Revenge Of The Nerds, Rise Of The Borg

Jocks, Nerds, Geeks & The Archetypes of Specialization & Supraliminality In Our Transition Towards Eusociality

There was a time, not very long ago, when everybody knew what a nerd was.

He was the skinny kid who hated gym class. He knew too much about computers, science fiction, comic books or some other subject nobody else cared about. He was awkward around girls. He wasn't good at fighting. He probably wore glasses. He spent too much time indoors. And somewhere nearby was his natural predator, the jock.

These were caricatures, obviously. Real people were never that simple. But caricatures are interesting precisely because a culture has to recognize the type before the joke works.

The nerd became such a recognizable American archetype that researchers were writing about his peculiar relationship to masculinity by the end of the twentieth century. He was male, but not quite masculine in the conventional sense. His status came from knowledge and technical competence rather than physical ability, sexual success or immediate social dominance.

And then something strange happened. The nerd won. Or at least that's how the story is usually told.

Computers stopped being something nerds did and became the infrastructure of civilization. Video games became one of the world's dominant forms of entertainment. Comic-book characters conquered cinema. Science fiction and fantasy moved from niche interests to mainstream culture. The internet turned obscure interests into communities. Technical competence became enormously valuable.

But saying the nerd won gets the causation backward. The nerd did not conquer the world. The world changed until being nerdy made considerably more sense.

That difference matters, because the story of the nerd may be part of a much larger story about what industrial and technological civilization has been doing to human beings.

The Fragmented Human

Humans have always specialized to some degree. Different people have different talents, interests and abilities. But increasingly complex hierarchical societies have taken specialization much further. We do not simply become better at some things than others. We build entire lives around increasingly narrow sets of competencies, while depending upon other specialists and systems for nearly everything else.

Buckminster Fuller had a strange but useful theory about how this happened. In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, he imagined history being shaped by what he called the Great Pirates, not ordinary pirates so much as sea masters whose mobility gave them a wider view than landbound rulers and populations. Their ships connected distant resources, technologies, markets and political systems. To operate across that scale they needed working knowledge of navigation, astronomy, weather, geography, shipbuilding, trade, resources, warfare, politics and human behavior. Fuller called them the "antithesis of specialists." Their advantage was not knowing the most about any one thing. It was being able to see relationships among many things at once.

Fuller makes this world concrete through maritime power. His Great Pirates operate through local kings, naval systems and increasingly sophisticated specialists while retaining the comprehensive view above them. He points to Leonardo da Vinci as an outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory thinker and describes the development of organized scientific expertise, including the Royal Society, within the expanding structure of sea power. The important distinction is between knowledge bounded by a place or discipline and the broader intelligence capable of understanding how many domains fit together.

In Fuller's account, comprehensive knowledge becomes power. Another comprehensive thinker is a potential rival, while a brilliant specialist is enormously useful. The Great Pirates cultivate mathematicians, scientists, engineers and other experts whose concentrated knowledge makes the larger enterprise more powerful without requiring any one of them to comprehend the enterprise as a whole. The specialist can know vastly more than the generalist about one piece of the machine while remaining dependent upon a larger coordinating intelligence to connect the pieces.

Then the arrangement breaks down in a revealing way. Industrial and technological civilization becomes too complicated even for the comprehensive rulers. Political leaders depend on economists, generals on engineers, corporations on technical experts, and experts on other experts. Authority can remain concentrated while comprehension is distributed. Nobody needs to understand the entire machine for the machine to continue operating, because coordination increasingly resides in institutions, procedures, markets, bureaucracies and technological systems. The system becomes more comprehensive while the people inside it become less so.

Specialization Is for Insects

Robert Heinlein approached the same problem from the other direction. Instead of asking who understands the whole system, he asked, in effect, what ought to remain inside a whole human being. His answer, given through Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, is worth quoting in full because the range of the list is the point:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

― Robert A. Heinlein

The famous last sentence is funny, but the list before it is the real argument. Heinlein jumps without apology from nurturing to warfare, agriculture to navigation, architecture to poetry, accounting to masonry, medicine to emotional care, obedience to leadership, cooperation to independence, mathematics to manual labor, computing to cooking, fighting to facing death. He is not describing a person who has accumulated an impressive collection of academic specialties. He is describing someone whose intellectual, artistic, emotional, social, domestic and physical capacities have not been split into separate kinds of people.

That is almost the opposite of caste. In a highly eusocial organism, essential functions are distributed across specialized members of the colony. The colony contains the larger repertoire while the individual performs a narrower role. Fuller and Heinlein therefore approach the same problem from different directions: Fuller asks what happens when comprehension of the whole is distributed among specialists and eventually absorbed by the system coordinating them; Heinlein asks what kind of human remains when we resist distributing the capacities of a whole person in the first place.

Put together, they raise a question much larger than occupational specialization: what happens when capacities that could coexist inside integrated individuals are increasingly sorted among different human types?

One thing that happens is that recognizable types begin to emerge. And the nerd/jock split may have been one of the most obvious.

The old jock stereotype inherited one bundle of traditionally masculine traits: strength, physical competition, risk, fighting, sexual confidence, athleticism and immediate social dominance. The nerd inherited another: intelligence, systems, rules, technical competence, abstract knowledge, obsessive interests and symbolic mastery. Neither is a complete human being. Both are caricatures produced by splitting capacities that can obviously coexist within the same person.

A man can write poetry and repair an engine. He can understand mathematics and fight. He can read philosophy and hunt. He can program a computer and build a wall. That was really the point of Heinlein's list. Yet our culture became remarkably good at imagining these capacities as belonging to different kinds of people.

The interesting part is what happened next. The physical side initially dominated the social hierarchy. The nerd got bullied by the jock. Then the larger society became increasingly abstract, and suddenly the ability to manipulate symbols, information and systems became extremely valuable.

This did not exactly destroy masculinity. Something stranger happened. Part of masculinity became disembodied. The nerd still competed. He still sought mastery. He could still be territorial, hierarchical, obsessive and status-conscious. He could defeat opponents. But increasingly the contest took place inside symbolic systems.

The fight became the game. The hunt became the quest. The territory became the server. The victory became the score. The physical machine became the computer. Even argument itself could become competitive sport.

This is something I would call supraliminal masculinity: masculine drives increasingly expressed through abstractions and representations rather than immediate embodied experience. And there is a wonderful contradiction inside it. The increasingly disembodied man often became obsessed with fantasies of extreme embodiment.

Look at the bodies and worlds of superheroes, Dragon Ball, Conan, Doom, Berserk, John Wick and countless games, comics and films. Men who may never fight anyone can spend thousands of hours consuming fantasies about fighting. Men whose daily lives involve almost no physical danger can inhabit worlds made almost entirely from danger. Bodies become enormous. Strength becomes superhuman. Violence becomes spectacular. Courage becomes cinematic.

The desire for embodiment did not necessarily disappear. Embodiment became entertainment. You don't have to climb the mountain. Your character can. You don't have to fight. Your avatar can. You don't have to become dangerous. You can identify with someone who is.

Eventually even attempts to resurrect "traditional masculinity" can start looking like cartoons of masculinity: muscles, money, cars, fighting, sexual conquest, domination. A child's picture of what a powerful man looks like. That isn't necessarily a return to integrated masculinity. It may be another simulation of it.

Enter the Geek

The geek appears somewhere in this transition too. "Nerd" and "geek" have never had perfectly stable meanings, and there is plenty of overlap between them. But there is a distinction worth making. The nerd is associated especially with systems and specialized knowledge. The geek is associated especially with obsessive engagement with cultural products.

The geek doesn't merely watch Star Wars. He knows Star Wars. He knows the ships, timelines, characters, obscure references, canon and contradictions in the canon. He may collect the objects, attend conventions, argue about interpretations and organize friendships around this knowledge. Consumption becomes expertise, expertise becomes identity, and identity becomes community.

Humans have always told stories, played games, collected things and become obsessed with subjects other people find ridiculous. Something genuinely changed when industrial culture learned how to manufacture symbolic worlds large enough for adults to inhabit for their entire lives.

The child who loved superheroes no longer had to leave superheroes behind. The products could mature with him. The toy becomes the collectible. The cartoon becomes the cinematic universe. The game becomes an online world containing thousands of hours of activity. The childhood interest becomes a lifelong consumer identity.

And this is where I think geek culture intersects with another trend that is usually discussed separately: infantilization.

Every generation thinks the next generation's entertainment is stupid, but there is something historically peculiar about a culture in which childhood and adolescent entertainments increasingly follow people through their entire adult lives. The cumulative pattern is worth noticing.

The toys stay. The cartoons stay. The games stay. The fantasy worlds stay. The collectibles stay. The childhood franchises stay. The difference is that the child eventually acquires an adult income, and the industry has every incentive not to let the childhood end.

The Supraliminal Woman

Women have not somehow escaped this transformation. Their version sometimes looks different.

Older feminine roles could be brutally restrictive, and gaining access to education, professions and economic independence greatly expanded women's available lives. But those older roles also involved an enormous amount of embodied competence: producing food, making and repairing clothing, caring for children and sick people, maintaining households, sustaining immediate social relationships, pregnancy, nursing and the practical knowledge surrounding all of those things.

Modern systems externalized many of those functions just as they externalized traditionally masculine ones. Women also entered the increasingly specialized and abstract world of institutional employment. Relationships moved onto screens. Social standing became quantified. Beauty became an industrial system. The body increasingly acquired a second existence as image: profile, photograph, filter, metric and brand.

Femininity became supraliminal too. And then something particularly strange happened to girlhood. The aesthetics of childhood did not simply persist into female adulthood. In some corners of popular culture they merged with sexuality.

The kawaii ideal in Japanese popular culture is especially interesting here. Research on popular anime has discussed its associations with vulnerability, innocence, smallness and infantilization alongside extensive sexualization and objectification of female characters. This doesn't mean anime invented infantilized femininity, much less that everyone who watches anime wants childlike women. It means there is a cultural phenomenon worth looking directly at rather than explaining away.

The adult female body can be sexualized while the performance of femininity becomes increasingly juvenile: cute, small, helpless, high-pitched, innocent, girlish. Meanwhile the male body in fantasy goes in the opposite direction. It becomes enormous, invulnerable and impossibly powerful. Both are exaggerated representations of embodiment consumed by people whose actual lives are becoming increasingly disembodied.

As ordinary embodied life recedes, symbolic embodiment can become more fantastic.

Then the Nerds Built the World

And all of this was happening before the nerd really built his world. Because eventually the people who understood computers stopped merely being a subculture and became essential to constructing the environment everybody else lives in.

Governments, militaries, corporations, investors and advertisers supplied money, goals and incentives, while engineers, programmers and other technical specialists built much of the machinery through which those interests now operate. That machinery has some interesting characteristics.

It likes information. Computers cannot encounter you as a complete embodied human being. They encounter representations of you: your name, account, location, purchases, searches, messages, contacts, photographs, viewing history, clicks, biometrics, preferences, social network, movements and attention. The human becomes legible to the system by becoming data.

Suddenly surveillance becomes almost effortless compared with anything available to previous civilizations. The surveillance state and surveillance economy are not identical things, but they feed upon the same technological fact: mediated activity leaves records. The more of life that passes through the system, the more of life becomes observable by the system.

That is an extraordinary development for any society moving toward increasingly collective organization. But surveillance may not even be the most important thing the nerd-built world gave us. The screen became habitat.

At first the computer was a machine nerds spent too much time using. Then it became a workplace, an entertainment system, a communications system, a marketplace, a dating environment and a social environment. Then we put one in our pockets and started carrying it everywhere.

Think about how many of the habits once used to mock nerds subsequently became ordinary: sitting inside staring at screens, communicating through computers, having friends you rarely or never physically meet, spending huge amounts of time in simulated worlds, developing intensely specialized interests, replacing physical play with games, avoiding uncomfortable face-to-face interactions, living through representations.

The nerd did not become normal. Normal life became nerd-like.

And the system increasingly makes direct human interaction optional. Self-checkout, apps, GPS, swiping, messaging, delivery, remote work, multiplayer gaming and now AI all allow needs to be met with less immediate embodied negotiation. This is not the disappearance of sociality. It is something stranger. Human interdependence becomes dependence upon infrastructure. The village becomes the platform, and platforms can coordinate far more people than villages ever could.

The screen is also not a passive window. Commercial platforms have powerful incentives to keep people looking at it. Notifications, feeds, recommendations, autoplay, endless content and algorithmic personalization compete for attention. A technology that initially allowed the nerd to retreat from immediate social life eventually became an environment designed to keep almost everyone inside mediated life.

Tool became medium. Medium became environment. Environment became dependency.

That accelerates the transition enormously. It also helps explain why infantilization is more than an aesthetic complaint about adults playing video games.

Infantilization Is More Than an Aesthetic

Modern adults can outsource astonishing portions of adulthood itself. We don't need to navigate. We don't need to remember phone numbers. We increasingly don't repair our own machines. Most of us don't produce our own food. We don't need to know the people who produce it. We don't have to entertain ourselves. We don't have to organize many of our own social encounters. We increasingly don't even choose what information arrives next. The system does these things for us.

This creates a peculiar kind of person who can be extraordinarily competent inside one specialized function and remarkably dependent outside it. A brilliant programmer may know almost nothing about where his food comes from. A surgeon may be helpless when a household machine breaks. A financial analyst may navigate an incredibly complicated symbolic environment while being unable to navigate his own city without GPS.

None of these examples makes the person stupid. That's exactly the point. The collective can become smarter while the individual becomes less complete.

Eventually incompleteness itself becomes identity. The macho man doesn't read. The nerd doesn't play sports. The geek doesn't care about practical things. The intellectual sneers at manual labor. The tradesman sneers at intellectuals. People stop merely having different strengths and begin organizing their identities around the things people like them supposedly do and do not do.

First we divide the skills. Then we divide the roles. Then we divide the identities. Eventually we may divide the humans.

From Archetype to Caste

This is where nerds and geeks become relevant to Becoming the Borg. They are cultural products of the fragmentation that makes increasingly specialized humans possible, and later they become active components of the systems accelerating it. The jock was fragmented too. The important thing is the fragmentation itself.

Eusocial organisms distribute essential functions across specialized members of the colony. Humans are nowhere near literal insect castes, and cultural archetypes should not be confused with biological castes. But if human beings were moving toward something increasingly caste-like, what would the beginning look like?

Probably not like ants. It might initially look like culture: different types of people becoming associated with different bundles of competencies; those bundles becoming identities; those identities becoming increasingly specialized; technology allowing people to survive comfortably without developing capacities outside their specialization; the collective absorbing the missing competencies; the system becoming increasingly capable of coordinating its increasingly dependent components.

The nerd and geek would then be neither villains nor causes. They would be harbingers.

The nerd first looked maladapted because the surrounding human environment still demanded forms of embodied social competence that weren't his strengths. Then the environment changed. His peculiar competencies became increasingly valuable. Eventually people possessing those competencies helped build the next environment, one even more abstract, mediated, surveilled and screen-dependent than the one that selected them. The geek flourished inside it. The rest of us increasingly learned to live there too.

What Kind of Human Does This World Need?

The nerd began as a joke because he seemed poorly adapted to the social world around him. Then the social world changed. Abstract knowledge, technical specialization and comfort with mediated environments became increasingly valuable, and people possessing those capacities helped build an environment that rewarded them even more. Geek culture supplied that environment with identities, communities and enormous symbolic worlds to inhabit. What began as recognizable subcultures increasingly became ordinary ways of living.

The jock, nerd and geek matter here because each makes fragmentation visible. The jock concentrates embodiment while treating intellectual breadth as somebody else's territory. The nerd concentrates abstract and technical mastery while embodied, practical or social capacities can become somebody else's problem. The geek turns mastery of symbolic worlds and their consumption into an identity of its own. None of these people has to fit the stereotype perfectly for the stereotype to tell us something about the culture that produced it. We learned to recognize partial bundles of human capacities as complete kinds of people.

Technology then makes those partial humans increasingly viable. The competencies missing from the individual do not disappear. They migrate outward into other specialists, institutions, markets, platforms, algorithms and machines. Navigation leaves the navigator and enters GPS. Memory moves into devices and databases. Social coordination moves into platforms. Practical knowledge moves into services. Entertainment becomes an industry. Increasingly even judgment, conversation and thought can be supplemented or outsourced to machines. The individual can therefore become narrower without becoming less functional, because the surrounding system becomes more capable of completing him.

That is where the comparison to eusociality stops being a metaphor about conformity and becomes a question about organization. A colony does not need every member to contain the capacities necessary for an independent life. It needs different members to perform their functions reliably while the colony contains the larger repertoire. Human beings are building something increasingly similar at the level of culture and infrastructure: specialized people whose incompleteness is compensated for by an increasingly comprehensive collective system.

The nerd did not cause this transition. He was one of its early cultural tells. Then the world that favored him gave his particular competencies extraordinary power in designing what came next. The geek followed naturally into a civilization where symbolic environments could become habitats, consumption could become expertise, and adulthood itself could be lived through systems that supplied more and more of what the individual no longer needed to contain.

Heinlein's joke therefore lands differently now than it did in 1973. “Specialization is for insects” sounds like a defense of the versatile individual. Read from the other direction, it is also a warning about the kind of social organism specialization makes possible.

A hive does not need complete individuals. It needs reliable specialists.

The question is whether an increasingly eusocial civilization still needs complete humans, and whether we want to become the kind of species such a civilization requires and creates.