What Is a Nerd?
A Prolegomena in Proposal of Redefinition and Restigmatization
Editor’s note: Cass appears to prefer sending work in the form of letters, emails, etc. Images, hyperlinks, and some formatting are therefore made by the editor for purposes of clarity.
By Cass Lowndes
Jordan,
I am feeling even more ornery than usual.
What is it about the first few weeks of the year? Some inchoate dread that stirs the stomach and curdles the blood. Indeed, should a medievally inclined physician care to inspect my humors, I expect he’d find something not unlike the pulpy flotsam one sees floating up from the bottom of certain barbecue festival Port-o-Johns. A dizzying faraggo of elements and dimensions. As if Blue-Period Picasso and Drip-Period Pollock were collaborating on the depiction of a chemically contaminated peat bog.
Anyway — as usual — everything is a goddamn racket. Traffic violations in the mail. Moles mining the backyard. Gas bills, electric bills, medical bills, bills that aren’t even mine. But damnit, if this isn’t exactly where they want you. Too weak to protest, too tired to care.
Well. I won’t be taken in. Stay sharp, my friend, and don’t let them catch you off your guard. Trust me, the trap is set.
To wit. I have been meaning to talk to you about something which has been bothering me for a while, and which in my opinion has reached the level of an honest-to-god crisis.
Nerds. Nerds! Who would have thought? “Nerd culture”, “nerd-dom” — real, actual things, I’m told. Mainstream phenomena worth celebrating.
I ask in all sincerity, when did a nerd cease to be anything more than a nerd? That is, a total afterthought? A figure so marginal to human civilization that he effectively doesn’t appear in recorded history until post-WW2 (check the etymology). For a while it seems we had the good sense to keep him culturally irrelevant: an act accomplished less out of malice and more as a matter of fact. In other words, as a country founded on a half-baked tautology (we hold these truths to be self-evident, et cetera et cetera), we could at least follow through on this logic: nerds are irrelevant — ergo — nerds are irrelevant.
Well, obviously something happened. Who the fuck knows what. My question is, why? Who let them out of the basement? Come to think of it — how’d they get in the basement in the first place? Where do they come from? What do they want? What do they want from me?
I can only assume all this would require a fair amount of sleuthing. Certainly more than I am able to accomplish in a single letter. So as a preliminary measure, I propose at least agreeing to a broad definition of what a nerd is, starting apophatically.
A nerd is not defined by their interests or hobbies.
This is important — and a common mistake. Indeed, you’ll note that I’ve implicitly made the mistake above in conjuring up the nerd of recent popular imagination: physically inept, optically encumbered, prone to obscure (obtuse?) obsessions. But that’s only the familiar stereotype, which as I’ve said is outdated to the point of farce. Compared to last century’s nerds, new era nerds are far less haphazard and far more calculating. If they appear shabby, they’re studiously shabby. If they appear nerdy, you can bet it’s because they’re trying to appear nerdy. Having been de-stigmatized, they’ve come round to the notion that, regardless of your station, in this life everybody needs a uniform.
Anyway the point is that any reasonable definition of a nerd has to start from the premise that the onus is on the subject, not the object.
For instance I can no more say Carl loves science fiction novels; ipso facto Carl is a nerd than I can say Carl loves boiled cabbage; ipso facto Carl is a serial killer. In fact, even if Carl owns the largest collection of science fiction literature east of the Mississippi, I can’t definitively say whether he is a nerd. Indeed all I’ve learned about Carl is metadata. I haven’t learned anything about Carl as a human person, and though some circumstantial evidence suggests he might be a nerd, the jury’s still out.
So what would justify a guilty verdict?
Well, for starters, if Carl loved science fiction and was a fucking asshole about it. Surely a telltale feature of the nerd is that — without exception — he is a fucking asshole. For instance, and again counter to the stereotype, the nerd isn’t necessarily or exclusively some helpless sadsack who gets stuffed into trashcans and can’t speak up for himself. On the contrary, if he does get stuffed in a trashcan, you can bet your ass he will make a show of it. He’ll insist that, well, actually, he loves trashcans. There’s nothing better than hanging out inside a trashcan! Sturdy walls, fresh air ventilation, an economical use of space — hell, if he can affix some wheels to this sucker, he might even move in! If he’s in an especially audacious mood he might go so far as to thank his tormentors, all the while thinking that he’s being clever and ironic and subversive — when of course he is only being a fucking asshole.
But to what end? Why at the slightest provocation, real or imagined (though often the latter), does the nerd feel the need to puff himself up like some exotic blowfish?
Simple. He is trying to cut a figure. He is trying — as a bone-in, farm-to-table try-hard — to play the hero. Indeed no one is more liable to practice hero worship than a nerd. Of course that fact partly explains why nerds tend to like science fiction, fantasy, video games, et al. — and all the more so if the narrative is formulaic. It also partly explains the compulsion to cults — figurative or literal, joining or founding — because a hero is only a hero if others say so. (As for the others, the nerd worshipers, I’ll have to save my comments on their kind for another day.)
I should also note that, while continuing to play the hero, the nerd is nearly always trying to say he is down and out when in reality he is up and over. He is Pilate crying, poor pitiful me, I didn’t want to hang him up there: I’m just a single, solitary, imperially-empowered governor trying to do his best, trying to bear an unbearable burden: if you’d just pause and think about it, you’d see that it’s me who’s suffering, me who’s a scapegoat, me who’s pinned between a rock and a hard place.
Well, shit. Need I mention the irony? If we take the Faustian schemes seriously, it would appear that nowadays the nerd intends to be a martyr who — for the first time in history — doesn’t experience martyrdom.
Now, as I mentioned, this is an incomplete definition. Much to our collective chagrin, the uniquely insidious features of nerd-dom continue to multiply and evolve.
But evolve from what? Again we run into the problem of origins: where do the bastards come from? Certainly they have their own (probably bunk) personal narratives, but I’m talking about big picture taxonomy: how “The Nerd” emerged and metastasized as a bonafide character of cultural consequence. Because here’s where the strictly postwar figure doesn’t hold water — nihilo ex nihilo, right? Shit, far more likely that the nerd is not a recent phenomenon at all. That he’s existed in various forms and guises throughout history, coming and going as suits him, and that this latest (albeit surprising) transformation is only another instance of a certain type of figure — or better yet, another certain type of disposition, attitude, or habit of being.
You see, what I’m trying to do is draw a line from, for instance, that gimp, Hephaestus, to the nerd of today. Because despite his claims to exceptionalism, the nerd has ancestors, too, and many of them, like Hephaestus, are unflattering. And while he may regret it, even the nerd is bound by bone and fastened with flesh, made of fallible matter, and so is not as fascinating as he thinks he is. (More often than not, he’ll claim he’s “only human” after he’s been tied to some catastrophe or outright crime.) But for as long as he continues his masquerade, as long he continues to insist on being a nerd, he is only fascinating in the way a children’s museum’s replica caveman is fascinating — that is, as an unintentionally ironic commentary on what it means to be lifeless.
(. . . The caveman — could the line reach back that far? A Stone Age Ur-Nerd? I see him now. Puttering around his dull and dingy cave basement — surely in France — contributing precisely nothing to society, only bloviating about his own magnificence, how he is the most innovative and influential caveman who ever lived, a pioneer destined to lead his benighted cohorts into the light of a new age of progress and prosperity. Meanwhile, curious about the source of all this racket, two men from a nearby farming settlement approach the cave entrance. They pause, continue to listen. Finally the first says, “What’s this guy’s deal?” The second shrugs, sees some primitive hammer abandoned among the bones and rubble. He pauses, then: “What the fuck’s a caveman?”)
Finally I want to throw out one more critical trait, perhaps the most important — certainty. Dogged and dogmatic certainty.
What a nerd lacks in possessing a palatable personality he more than makes up for in self-assurance. Nor are we talking about some kind of hard-won, multi-layered, nuanced confidence. Not a bit. His certainty is a straitjacket. His eccentricity is a posture, a crutch, or both. In reality he is among the most boring people on earth, one of his few true accomplishments. Indeed you’ll never hear someone call a nerd “well rounded.” The fucker might’ve developed the most advanced algorithm in history, but rest assured as a human being he’s as linear as a stick figure’s erection.
Consider this “SBF” character, whom I recently learned about. (Have you heard about him?) If SBF is a nerd it’s not because of his area of interest and/or ostensible expertise, nauseating as I happen to find it. It’s not because he looks like the ghost of a pilgrim who got lost foraging for mushrooms in the dead of winter. It’s not because I assume he sweats when it’s above 70 degrees, walks faster than he runs, and has the lung capacity of a coal miner on a hang glider.
No, if SBF is a nerd, it’s because he doesn’t read.1 What’s more, he doesn’t understand why any rational person would. In other words, he is so certain that he knows everything there is to know about the world and what he needs to do to it that he can’t imagine so much as skimming anything other than an instructional blog post: how to execute x function in order to produce y result.
Damnit if the imperious aren’t meticulously incurious! You gotta admire them!
Take Napoleon. Not someone you’d normally think of as a nerd — and here is checking every box. Hero posturing, victimization complex, pathological solipsism: total fucking asshole. Hell, you’d be forgiven for mistaking his resume with a DSM entry. But what’s the kicker? What’s the coup de grace? Forget Egypt, forget Waterloo, forget the fact that the son of a bitch was actually Italian. The nerdiest thing that bastard ever pulled was when he swiped the crown from the Pope’s outstretched hands and placed it on his own head. Self-coronation: only a nerd does that. Only a nerd is so certain of himself that he even thinks of doing that.
In short, a nerd is someone who cannot imagine being wrong. Who completely lacks what that invalid poet you like called negative capability. So when it comes to defining what a nerd is, and despite nerds’ infatuation with “smartness,” intelligence is besides the point. It’s never a question of intelligence. It’s never a question of anything, because there are no questions, there are no mysteries. There are problems, and there are solutions. It’s an issue of execution. And you can be damn sure that the nerd isn’t going to involve himself in execution. No, no. When it comes down to the dirty details, like another one of his comrades, Ol’ King Dick III, the nerd’ll have his lackeys do it for him.
Over and out,
Cass
Editor’s note: I have pointed out to Cass that the kickboxer-turned-men’s-rights-influencer Andrew Tate has also advocated against reading on similar grounds. As of this writing, Tate is being held in a Romanian prison without bail on suspicion of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized crime group. He was apprehended by authorities shortly after engaging in a Twitter dispute with Greta Thunberg. Some have speculated that a pizza box seen in Tate’s video response to Thunberg alerted local officials to his location, though police have denied the claim. On learning of the story and Tate’s ongoing legal challenges, Cass texted me: “Fucking nerd.”