Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I, for one, welcome myself as one of our new overlords.
<sarcasm>
Right - people get picked on in high school because they're not sufficiently well rounded. That was exactly my experience.
How clearly I remember the captain of the wrestling team accosting me in gym class in my sophomore year, throwing me against the wall, and sneering, "You know, you could really benefit from a more diverse set of interests."
</sarcasm>
The dichotomy between nerds and jocks is a false one, and it has been for some time. The stereotypes assert that "jocks" who are socially active, athletic, and attractive must not have any interest in technology, be smart, or value intellectual pursuits. Likewise, "nerds" who are smart and dedicated to learning must be slobs, socially awkward, and unattractive. This hasn't been the case at any time in the last decade or so that I've been paying attention. Some of the smartest and most academically successful people at my high school, who went on to attend highly prestigious universities, some to study science and engineering, were also athletic, social, attractive people. Many of the socially awkward nerds were not smart and did not value learning. In college, a significant percentage of my incredibly smart engineering colleagues had been high school football stars, loved to party, and were quite successful in relationships.
Now that I'm in law school, it's clear that my fellow students value intelligence (including technical knowledge) right along with social prowess and appearance. The entire spectrum of personal attributes is not only respected, but expected in these circles. I believe this has been the norm among high-performing, successful people for quite some time now - it's not even clear that the jock-nerd dichotomy every really existed the way it is portrayed. As far as I can tell, the real divide has everything to do with social skills and nothing to do with intelligence.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Women, despite outnumbering men, have been unable to achieve equality in macho culture despite at least 100 years of effort. No big reason to think that nerds will do any better.
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.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Turn in your Nerd Card because you fail. That's John Hodgeman, better known as the PC in the Mac ads.
Here, I'll get the rest of the thread out of the way:
"I thought that was the guy on Mystery Science Theater 3000."
"That's Joel Hodgson."
"No, he was on Miami Vice."
"That's Don Johnson!"
"He hosted Hollywood Squares!"
"Tom Bergeron!"
"Brother of Menelaus!"
"Damn it, that's AGAMEMNON!"
(Yes, I stole the last few items from Frisky Dingo.)
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Sounds like he had a thing for you and really bad pickup lines.
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.
You just got troll'd!
you could preserve american labor, and someone else would use cheaper overseas labor. then american consumers would buy that cheaper product of which nothing, not even company headquarters, gets a cut of that profit. then the next step is protectionism, where you insist everyone buy more expensive american made goods. then people buy far less, or they buy black market goods, because patriotism does not magically put money into your bank account, and you still need to buy a refrigerator. meanwhile, the rest of the world enjoys better products at cheaper prices while the american economy stagnates and shrinks, cut off from the rest of the world because of protectionism
i'm sorry, but in the interest of what is best for the united states, fuck american labor. the industrial age is over, let china pollute itself rather than the usa. and unions seem less like their ancestors, out to protect american labor from predatory management, and more like the new predator: upper middle class incomes at the expense of everyone else, including the health of the company, and the country
goodbye GM, goodbye industrial dinosaurs, good fucking riddance. if that means we are a poorer country for it, fine, no problem. as if the industrial age defines what is best for us, or even the only model for wealth creation possible. no, your lament at the decline of american labor only means that you don't know any better, not that there isn't anything better than what you have unilaterally decided is the come-all be-all of existence. you think the industrial model is only thing that defines wealth creation, and for some reason is fixed in your mind as a golden age, and all that comes after is somehow magically inferior. maybe its superior, and you simply don't see that. superior not in terms of the economic imperialism of past ages, but superior in simple quality of life
japan is coping with ecnomic decline to a far greater extent than the usa, and for a lot longer (since their economy stagnated in 1990). and maybe it means the japanese aren't seen as ubereconomic imperial masters any more, but maybe it also means less salarymen are having heart attacks and that the japanese have a more mellow, easier and happier life. the europeans have months of vacation time and generous social safety nets. so what exactly should we be fighting to retain in your mind? are we at economic war with the world?
fuck your fetishization of the industrial age as all we should aspire to. welcome the poorer, more mellower american age. time to step off the world stage as its master, and fuck you to those of you who think we need to stay in that role for some reason
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Maybe you were too sarcastic in high school?
A lot of people don't like that, you know.
Really? You don't say?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.