No, ‘nerds’ and their technologies are not going to save the world

A soft coup is taking place in the United States right now. Under Donald Trump’s second administration, the nation is being reshaped and rebuilt. Elon Musk, Trump’s billionaire special adviser and head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is in charge of this change, not Trump himself. And in Musk’s America, one demographic, “nerds,” seems to have taken center stage and are quickly gaining power.

Indeed, Marko Elez, Gavin Kliger, Edward Coristine, and Marko Elez, who have taken control of multitrillion-dollar government systems, easily made up Musk’s mendacious band of merry, young white and white-adjacent acolytes.

In the 1990s, the Internet Age and the Information Age had already seen “nerds” become billionaires and gained widespread respect and admiration for delivering the world’s technologies that transform lives. These awkward, unattractive men with limited social skills but a strong desire for technology and STEM. We were repeatedly reminded that nerds were the ones who first gave us PCs and iMacs before iPhones and Androids.

Creatives have portrayed nerds like Apple’s Steve Jobs, Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Oppenheimer (1923), and Mark Zuckerberg as underdogs in numerous articles published in tech magazines and in films like Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Oppenheimer (1923), and The Social Network (2010). Such nerdy visionaries have long been portrayed in mainstream media as complex individuals who are desperate to save the world and improve it.

The three-part documentary Triumph of the Nerds was broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK and PBS in the US three decades ago. Long-time technology journalist Robert X Cringe cited the computer revolution that the nerd set underwent between 1975 and 1995 as evidence that “the most amazing thing of all was that it happened by accident because a bunch of disenfranchised nerds wanted to impress their friends.”

The idea that the robber barons of the late 20th century accumulated enormous wealth almost accident-free while trying to save the world is a ridiculous lie may already be deeply embedded in our culture. Particularly given the iron-fisted manner in which many “nerd billionaires” — especially Jobs and Bill Gates — are thought to run their capitalist businesses.

It is obvious that the tech-savvy billionaire class wants to control the flow of truth in addition to the heavy-handed censorship that billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong have used against the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times in recent months.

In Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) said to Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland) and his group of white South African mercenaries, “Well, well, it’s the master race. It’s the master race.” This is a much better description of the “nerds” who came to rule America under Trump.

This statement goes beyond Musk’s dreadful path to becoming a US citizen through South Africa and Canada. Similar to the South African henchmen in Lethal Weapon 2, tech nerd billionaires like Musk and the people he has worked for DOGE believe in eugenics, racism, and other misogynistic, queer, and racial paradigms. Yes, many of the Musk haters are engineers who can write for and contribute to Starlink, SpaceX, and Tesla projects that lead to significant and valuable discoveries and inventions for humanity. However, they also repost tweets that refer to a woman as a “huzz” or say, “I just want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask” on X and other social media platforms. They are not exactly role models for any workforce or multicultural democracy. And they don’t seem to care about improving the world for anyone other than themselves, much like white men generally do. When, in reality, white men continue to be the main demographic in this economic sector, they would agree with Zuckerberg’s absurd claim that the tech industry needs more “masculine energy.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, I once participated in the computer-crazy nerd community. Before moving on to becoming a writer and academic historian, I first studied computer science at the University of Pittsburgh in my eighth grade year, then I took Pascal in my eleventh grade year. I spent two years working in Pitt’s computer labs as a work-study student. I observed as my equally geeky coworkers made jokes about our “computer illiterate” classmates, including the frequent use of the r-word. I observed my male counterparts rubbing up too much against the women who needed their assistance with computer issues. And during one of my final three months on the job, a coworker groped me twice while I was still working and received sexual and racial harassment from an older, white woman.

In a movie, social awkwardness can be easily depicted as endearing and innocent. In a society that socially defaults to racist, misogynistic, queerphobic, and xenophobic behavior, it is rare if ever to be “sweet.” In a white male supremacist society, whether or not, all white men have a metric tonne of racial and gender privilege, which makes them no different from “cool” white men when left unchecked. Gilbert is being asked, “Why?” by Booger. Is there a penis on her? In Revenge of the Nerds, Musk makes a transphobic reference to his friend’s inability to date, which is not very different from Musk’s claim that he “lost” his “son” to “the woke mind virus” by his estranged transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson.

Additionally, it is believed that the elite nerd elite have always had positive effects on the world. Not when social media addiction has caused depression, anxiety, and isolation in millions of younger Americans. Not with a brand-new generation of American men abusing girls and women through image-based sexual abuse. Not at all when people who are unwilling to practice critical thinking, media literacy, and writing skills turn to AI plagiarism machines (which isn’t true artificial intelligence, by any means).

Being a cool athlete versus a dictatorial, socially awkward pencil neck is truly a distinction in the world of white male privilege. Nerds and their technological advancements were only intended to improve and empower their respective worlds. No one in any other billionaire nerd camp has ever accessed Apple or Amazon’s offshore accounts and redistributed billions of dollars to regular Americans out of their wealth using their talents. Additionally, they have not eliminated every student’s student debt in the nation. These nerds ultimately also want wealth and power from the underprivileged.

Source: Aljazeera