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 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.