America is within the midst of a delicate 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 alteration. 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, young 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 Info Age and the Web Age that it spawned within the Nineties had already seen “nerds” – awkward, unattractive males with restricted social expertise however immense dedication to and enthusiasm for tech and STEM – turn out to be billionaires and achieve 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 films 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. Standard media have lengthy described such nerdy visionaries as complicated individuals with an incredible want to save lots of 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 know-how journalist Robert X Cringely said, “Probably the most wonderful factor of all is that it occurred by chance 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 that the robber barons of the late twentieth century gathered immense wealth, nearly by chance, whereas making an attempt to save lots of the world is a ridiculous lie. Particularly given the iron-fisted methods through which we all know many “nerd billionaires” – and particularly Jobs and Bill Gates – ran their capitalist ventures.
In mild of the heavy-handed censorship that billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong have exercised with the Washington Put up and the Los Angeles Occasions in latest months, it’s obvious that the tech-savvy billionaire class desires to regulate the movement of fact as properly.
A significantly 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, “Effectively, properly … 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 reminiscent of Musk and the individuals he has employed at DOGE imagine 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, additionally they repost tweets on X and different social media platforms that seek advice from a girl 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 typically, they don’t appear to be involved about making the world a greater place for anybody apart from themselves. They’d too readily agree with Zuckerberg’s ridiculous claim 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 Nineties. I discovered Primary 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 lady, a co-worker who groped me twice whereas at work.
Social awkwardness can simply be portrayed as harmless and endearing in a movie. However 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 buddy 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 addiction to social media has led to thousands and thousands of youthful People turning into depressed, anxious, and remoted. Not with a new generation of American males doxxing and committing image-based sexual abuse in opposition to women and girls. Definitely not when the plagiarism machines of AI (which isn’t true synthetic intelligence, anyway) are the instruments of alternative 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 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 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 scholar 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.
