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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Incels and women hating are and will lead one farther down the road of reactionary beliefs
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
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
gamergate (2014) was unironically the mainstream debut of the alt-right.
I think you might wanna ask Hexbear… their experts in it…
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.
Enough people got online to ask the original nerds to stop calling women femoids and rather than adapt they reflexively doubled down.
Rinse and repeat for 10 years.
Internet was initially only accessible by military and academia, its never not been reactionary
Back in 2009, the unfortunate precipitation of the infamous Endless Eight arc caused many 4chan posters to abandon Haruhiism and drift afloat in a position of moral vulnerability which the Nazis quickly moved to exploit </s>
Anime Pope, is that you? /sus
It’s a violent (over)reaction to 2013-2016 SJW culture. Now hating women and minorities makes you “based” and not a weirdo.
Nerd culture saw itself as white (or certain east-asian), male, middle class plus and in the developed world. It was bound to devolve into reactionary thought. The only pro I see is its tendency to be accepting or at least ambivalent towards transpeople, even 4chan (outside of /pol/) seems to be more accepting towards trans than their political opinions of everything else.
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).
