Behold, the nerd! I took this photo in the basement four years ago while working on an electronics project (I look so young!). I’m holding a soldering wire in my teeth. I look kinda nerdy don’t I, with my Google-branded maker space glasses.
I could write hundreds and hundreds of pages on what makes me a “nerd”. I’m not sure how I feel about the name. He could be lots of things.
the technologist
the analyzer
the systemizer
the programmer
He learns how systems and machines work.
He is great at thinking of the world in terms of information and systems and relationships and variables.
Everything can be abstracted, fit into the language of object-oriented programming, can be compressed into an information stream of ones and zeros.
The process of making breakfast can be systemized and broken down into discrete charts, like a supply chain.
Even human relationships can be abstracted, turned into a relational graph, adjusted into a scoring system.
When the nerd finds his inner peace, everything can be expressed as pure information. His breath takes the form of a simple circle, its radius changing with each expansion and compression. Each distracting thought is merely a node in a network. The outside world is decomposed into bytes of information—a chirping bird or a beeping truck is merely an mp3 file streamed into his consciousness. Each internal sensation can be labelled with a simplifying “emotional tag”. He has escaped reality and ascended into the world of pure abstraction.
This way of thinking is very powerful. It’s taken us to the moon and split the atom and given us 3D Doritos.
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SHADOW OF THE NERD
But everything falls under the tyranny of his mental forms. Complexity is lost for the sake of simplification. We can even objectify the entire universe, forming an I-It relationship.
What about the soul? What about the spirit?
What about the body, the gut, the rest of the chakras.
What about situations that can’t be captured by the nerd’s existing machine learning algorithm? His serenity is ripe for disruption, for energetic flows to upset his neat mental abstractions.
What about poetry and love and hate and all those other good things?
Okay you get the point. I’ve been getting back into nerd mode so I don’t feel like being much too poetic. I’ve spent more time programming (like that animation above), which makes the nerd very happy. I would rather write a text parser than attempt to write any text with emotional valence.
I’ve accessed my database of quotes, so I’ll leave you with some words that are more potent than anything my nerd self is capable of writing at the moment.
Number is the most imposing and least creaturely of pacifiers, man’s yearning hope for objectivity. It is to number that he withdraws to escape from the chthonian mire of love and hate.
- Camille Paglia
Oh here’s a good one.
There is a speculation that nerds love: that the universe is “logic” or information. That what constitutes matter can in fact be recorded as “information”, as relations of logic, and that therefore the universe must be precisely this.
- The Bronze Age Pervert
What he said. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just Elon Musk ourselves to escape our mortal forms and upload our consciousnesses to some global computer?
All of these delusions, that you can be “uploaded” because your “brain” can be uploaded, that “the universe is information” or that something like “artificial intelligence” actually can exist, are all at bottom the same delusion and the same power fantasy of the nerd.
- The Bronze Age Pervert
Oh, and there was that time the nerds like Richard Feynman invented the atomic bomb! Nerds beware of your creations!
History shows again and again
How nature points up the folly of man
- Blue Öyster Cult
You get the idea. Now I’m getting back on my nerd shit.