Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture

Anthony Lioi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781350066892
• eBook ISBN: 9781472567642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Drawing on a wide range of examples from literature, comics, film, television and digital media, Nerd Ecology is the first substantial ecocritical study of nerd culture's engagement with environmental issues. Exploring such works as Star Trek, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, The Hunger Games, and superhero comics such as Green Lantern and X-Men, Anthony Lioi maps out the development of nerd culture and its intersections with the most fundamental ecocritical themes. In this way Lioi finds in the narratives of unpopular culture - narratives in which marginalised individuals and communities unite to save the planet - the building blocks of a new environmental politics in tune with the concerns of contemporary ecocritical theory and practice.

1

Nerd Ecology

I will take a serious approach to a subject usually treated lightly, which is a nerdy thing to do.

—Benjamin Nugent, American Nerd: The Story of My People

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

—John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

On a cold spring morning in the early twenty-first century I stood ankle-deep in mud on the banks of the Woonasquatucket River in Providence, Rhode Island. The Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council had called for a cleanup in Olneyville, where the Industrial Revolution could still be evoked from the ruins of factories littering the banks. Our task was to pull junk out of the water: shopping carts, fishing line, tires—a regular day in the restoration of an urban watershed. The Woonasquatucket had been industrial for as long as there had been industry in North America; its factories produced cloth, machine parts, jewelry, locomotive engines, and all the waste thereof. That is what worried me. Try as we might to avoid the experience, we had to get wet to recover the garbage. We had to be smeared with the mud of the river and everything the mud contained. Though I had not read the report of the Environmental Protection Agency on the Woony, as the river is affectionately called, I would not have been surprised to learn of the dioxins, PCBs, heavy metals, and pesticides hidden in its sediments. Neither would anyone else. The people on the banks that morning shared a sense, as Robert Sullivan once wrote of the Meadowlands, that one would need “magic or the assistance of angels” to get all of the poison out of that river (Sullivan 142). Already dripping with God-knows-what, I wondered aloud what kind of superpowers I would develop from exposure. There was sufficient precedent: Daredevil and the Toxic Avenger had sonar and superstrength bestowed by a toxic waste spill. Would I sprout wings? Command the winds like Storm of the X-Men? (Personally, I favored telepathy or pyrokinesis.) Then, right on cue, my mentor appeared, wheeling his chair back and forth across a footbridge above us. “Don’t worry kid,” he yelled, “you’re already a hero. You clean up that river real good!” My neighbors nodded gamely and waded back into the water. We would be the Superfriends of this place. With our uncanny abilities, we would make sure that, one day, the alewife would spawn, herons return, and teratogenic ooze fade into memory. All we needed was some decent mutation and a snappy origin myth.

I recall this story not because it came true—I have not sprouted wings (yet)—but because everyone on the river that morning understood what I had asked. Partly disguised by outdoor adventure clothing, we were a group of earnest, bespectacled persons who had grown up on comic books and Saturday morning television. These sources suggested that the world should be defended, that defenders hid among us as school children, newspaper reporters, and Amazon princesses. Such people were hidden in our bookish, asthmatic selves, just waiting for the right industrial accident to appear in their full glory. In the meantime, we were biding our time in Rhode Island and around the world, doing good as our inhalers and allergy medicines might allow. Our nascent lifeways, still struggling toward the name of “nerd culture,” would be put in service of the ecological revolution we had been promised since childhood. As American nerds of a certain age, we had grown up in the wake of Earth Day and the Space Program. We had read about national recycling protocols in 1973, and expected the arrival of a bullet train at any time. We knew we possessed the skills to respond to the ills of modernity, but we were moving too slowly given the scope of the problem. In her analysis of our predicament, the philosopher Val Plumwood contends that the delay is “not primarily about more knowledge or technology; it is about developing an environmental culture that values and fully acknowledges the non-human sphere and our dependency on it, and is able to make good decisions about how we live and impact on the non-human world” (Plumwood 3). Culture, in this expansive sense, encompasses the practice of everyday life and the structure of planetary economies. Nature is not a set of resources for civilization, it is the oikeios topos, the “favorable place” or home of human life, a matrix of elements, species, and planetary forces (Moore 3). Can nerd culture spawn environmental culture, like the Batcave spawns Batman (POW!)? Despite (or because of) our deficiencies, can nerds defend the earth as a favorable place for humanity and our fellow creatures? The desire to make it so lies at the heart of this book.

The question of a nerd ecology arises in the early twenty-first century at a moment when the meaning of nerd is changing. In American popular culture of the last century, “nerd” begins with shame, a name one is called, not a name one calls oneself. It denotes, at first, a socially awkward adolescent, usually a white, middle-class boy, who is sickly, unathletic, and unpopular: someone other boys do not befriend, and girls do not desire. At one end of the spectrum, a nerd may be a boy who will “grow out of it” in a metamorphic adulthood. At the other end, a nerd may be an immature sociopath, corrupt and contagion incarnate. The biological constitution of the term is unmistakable: nerds can be the larval form of a healthy adult, or a pathological incursion in the body politic. The perplex of a nerd ecology is, at first, an issue of the nerd in socio-ecological context, as contagion or genetic deviant in a healthy population. The nerd may also be understood as an agent of production in the global economy that emerged after the collapse of Soviet communism in the late 1980s. Here, the nerd is a knowledge worker, an avatar of specialization whose mastery of computer technology is a cornerstone of the digital age. In this form, nerd labor is necessary to economic growth, and amply rewarded, at least at the entrepreneurial end of things. This is the so-called “revenge of the nerds”: the high school geek becomes the digital capitalist. The prey of the schoolyard becomes the predator of the professions. Paragons of this type, such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, generate stories that become a legendarium for Webslingers. Even here, there is a dark ecological subtext: the reversal of role leaves the Darwinian nightmare of childhood intact, though the losers are Congolese coltan miners and Chinese factory workers. The triumph of nerd technology is built upon environmental injustice on a global scale. A nerd flaps its wings in North America, and a typhoon hits the Philippines. Who else invented fracking, semiconductors, and high school, after all? The brainiacs of yore are smart enough to notice this inversion, so American culture grows more ecological as nerds take charge of media production. Chris Hardwick argues in The Nerdist Way that this practice of skillful self-appropriation marks the boundary between nerds and nerdists. A nerdist, he says, is “an artful Nerd” who doesn’t “just consume,” but “creates and innovates” (Hardwick x). The Nerdist uses the nerd powers of “overanalysis” and “hyper-self-awareness” for good (x). Nerdism is a cultural technology for the ethical transformation of self and world motivated by the American urge for progress through hard work. Can Nerdists invent environmental culture? The first step in artful invention is self-awareness on the part of the artist. We now investigate the origins of the nerd in order to understand better what nerdism has to offer ecology.

Disgusting mess: A brief survey of nerd discourse

Nerds are people, but also stories and their components: figures of speech, rhetorical topoi, arguments and anecdotes, dystopia and utopia on a school bus, sharing a Twinkie. To know what it would mean to act on nerd discourse with skillful means, one must comprehend the tropes of unpopular culture, that is, the culture of the unpopulars, that is, nerd culture as the repository of identities, narratives, and aesthetics. The constitution of the nerd as a social identity through biological categories, the imbrication of nerds in ecological systems, and the tangled bank of self-recycling—nerd ecology—are the products of a cultural negation negated, turned back on itself, to produce an affirmation that appeared in popular media before it is appropriated for literary and political ends. I will first trace the terms of unpopularity, and then double back, as did nerd culture itself, to appropriate and contradict those terms. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word nerd is of uncertain origin, having first appeared in print in the Dr. Seuss’ book If I Ran a Zoo in 1951. In that book, the protagonist makes a list of the fantastic animals that would appear in the ideal zoo, including “a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too,” an origin that reveals little of the word’s significance. However, by the time the nerd appears again, circa 1975, in the television series Happy Days, it has taken on the meaning of an awkward, socially inept young person who is shunned by his peers and condemned for ugliness, offensiveness, and dedication to specialized, often technical pursuits seen as antisocial by middle-class, suburban culture. It is here, in the connection to specialization, that the terms nerd and geek become entangled in a web worthy of Spider-Man himself. Geek appears to be of much older provenance, and once designated a person who decapitated chickens. This limited meaning was applied more broadly to indicate the pursuit of hyperspecialized knowledge, as in the terms “math geek,” “science fiction geek,” and even “knitting geek” and “baseball geek,” if those otherwise ordinary activities are pursued with dedication that verges on obsession.

Nerds are smart people, but in his study of American anti-intellectualism, Richard Hofstadter argues that intelligence itself is not stigmatized in American culture. In “The Unpopularity of Intellect,” he characterizes intelligence as an “excellence of mind” directed toward practical and concrete ends (Hofstadter 25). Inventors, entrepreneurs, and soldiers are celebrated in the United States, and these professions are full of intelligent people. Hofstadter contrasts this positive trait with intellect as the “critical,” “creative,” and “contemplative” side of the mind (25). The intellect questions the purpose behind activity, decides to create something other than planned, and reflects on the value of the result. This behavior has been stigmatized in mainstream culture. Smart, then, is not the problem. The problem is the performance of intellect in public. To question, create, or contemplate is the beginning of deviance and treason. Hofstadter, a historian at Columbia University, came to this conclusion in 1962, as the paranoia of McCarthyism gave way to the optimism of President Kennedy’s administration, friendlier to intellectuals. It is important to note these prior cycles of unpopularity for intellectuals. Nerds have risen and fallen before the contemporary “turn to the nerd” that characterizes the culture of digital innovation. In light of this turn, it is helpful to examine the ancestral idea of the “egghead” in the decade after World War II. Hofstadter cites a novelist, Louis Bromfield, whose essay “The Triumph of the Egghead” (1952) anticipates the negative stereotype of the nerd. Eggheads may be overly assertive and contemptuous of “the experience of more sound and able men” (9). At the same time, they are “over-emotional and feminine in reaction to any problem” (9). Eggheads are affective hermaphrodites who display masculine and feminine characteristics in an offensive and dangerous manner. Hofstadter traces the lineage of this position to disparate sources: Jacksonian hostility to experts and expertise (14); the disdain for pure as opposed to applied science (11); the culture of business and its suspicion of other kinds of authority (12); and the identification of the university as training ground for subversive Leftists (13). With the advent of the Space Program and the growth of the Civil Rights Movement, these stereotypes were partially displaced by the role of the public intellectual who improved society through engagement with the life of the nation. The early Cold War period was hospitable and inhospitable by turns to the performance of intellect in public. The performative aspect of egghead identity links the trouble with nerds to the trouble with antiracist, feminist, and gay liberation movements. Postwar culture had begun a renegotiation of public and private identities that expanded the boundary of acceptable behavior, along with the wish that nerds, among others, would keep it to themselves.

The public performance of intellect distinguishes nerd culture from personal geekiness. Geeks can be private, which makes them less disturbing. Proponents of “geek” argue that the term possesses a positive connotation, but this is an effect of its restricted area of operation. One may proclaim oneself a geek to affirm a passionate pursuit or technical expertise, but such interests, by themselves, threaten no one. Geeks point to the negative connotations of nerd from which geeks wish to dissociate: social dysfunction, personal isolation, and inability to communicate effectively with others in conventional social situations. Sociological research into nerd identity in American high schools confirms that nerd is a pejorative label applied from the outside by persons of superior social status. It is an all-purpose negation: no matter how many other social groups a school has—“jocks,” “beautiful people,” “cool kids,” “stoners,” and so on—nerds are the opposite of all of them, an umbrella term for unbelonging. Mary Bucholtz, who researched the language patterns of “nerd girls” in suburban California in the 1990s, observes that her subjects affirmed this negative definition of themselves as a means of creating a stable group identity (Bucholtz 211). This strategy prefigures the trends found in later nerd literature, where the term is reversed, like niggah in hip-hop and bitch in feminism, into a forbidden self-affirmation. If the novelist Rick Moody is right, and nerd arose as the opposite number of cool, then there is a direct line from 1950s counterculture to the rise of the nerd (Moody 167). If cool kids resisted the forces of postwar conformity by appearing not to care, and followed the underground currents of jazz, the Beats, and the nascent Civil Rights Movement, nerds cared too much about the technologies that produced the suburban sameness decried by hipsters. One of the chief ironies of this history is the transformation of the nerd in the 1990s into an oppositional identity that signified self-affirmation in the face of peer rejection. Coolness and nerdiness switched places as markers of social conformity and rebellion. Christine Quail warns us that the categories of cool were subverted by their incorporation into commodity culture. “This consumer commodity, as it is (re)produced in film, television, and other popular culture texts, has proven to hold significant cultural weight and economic benefit for media industries, at the expense of fully understanding those who would be ‘jocks’ or ‘nerds’” (Quail 461). One must keep this cooptation in mind when dealing with the texts of nerd representation, lest we confuse the evolution of the figure of the nerd with the persons labeled nerds.

That distortion already appears on television in the 1970s in contexts that preserve the nerd as the antithesis of cool. In Happy Days, “Nerd!” begins as a mild epithet used by Arthur Fonzarelli, “the Fonz,” as he prods his square friend Richie Cunningham into a broader frame of mind in the American Midwest of the 1950s. A hipster who wears a leather jacket and rides a motorcycle, Fonzie advocates cool but defends the less cool, including the Cunningham family, from whom he rents a room. In an episode called “Fonzie Versus the She-Devils,” the Fonz rescues his cousin Chachi from the clutches of a gang of girls who want to cut Chachi’s long hair. Fonzie teaches the gang a lesson by appearing in nerd drag, impersonating a shy, awkward, badly dressed boy who throws himself on the mercy of the tough girls. Having fooled them into believing he is a nerd, Fonzie exits the room, only to kick open the door to reveal his true self. Like Locke in leather, he lectures the girls on the value of tolerance. “I’ll give you somethin’ to do,” he says in high swagger, “Write down five hundred times, Live and let live.” Though Fonzie tells others not to be so nerdy, he believes that nerds are cool kids waiting to happen. In this way, Happy Days both reinforced the traditional negative connotations of the word and deconstructed the nerd-hipster opposition. This defense prepares the way for the transformation of nerd identity in later media.

Happy Days posits the nerd as a middle-class white boy in need of enlightenment. The whiteness and maleness of the archetypal nerd is an important aspect of this identity well into the 1980s, when representations begin to shift in terms of race and gender, if not class. Ironically, Richie Cunningham reveals the defective nature of the nerd precisely in those terms. As Ron Eglash observes, “we might note that in comparison to, say, Hitler’s Aryan Übermensch, the geek image is hardly a portrait of white male superiority” (Eglash 50). For Fonzie, his nerdy friends and relatives are defined by their inability to fend for themselves, by a failed struggle for existence in the absence of a defender. Though Happy Days does not address this theme directly, the need for a defective white boy to be defended against the violence of women suggests a queerness to the idea of the nerd. If such a boy could not be described as gay—television was still evolving openly gay characters in the 1970s—he was certainly an example of failed heterosexuality. In his analysis of Plato in Rebel without a Cause, Eglash asserts that “nerd identity will come at a price, threatening the masculinity of its male participants” (51). From this angle, Fonzie’s defense of Chachi constitutes a coded assertion of gay rights, but the need to defend a gentle boy from physical abuse marks a limit to the emancipation of the nerd. Unlike the Fonz, Chachi does not turn into a superhero to defend himself. He must be protected by an older, stronger man whose working-class ethnicity underlines his dominance. Nerds still need defenders among men whose sexuality, physical strength, and social status are not impaired.

The figure of the nerd undergoes an important shift in the 1980s, just as the personal computer and the technology sector gain importance in the American economy. The nerd begins to achieve autonomy from the patronage of heteronormative men, and the role of nerd diversifies along lines of race, ethnicity, and gender. These shifts are linked as cause and effect: once the nerd proliferates into different forms, the possibilities of nerd narrative expand. Once the nerd is no longer a sidekick, but a member of an alliance, it becomes possible to compensate for physical inferiority with economic power. The touchstone for this transformation in popular culture is the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds, a college comedy that appeared on the heels of Animal House (1978) and Porky’s (1982), the cinema of sexist vulgarity. The title, Revenge of the Nerds, is somewhat misleading: the titular revenge does not involve the destruction of an opposing group, but the creation of a marriage plot, in which a rejected group protagonist is accepted into college society as a new kind of cool kid. This plot is sponsored by a privileged setting: “Adams College,” the kind of elite private school that features a strong Greek life and vibrant athletic supporters. Greek life is dominated by the “jocks,” the traditional nerd enemy, now engaged in the rituals of social bonding that will lead to advantageous alliances after graduation. Louis and Gilbert, the initial protagonists—white, male nerds—fail to break into these elite social circles due to their traditional failings of social ineptitude and physical inferiority. Instead, they bond with their fellow freshmen who have been exiled to the gym after the football team appropriates their dorm. At this point, the plot resembles the typical college farce, and even World War II movies, in which unlikely heroes triumph over adversity by forming a “band of brothers,” a surrogate, all-male family. But Revenge of the Nerds departs from this pattern by introducing inclusiveness. When Gilbert and Louis form their rival fraternity, they recruit a gay black man, a Japanese student, a mute violinist, a slovenly stoner, and an engineering wunderkind. (It is as if Akira Kurosawa had made Seven Samurai with American losers.) Together, this group tricks its way into Lambda Lambda Lambda, a national black fraternity, absorbing its otherness into a white-led, multiethnic group. The alliance diversifies by gender when a corresponding sorority, Omega Mu, is introduced to serve in the supportive girlfriend role. The “Lambdas” and the “Omegas” are coded by name as outsiders: the Greek letter λ is associated with the Gay Rights movement, and the “omega” gestures to the wolf pack structure to indicate the lowest rung in the social hierarchy—in this case, the “o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Nerd Ecology
• 2. Stellar Cosmopolitans: Star Trek and a Federation of Species
• 3. The Destruction of the Sky: Virtual Worlds as Refuge
• 4. The Great Music: Restoration as Counter-Apocalypse in the Tolkien Legendarium
• 5. Slayer and Signal: Joss Whedon Versus the Big Bads
• 6. Icons of Survival: Metahumanism as Planetary Defense
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index
• Imprint