Cut adrift

version

Well-known member
The change has been that the false opposition of jock Vs nerd has collapsed. You now have the Alcebiadian Chad, who is perfectly well informed and technically competent but also jacked, redpilled and couldn't care less.

 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
I fundamentally don't trust anyone who looks like they take that much care of themselves.

What's wrong with sitting on the sofa eating crisps and chatting shit like the rest of us?
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Now yoga, gyms, health food predominate. London no longer really cares about what I am interested in. It has moved on.

One way to look at this is obviously gentrification. But I think it's a bit different to that. Buying second hand krautrock records and going to Plastic People are just as much the activities of a comfortably off leisure class as is yoga and artisan coffee.

They are, but they're largely based around pleasure and artistic culture rather than well-being and conspicuous consumption. Becoming superhealthy has become a second job for many people.

On the other hand, echoing HmGovt, i think it's good that a false dichotomy has collapsed for good. On the third hand, loads of people always liked music, football and drinking anyways, so maybe the distinction wasn't that clear in the first place.

Also rent changes things. In London it's so high that marginal profit making enterprises such as record shops aren't going to be as popular as businesses with a higher markup/selling overpriced services. So maybe smaller cities/towns are more likely to have these things now? But rent can be high there too.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
I've said this before on here - Luka has threatened to start a thread about it even - but I think the whole subcultural model I (and you?) grew up with and are still carrying around in our heads has just gone. Distinct music + distinct style = subcultural tribe now seems like something out of the ark. The idea of subculture as opposition to the mainstream has just disappeared, and the idea of subculture as a preserve of knowledge/exclusivity - what sense can that make in the era of the internet? Also as Jon says, the ways in which young people are being weird and unknown/incomprehensible to us has kinda increased and varied - I think the fitness thing is interesting in that regard as it's one thing we can't purloin. We can nick their trainers maybe but not that potential for physical development.

Idk - I kinda like it when there's cultural moments happening that confuse me. Isn't that what the the generations below us are supposed to do? Be annoying and refuse to fit into comprehensible categories?

It's obviously a confluence of things coming together that drives this sense of change and alienation from it, not least our own ageing - but to be a bit Marxist about it, I think it's underlying intermeshed changes to economics/technology that really drive the forces that create these feelings. New circumstances bring about new subjectivities. We're perhaps lamenting the loss of one, while puzzling out the new.
 
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comelately

Wild Horses
Nerds don't have to go out anymore, we have internet. Elephant in the room here.

Some nerds, obviously not all, can get laid off Tinder (Snap too I imagine, but don't ask me about that).

Price of drinking at home has stayed relatively static over the last 20 years, going out not so much. Supermarkets supply the beer and wine, Amazon supplies the midshelf liquor.

Going to the gym has got cheaper. Gym supplements have got cheaper too I think.

not that potential for physical development.

Bollocks. I'm making all kinds of gains at 41 no problem. But maybe...I always thought the skinny jeans were about separating the boys from the men. So maybe something in that.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I was going to make a similar point to barty. The nerds dominate the internet. They also dominate culture via things like superhero movies, Game of Thrones, video games and whatnot.
I'm not convinced by this, tbh. Some stuff that used to be nerd culture is now mainstream culture but it feels a lot more like the mainstream's co-opting nerd shit rather than nerds dominating the mainstream. There might be office chat about Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, but if you make a comment about some obscure bit of the Silmarillion people are still going to look at you like you're a weirdo rather than showing awe at your incredible subcultural capital.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
One of the biggest comedy shows of the last decade was Big Bang Theory. The nerd look is popular in fashion. There's a nerdy/bookworm girls porn category. Hipster culture is very much nerd adjacent. All the sci fi and hero stuff in Hollywood. The web. The names of websites. Memes. 4chan. It's all become intermeshed into mainstream reality.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
But I don't think it's actual putting actual rank-and-file nerds in the cultural driving seat, is what I mean. Stuff that's culturally associated with nerds is everywhere, but it's being consumed in the way that football or soaps or mainstream films were ten years ago - the nerd mindset is still fairly alien, even if nerd content isn't nerdy any more. Everyone in the office might be chatting about Avengers Endgame, but that doesn't mean that the geeks who were memorizing the issue numbers of Uncanny X-Men back in the 90s are suddenly being looked up to as heroes or anything.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
One of the biggest comedy shows of the last decade was Big Bang Theory.
But to me this is a good example of mainstream taking stuff nerd stuff rather than nerds taking over the mainstream. It's massively popular but - in the same way that Woody Allen films mention Fellini but aren't Fellini - it mentions nerd stuff but it isn't nerd stuff. I've seen people (nerds I guess) complaining that saying something about Star Trek now and again and pretending to be a physicist does not a nerd make.
Though wait a minute, are we not mixing up nerds and geeks here?
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Though wait a minute, are we not mixing up nerds and geeks here?

Not getting into an argument about the distinction, but I think that either is as much a function of how you relate to your interests as it is of what those interests are. Star Trek is classic nerd stuff and football is classic jock stuff, but someone who just watches Star Trek as a fun space-opera is IMO less of a geek / nerd than someone who obsesses over websites like Zonal Marking and fucks up every normal football conversation by off on one with super-detailed tactical analysis that no-one else can follow.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Interesting how jock types can be very nerdy when it comes to sports history and statistics, but not attract the same kind of attention as someone who could tell you the cast of every episode of Star Trek TNG. I was listening to some people talk about the NBA in the 70s on a podcast the other day and it was crazy how many tiny details they could remember for loads of players, and not just the most famous ones.
 
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droid

Well-known member
There is an important distinction thats developed.

Being nerdy/geeky, used to be associated with being heavily interested in a niche topic, could be anything from astronomy to maths, to chess to jigsaws... the kind of people who developed these interests also tended to very introverted and be into certain (often solitary) subcultures - comics, roleplaying, science fiction, sometimes music. In this paradigm its possible to be nerdy about anything - its a mindset rather than a set of interests.

Nowadays, being nerdy just means the latter, shorn of almost any other factors, so its a classic mainstream co-option. Take the surface level, repackage, and sell it on as something desirable. So essentially, being into nerdy 'stuff', doesn't really have anything to do with being a nerd anymore.
 

version

Well-known member
Anything picked up by the mainstream is co-opted. That's the nature of the mainstream. And there are actual nerds in the driving seat - Zuckerberg's a nerd, Bezos is a nerd, Musk's a nerd. If we're looking closer to home, we've got a complete nerd running the government atm in Dominic Cummings.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
I'm not convinced by this, tbh. Some stuff that used to be nerd culture is now mainstream culture but it feels a lot more like the mainstream's co-opting nerd shit rather than nerds dominating the mainstream. There might be office chat about Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, but if you make a comment about some obscure bit of the Silmarillion people are still going to look at you like you're a weirdo rather than showing awe at your incredible subcultural capital.

yeah I was going to say, the internet being an environment where the normal social hierarchy is flipped seems like a pretty old, even dated idea. surely that was more true pre social media? i guess, of the really big sites, reddit and to a lesser extent twitter would be the most consistent with that view.

also the normalization of fitness culture has come up in a number of threads. i wonder if this perception is influenced by living in a major city. seems to me like it's a fairly small but extremely visible portion of the population who have fully taken advantage of this, and the rest of us are physically worse than ever. people are increasingly spit between Zyzz/instagram types and sedentary gamer/reddit types, but most people are closer to the latter. at least in the US.
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
the people who are at the top of the internet social hierarchy now are nerd-popular kid hybrids. the e-boy/girl aesthetic.
 
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