Drift Reality

“You’re a nerd,” a friend told me in response to something I said the other day, which was probably quite nerdy.

“Oh yeah?” I responded.

“Yeah, but that’s okay, I like nerds,” she shot back.

A flurry of memories gushed into my conscious, of similar statements made along the way. There was the friend in San Diego who had once said she liked guys who wore thick black-rimmed glasses, the friend in London who was constantly on the look-out for guys reading Hume in coffee shops, and there was my own fixation with girls who wear glasses and wear their hair in pig-tails.

At any rate, it was at that moment that I realized something had shifted in the universal fabric of reality over the past several years, which had ultimately resulted in the ascension of the nerd on the social scale.

I decided it was time to look back on the nerd archetype in an effort to better understand how we got here.

According to Wikipedia, the word ‘nerd’ first appeared in a book by Dr. Seuss published in 1950, used in reference to an imaginary animal. From there, the term made its way into the mainstream, gradually evolving into what Merriam-Webster now defines as an ‘unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person: especially: one slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits.’

In 1984, a story of nerd persecution and redemption launched the nerd into the public view. Revenge of the Nerds proved to be one of the hits of the mid-80s and spawned a variety of cultural forms that celebrated the nerd.

A young and virile Robert Carradine

The mid-80s represented the nerd as misunderstood and alienated from mainstream society, cast as the classic underdog who must use ingenuity to ultimately succeed and gain mainstream acceptance. Nerds were also closely associated with young Asian males – seen in characters like Toshiro from Revenge and Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles, which I personally find a bit distasteful because even in comparison to white nerds, these asian males seemed nerdy but I digress.

So what was happening to compel this celebration of the nerd?

The mid-80s was also a time during which the personal computer was beginning to diffuse throughout the United States and a new class of computer-savvy nerds was beginning to emerge in society. The personal computer empowered the nerd to a great extent – a situation personnified in the 1985 hit Weird Science, in which two nerds use a computer to ‘manufacture’ a smoking hot Kelly LeBrock.

The 90s hit and the nerd experienced a temporary setback when their monopoly on the alienated lovable reject was temporarily marginalized by a new breed of grunge and alternative rockers (with the exception of Weezer, whose ‘Blue Album’ was most certainly a nerd-oriented product).

Then the Internet arrived in the mid-90s and along with it came a resurgence of the nerd.

With figures like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs gaining prominence, along with a host of Silicon Valley nerdlings, the world had to once again account for the increasing power and influence of the nerd. The dot-com crash was a temporary set back and n 2007, I believe we are seeing yet another revitalization of the power of the nerd.

The growing influence of Internet sites like Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, and Facebook, pioneered by a new generation of nerds signals a new age in which the nerd, once reviled and looked down upon, has now become something to be revered. Well, maybe that is taking it a little too far. Then again, I suppose I am a nerd.

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