Evil Nerd Theory Part 1: What is an Evil Nerd?

Who are these guys? And why are they all guys?

Every happy internet user is different, unhappy internet users are alike. It’s 2022, why are the billionaires shitposting? And why, in response to—as the meme with the Kwik-E-Mart holdup goes—“valid criticism” do some of the weirdest nerds come out of the woodwork to take a bullet for them? What unites the grievances of those who have the most power and those who have, seemingly, some of the least?

This is the beginning of a multi-part breakdown of a peculiar 21st century internet phenomena: the Evil Nerd.

The world is changing, to quote a line from one of the Evil Nerds’ favorite fantasy franchises. These guys (and they are mostly guys), being nerds, recognize that. They’re smart, they’re good at analyzing conditions. They geek out on stuff, they don’t just read fantasy, they read history too, sometimes even along with theory and criticism! But for this particular kind of person, wealthy and powerful or not, intelligence comes paired with a certain kind of malignance. The Evil Nerd is sharp, and also mean, their big brains are oriented towards anger and destructiveness. They recognize a kind of world that’s one way, and they want to make it another way, by force if necessary. What are they so angry about?

The first key characteristic of the Evil Nerd mindset in general is this: their understanding of the situation they find themselves in is basically accurate, while their recommendations for actionable steps to take within that situation are wildly off. They have a good diagnosis, but a very, very bad prescription.

Here’s the deal; in Europe and North America, over the past 50 years, culture at large has been starting to move away from a dominant worldview that centers the christian white male straight cisgender human person. For hundreds of years, the default human being in North America and Europe was figured as an able bodied white dude in his early 30s. Over time, very gradually, more and more people and institutions are recognizing that religious minorities, people from other racial backgrounds, women and nonbinary folks, and transgender individuals, all have value for their own sake. If you’re reading this and nodding your head in satisfaction, congratulations, you are not an Evil Nerd. If you’re currently making a little angry fist like Arthur the Aardvark from that one TV show, you might undertake some introspection.

The second important aspect of the Evil Nerd worldview is that they see themselves as outsiders and even victims. This trend towards greater and greater recognition of the value of people who are different from them has had an alienating effect. Combine this alienation with an inherent distrust of institutions and received knowledge, and an outsized belief in their own superior reasoning and research skills, and you have a group of people who think they see things that no one else sees, and it makes them mad. Evil Nerds will often self-identify as heretics, subversives, dissidents, contrarians, as if their belief that IQ correlates with intelligence and race makes them identical with like Galileo or something. Sometimes they go one further on the O.G. and actually assert that the Earth is flat.

This is, in political terms, a Reactionary position. More on that later, but to offer a quick sketch, Reactionaries do just what the word says - they react, especially in negative ways to perceived change and power. They want to get outside of all that and away from it. They long to EXIT … to some other where, and RETURN … to some other when. They want to wind back progress, usually to an imaginary Golden Age that’s like some mashup of 1950s advertising material from the US, nostalgic postcards of the English countryside, and, for some reason, the white statue mausoleum of ancient Rome. A lot of them also love Russia. (I mean, I kind of love Russia too, Russia is interesting.)

Which brings us to third defining characteristic of the Evil Nerd - they are hierarchy fetishists. What all of these idealized historical periods have in common, wether it’s Mad Men suburban Connecticut, peasant Britain, or the imperial Mediterranean, is a clear pecking order, with straight(ish) white Christian men on top.

There’s an Evil Nerd meme about this: “Hard times make strong men. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men. Weak men make hard times.” This is a variation on the Kali Yuga construct, the idea that the world goes through endless cycles of pain and repetition in which ultimately, nothing new is possible. Note the terms and the brutally simple value judgements: hard/good; weak/strong, and of course, the only people who make anything in this bleak scenario are “men.” So there’s this obsession with hierarchy that’s visible here, and again, more about this later, but I think that may only be a symptom of a larger issue, the longing for some kind of absolute clarity that takes the noise of history and change and reduces that ambiguity down to a blunt and violently stupid slogan, pretending to explain it all to the scared and angry.

And this is the fourth and final main thing we need to know about the Evil Nerds: they are fundamentally unhappy. When you know you’re smart, you think you’re correct, and you see that the world is telling you that you’re wrong, you are going to get mad, and sad, and, if you can admit it, not a little worried.

Evil Nerds are scared. And what they are scared of most is winning. They are deeply invested in their status as dissident outsiders. If they inherited a mandate, how could they blame others for everything that’s going wrong? If they found themselves in front of the means of production, then they would have to take responsibility for processes like energy generation, food distribution, public health, regional planning … is it possible to provide goods and services and opportunity to a 2050s population using ideology and technology from the 1950s? The 1650s? The 0150s? Who wants to deal with that? Better to whine and tweet from the sidelines, than to be on the hook for figuring out how to make a future from random pieces of an idealized past.

This is the nature of the Evil Nerd mindset: just smart and critical enough to convince themselves that their prior assumptions were right all along, self obsessed enough to rest easy thinking that they’ve got all the answers and it is the children who are wrong, happy with the explanation that is clear and dumb and puts down their enemies, but unhappy with the contradiction they end up trapped in - if you’re so intelligent and correct, bucko, and the world is a meritocracy, then why aren’t you running the show? And by the way what would you do if you were (other than, intentionally or through ineptitude, kill billions of people who aren’t like you)?

But we, the Nerds who are not Evil, find ourselves in a contradiction as well, and it’s one that parallels this other, perhaps predictably. If the Evil Nerds are so sad and wrong, how come they are increasingly influential? Why are the richest men (yes, men, again) in the world posting with Evil Nerd characteristics? If they don’t have power, then … why do they have power? And again, why do those with no power seem so invested in defending them? Also: where did the Evil Nerd mindset come from in the first place? These are questions we will take up in subsequent installments in this series.

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This has been Part 1 of Evil Nerd Theory. Thanks for reading. You can find Part 2 here.