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The Fluctuating Coolness of Geekdom

~softwarepagan

I know I've written quite a bit about "geek culture" on here in the past, but it is a phenomenon I find myself thinking about a lot, as I feel I had a front-row seat to the entire odyssey that was the rise and fall of geek culture. Before the 2000s, every part of geek culture was considered deeply uncool, both the aesthetic and cultural aspects as well as the . However, in the late 2000s and into the early-to-mid 2010s, it seems geek culture enjoyed a brief window of being THE cool thing (see: Felicia Day's song "Now I'm the One That's Cool).

At some point in the mid 2010s, however, only the most surface-level pop-culture aspects of geek culture (such as gaming, movies, superheroes etc) became simply a part of culture-at-large, while the parts of geek culture that made it truly "geek culture," that is to say the countercultural streak, the refusal to walk in lock-step with the rest of society, the determination to actually *learn* and *understand* things, that has become even more taboo than it was before the 2000s.

As an example, my commitment to FOSS has been described as a "dangerous dog whistle" before by people who would describe themselves as vaguely pertaining to geek culture, but who no longer believe in challenging the official narrative on any subject, such as corporate spyware. Indeed, we are seeing the official narrative start to paint any opposition to corporate spyware as somehow suspicious and something to be combatted.

Anyway, just some Saturday morning thoughts.

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~ew wrote (thread):

Thanks to my private goddess of bitly nirvana I have never been "cool", or "geek" --- don't even know how to recognize geekness. Checking wikipedia did not help. I can say, that a fellow traveller called me "hardcore nerd" a few years back. Although I'm old enough, I never participated in some culture netnews/irc/bulletin board/forum/facebook/twitter/whatever thing. I'm boring, and that keeps me out of trouble.

In other words: I have no clue, what you are trying to say.

~inquiry wrote (thread):

I don't know whether to consider myself lucky or deprived to have never gotten with the "culture" despite possibly qualifying for it in the "interests leaning tech-ward" sense.

I say "lucky" in that I swear "culture" invariably attracts fundamentalists who degrade what was simply a culture into a religion of sorts.

As for me and my house, we shall serve The Tech! :-)

~indoors wrote (thread):

Ironically, describing anything as a "dog whistle" is a huge red flag.

What you describe is typical of the incorporate and destroy mentality. Dumb something down enough to be digestible by the norms, then other anyone outside of the harmless version.

RE people defending invasion of privacy: even if an opinion has a pulse, it can still be a bot opinion.

~tffb wrote (thread):

I always felt those averse to spy/malware awareness and general, common sense personal security/privacy/safety practices to be ignorant of life in the 21st Century. That is, those who always say "I have nothing to hide" or "I could print my texts and emails, I don't give a shit" are blatantly ignorant, reckless with their own privacy/dignity online, and should just subtract themself from the online privacy/safety narrative, because "I don't give a shit" is not an argument against, nor defense for, anything at all (because them giving a shit does not register with what I do or don't do online).

So being "into" FOSS and small projects and sustainable software/hardware, expansion of programming knowledge, broadening one's skillsets, protecting privacy (in general) and also being off/away from a multinational corporation's members/customer/user books, is nothing one should shy away from or be hesitant in discussing openly, proudly.

Just my take