It’s like, at first, it was relatively apolitical except maybe the New Atheists who got popular by criticizing the mostly right-wing religious nutjobs.
But then, I think around the mid-2010s, it started to get super political. Suddenly, everybody started to talk about how the evil wacky feminazi SJWs were trying to destroy gaming and our culture?
At this point, it seems like many people have snapped out of it and are making fun of these “anti-woke” crazies, but what materially caused this phenomenon to happen in the first place and why does it still persist to an extent?
Nerd or geek culture was quite reactionary for a long time now. It’s a product of the (predominantly white male) western bourgeoisie and labour aristocrats, and its links to racism and sexism go quite deep.
This 3-page article (page 1, page 2, page 3) does a good job at analyzing these cultural aspects. It’s a very interesting read.
Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
As geekdom moves from the cultural fringes into the mainstream, it becomes increasingly difficult for the figure of the geek to maintain the outsider victim status that made him such a sympathetic figure in the first place. Confronted with his cultural centrality and white, masculine privilege—geeks are most frequently represented as white males—the geek seeks a simulated victimhood and even simulated ethnicity in order to justify his existence as a protagonist in a world where an unmarked straight white male protagonist is increasingly passé.
Our investigation proceeds through three core concepts / tropes prevalent in geek-centered visual narratives:
- “geek melodrama” as a means of rendering geek protagonists sympathetically,
- white male “geek rage” against women and ethnic minorities for receiving preferential treatment from society, which relates to the geek’s often raced, usually misogynistic implications for contemporary constructions of masculinity, and
- “simulated ethnicity,” our term for how geeks read their sub-cultural identity as a sign of markedness or as a put-upon status equivalent to the markedness of a marginalized identity such as that of a person of color.
We analyze these tropes via an historical survey of some key moments in the rise of geek media dominance: the early-20th century origins of geekdom and its rise as an identifiable subculture in the 1960s, the mainstreaming of geek masculinity in the 1970s and 80s via blockbuster cinema and superhero comics, and the postmodern permutations of geekdom popularized by Generation X cultural producers, including geek/slacker duos in “indie” cinema and alternative comics.
that was a pretty good and interesting read. thanks
thanks for linking that article
Nerds have always been “apolitical” and nazis were always nerds (seriously, look at some of the shit Himmler got up to, dude was a massive LARPing loser)
So any “apolitical” group is vulnerable to fascists, because being openly anti-fascist is a political statement, and demanding a fascist leave the group is also a political statement. But trying to “find a compromise” isn’t “political.”
So fascists infiltrating a group will always test the waters, saying things that are offensive, but juuuuust short of the dreaded “political.” Usually in the form of insisting “It’s not political, it’s just how it is.” (insert statement about the absurdity of the anti-semite here).
So you get facists constantly normalising fascist ideas, while acting like anyone calling them out is being “political” and therefore trying to “ruin” a fun hobby forum (such as a gaming forum) by “talking about politics.” Over time decent people will just leave a group that tolerates fascists, and in turn, they use the apolitical’s fear of things becoming “political” to make disagreeing with them a “political” statement.
This generally only works in communities full of privileged people who can afford to not have an ideology and don’t feel a need to care about things other than their latest distraction/treats, and people who generally don’t get out too much. So Gamers are a perfect cross section of those two most of the time.
Yes. Any space that is not actively anti-fascist will become fascist.
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.- Michael B. Tager / iamragesparkle
Turns out all those Nazis accusing immigrants of being invasive vermin were projecting all along. Shocking.
I would hardly say that nerds are always apolitical, many nerds are some of the biggest leftists out there, with even massive personalities like George Lucas personally gushing over the Soviet Union while making a not so subtle commentary on the United State’s imperialism.
The sad part is that Nazis and fascists often hijack or force their way into communities that were originally leftist, or for leftist media, and use it for themselves. Star Wars, Starship Troopers, Star Trek, Helldivers, etc etc.
Sorry, I meant more that internet nerd culture in general has always focused on “I don’t want to talk politics, I just want to talk about this cool game etc.”
The people who make the media may not be apolitical, but a lot of people, especially in the west, demand an apolitical reading of any and all media. That’s how these groups get infiltrated, though Sickos below put it much better.
I would kind of push back on that first point though, as politics has always been part of the conversation. In my experience the ones demanding “apolitical media” and the ones saying “I don’t want politics in my XYZ” are usually the Nazis masquerading with faux-care, because to them the existence of women, black people, lgbt people, and minorities is “political”.
Most nerds seem more then eager to discuss the politics of certain media, however the same can be said for the fascists frothing at the mouth to infect the conversation or shut it down in the guise of being apolitical.
Sadly, I would agree with you and sicko that this is how it usually goes with media, but I will say that I hardly think it’s most nerds, as the ones that talk loudest and end up occupying once good spaces are usually the Nazis. Which in turn attracts more Nazis and so on.
I think we may be talking about two different kinds of “nerd” here. In this specific example, I’m not just talking about people with nerdy hobbies, I’m talking specifically about a very particular kind of (usually white, male, middle class) guy whose understanding of politics begins and ends with the South Park “everyone is dumb for caring about things” mentality. Spaces like that were very common prior to gamergate stuff, I would say they were the majority of “nerd” spaces online, but not the only spaces (people who didn’t want to tolerate that bullshit didn’t)
I wouldn’t say that these people were concern-trolling nazis, but rather people who were useful idiots for them, and had their “let’s just not talk about politics because it starts fights, and just enjoy the media we talk about here.” twisted into the “politics is when wamens and minorities.” sort of stuff we see today.
I can agree with everything you’ve said, I think we were just talking about two different types of people.
Yeah, I don’t disagree with your stuff at all, I’ve known plenty of nerds who do care about politics and political ideas in their media as well.
gamergate (2014) was unironically the mainstream debut of the alt-right.
I wouldn’t say that it has? At least not unilaterally.
I’d lay the blame squarely on capital’s doorstep. Capital runs most major internet forums, and capital decides which views are platformed and which are muted. Fascism and capital go hand in hand. Rage gets more clicks, which means more ad revenue.
We’re both on sites loaded with nerds who are comrades. Nerds are not at all inherently fascist. The terminally online are not inherently fascist. However, “Internet/Nerd culture” was doomed to become fascist when it became a packaged commodity. The most successful “nerds” were also the most ruthlessly capitalist. Wozniak vs Jobs and all that.
Inceldom also has a part to play in this, but, again, this is largely a product of capital. They’re useful idiots. Like LBJ put it, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Lonely men are convinced women are to blame, that women are garbage, and they become clients and, frankly, weapons. There are a lot of lonely nerds out there thanks to the isolation that capitalism encourages.
You say this change happened in the mid-2010s; putting that in context, social media as we know it really only started taking off in the late oughts. Reddit and Facebook were like 2005-ish, and didn’t hit their strides for a few years. Facebook’s IPO was 2012. Capital.
And, finally, nobody’s immune to propaganda. It’s not just “nerd culture” that’s taken this turn, it’s a society-wide poison.
Honestly though, the direct direct direct answer to your question as phrased, “what caused internet/nerd culture to go full-on fascist [in the mid-2010s]?” is just GamerGate. That’s it. That was kinda the moment that all the right-leaning nerds who hated women that wouldn’t date them realized there were other right-leaning nerds that also hated women, and they very publicly organized around it, formed forums about it, and basically created the modern alt-right.
Before that, like, the loudest nerd voices on the internet were like Wil Wheaton whose core tenet was “Don’t be a dick”, and the loudly anti-copyright Cory Doctorow. They got drowned out by the forces of reaction.
At least Doctorow is still around; I still read his blog on the reg
Yep, gamergate, Steve Bannon and algorithms starting to trend towards the inflammatory.
Also the SJWs, hot off their cultural kill streak, finally extended too far with demanding pronouns. It’s ivory tower level privilege to demand the world bend around you, and then do it again, for every single person who identifies as whatever they feel like. The “I identify as an attack helicopter” really summed up the zeitgeist and capped the cultural narrative. That was the moment where the right crystalized into a mirror to point out the pronoun lunacy - and it absolutely is, if you think otherwise, get over yourself. Nowhere in anywhere, ever, do we see people just make ridiculous demands on people like that and it EVER work. Like, is every meet and greet, business networking party just gonna start with 2 hours of writing down everyone’s him/hers/zlers/swishes/a12x2 whatever nonsense? No. Never. Sorry. In a perfect world, maybe, but we got a lot of work to do before even that level of perfection can be reached, I’m not thrilled about it either.
what are you even on about lol. I don’t even know where to start in this diatribe, but I find the “there’s no time to ask everyone pronouns” part funny when corporate events already spend a ton of time on ‘team-building’ exercises and affirmations.
You know also you can just ask people these before the event?
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>lemm.ee
>‘ivory tower level privilege’ (to request proper acknowledgement; when I know you’d throw a father-fucking fit if someone questioned your identity and where you deem yourself to fit within the social hierarchy)
>‘the right had a point’ (about it being ‘lunacy’ to request proper acknowledgement from crackers dead set on disrespecting those with alternate pronouns) (isn’t respect supposed to be a core tenet of fascist ideologies, you prick?)
>helicopter memes (yup, you’re just a fascist)
ok settler, go back to /pol/. Everyone who uses Outlook in my workplace has their pronouns at the bottom of their signature block, you’re just DELIBERATELY being a shithead.
Was talking to this POS in another thread, they were saying some very sus things about Israel, insisting that Israel isn’t really the US’s “friend” because Israel doesn’t directly send troops to fight in US wars or something.
I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt and asked them to clarify, but a part of me wondered whether they were being openly antisemitic and were literally trying to argue that (((Israel))) is secretly running the US. Now I know why they never actually gave me a straight answer when I asked them to clarify, because they’re a fascist. And to think, I just assumed they were a garden variety debatebro!
There is the nature of what gets clicks. Clicks of inflamitory exaggerations of what Anita Sarkesian was up to. She would make a presentations for corporations to tell them that women are a market for games and they should be appealed to. Somehow in reactionary brain this meant that games can’t be made for 20 something manchildren. People just straight up lied about all kinds of shit and made fun of hot takes with 5 upvotes on twitter as if this meant something.
Ight, cissie…
Nerd culture was always fairly reactionary, all things considered. The “girls don’t play video games” trope was so overplayed in the mid 00’s even Ctrl+Alt+Del was able to subvert it by having a gamer gf and B^U is not a creative person by any stretch of the word.
Although it did get worse when reactionaries realised they could make money by criticizing otherwise non-issues. If San Andreas came out today the right wing youtubers would lose their minds that the protagonist is black, the main antagonist is a cop and the secondary antagonist is a CIA agent and the supporting cast includes a female Latina, a weed smoking hippy and a disabled Chinese American. Gamergate’s consequences hasn’t exactly fallen away.
Interesting thing about that one is that C.R.A.S.H. is actually barely abstracted away from a real portion of the LAPD involved in a real scandal.
Nerd culture was always fairly reactionary, all things considered.
Reminder that Dungeons and Dragons creator E. Gary Gygax justified lawful good characters killing the babies of races listed as evil by quoting
CW: genocide
an American colonizer giving his reason for pursuing the total extermination of American Indians.
Your framing and your questions seem to mash many different things—spanning decades—together as if it was all one thing. I’m not going to try to disentangle it all, but I’ll make a few of observations.
- The Internet is a product of the US’s military-industrial complex.
- “Apolitical” isn’t. “Apolitical” is the politics of maintaining the status quo. It’s the politics of I Just Wanna Grill for God’s Sake: White American male labor aristocrats.
- To a large extent New Atheism was a racist, Islamophobic reaction to 9/11, which provided ideological support for the imperial core’s War On Terror.
Incels and women hating are and will lead one farther down the road of reactionary beliefs
Selection bias, I think. It depends on the site you’re using, but often communities are dominated by people who can afford to spend enormous amounts of time on the internet. That’s going to favor people with money and free time, not to mention the people who are literally paid to post.
Steve Bannon
I was looking through the thread to see when this would come up. Yes, a big part of it was that nerd culture was deliberately targeted by the far right. Before that they were the target of the New Athiest grifters which was the progenitor of the “facts and logic” bullshit. People are pointing out good reasons why that culture was considered a good target, but its important to realize that there was also a coordinated campaign
Internet was initially only accessible by military and academia, its never not been reactionary
I’m gonna introspect here. Most of the other explanations in this thread I agree with, but I’m gonna focus inwards on the left.
The left abandoned geek culture spaces and allowed chuddery to take root unimpeded. We have a tendency to leave spaces to create our own instead of fighting over them. There are pros and cons to this, but one clear con imo is that we forfeit any culture wars before they’re even fought. Sure, we also get banned and whatnot, but we don’t (for example) use this place to coordinate raids on ! mainstream spaces the way 4chan and like do.
I also think there was a general distain for geek culture as a hyper capitalist expression of the lumpenproletariat. To what extent that is true is up for debate imo. There are still many anti-capitalist expressions from gamers and the like, but there are not enough leftist voices to frame them as such inside those communities. Recently we’ve had some discussions here about how abandoning and looking down on the rural working poor (so called “rednecks”) and I think that’s a really apt comparison.
The far right put in the work and ideological effort to fight over gamers and geeks, the left did not. As other comrades here have pointed out, any space without a leftist presence automatically drifts right.
A big reason for this is that left spaces need to be very tightly moderated in ways that right wing spaces don’t need to be. Part of that is because left spaces are going to disproportionately represent bipoc folk, queer folk, disabled people, etc. And they’re not going to stick around in spaces where they have to constantly defend their own existence. It’s already enough of a hassle in daily life, so why go on a forum that’s full of slurs or go to a nerd con that’s full of smelly dudes who’ll say you’re the incorrect race to do cosplay? So people drift away, find their own communities where they feel safer.
Right wing spaces have the privilege of speaking to the dominant ideological authority already. Unless they’re pulling out actual Nazi flags or doing salutes, they come across as fairly normal to everyday, uninitiated people who don’t think about theory all day. Whereas leftist perspectives in the west aren’t as common, and usually at best it’s the very milquetoast progressive liberal sort of stuff. You say there’s not enough leftist voices to frame the narrative within gamer communities, well there aren’t much in the way of leftist voices in general. It’s becoming more common to express anti-capitalist sentiment, and thankfully among younger people, but it’s still fairly rare within the west and English speaking spaces.
Yeah, so the right already has the home field advantage here. Modern nerd culture can be traced back to things like Star Trek conventions in people’s basements, or ham radio enthusiasts. It started off with moderately affluent white guys who had access to Usenet in the early 80s who were prime targets for the burgeoning commercialism of little plastic trinkets. It was only a matter of time before those beginnings would coalesce into functionally coherent fascist rhetoric because of the inherent overlap with the social base for white, settler fascism.
I think everything you say is accurate. It is good that we have established a space for leftists and all people seeking to be free from discrimination and oppression. In the model of Mao’s protracted people’s war, we have completed phase one: securing a revolutionary base area.
The next difficult step is to step out of the revolutionary base area, agitating, debating, fighting, until other areas become the new revolutionary bases. This is the hard part, and my overall point is that we can’t get complacent and just vibe in the existing revolutionary bases.
I know lots of comrades are out there in the real world doing this, but internet culture is not exactly the real world and I think we can do a better job of getting out there.
How do you think we could do that? It’s hard to do much of anything in capitalist controlled spaces.
I’d love to take back these spaces cause they can provide us with an opportunity to make some of the things in nerd culture better cause we can remove all the liberalism from it.
they’re not going to stick around in spaces where they have to constantly defend their own existence.
But they don’t. Ultimately they’re just words on a screen. Even 4chan allows people to hide posts/threads, filter by username, words and so on. People are bothered by those things because they grew up in “very tightly moderated” spaces both online and in real life, where others removed “bad words” so they never had to learn how to control their emotions or develop “thick skin” in response to them. I’m not defending the usage of slurs, but over-moderation creates another extreme where the mere sight of a word makes people emotionally distressed. People love to fantasize about revolution and “seizing power”, but you think those who oppose us are going to use only nice words and be polite?
People love to fantasize about revolution and “seizing power”, but you think those who oppose us are going to use only nice words and be polite?
This is pinging ‘false equivalence’ for me. The revolution is going to be a harrowing meat-grinder of an event of which few of us will survive it and will be expected to give everything we have for it. Nerd spaces are not that deep; and do you really think I’m going to just be cool with a dozen crackers in a Halo lobby popping off every settler-crafted slur in the book? I don’t get ‘distressed’ when some cracker piece of shit hard-r’s me; I get furious. I don’t play games, I don’t watch movies, I don’t do anything entertainment/leisure-coded with the intent for fury. So of course I’m going to cut myself off from the average cracker Gamer™ to try and forge a space of my own. “Ultimately just words on a screen” is so Very much not the take. A racist online is going to be a racist IRL, and a racist IRL is a threat IRL.
“Ultimately just words on a screen” is so Very much not the take.
But that’s what they are. Because the only power those words have is the power you allow them to have.
A racist online is going to be a racist IRL, and a racist IRL is a threat IRL.
They’re not an (immediate) threat to you, by virtue of being very far away and not knowing where you live. They could be a threat to someone else, someone they share a physical space with, sure, but removing them from an online space doesn’t make that person disappear or make them less racist, if anything it’ll make them hide their racism better. Isn’t that more dangerous?
“Being racist” is not an immutable characteristic people have. The best (non-violent) way to get rid of racists is to expose them to the people/cultures/ethnicities they are racist against. Otherwise they will forge their own insular, racist communities where they will reinforce each others’ racism and push each other to extremes.
cracker Gamer™
That’s a tactic. You can call them slurs too, “cumskin” is a good one. If you let them get to you, then they will know their tactic works. So next time they are losing or want to get their opponent angry (if we’re talking about gaming) then they will just repeat what they did knowing it is successful. Showing them their words have no power might make them rethink their strategy.
and forge a space of my own.
I’m saying you shouldn’t let them kick you out with words. If you’re all gamers in a Halo lobby (to use your example) they have no way of actually removing you from a public lobby, other than getting you angry with their words. But fuck that, make them leave if they don’t like it. After a while of screaming racial slurs they might be the ones who get angry enough to ragequit. Isn’t it preferable that they be the ones who leave and not you?
but removing them from an online space doesn’t make that person disappear or make them less racist, if anything it’ll make them hide their racism better. Isn’t that more dangerous?
Bigots are cowards at heart, and largely they will act on their feelings only to the extent that they believe they have social license to do so. Scared bigots are less dangerous than emboldened bigots.
You think online moderation makes bigots scared? Come on… They hide it cause they don’t want to be banned from platforms. This also makes them able to “infiltrate” spaces if they so wish.
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There are still many anti-capitalist expressions from gamers and the like, but there are not enough leftist voices to frame them as such inside those communities.
I think another aspect that has occurred recently is capital corporations have cloned the socially progressive talking points of the left.
These concessions to progressive politics to court younger consumers are no challenge to the power of capitalism. Throwing corporate sponsorship at BLM, LGBTQ or environmental organisations still keeps real power in corporate hands. Allowing an amount of dissent and protest in non disruptive forms poses no threat to them (Don’t block a motorway and they’ll let you protest as much as you like).
However it does allow the far right to radicalize the geeks. They can be convinced that the SJWs are their enemy rather than the bosses who adopted some SJW points in the name of progress so business can run as usual. Both “sides” are still just an internal contradiction within capitalism.
You hit the jackpot with the second paragraph.
Subcultures are always more extreme expressions of an aspect/aspects of their supercultures.
Internet and geek cultures both, in the Anglosphere, have always been proponents of American Exceptionalism and Liberal Exceptionalism. And both of those things have progressed to fascism.
I’m truly convinced that a huge part of this was moot leaving 4chan in 2015. Nerd culture has always been misogynistic and insular, but it never seemed politically focused until the past 10 years. It used to be more unfocused horribleness. When moot resigned from 4chan, there was a genuine white supremacist plot to gain moderator positions and push fascist rhetoric. It worked. All that ambient horribleness became laser focused and more coherent.
Also probably a lot more to do with material conditions honestly. The fraying economic features of the 2008 recession were never truly fixed. People no longer believe in a future and it became harder for nerd culture to act as an escape. Everyone’s more stressed, more pissed off, and more vocal. With nerd culture the ambient feelings got pushed forward as the things themselves ceased being enough of a draw on their own. More frayed and deranged types started demanding their misogynist, white supremacy be reinforced more aggressively, in every moment, by all media.
Back in the 90s some nazi groups invested 10k in internet propaganda, I figure the internet being so fascistic is just the results of that along with nerds being all sorts of fascistic is just a product of western academia culture to an extent as well.
So, the nerd culture of pre-gamergate had a big streak of the internet atheist movement. I’m not actually sure you could meaningfully say one was separate from the other. An unspoken part of that was libertarianism. Real end-of-history hours. That’s not to say there weren’t non-libertarians in that space, it’s just the default was you were assumed to be white, male, libertarian, and into pop-culture franchises above and beyond ordinary consumptive habits of the general public.
A big part of nerd-dom, promoted by the owners of these franchises themselves, was the competitive consumption of cultural artifacts. The most obvious manifestation of this is large walls of collectibles, pristine in their packaging, which requires a decent amount of disposable income to indulge in. You didn’t have to spend lots of money, of course. You could competitively consume “lore”, which is often free from your local library.
The consumptive practices excluding certain income levels, the hierarchical nature of “who was in”, and the end of history I think explains a lot of reactionary nerds today (even though nerdy stuff has been used to explore emancipatory ideas about queerness, different societies etc… The artists tend to be more woke than the fans/fan leaders).
There is also the idea of scholarly merit and social exclusion. Obviously its a stereotype, but people who lived that (or believe they lived that) became part of the tech start up culture that drove a lot of the wealth in the Anglosphere, especially as decent paid industrial work started to decline. Again, the increase in wealth lends itself to walls of arcade games and reactionary content.
Politics has always been present in the works and in the fan culture, but there was a certain tendency across everything in the 90s and 2000s to think of itself as apolitical and non-ideological.
Nowadays, enough traditional nerds have enough money and clout to direct movie franchises. No longer is it business majors dictating that “audiences wouldn’t understand a lore accurate X-Men movie” or whatever. But the economics of it are the same (or similar).
