What the Fuck Happened to Nerds(mrmarket.lol) |
What the Fuck Happened to Nerds(mrmarket.lol) |
People whose whole career always was to manipulate and impress people, to talk well, to convince investors to give them money, to lead companies just are not nerds. Regardless of whether they are narcistic assholes or not.
I can only speak for my institution, but eagerness to lock down ip and keep ownership of everything tightly controlled and out of the hands of said nerds/inventors doesnt really incentivise me to do beyond what I'm paid for.
The one time I tried, I was hit by the full force of my institutions commercialization goons and lawyers, to a degree that it killed my drive to do anything novel for them. Despite being promised partial ownership, in the end, after federal grant funds were secured and product developed, they took everything using "loopholes" that go against the law and the institutions own rules, but to fight it I need resources I don't have, which the institution no doubt knows. All that despite me initially being fully aligned with my institution, and happy to only take a very minor share of actual profit, in-line with what i'd get anway, only stipulation was veto rights in application (as the tech has very real applications in offline autonomous drones, which I consider an X-treat).
If my own institution is a hostile actor, and willing to fuck me over nothing, simply because they can, why do anything?
So, current state of Copyright law favours institutions over the very individuals it was meant to protect, and there are no options to protect one self if anything interesting is developed without serious capital and legal might. So, fuck it, im not doing anything except hobby related, GPL licensed stuff. If I can do anything to make it hard to commercialize, I will. If it can be kept in house, it is kept there.
Capital interest has become a rather ugly and hostile egregore with interest aligned against that of humanity. All those building cool and novel shit I know hold similar opinions, so it is no surprise to me. I was strongly advised against working with the institution by older folks i look up to, people who have built really powerful tools of their own. Their warnings ended up being proven valid with deafening clarifty. I've always found the statement that capitalism breeds innovation to be a joke, and while it works in the chinese model, the "western" model is sick and suffers a sort of cultural psychosis that makes it rather unttractive to engage with.
A new thing will come along which the finance types won't recognise for its potential, nerdy types will start experimenting with it, make progress, gain some small successes but being nerds they're not really interested in creating large markets for their things. People with less eye for the detail but more for the market potential will pick it up, sometimes together with the nerds (Wozniak/Jobs), sometimes without them and create larger markets. If it really takes off like computers did there will be a wild-west period in which those who understand the technology - i.e. nerds - get to step out of the shadows for a bit until the technology is commoditised and the market is consolidated. Eventually there is less need to know the tech which has become 'boring' anyway so the nerds disappear into the shadows again to tinker with whatever scratches their itch.
The market is like society in that it needs both conservatives who recognise a good thing and do their best to keep it alive as well as progressives who are less interested in keeping things going than they are in changing things in search of some Platonic ideal. While the good thing is good the progressives are doing their things in their workshops without being seen much. When the good thing starts going bad the conservatives are mostly ignored because nearly everyone is looking at the progressives for a solution which is not "a faster horse" or "a lighter buggy whip".
Objectivism is a stupid, angry idea borne out of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. It exists in a vacuum. Eddie Lampert named his yacht the Fountainhead which is amusing since, while I don’t question he has talent, he got millions in seed money to start his own fund from Richard Rainwater. Elon Musk is not some scrappy kid; the vast majority of founders are from comfortable and increasingly upper middle class families where they can tolerate the risk of failing with a reasonable safety margin and then delude themselves that they bootstrapped everything themselves.
Curtis Yarvin does not exist in a vacuum. These are awful people and the fact that we’ve allowed them to be taken seriously and control the conversation is…obscene.
They may have shared a love for technology, what they also shared is a deep immaturity.
The immaturity of a person not wanting to acknowledge and cary any responsibility for other people, for the consequences of their work, for any kind of accountability. Just play with their toys without any concern for the external world.
'I'm just here playing with tech and code'. Sure! but that stuff you're building is being weaponised by other (the venn diagram unfortunately overlaps) tech bro's so men can film women with their glasses in public like the little sick creeps they are. Or steal all their data. You can't pretend you are not responsible and complicit.
They want "what's theirs" and anything in their way - including people - have to comply or be destroyed.
Elon probably most of all, he was the one who took fringe edge lord behavior and elevated to something to be admired.
Tim Apple [sic], Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos all went to the inauguration to bend the knee. They all paid 7 figures plus to be there.
Being a billionaire is fundamentally incompatible with being a countercultural nerd. If anything, this was Silicon Valley returning to its roots. The first companies were founded before WWI (eg Federal Telegraph Co) but the true origins of the name "Silicon Valley" came from semiconductors and the likes of HP and Lockheed Martin as a Cold War defense offshoot.
because previously it was mostly the nerds who were at the forefront of the innovation (they still are), but they now have a playbook where they see all the other people (grifters) who are entering tech for money and the playbook of the attention economy and doing that because its a profitable strategy.
It's basically the fact that there are multiple companies where a grift culture is promoted within tech (ironically I am on YC website and YC had a company which you might've heard called delve :D)
As people realized that the technology has value and finance people realizing it to pour head over fist money into it.
With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.
So I think this is what has happened to nerd culture. It simply became profitable and then commoditized and used by people who could then grift.
BUT people are respecting the nerd culture (well the non grift version of it) a lot more
For some reason, I wish to recommend Weird Al video song about White & Nerdy[0] and how people within the comments are saying that Nerd culture has its own unique identity and many if not all appreciating the nerd culture
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw&list=RDN9qYF9DZP...
So TLDR: people like the previous nerd culture and it still exists, especially on HN but on platforms like twitter and others, as discussed within the article itself, with the attention economy. The grift culture is getting more attention than the nerd culture and because of the overlap in tech, the nerd culture is getting some bad rep but overall people appreciate the actual nerd culture (IMO) as interesting and unique (whereas previously, people wouldn't have appreciated it so much)
You don't hear about the actual nerd culture because it isn't algorithmic hungry but it still exists on platforms like Hackernews IMO!
Reminds me of Pink Floyd’s "Have a Cigar":
> And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
> We call it Riding the Gravy Train
Although I would wish for less overlap with tech-bros but it is sadly what it is and there are ways to mitigate it by being on more nerd friendly websites like hackernews.
Also, one more observation I wish to share is that not all nerds are tech product creators and neither should they be. Some just create for the sake of creation and IMO there is long way to go after creation as well and the nerd culture doesn't have standardized playbook as compared to grift culture.
Basically the nerd culture is immeasurable and is driven by it and the grift culture is measurable and is also driven by it. It's just that tech has more overlap but if trillions of dollars were thrown in physics instead of AI (quantum computing?), I would consider physics to have a lot of tech-bro culture as well.
Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.
Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as already proven effective for everything from selling books, personal brand, career skill/virtue signalling, staying relevant.
Due to this everyone is talking more without restraint and not keeping in their own lane of earned expertise.
aka techbros
“What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing in any sense at all, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates – both “technology entrepreneurs”.
People who spend their entire life in front of computers should not be the ones with the keys to society yet here we are.
Generally I'm not sure you'd be considered a nerd if you weren't too honest for your own good. Not that this covers all types of virtuous behavior - there do exist nasty scientists. (And there is some level of fraud/dishonesty in academia, too).
I have the feeling it probably teaches you something, or at least it should. Something not too unlike epistemic humility, maybe.
Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core.
Want to see "the lost nerds"? Here, on HN there are many very high-profile nerds. People who built the internet and the most popular tools exchanging insight and jokes over posts. Many founders who aren't loud, who aren't about PR.
So - nothing happened. Author looks for them in wrong places.
And that's exactly the argument of the article IMO, that the famous nerds went from well-meaning eccentrics to evil greedy overlords.
Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history.
Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361
Anyway, the answer to the question: 'Nerds', like any cultural grouping, are a product of their environment. The United States of today has developed much higher inequality, debt burdens, rent demands, maintenance cost demands and trade deficits than the same environment had in the past, largely due to the Fed policies of the 21st century, with some help in worsening things by all administrations.
I guess in a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say is that I wonder how much of this is a change in PR rather than a change in the people themselves.
Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple.
Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clue existed, has become almost a mainstream ambition. Some of the people that never identified themselves as nerds, will wander from industry to industry, which one that pays the most.
But back to the nerds: Some nerds obviously changed. If you throw generational wealth at most people, they will change. Few people are so disinterested in money that it is simply not a thing they care about.
What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing.
The money and power corrupted them.
In fairness the exposed brick was already there when they rented the place.
Elizabeth Holmes persuaded for years that she was a groundbreaking innovator, even with non-existent product. Other manipulators are smart enough to have a real product that protects them via benefit of a doubt. Society is still not immune to people like that.
When I worked in the Bay Area, I noticed the nerd-culture was still more or less predominant in South Bay. The arrogant, shallow types were always there (as witnessed by their fancy cars--"should we take the Jag or the Merc today?"), but I could still tolerate it. San Francisco was a different story. I started a new job at a startup once and remember thinking "I'm surrounded by Ivy Leaguers who look like models--this place is not for me". I think the crazy amounts of money just brought in everyone looking to make a buck, and the nerds no longer were the majority.
But then you have the company missions. It seems like most of the companies in the Bay Area are all about advertising or compiling info on individuals and selling it. It's mostly B2B and not so much "cool products".
We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.
I think it'll keep having waves, but I agree that a bit of cooling off could be a good thing.
The technologies are genuinely cool, interesting stuff, it's a super exciting time to be building stuff. But the business side of things seems quite vapid and desperate for many companies.
I wonder if more tangible industries like manufacturing have had similar peaks? Was there a time where the Wood Industry was going crazy, making everything out of wood, stuff that didn't need to exist?
Hear me out: back in the day founding a company wasn't an identity, it was just an action, a verb. Stuff started going sideways when people started thinking of themselves as "founders". Suddenly the product wasn't the top priority anymore, instead it was second to defending their identity as a "founder". Seemingly stupid decisions followed, but seen from the perspective of a CEO who wants nothing more than to be a founder, they start to make sense.
We see something similar in politics, I think. Note that it doesn't apply to everyone, but it's interesting to compare people who are engaged in a social justice struggle, Vs people who identify as "activist". The latter will be very prone to doing things that are counter-productive to their started cause, because they don't really care about any cause, they're just defending their identity as activist.
I reckon the same idea holds elsewhere as well.
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure how common that last thing is in the US, but where I live, it definitely happens a fair bit. But even here it does not apply to everyone, it's just a very loud minority)
Second disclaimer: I use the word identity in a very specific way in this comment. It is not to be confused with other uses of the same word, for example in the phrase "gender identity". That is a completely different kind of identity and is completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what I'm trying to express in this comment
https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
Of course one can't have any identity whatsoever, afterall ethics is a type of identity and no one should in their right frame of mind contest basic things like human rights.
It doesn't matter if you write fantastic library, nobody is gonna use it because they won't know about it, the one with a gif of the terminal (ffs) will win that has a good page describing what it does (and being the most popular one can even become better than your library because of the following but that's not the point here).
It's everywhere, products, hiring, services. We have no network of trust (sigh), we need to trust some heuristics based on a shallow information. If somebody focuses on the shallow he wins, because nobody can ever dive into everything.
did this guy ever hear of Larry Ellison? He also claims Gates wasn't a terrifying overlord
Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking.
Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.
Linus Torvalds on the other hand - that is a household name.
Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms. This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion". But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more important than conformity.
Reddit was the place to be for nerds and spread like a pandemic. However, karma points turned this on its head since you have a mechanism to enforce conformity in non-conformity that was the basis for "nerd communities". Nerds hobbies that would be the gateway are gated behind such platforms that enforce a social credit system in a totalitarian way. The would have been nerds are thus mostly integrated into the redittor archetype that is so fundamentally opposed to the nerd archetype; a contorted version of itself trying to fit through distorting mirrors.
I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept?
Why should I spend my energy to discuss with someone who doesn't want to listen, and not rather build something I like or learn something I wonder about, or converse with the people I care about?
Life is too short to talk with walls disguised as humans. Talking with a wall, the ocean or oneself is more productive than doing unproductive self-torture.
I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
Strong disagree. Having lived those times, it really really was different, and there are a bunch of reasons for it.
1. First, back then (90s, early 00s) there was very little financial incentive to participate in discussions. BBSs, IRC, forums etc. were mostly non commercial. People joined without any expectation of making a profit, just for "the fun" of it. And for something new, interesting, evolving. Way less perversion of topics for monetary gain.
2. People back then made a clear separation between being online and offline. We literally had the term IRL coined. So a lot of discussions were "in abstract" and much less prone to be taken literally or seriously. A lot less identity / ideology stuff as well. Having a clear separation made it easier to not confuse your real world self with your online persona. Having an idea debated wasn't about you / your identity.
3. Politics was much less divisive back then. There was political debate, but again a bit more "abstract" and theoretical. I'd say the moment when this changed was 2008s US presidential campaign. Until then the Internet was seen as "not important". It has changed a lot since then.
4. Entry barrier. This might sound elitist or disparaging, but it really was a thing back then. The people online were mostly tech inclined, or curious enough to learn. It was much more educational, and (linked to point 1 above) everyone wanted to learn the cool new thing, without any monetary incentives. Much more sharing of pure knowledge, helping out and so on. It of course changed over time, but the early days were really something beautiful. I have very fond memories.
Not to mention for a good while, FOSS was a big nerd holy grail (informing many discussions and forums, away from corporate solutions shilling and careerism), and a big goal of every tech nerd (unlike after about 2010).
Also nerd culture was by nerds, for nerds, not dilluted and "championed" by every mainstream hipster.
Remember when even Comicon was something mostly nerds, the kind "normie" people used to point and laugh at, went, and sci-fi/superhero movies excited the same small demographic niche?
I'd claim a relevant axis is argument as deduction (common in mathematics) vs argument as rhetoric/persuasion (common in politics).
It's not that the former type is necessarily rational. "All birds have wings, planes have wings, therefore planes are birds" is the former type of argument and fallacious, whereas "are you really comparing birds to planes?" is the latter type.
I feel the former can allow deeper exploration of some topic, but sometimes involves things like playing devil's advocate for stances outside of social norms - and requires others to engage at that level rather than taking the rhetoric path of shaming you for even considering it.
And HN isn't it...
I'm sure it has a different meaning, though
Shitposting, trolling, and harassment has been around since the very beginning of the public internet. If you didn't see it, it has to have been because you were (unconsciously or not) looking away.
The "ideologues and political commissars" didn't ruin your "friendly technical discussions", they merely pointed out how toxic a lot of those communities had always truly been.
If anything, if you really want to focus on the technical details, you should welcome their attempts to make it a friendlier and more professional space!
I think you're seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. In some FLOSS circles the discussions were dominated by ideologues, to the point some discussions seemed like Monty Python skits. I mean, your choice of window manager, let alone Linux distro, was something you'd be judged by.
I mean not using the Dutch translation of the n-word as part of your username and thinking you're clever for hiding it in a plausibly deniable way would certainly help with me believing you're arguing in good faith.
Sadly, while I find AI effective, I also find it's removed the craft and personal reward I get from open source. So I will instead grow potatoes.
Even if machines can be made to produce compact, well thought out and beautiful, the interaction pattern almost inevitably ensures the "developer" produces something that is neither compact, well thought out or beautiful
> The money and power corrupted them.
Actually accomplishing things in the world that constitute building a sci-fi dream world requires significant amounts of money and power, and any person or institution at all that could in principle have the capacity to do this would also have the capacity to become corrupt, at least by someone's judgement.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with many of the sci-fi things that tech billionaire nerds have made their money by bringing into existence. I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.
One of the reasons why I stopped going on Facebook, even though a lot of communities I care about have moved there. I wrote a long comment about someone's suggestion about car maintenance, only to get a reply "I didn't come here to discuss this, if you don't like what I said then go somewhere else". Like, WHY EVEN BE IN A PUBLIC FORUM THEN. But I feel like that's just me and my early internet sensibilities. Nowadays people want to post something, get some likes, and not be challenged. Even a mild disagreement is met with immediate aggression a lot of the time, because people are just not used to talking on the internet at all(imho).
This feels like maybe even the majority of the problem.
In general corporate social media favors memetic content and disfavors "inconvenient" content. Inconvenient meaning things that cause non-trivial numbers of users to mash the thumbs down or "report content" button. The premise of that is supposed to be that people are reporting spam and trolling etc.
The problem naturally being that people will also use the platform's "make it go away" mechanism to penalize anyone who tells them things they don't want to hear. And then the sort of people who insist on telling the technical truth even when it's inconsistent with the political lie tend to get shadow banned into irrelevance, which leaves what in everyone's feed instead?
I remember Usenet in the 90s being 50% interesting conversations mostly about niche topics and 50% randomly devolving into flame wars in larger communities.
Even "Eternal September" as a concept was something from around 1993/1994 right?
Same for the 2000s era online-bulletin-board. I often go to thegearpage.net and am appalled at the amount of shilling, dismissals and disrespect, but then I remember that in the 2000s the main guitar forum was Harmony Central, which was mostly kids calling other kids moms names.
EDIT: But coldtea makes a good point about some (IMO) more recent changes: tone-policing, excessive marketing. There's IMO also a different attitude towards curiosity today.
Otherwise, my memory of early 90s internet supports exactly your conclusion. There may have been better opportunities for small discussions, but big ones devolved the same way they do today.
It was never a very placid or friendly place. There was more tolerance for vigorous debate than there is now. The debate didn’t change many minds, I suppose.