Oliver Bateman Does the WorkVerified account

“The people I like aren’t nerds and are Good. In fact, they are jocks.” This is how online thinking does the work. Identify some categories. One category is bad, actually. The other category is good, actually. Don’t like it? Wait a few years and hot-take it the other direction

I’ve followed this line of takes for the past decade, because it’s so inconsequential-seeming yet eventually evolved into a kind of against-the-grain dogma included in the NYT. The prevailing wisdom today is that the weak are the strongest, but not so for nerds. They are Suspect

There’s a lot going on here, a lot to unpack. There has been a lengthy push to evolve male-presenting types into “soft” and “kind” individuals, “nice guys” if you will, but this kind of assumed weakness (an affected higher voice, etc.) secretly raises alarms. So it is attacked

This is an interesting line of takes because they have gone all the way round: the nerd has either become incel or weak in a socially acceptable way, but has become socially and perhaps morally unacceptable in the process. Their pretense to weakness offends people around them

The “nerd” as archetypal weak figure simply got its comeuppance sooner because the disgust with nerds writing their own “nerd entitlement” scripts from the late 70s on occasioned a re-evaluation as the nerd as underdog (the underdog attempting to become overdog of the weak)

As nerd culture fused with pop culture, the nerd’s true face became known to all, but others have adopted this approach and, though they appear to be virtuous one eyed jacks now, public opinion will eventually turn on them “as the takes turn”. This is the Work