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1. 🎄 Rick 🎄 (praxisofevil@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 17-Jun-2024 15:10:27 JST 🎄 Rick 🎄
   Watching The Social Network for the first time in over a decade it's apparent that the 00s was a time where we really thought being extremely smart was cool and very sought after. Zuck was a dorky hacker who cobbled together a billion dollar website one night when he was drunk in his dorm. Now guys like him are frozen out of elite colleges and are relegated to streaming themselves doing modded Super Mario speedruns so scholarships can be given to subliterate niggers. What passes for "smart" these days is whoever can repeat regime propaganda in the most ironic way.
   • 🎄 Rick 🎄 (praxisofevil@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 17-Jun-2024 15:10:25 JST 🎄 Rick 🎄

     in reply to

     • Remi
     • Festive Bridgelurker Kip
     @Remi @JedKron1248 This meme is older than me
   • Remi (remi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 17-Jun-2024 15:10:25 JST Remi

     in reply to

     • Festive Bridgelurker Kip
     @PraxisOfEvil @JedKron1248 I was just thinking that a zoomer wouldn't even understand what it's making fun of.
     
     How do you even begin to explain that there used to be a TV channel that tried to be MTV but with video games.
     luithe likes this.
   • 🎄 Rick 🎄 (praxisofevil@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 17-Jun-2024 15:10:25 JST 🎄 Rick 🎄

     in reply to

     • Remi
     • Festive Bridgelurker Kip
     @Remi @JedKron1248 2007 was a wild time, videogames were playable and gamers were getting pandered to instead of shamed. Little did we know that our desire for ethics in games journalism would reawaken global fascism.
     luithe and New Janny in Town like this.
   • 🎄 Rick 🎄 (praxisofevil@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 17-Jun-2024 15:10:26 JST 🎄 Rick 🎄

     in reply to

     • Festive Bridgelurker Kip
     @JedKron1248 I think your response was very well thought out, I'll try to respond to it in a non retarded way.
     
     Was being a nerd ever cool? Maybe not, and your point about how the dynamics of nerd/jock got flipped in the 90s stands. Being a pit stained basement dweller playing Warhammer with your dork friends wasn't "cool" at the time, but a lot of my generation remembers it fondly.
     
     In the context of the 2000s in which the film was based there was sort of an "underground" appeal to nerdiness, and this was aided by the internet which was still relatively new to consumers at the time. There was a lot of optimism surrounding it, the possibities seemed endless and guys who could code or edit videos or make memes moved the "nerd" culture forward and normies dug it.
     
     But nerdiness got co-opted by less socially awkward people and nerd stuff like Star Wars was mass adopted. Cool people were claiming the title of nerd like Rachel Dolezal claiming the title of black. Soon the original nerd audiences for such things were abandoned to cater to new demographics. Nerd is practically a meaningless term now.
     
     Crypto was a nerd thing, downloading music was a nerd thing, running emulators was a nerd thing, modding games was a nerd thing. People just removed the nerd from these practices.
     
     But before 2016 there was a different zeitgeist around awkward dorks like Zucc crowded around computers than there is today, if the movie had come out 5-6 years later people would've been calling him an incel.
     
     So, to answer your question, Nerds weren't cool but what they created was.
   • Remi (remi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 17-Jun-2024 15:10:26 JST Remi

     in reply to

     • Festive Bridgelurker Kip
     @PraxisOfEvil @JedKron1248
     luithe likes this.
   • Festive Bridgelurker Kip (jedkron1248@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 17-Jun-2024 15:10:27 JST Festive Bridgelurker Kip

     in reply to

     @PraxisOfEvil I haven't workshopped this, so take it with a grain of salt.

     Did we ever, truly, think being a dork was cool? Or was it a stereotype astroturfed into likability by the usual suspects? In older movies (50s, 60s), the heroes were unabashedly, unashamedly masculine and aryan: Cowboys, war heroes, strong and smart men able to think and take a punch.

     However, as time crawled on, that aesthetic shifted from the protagonist to the antagonist. Sure you had the meathead bully archetypes in older films, but the protagonists were only slightly less athletic, if any. In 90s cinema on, a noticeable undercurrent for the underdog began to develop, and that underdog increasingly was weasely, squirrely, and dorky. The merits of a hero stopped being in their physical and moral prowess, it shifted to their intellectual acumen as the determining factor for ultimate victory.

     Not discounting your point, I agree that the state of our intelligent young men is pitiable and wrong. Men who should be revolutionizing industries are instead forced to create working computers in Minecraft. But that attraction to the "intellectual" seems to me to be an intentional substitution for the classic White hero, successful due to the combination of strength of mind, body, and morals. Jews in media replaced the unobtainable-for-them righteous White with a character that they could embody more easily: a morally devious intellectual successful only through scheme and happenstance against a physically superior, but mentally inferior (White) foe.

     Like I said, this is a half-baked thought. I doubt ((Zuckerberg)) would ever be frozen out of an elite college, but the White guy smarter, but less connected than him? Straight to modded Mario, with the specter of HRT looming behind him, waiting to claim another tormented victim.