alt Hacker NewsWhat the fuck happened to nerds
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People are pointing to money, which yes absolutely is a factor. But what's also important to recognize is that tech has gone mainstream with smart phones, and what people do with that tech is basically 'TV'. Thus society-wide harm is now possible and, unfortunately, desired because that's also what ends up making money.
Oh that's easy... "money".
When it was just about the "love of technology" and the building of the skills involved, things were different...
I could similarly ask what happened to journalists? Or the politician that cared about their stated principals.
The reality isn't even that they went away, necessarily. Or that it was all a lie. There were always exceptions and it always took some level of good faith between our different institutions to keep them working well. At some point, that good faith interaction got hijacked and it has quickly spread as a rot to all things.
20 years in and my coworkers are about the same. What's changed is the public perception.
Arguably because of the media
I respect Moxie a lot and it greatly diminishes my opinion of him that he agreed to be part of this. I hope he got paid a lot for this, and that he’s plowing the money back into something worthwhile.
the former nerd type was based on not having social and economic power. people wit social and economic power are inevitably drawn to be assholes (which is what nerds used to know).
'Humans have Limited capacity to pay Attention to anything but Unlimited capacity to receive Attention'. Nerds included.
Attention Economy/Social Media platforms exploited that piece of human nature. Its not just nerds trying to capture Attention but everyone. I have a cop buddy complaining about how top people in the police dept are competiting with each other for likes and views. Everyone gets trapped cuz pool of Attention to fish in is finite.
How do we get out of this situation? Platforms including HN have to be forced to show people that 1 View they get is actually a fraction because that viewer is going and reading 20 other things. By not showing it reality warps.
I think the comments that the tech industry was always a bit terrifying and this piece can both be accurate. It is the case that the public perception has changed significantly due to lighting trust on fire and that the trust might not have been that deserved in the first place.
The asset liquidation analogy is perfect. For about the past ten year, I think the Cambridge Analytica hearings are a good turning point, tech has realized that their warm and fuzzy persona is no longer valuable cultivating and so there’s been a very rapid burn down of that persona into the hyper capitalist power hungry one we have today. It has always been the case that money and power were motivating factors but until that was laid fully bare there was value in pretending like it wasn’t the only factor.
When too much money is involved, evil people enter. Soon, the good people are pushed out.
The nerds you are looking for are still here. We just got pushed out of the leadership of the tech industry by evil people who are not nerds.
The reason you can’t see us anymore is because you don’t know how to look. Money and the major social platforms will never direct your eyes towards us. You must look at the independent spaces that are hiding in plain sight.
Seriously, the fuck has happened to nerds? I expected to see some name-dropping in the post, probably some mentions of GNU / Richard Stallman. What have I found? Jobs and Woz, you're sure nerdy as hell, Mr. Apple-Fanboy.
>Charming nerd to terrifying overlord
If there was this shift, it was always superficial. To a certain degree, nerds were always 'terrifying overlords'. It’s just that once they accumulated enough power, there was no longer any point in maintaining that façade
Wealth inequality.
100% agreed. I saw it somewhere else that the tech industry has burned all the transformative good will it had earned over the years and is now seen as the key villain in joblessness, societal discord and loneliness. What the fuck did happen? Edit: this isn't just an old man thing, this is the new generation saying this
It's a shift in mindset and feels a bit "man yells at clouds". I think this really underestimates how jarring Jobs and his peers were to the older generation of techies who themselves were jarring to the even older ones (eg. remember all the hate Jobs and Gates would receive from Stallman types?).
I also think OP fails to understand how much more competitive tech culture is now.
Visit and talk with undergrads at a top CS program like Stanford, Cal, UIUC, MIT, etc. The culture is different because this is a much more competitive generation. When the acceptance rate into a top CS program is in the 1-5% range and laurels like being a Valedictorian, NHS member, JV or Varsity team member in HS, and taking 6-7 APs are viewed as table stakes, you get a degree of viciousness, competitiveness, and steel-eyed execution that older Americans just aren't used to.
Honestly, I like it. It reminds me of the culture and mindset I'd find amongst my Chinese peers in the 2000s and 2010s when they built China.
This misses what happened entirely.
What happened is that tech companies got so large that they are now essentially defense contractors. You can't both be a countercultural rebel, the kind who would evoke 1984 in a TV ad, and be a CEO and/or significant owner in a trillion dollar company.
At some point, the company's interests align with domestic and foreign policy and the company becomes a tool of the state, which is interesting because that's the accusation levelled at Chinese companies but it's exactly what Google, Meta, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, Amazon, etc have become. They're deeply entwined with government contracts and defense that alignment is impossible to avoid.
You saw this as Tim Apple [sic], Sundai Pichai, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk and Sam Altman all bent the knee at the last inauguration. All of them paid 7 figures to be there.
Idealism, disruption, etc are fundamentally incompatible with being a multi-billionaire.
nerds stopped existing around the 1990s when money was poring into tech. The bros moved from marketing into tech for the money, pushing out nerds. An example of this is all the bloatware being created.
Yes some still exist, but I think the tend to be working in non-tech jobs or maybe in Corp IT and working on their own items in between.
I have an imperfect "canary in the coalmine" test for whether/where the principled/idealist nerds have the power vs the mercenary/cynical nerds have the power:
Advertisers vs Ad Blockers - as long as the Ad Blockers are blocking the vast majority of junk, I feel like team principles is winning. Like they have more nerd power to outsmart the lesser nerds working on team mercenary.
But there are places like Facebook where that is not the case. And even in Youtube, team mercenaries has recently won some territory from team principles.