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Notes -
The new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy has been making the rounds. In lieu of reading it, here's an NPR interview.
At the core of this is a middle-school-cafeteria psychodrama that remains unresolved. The lived-experience of "computer nerds" is that of being instrumentally valuable to many, terminally valuable to none. As a result, anti-capitalist rhetoric that disparages money as a source of moral value is received by them as a personal attack. The computer nerd feels deep down that his earning-potential is the only thing he brings to the table in the status game; as far as he's concerned, his value on all other axes might as well be rounded off to zero.
Therefore, the computer nerds wants nothing more than to get away from all those teeming masses with their grabby hands who want to take all his stuff and leave him with nothing. If it takes moving to one of Balaji Srinivasan's seasteads, or to Elon Musk's space colony, then so be it.
Huh? Is it a zone, or the whole world? There's a big difference - but hold on. That comic is the story of nerds simpliciter, not just computer nerds. And the people most outspoken against "The Nerd Reich" are also nerds - "theater nerds" to be precise. To continue the cafeteria picture, the theater nerds are (if anything) even more autistic, more put-upon, and more bullyable than the computer nerds, while the bullies themselves (the "jocks" and "popular kids") don't even figure in to the dialectic at all. So what's going on?
I guess it comes down to the different coping mechanisms each group employs. The theater nerds find solidarity with each other at least, whereas the computer nerds have no need for each other because they have their toys to play with, which can incidentally eke them out a living independent of anyone else. But the theater nerds have no such refuge, and so, being poor in both financial and social capital, have been forced over generations to build up an elaborate alternative system of social capital which is a lot more off-putting to outsiders but seems to form much deeper personal relationships within itself than any within the computer club. This, at least, levels the playing field between the two nerd factions somewhat.
But then, if some computer nerds start getting uppity and decide to form alternative solidarity groups of their own, now this upsets the balance. I suppose the theater nerds believe there's only so much space for nerds in this world, and so any ascendancy of computer nerds will leave less for them.
Honestly, I'm really just spinning a yarn at this point. There are a lot of holes in this story that I don't know how to patch up. In particular:
But I can't shake the feeling that all of this debate about "techno-fascism" (or whatever) is operating at a high simulacrum level, concealing the true reasons why people get so animated about this and why they choose the sides that they do. But what are those true reasons?
I was annoyed to read this piece on it in the national broadcaster, which, for all that it is marked 'Analysis' (not even Opinion!), just uncritically repeats the book's claims as truth.
I have not been able to read it yet - and I may not bother - but certainly the impression I get from the coverage of it is that its fundamental case is, well, that nerds are gross.
It is, as it happens, true that plenty of the people it's talking about are gross. I have said it myself. If you look at most of the people he's talking about - Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, Altman, Zuckerberg, Srinivasan, etc. - they are, I think it's fair to say, kind of disconcerting. But I think you can't build a larger political argument on that. Someone presenting as anti-social is not necessarily a threat to democracy. Something is being elided here.
I was also struck by the repetition of the word 'billionaire', in a way that reminds me of attempts to use 'oligarchy' as the word of the day a while back. It's democracy versus billionaires, data centres are an intrusion of billionaire power, they found billionaire cities, and so on. Clearly the author has very negative affect around the word 'billionaire', but my sense is that Americans in general do not. As with oligarchy, it feels to me like an attempt to will a movement into existence, as if repeating "people are waking up" enough times will summon the revolution into being.
That's what it's always been. For a long time, nerds were kept in their place. Then with the dot-com boom and the rise of the FAANGs, some nerds had not only a lot of money (something always occasionally possible) but actual status. To be a software engineer at one of the top tech companies was to be someone respected. It drove the kind of people who use the word "nerd" with scorn absolutely nuts. They tried to tear it down. They mostly succeeded, but there's still those pesky execs (who liked their employees losing status) who are pretty nerdy.
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