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It's interesting that your two examples are of men whose early adulthoods were shaped by large scale global conflicts, yet you totally dismiss the author's idea

It's interesting that your two examples are of men whose early adulthoods were shaped by large scale global conflicts, yet you totally dismiss the author's idea that the easy rewards of high status and pay in tech could lure young thinkers into a kind of permanent adolescent 'nerd culture' bubble (reminiscent of a kind of a nightmare glass bead game, centered around the subset of mass media that smart kids enjoyed in the 70s/80s/90s - endless remakes, merchandise, collectables, conventions). Camus/Hemingway were 'intellectual' in the sense that they sort to engage with the wider world, to explore and to understand and to improve it. 'Productivity' culture gurus are usually not 'intellectual' in that sense at all - and they are often caricatured as having a narrow focus in their work, reductive worldviews, social difficulties, and little compassion for other people. I'd argue that productivity culture is actually tied to nerd culture (both are rooted in the huge rewards that big tech has paid for insect-like specialization) and therefore just as anti-intellectual. People are 'guilted' into learning to code, side hustles, day trading, open-source software, streaming, extra-curriculars, making an app, creating content, etc - not studying political economy, becoming a journalist, joining a political organization.

gabriel666smith 3mo ago
> your two examples are of men whose early adulthoods were shaped by large scale global conflicts, yet you totally dismiss the author's idea that the easy rewards of high status and pay in tech could lure young thinkers into a kind of permanent adolescent 'nerd culture' Yes - the former are high-risk actions motivated (at least partially) by a collectivist urge to help other people. The latter is significantly lower risk, and generally individualistically motivated, which is what I think you're pointing towards. I used those examples specifically to highlight that people, especially 'intellectuals', can hold intellectual beliefs very strongly, often at significant risk to themselves, and that those beliefs are often partially sparked by geopolitical events. The author's implied argument is that the soft gaze of the MCU might either avert beliefs of that strength, or render them impotent. Or indeed prevent the geopolitical events which partially formed those beliefs from being of interest, and of cultural importance (or happening at all, I suppose, like when Superman fights Hitler in the WW2-era DC stuff). This attributes a hell of a lot of power to contemporary "nerd culture" which I simply do not think it has. It's a relatively safe argument to dismiss because it is deeply silly. Not least because if this imagined intellectual's positions were so flimsy that they'd go weak at the knees after a wink from Wonder Woman or Wolverine, I'd be skeptical of the person's intellectual capacity in the first place. To frame it as something akin to a lost generation of intellectual capacity is laughable - it's nothing at all like, for example, the intellectual work we lost to the AIDs epidemic. We're talking about literal baby movies. Do you mean that you think "studying political economy, becoming a journalist, joining a political organization" was equivalent in that it was also guilt-motivated, at a time when you think these attributes were seen as of higher cultural virtue, and we have since culturally become more individualistic? I'm not sure I fully followed, but that would perhaps be a more tractable idea, I think.
- skew-aberration 3mo ago
  I had a more generous reading of the article. Let's say a nerd is an intelligent but introverted person who shies away from the world, focusing their energy on a narrow range of self-centered interests. At the office they work hard decreasing page load speed by 10%, then they go home and play videos games, watch MCU movies, etc. In the past, this kind of one-dimensional inward-looking person was widely ridiculed as selfish, weak, a moral failure and an embarrassment. Unattractive and uninspiring. Perhaps even a genuine threat to society. Notes from the underground, Ivan Karamazov, Faust, Glass bead game, etc. I was reading 'nerd culture' as the celebration and acceptance of this kind of man in the current zeitgeist. The point is that the heroes in the MCU stories didn't have to outgrow their nerd phase through virtues like courage, responsibility, duty - instead science made them into men. Peter Parker is bit by a spider, The Hulk got irradiated, Captain America got injected, Tony Stark's invention is a literal shell which superficially turns him into Iron Man and protects him from consequences/reality. Hemingway travelled to a war zone and got shot - he's the polar opposite of these characters, and a far better example for young men. RE guilt -> I was actually saying that productivity culture as you describe it has some overlap with nerd culture as OP sees it, and arguing that P.C. is also anti(faux?)-intellectual in the same sense. But yes, I do think that the high esteem those virtues were once held in influenced the lives people chose to live.
  - gabriel666smith 3mo ago
    I was being a tad intentionally ungenerous for fun. Thanks for taking the time to clarify. Your "science made them men" point feels astute, compact, and one that feels familiar, as if I've come across it before in some form, relating to an older context, but I'm not sure where. If it's not an original take, I'd really like to read whoever you read it in. It's very sharp. More broadly, "getting MKULTRA'd is an epic path toward maturity" is a deeply / darkly funny message.
    - cindyllm 3mo ago
      [dead]
    - 3mo ago

gabriel666smith 3mo ago

> your two examples are of men whose early adulthoods were shaped by large scale global conflicts, yet you totally dismiss the author's idea that the easy rewards of high status and pay in tech could lure young thinkers into a kind of permanent adolescent 'nerd culture' Yes - the former are high-risk actions motivated (at least partially) by a collectivist urge to help other people. The latter is significantly lower risk, and generally individualistically motivated, which is what I think you're pointing towards. I used those examples specifically to highlight that people, especially 'intellectuals', can hold intellectual beliefs very strongly, often at significant risk to themselves, and that those beliefs are often partially sparked by geopolitical events. The author's implied argument is that the soft gaze of the MCU might either avert beliefs of that strength, or render them impotent. Or indeed prevent the geopolitical events which partially formed those beliefs from being of interest, and of cultural importance (or happening at all, I suppose, like when Superman fights Hitler in the WW2-era DC stuff). This attributes a hell of a lot of power to contemporary "nerd culture" which I simply do not think it has. It's a relatively safe argument to dismiss because it is deeply silly. Not least because if this imagined intellectual's positions were so flimsy that they'd go weak at the knees after a wink from Wonder Woman or Wolverine, I'd be skeptical of the person's intellectual capacity in the first place. To frame it as something akin to a lost generation of intellectual capacity is laughable - it's nothing at all like, for example, the intellectual work we lost to the AIDs epidemic. We're talking about literal baby movies. Do you mean that you think "studying political economy, becoming a journalist, joining a political organization" was equivalent in that it was also guilt-motivated, at a time when you think these attributes were seen as of higher cultural virtue, and we have since culturally become more individualistic? I'm not sure I fully followed, but that would perhaps be a more tractable idea, I think.

skew-aberration 3mo ago
I had a more generous reading of the article. Let's say a nerd is an intelligent but introverted person who shies away from the world, focusing their energy on a narrow range of self-centered interests. At the office they work hard decreasing page load speed by 10%, then they go home and play videos games, watch MCU movies, etc. In the past, this kind of one-dimensional inward-looking person was widely ridiculed as selfish, weak, a moral failure and an embarrassment. Unattractive and uninspiring. Perhaps even a genuine threat to society. Notes from the underground, Ivan Karamazov, Faust, Glass bead game, etc. I was reading 'nerd culture' as the celebration and acceptance of this kind of man in the current zeitgeist. The point is that the heroes in the MCU stories didn't have to outgrow their nerd phase through virtues like courage, responsibility, duty - instead science made them into men. Peter Parker is bit by a spider, The Hulk got irradiated, Captain America got injected, Tony Stark's invention is a literal shell which superficially turns him into Iron Man and protects him from consequences/reality. Hemingway travelled to a war zone and got shot - he's the polar opposite of these characters, and a far better example for young men. RE guilt -> I was actually saying that productivity culture as you describe it has some overlap with nerd culture as OP sees it, and arguing that P.C. is also anti(faux?)-intellectual in the same sense. But yes, I do think that the high esteem those virtues were once held in influenced the lives people chose to live.
- gabriel666smith 3mo ago
  I was being a tad intentionally ungenerous for fun. Thanks for taking the time to clarify. Your "science made them men" point feels astute, compact, and one that feels familiar, as if I've come across it before in some form, relating to an older context, but I'm not sure where. If it's not an original take, I'd really like to read whoever you read it in. It's very sharp. More broadly, "getting MKULTRA'd is an epic path toward maturity" is a deeply / darkly funny message.
  - cindyllm 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - 3mo ago