America is within the midst of a gentle coup. The nation is being reshaped and restructured below the second administration of Donald Trump. It’s not Trump himself, however his billionaire particular adviser, Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) head Elon Musk, who’s guiding this transformation. And in Musk’s America, there’s one demographic that appears to have discovered itself at centre stage and quickly gaining energy: “nerds”.
Certainly, Musk’s mendacious band of merry, younger white and white-adjacent acolytes, together with Gavin Kliger, Edward Coristine, and Marko Elez, who has gained management over multitrillion-dollar authorities techniques, simply match the mildew of nerd.
The Data Age and the Web Age that it spawned within the Nineties had already seen “nerds” – awkward, unattractive males with restricted social abilities however immense dedication to and enthusiasm for tech and STEM – turn out to be billionaires and acquire widespread respect and admiration for delivering the world applied sciences that change lives. It was, we had been repeatedly reminded, nerds who first gave us PCs and iMacs after which iPhones and Androids.
In quite a few articles in tech magazines and in motion pictures like Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Oppenheimer (2023), Steve Jobs (2015), and The Social Community (2010), creatives have portrayed nerds like nuclear weapons developer J Robert Oppenheimer, Apple’s Steve Jobs, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg as underdogs. In style media have lengthy described such nerdy visionaries as advanced individuals with an amazing want to save lots of the world and make it a greater place.
Three a long time in the past, the UK’s Channel 4 and the US’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired the three-part documentary titled Triumph of the Nerds. Referencing the pc revolution the nerd set launched between 1975 and 1995, longtime know-how journalist Robert X Cringely mentioned, “Essentially the most wonderful factor of all is that it occurred accidentally as a result of a bunch of disenfranchised nerds wished to impress their mates.”
This notion of billionaire nerds could by now be a deep-rooted a part of our tradition, however the concept the robber barons of the late twentieth century collected immense wealth, virtually accidentally, whereas attempting to save lots of the world is a ridiculous lie. Particularly given the iron-fisted methods wherein we all know many “nerd billionaires” – and particularly Jobs and Invoice Gates – ran their capitalist ventures.
In gentle of the heavy-handed censorship that billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Quickly-Shiong have exercised with the Washington Publish and the Los Angeles Instances in latest months, it’s obvious that the tech-savvy billionaire class desires to regulate the stream of reality as nicely.
A a lot better description of the “nerds” who got here to rule America below Trump was given in a single line in Deadly Weapon 2 (1989), when Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson), having extralegally entered the South African consulate, mentioned to Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland) and his group of apartheid-loving white South African mercenaries, “Properly, nicely … it’s the grasp race!”
This quote is way over only a reference to Musk’s doubtful path to US citizenship by South Africa and Canada. It’s in regards to the actuality that, just like the South African henchmen in Deadly Weapon 2, tech nerd billionaires equivalent to Musk and the individuals he has employed at DOGE consider in apartheid, eugenics, and different racist, misogynistic, and queerphobic paradigms. Certain, most of the Musk fanboys are engineers, can write, and contribute to Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink that result in necessary and useful-to-humanity discoveries and innovations. However, in addition they repost tweets on X and different social media platforms that confer with a lady as a “huzz” or declare “I simply desire a eugenic immigration coverage, is that an excessive amount of to ask?”. They aren’t precisely nice position fashions for a multicultural democracy or for any workforce. And, like white males on the whole, they don’t appear to be involved about making the world a greater place for anybody apart from themselves. They might too readily agree with Zuckerberg’s ridiculous declare that the tech world wants extra “masculine vitality”, when, in reality, white males stay the dominant demographic main this financial sector.
I used to be as soon as part of the computer-crazy nerd world within the Eighties and Nineties. I realized Fundamental in eighth grade, took Pascal in eleventh grade, and spent my first three semesters on the College of Pittsburgh as a pc science main earlier than altering my path to changing into a author and tutorial historian. As a work-study scholar, I labored in Pitt’s computing labs for 2 years. I noticed as my equally geeky co-workers made jokes about our “pc illiterate” classmates (together with the common use of the r-word). I watched my male counterparts rub up too intently to the ladies who wanted their assist troubleshooting pc points. And in my final three months on workers, I skilled sexual and racial harassment from an older white girl, a co-worker who groped me twice whereas at work.
Social awkwardness can simply be portrayed as harmless and endearing in a movie. Nevertheless it not often if ever interprets to “candy” in a world that socially defaults to racist, misogynistic, queerphobic, and xenophobic behaviours. Nerds or not, all white males in a white male supremacist society maintain a metric tonne of racial and gender privilege – a way of entitlement that, when left unchecked, makes them no totally different from “cool” white guys. Booger asking Gilbert, “Why? Does she have a penis?” – a transphobic reference to his good friend not getting laid in Revenge of the Nerds – isn’t a lot totally different than Musk declaring that he “misplaced” his “son” – his estranged transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson – to “the woke thoughts virus”.
There’s additionally the embedded assumption that the applied sciences created by the elite nerd set have all the time been good for the world. Not when dependancy to social media has led to thousands and thousands of youthful Individuals changing into depressed, anxious, and remoted. Not with a new technology of American males doxxing and committing image-based sexual abuse towards women and girls. Definitely not when the plagiarism machines of AI (which isn’t true synthetic intelligence, anyway) are the instruments of selection for individuals unwilling to develop important considering, media literacy, and writing abilities.
On this world of white male privilege, being a cool athlete versus being a dictatorial, socially awkward pencil neck is actually a distinction with out distinction. Nerds and their technological breakthroughs had been solely meant to empower and enrich their particular person worlds for the higher. For this reason nobody in some other billionaire nerd camp has used their abilities to interrupt into Apple’s or Amazon’s offshore accounts and redistribute trillions of {dollars} to on a regular basis Individuals. Nor have they worn out the scholar debt of each scholar within the nation. For ultimately, these nerds need wealth and energy over marginalised individuals, too.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.