Something Amyss said:
briankoontz said:
That's not true. Nerds were proud of how they looked - they wanted to distinguish themselves from mainstream society and they succeeded, if their mockery by that society was any indication.
That's never particularly been true of "nerds" as a general body. Yes, you can point to selective parts of the culture as you've done, but that's not particularly reasonable.
The main character from War Games and the kid from Cloak and Dagger are not nerds, despite their computer-savvy/games/hacking identity. The reason they aren't nerds is that they don't exhibit a key feature required of nerds - the desire to separate from society in order to prevent that society from interfering with their own development of the system (that would emerge into computers and the internet). In contrast, the nerds from Revenge of the Nerds ARE nerds - they go to college but then form a "nerd society" in a frat house and "do battle" against the jocks for social supremacy.
The War Games character is an interesting study. His parents are scared of computers by way of obliviousness - they avoid his room as if it's radioactive. The only classmate the movie shows is a curious girlfriend. The movie makes it clear that the people around the main character enable him to remain IN society - if he faced harassment or exclusion for his interests he could easily become a Revenge of the Nerds type of character.
Let's also look at a key analogy that nerds themselves often used - that of Wizards. 2nd generation nerds (since fallen out of favor in the age of "Nerd Cool") called themselves Wizards, or Programming Wizards, also reflecting an interest in playing the Wizard (Magic-User) class in Dungeons and Dragons. Wizards were dark, mysterious, performing strange experiments in secluded towers away (intentionally) from a society that fears them. This was reflective of the "delving into the dungeons of code" that nerds did into the emerging computerization that then took over the world in the 1990s. The movie Cloak and Dagger expressed this dark and mysterious angle of nerd culture in a metaphorically logical way.
In order to be a nerd in modern society one needs to continue to be harassed by society in order to provoke a response by the nerd of excluding himself from that society. But society has completely embraced computerization (to an alarming extent in my opinion) so one can no longer be a nerd for the same reason that the 2nd generation nerds were. The 3rd generation of nerds were faux-nerds, merely referencing the true nerds as part of "nerd cool", to benefit culturally and economically from what the nerds had built, devolving into the current twitch streamer who claims to be a nerd to help them get more views and donations.
Hipsters might indeed be the descendants of nerds with respect to FASHION, but hipsters are not excluded by society nor are doing anything important (or really, seemingly anything at all) to necessitate excluding themselves. Hipsters are the cultural *remnants* of nerds, minus any of the REASON why nerd culture was what it had to be.
Hipsters reminisce on nerds and say - "Wouldn't it be nice if I could be that cool?" - without an ability to do any project that compares to the construction of the modern system of computerization.
