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It feels pretty mean-spirited to describe tech billionares as simply "nerds". Maybe they started off as humble computer nerds, but that was a long time ago and they've done a lot of other stuff since then.Now they have a lot more in common with the richest CEOs of non-tech companies than they do with the rank-and-file engineers. And like you said, theater kids can be nerds too... what about them?
Imagine if they wrote a book talking about Hollywood celebrity culture had gone too far, and for some reason the subtitle used the word "fag." I feel like that would not go over well, even if they later clarified that "oh I didn't mean all the fags in Hollywood, just the ones who run it!" But I guess it's still normal and cool to throw out slurs against people who work with computers for a living, even though that's an increasingly large and diverse part of the population.
This is just the apex fallacy, and it has been standard operating procedure for any social analysis of population groups considered low status by the SocJus-inclined for at least a couple decades, I'd guess longer. I recall noticing it first in the early-10s, when people were yelling at nerds for claiming to have had difficulties in life due to their nerdiness, which couldn't possibly be the case since Zuckerberg is a billionaire. There's also the all-consuming gender war where feminists, to this day, often claim that the sexual revolution was a pro-patriarchy psy-op because it gives them easy access to women whenever they want, while women have to put out in order to compete for the men, because men below a certain level of attractiveness just don't register to them as counting. This extends to the trans phenomenon too, where girls transition to becoming trans men, under the belief that they'd get to enjoy life like a high status man (a high profile case right now is Elliot Page, who is openly complaining about not getting Hollywood roles, after transitioning from a very high status woman to a trans man).
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Scott's working definition of "nerd" is something like "unusually intelligent, but lacking in social skills". Which still seems like an apt description of e.g. Mark Zuckerberg, in spite of his billions.
I think that two things can be true at the same time:
Being a nerd, I find this classification -- especially in the phrase "nerd reich" insulting.
As an intuition pump, consider the following: Suppose (Ashkenazim) Jews are strongly over-represented among tech leaders. Now someone writes a book called "Evil Tech Jews". This is already the implied claim that there is a correlation between being an evil tech leader and being a Jew, or even that evil tech CEOs are evil for the very reason of their ethnicity.
You will have a very hard time convincing me that in fact, this book is not about Jewishness at all and merely explores the problematic behaviors exhibited by both Jewish and gentile tech leaders. In a culture where antisemitism very much exists, and in which I can probably not read one word in a million words being written, I have already extrapolated your book's thesis to something like "our tech woes are because we did not let Hitler finish the job", and already wasted three more words of my reading allowance on them than that warranted.
The main difference between Jews and nerds is their position on the woke totem pole. Basically, nerds are not a protected minority, but a valid target for the wokes. They are socially awkward and typically not good at keeping up with the vocabulary which is used to indicate that you are a good person. Like the white working class, the wokes would be happy to ignore them if they only knew to stick to their designated social role. But either of workers and nerds sometimes have ideas beyond their station. Sometimes the plumbers dare elect Donald Trump, and sometimes the tech people dare getting far richer than their looks would indicate.
Still, as someone outside the woke bubble (and a nerd besides), focusing on the nerdiness of the tech CEOs is about as besides the point for me as focusing on their Jewishness. So I read the title as "think about how much better the world would be if the jocks had sufficiently bullied Zuck, as God intended", and this rhymes with "think about how much better the world would be if the Nazis had dealt with him". If you want to argue that Meta is evil, then by all means argue so, but if you tie it to Zuck being too nerdy or Jewish then you have already lost me three words in.
I think perhaps the main difference is actually that you can't really choose not to be a Jew. You can forsake visible signs of Jewishness but sufficiently antisemitic people will still hate you if they find out.
Contrariwise, being a nerd is not an immutable characteristic - and I think it's less and less of a coherent one, as "nerd" culture is mainstream now. I literally came back to write this comment after having a conversation with a window salesperson that involved hunting, fishing, and Pokemon. I can't speak to his high school years but I don't think anyone looks at a guy who wears boots and jeans and a full beard and drives a truck and thinks "man that guy needs to be stuffed in a locker."
Left wing antisemitism is usually about visible characteristics of being a Jew (including political beliefs on subjects such as Israel), which you can in fact choose not to show.
I am not claiming that you cannot mitigate persecution for being a Jew (or really any immutable characteristic) by pretending not to be that thing, but I don't think that being criticized for which media products you consume or which afterschool activities you partake in or however else you want to slice it really rises to the level of antisemitism...pretty much any way you slice it. Even if you don't think the mutable versus immutable characteristics distinction is coherent, right now it is still more physically dangerous to be a Jew!
Moreover I don't think it's actually a good idea for nerds or those who wish them well to draw that parallel. Nor do I think it is good for society. "Everything I don't like is Hitler" is already a problem; it's risible for people who like Dungeons and Dragons to suggest that being bullied in middle school is in some way analogous to the Holocaust (even indirectly) and doing so just makes nerds seem out of touch, reinforcing the stereotypes that nerds presumably want to avoid.
I am not saying that no nerd can ever experience anything that is similar to anything a Jew can ever experience, or that Jewish persecution is ontologically different from other forms of persecution, or that any comparison is automatically invalid. Getting bullied for being a Jew and getting bullied for being a nerd are similar from the perspective that the bullying is very analogous. But that's analogous because the bullying is analogous. The Jewishness and nerdiness are not analogous. There is more to both of those things than their position on the woke totem pole.
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Great comment, agreed on all particulars.
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I mean, it seems pretty obvious that it's because, despite all the political rhetoric to the contrary, the leftists don't hate them for being rich, they hate them for being nerds. Indeed, the leftists hate the less-rich employees at the companies a lot more than they hate the CEOs, because they're much nerdier than the CEOs. They hate random nerds in their everyday lives who are much poorer than them a lot more than they hate the CEOs, because those are also much nerdier than the CEOs. The existence of somewhat nerdy CEOs is just very flimsy cover.
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