,
power, and ultimately, the drive underlying it all, the hope
of reproductive success unto many generations. Two problems:
we don't know which set of memes is the right one, since they
all contradict each other. Some of the memes are harmless
symbionts, like the billions of bacteria affectionately nicknamed
your gut fauna. Sometimes the memes are parasites. Meanwhile,
the social forces that
have kept obsessiveness under control for most of our history
are no longer in place. Obsessive-compulsive disorder
is one of the many outward manifestations of depression, a
physiological epidemic in our society like diabetes and AIDS.
The good news for a mild OCD sufferer like myself is that
America also offers many ways to turn this condition to our
advantage, if we can focus our compulsiveness on computer
programming, or engineering, or music
or whatever.
A friend once described me as an 'expert', meaning not so
much an expert on any one thing, more like a would-be expert
on everything. A former co-worker unkindly nicknamed me The
Great Pontificator. You know who else pontificates? The Pope.
Another term for an expert is: an authority. I have some problems
being on the receiving end of authority, but I don't mind
dishing it out. Another former colleague compared me, in a
friendlier way, to Niles Crane (brother of Frasier.) This
is a trait I share with all nerdkind. We feel oppressed by
authority, put-upon or even endangered by it, but we're nevertheless
fascinated by it, to the point of fetish. We feel ourselves
to be humanoid but not completely human, a
stranger in Robert Heinlein's strange land. It's a precarious
position to be in, and expertise gives us a feeling of security.
If we possess the arcane knowledge, we remain necessary to
the group, no matter how much animosity or indifference the
group may feel toward us. As always, the Onion
says it the most concisely:
Corporate Brass Forced To Tolerate IT Guy's Wolfman-Like
Hair, Beard
The biggest rock stars in the world are increasingly nerds:
Björk,
Radiohead, Gnarls
Barkley. The late Jerry
Garcia was quite the sci-fi and comic book fanboy. Comedians
have always been nerdy, but the best ones right now are off-the-charts
nerdy: the Simpsons people, Stewart and Colbert, Matt Stone
and Trey Parker, Seth MacFarlane.
Hip-hop culture has been a nerd-free zone almost by definition,
but as production moves to the computer, the situation is
changing fast - it's a short line from Rick Rubin to MC
Frontalot. Closely related is the ghettonerd phenomenon,
a term I first encountered in Junot
Díaz.
So why did I use the word 'revenge' in the title, aside from
the reference to everyone's
favorite terrible movie from the eighties? Because the
nerds are terribly angry, and we fantasize about revenge endlessly.
Did you know that Return Of The Jedi's original title was
Revenge Of The Jedi? Presumably, Lucas changed it in the weeks
before its release so as not to scare away the customers.
Wikipedia
asserts that Lucas originally wanted David Lynch to direct,
but that Lynch opted to make Dune instead. Could that possibly
be true? I hope it is. Could you imagine Revenge Of The Jedi
as directed by David Lynch? What I would give to see that
movie.
Everybody in America fetishizes violence and dreams of the
day of vengeance, but nobody does it on quite the eroticized
scale of the fanboys, except Christians.
Which is ironic, since most nerds I know are avowed atheists.
Or maybe not. Many, many of the sacred texts of geekdom are
thinly veiled Bible stories: not just Narnia, but Star Wars,
the Matrix, Robocop, the Terminator series, and most recently
Halo. Did you know that one species of enemies in Halo is
called The Covenant, and that another is The Flood? Ever read
the book of Revelations? I bet it would make an utterly kickass
first-person shooter.
What makes the nerds even more dangerous is that we're not
in touch with our anger for the most part, so we're prone
to snap unpredictably. If you befriend the punks, by contrast,
you learn very quickly that all the anger is right there on
the surface. Once you get past the piercings and tattoos,
punks are mostly docile, writers of poetry, utterly harmless.
Nerds are another story. Be afraid of the revenge of the nerds.
Be very afraid. Mostly our weapons are sarcasm and passive
aggression, but under enough duress, nerds can enter dissociative
fugue states and go utterly postal, like the Trench Coat Mafia,
or that guy at Virginia Tech. Remember how in The Forty-Year-Old
Virgin, Steve Carell's coworkers all think he's a serial killer?
That scary depersonalized state severely depressed people
get into is actually the goal of a lot of science
fiction, music, drugs and other forms of mass entertainment.
Roger Ebert's original review of Star Wars in 1977 called
it "an out-of-body
experience." He meant that as praise, but it causes
me some alarm. We should expect the nerds to continue to violently
erupt until everybody gets some
help.
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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