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The obvious hypotheses are valid, but boring. Yes, men are worried about being cancelled. Yes, online alternatives (dating apps) disincentivize in-person courtship. Yes, if women have better outcomes than men, they don't need men. Yes, by forcing men to be same as women, men aren't doing the things men were supposed to anymore.
I want to go in another direction : 'Revenge of the Nerds '
Culture reflects the traits of economically ascendent groups. So far, the 21st century belongs to introverted tech-nerds. Therefore, the next generation has traits of introverted nerds.
Vivek is correct, about his youth at least. 90s Cincinnati was a place that valorized the Jock. Aspirational Americans looked to become a partner at McKinsey, BigLaw litigator or to own a Auto showroom. IE. to be a charismatic man in a suit.
But Vivek appears to have missed the last 30 years. Right after his youth came Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The nerd became cool. Over the late-90s/early-2000s, the nerd was an ascendent underdog. But, NY Finance clearly stood atop the American caste system. Then 2008 happened. The financial crisis destroyed finance's chokehold on the American psyche and nerds swooped in with the 1-2 punch of the Social network & Iron Man. It was done. Nerds won. The first generation that's grown up under nerd-supremacy is reaching high school, and families can now see the fallout.
Woke culture, dating apps, asexual movie leads can be traced back to tech & nerds running the show. Influencer-media allows basement dwellers to become role models overnight. Like it or not, that's nerd culture.
I don't dislike nerds. I like them and am one of them.
But I dislike 2 aspects of nerd culture.
This worst aspects of nerd culture aren't more or less degenerate than what came before. But Nerd culture (and as a result our culture in general) has failure modes that are a result of this unique tendency towards anxiety and repression.
Personally, I'll take a jockish and fertile culture over a nerdy and barren one any day.
I think this analysis is interesting but fundamentally off the mark. "Jocks" and "nerds" aren't real, except in a descriptive sense. They're polyphyletic groups. There are jock and nerd behaviors, by which we assign the labels, but no jock or nerd etiology. There are multiple causes that might cause a person to externally present as either, and no cause common to either party. It may or may not be correct to say that kids nowadays want to be more like nerds, but trying to attribute deep social changes to that is fundamentally futile. Even if it's true, these kids don't want to be more anxious, or more socially awkward, or pastier-- they just want the positive attributes associated with nerdity... intelligence, education, high-paying jobs. But they aren't copying the monomaniacal focus on studying that creates the "true" nerds and their social problems.
Now, I think you're onto something about the impact of 2008-- but you're missing the root cause. It wasn't the GFC, it was facebook, youtube, and the iphone. Modern kids don't idolize tech founders, they idolize influencers! (Streamers, youtubers, social media stars, etc.) Think about the dynamics of that. From their own perspective, an influencer is just a person-- they're constantly concerned with social approval, and constantly afraid of failing. But from the perspective of an impressionable media-consumer, every influencer is constantly succeeding, because failing or quitting just means means they're seamlessly replaced with another aspirational influencer selling the same vision of success. So the narrative they're fed is: all the most successful people in the world are hyper-vigilant about social consequences and also glued at all times to the drama-and-suffering machines we all have in our pockets.
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Thats because what Vivek is actually complaining about is the absence of sufficient credentialism (in his eyes, I imagine many Americans think there's already too much).
He wants some South Korean/Indian model where people are told what to grind and then rewarded for meeting the goal with the right certificate.
The actual computer nerd hero origin story is about breaking the path, one way or another. You're cooler for dropping out of Stanford or some such school that an immigrant child would kill to get a degree from to do something amazing.
The Social Network has a scene laying this out. Zuck doesn't need the class. He's that good. That's the dream. Not getting a nice shiny A.
As for Woke Culture being the fault of nerds...debatable. I recall when nerds were the irreverent types. If anything, that was the line of attack: nerds were low SMV types who were inordinately pleased with themselves and resentful at women for not agreeing.
I remember when feminists were hunting nerds for wearing the wrong shirt or having the wrong opinion.
I'll cop to the dishonesty with which nerds approach their own sexuality. But , even here, we're downstream of a generation's worth of negative messaging about what nerdy men actually like. The overly-online "Step on me mommy" stuff is viscerally disgusting but it is safe/"unproblematic" after constant objectification discourse around unapologetic nerd thirsting for their sex symbols. In the real world it doesn't matter as much. But people don't want to be continually whined at or browbeaten online.
Why wouldn't it just be that what happened to everything else happened to nerd spaces too, especially since a lot of successful nerds were within the academy or tech companies in liberal states and nerds can be quite secular and progressive?
There's a strand of woke culture which comes from women in tech -- "Geek Feminism" is probably the term to search for. Some of these women were various sorts of hangers-on (looking at you, Shanley Kane) but some were actual female nerds who despised male nerds for whatever reason (probably mostly the same reasons non-nerd women do). I believe a lot of earlier woke male nerds got woke trying to impress or appease that group.
Were they? There are some male nerds who are even despised by other male nerds, but it's almost a tautology that the "Star Trek posters in the workplace are Not Inclusive and Not Okay" sorts of woke blather were coming from non-nerds; actual female nerds were more likely to be Star Trek fanfic (or actual Star Trek novel, for that matter) writers. There are many male nerds who are basically perceived as romantically undesirable by most female nerds, as in the old "the odds are good but the goods are odd" joke in so many gender-lopsided environments, but there's a big difference between being unloved and being despised (although I'm sure that difference feels academic to the chronically unloved).
Consider the crime of Landing On a Comet While Wearing The Wrong Nerdy Shirt: there's a reason why it took a fashion writer out of her depth to call the guy out, despite both his boss and the creator of the shirt being women.
Yes, much of that was coming from non nerds. (in fact, you can name the person -- Dr. Sapna Cheryan -- who gave academic backing for that particular one). But there was some which was not; there are female nerds who are not particularly enamored with some of the trappings of nerd culture (male nerds too, but no one cares), and they were happy to use the weapons provided by the non-nerds.
It's not just "unloved", it is "despised". One reason given for this is that the women would be romantically approached by male nerds they found undesirable, and this was wholly unacceptable and makes male nerds despicable. However, as with most things in the area of male-female relations, that reason probably should be taken with a grain of salt.
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Everyone needs to go watch a Studio Ghibli movie right now. We should aspire to be well rounded people who aren’t specialized weirdos. People in other countries understand this. Why do Americans want to flatten their identities into one weird thing? Someone thinks they’re a nerd so now they’re absolved of the responsibility of being attractive or the expectation that they can hold a conversation. Someone else believes they’re a jock so now they don’t have to suffer the irritation of being corrected by pedantic relatives or be expected to work at a computer all day. It’s so exhausting and reductive. Why aren’t we supporting everyone to be a well rounded person who is as capable as anyone else at all the various parts of life we’re going to have to deal with? It’s really sad to see people waste away their potential in identities pushed onto them by family and schoolmates at an early age.
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