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Honestly I think all the think pieces about "Toxic Nerd Culture" and such are a bunch of bull. It's easy to go after it because 50 years of culture has told us it's okay to go after it and the people who get into it. Yet here on this same page we see sports and sports fans being just as bad, nay worse, than what some bigot Star Wars fan said on twitter. It wasn't nerds who elected trump. And when Kaepernick had the audacity to politely and silently protest black people being murdered by the cops, It was Middle America that had a collective aneurism. But there are no big think pieces on how evil and childish sports fans can be. Indeed drunkenly running around naked painted in your teams colors is lauded as being an example of true fandom. All the issues with racist/sexist/otherwise bigoted nerds aren't because these things are inherently more toxic, it's because all of America is dealing with an explosion of open bigotry by those who took Obama daring to get elected while Black as the final straw. The media spent the 90's convincing White America that racism was over (it wasn't) and covering up the trouble bubbling under the surface. Then 9/11 happens and it's okay to hate the other again. And once it's okay to hate Muslims/Arabs for their race, why not openly hate blacks again? All this stuff saying nerds are inherently bigoted incel untersmench I thin are really just people creating a scapegoat so they can ignore the very real and serious problem White America has in its entirety.
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Feb 17, 2019 12:14
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Source yr quotes.
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Feb 17, 2019 12:32
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Not to mention eagerly erasing all the nonwhite and queer people who are into and contribute to nerd culture; ironically, apparently those don't count as 'real' nerds, only straight white males can be considered representative of subcultures, and must be subjugated to finally allow the entrance of outsiders for the very first time. The battles are re-fought over and over with all previous progress erased. Finally, a woman superhero! Finally, a black superhero! Did you hear some nerds on the internet are mad and not purchasing the product and/or service? Purchase it three times for every purchase they do not make! Ghost Leviathan has issued a correction as of 12:40 on Feb 17, 2019 |
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Feb 17, 2019 12:37
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galagazombie posted:And when Kaepernick had the audacity to politely and silently protest black people being murdered by the cops, It was Middle America that had a collective aneurism. i wouldn't limit this sort of stuff to "middle america."
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Feb 17, 2019 17:10
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Oh cool, we have a hell thread now
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Feb 17, 2019 19:06
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galagazombie posted:Honestly I think all the think pieces about "Toxic Nerd Culture" and such are a bunch of bull. It's easy to go after it because 50 years of culture has told us it's okay to go after it and the people who get into it. Yet here on this same page we see sports and sports fans being just as bad, nay worse, than what some bigot Star Wars fan said on twitter. It wasn't nerds who elected trump. And when Kaepernick had the audacity to politely and silently protest black people being murdered by the cops, It was Middle America that had a collective aneurism. But there are no big think pieces on how evil and childish sports fans can be. Indeed drunkenly running around naked painted in your teams colors is lauded as being an example of true fandom. All the issues with racist/sexist/otherwise bigoted nerds aren't because these things are inherently more toxic, it's because all of America is dealing with an explosion of open bigotry by those who took Obama daring to get elected while Black as the final straw. The media spent the 90's convincing White America that racism was over (it wasn't) and covering up the trouble bubbling under the surface. Then 9/11 happens and it's okay to hate the other again. And once it's okay to hate Muslims/Arabs for their race, why not openly hate blacks again? All this stuff saying nerds are inherently bigoted incel untersmench I thin are really just people creating a scapegoat so they can ignore the very real and serious problem White America has in its entirety. The real bullshit is calling corporate marketing for children a "culture" in the first place.
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Feb 18, 2019 00:07
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Helsing posted:The real bullshit is calling corporate marketing for children a "culture" in the first place. the thing is that the fandom around this poo poo existed before the marvel movies created our newest corporate media hellscape so its hard to dismiss it entirely
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Feb 18, 2019 01:00
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nerd culture didn't create the concept of consumption as personality, but i imagine that a lot of the media tastemakers came from or were exposed to it before they got freelance gigs writing about how important some "hero punch bad guy" movie isEasy Diff posted:Wait- dibs on guillotining him or dibs on living in him like a tauntaun? get that OUT of my face has issued a correction as of 01:04 on Feb 18, 2019 |
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Feb 18, 2019 01:02
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everything is nerd culture now and it sucks
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Feb 18, 2019 03:02
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01011001 posted:everything is nerd culture now and it sucks yea marvel movies and indecipherable memes are the most normie poo poo ever now. there was a time when it wasnt in the 80s or whatever but the equivalent of those people have had to get into stranger and stranger poo poo to compensate
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Feb 18, 2019 03:13
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Consumption is the only kind of identity most people have left now. Everything's been either co-opted into it or obliterated. You tell people they shouldn't be defined by what they consume, but what else do they have?
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Feb 18, 2019 03:18
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Consumption is the only kind of identity most people have left now. Everything's been either co-opted into it or obliterated. a personality, ideally
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Feb 18, 2019 04:00
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A Big Fuckin Hornet posted:a personality, ideally *gestures towards desk covered with funko pops*
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Feb 18, 2019 06:30
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A Big Fuckin Hornet posted:a personality, ideally Do mental illnesses count?
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Feb 18, 2019 06:34
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:the thing is that the fandom around this poo poo existed before the marvel movies created our newest corporate media hellscape so its hard to dismiss it entirely People were obsessing over Lord of the Rings or making Star Trek fanzines or sending fan-mail to Marvel long before corporate america realized they could commoditize the act of liking a work. Fans getting together and obsessing over shared interests is as old a time. Look at the King Arthur thread over in GB. The Arthurian mythos are a bunch of fan works made by horny medieval dudes. Or how the modern definition of "Canon" was coined by the Sherlock Holmes fandom. The only real difference between then and now is that todays IP owners have put the idea in peoples head that legal ownership of an IP is the one and only metric of whether something is a "real" aspect of the work. This logic then inevitably (and purposefully) transfers that to every commercial product the IP holder bequeaths officialness to. So then you get goddamn Funko Pop's being considered a way to "prove" your a real fan. It's how the fan published Star Wars fanzines of the past get replaced with the "Official Star Trek Magazine" or the Star Trek convention set-up by fans get replaced with ones run by Paramount and CBS.
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Feb 18, 2019 14:24
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Thanks for that huge run on post that doesn't disagree with me or add anything
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Feb 18, 2019 14:44
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I reject the notion that our current incarnation of consumptive-mania-as-ersatz-personality can be sanely related to collaborative mythology built in precapitalist societies like the Arthurian legends. Those weren't a commodity and all your other examples are commodities from our current capitalist hellscape or a slightly earlier incarnation. I mean, the 70s weren't some distant past, hyper marketed cynical products were already the norm, and while I think the Sherlock Holmes stories are an example of maybe a genuine popular phenomenon I can't think of any particularly insane/consumptive patterns of production or purchase associated with them besides the rush to purchase the books themselves (like with many popular serials) I think the specific model of Liberal identity where the specific products you consume are also the basis for your abstract Identity (which determines a lot of things in the context of liberalism) is something that can only really be understood in the context of the late 20th century. I mean, if nothing else, monoculture is basically technologically bound to the extremely recent past
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Feb 18, 2019 15:03
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I guess it depends on how you define "commodity". I'd disagree with you that a ton of old stuff (especially after the printing press) wasn't made at least partially to be sold. Don Quixote got super popular and some dude wrote and sold a sequel to it, then the original author went and wrote his own different sequel and sold it. That to me seems pretty similar to a "commodity".
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Feb 18, 2019 15:22
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I mean commodities existed but the capacity for them to have an intense cultural impact simply didn't, not the least because when Don Quixote was first written most people weren't even literate. you can't have a popular monoculture without a universally accessible form of entertainment you're mistaking things that in the past were essentially a luxury reserved for the nobility, priesthood, and nascent bourgeois of the precapitalist world
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Feb 18, 2019 15:27
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galagazombie posted:People were obsessing over Lord of the Rings or making Star Trek fanzines or sending fan-mail to Marvel long before corporate america realized they could commoditize the act of liking a work. Fans getting together and obsessing over shared interests is as old a time. Look at the King Arthur thread over in GB. The Arthurian mythos are a bunch of fan works made by horny medieval dudes. Or how the modern definition of "Canon" was coined by the Sherlock Holmes fandom. The only real difference between then and now is that todays IP owners have put the idea in peoples head that legal ownership of an IP is the one and only metric of whether something is a "real" aspect of the work. This logic then inevitably (and purposefully) transfers that to every commercial product the IP holder bequeaths officialness to. So then you get goddamn Funko Pop's being considered a way to "prove" your a real fan. It's how the fan published Star Wars fanzines of the past get replaced with the "Official Star Trek Magazine" or the Star Trek convention set-up by fans get replaced with ones run by Paramount and CBS. i think you'll find the real origin of canon to be when a bunch of nerds in 382 ad decided which stories to include in their superhero anthology 
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Feb 18, 2019 15:35
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Plank Walker posted:i think you'll find the real origin of canon to be when a bunch of nerds in 382 ad decided which stories to include in their superhero anthology Rack em bich
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Feb 18, 2019 17:04
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Frog Act posted:I mean commodities existed but the capacity for them to have an intense cultural impact simply didn't, not the least because when Don Quixote was first written most people weren't even literate. you can't have a popular monoculture without a universally accessible form of entertainment but, i mean, who gives two shits about the peasantry? they didn't matter until very recent times and any time a burgher accumulated any sort of access to culture they would just immediately ape the nobility because theirs was the monoculture, the only culture that mattered in any way so sure mass culture didn't exist in the sense that the masses didn't have access, but there was definitely a mass, semi-homogeneous culture amongst the only class of people who mattered in any discernible way. the actions of the nobility, priesthood, and nascent bourgeois (who just aped the nobility) were the culture. peasants hardly even counted as human
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Feb 18, 2019 18:31
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:Rack em bich *crumples paper* <interminable pause> "Clones, ..."
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Feb 18, 2019 19:17
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:Thanks for that huge run on post that doesn't disagree with me or add anything lol
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Feb 20, 2019 03:00
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Plank Walker posted:i think you'll find the real origin of canon to be when a bunch of nerds in 382 ad decided which stories to include in their superhero anthology jesus
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Feb 20, 2019 03:26
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before star wars people cared about poo poo like religion. feel free to use this idea to write the worst phd thesis of all time
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Feb 20, 2019 03:28
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Dante's Inferno is literally christianity fan fiction that most people treat as literal canon
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Feb 20, 2019 06:54
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Farm Frenzy posted:before star wars people cared about poo poo like religion. feel free to use this idea to write the worst phd thesis of all time Webster's defines religion as
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Feb 20, 2019 07:01
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In Australia a statistically significant number of people listed their religion on the census as 'Jedi'
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Feb 20, 2019 07:22
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Nerds aren't people
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Feb 20, 2019 08:10
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Dante's Inferno is literally christianity fan fiction that most people treat as literal canon So is The New Testament
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Feb 20, 2019 10:56
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StuG Jeebus posted:Nerds aren't people But corporations are!
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Feb 20, 2019 11:01
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Ghost Leviathan posted:But corporations are! To get this thread back on track, I think this is an interesting example of effective propaganda laser focused at a very small but influential class. The vast majority of people rightly raise an eyebrow at the absurdity of the claim, and indeed never heard it before it was made law. But so much effort has gone into convincing the 1% thats it's true.
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Feb 20, 2019 11:28
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Farm Frenzy posted:before star wars people cared about poo poo like religion. feel free to use this idea to write the worst phd thesis of all time
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Feb 20, 2019 13:12
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Farm Frenzy posted:ppl make fun of gen xers for not impacting the world but weve spent the last 20 years being forced to endlessly relive their childhoods I feel like you're sort of right but it's not really our gen x childhoods you're being forced to relive. Yes there are a few 80's nostalgia pieces around but I think in reality American culture is stuck somewhere between the late 90's and 2001 and it hasn't really moved a whole lot since then. And because it's America it just gets more refined and more intense. I think 9/11 stunted everything and we are never going to be able to move past it as a society.
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Feb 20, 2019 15:34
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The end of the Cold War dropped American culture into a weird kind of stasis because capitalism is evil and will kill the world, but Americans can’t imagine an alternative to it.
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Feb 20, 2019 15:48
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Some Guy TT posted:weird to think how totally divorced our ideas of historical events are from how actual contemporaries would have seen them southerners actually fighting in the civil war would have been offended if you said the war wasnt about white supremacy given the only other reason a foot soldier had to participate was the promise of not getting shot by recruiters conversely the average northerner would have considered it an insult if you said it was about white supremacy. then jump ahead a century and a half and both side's descendants would be insisting the opposite the lesson of this is that events are incoherent and barely understood at the time and this only gets worse as first hand knowledge recedes.
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Feb 20, 2019 16:11
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Local Weather posted:I feel like you're sort of right but it's not really our gen x childhoods you're being forced to relive. Yes there are a few 80's nostalgia pieces around but I think in reality American culture is stuck somewhere between the late 90's and 2001 and it hasn't really moved a whole lot since then. And because it's America it just gets more refined and more intense. I think 9/11 stunted everything and we are never going to be able to move past it as a society. im extremely skeptical of claims that 9/11 actually changed the trajectory of America as opposed to 9/11 itself being just another symptom of the same underlying process that hollowed out American culture. The same process that made New York the logical target of Middle East terrorism is the same process that turned American culture into a simplified commodified version of itself. SickZip has issued a correction as of 16:32 on Feb 20, 2019 |
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Feb 20, 2019 16:23
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Local Weather posted:I feel like you're sort of right but it's not really our gen x childhoods you're being forced to relive. Yes there are a few 80's nostalgia pieces around but I think in reality American culture is stuck somewhere between the late 90's and 2001 and it hasn't really moved a whole lot since then. And because it's America it just gets more refined and more intense. I think 9/11 stunted everything and we are never going to be able to move past it as a society. American pop culture has had a generational nostalgia cycle throughout the 20th century, we're just on 80s nostalgia right now because it's the Gen Xers who are at the age where they're either making the content, or are deciding which content gets made. We're starting to see some 90s stuff creep in now, and no doubt in 15 or 20 years we'll be drowning in early 2000s poo poo.
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Feb 20, 2019 16:30
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:The end of the Cold War dropped American culture into a weird kind of stasis because capitalism is evil and will kill the world, but Americans can’t imagine an alternative to it. I agree. In the mind of everyone in America 45 and older there is simply no alternative to capitalism and in fact the more extreme the capitalism the better. It's weird to think that the Cold War may have actually been a moderating force in American society. SickZip posted:im extremely skeptical of claims that 9/11 actually changed the trajectory of America as opposed to 9/11 itself being just another symptom of the same underlying process that hollowed out American culture. Of course it's impossible to say what the present day would be like without the 9/11 event but it seems like that really broke a lot of people's brains and really instilled a deep fear into the American psyche unlike anything else ever had.
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Feb 20, 2019 16:35
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