Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals

Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals

Erik Hoel

For while most intellectuals are nerds, not all nerds are intellectuals. In fact, the majority of nerds aren’t intellectuals. And it’s problematic that the taste of the majority is swamping out the minority, leading to the nostalgia porn of Stanger Things, the CGI paste that is the latest Marvel movie, the unending Star Wars re-runs where Palpatine comes back yet again. Who is left to read literature, to make art-house cinema, to write weird burning-with-an-inner-fire poetry? That’s what some segment of nerds should be doing, metamorphosing from nerd into that more delicate but potent creature, the intellectual, but instead they are drawn to the easy honeypot of modern middlebrow culture because it is too nerdy, too attractive, too omnipresent, to ever leave. A key portion of nerds are supposed to complete a lifecycle and pupate into fancy-pants intellectuals, yet this natural process has been stymied by the very success of nerds in the first place. Looking around me at the rising “thought-leaders” (what a term) of my generation, the millennials, I see mostly either overly-political academics or ex-academics, or, on the other side, anti-intellectual populists. I feel a certain lack, an empty space where a particular kind of person should be—all those who used to read comic books but now want to do something more substantial culturally with their minds and their tastes.