Huddle Up, Geeks: Some of These Hot Garbage Developments Are Our Fault

We here in the geek community are very used to considering ourselves smarter, kinder, and more accepting than the madding crowd, but Elon Musk is our fault. At a minimum.

Remember how I said I’d be using the paid tier for follow-up pieces to talk about something I wanted to say in the main public essay but felt was just a little too spicy to devote bandwidth to dealing with the blowback of flump-by sea lions from around the internet in the comments?

Yeah, so this one has a Scoville number. I really probably should just leave it in the bin, but I’m far too dumb to do that.

It’s been knocking around my head for a long time, and with the kabuki theater pay-per-view Billionaire’s Brawl of the last few weeks, it wants out real bad. In some ways, it’s a highly-seasoned follow-up to every essay I’ve written here since December last year. It’s an addendum to all of them, all of it, the oncoming AI train and the poor quality of contemporary capitalists, the highly effective stupidity of fascists and the arrogance of the wise left, the wheel of internet becoming and unbecoming and the decay of compassion.

I’ve been a geek for a long time, and in a lot of different ways. I’m even old enough to remember when geek, let alone nerd, wasn’t really a word you wanted to call yourself, or especially to hear yourself called, at all. It was word that made us flinch, because it was usually followed by something directing some flavor or other of assholery our way.

So when I say that geeks and the geek community has long considered itself very special, very welcoming, very enlightened and advanced, well, it makes a kind of sense. We were bullied, so we should understand pain and the horror of feeling defenseless. We had nowhere to belong, so we built our own spaces and logically wouldn’t want to repeat the structures of the spaces that hurt us. We were excluded for our interests and for being booksmart, so the geek proletariat should generally be made of fairly smart people who can see through the lies and hypocrisies and contradictions wielded by the greater mainstream world around us.

And sometimes it is, all those things and more.

And sometimes I look at Elon Musk splashing around wearing his fascist little arm-floaties in the liquefied remains of a community that really did once mean quite a lot to people, particularly geeks of all stripes, repeatedly nailing his tongue to his nose with a rusty, but Verified Blue, hammer, and I think about how eager geeks were to put this man in the cultural position to do what he’s done, trusting based on nothing that this one just…wouldn’t do that to us. Not this time.

This time was different.