To say that someone “peaked in high school” is to cast a horrible aspersion. The character of Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, boozing, dissolute, mourning after the suicide of a best friend / not-quite lover, is all the more pathetic for having come after a promising start as a high school football quarterback. David Velleman took up this point in “Well-being and time” (1993), arguing that a life of steady progress, from rocky beginning to eventual triumph, is worth more than one of gradual deterioration, even if the two in sum contain equal quantities of pleasure or happiness. Whether or not it is the “shape of life,” the ordering of good and bad, pleasant and painful episodes, that counts — one might reasonably instead point out that the glories of youth are of a piece transient joys, ecstasies that flicker like lightning bugs in an autumn oak, or mere promisory notes, the schoolbook laudatory is “Most Likely to Achieve,” as opposed to the more significant accomplishments that we expect of the middle-aged — the shape of a jock’s life, howsoever high its initial peak, is not one much to be desired.
Indeed, such reflections form the basis of a nerd’s schaudenfreude, a revenge they get on the jocks for free by a simple and just ordering of the universe: they will be buying beachside property off an initial public offering at just the moment that the jock’s chronic traumatic encephalopathy forces them to move back into the trailer park with Big Mama and Big Daddy. Such reveries populate the mindscape of the Silicon Valley technological elites, witness the above outpourings of Tim Sweeney or the musings of Scott Aaronson on AI safety wherein concerns of AI pessimists are dismissed because they “rhyme with the worldview of every high-school bully stuffing the nerds into lockers”. If it is contemptible to have peaked in high school, is it any less so to have one’s worldview stuck in such a state of arrested development?
Yet, to give the Aaronsons of the world their due, they never needed to abandon this worldview. The revenge of the nerd, it turns out, is a sufficient project to absorb one’s whole life. As Aaronson goes on to write.
In short, if my existence on Earth has ever “meant” anything, then it can only have meant: a stick in the eye of the bullies, blankfaces, sneerers, totalitarians, and all who fear others’ intellect and curiosity and seek to squelch it.
In the worldview of the nerd, this stick in the eye, thankfully, consists not in any actual acts of violence, but rather an endless crescendo of “showing them up,” a crescendo which will one day, inevitably reach its limit in the Singularity, in which artificial intelligence, the nerd’s creation in his own image, will learn the master’s trade and improve itself at such a rapid and rapidly improving rate that a technological utopia, a world of infinite abundance, cannot help but arise.
For the nerd, what is required to win this fight against their amorphous roster of enemies is simply for the playing field to be fair and level. It is this conviction that naturally, if not inevitably, turns the nerd on to free speech and free markets: it is only censorship and regulation, the cackling of bullies as they hold you down for your lunch money, by hook and crook, that the enemies have had any chance at all. As Sweeney writes elsewhere in the quoted thread, “an online community like [Twitter] should be a meritocracy,” and indeed thanks to the virtual market of “following & retweeting[, t]he best rose to the top.” Then, of course, the coastal elites, the media libs, took over and invented the blue check mark, corrupting the pure systems of algorithmic recommendation with political backscratching. All this ignores the fact that nerds make terrible posters.
Outside of the confines of the schoolroom, where confined spaces and forced interactions necessitate motley alliances along clique lines, the nerd is scarcely a coherent political identity precisely because anti-intellectualism is not a stable and unified political force but instead an occasional trait appearing in a range of phenomenon. Since no one but the jocks, who anyways peaked in high school and have not been heard from since, has it truly out for the nerds, his revenge fantasies must be a matter of individual interpretation to be applied to whatever localized conflict engrosses him. The nerd’s world is devoid of solidarity and indeed the greatest danger to the nerd is other nerds. To open up a raw meritocracy, an arena in which the participants must “fight fair,” is to invite the possibility of true and abject failure. Indeed, we must note that the fantasy of the Singularity is precisely a fantasy in which the nerd is out-nerded, demoted by the machine which awards him immortality only as a consolation prize, which we must assume he enjoys as the bottom of a bottle of brandy, thinking perhaps of his own Skipper on that summer night after Quiz Bowl, loosening and then removing his plaid bowtie.
Hey Damon, I've been meaning to write a comment under one of your posts for quite a while and thought I'd finally do so! I just wanted to let you know that the way you write has been profoundly inspiring to me – not only do you write well and with a unique style, but you also always manage to find interesting concepts and ideas to talk about. Every time I'm done reading one of your new posts, I always have something new to think about.
I've been reading pretty much everything you've been posting here, on Discord and on your website for years, so I just thought I'd let you know that you have at least one (1!!) big fan of your work, ahaha.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on things. I'll be eagerly awaiting the next posts :)