Excerpts from “What was the Nerd?”

“Today’s American fascist youth is neither the strapping Aryan jock-patriot nor the skinheaded, jackbooted punk: The fascist millennial is a pasty nerd watching shitty meme videos on YouTube, listening to EDM, and harassing black women on Twitter. Self-styled “nerds” are the core youth vanguard of crypto-populist fascist movements.”

“The nerd probably read Ayn Rand or, at the very least, bought into pseudo-meritocracy and libertarianist “freedom.” From his vantage, social problems are technical ones, merely one “disruption” away from being solved. The sea-steading, millennial-blood-drinking, corporate-sovereignty-advocating tech magnates are their heroes — the quintessential nerd overlords.”

“The nerd appeared in pop culture in the form of a smart but awkward, always well-meaning white boy irrationally persecuted by his implacable jock antagonists in order to subsume and mystify true social conflict — the ones around race, gender, class, and sexuality that shook the country in the 1960s and ’70s — into a spectacle of white male suffering.”

“But the nerd myth — outcast, bullied, oppressed and lonely — persists, nowhere more insistently than in the embittered hearts of the little Mussolinis defending nerd-dom.”

“Now, of course, these films are subjects of much high-profile nostalgia. Netflix’s retro miniseries Stranger Things, for instance, looks back wistfully to the ’80s, re-enchanting the image of nerds as winning underdogs (rather than tyrannical bigots) […] The films celebrated in Stranger Things as fun 1980s camp at the time were functioning as reactionary cultural retrenchment: They reflected Hollywood’s collusion in the Reaganite project of rationalizing and justifying a host of initiatives: privatization, deregulation, the offloading risk to individuals by cutting safety nets and smashing labor unions.”

“As a social character, the nerd exists to deny the significance (if not the existence) of race, class, and gender oppression.”

“The nerds, on the other hand, are shit-posting for a new American Reich. The nerd/jock distinction has always been a myth designed to hide social conflict and culturally re-center white male subjectivity. Now that the nerds have fully arrived, their revenge looks uglier than anything the jocks ever dreamed.”

“Willie Osterweil is a writer, editor and agitator based in Brooklyn. Willie is an editor at the New Inquiry, and is the author of In Defense of Looting, coming out from Verso Press in Spring 2017.”