This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium.
Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.
Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as already proven effective for everything from selling books, personal brand, career skill/virtue signalling, staying relevant.
Due to this everyone is talking more without restraint and not keeping in their own lane of earned expertise.
Totally. I feel the author, we just used to nerds, but now the space is occupied by social media and false narrative that revolves around founders. No ego hurt here of course - but it is hard to imagine Woz or Stallman to ask for a mass surveillance program or ads in AI or pushed AI search in internet search. I believe this article actually went to this realm - tech for tech, having fun…but all we get is maxxxx enshitification.
Yeah, for law I imagine these "nice" beginnings were 2000 years ago at best. If they even existed at all. But all these jobs where talking to other humans is paramount will be dominated by extroverted quacks by default. Same goes for the capital raising college dropout pseudo-tech-bros. They were never nice, they just weren't so engaged in public discourse before, when billion dollar net worths still meant you actually had revenue and not just a vague trendy idea.
Not that far. Lawyers had a great deal of influence in creation of all modern nation-states, human rights, international law and maintenance of the core social contract in the modern society.
Similarly lawyers/bankers were the ones who built in trust in capital, contracts, businesses and protection of investor rights. Delaware c corp is not an outcome of bad guys.
I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior. They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group.
“What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing in any sense at all, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates – both “technology entrepreneurs”.
People have made "nerdiness" a premium because other nerds view it as passion. The rationale is that if you craft something out of passion, it will somehow be better than. I think it also comes down to the fact that many tech nerds view engineering more as a art than cold engineering, and they view themselves as artists and artisans.
There's also this age-old belief that if you do something out of passion, you're willing to pull more hours, and do whatever it takes to reach your goals.
I also believe that nerds, whatever thing they are obsessed with, make their nerdiness a personality defending trait. Their nerdiness is their personality. And if others aren't as willing to commit, they're simply frauds or wannabes.
Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
In tech, however, it is too often assumed that you must be consumed by tech. Otherwise you're not really that passionate about it.
Nerd-dom has also somehow merged with the world of fantasy and fandom. These are subcultures obsessed with hero journeys, morality tales, escapism, and cartoonish black-and-white ethical systems. I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.
> I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.
Maybe this is just a human trait in general? Seems every person from any subculture fall victim to "fame and wealth" basically turning them into an evil and greedy person, maybe 1/1000 manages to still stay human in such transition. Or is there any subcultures in particular where most people seem to actually be able to handle "fame and wealth" without the problems that you've observed people from other subcultures?
This is so true. The obsession with framing things in black and white permeates everything, including unfortunately work in tech. This has always had me keep my distance from “fellow” nerds, despite ostensibly being one.
There are Black Mirror episodes for people in all sorts of careers who find themselves with too much power, poorly handled; the show's narratives depend on the fact that the technology is the axe but not the executioner.
It's hard to claim that the initial generation of Free Software developers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't virtue-minded people. The issue isn't spending one's entire life in front of a computer, it's being outcompeted by people who do the same but with mercenery aims.
I think nerd -> believes in science.
Science -> requires honesty, curiousity, humility, persistence (i.e. admit you are wrong, accept you losses).
Generally I'm not sure you'd be considered a nerd if you weren't too honest for your own good. Not that this covers all types of virtuous behavior - there do exist nasty scientists. (And there is some level of fraud/dishonesty in academia, too).
I wonder how personality forming it is, being a curious kid growing up hacking on computers. If you don't get what you expected, it's almost never the computer's fault - it means you did it wrong, and need to reconsider. There's no excuses and no dumping responsibility on anyone or anything else.
I have the feeling it probably teaches you something, or at least it should. Something not too unlike epistemic humility, maybe.
If you grew up with extreme trauma and craved control over something, you could also find yourself compelled to pursue science. I’ve witnessed a lot of people with this background thrive in tech. Which can be healing but can also enable bad actors (from societies perspective) to gain control.
Bill Gates is a great counterexample to the article's premise. Always clearly a nerd, yet led a company that no one loved and many people hated for its strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish.
Post-CEO, he had completely refurbished his image via philanthropy, only to throw it away with the Epstein stuff.
You listen to the Radio Channel you picked. I understand the complaint, though it's like a complain that nerds featured in Cosmopolitan aren't as nerdy as they were.
Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core.
Want to see "the lost nerds"? Here, on HN there are many very high-profile nerds. People who built the internet and the most popular tools exchanging insight and jokes over posts. Many founders who aren't loud, who aren't about PR.
So - nothing happened. Author looks for them in wrong places.
Very much similar thoughts. The examples provided are not nerds, except a few. It is just tech is a lucrative path to make money and it attracts a variety of “interesting” personalities, specifically those that can captivate and persuade masses to invest in them. By all means tech is just a means to an end to such founders. A nerd is someone who is interested in tech for the sake of it, because it is beautiful, not because it will aid drones in killing targets more efficiently and not because it will land a great contract.
> Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me.
It's pretty hard to describe Elon Musk's ventures in space exploration and human-like AI as anything other than prototypical, "core" nerd culture. Especially when it turns out that the very word 'Elon' shows up in obscure magazine excerpts from the 1950s as the leader of a science-fictional Martian government, and apparently this somehow plays a part into why Musk gets named Elon.
I'd say, you are looking at this from the angle of a nerd. For you Elon or Sam are not (primarily) nerds because you know nerdier nerds (what you called very high-profile nerds).
But for the general public Elon and Sam are very much the definition of a nerd. They have never heard of any of the high-profile nerds you know.
And that's exactly the argument of the article IMO, that the famous nerds went from well-meaning eccentrics to evil greedy overlords.
Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning.
Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history.
Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms.
This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion".
But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more important than conformity.
Reddit was the place to be for nerds and spread like a pandemic.
However, karma points turned this on its head since you have a mechanism to enforce conformity in non-conformity that was the basis for "nerd communities".
Nerds hobbies that would be the gateway are gated behind such platforms that enforce a social credit system in a totalitarian way.
The would have been nerds are thus mostly integrated into the redittor archetype that is so fundamentally opposed to the nerd archetype; a contorted version of itself trying to fit through distorting mirrors.
I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept?
> I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept?
Why should I spend my energy to discuss with someone who doesn't want to listen, and not rather build something I like or learn something I wonder about, or converse with the people I care about?
Life is too short to talk with walls disguised as humans. Talking with a wall, the ocean or oneself is more productive than doing unproductive self-torture.
>>Why should I spend my energy to discuss with someone who doesn't want to listen
One of the reasons why I stopped going on Facebook, even though a lot of communities I care about have moved there. I wrote a long comment about someone's suggestion about car maintenance, only to get a reply "I didn't come here to discuss this, if you don't like what I said then go somewhere else". Like, WHY EVEN BE IN A PUBLIC FORUM THEN. But I feel like that's just me and my early internet sensibilities. Nowadays people want to post something, get some likes, and not be challenged. Even a mild disagreement is met with immediate aggression a lot of the time, because people are just not used to talking on the internet at all(imho).
I feel that too many people are confusing arguments they agree with with logical arguments. Most of people, when they claim that something is rational or logical, actually mean that it's a position that they agree with.
I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
> I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
Strong disagree. Having lived those times, it really really was different, and there are a bunch of reasons for it.
1. First, back then (90s, early 00s) there was very little financial incentive to participate in discussions. BBSs, IRC, forums etc. were mostly non commercial. People joined without any expectation of making a profit, just for "the fun" of it. And for something new, interesting, evolving. Way less perversion of topics for monetary gain.
2. People back then made a clear separation between being online and offline. We literally had the term IRL coined. So a lot of discussions were "in abstract" and much less prone to be taken literally or seriously. A lot less identity / ideology stuff as well. Having a clear separation made it easier to not confuse your real world self with your online persona. Having an idea debated wasn't about you / your identity.
3. Politics was much less divisive back then. There was political debate, but again a bit more "abstract" and theoretical. I'd say the moment when this changed was 2008s US presidential campaign. Until then the Internet was seen as "not important". It has changed a lot since then.
4. Entry barrier. This might sound elitist or disparaging, but it really was a thing back then. The people online were mostly tech inclined, or curious enough to learn. It was much more educational, and (linked to point 1 above) everyone wanted to learn the cool new thing, without any monetary incentives. Much more sharing of pure knowledge, helping out and so on. It of course changed over time, but the early days were really something beautiful. I have very fond memories.
It was different in several ways, one was far fewer people enforcing norms or doing marketing in those forums, far less moderation and tone policing, and far more tolerance (even rejoicing) into getting into deep technical argumentation and "well, actually" debate.
Not to mention for a good while, FOSS was a big nerd holy grail (informing many discussions and forums, away from corporate solutions shilling and careerism), and a big goal of every tech nerd (unlike after about 2010).
Also nerd culture was by nerds, for nerds, not dilluted and "championed" by every mainstream hipster.
Remember when even Comicon was something mostly nerds, the kind "normie" people used to point and laugh at, went, and sci-fi/superhero movies excited the same small demographic niche?
This feels like maybe even the majority of the problem.
In general corporate social media favors memetic content and disfavors "inconvenient" content. Inconvenient meaning things that cause non-trivial numbers of users to mash the thumbs down or "report content" button. The premise of that is supposed to be that people are reporting spam and trolling etc.
The problem naturally being that people will also use the platform's "make it go away" mechanism to penalize anyone who tells them things they don't want to hear. And then the sort of people who insist on telling the technical truth even when it's inconsistent with the political lie tend to get shadow banned into irrelevance, which leaves what in everyone's feed instead?
I remember Usenet in the 90s being 50% interesting conversations mostly about niche topics and 50% randomly devolving into flame wars in larger communities.
Even "Eternal September" as a concept was something from around 1993/1994 right?
Same for the 2000s era online-bulletin-board. I often go to thegearpage.net and am appalled at the amount of shilling, dismissals and disrespect, but then I remember that in the 2000s the main guitar forum was Harmony Central, which was mostly kids calling other kids moms names.
EDIT: But coldtea makes a good point about some (IMO) more recent changes: tone-policing, excessive marketing. There's IMO also a different attitude towards curiosity today.
One thing I do miss from the early internet was less anonymity being the norm on Usenet/forums/etc. Discussions tend to stay more civil when both parties know there's a "real" person on the other end.
Otherwise, my memory of early 90s internet supports exactly your conclusion. There may have been better opportunities for small discussions, but big ones devolved the same way they do today.
I am remembering the same Internet. I got into lots of flame wars on comp.software-eng and before that on Compuserve and various FIDO boards.
It was never a very placid or friendly place. There was more tolerance for vigorous debate than there is now. The debate didn’t change many minds, I suppose.
> Most of people, when they claim that something is rational or logical, actually mean that it's a position that they agree with
I'd claim a relevant axis is argument as deduction (common in mathematics) vs argument as rhetoric/persuasion (common in politics).
It's not that the former type is necessarily rational. "All birds have wings, planes have wings, therefore planes are birds" is the former type of argument and fallacious, whereas "are you really comparing birds to planes?" is the latter type.
I feel the former can allow deeper exploration of some topic, but sometimes involves things like playing devil's advocate for stances outside of social norms - and requires others to engage at that level rather than taking the rhetoric path of shaming you for even considering it.
I think there is a difference when you can assume that the other person probably isn't a complete idiot. Compare Reddit's technical subs and HN and there is a vast difference in general civility. Non-nerds look at this site's CSS and their mental parsing breaks entirely, so that filtering still exists.
> Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning.
I don't remember this internet. Ever since I got my first modem, I remember the kinds of vitriolic posts that led to the publication of IEN 137 (On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace).
Whether it was endianness or RISC vs CISC or ZModem vs Kermit or Microsoft or Kirk vs Picard or Kimagure Orange Road, flame wars erupted everywhere. The smaller the stakes, the bigger the war.
I have found those who I would consider nerds to be far from logical or rational. They are some of the most fervent people about the things they care about, which can make them very illogical and irrational.
True, but that's not really a bad thing. It feels like the passion has been watered down, with less and less space for being yourself, with the need to self-censor for the sake of advertisers', with hopes of monetization of every interaction ruining everything.
Most of them had quarter/midlife crises and got partners/children/mortgages etc. and no longer care. The next generation know nothing else other than the current internet.
Ah yes, the internet where we had polite conversations on the merits of Vim vs Emacs, and women wanting to participate were warmly welcomed with a friendly "tits or gtfo"...
Shitposting, trolling, and harassment has been around since the very beginning of the public internet. If you didn't see it, it has to have been because you were (unconsciously or not) looking away.
The "ideologues and political commissars" didn't ruin your "friendly technical discussions", they merely pointed out how toxic a lot of those communities had always truly been.
If anything, if you really want to focus on the technical details, you should welcome their attempts to make it a friendlier and more professional space!
> Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up
I think you're seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. In some FLOSS circles the discussions were dominated by ideologues, to the point some discussions seemed like Monty Python skits. I mean, your choice of window manager, let alone Linux distro, was something you'd be judged by.
Some of nerds earned a lot, a lot of money, some of the other nerds they employed also earned a lot of money, and they all decided to screw up the world we all live in. Fuck the nerds! The jocks back in the '70s and the '80s were right, these nerds should have been bullied to hell and back, maybe that way we wouldn't have had today's Musks and Thiels, shitheads that are bringing this world over the edge.
A society that creates bullies and thinks they are right is the same one that big surprise, doesn't give a shit about you. But you're stupid enough to be a cheerleader to bullies out of envy so you deserve whatever you get from it.
> Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
I mean not using the Dutch translation of the n-word as part of your username and thinking you're clever for hiding it in a plausibly deniable way would certainly help with me believing you're arguing in good faith.
It seems to me the role of venture capital has changed and is somewhat responsible for this. The obsession with MVPs followed by hyper-growth and then moat-building has warped our relationship with technology. It's driven by a desire for VC funds to "return the fund" with each investment, and increasingly, by a SoftBank approach which requires inundating the market leader with capital that forces out all competition. Technology has been financialized.
>Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.)
If you're a visionary, by definition you see what others do not. Which means that there's a lag between being right and being seen as right. That lag looks like arrogance.
Of course, the trick is how do you tell the difference from the outside? I used to think "be right about everything all the time" would be enough, but I've seen it fail constantly for myself and for others.
Now I think it boils down to "some people will decide to love you and some will decide to hate you, based mostly on tribal affiliation[0] -- how much will liking him cost me socially? -- and how often you've been proven right actually has very little bearing on the situation."
[0] Also apparently your spinal posture matters a lot more than what you're saying. Crucially both are social-emotional, not logic-based.
Anyway, the answer to the question: 'Nerds', like any cultural grouping, are a product of their environment. The United States of today has developed much higher inequality, debt burdens, rent demands, maintenance cost demands and trade deficits than the same environment had in the past, largely due to the Fed policies of the 21st century, with some help in worsening things by all administrations.
I miss Jobs. He was the one all these tech founders wanted to be. And Job, for all his faults always really cared about the product he made.
I feel like every founder is now some kind of grifter. Bouncing from new idea to new idea on how to make more money even if the whole thing is just smoke and mirrors.
Interesting that he mentions Elon as being the archetypal "phase 3" nerd, since he was fairly high profile in all 3 phases and his reputation during the "phase 1" and "phase 2" timelines pretty much matched the author's description of the archetypal founder from those periods too.
I guess in a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say is that I wonder how much of this is a change in PR rather than a change in the people themselves.
come on man, what are you doing. must admit that i haven't followed this guy closely, but i thought with him being a part of Signal he would know better.
that actually makes me even more suspicious about Signal...
This is looking back at Apple through some very rose tinted lenses. Apple had a big role in moving the tech industry to become "grift-adjacent". There were at least 2 contiguous decades when Apple products were unusable, poorly designed, self-important, overpriced pieces of junk. Some would argue they still are.
People bought Apple because they were subscribed to Steve Job's personality cult. Heck, they might've even bought a flamethrower if he tried to sell one.
I don't like Apple products really but 2 contiguous decades is a bit much? The first mac was good, os x when it first came out was phenomenal, and there aren't 2 decades in between there.
OS X was never good and still isn't. I need to install like 7 third-party usability tools to make myself productive on a Mac.
Also, Steve Job's "font obsession" is overrated. The fonts on Windows have always been much better and rendered way better as well (even to this day). Helvetica Neue is widely considered one of the worst fonts and Apple used it for a whole 3 decades.
The premise of this post is that tech founders used to be admirable nerds, but have since changed. I wonder if it isn't the other way around. We're the nerds. Us. Here. We used to admire tech founders because sometimes they were nerds too, but then we changed. We grew up. We got wise to it.
The author wants founders to stop projecting “an obsession with wealth and power” and instead “focus carefully on projecting an obsession with core nerd values”. And maybe it doesn't occur to them (as a fellow nerd) that _wealth and power were the whole point_. The author enjoyed being blind to the greed of it all, and now being unable to unsee they are begging the founders “please please just pretend a bit better”.
Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple.
Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clue existed, has become almost a mainstream ambition. Some of the people that never identified themselves as nerds, will wander from industry to industry, which one that pays the most.
But back to the nerds: Some nerds obviously changed. If you throw generational wealth at most people, they will change. Few people are so disinterested in money that it is simply not a thing they care about.
What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing.
I just want enough money to retire and write interesting open source software, but doing that in my 20s made me poor, so since then I am trying to speed run retirement so I can go back to it.
Sadly, while I find AI effective, I also find it's removed the craft and personal reward I get from open source. So I will instead grow potatoes.
I'm coming full circle on the AI thing, it's almost entirely useless at creating a crafted result, so counterintuitively it places a greater premium on craft just at a time the industry as a whole are running in the opposite direction. There are some pieces of software I've thought of building now that I would not have considered a worthwhile pursuit a few years ago, solely due to this idea that a crafted result may have an increasingly inherent value in its own right
Even if machines can be made to produce compact, well thought out and beautiful, the interaction pattern almost inevitably ensures the "developer" produces something that is neither compact, well thought out or beautiful
> What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing.
> The money and power corrupted them.
Actually accomplishing things in the world that constitute building a sci-fi dream world requires significant amounts of money and power, and any person or institution at all that could in principle have the capacity to do this would also have the capacity to become corrupt, at least by someone's judgement.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with many of the sci-fi things that tech billionaire nerds have made their money by bringing into existence. I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.
It would be fair to reflect for a moment, perhaps you are not impacted by the negative aspects of the corruption making this a much easier stance to take.
100%. What matters most is always the intention of why a person does something. If it is based on external factors like money or power, and not intrinsic motivation like being fascinated or interested in new technology, this will happen.
Who can forget the MeetUp crazed scene with mostly early 20 something tech startup cosplaying 'founders', mostly lounging and tweeting from their macbook seated on a brown leather couch in their exposed brick 'offices' with a pool table in the back?
To expand on this: certain people have learned how to capitalize on “nerdiness” - i.e. how to virtue signal in a way so that investors and general public treat you like an engineering genius.
Elizabeth Holmes persuaded for years that she was a groundbreaking innovator, even with non-existent product. Other manipulators are smart enough to have a real product that protects them via benefit of a doubt. Society is still not immune to people like that.
“Tech Otakus Save the World!” Yes thats the official corporate motto and philosophy of the huge mobile game company miHoYo (creators of Genshin Impact). I live next to their HQ and had to look twice when seeing guys wearing tshirts with that slogan
Their founding story is also very interesting, highly recommend reading it! Did you know that one of the founders (Liu Wei) personally did customer support in the early years? https://mihoyo.fandom.com/wiki/MiHoYo
Hear me out: back in the day founding a company wasn't an identity, it was just an action, a verb. Stuff started going sideways when people started thinking of themselves as "founders". Suddenly the product wasn't the top priority anymore, instead it was second to defending their identity as a "founder". Seemingly stupid decisions followed, but seen from the perspective of a CEO who wants nothing more than to be a founder, they start to make sense.
We see something similar in politics, I think. Note that it doesn't apply to everyone, but it's interesting to compare people who are engaged in a social justice struggle, Vs people who identify as "activist". The latter will be very prone to doing things that are counter-productive to their started cause, because they don't really care about any cause, they're just defending their identity as activist.
I reckon the same idea holds elsewhere as well.
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure how common that last thing is in the US, but where I live, it definitely happens a fair bit. But even here it does not apply to everyone, it's just a very loud minority)
Second disclaimer: I use the word identity in a very specific way in this comment. It is not to be confused with other uses of the same word, for example in the phrase "gender identity". That is a completely different kind of identity and is completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what I'm trying to express in this comment
> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
Of course one can't have any identity whatsoever, afterall ethics is a type of identity and no one should in their right frame of mind contest basic things like human rights.
Once tech became glamorous, it started attracting people with narcissistic traits - much like Hollywood did. Expect to see more antisocial behavior as a result.
At least there's still plenty of places for real nerds to be nerds. HN, hanging around in IRC, Eternal September, among other places. Finding myself more and more drifting away from "mainstream" internet stuff, and as a result I'm finding a lot more engaging and thought-provoking things and am overall happier as a result.
I think the issue boils down to money, lots of it.
When I worked in the Bay Area, I noticed the nerd-culture was still more or less predominant in South Bay. The arrogant, shallow types were always there (as witnessed by their fancy cars--"should we take the Jag or the Merc today?"), but I could still tolerate it. San Francisco was a different story. I started a new job at a startup once and remember thinking "I'm surrounded by Ivy Leaguers who look like models--this place is not for me". I think the crazy amounts of money just brought in everyone looking to make a buck, and the nerds no longer were the majority.
But then you have the company missions. It seems like most of the companies in the Bay Area are all about advertising or compiling info on individuals and selling it. It's mostly B2B and not so much "cool products".
We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.
> We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.
I think it'll keep having waves, but I agree that a bit of cooling off could be a good thing.
The technologies are genuinely cool, interesting stuff, it's a super exciting time to be building stuff. But the business side of things seems quite vapid and desperate for many companies.
I wonder if more tangible industries like manufacturing have had similar peaks? Was there a time where the Wood Industry was going crazy, making everything out of wood, stuff that didn't need to exist?
It's simple, marketing dominates everything. With attention being very expensive, appearance is what matters.
It doesn't matter if you write fantastic library, nobody is gonna use it because they won't know about it, the one with a gif of the terminal (ffs) will win that has a good page describing what it does (and being the most popular one can even become better than your library because of the following but that's not the point here).
It's everywhere, products, hiring, services. We have no network of trust (sigh), we need to trust some heuristics based on a shallow information. If somebody focuses on the shallow he wins, because nobody can ever dive into everything.
Nerds became an industry field - that's what it happened. Back in the 90'ies we were doing IT things because it geniunely interested us, not that it would "net us high salaries". I'd do this even if you didn't pay a single centa because it triggered my dopamine receptors.
Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking.
Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.
This seems to be a critique of "Can Tech Legends Find the Liar? (Mafia
Episode 1)" on Youtube but critiqued from a "nerd subculture" angle, which is a thing in the USA, I guess? As a European, this took me a moment to figure it out.
There definitely is/was a nerd subculture in Europe, it's just that those who represent it were always only vaguely aware of the existence of Jobs and Wozniak.
Linus Torvalds on the other hand - that is a household name.
Jobs is not the one to think of when relating to nerds, Wozniak is. Jobs is the one who comes in and takes most of the money as well as the limelight when some nerds have done something interesting but then act like the dog who has caught the car. European nerd culture is more Fabrice Bellard and Linus Torvalds, less Steve Jobs.
Great post, and largly captures my own experience.
I can only speak for my institution, but eagerness to lock down ip and keep ownership of everything tightly controlled and out of the hands of said nerds/inventors doesnt really incentivise me to do beyond what I'm paid for.
The one time I tried, I was hit by the full force of my institutions commercialization goons and lawyers, to a degree that it killed my drive to do anything novel for them. Despite being promised partial ownership, in the end, after federal grant funds were secured and product developed, they took everything using "loopholes" that go against the law and the institutions own rules, but to fight it I need resources I don't have, which the institution no doubt knows. All that despite me initially being fully aligned with my institution, and happy to only take a very minor share of actual profit, in-line with what i'd get anway, only stipulation was veto rights in application (as the tech has very real applications in offline autonomous drones, which I consider an X-treat).
If my own institution is a hostile actor, and willing to fuck me over nothing, simply because they can, why do anything?
So, current state of Copyright law favours institutions over the very individuals it was meant to protect, and there are no options to protect one self if anything interesting is developed without serious capital and legal might. So, fuck it, im not doing anything except hobby related, GPL licensed stuff. If I can do anything to make it hard to commercialize, I will. If it can be kept in house, it is kept there.
Capital interest has become a rather ugly and hostile egregore with interest aligned against that of humanity. All those building cool and novel shit I know hold similar opinions, so it is no surprise to me. I was strongly advised against working with the institution by older folks i look up to, people who have built really powerful tools of their own. Their warnings ended up being proven valid with deafening clarifty. I've always found the statement that capitalism breeds innovation to be a joke, and while it works in the chinese model, the "western" model is sick and suffers a sort of cultural psychosis that makes it rather unttractive to engage with.
What does any of that have to do with "nerds"? You are complaining about business and management people in tech. None of them is a "nerd" and never was. Or otherwise said, what does the "nerd" even means to you? I thought that nerd means a person who is a person with lower social skills, obsessed over technical details so much they are unable to discuss anything else.
People whose whole career always was to manipulate and impress people, to talk well, to convince investors to give them money, to lead companies just are not nerds. Regardless of whether they are narcistic assholes or not.
Not gone forever though. There were nerds at the start of the industrial revolution, they were there when electrification happened, when radio became feasible, rinse and repeat to the most recent iteration of "computer nerds".
A new thing will come along which the finance types won't recognise for its potential, nerdy types will start experimenting with it, make progress, gain some small successes but being nerds they're not really interested in creating large markets for their things. People with less eye for the detail but more for the market potential will pick it up, sometimes together with the nerds (Wozniak/Jobs), sometimes without them and create larger markets. If it really takes off like computers did there will be a wild-west period in which those who understand the technology - i.e. nerds - get to step out of the shadows for a bit until the technology is commoditised and the market is consolidated. Eventually there is less need to know the tech which has become 'boring' anyway so the nerds disappear into the shadows again to tinker with whatever scratches their itch.
The market is like society in that it needs both conservatives who recognise a good thing and do their best to keep it alive as well as progressives who are less interested in keeping things going than they are in changing things in search of some Platonic ideal. While the good thing is good the progressives are doing their things in their workshops without being seen much. When the good thing starts going bad the conservatives are mostly ignored because nearly everyone is looking at the progressives for a solution which is not "a faster horse" or "a lighter buggy whip".
Silicon Valley has always had a bit of a libertarian bent, but I really think a lot of people have spent a significant and successful effort at pushing it towards Objectivism.
Objectivism is a stupid, angry idea borne out of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. It exists in a vacuum. Eddie Lampert named his yacht the Fountainhead which is amusing since, while I don’t question he has talent, he got millions in seed money to start his own fund from Richard Rainwater. Elon Musk is not some scrappy kid; the vast majority of founders are from comfortable and increasingly upper middle class families where they can tolerate the risk of failing with a reasonable safety margin and then delude themselves that they bootstrapped everything themselves.
Curtis Yarvin does not exist in a vacuum. These are awful people and the fact that we’ve allowed them to be taken seriously and control the conversation is…obscene.
Nothing happened to the Nerds. They are all showing their true colours.
They may have shared a love for technology, what they also shared is a deep immaturity.
The immaturity of a person not wanting to acknowledge and cary any responsibility for other people, for the consequences of their work, for any kind of accountability. Just play with their toys without any concern for the external world.
'I'm just here playing with tech and code'. Sure! but that stuff you're building is being weaponised by other (the venn diagram unfortunately overlaps) tech bro's so men can film women with their glasses in public like the little sick creeps they are. Or steal all their data. You can't pretend you are not responsible and complicit.
They want "what's theirs" and anything in their way - including people - have to comply or be destroyed.
I think that the title should be more, what the fuck happened to tech executives as compared to nerds.
because previously it was mostly the nerds who were at the forefront of the innovation (they still are), but they now have a playbook where they see all the other people (grifters) who are entering tech for money and the playbook of the attention economy and doing that because its a profitable strategy.
It's basically the fact that there are multiple companies where a grift culture is promoted within tech (ironically I am on YC website and YC had a company which you might've heard called delve :D)
As people realized that the technology has value and finance people realizing it to pour head over fist money into it.
With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.
So I think this is what has happened to nerd culture. It simply became profitable and then commoditized and used by people who could then grift.
BUT people are respecting the nerd culture (well the non grift version of it) a lot more
For some reason, I wish to recommend Weird Al video song about White & Nerdy[0] and how people within the comments are saying that Nerd culture has its own unique identity and many if not all appreciating the nerd culture
So TLDR: people like the previous nerd culture and it still exists, especially on HN but on platforms like twitter and others, as discussed within the article itself, with the attention economy. The grift culture is getting more attention than the nerd culture and because of the overlap in tech, the nerd culture is getting some bad rep but overall people appreciate the actual nerd culture (IMO) as interesting and unique (whereas previously, people wouldn't have appreciated it so much)
You don't hear about the actual nerd culture because it isn't algorithmic hungry but it still exists on platforms like Hackernews IMO!
> With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.
Also, you can find a lot of nerds on Mastodon, PeerTube, and other non-mainstream, federated social media platforms that were not captured by the finance people (and cannot be thanks to their distributed design).
Exactly but because I suppose that the author is conflating tech founders on twitter (refuse to call it X) and other standard platforms which all share the same playbook and conflating it to all
Although I would wish for less overlap with tech-bros but it is sadly what it is and there are ways to mitigate it by being on more nerd friendly websites like hackernews.
Also, one more observation I wish to share is that not all nerds are tech product creators and neither should they be. Some just create for the sake of creation and IMO there is long way to go after creation as well and the nerd culture doesn't have standardized playbook as compared to grift culture.
Basically the nerd culture is immeasurable and is driven by it and the grift culture is measurable and is also driven by it. It's just that tech has more overlap but if trillions of dollars were thrown in physics instead of AI (quantum computing?), I would consider physics to have a lot of tech-bro culture as well.
What happened? Tech companies became trillion dollar companies and tech founders became billionaires. As a trillion dollar company, you are a military contractor and are deeply invested in and intertwined with the American imperial project.
Tim Apple [sic], Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos all went to the inauguration to bend the knee. They all paid 7 figures plus to be there.
Being a billionaire is fundamentally incompatible with being a countercultural nerd. If anything, this was Silicon Valley returning to its roots. The first companies were founded before WWI (eg Federal Telegraph Co) but the true origins of the name "Silicon Valley" came from semiconductors and the likes of HP and Lockheed Martin as a Cold War defense offshoot.
Nerds were bought out and turned into money and thus wife having chads. Now, the basement dwellers of today are actually tech illiterate and skillless with no charming qualities at all. Blame capitalism.
This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium.
Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.
Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as already proven effective for everything from selling books, personal brand, career skill/virtue signalling, staying relevant.
Due to this everyone is talking more without restraint and not keeping in their own lane of earned expertise.
None of those categories were ever “nice”, wtf.
Totally. I feel the author, we just used to nerds, but now the space is occupied by social media and false narrative that revolves around founders. No ego hurt here of course - but it is hard to imagine Woz or Stallman to ask for a mass surveillance program or ads in AI or pushed AI search in internet search. I believe this article actually went to this realm - tech for tech, having fun…but all we get is maxxxx enshitification.
Yeah, for law I imagine these "nice" beginnings were 2000 years ago at best. If they even existed at all. But all these jobs where talking to other humans is paramount will be dominated by extroverted quacks by default. Same goes for the capital raising college dropout pseudo-tech-bros. They were never nice, they just weren't so engaged in public discourse before, when billion dollar net worths still meant you actually had revenue and not just a vague trendy idea.
Not that far. Lawyers had a great deal of influence in creation of all modern nation-states, human rights, international law and maintenance of the core social contract in the modern society.
Similarly lawyers/bankers were the ones who built in trust in capital, contracts, businesses and protection of investor rights. Delaware c corp is not an outcome of bad guys.
> guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status
aka techbros
I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior. They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group.
“What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing in any sense at all, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates – both “technology entrepreneurs”.
People have made "nerdiness" a premium because other nerds view it as passion. The rationale is that if you craft something out of passion, it will somehow be better than. I think it also comes down to the fact that many tech nerds view engineering more as a art than cold engineering, and they view themselves as artists and artisans.
There's also this age-old belief that if you do something out of passion, you're willing to pull more hours, and do whatever it takes to reach your goals.
I also believe that nerds, whatever thing they are obsessed with, make their nerdiness a personality defending trait. Their nerdiness is their personality. And if others aren't as willing to commit, they're simply frauds or wannabes.
Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
In tech, however, it is too often assumed that you must be consumed by tech. Otherwise you're not really that passionate about it.
Nerd-dom has also somehow merged with the world of fantasy and fandom. These are subcultures obsessed with hero journeys, morality tales, escapism, and cartoonish black-and-white ethical systems. I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.
> I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.
Maybe this is just a human trait in general? Seems every person from any subculture fall victim to "fame and wealth" basically turning them into an evil and greedy person, maybe 1/1000 manages to still stay human in such transition. Or is there any subcultures in particular where most people seem to actually be able to handle "fame and wealth" without the problems that you've observed people from other subcultures?
This is so true. The obsession with framing things in black and white permeates everything, including unfortunately work in tech. This has always had me keep my distance from “fellow” nerds, despite ostensibly being one.
[delayed]
Virtuous people become doctors, social workers or kindergarten teachers.
People who spend their entire life in front of computers should not be the ones with the keys to society yet here we are.
There are Black Mirror episodes for people in all sorts of careers who find themselves with too much power, poorly handled; the show's narratives depend on the fact that the technology is the axe but not the executioner.
It's hard to claim that the initial generation of Free Software developers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't virtue-minded people. The issue isn't spending one's entire life in front of a computer, it's being outcompeted by people who do the same but with mercenery aims.
Exactly. Incentives, unfortunately, are sufficient to weed out virtue and honor.
I don't believe doctors and kindergarten teacher needed to be virtuous at all
Not necessarily no - but sustainably doing good work while shoulder-to-shoulder with human frailty and confounding diversity does raise the chances.
> Virtuous people become doctors
And by the time medical school and residency are done with them, many if not most will be sociopaths to rival all the top CEOs.
Talk about peak arrogance. Who the hell are you to think you get to be the one to decide who should have the key to society?
I think nerd -> believes in science. Science -> requires honesty, curiousity, humility, persistence (i.e. admit you are wrong, accept you losses).
Generally I'm not sure you'd be considered a nerd if you weren't too honest for your own good. Not that this covers all types of virtuous behavior - there do exist nasty scientists. (And there is some level of fraud/dishonesty in academia, too).
I wonder how personality forming it is, being a curious kid growing up hacking on computers. If you don't get what you expected, it's almost never the computer's fault - it means you did it wrong, and need to reconsider. There's no excuses and no dumping responsibility on anyone or anything else.
I have the feeling it probably teaches you something, or at least it should. Something not too unlike epistemic humility, maybe.
If you grew up with extreme trauma and craved control over something, you could also find yourself compelled to pursue science. I’ve witnessed a lot of people with this background thrive in tech. Which can be healing but can also enable bad actors (from societies perspective) to gain control.
Bill Gates is a great counterexample to the article's premise. Always clearly a nerd, yet led a company that no one loved and many people hated for its strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish.
Post-CEO, he had completely refurbished his image via philanthropy, only to throw it away with the Epstein stuff.
"I identify as a nerd and think I'm virtuous, therefore other people who identify as nerds should be virtuous in order to validate me"
You listen to the Radio Channel you picked. I understand the complaint, though it's like a complain that nerds featured in Cosmopolitan aren't as nerdy as they were.
Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core.
Want to see "the lost nerds"? Here, on HN there are many very high-profile nerds. People who built the internet and the most popular tools exchanging insight and jokes over posts. Many founders who aren't loud, who aren't about PR.
So - nothing happened. Author looks for them in wrong places.
Very much similar thoughts. The examples provided are not nerds, except a few. It is just tech is a lucrative path to make money and it attracts a variety of “interesting” personalities, specifically those that can captivate and persuade masses to invest in them. By all means tech is just a means to an end to such founders. A nerd is someone who is interested in tech for the sake of it, because it is beautiful, not because it will aid drones in killing targets more efficiently and not because it will land a great contract.
> Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me.
It's pretty hard to describe Elon Musk's ventures in space exploration and human-like AI as anything other than prototypical, "core" nerd culture. Especially when it turns out that the very word 'Elon' shows up in obscure magazine excerpts from the 1950s as the leader of a science-fictional Martian government, and apparently this somehow plays a part into why Musk gets named Elon.
Does anyone consider Musk a nerd? He's more into marketing than GOOGL.
Really? I heard @TeslaFan1337 saying that Tesla has a $0 marketing spend and it’s all about the engineering bravado Elon uniquely possesses.
I'd say, you are looking at this from the angle of a nerd. For you Elon or Sam are not (primarily) nerds because you know nerdier nerds (what you called very high-profile nerds). But for the general public Elon and Sam are very much the definition of a nerd. They have never heard of any of the high-profile nerds you know.
And that's exactly the argument of the article IMO, that the famous nerds went from well-meaning eccentrics to evil greedy overlords.
Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning.
Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history.
Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
Isn't it the reddit model that absorbed them?
Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms. This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion". But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more important than conformity.
Reddit was the place to be for nerds and spread like a pandemic. However, karma points turned this on its head since you have a mechanism to enforce conformity in non-conformity that was the basis for "nerd communities". Nerds hobbies that would be the gateway are gated behind such platforms that enforce a social credit system in a totalitarian way. The would have been nerds are thus mostly integrated into the redittor archetype that is so fundamentally opposed to the nerd archetype; a contorted version of itself trying to fit through distorting mirrors.
I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept?
> I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept?
Why should I spend my energy to discuss with someone who doesn't want to listen, and not rather build something I like or learn something I wonder about, or converse with the people I care about?
Life is too short to talk with walls disguised as humans. Talking with a wall, the ocean or oneself is more productive than doing unproductive self-torture.
>>Why should I spend my energy to discuss with someone who doesn't want to listen
One of the reasons why I stopped going on Facebook, even though a lot of communities I care about have moved there. I wrote a long comment about someone's suggestion about car maintenance, only to get a reply "I didn't come here to discuss this, if you don't like what I said then go somewhere else". Like, WHY EVEN BE IN A PUBLIC FORUM THEN. But I feel like that's just me and my early internet sensibilities. Nowadays people want to post something, get some likes, and not be challenged. Even a mild disagreement is met with immediate aggression a lot of the time, because people are just not used to talking on the internet at all(imho).
I feel that too many people are confusing arguments they agree with with logical arguments. Most of people, when they claim that something is rational or logical, actually mean that it's a position that they agree with.
I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
> I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
Strong disagree. Having lived those times, it really really was different, and there are a bunch of reasons for it.
1. First, back then (90s, early 00s) there was very little financial incentive to participate in discussions. BBSs, IRC, forums etc. were mostly non commercial. People joined without any expectation of making a profit, just for "the fun" of it. And for something new, interesting, evolving. Way less perversion of topics for monetary gain.
2. People back then made a clear separation between being online and offline. We literally had the term IRL coined. So a lot of discussions were "in abstract" and much less prone to be taken literally or seriously. A lot less identity / ideology stuff as well. Having a clear separation made it easier to not confuse your real world self with your online persona. Having an idea debated wasn't about you / your identity.
3. Politics was much less divisive back then. There was political debate, but again a bit more "abstract" and theoretical. I'd say the moment when this changed was 2008s US presidential campaign. Until then the Internet was seen as "not important". It has changed a lot since then.
4. Entry barrier. This might sound elitist or disparaging, but it really was a thing back then. The people online were mostly tech inclined, or curious enough to learn. It was much more educational, and (linked to point 1 above) everyone wanted to learn the cool new thing, without any monetary incentives. Much more sharing of pure knowledge, helping out and so on. It of course changed over time, but the early days were really something beautiful. I have very fond memories.
It was different in several ways, one was far fewer people enforcing norms or doing marketing in those forums, far less moderation and tone policing, and far more tolerance (even rejoicing) into getting into deep technical argumentation and "well, actually" debate.
Not to mention for a good while, FOSS was a big nerd holy grail (informing many discussions and forums, away from corporate solutions shilling and careerism), and a big goal of every tech nerd (unlike after about 2010).
Also nerd culture was by nerds, for nerds, not dilluted and "championed" by every mainstream hipster.
Remember when even Comicon was something mostly nerds, the kind "normie" people used to point and laugh at, went, and sci-fi/superhero movies excited the same small demographic niche?
> far less moderation and tone policing
This feels like maybe even the majority of the problem.
In general corporate social media favors memetic content and disfavors "inconvenient" content. Inconvenient meaning things that cause non-trivial numbers of users to mash the thumbs down or "report content" button. The premise of that is supposed to be that people are reporting spam and trolling etc.
The problem naturally being that people will also use the platform's "make it go away" mechanism to penalize anyone who tells them things they don't want to hear. And then the sort of people who insist on telling the technical truth even when it's inconsistent with the political lie tend to get shadow banned into irrelevance, which leaves what in everyone's feed instead?
It wasn't different.
Indeed.
I remember Usenet in the 90s being 50% interesting conversations mostly about niche topics and 50% randomly devolving into flame wars in larger communities.
Even "Eternal September" as a concept was something from around 1993/1994 right?
Same for the 2000s era online-bulletin-board. I often go to thegearpage.net and am appalled at the amount of shilling, dismissals and disrespect, but then I remember that in the 2000s the main guitar forum was Harmony Central, which was mostly kids calling other kids moms names.
EDIT: But coldtea makes a good point about some (IMO) more recent changes: tone-policing, excessive marketing. There's IMO also a different attitude towards curiosity today.
Discussion quality is, in my experience, mostly a function of group size. Online discussions scale better than in person, but there's a limit.
One thing I do miss from the early internet was less anonymity being the norm on Usenet/forums/etc. Discussions tend to stay more civil when both parties know there's a "real" person on the other end.
Otherwise, my memory of early 90s internet supports exactly your conclusion. There may have been better opportunities for small discussions, but big ones devolved the same way they do today.
I am remembering the same Internet. I got into lots of flame wars on comp.software-eng and before that on Compuserve and various FIDO boards.
It was never a very placid or friendly place. There was more tolerance for vigorous debate than there is now. The debate didn’t change many minds, I suppose.
> Most of people, when they claim that something is rational or logical, actually mean that it's a position that they agree with
I'd claim a relevant axis is argument as deduction (common in mathematics) vs argument as rhetoric/persuasion (common in politics).
It's not that the former type is necessarily rational. "All birds have wings, planes have wings, therefore planes are birds" is the former type of argument and fallacious, whereas "are you really comparing birds to planes?" is the latter type.
I feel the former can allow deeper exploration of some topic, but sometimes involves things like playing devil's advocate for stances outside of social norms - and requires others to engage at that level rather than taking the rhetoric path of shaming you for even considering it.
FWIW nerds pre-date the internet. We used to get together in user groups, like at public libraries, and talk tech, logic and reasoning.
I think there is a difference when you can assume that the other person probably isn't a complete idiot. Compare Reddit's technical subs and HN and there is a vast difference in general civility. Non-nerds look at this site's CSS and their mental parsing breaks entirely, so that filtering still exists.
> Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning.
I don't remember this internet. Ever since I got my first modem, I remember the kinds of vitriolic posts that led to the publication of IEN 137 (On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace).
Whether it was endianness or RISC vs CISC or ZModem vs Kermit or Microsoft or Kirk vs Picard or Kimagure Orange Road, flame wars erupted everywhere. The smaller the stakes, the bigger the war.
I have found those who I would consider nerds to be far from logical or rational. They are some of the most fervent people about the things they care about, which can make them very illogical and irrational.
True, but that's not really a bad thing. It feels like the passion has been watered down, with less and less space for being yourself, with the need to self-censor for the sake of advertisers', with hopes of monetization of every interaction ruining everything.
I’d say everyone got on the internet, and it turned into the equivalent of your local bar for discussions
Then LLM bots got on and it turned into an email spam folder.
Too many words to say: Nerds don't voice their opinions on the Internet because Eternal September IRL.
Why didn't they build a nerd oasis somewhere?
And HN isn't it...
Most of them had quarter/midlife crises and got partners/children/mortgages etc. and no longer care. The next generation know nothing else other than the current internet.
I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but interesting username. This would fly in my language, haha!
I'm sure it has a different meaning, though
Because it means you let those with unsavory behaviour define your behaviour
Ah yes, the internet where we had polite conversations on the merits of Vim vs Emacs, and women wanting to participate were warmly welcomed with a friendly "tits or gtfo"...
Shitposting, trolling, and harassment has been around since the very beginning of the public internet. If you didn't see it, it has to have been because you were (unconsciously or not) looking away.
The "ideologues and political commissars" didn't ruin your "friendly technical discussions", they merely pointed out how toxic a lot of those communities had always truly been.
If anything, if you really want to focus on the technical details, you should welcome their attempts to make it a friendlier and more professional space!
> Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up
I think you're seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. In some FLOSS circles the discussions were dominated by ideologues, to the point some discussions seemed like Monty Python skits. I mean, your choice of window manager, let alone Linux distro, was something you'd be judged by.
At least those were on technical merits. However imaginary or arbitrary those merits were... Which I think was more healthy place.
Some of nerds earned a lot, a lot of money, some of the other nerds they employed also earned a lot of money, and they all decided to screw up the world we all live in. Fuck the nerds! The jocks back in the '70s and the '80s were right, these nerds should have been bullied to hell and back, maybe that way we wouldn't have had today's Musks and Thiels, shitheads that are bringing this world over the edge.
A society that creates bullies and thinks they are right is the same one that big surprise, doesn't give a shit about you. But you're stupid enough to be a cheerleader to bullies out of envy so you deserve whatever you get from it.
> Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
I mean not using the Dutch translation of the n-word as part of your username and thinking you're clever for hiding it in a plausibly deniable way would certainly help with me believing you're arguing in good faith.
It seems to me the role of venture capital has changed and is somewhat responsible for this. The obsession with MVPs followed by hyper-growth and then moat-building has warped our relationship with technology. It's driven by a desire for VC funds to "return the fund" with each investment, and increasingly, by a SoftBank approach which requires inundating the market leader with capital that forces out all competition. Technology has been financialized.
Invoking LOTR analogy, Woz would be Tom Bombadil of the industry. Musk, Altman & Thiel, on the other hand, quite the opposite.
>Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.)
If you're a visionary, by definition you see what others do not. Which means that there's a lag between being right and being seen as right. That lag looks like arrogance.
Of course, the trick is how do you tell the difference from the outside? I used to think "be right about everything all the time" would be enough, but I've seen it fail constantly for myself and for others.
Now I think it boils down to "some people will decide to love you and some will decide to hate you, based mostly on tribal affiliation[0] -- how much will liking him cost me socially? -- and how often you've been proven right actually has very little bearing on the situation."
[0] Also apparently your spinal posture matters a lot more than what you're saying. Crucially both are social-emotional, not logic-based.
Same blog from a different URL 2 days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361
Anyway, the answer to the question: 'Nerds', like any cultural grouping, are a product of their environment. The United States of today has developed much higher inequality, debt burdens, rent demands, maintenance cost demands and trade deficits than the same environment had in the past, largely due to the Fed policies of the 21st century, with some help in worsening things by all administrations.
I miss Jobs. He was the one all these tech founders wanted to be. And Job, for all his faults always really cared about the product he made.
I feel like every founder is now some kind of grifter. Bouncing from new idea to new idea on how to make more money even if the whole thing is just smoke and mirrors.
What "charming personality", lol? Nerds always had a higher than average probability of being total assholes. That has always been my experience.
Interesting that he mentions Elon as being the archetypal "phase 3" nerd, since he was fairly high profile in all 3 phases and his reputation during the "phase 1" and "phase 2" timelines pretty much matched the author's description of the archetypal founder from those periods too.
I guess in a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say is that I wonder how much of this is a change in PR rather than a change in the people themselves.
> Moxie Marlinspike
come on man, what are you doing. must admit that i haven't followed this guy closely, but i thought with him being a part of Signal he would know better.
that actually makes me even more suspicious about Signal...
Once people get rich and gain power, they do everything to grow and maintain their wealth and power. It's a tale as old as time.
They let in non-nerds. That's what happened.
This is looking back at Apple through some very rose tinted lenses. Apple had a big role in moving the tech industry to become "grift-adjacent". There were at least 2 contiguous decades when Apple products were unusable, poorly designed, self-important, overpriced pieces of junk. Some would argue they still are.
People bought Apple because they were subscribed to Steve Job's personality cult. Heck, they might've even bought a flamethrower if he tried to sell one.
I don't like Apple products really but 2 contiguous decades is a bit much? The first mac was good, os x when it first came out was phenomenal, and there aren't 2 decades in between there.
OS X was never good and still isn't. I need to install like 7 third-party usability tools to make myself productive on a Mac.
Also, Steve Job's "font obsession" is overrated. The fonts on Windows have always been much better and rendered way better as well (even to this day). Helvetica Neue is widely considered one of the worst fonts and Apple used it for a whole 3 decades.
The premise of this post is that tech founders used to be admirable nerds, but have since changed. I wonder if it isn't the other way around. We're the nerds. Us. Here. We used to admire tech founders because sometimes they were nerds too, but then we changed. We grew up. We got wise to it.
The author wants founders to stop projecting “an obsession with wealth and power” and instead “focus carefully on projecting an obsession with core nerd values”. And maybe it doesn't occur to them (as a fellow nerd) that _wealth and power were the whole point_. The author enjoyed being blind to the greed of it all, and now being unable to unsee they are begging the founders “please please just pretend a bit better”.
Nah. I think you got it wrong
Money happened.
Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple.
Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clue existed, has become almost a mainstream ambition. Some of the people that never identified themselves as nerds, will wander from industry to industry, which one that pays the most.
But back to the nerds: Some nerds obviously changed. If you throw generational wealth at most people, they will change. Few people are so disinterested in money that it is simply not a thing they care about.
What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing.
The money and power corrupted them.
I just want enough money to retire and write interesting open source software, but doing that in my 20s made me poor, so since then I am trying to speed run retirement so I can go back to it.
Sadly, while I find AI effective, I also find it's removed the craft and personal reward I get from open source. So I will instead grow potatoes.
I'm coming full circle on the AI thing, it's almost entirely useless at creating a crafted result, so counterintuitively it places a greater premium on craft just at a time the industry as a whole are running in the opposite direction. There are some pieces of software I've thought of building now that I would not have considered a worthwhile pursuit a few years ago, solely due to this idea that a crafted result may have an increasingly inherent value in its own right
Even if machines can be made to produce compact, well thought out and beautiful, the interaction pattern almost inevitably ensures the "developer" produces something that is neither compact, well thought out or beautiful
> What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing.
> The money and power corrupted them.
Actually accomplishing things in the world that constitute building a sci-fi dream world requires significant amounts of money and power, and any person or institution at all that could in principle have the capacity to do this would also have the capacity to become corrupt, at least by someone's judgement.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with many of the sci-fi things that tech billionaire nerds have made their money by bringing into existence. I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.
It would be fair to reflect for a moment, perhaps you are not impacted by the negative aspects of the corruption making this a much easier stance to take.
100%. What matters most is always the intention of why a person does something. If it is based on external factors like money or power, and not intrinsic motivation like being fascinated or interested in new technology, this will happen.
Haven't quant jobs always been lucrative since the category had been invented?
Who can forget the MeetUp crazed scene with mostly early 20 something tech startup cosplaying 'founders', mostly lounging and tweeting from their macbook seated on a brown leather couch in their exposed brick 'offices' with a pool table in the back?
I worked for a company which emulated this style.
In fairness the exposed brick was already there when they rented the place.
Discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361
Nothing, I'm here since the 70s and haven't moved.
So you are in a totally different place now :-)
:-)
What happened to Nerds was HN started calling Musk an Engineer...and rockets he was developing...
To expand on this: certain people have learned how to capitalize on “nerdiness” - i.e. how to virtue signal in a way so that investors and general public treat you like an engineering genius.
Elizabeth Holmes persuaded for years that she was a groundbreaking innovator, even with non-existent product. Other manipulators are smart enough to have a real product that protects them via benefit of a doubt. Society is still not immune to people like that.
“Tech Otakus Save the World!” Yes thats the official corporate motto and philosophy of the huge mobile game company miHoYo (creators of Genshin Impact). I live next to their HQ and had to look twice when seeing guys wearing tshirts with that slogan
Their founding story is also very interesting, highly recommend reading it! Did you know that one of the founders (Liu Wei) personally did customer support in the early years? https://mihoyo.fandom.com/wiki/MiHoYo
Maybe identity is the root of all evil?
Hear me out: back in the day founding a company wasn't an identity, it was just an action, a verb. Stuff started going sideways when people started thinking of themselves as "founders". Suddenly the product wasn't the top priority anymore, instead it was second to defending their identity as a "founder". Seemingly stupid decisions followed, but seen from the perspective of a CEO who wants nothing more than to be a founder, they start to make sense.
We see something similar in politics, I think. Note that it doesn't apply to everyone, but it's interesting to compare people who are engaged in a social justice struggle, Vs people who identify as "activist". The latter will be very prone to doing things that are counter-productive to their started cause, because they don't really care about any cause, they're just defending their identity as activist.
I reckon the same idea holds elsewhere as well.
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure how common that last thing is in the US, but where I live, it definitely happens a fair bit. But even here it does not apply to everyone, it's just a very loud minority)
Second disclaimer: I use the word identity in a very specific way in this comment. It is not to be confused with other uses of the same word, for example in the phrase "gender identity". That is a completely different kind of identity and is completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what I'm trying to express in this comment
I don't agree with Paul Graham on everything but he nailed this argument:
https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
Of course one can't have any identity whatsoever, afterall ethics is a type of identity and no one should in their right frame of mind contest basic things like human rights.
Words matter. They’re not only founders. They’re founders who generate money and create jobs.
I agree with your take, most of it boils down to ego, I believe.
Not at all, the issue is that money and glamour attracted techbros.
Once tech became glamorous, it started attracting people with narcissistic traits - much like Hollywood did. Expect to see more antisocial behavior as a result.
We need a new unglamorous tech, massaging floating point quants by hand in a hex editor.
At least there's still plenty of places for real nerds to be nerds. HN, hanging around in IRC, Eternal September, among other places. Finding myself more and more drifting away from "mainstream" internet stuff, and as a result I'm finding a lot more engaging and thought-provoking things and am overall happier as a result.
I think the issue boils down to money, lots of it.
When I worked in the Bay Area, I noticed the nerd-culture was still more or less predominant in South Bay. The arrogant, shallow types were always there (as witnessed by their fancy cars--"should we take the Jag or the Merc today?"), but I could still tolerate it. San Francisco was a different story. I started a new job at a startup once and remember thinking "I'm surrounded by Ivy Leaguers who look like models--this place is not for me". I think the crazy amounts of money just brought in everyone looking to make a buck, and the nerds no longer were the majority.
But then you have the company missions. It seems like most of the companies in the Bay Area are all about advertising or compiling info on individuals and selling it. It's mostly B2B and not so much "cool products".
We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.
> We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.
I think it'll keep having waves, but I agree that a bit of cooling off could be a good thing.
The technologies are genuinely cool, interesting stuff, it's a super exciting time to be building stuff. But the business side of things seems quite vapid and desperate for many companies.
I wonder if more tangible industries like manufacturing have had similar peaks? Was there a time where the Wood Industry was going crazy, making everything out of wood, stuff that didn't need to exist?
It's simple, marketing dominates everything. With attention being very expensive, appearance is what matters.
It doesn't matter if you write fantastic library, nobody is gonna use it because they won't know about it, the one with a gif of the terminal (ffs) will win that has a good page describing what it does (and being the most popular one can even become better than your library because of the following but that's not the point here).
It's everywhere, products, hiring, services. We have no network of trust (sigh), we need to trust some heuristics based on a shallow information. If somebody focuses on the shallow he wins, because nobody can ever dive into everything.
> A short history of how tech leaders went from charming nerd to terrifying overlord
did this guy ever hear of Larry Ellison? He also claims Gates wasn't a terrifying overlord
LinkedIn, Twitter and tons of money
Nerds became an industry field - that's what it happened. Back in the 90'ies we were doing IT things because it geniunely interested us, not that it would "net us high salaries". I'd do this even if you didn't pay a single centa because it triggered my dopamine receptors.
Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking.
Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.
This seems to be a critique of "Can Tech Legends Find the Liar? (Mafia Episode 1)" on Youtube but critiqued from a "nerd subculture" angle, which is a thing in the USA, I guess? As a European, this took me a moment to figure it out.
There definitely is/was a nerd subculture in Europe, it's just that those who represent it were always only vaguely aware of the existence of Jobs and Wozniak.
Linus Torvalds on the other hand - that is a household name.
Jobs is not the one to think of when relating to nerds, Wozniak is. Jobs is the one who comes in and takes most of the money as well as the limelight when some nerds have done something interesting but then act like the dog who has caught the car. European nerd culture is more Fabrice Bellard and Linus Torvalds, less Steve Jobs.
A post complaining about the spectacle of tech CEOs media image, rather than people's real lives.
Great post, and largly captures my own experience.
I can only speak for my institution, but eagerness to lock down ip and keep ownership of everything tightly controlled and out of the hands of said nerds/inventors doesnt really incentivise me to do beyond what I'm paid for.
The one time I tried, I was hit by the full force of my institutions commercialization goons and lawyers, to a degree that it killed my drive to do anything novel for them. Despite being promised partial ownership, in the end, after federal grant funds were secured and product developed, they took everything using "loopholes" that go against the law and the institutions own rules, but to fight it I need resources I don't have, which the institution no doubt knows. All that despite me initially being fully aligned with my institution, and happy to only take a very minor share of actual profit, in-line with what i'd get anway, only stipulation was veto rights in application (as the tech has very real applications in offline autonomous drones, which I consider an X-treat).
If my own institution is a hostile actor, and willing to fuck me over nothing, simply because they can, why do anything?
So, current state of Copyright law favours institutions over the very individuals it was meant to protect, and there are no options to protect one self if anything interesting is developed without serious capital and legal might. So, fuck it, im not doing anything except hobby related, GPL licensed stuff. If I can do anything to make it hard to commercialize, I will. If it can be kept in house, it is kept there.
Capital interest has become a rather ugly and hostile egregore with interest aligned against that of humanity. All those building cool and novel shit I know hold similar opinions, so it is no surprise to me. I was strongly advised against working with the institution by older folks i look up to, people who have built really powerful tools of their own. Their warnings ended up being proven valid with deafening clarifty. I've always found the statement that capitalism breeds innovation to be a joke, and while it works in the chinese model, the "western" model is sick and suffers a sort of cultural psychosis that makes it rather unttractive to engage with.
What does any of that have to do with "nerds"? You are complaining about business and management people in tech. None of them is a "nerd" and never was. Or otherwise said, what does the "nerd" even means to you? I thought that nerd means a person who is a person with lower social skills, obsessed over technical details so much they are unable to discuss anything else.
People whose whole career always was to manipulate and impress people, to talk well, to convince investors to give them money, to lead companies just are not nerds. Regardless of whether they are narcistic assholes or not.
The nerds era is gone. Welcome to the era of super-villains and self-entitled smartasses.
Not gone forever though. There were nerds at the start of the industrial revolution, they were there when electrification happened, when radio became feasible, rinse and repeat to the most recent iteration of "computer nerds".
A new thing will come along which the finance types won't recognise for its potential, nerdy types will start experimenting with it, make progress, gain some small successes but being nerds they're not really interested in creating large markets for their things. People with less eye for the detail but more for the market potential will pick it up, sometimes together with the nerds (Wozniak/Jobs), sometimes without them and create larger markets. If it really takes off like computers did there will be a wild-west period in which those who understand the technology - i.e. nerds - get to step out of the shadows for a bit until the technology is commoditised and the market is consolidated. Eventually there is less need to know the tech which has become 'boring' anyway so the nerds disappear into the shadows again to tinker with whatever scratches their itch.
The market is like society in that it needs both conservatives who recognise a good thing and do their best to keep it alive as well as progressives who are less interested in keeping things going than they are in changing things in search of some Platonic ideal. While the good thing is good the progressives are doing their things in their workshops without being seen much. When the good thing starts going bad the conservatives are mostly ignored because nearly everyone is looking at the progressives for a solution which is not "a faster horse" or "a lighter buggy whip".
That's incredibly disappointing from Moxie
Silicon Valley has always had a bit of a libertarian bent, but I really think a lot of people have spent a significant and successful effort at pushing it towards Objectivism.
Objectivism is a stupid, angry idea borne out of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. It exists in a vacuum. Eddie Lampert named his yacht the Fountainhead which is amusing since, while I don’t question he has talent, he got millions in seed money to start his own fund from Richard Rainwater. Elon Musk is not some scrappy kid; the vast majority of founders are from comfortable and increasingly upper middle class families where they can tolerate the risk of failing with a reasonable safety margin and then delude themselves that they bootstrapped everything themselves.
Curtis Yarvin does not exist in a vacuum. These are awful people and the fact that we’ve allowed them to be taken seriously and control the conversation is…obscene.
Almost like no group of humans is above the usual human vices.
Its a lot harder for poor or powerless people to have child sex orgies on yachts though.
Nothing happened to the Nerds. They are all showing their true colours.
They may have shared a love for technology, what they also shared is a deep immaturity.
The immaturity of a person not wanting to acknowledge and cary any responsibility for other people, for the consequences of their work, for any kind of accountability. Just play with their toys without any concern for the external world.
'I'm just here playing with tech and code'. Sure! but that stuff you're building is being weaponised by other (the venn diagram unfortunately overlaps) tech bro's so men can film women with their glasses in public like the little sick creeps they are. Or steal all their data. You can't pretend you are not responsible and complicit.
They want "what's theirs" and anything in their way - including people - have to comply or be destroyed.
Elon Musk happened. Zuckerberg happened (yes, before the current bro transformation, we had The Social Network showing us).
Elon probably most of all, he was the one who took fringe edge lord behavior and elevated to something to be admired.
I think that the title should be more, what the fuck happened to tech executives as compared to nerds.
because previously it was mostly the nerds who were at the forefront of the innovation (they still are), but they now have a playbook where they see all the other people (grifters) who are entering tech for money and the playbook of the attention economy and doing that because its a profitable strategy.
It's basically the fact that there are multiple companies where a grift culture is promoted within tech (ironically I am on YC website and YC had a company which you might've heard called delve :D)
As people realized that the technology has value and finance people realizing it to pour head over fist money into it.
With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.
So I think this is what has happened to nerd culture. It simply became profitable and then commoditized and used by people who could then grift.
BUT people are respecting the nerd culture (well the non grift version of it) a lot more
For some reason, I wish to recommend Weird Al video song about White & Nerdy[0] and how people within the comments are saying that Nerd culture has its own unique identity and many if not all appreciating the nerd culture
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw&list=RDN9qYF9DZP...
So TLDR: people like the previous nerd culture and it still exists, especially on HN but on platforms like twitter and others, as discussed within the article itself, with the attention economy. The grift culture is getting more attention than the nerd culture and because of the overlap in tech, the nerd culture is getting some bad rep but overall people appreciate the actual nerd culture (IMO) as interesting and unique (whereas previously, people wouldn't have appreciated it so much)
You don't hear about the actual nerd culture because it isn't algorithmic hungry but it still exists on platforms like Hackernews IMO!
> With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.
Reminds me of Pink Floyd’s "Have a Cigar":
> And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
> We call it Riding the Gravy Train
And then Britney Spears albums out sold The Dark Side of the Moon
Also, you can find a lot of nerds on Mastodon, PeerTube, and other non-mainstream, federated social media platforms that were not captured by the finance people (and cannot be thanks to their distributed design).
Exactly but because I suppose that the author is conflating tech founders on twitter (refuse to call it X) and other standard platforms which all share the same playbook and conflating it to all
Although I would wish for less overlap with tech-bros but it is sadly what it is and there are ways to mitigate it by being on more nerd friendly websites like hackernews.
Also, one more observation I wish to share is that not all nerds are tech product creators and neither should they be. Some just create for the sake of creation and IMO there is long way to go after creation as well and the nerd culture doesn't have standardized playbook as compared to grift culture.
Basically the nerd culture is immeasurable and is driven by it and the grift culture is measurable and is also driven by it. It's just that tech has more overlap but if trillions of dollars were thrown in physics instead of AI (quantum computing?), I would consider physics to have a lot of tech-bro culture as well.
What happened? Tech companies became trillion dollar companies and tech founders became billionaires. As a trillion dollar company, you are a military contractor and are deeply invested in and intertwined with the American imperial project.
Tim Apple [sic], Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos all went to the inauguration to bend the knee. They all paid 7 figures plus to be there.
Being a billionaire is fundamentally incompatible with being a countercultural nerd. If anything, this was Silicon Valley returning to its roots. The first companies were founded before WWI (eg Federal Telegraph Co) but the true origins of the name "Silicon Valley" came from semiconductors and the likes of HP and Lockheed Martin as a Cold War defense offshoot.
Nerds were bought out and turned into money and thus wife having chads. Now, the basement dwellers of today are actually tech illiterate and skillless with no charming qualities at all. Blame capitalism.