@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.