Old nerds, new nerds

Curiosity and optimization

Paul Graham writes a lot about nerds. In “Why Nerds are Unpopular,” he ranks the lunch tables. There were the popular kids, the nerds, and everyone else in between. He writes about the persecution of nerds, of junior high bullying, and a time when the category of “nerd“ was meaningful. I thought nerds were a movie trope. Who acts like this anymore?

There’s this style of thought in Microserfs, Steve Yegge’s essays, and in various other old forums. They detail this grand culture that I never knew. I have no clue what to call it other than nerd culture, some amalgamation of the then-popular culture, occasional all-caps, colorful analogies, and obsession with the technical.

My mental model of this old nerdom is disorganized and abstract. It’s Steve Wozniak building boxes for phone phreaking. It’s the existence of Radio Shack. I think of script kiddies and whoever they grew up to be. Star Trek, LoTR, retro gaming, hacker manifestos, mailing lists, and Slashdot. Now and then, the archetypal old nerd will appear and enlighten me on the difference between geeks and nerds, perhaps citing an XKCD. He is unaware that my generation doesn’t care.

There seemed to be so much curiosity, so much fun, and so much left unexplored. People made what they wanted. They coded or built fun things, and people paid attention. The world wasn’t saturated with software. Nobody had figured out the cloud yet. Nobody had realized the potential of rich web apps. The inflection point of computation (and later the web) had just begun, a wave that would define the next decade. The CS major used to be niche. Nerds could extract monopoly profits from their labor and become fabulously wealthy. They used this money to live out their nerd dreams: ponder the future, back crazy ideas, self-actualize, and learn.

No wonder Google perks are the way they are.

What are nerds nowadays? I couldn’t give you a first-hand account of how nerds used to be, but I can about nerds today.

Nowadays, nerds think about the IMO, USACO, or other scary acronyms. They hyperoptimize their lives, maximizing for the most prestigious college. They work internships in high school. They send out cold emails and start non-profits. They have several leadership positions in their high school clubs. They do scientific research and rigorously plan out their lives and schedules.

There’s not enough time or attention span to read The Lord of the Rings, so they read short manga instead. Others give up reading altogether and scroll reels. For some, the grind is their life, so they abandon all forms of entertainment.

Some endlessly debate whether a 1560 SAT score is any good. Some grind out varsity sports and ponder whether their personal narratives will be compelling and differentiated enough for admissions officers. Some decide they are destined for investment banking and begin coffee-chatting and discounting their cash flows.

High schoolers today don’t live in Paul Graham’s world anymore, where popularity is defined by “football players and cheerleaders.” Nowadays, the football player is the coding club president, has founded a non-profit, and scored a 1580 on the SAT. The rest of the football team has similar stats, along with the cheer team. Previous markers of popularity have grown abundant, so people strive for the only scarce good: admissions to top universities. Social capital is no longer the popularity of the past. Instead, the one headed to the best university is the winner.

The world is more competitive now. Time pressure and competition eat away at curiosity and passion. If you want to follow your dreams, you'd better start early. You also better be good. Success compounds, so an early win is critical.

I’m not particularly surprised that things like linkd.inc exist. Competition is on the up. It always had to be this way. High schoolers trying to become LinkedIn influencers do not surprise me either. They have internalized the first-mover advantage.

Those I know who tried “applying sideways” got crowded out. Some great people never bothered applying to selective universities. I don’t think there’s enough faith that fun is on the road to success, that the fun-lovers won’t lose to the grinders. Moreover, I don’t believe any admissions officer or hiring manager can tell apart the fun-lovers from the grinders with certainty. I’m sure Gen-Z “old nerds” exist outside my knowledge, probably busy working on a LISP interpreter. What I don’t know is if these people will win over the grinders, if they can even compete.

I don’t think anyone cares about nerd culture anymore, at least not the people I know. SWE is the new banking, an abstracted road to success. Competition has arrived. I look to banking and see “target schools,” formalized networking, and student blacklists. I wonder if this is coming to tech.

Maybe I’m not in the right places. Maybe the old nerds never had it good, having their luck ended with the dot-com crash or whatever else. Maybe the second-hand accounts I read simply were never true.

I don’t know, but I wish it were true. I miss when people could succeed by having fun.