this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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Le epic bacon cringe "nerds are cool now!" culture.
I say this as a guy who plays D&Ds and has a Star Trek next gen poster on the wall.
I'd like to think that people are waking up to the fact that the nerds make up dominant society now via silicon valley and are making everyone's lives worse.
this lacks class analysis. None of the megacorps making shitloads of money the last 20 years is paying for my therapy for liking that stuff the ten years before that.
That and I think a lot of these people grew up and just became normal people with niche hobbies and realized the whole attempt to turn it into an identity was silly at best.
no the bullies became project managers at those tech companies
I don't condone bullying weaker people, so no, I don't think they were right. But I think they were right to spot in nerds the antisocial behavior, now the same antisocial behavior is lauded in nerd circles and being a creep is seen as a good thing.
No nerd was being bullied for anti-social behavior, they were being bullied for not liking popular things, being seen as weak and unmasculine. No one was bullying nerds for harboring misogynistic communities.
Which is rich because the nerds were never going to have a seat at the table of traditional patriarchy since the jocks viewed them as weak.
The bullies were mostly targeting people who were visibly queer or disabled, and said bullying frequently involves forms of SV. So no, fuck that and anyone who says it.
CW: Sui
My best friend growing up was bullied so severely for being overweight that he tried to take his own life (mercifully, he failed). He's not a Silicon Valley techbro now, he's an overworked and underpaid nurse.The kid I knew who got bullied the most (as in, pretty much every single day) was targeted because he had Down Syndrome. He was, last I'm aware, living in poverty because he couldn't keep a job because he had Down Syndrome and in any decent society would've been in a care home.
I'm so cynical that I think this was all a psyop to get things like Marvel movies accepted by the mainstream, plus of course a way to sell things like Funko Pops.
I hear what you're saying, but having lived through it, I'm pretty sure the ball was already rolling before Hollywood capitalized on it. The "nerds are cool now" thing was more a byproduct of the social media age, particularly YouTube. It was the meat and potatoes of a lot of big early YouTube names, Loading.Ready.Run is one property that comes to mind (not to shit on those guys, they seem like nice enough people), as well as Angry Video Game Nerd and Channel Awesome (who seem less cool). The media elite may have encouraged it once they realized they could make big bucks off of it, but I think the beginnings were organic based on what I recall.
In my experience, the Lord of the Rings movies seemed to break the membrane to begin with. There was a qualitative shift then, which the money first meandered then rushed into until extraction had ramped up to maximum.
A psyop to enable another psyop.
We can get everybody to watch lots of movies that are vetted by the DoD, but first everybody has to be open to comics.