alt Hacker NewsWhat happened to nerds?
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Big companies tend to be somewhat older companies. The people who run them tend to be older. Older people have had a longer time to adjust to society, open up, get out of their shell. People who run large companies also end up adapting to social contact, which is not something we tend to define nerds by. That is all amplified by social media and youtube which help scale up interpersonal examples for people to adjust to for good or for bad.
Some subset of these big companies will be run by people who appreciate that they're having an impact on society and feel that it's important for them to be more public so people can better appreciate who they are. Jeff Bezos was a bit awkward in the 1990s, Bill Gates was way more awkward back then, oh man, it was physically uncomfortable to watch him in interviews. Mark Zuckerberg was absolutely out of touch and forcing himself into the spotlight of his company was a disaster, he rolled -1000 charisma. They had to get Elon Musk to make dice just for that to be possible.
Most of them get better over time. These are not people that generally started hugely confident in public or with lots of people, but when you run these companies you gain both confidence and money which make public appearance less painful. You could argue they might sometimes veer into overconfidence to make up for confidence slipping, which can also be seen as ego.
There are plenty of nerds out there. Statistically based on population growth and also increases in autism spectrum diagnoses, there are more than ever.
> Phase one (late 1970s to 2007): the founder as charismatic, mysterious byproduct
> Phase two (2007 to 2015): the founder as parable.
> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent.
This pops out at me for a few reasons.
1. The grift era started long before 2015.
2. The dotcom era (which falls in the absurdly large 1970s-2007 range) was pretty grifty.
3. Come to think of it, maybe the parable we were sold in the 2007 era was ... Wait for it... A grift?
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.
What happened is that the computing industry was acquired by the advertising industry.
What kept things sane for a long time was the focus on products. Someone made something and sold it to end users. The end users had to be kept happy. That leads to a sane industry.
Now, most of the big names in computing are ad-supported. That's a completely different dynamic. The hype is the product. The user is the enemy.
On August 9, 2006, Eric Schmidt, head of Google, spoke at the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] Before that, "search engine optimization" was considered a scumbag business, and it was the job of search engine companies to fight it. On that day, Google made it legitimate and turned evil.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-ceos-new-paradigm-cloud...
>why are they doing this?? [the mafia game show]
Instantly thought of the big short: “they’re not confessing. They’re bragging”
I am in no way supportive of monopolies though taking "the need to compete" out of the equation and having steady flow of money that won't be cut off if "someone beats you to market" was pretty revolutionary. Consider Bell Labs, staffed with real "nerds" that never had to prostitute themselves or to pitch an idea on the merits of making money -- they simply did stuff that was fun, in ther nerdy way. Because of this we have wireless communication, transistors, digital cameras sensors, c, and many others.
(There were a lot of negatives due to this AT&T monopoly but we are talking about nerds here and having to socialize your own worth/value. It's a shitty game that real nerds aren't necessary interested in playing)
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.
Things like ycombinator and their censorship, they all went someplace else.
> 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
> Then there was Woz, the patron saint of computer science: bashful, generous, humble, averse to the spotlight, and content with having a reasonable amount of wealth but not an absurd, evil-seeming amount of wealth
I think broader problem is HN’s laser focus on few managers that are 1) doing [subjectively] immoral things 2) doing things not in a way busines and tech industry were doing it 15-20 years ago.
Down to a point where people start painting an “us vs them” picture with white knights of old and scary liars of new.
Everything the author complains about occurred in the dot-com bubble as well. His view that until 2007 founders were lovable nerds is completely off-base. In Silicon Valley, the same dynamics of start-ups chasing money, then getting it and proclaiming their genius, as they were “going to change the world” happened in 2000 as in similar ways today. The popping of the internet bubble brought back a lot of humility.
"The digital commons of 2026 is defined by its grifters. So it's not purely tech's fault that its now seen as a sort of avenue for getting rich quick and amorally"
I am not so sure I agree with this take. The "nerds" are building incredibly powerful technologies (Amazon, Starlink/SpaceX, search, algorithmic social media, AI, etc.) that literally control our lives now. It isn't any great mystery that the tech titans realized they had this power, and hence are questioning whether democracy is some outdated concept. They all want to be Plato's philosopher (or in this case, technologist) kings. At the risk of sounding like an AI, it isn't just grifting (or a con game) - these guys really do think of themselves as the new feudal lords. So I don't think this author is thinking big enough...
Increasingly men have been disenfranchised over the last decade so the only way forward is to take on such titles to at least appear successful. It looks like normal behaviour to me.
> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent.
I'm gonna disagree on the timeline and maybe get some flak for it: phase 3 was 1995-2000ish. When the first advertisement script and web analytics were born and disseminated. That's where all the tech grifts originate.
When I first heard of "Hackers" being equated with startups (viz. this very forum's name!) I was disgusted. A hacker, to me, was personified by Richard Stallman, or a phreaker, or Neo from the Matrix. But here we are.
Wow, this comment section alone speaks to how much things have changed.
As someone who started to read this forum because it was y-combinator startup-friendly, business-friendly and investor-friendly, I never would have imagined the anger and ridicule on display here.
Obviously, the nerds have left the building--or at least this forum.
Did anyone read this article?
"There is no reason founders should disappear from public life. There are too many advantages to building in public to ignore it."
Someone has to say this: don't be a victim--get out there and build something valuable for yourself.
There are no overlords, except in your imagination. Go build great things.
I think the bigger social problem is that too many people think it is counter-cultural to be defending rich people and billionaires, and an act of rebellion to mindlessly consume.
This is going to be buried, but I'll say it anyway.
I've been thinking about this a fair amount over the past 5-10 years, and I think a lot of the issues that we have can be traced to our demography and specifically 'the zeal of the convert' along with existing cultural dysfunction that would have been addressed if we'd grown more slowly as a group.
There's a lot of discussion about tech as an industry, but much less about tech as a culture, encompassing people's lives outside of their work/career.
Most people who are into tech in their 40s-60s came into it via a strong interest as an adolescent or young adult, and a fair number of them felt misunderstood and/or were abused/taunted/bullied/etc by mainstream culture. Then they discover this part of the world where people think like them and things make sense. They make friends who see things in systems! They can argue with facts! They agree what is important to argue about! They agree that consistency in thinking principles matters! Etc. This means a lot of people in tech, particularly the ones who hold the most power (even outside of founders) are decently likely to have either a disdain of or fear of non-tech cultures due to bad experiences, feel that tech culture needs to be defended from outside influences who don't understand and would crush it, and are well... zealots about it.
The problem is zealots are really bad at accepting and pinpointing issues within a culture. They want to defend it beyond all reason because to them, that culture/group is their safe place. If someone is bad in the culture, it can't be a sign of something wrong with the culture (because the culture is a safe place). Instead, that person 'isn't a true X'. Or that person is just a bad apple. The other influence is that converts absolutely don't want to lose their place. In the case of tech culture, because we've intertwined the culture with a career, that means people being afraid of losing their career/network/etc.
This is a different than being born into something. The perspectives are different. People born into tech culture/grey tribe/however you want to label it get to see more of how the culture expresses itself in different relationships (including its problems). They see disagreements between nerd adults that aren't mediated with corporate or monetary power/status structures, they have a choice about how much of the culture they participate in or not (like how someone born Catholic who goes to Mass once a year at Xmas is still considered Catholic regardless). There's more wiggle room, and more a sense of how those virtues play out over an entire lifetime instead of being limited to how they're expressed in a workplace between the ages of 20 and 45. Depending on the particular situation, it's also possible to have someone in tech culture who doesn't hold any personal grudges against the other cultures they share space with.
Right now, since we're dominated by converts between the ages of 20 and 50 and we've grown so quickly, we haven't had the time to create the cultural guardrails that would allow us to do things like 'agree on what constitutes an abuse of power' or 'agree on what we should teach our kids about morals', etc.
And because of the lopsided age pyramid, we have next to no elders, which doesn't help either.
This is shifting slightly as the first generation of explosive growth is starting to reproduce, and soon they'll start aging out of the workplace and we'll start to see more contemplative behavior. It's already somewhat starting: there's hints of people reaching that stage in their lives.
(NB: Yes, I'm aware that the tech industry pre-dates the 80s, but demographically those numbers are minuscule in comparison to the people who joined during and after the dot com boom. My grandmother used punchcards and knew C and was born in 1934, but there just aren't enough people with that experience for them to exert a cultural pull. Almost all of the elders we do have are regarded individually: we know (or know of) those people, but that's different from 'I'm struggling with this moral question, I'm going to go ask John because he's both wise and will understand what I'm talking about enough to give decent advice'.)
nerds and geeks are different beasts
That's incredibly disappointing from Moxie
LinkedIn, Twitter and tons of money
Money happened
Nerds were commoditized by Hollywood, who exploited the rising digital era to develop stereotypical caricatures which could be easily pigeon-holed, and thus controlled.
They were compelled to do this, because nerds ate Hollywoods' lunch.
Just look at the show, Big Bang Theory. A heinous exposition of nerd culture which derides and degrades nerd'ism and aligns it with the neo-fascist Ayn Rand'ian ideology being propagated by Hollywoods' culture class in order to promulgate division and derision.
The Wests' copycat culture, not really able to develop culture of its own, simply picked up the baton and ran with it.
Now, gullible impressionable generations assume - courtesy of incessant mass-media groupthink - that its necessary to be a misanthropic asshole if you want to sound clever.
> 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
I think it started with “developers developers developers” and kids went to colleges for CS degrees to get rich not to solve problems or geek out on hard problems but to get wealthy. That dropped in a lot of new personalities some of which were highly narcissistic.
I don’t understand what we’re talking about here. Plenty of founders still embrace nerd-dom, Jensen Huang constantly runs around signing people’s graphics cards. They’re just no longer part of the story media outlets wish to tell about tech.
Putin is right now considering how to get on that Mafia show and improve his public image in the US
The mafia game aspect is something I had not thought of. Have science fiction / dystopian novels focused on propaganda like that? Novels seem to have cartoonishly evil societies but the real world has stuff like this.
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.
This is easy to answer -- the nerds are out there, but they don't push themselves into the spotlight. The reason Sam Altman gets more press than Linus Torvalds is because Altman is a media spectacle and Torvalds is a technologist. In terms of importance, Torvalds outranks Altman. In terms of flash, the reverse.
Consider this: present-day historians say Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the time of Leonid Brezhnev. 100 years from now they'll say Brezhnev was a politician in the time of Solzhenitsyn.
I think the turning point was not 10 years ago, but 15 years ago with Facebook's IPO.
Since then, the only thing that's mattered in tech is "how will you monetize", and monetization doesn't mean a modestly successful software company, no, it's a billion dollar unicorn or bust. Or getting your company to a high valuation and then sell and gtfo, rinse and repeat.
So why do you get? The people who care very much about making a billion dollars. And for the most part, people who care very much about that are assholes.
Money
I absolutely despised the game "Mafia" when my friends played it in college. Now I know I'm not alone in that.
Money
The nerds era is gone. Welcome to the era of super-villains and self-entitled smartasses.
Oof, the section on the founders fund mafia video pointed out things I hadn’t realized about the degree of planning behind it.
The money got big, and no one stops them from doing these things.
It's not particularly difficult to understand. "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the results." - Charlie Munger.
because 400k TC plus attracts people who optimize for earning high TC and not necessarily being “passionate” about the actual tech.
i’d say it’s worse for founders. i barely see any nerdy founders anymore in sf.
it is all striver types whose parents are execs or other wealthy types, and all these people want to do is rent seek or attention seek instead of making something interesting.
so many of their ai products don’t even work. the entire goal is to get suckers to pay for a few months or sign a contract to lock down “$insaneAmount arr in six months” and then blow the VC money on yacht parties and other lame stuff.
Did someone mention Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy yet? It's not one organization, but there's just so much money in tech and it's so mainstream, that it just attracts more people that want to be successful not as a byproduct of skill, but just on its own. This bit me recently when changing jobs, I underestimated that despite all the problems I had, at my previous job there were a lot of people prioritizing being good at their job. Now it's just kicking the can so it's someone else's problem.
This sounds insane to say but...
does anyone else get the feeling this comments section is being subtly astroturfed to sabotage the spirit of good-willed idealism and innovation? Look closely, there's reasons the powers that have insane capital would do this.
They've done it to every other space already.
Also- everyone is a whore now, and not in the fun literal way.
It really changed when the game went from "Build the best product" to "Get the highest valuation" and the means of doing so were specifically NOT about building the best product. VC money was a factor, public exits were a factor, but even more generally, the idea became that you could become a billionaire without making anything at all.
Just create enough FOMO among the monied and you win. This is not nerd stuff... it's psychopath stuff.
It became all about money. YC is actually really the epitome of this transformation. VCs started deploying massive amounts of money, turbocharged by Covid.
We got old, slowly approaching retirement age, and now what is cool is being that guy or girl on Silicon Valley show, naturally with VC backing hoping to win the startup lottery.
Bullied in their childhood, they will reflect the cruelty back on the society once they get into position of power. You reap what you sow.
This is the era of unbridled, shameless narcissism and tech is no different. Money and publicity are excellent vehicles for the narcissist.
You can tell you’re slop weary when it feels enjoyable just to read text at length written purely by a human.
This blog looks AI generated to me.
A post complaining about the spectacle of tech CEOs media image, rather than people's real lives.
Nice shadow marketing for Kagi in there, linking to a Kagi image result page that asks you to sign up to view it, instead of the image.