John Hodgman On the Coming Geek Culture

An anonymous reader writes "Famous writer and minor television personality John Hodgman posits the end of the culture of Jockdom in favor of a cultural reverence for engineers, scientists and Slashdot readers: 'Jockdom is very noble. It's not deliberative. It's certainly the best way to win wars. It's the best way to motivate teams of people to fulfill a goal — not just war, but getting things done. The most important way to motivate a factory floor. But as you know, we're not as much of a manufacturing society as we were before. China and other big industrial nations are rewarding their nerds and technicians rather than creating a culture that makes fun of them — it would be wise for us to embrace the book-smart as much as our culture has traditionally embraced the street-smart, the jock-smart. I'm not saying nerds must have their revenge; I'm just saying the time for wedgies is at an end.'"

Comments

Re:I'm a PC

[Philip K Dickhead]

From the article:
'My town is the best because the incredibly wealthy owners decided to keep the team for now.' Or, 'My political team is the best because it was my dad's and they best stoke my primitive fears,' as opposed to 'They have the best policies for me and my family.'

Required reading. In a couple of short sentences, he exposes and decodes the core cultural aberration of the false spectacle - the pseudo-life - in which people imagine themselves.

Re:Maybe people should be more well-rounded

[TheRaven64]

I've lost count of the number of times I've been able to solve a programming problem that specialists are stumped by simply by realising that it was already solved a decade ago in another field and the solution can be moved across.

Sad

[4D6963]

It's sad to see middle-aged men still talking about stuff that happened to them in high school. I know John Hodgman is hardly serious, but the more I know about the USA the more it sounds like a country of 17-year old self-claimed losers who get publicly humiliated on a daily basis by having their underpants pulled up.

Seriously, it's sad to see grown men still dragging along their high school complexes. Jocks and nerds? Grow the fuck out of it. Not only must every single god damn American TV show plot that's centred around males at school must be about so-called losers who get humiliated by big mean guys and mean "popular girls", on top of that you have a very significant portion of the American adult population who must completely identify and go out of their way to fit the stereotypes, from reading children's comic books about superior men in tight pants who avenge anyone by kicking the arse of the big mean guys (yes, so-called losers enjoy escapism by means of reading about a superior man who kicks all the arse they never had the balls to kick themselves) to being pansies who'll get pushed around by their wife as if they were still 12 and that the chick was their mom, probably because they feel that so-called losers don't need to grow some balls and become a man, so they forever remain whiny overgrown teenagers who play with Star Wars figurines and get flashbacks of having their underpants pulled up. If you're gonna play something that involves dungeons and you're over 20, it'd better involve gags and leather restraints.

As an outsider, watching that shit is getting increasingly painful. We don't even have a word for wedgie cause no one gets their underpants pulled up in France, except maybe girls with G-strings that stick out of their pants, so that's hard to relate to your neurosis. It's like your entire culture and civilisation revolves around men with complexes who can't grow out of their teenager bullshit. Look at movies. How many of them are about a loser hero any other loser can relate to and who becomes a loser+ by staying a loser so you can still relate but in the process accomplishing something great? As in "big jewy loser who never kissed a girl and plays WoW goes through a bunch of adventures and in the end he kisses a hot chick whom he thought was "out of his league", whatever the fuck that means". Or "divorced middle-aged loser with a crappy job saves the world and gets with a hot woman". Sometimes it seems like you ALL must think of yourselves as loser, one way or another. That's pathetic.