Originally published 9 March 1998
Kevin Kelly is executive editor of Wired magazine, the ultra-hip organ of the computer generation, known for its screaming graphics and esoteric nerd-speak.
Recently, he visited the staid pages of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to announce that electronic technology has seized control of culture.
Forget the traditional “two cultures” of the arts and sciences, says Kelly, referring to the term coined so famously by scientist/novelist C. P. Snow more than 30 years ago. There is a new kid on the block, he says, a “third culture,” spawned by science but now burgeoning with adolescent cheek and energy.
Nerd culture, he dubs it: a revolution wrought by computer hackers, with ranks swelled by Nintendo kids come of age — talented, sassy, irreverent — and now challenging the arts and sciences for cultural supremacy.
Nerd culture is cool, pop, hard to ignore. Powerful off-the-shelf computers have put unprecedented power into the hands of anyone smart enough to use it, says Kelly. Establishment credentials are no longer necessary to discover or create novelty; armed with PCs and the Internet, an unannointed nerd rabble is storming the ivory towers of science and art.
Science pursues the truth of the universe; art aims to express the human condition. Nerd culture strays from both of these, says Kelly. Its goal is not truth but novelty, not expression but experience.
For the new culture, a trip into virtual reality is more to be desired than a trip to a museum. Even the irrational is preferred to reason if it brings new possibilities.
Nerds get new answers to old questions — What is reality? What is life? What is mind? — not by rehashing Plato or by doing experiments, but by creating an artificial reality, an artificial life or an artificial mind in a computer, then plunging themselves into it.
Consider the question: How does the mind work? Scientists devise experiments, make measurements, generate theories. Artists contemplate and create metaphorical abstractions. Nerd culture would settle the question by building a working mind in a computer. The answer is not a new theory, but a new technology.
The nerds who rendered virtual dinosaurs for the movie Jurassic Park by creating a complete muscle-clad skeleton moving beneath virtual skin, discovered things about dinosaur locomotion that no paleontologist had done before, claims Kelly.
To put it succinctly, special effects have trumped reality.
Like all provocative generalizations, Kelly’s “nerd culture” thesis is seductive. Certainly, the paraphernalia of digital technology is all around us, transforming the way we work, communicate and play. Significantly, I read Kelly’s essay not in a paper issue of Science magazine, but by plugging into the Internet from an out-of-the-way island in the Bahamas with my laptop computer.
But, examined closely, “nerd culture” begins to look suspiciously shallow. When one starts enumerating the accomplishments of the Nintendo generation, they ring tinny and hollow. Nintendo games provide mindless self-absorption; they are fun, perhaps, but unproductive. Most Nintendo nerds I’ve come across are cockily arrogant but frightfully narrow. Nerd entrepreneurs are certainly clever, but they seem to have no goal in mind but making themselves wildly rich.
What else? Show me an electronic ‘zine created on and for the web that carries the clout, say, of the New York Review of Books. Show me nerd art that can compare to the best literature, graphic art, and music of traditional artists.
Above all, show me real accomplishments of “nerd” science. Building an artificial mind in a computer doesn’t, by itself, tell us anything about how the human mind works. For that, we still need the old-fashioned experiments and observations of neuroscientists, linguists, and psychologists. Building a virtual dinosaur that scares our pants off doesn’t, by itself, tell us anything about how real dinosaurs lived. For that, we still need paleontologists working in the field with a spade.
Computers, digital methodologies, and virtual realities are powerful new ways of generating insights, posing problems, testing theories; as tools, they have transformed the way science is done. But science is still science, and it exists independently of and aloof to “nerd culture.”
I asked a friend, a self-professed nerd, to read Kelly’s essay and let me know what he thought. He said: “All scientists are nerds, but not all nerds are scientists.”
His remark is profound. For scientists, technology is a means to an end; for nerds of Kelly’s third culture, technology is the end.
When we start apotheosizing our tools, we have sadly strayed from our ancient quest for truth and beauty.
Yes, there is something called “nerd culture.” A visit to the Internet reveals the culture in full flower. Scientists built the Internet as a tool for communication; now they find it has been usurped by self-absorbed Nintendo kids. Whatever truth and beauty are to be found on the net are swamped by the cacophonous hue and cry of the techno-rabble.
But so far the traditional “two cultures” of science and art have little to fear from science’s upstart child. We are still waiting for the Nintendo generation to throw up a nerd-culture equivalent of Einstein or Picasso.
