- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
Pardon me while I sit down in my psychiatry armchair ...
As with many things, I think identity is the core of it. If you're American, white-ish, middle-class, agnostic/vaguely Protestant, and haven't had the shit kicked out of you by your parents, chances are you can make it to your 20s without developing a strong sense of identity one way or another. People want to belong to groups. People like the idea of "us against them." From 2007 onwards, "nerd" is a group with very obvious identity tokens--the t-shirt, the keychain, the stupid hair.
Furthermore, culture for the longest time had the whole "nerd loser" stereotype, so this upmarketed, repackaged version of the nerd identity lets you roleplay persecution and outsiderdom without actually ever risking being outre.
As with many things, I think identity is the core of it. If you're American, white-ish, middle-class, agnostic/vaguely Protestant, and haven't had the shit kicked out of you by your parents, chances are you can make it to your 20s without developing a strong sense of identity one way or another. People want to belong to groups. People like the idea of "us against them." From 2007 onwards, "nerd" is a group with very obvious identity tokens--the t-shirt, the keychain, the stupid hair.
Furthermore, culture for the longest time had the whole "nerd loser" stereotype, so this upmarketed, repackaged version of the nerd identity lets you roleplay persecution and outsiderdom without actually ever risking being outre.