ObsidianJones said:
There's nothing wrong with Geek Culture.
What is happening has nothing to do with Geeks and Nerds Exclusively.
What everyone is picking up on is happening to Human Society as a whole.
We live on a planet where the predominate emotion is anger. I'm not being heard enough. I'm not being respected enough. I'm tired of hearing other people. I'm tired of always having to try to respect others. I didn't get enough from life and others. I'm tired and done of giving stuff to anyone. My beliefs are right. Your beliefs mark you as inferior to me.
Very few has patience for the different. No one wants to sacrifice any more, because they feel like they've done it their whole lives. Everyone has a chip on their shoulder, and those chips double exponentially when they go out into the world and find OTHERS have chips on their shoulders.
It's like "How DARE anyone else have the audacity to be upset? Only I and people who are likeminded to me or who are physically and socially similar to me has had any real problems. Who the hell could anyone ever suffered like we did?!"
Take that sentence and apply it to the asshole Trump Supporters, People who hate America, Americans who hate others, Atheists who hate Theists, Theists who hate Atheists, SJW, Men's Right Activist, Geeks, Feminists, Minorities, The Majority, Rich, Poor, The Glorious PC Master Race, Consolers, People who can't eat cereal soggy, People who put toilet paper in front, Those who put it in the back (giggity).
Once you strip down their 'reasons' and get to their feelings, you will find a variant of the sentence.
Ding ding! We have a winner.
As I'd posted in another thread, it's not a matter of 'geeks are assholes', it's a matter of 'people are assholes'.
We live in an age where anyone and everyone has a voice amongst the greater whole. And as we're all starting to discover, the vast majority of us are not nice, well-meaning, intelligent, nor rational. Moreover, we've started seeing patterns of behavior within ourselves that become obviously negative when seen through the eyes of others.
Being uncomfortable with that fact, many of us have begun looking for a scapegoat. A 'group' to target our self-loathing and disgust towards. One of those groups, for communities such as the Escapist, is the so called "geek culture".
madwarper said:
I'm beginning to reject the idea that this has to do with any anonymity of the internet, but rather the fact that we're not all in the same room, having the same conversation at the same time.
I mean, this all had its origins in friends sitting around a table, on a couch, or at a LAN party, etc. While trash talk was still prominent, we could immediately read the temperature of the room, and see how our comments affected the others. And, if we went too far, there was reprisal with consequences, such as being admonished or even ejected from the group.
However, with the internet, we don't immediately see how our words affect others, so without that sense of empathy, leads to escalation that goes far beyond toxic. Furthermore, with the numerous amount of communities, being ejected from one is far less consequential than it had when the one playgroup in your town stopped talking to you.
TL,DR: The internet killed the superego. So, the id runs amuck.
I've felt the same for quite some time. It's not just the sense of freedom from consequence that anonymity brings. It's the all-too-often lack of context and proximal empathy that leads to the usual hostility and escalation that we see.
At least, that's what I've come to believe. I have no meaningful evidence to support that.
CaptainMarvelous said:
Well, if the thread is anything to go by, Geek Culture is quite self deprecating if not self absorbed.
Which goes hand-in-hand with my claim that 2016 is, indeed, the Year of Cynicism.
Zhukov said:
I like a lot of the stuff it produces.
I do not so much like a lot of the people it produces.
I love the idea of the underdog as much as the next person, but the reality isn't quite so sympathetic.
Turns out, if you gather up the outcasts, the misfits and the maladjusted and mash them all together the outcome actually isn't all that pretty. You get a whole lot of unhealthy, unhappy, immature, terminally bitter folks of questionable mental condition who never got over being bullied in high school and have chosen to define themselves by their preferences in entertainment media.
Many of them probably ended up the way they are through no fault of their own, but that doesn't make the end result any less unpleasant to be around.
This isn't to say "geek culture" is somehow worse than other cultures. I mean, people fucking die in riots over sport. It just means geek culture has its own brand of awfulness which I refuse to tolerate just because no corpses have shown up with "fake geek girl" etched into their foreheads... yet.
As I'd brought up in the other thread, why make the distinction then? What possible purpose does it serve other than to single out a single demographic as being wholly responsible? Are we not better served by
only targeting those who are behaving poorly, rather than broadly accusing an entire, tangentially-associated group? As I'd said, yes there have been instances of sports fans going full mental and rioting over a lost game. But I would never use that as an example for the claim "sports culture is toxic and needs to die". So why do we use instances of bad behavior by some geeks as a rallying cry for the death of 'geek culture' as a whole? To me it feels just as demeaning and exclusionary as 'geeks' are portrayed as behaving.
I guess I just don't understand the hypocritical nature of todays culture/counter-culture mindset.
