The Pacification of the Nerd

I've been thinking about writing this post for a long time. I'm still not sure if I can put my finger exactly on what it is I want to say - but since that's never stopped me before I might as well go ahead with it.

There was a time when being a nerd was in its own way genuinely subversive. Most people reading this will have been alive and compus mentus in the 1980s and/or 1990s or before - cast your minds back to what it meant to be a nerd or a geek in those days. At least in my experience, there were two categories of such social pariahs. There were the real nerds - the kids who were into chemistry sets, train spotting or amateur dramatics and whatnot; the genuinely unfortunate sensitive and intelligent souls who didn't understand that Anglo-Saxon culture despises earnest and heartfelt interest in intellectual pursuits, and were bullied remorselessly as a result (but are probably now making millions working in STEM industries). Then there was the group which I belonged to, who were generally referred to as "the hippies" by the mainstream kids who we disparagingly referred to as "the trendies". We were nerds but we were into wearing denim and CND badges, and played in bands and drank alcohol and did other things we weren't supposed to. D&D and Warhammer nestled alongside other interests, like hanging out on park benches at night drinking cider or going to "rock night" at a local hotel every Wednesday or listening to Black Sabbath.

Either way, though, there was something about being a nerd that had a sort of punk quality to it. The "trendies" - the kids for whom wearing the latest fashions mattered, listening to chart music mattered, appearing not to care about school mattered, saying the right thing at all times mattered - were hugely suspicious of the "hippies" and hated and feared the real nerds beyond measure. The existence of the hippies and real nerds represented alternative lifestyles and possibilities - the idea that you could actually choose your own path in life and be into D&D or for that matter train spotting if that was what you wanted. (The truest punk of all was a boy I remember, called Paul, who was obsessively interested in chemistry and Land Rovers; he was bullied so much that eventually he had to be taught separately from the other kids for his own safety - that's how subversive he was and how much he threatened the established "popular" types.)

In its own way being a nerd at that time was also pretty strongly anti-consumerist. I don't think this was ever particularly well thought-out, but for us the idea that you had to be wearing the latest clothes, listening to the latest music and so on was anathema. Being a "hippy" was about not giving a fuck about that sort of thing. We got most of our fun out of the local library and musical instruments. The real nerds were into even more esoteric pursuits and were, of course, barely even aware of such concepts as fashion at all. It seemed to us (though I don't think I would have put it like this back then!) that physical status symbols like the Nike trainers or goretex jackets that were popular at the time were irrelevant to one's actual status. And we made a point of acting as if that were the case, with our greasy long hair, Doc Martens and West German army surplus jackets.

In any event, the point I want to make, I suppose, is that at one time being a nerd meant being rather strongly counter-cultural in certain important ways that, if you were being overly romantic, you could see as an important corrective to societal pressures to conform. The nerd was non-violent but also rather unpleasant to behold, difficult to understand, and bloody-mindedly unimpressed with the prospect of conforming. He was in his own way vaguely monstrous in the eyes of mainstream society.

Fast forward to 2017 and it seems to me that the dangerous, weird nerd has become pacified. It is hard to detail exactly how or when this happened, but the release of The Fellowship of the Ring film is a good place to begin the search. Nowadays there is such a thing as "geek culture" and it is all the range - from Hollywood to the world of fashion to the professional video game playing industry. The nerd is no longer the outsider; he is the king of Silicon Valley and hence the world. He is not the awkward, sharp, non-conformist splinter in the skin of the mainstream. He increasingly is the mainstream.

It's good that mainstream culture no longer militates quite so destructively against the defenseless nerd - I think poor Paul would have fit in a lot better if he had been born 15 years later - but quite a few things have been lost as a result. Not least of those things is what the nerd used to represent - the possibility and promise of non-conformity, and particularly non-conformity with consumer capitalism. The nerd as I remember him (whether of the hippy or the real nerd variety) above all wanted to carve enjoyment out of pastimes that weren't readily commercialized. You got your AD&D books, some scrap paper and pencils, a library card, a guitar and a load of hand-me-down Warhammer figures, and you were good to go. You didn't need the latest clothes, the latest gadgets, the latest football shirt.

In contemporary geek culture, that seems less and less the case: whether it's the latest collectible, the latest £50 PS4 game, or the latest $200 million dollar Star Wars extravaganza, it is all about the money and all about the status that comes from having the latest whatever-it-is-that's-cool. You could make the argument that in the last 15 years nerd-dom has colonised the mainstream but I increasingly tend to think it is the other way round, and the two-fingers-up to the "real world" that was the 80s/90s nerd has all but disappeared.