No longer a geek?

“Can I interest you in everything all of the time” – Bo Burnham, Welcome to the Internet

At what point do you realize that you’re no longer part of a culture? That you’ve aged out, that the culture has shifted beyond you, that the things you once thought were cool are seen as cheugy? And, if you being part of this culture is central to your identity, to your self-perception, what do you do? How do you react?

What do you do when you realize you’re no longer a nerd?

We’ll get back to that in a moment. The question was shared with me on TikTok by @midnightlibrarian, who posts some really great M:tG content. Feeling like nerd culture now, focused on video games, cosplay, MCU, and the like may no longer have a place for the elements of nerd culture that he partakes in. That the ground may have shifted beneath their feet. That, even though they still self-identify as a nerd, that identity is called into question, as they don’t identify with the aspect of nerd-dom that is now dominant in the hierarchy. It can be unsettling, this feeling of being unhomed, of the the doubt and instability that this feeling brings with it. How do you deal with it?

There’s no one true way to deal with it, but some work better than others. One of the ways that emphatically doesn’t is one we reach to instinctively. Standing your ground, and defiantly resisting the entrance of newcomers to your corner of the nerd culture happens time and time again. It’s a large component in a lot of the online “toxicity” that happens throughout nerd-dom. And it works so well: just ask the model railroaders and OG wargamers how well leaning in to grognardia worked out. If you can find them.

(Yes, it’s the internet, I’m aware you can still find them.)

I’m hard pressed to think of examples of nerd-dom that have successfully resisted the changing tides. And, as noted, the defense mechanisms that get deployed in these Bourdieu-sian wars over social capital are incredibly toxic. (But more on this later: a working paper of mine on toxic gamer cultures was recently accepted to a conference, and I’ll publish more on that as it gets closer to publication). In the meantime, perhaps a Simpson’s meme sums this position up best:

Of course, if you want to resist without contributing to the (overt) toxicity, you have other options available to you. I call it the “smile and wave” approach. (It works better if you’re humming along to The Headstones tune of the same name while you do it). It’s a recognition that cultural change is constant, and that trying to capture the vagaries of youth culture is like reaching for a sunbeam with a butterfly net: amorphous and ephemeral, and constantly just out of reach. For most of us, this can be fleeting: we may happen to be down with whatever is cool for the moment, but in an instant it’ll pass us by. It’s okay though, it’ll happen to the next generation too:

Going down this road can still be toxic, depending on delivery, as it may arrive with an air of condescension and dismissiveness. It can be bundled with elitism, nostalgia, and smugness, and we’ve recently seen what lies down the road of nostalgia. But delivery is everything, and it can be server up with a slice of wry too.

And this leads us to our third path: just let it go. (No need for a Frozen take here, you can write your own.) This can be the hardest path, to put it down and walk away. It can be difficult to push aside something that you’ve drawn in and made part of your identity. It can involved some self-awareness and self-reflection, and honestly who has time for that in the midst of the dumpster fire that has been the Twenty-twenties so far. Realizing that others’ enjoyment of things within your culture in no way impacts your experience or enjoyment is hard, because it feels like it does, especially in the moment. If you’ve spent your childhood and teens feeling ostracized, and finding solace and friendship within a little corner of nerd culture where you’ve been left undisturbed, it can be traumatic when it opens up to the mainstream and all of a sudden everyone is there with you. (More on this later, in the above mentioned article). It can be hard, really hard, to let it go.

Ultimately, something as vast and amorphous as nerd-dom is no one thing. The shifting tides of interest and attention will lift some boats and sink others. And as nerd culture has become more prevalent in the 21st century – as nerd culture has become pop culture, with the rise of the MCU, videogaming, et al. – those tides are larger and moving swifter than before. And that’s okay.

Being a part of nerd culture does not mean you need to be down with all of nerd culture. One of the (many) ways that a show like The Big Bang Theory misrepresented nerd-dom was the ease and facility that the gang were suddenly into everything nerdy, from week to week. Grad students and post-docs! Please! Hence the Bo Burnham quote in the epigraph: the internet will present you everything you might be interested in with click or two, and the algorithmic engines of Google, Facebook, and TikTok will show you anything tangentially related to it in the service of advertising, but there’s no need to dive into it all. You’ll be overwhelmed; the tides are too strong.

But that doesn’t mean you need to let it go either, to let that identity pass you by. You can maintain your position within nerd-dom, maintain your geek cred, and let it thrive within you. You may look at what “the kids these days” are interested in, and see if you can share what they love about it too. Or you may decide to put it away and move on to find a new element of interest, move to a new stage or new field, with new areas of excitement on the horizon. The paths are open, the choice is yours.

A Thousand Plateaus (0/n)

“What is your ‘white whale’ book?” asked @schizophrenicreads on TikTok recently, and I knew the answer immediately: Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. It’s a book that I’ve bounced off several times, and in so doing always felt that I was somehow lacking in my understanding. When the subject(s) of the book are explained to me it always intuitively makes sense, but when I try and decipher the text I feel as though I’m trapped in Borges’ endless library reading something that’s just off by a dimension or two.

But I’m nothing if not persistent, so perhaps this time will be the charm.

I feel like it should be understandable. The later works of Deleuze that I’ve read (such as “Postscripts on a Control Society”) were straightforward and easy to grok. Perhaps there was a significant shift in Deleuze’s writing over time, becoming more refined, more focused. Or perhaps it’s a question of translation, ever a cause for academic inscrutability and undergraduate confusion. Maybe Immanuel Kant is an easy read in the original German? Perhaps, but I suspect this is still not the case…

However, I’m going to document and share my journey of trying to crack this Whale of a text, interstitially, with the other content on this feed as I make my way through. Perhaps it’ll help in making headway. To assist in the process, to ensure success, I’ve spoken with a friend and colleague who is somewhat of a Deleuzian scholar, and I’ve consumed a couple quick summaries, one of which I’ll link down below. To progress, and bringing in that White Whale. Arggh!

The roots of boomers’ attitudes?

It started innocuously enough: tiktok user @h.mourland asked why boomers hoarded knowledge, as his own experience with his father suggested that they were unwilling to pass on the knowledge that they had. The discussion brought up some relevant points: that they treat it as a scarce resource, they do so to maintain power and control, and so forth. But I wonder if there is a simpler reason, Occam’s razor being what it is: perhaps the boomers don’t know.

That is, they’re not necessarily aware that they’re hoarding the knowledge. (Now of course, in some cases certain individuals most certainly are hoarding knowledge, but we want to caution against generalizing based on anecdotal cases, about universalizing the particular.) Teaching is hard, and “they know more than they can tell”, as Michael Polanyi commented about the difficulties of transferring tacit knowledge back in the 20th century. The boomers may be guilty of making the assumption that you’ll figure it out the same way they did, either through formal instruction or trial-and-error experimentation. Their reticence to share knowledge may come from other sources: alienation and shame. But we’ll get to that in a moment; first, a comment on instruction.

I like to call it the Wayne Gretzky Effect, that idea that it can be difficult to teach what is understood intuitively. During his 20 seasons as a player in the NHL, Gretzky amassed an incredible record of achievements, including being the all time leader in goals, assists, and points, and (such as?). After his career, he became a co-owner of the then expansion Phoenix Coyotes, and in 2005 he took over as head coach. His record there was 143-161-24, missing the playoffs each year and only once having a “winning” season (in 2007-08). He stepped down as head coach as the Coyotes went into bankruptcy following the end of the 2009 season. The intuitive understanding possessed by hockey’s GOAT didn’t necessarily translate into behind-the-bench success.

Conversely, a look at the playing careers of many HOF coaches, both in and outside of hockey, will show that an average player may make a great coach: a lot of third-line players who spent some time on the bench turned into great coaches. John Madden played some college football and was a practice squad player in the NFL before becoming one of the greatest coaches NFL history, and he took that knowledge into his role as a TV analyst. Scotty Bowman only played junior hockey before moving on to become the winning-est coach in NHL history. Current NY Islanders coach Barry Trotz is 3rd all time in wins, but had a limited career as a defenceman in the minor leagues. There’s a host of other examples as well.

This isn’t to say that Wayne Gretzky didn’t work at being a coach; far from it. Just the knowledge that one may have about their field does not translate into being able to effectively explain that. (There’s a host of other factors too; hockey is an incredibly fast moving and complex game with a lot of moving parts, in addition to off-ice elements beyond the coaches control).

But teaching can be just as challenging as learning; that shift to a role in education has been one of the most difficult I’ve faced personally over the last decade. [more]

And there’s a secret that I need to tell you. Come closer. Can you hear me? Good. Here it is: I don’t know everything. And that’s okay. Granted, I do know some things very, very well, but it took me a long time to admit that I didn’t know things. After many years of self-reflection (and learning how much I don’t know), I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t know something. And that’s one of the elements that is connected to a reticence to share knowledge: shame. The boomers have been told they’re masters of their domain, and it can be a challenge to their identity or self-image to admit that they’re not. They have become fallible, with feet of clay. To be questioned, and to be found wanting, is crushing – better to not admit it at all.

And this ends up manifesting in a lack of engagement, a lack of willingness to pass on the information. This can be summed up as a profound sense of alienation. What does this mean? Simply put, estrangement; that separation that we feel between us and everything else around us. Depending on your perspective, this is either directly caused by or a by-product of things like capitalism or industrialization.

A couple examples of this separation include work, where you may be only doing one job that’s part of a larger whole and you never see the final results. Or separation from our materials, like our removal from the process of delivering food to our table, and getting bright-red beef wrapped in cellophane. Or separated from each other, moving out to single family dwellings in suburbia (cue up Rush’s Subdivisions on your mix tape and head down to the arcade). Or just separated from the natural world as a whole. This is drawing mostly from Bertell Ollman’s Alienation (1976). The boomers – post WWII – may have experienced the largest process of this alienation in history.

A big part of this was the change in material living conditions that occurred in the United States. The shift to the suburbs, as GIs returned home, and spread further across the country, disrupting the prior social life that had existed. Robert Putnam covers a lot of this social malaise in Bowling Alone (2000), where he figures suburbanization and increased commuting time accounted for about 10% of the overall reduction in civic engagement (with things like generational attitudes, double income families, increased use of personal mass media (TV and phone)), and others). As above, the decline in civic life is more like a byproduct of the commodification of everything that occurs under capitalism. There’s no one cause; there’s just a lot of factors.

It’s a complex problem.

But this discussion here isn’t about condemning anybody – it’s about understanding. Whether we’re talking about alienation, suburbanization, knowledge transfer or commodification, all these things are about trying to understand what’s going on. There’s one more element to bring in: the underlying ideology of the boomer generation. In the late 70s Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism. While at the time of it’s release he was talking about the current generation (the boomers), and the self-centered-ness of American society at the time, the causes for those attitudes went back much further, all the way to the 19th century and the Gilded Age. This ideology wasn’t tied to any one particular generation. Certain events can have repercussions that echo down through history and affect us much, much later.

A note on method

The underlying method I’m using here is a cultural anthropological approach that I originally used in my MA Thesis back in 2008-10. The principal is the same: construct a historiography of the key titles and works, wending a way backward through the layers of popular culture that preceded RT’s publication. Once this overarching map is laid out, move forward through the different media streams, tracing the influence and connections between them. Similar to a Social Network Analysis, here we chart the influences chronologically, as they’re drawn into the collective sphere that will become W40K in time.

A number of characteristics are relevant to keep in mind when reviewing any of the media ‘artifacts’ (and I’ll use artifact here, as is generally understood in the field, for any discrete piece of media that gets looked at). These characteristics include:

  • Popularity
  • Reach/Sales
  • Critical Appeal – low reach, high impact titles
  • Range – UK titles over US ones, frex
  • Aesthetic

Also, the same title may be counted twice depending on how it is represented in different forms of media. Frex, Starship Troopers could show up twice, once for the book and once for the film, as they are very different properties, with different aesthetics and interpretations, but both will have had an influence. Same for Dune, Judge Dredd in all its incarnations, etc.

Appendix W /2

The memetic influences that went into the development of Warhammer 40,000 extend across multiple media, in the decades leading up to Rogue Trader’s publication in 1987. Broadly speaking, those sources of influence include:

  • Science Fiction
    • MilSciFi
    • “Dying Earth”
    • Dune
  • Movies & TV
    • Star Wars
    • Blake’s Seven
    • Space: 1999
    • Starlost
  • Music
    • NWOBHM
  • Comics
    • 2000AD
    • Judge Dredd
    • Heavy Metal
    • Alien Legion
  • Tabletop Games
    • Roleplaying
      • D&D
      • Judge Dredd
      • Stormbringer
    • Wargaming
      • Laserburn

We’ll get into each in turn over the coming weeks…