Revenge of the Poseur Nerds

Last night, I was telling some friends about Peter Thiel and one of his intellectual gurus, Curtis Yarvin. I ended up pointing them at a great piece published in The Baffler in 2014.

Then, out of curiosity, I went looking on the Internet to see if anyone had made any commentary on that piece. What I found was plenty of unabashed nerd-bashing. But I'd argue that billionaires seeking wealth, power, and status are not nerds at all. They are not of my tribe.

A nerd tends to not give a fuck about things like wealth, status, and power. They pursue intellectual interests for the pure joy of it. Many obsess over those interests. Nerds do things like write free software, such as GNU and the Linux kernel. Some are obsessed with math, or physics, or breaking into computer systems just for the hell of it. Some of them are into lock-picking. Games of the mind are popular. Nerds with a linguistic bent might take interest in constructed languages like Esperanto, or Lojban, or the much newer Toki Pona. Some are even interested in languages from mythical worlds, like Tolkien's Quenya or the language of the Klingons from Star Trek. They're often into science fiction, fantasy, or both. Maybe they play D&D in multi-hour stretches. With all of these interests, they don't have the time, the drive, or the ambition to build a capitalist totalitarian hellscape.

People like Thiel and Musk are just poseurs. They're probably into science fiction or fantasy, though if they watch Star Trek, they probably fantasize about being fascistic Cardassians or hypercapitalistic Ferengi. I'm convinced that Thiel jerks it to the fantasy of being Sauron whenever he reads Lord of the Rings. The dude is obsessed with Tolkien, as seen in his choice to name companies Palantir, Mithril, and Rivendell. Some of them might even be obsessed with programming. Bill Gates was at one time. But the difference between Bill Gates and nerds is that Gates was primarily driven to make money and used it as a means to that end. My point in all this? Don't let these billionaire poseurs coopt our culture.

An Aside about Lock Picking

I had an introductory lesson in lock picking a couple years ago, and I found it to be like a form of meditation. My body and mind were as one, and I sought oneness with the lock. I had a similar experience playing Jenga a few years ago.