Because it's the radical chic thing, and for the nerd/geek, acceptance.
I’ll never understand why any nerd or geek would identify with the Left.
Because it's the radical chic thing, and for the nerd/geek, acceptance.
1)Why should any geek or nerd be tempted to be "radical chic?"
2)Once one gains acceptance, one is by definition no longer a nerd/geek . . . correct?
There is only a nerd chic because Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, founders of Oracle and other technical geniuses are billionaires.
The nerd chic is more a matter of aping the rich elite than actual raising of the average intelligence of the discourse. Sounding smart is like learning French in the 1700s or wearing fashions like Queen Victoria in the late 1800s.
IMO, there is not a true increased valuation of math, science and engineering. Otherwise we would not see the continued development of soft liberal arts majors but a renewed emphasis on teach kids true math (and ditching Common Core’s WTF questions). We would see more push back against NSA hacking of our networks on both the technical compromise of the internet as we do the invasion of privacy. We would see more emphasis of getting quality graduates into science and engineering, instead of saying we need diversity regardless of quality, AKA as many good engineers as possible instead of a few more black girls in the field. And there would be less emphasis on bringing in HB-1 visa holders and development of the local talent pool so we wouldn’t undercut our talent bases while risking those people going home to create competing products.
Instead, I see article on how to set up your own social network in the hope of getting rich and the technical merits of PHP versus Python for creating Wordpress plug-ins. Or “Look, I’m carrying a book on Ruby on Rails, I’m brilliant and a future Bill Gates, so date me!”
“I’ll never understand why any nerd or geek would identify with the Left.”
“Because it’s the radical chic thing, and for the nerd/geek, acceptance.”
Or as I overheard a remarkably bright young teenager tell his friend at an ice cream shop:
“Dude, you don’t get it. Nonconformity is the new conformity.”