America is within the midst of a comfortable coup. The nation is being reshaped and restructured below the second administration of Donald Trump. It isn’t 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 methods, simply match the mould of nerd.
The Info Age and the Web Age that it spawned within the Nineteen Nineties had already seen “nerds” – awkward, unattractive males with restricted social expertise however immense dedication to and enthusiasm for tech and STEM – turn into billionaires and acquire widespread respect and admiration for delivering the world applied sciences that change lives. It was, we have 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. Widespread media have lengthy described such nerdy visionaries as advanced individuals with an incredible want to avoid wasting the world and make it a greater place.
Three many years 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 expertise journalist Robert X Cringely stated, “Essentially the most wonderful factor of all is that it occurred accidentally as a result of a bunch of disenfranchised nerds needed to impress their associates.”
This notion of billionaire nerds might by now be a deep-rooted a part of our tradition, however the concept the robber barons of the late twentieth century accrued immense wealth, nearly accidentally, whereas making an attempt to avoid wasting 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 Occasions in current months, it’s obvious that the tech-savvy billionaire class desires to regulate the move of fact as effectively.
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, stated to Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland) and his group of apartheid-loving white South African mercenaries, “Nicely, effectively … it’s the grasp race!”
This quote is excess of only a reference to Musk’s doubtful path to US citizenship via South Africa and Canada. It’s concerning the actuality that, just like the South African henchmen in Deadly Weapon 2, tech nerd billionaires comparable to Musk and the individuals he has employed at DOGE imagine in apartheid, eugenics, and different racist, misogynistic, and queerphobic paradigms. Positive, most of the Musk fanboys are engineers, can write, and contribute to Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink that result in vital and useful-to-humanity discoveries and innovations. Nonetheless, additionally they repost tweets on X and different social media platforms that consult with a lady as a “huzz” or declare “I simply desire a eugenic immigration coverage, is that an excessive amount of to ask?”. They don’t seem to be precisely nice position fashions for a multicultural democracy or for any workforce. And, like white males normally, 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 power”, when, the truth is, 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 Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties. I discovered 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 turning into a author and educational historian. As a work-study pupil, 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 carefully to the ladies who wanted their assist troubleshooting pc points. And in my final three months on employees, 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 hardly ever 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 pal 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 habit to social media has led to hundreds of thousands of youthful People turning 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 vital considering, media literacy, and writing expertise.
On this world of white male privilege, being a cool athlete versus being a dictatorial, socially awkward pencil neck is really a distinction with out distinction. Nerds and their technological breakthroughs have been solely meant to empower and enrich their particular person worlds for the higher. That is why nobody in some other billionaire nerd camp has used their expertise to interrupt into Apple’s or Amazon’s offshore accounts and redistribute trillions of {dollars} to on a regular basis People. Nor have they worn out the coed debt of each pupil 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.
