I’m Concerned for Geek and Nerd Culture

In so many ways, this is the best time to be a nerd.  When I was growing up, the title of geek or nerd was an insult, a degradation, a put down.  Now we live in a world where Weird Al Yankovich is a number one top seller, and geek culture has entered the mainstream.  It’s even popular to call yourself a nerd.

And that’s where my concern lies.

Any time something becomes popular, people want to emulate it, even if they don’t care about it.  It becomes all about conformity.  Comic Con is a great example.  Once a hive for those of us who enjoy stories that were off the beaten path, it’s now become the place for the mainstream to come see celebrities.

We don’t want to exclude anyone, of course, but it does seem less than genuine when Entertainment Tonight and their wannabes are hash tagging themselves as “total nerds” when they’ve really just followed fad after fad, and they will leave when this one fades.

But my concern runs deeper still.  To me, one of the major definitions of nerd and geek culture was giving a chance to the more alternative art forms.  While everyone else was following Debbie Gibson and Tiffany and whatever nameless movies were the latest fads in the late ‘80s, I was reading The Dark Knight, watching Indiana Jones, and listening to Weird Al.  What was the common string in all these things and others I was into?  They broke new ground.  Only Spike Jones had done anything remotely close to Weird Al.  Indiana Jones was an entirely new invention; it wasn’t based on books or old TV shows.  And even The Dark Knight, though it was based on Batman who had been around for 40 years, it was an entirely new take on him, and superheroes in general.  The entire genre has blossomed from that.

The point is, we were willing to try new things.  That’s really what made a “nerd” or a “geek” more than something being cerebral or fantasy-oriented.  Today, however, it seems as though few self-proclaimed nerds and geeks are willing to try anything new.  They are stuck repeating the same things over and over.  For instance, I took my new series Relic Worlds to the Indiana Jones fan club at Comic Con.  It’s inspired by the series, and has elements of Lucas’s other great creation, Star Wars.  Those movies caused me to grow up and want to do something new, though similar.  Instead of giving it a try, the fan club showed no interest.  What would have happened if our parents had given the same chance to Raiders of the Lost Arc in 1980?  If, instead of giving a chance to this new movie by these aspiring filmmakers, they were too busy obsessing over something nearly 35 years old?  If they had been like current fans, they would have been so busy obsessing over something from 1945 that Raiders would have been a failure, and would not exist today in the lexicon of great adventure movies.

And the same is true across the board.  It’s the reason why Hollywood and publishers are obsessing on toys from the past.  It’s not that there aren’t good ideas out there.  I know of many authors and filmmakers who are striving to be heard; and many of them are in the areas that geek and nerd culture would love.  But people are so obsessed with what’s in the past they’re not willing to give a chance to what’s in the present.

So this is a call to all nerds and geeks out there.  Find your roots.  And by that, I don’t mean your old comic books and toys still in their wrappers.  I mean, remember that what made all the things you enjoy from the past famous is because people gave them a chance.  And there are new works that are equally great just waiting to be found.  Give them a chance.  Stop looking backward all the time.