I guess I grew up with a different definition of "nerd". I was a child mostly of the '80s and I don't remember a "nerd culture" like what seems so oppressive now.
@kara_dreamer I didn't think of it as "culture." I just had friends who liked what I liked and wanted to build on it or just have fun picking at it.
What I see of modern day "nerd culture" makes me want to go back in time and try harder at the jock thing. 😐
@amylsacks yeah, I just don't remember so much obsession with a nerdy "pecking order" until I got to college. Different people were into different things. Being the "wrong" sort of nerd was something I started to see on Usenet in the '90s.
@kara_dreamer You may be right that some of the worrying stuff was always there, but... yeah, either the internet amplifies all that... Or I was just so ecstatic to have a few like-minded people around me that I didn't notice it back then.
@kara_dreamer Like, I know that obnoxious racist/sexist nerds have existed for a long time-- there were problems with them in the very early science fiction fandoms, for instance-- but there definitely was this marketing shift in the '90s that was all about making nerd things "edgy" / possessing of masculine cred. And I blame that for a lot of the today's toxic nerd culture.
@listelian I'm also going to do something really silly but typical of me here and blame "Babylon 5" :p well, not _blame_ it exactly, but point it out as a example of something that I first really started to notice in the '90s, which was turf wars between bands of competing nerds defending commercial properties. Straczynski deliberately courted nerd fans on Compuserve and then Usenet, playing up the superiority and sophistication of his product compared to Paramount's, and helped create a nasty fan schism. And that sort of thing's only gotten worse.
I'm sure it was all there, I just didn't see it yet