The External and Internal Faces of Nerd Commerce

Yesterday, I had half an hour to kill in the local city centre while waiting for a delayed train. There are two chain nerd shops not far from the train station, and almost right next to each other, so I popped into both.

The first, Travelling Man, is a cornucopia of obviously quite carefully curated delights. Not all of it is for me, of course. But it contains a big RPG section, a big board game section, a big Games Workshop section, a big manga section, a big comic section, and various others. It is almost overflowing with stock, all of it creating the impression of having been chosen by enthusiasts who really like what they are selling. There are recommendations; there are displays; there are regular customers engaging in awkward nerd-banter with the staff. I found it a very congenial space in which to spend time.

The second, Forbidden Planet, essentially sells those little Funko figurines with the big wobbly heads. And that's about it. There are one or two glass cabinets featuring other, more expensive forms of tat (a cast iron statue of the batmobile, etc.), but I would estimate that over 75% of the shop's revenue come entirely through selling Funkos. I found it alienating and depressing to be in there for more than two minutes. 

I observed this - that more or less next door to each other there are these two wildly different approaches to, let's call it, nerd commerce - to a friend with a WhatsApp message and he made the following comment:

There are lots of people who like tat. Or people who don't know what to get someone for a gift but they think they remember the person saying something about Star Wars one time and so they buy them a Star Wars Funko Pop/keyring/poster etc.

I thought this was pretty astute. And it alludes to an important distinction between two aspects of nerd culture, and suggests that nerd commerce is in fact bifurcating (or has bifurcated) to meet them.

The first aspect of nerd culture is that it is very inward facing. It is insular, introspective, and indeed introverted; nerds like a special thing which only they and a very select group of other nerds know very much about. And Travelling Man meets the need of that audince. It feels like going into a clubhouse. And it would, I imagine, be quite an intimidating place for a non-nerd to go. It would be hard to figure out what half the stuff in there even is without having been introduced by somebody in the in-group.

The second aspect of nerd culture is that it is also outward-facing. Nerds like to be associated with 'their thing', I think often almost as a kind of shield behind which to hide their more private thoughts, and non-nerds will often fixate on the 'thing' that the nerd in their lives is into, recognising it to be an important facet of their personality. 'I am Bob and I am into Babylon 5' becomes a means through which Bob's friends, family and colleagues can relate to him (in much the same way that they might relate to his brother, Reg, through the fact that he is a big Motherwell fan). 

These two faces, the internal and external, interior and exterior, private and public, exist in a state of tension in nerddom as such, and within the heart of the individual nerd. I perform no psychoanalysis here, but it is interesting that the two sides of the nerd personality appear to have given rise in our age to two very distinct mode of moneymaking activity: on the one hand, the studiedly hobbyist outfit; on the other, the acceptable face of nerdishness as laundered through gift-giving. To experience one or the other is almost to step into a different world - one (to me) warm and comfortable, the other cold and transactional. But some readers, no doubt, will rather like Funkos, so perhaps that's just me.