alt Hacker NewsWhat happened to nerds?
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This is looking back at Apple through some very rose-tinted lenses. Apple had a big role in moving the tech industry toward "grift-adjacent". There were at least 2 contiguous decades when Apple products were unusable, poorly designed, self-important, overpriced pieces of junk. Some would argue they still are.
People bought Apple because they were subscribed to Steve Job's personality cult. Heck, they might've even bought a "not-a-flamethrower" if he tried to sell one.
> He and DH Hansson have retained the nerd-dom that made tech interesting/fun/curiosity-driven/charming for an audience with a certain taste in the first place. With them, it at least 'feels' like what you see is what you get. That does wonders for your reputation.
Doesn’t seem like you’ve been keeping up with DHH’s reputation. He’s at best controversial. He has publicly expressed fervent views about subjects outside tech that were definitely not fun/curiosity-driven/charming and has gotten plenty of backlash. I also see no reason to believe he’d decline to be on that Mafia game, he feels as much a “personality” as the others.
> Moxie Marlinspike
come on man, what are you doing. must admit that i haven't followed this guy closely, but i thought with him being a part of Signal he would know better.
that actually makes me even more suspicious about Signal...
Great post, and largly captures my own experience.
I can only speak for my institution, but eagerness to lock down ip and keep ownership of everything tightly controlled and out of the hands of said nerds/inventors doesnt really incentivise me to do beyond what I'm paid for.
The one time I tried, I was hit by the full force of my institutions commercialization goons and lawyers, to a degree that it killed my drive to do anything novel for them. Despite being promised partial ownership, in the end, after federal grant funds were secured and product developed, they took everything using "loopholes" that go against the law and the institutions own rules, but to fight it I need resources I don't have, which the institution no doubt knows. All that despite me initially being fully aligned with my institution, and happy to only take a very minor share of actual profit, in-line with what i'd get anway, only stipulation was veto rights in application (as the tech has very real applications in offline autonomous drones, which I consider an X-treat).
If my own institution is a hostile actor, and willing to fuck me over nothing, simply because they can, why do anything?
So, current state of Copyright law favours institutions over the very individuals it was meant to protect, and there are no options to protect one self if anything interesting is developed without serious capital and legal might. So, fuck it, im not doing anything except hobby related, GPL licensed stuff. If I can do anything to make it hard to commercialize, I will. If it can be kept in house, it is kept there.
Capital interest has become a rather ugly and hostile egregore with interest aligned against that of humanity. All those building cool and novel shit I know hold similar opinions, so it is no surprise to me. I was strongly advised against working with the institution by older folks i look up to, people who have built really powerful tools of their own. Their warnings ended up being proven valid with deafening clarifty. I've always found the statement that capitalism breeds innovation to be a joke, and while it works in the chinese model, the "western" model is sick and suffers a sort of cultural psychosis that makes it rather unttractive to engage with.
It's the logical conclusion of the acceptance of hacktivist/activist groups in the tech community. Activists/Hacktivists want something their way. If they don't get it, they resort to violence, disruption, and/or harassment (rather than use mainstream political tools like trying to get elected into office or trying to get new laws passed).
This sort of behavior is authoritarian. During Covid, this was was very apparent. I saw tech leaders supporting forced vaccinations, suppressing opinions online, and getting people fired from their job for simply stating their opinion.
Magazines like 2600, who always championed freedom of speech and expression during multiple administrations, showed their true colors. They supported suppression of people they disagreed with politically.
Twitter/Facebook were found to be colluding with the government to target individuals that made the government look bad or had contrarian views.
The worst part? It was swept under the rug. Nobody in the tech industry cared.
This is why I support the suppression of rights of people I disagree with politically. This tit for tat will need to continue, until lessons are learned, and it stops for everyone.
Elon Musk happened. Zuckerberg happened (yes, before the current bro transformation, we had The Social Network showing us).
Elon probably most of all, he was the one who took fringe edge lord behavior and elevated to something to be admired.
Nerds are no better or worse than other people. Dump massive money and power into an industry and you will get unhinged shit like this that bubbles to the surface.
Some of it is the mask falling off and some of it is people genuinely getting warped by it. It’s a little of both.
In finance it’s covered over by a buttoned down ivy league veneer, but the coke snorting maniac is there.
Same in politics where there’s pomp and ceremony to cover it, but when it comes out in the open there it’s probably the most ugly. Governments have armies and police.
In nerd-dom it comes in a form that’s uniquely tone deaf to the point of coming off like a comic book or anime villain.
Almost like no group of humans is above the usual human vices.
I think that the title should be more, what the fuck happened to tech executives as compared to nerds.
because previously it was mostly the nerds who were at the forefront of the innovation (they still are), but they now have a playbook where they see all the other people (grifters) who are entering tech for money and the playbook of the attention economy and doing that because its a profitable strategy.
It's basically the fact that there are multiple companies where a grift culture is promoted within tech (ironically I am on YC website and YC had a company which you might've heard called delve :D)
As people realized that the technology has value and finance people realizing it to pour head over fist money into it.
With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.
So I think this is what has happened to nerd culture. It simply became profitable and then commoditized and used by people who could then grift.
BUT people are respecting the nerd culture (well the non grift version of it) a lot more
For some reason, I wish to recommend Weird Al video song about White & Nerdy[0] and how people within the comments are saying that Nerd culture has its own unique identity and many if not all appreciating the nerd culture
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw&list=RDN9qYF9DZP...
So TLDR: people like the previous nerd culture and it still exists, especially on HN but on platforms like twitter and others, as discussed within the article itself, with the attention economy. The grift culture is getting more attention than the nerd culture and because of the overlap in tech, the nerd culture is getting some bad rep but overall people appreciate the actual nerd culture (IMO) as interesting and unique (whereas previously, people wouldn't have appreciated it so much)
You don't hear about the actual nerd culture because it isn't algorithmic hungry but it still exists on platforms like Hackernews IMO!
Silicon Valley has always had a bit of a libertarian bent, but I really think a lot of people have spent a significant and successful effort at pushing it towards Objectivism.
Objectivism is a stupid, angry idea borne out of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. It exists in a vacuum. Eddie Lampert named his yacht the Fountainhead which is amusing since, while I don’t question he has talent, he got millions in seed money to start his own fund from Richard Rainwater. Elon Musk is not some scrappy kid; the vast majority of founders are from comfortable and increasingly upper middle class families where they can tolerate the risk of failing with a reasonable safety margin and then delude themselves that they bootstrapped everything themselves.
Curtis Yarvin does not exist in a vacuum. These are awful people and the fact that we’ve allowed them to be taken seriously and control the conversation is…obscene.
The premise of the article is faulty. "Nerds" became "cool" as technology became more important, so sociopaths in leadership positions stated to pretend to be nerds. It's as simple as that.
I think a far more important question is why we no longer have more reasonable public figures. Who are the modern equivalents of Isaac Asimov or Richard Feynman?
Nerds were bought out and turned into money and thus wife having chads. Now, the basement dwellers of today are actually tech illiterate and skillless with no charming qualities at all. Blame capitalism.
Come on, are you really complaining that they played a game of Mafia? Please.
Nothing happened to the Nerds. They are all showing their true colours.
They may have shared a love for technology, what they also shared is a deep immaturity.
The immaturity of a person not wanting to acknowledge and cary any responsibility for other people, for the consequences of their work, for any kind of accountability. Just play with their toys without any concern for the external world.
'I'm just here playing with tech and code'. Sure! but that stuff you're building is being weaponised by other (the venn diagram unfortunately overlaps) tech bro's so men can film women with their glasses in public like the little sick creeps they are. Or steal all their data. You can't pretend you are not responsible and complicit.
They want "what's theirs" and anything in their way - including people - have to comply or be destroyed.
> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent... Elon Musk is the most absurd example of this
Elon? Grift? Give me a break. He's the greatest true technologist of all time.
I couldn't fine even one other defender in either discussion. Maybe its true that HN has been BlueSky'd and Twitter is the new HN
ps. Great post aside from this
> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent. 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, even if you are an otherwise ordinary person. But it is our fault that many of our 'figureheads' are leaning way the hell in on this. Elon Musk is the most absurd example of this, but he almost doesn't count because he is in his own tier of ridiculously self-promotional and attention hungry.
There's a new trend to call everyone you don't like a "grifter". How is Elon a grifter? The dude has been getting shit done on and on for years. This is the opposite of grifter.
> One of them builds autonomous weapons for the Pentagon
Also what is this? Wasn't the whole point to have an agreement to not build AI weapons? I think the author is on some emotional screed.
The missing piece of data that distinguishes what happened to nerds and to finance bros is that nerds got sold on post-religious cults like Landmark, The Secret, or the metastasized principles thereof (see also Silicon Valley s01’s guru, the marketing for Devs, the documentary The Institute, et al.) — but finance bros were insulated against this because their employers and industry had rigorous belief systems already in place centered around money, profits, and self-confidence; and, most importantly, a much higher tolerance for arrogance.
So, in Civ6 terms: Nerds didn’t have an existing industry pantheon that could stand up to religious pressure by non-religious entities. This is part of what made Jobs and Apple so successful: arrogance is a stellar defense against religious pressure, and Jobs was implemented a rigorous culture that resists religious pressure very strongly. It’s not invulnerable to sects from within, but it’s nearly impenetrable to sects from without.
There’s also a subtler reason why Jobs and Woz could coexist at all: Jobs wasn’t arrogant and cruel to people because he looked down upon them; he was arrogant and cruel to ideas, and so to work with him, that detachment of idea from self-worth and ego and etc. was mandatory.
To use Woz and Jobs as a constructed spectrum analogy: Everyone perceives me as being more like Woz than Jobs interpersonally, though never fully Woz (I’m a little too distant for the tastes of the needy), until they invite me to critique their ideas or listen to my describe my own, at which point they (permanently thereafter) perceive me as being much more towards the Jobs end of the scale. It can be somewhat isolating and uncomfortable to ride alongside someone like that long-term, but that’s compensated for somewhat by having a work culture that prioritizes hallway chats over cubicle farms. (No coincidence the UFO, then!)
Most nerds lacked both the arrogance and unconcern for other people’s feelings that insulated Jobs against the belief grifters and the innate confidence that insulated Woz, and instead have what we see in Elon Musk: a deep and desperate craving for other people to like them, to value them, to adore them. (Praise him.) So of course most successful nerds fell prey to the basic grift that hooks people on religious and secular cults every day: “we’ll sell you a feeling of belonging, of being valued, in exchange for your adoption and propagation of our beliefs”. Jobs didn’t give a fuck if you propagated his beliefs or not, so long as you adhered to them at work; and Woz clearly doesn’t need to belong to be confident in his value to others.
Zuckerberg is a good example of someone who has the arrogance/asocial of Jobs down pat, but in contrast is fully decoupled from prosocial outcomes. Investigating what the guiding forces in Jobs’ life were that directed him towards prosocial outcomes, rather than asocial outcomes like Zuckerberg, would perhaps be quite revealing; Jobs built a company that tends to minimize harm to its customers, while Zuckerberg built a company that tends to maximize harm to its customers, but both succeeded at building institutions that resist external religious pressures. That’s a distinction missed by this post, and separates the outcomes neatly into a simple 2x2 matrix: asocial/prosocial (Jobs), asocial/apathetic (Zuckerberg), social/confident (Woz), social/needy (Musk).
the technology industry spent forty years accumulating a very specific kind of trust and mostly had boring motives, which made us appear trustworthy and largely benign
Are we on the same planet? Trust and motives? Is this some kind of secret that we’re not supposed to talk about? Tech, from its very beginnings, has been about libertarianism, subversion, counter culture, trying to be cooler than the people, wanting to wield power over them, misogyny, abusing free speech, racism, gatekeeping. The list keeps going of so many bad characteristics.
“core nerd values: a love of learning, curiosity, an obsessive interest in your domain, and an admirable humility”
Again what planet is this? Most nerds are some of the most self important condescending better than you social weirdos.
Ohhhh yes. Here it comes
“occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.”
Ah yes applauding arrogance as correctness.
Phase One. Holy. The delusion here thinking that 1970-2007 was some golden CEO age. Do you live your life never understanding the incredible pain and exclusion and mistreatment that people experienced and continue to everyday? Is that by choice (willfully ignorant) or are you just this privileged that you thought the world was fantastic?
Here’s the fact: These CEOs, SVPs, Directors, Managers, Engineers didn’t just magically become shitty people in recent years. They’ve always been terrible people right down to the no-social-skills neckbeard who manages IT. This has always been the case. Might I remind you that computing was full of women? That’s how it started. What did boys do? They came in, kicked all the women out. Took over and then invited their buddies. It gets worse because then it also became racist. This was never a surprise. The root cause was that terrible people came in and ….. SURPRISE …. behave terribly.
This is some of the most delusional and downright offensive stuff I’ve ever read and I don’t even want to begin to read some of the HN comments. And HN has had far worse discussions and articles on the front page. Most of us have never experienced the depressingly (yes actual clinical depression) horrible treatment that people have been experiencing either as potential employees or full time employees ever since those ENIAC days. Go look at your team. And then look at your other teams. And then your line of management. You’ll see the pattern. Now go back and look at history for the same things. You’ll once again see the same thing. It’s the same people. Young terrible hateful xenophobic racist homophobic freaks grew up and continued their ways. Nerds being the good guy is as cringe as the incel nice guy. Yuck.
Our industry is rotten because it has rotten people all through the ranks. It’s not just CEOs or founders. It’s everyday working people who are terrible to each other. And sorry to say but nerds geeks whatever you want to call them are at the top of the most terrible. That’s what make this industry suck. We never actually sat down and told most of these people (and us) to goto a therapist and deal with our trauma, demons, etc. and stop propagating that hurt to others. Start there.
Oh and this is the same blog with a different URL from 2 days ago and commenter pointed out. Yikes.
What happened? Tech companies became trillion dollar companies and tech founders became billionaires. As a trillion dollar company, you are a military contractor and are deeply invested in and intertwined with the American imperial project.
Tim Apple [sic], Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos all went to the inauguration to bend the knee. They all paid 7 figures plus to be there.
Being a billionaire is fundamentally incompatible with being a countercultural nerd. If anything, this was Silicon Valley returning to its roots. The first companies were founded before WWI (eg Federal Telegraph Co) but the true origins of the name "Silicon Valley" came from semiconductors and the likes of HP and Lockheed Martin as a Cold War defense offshoot.
[dead]
TLDR, "Yoink" =3
Patrick Boyle seems to cover the SPCX trajectory fairly well...
Nerds have made themselves obsolete by inventing LLMs.
So now instead of programming it makes more sense to go to the gym.
What does any of that have to do with "nerds"? You are complaining about business and management people in tech. None of them is a "nerd" and never was. Or otherwise said, what does the "nerd" even means to you? I thought that nerd means a person who is a person with lower social skills, obsessed over technical details so much they are unable to discuss anything else.
People whose whole career always was to manipulate and impress people, to talk well, to convince investors to give them money, to lead companies just are not nerds. Regardless of whether they are narcistic assholes or not.