The beauty of the geek

Are nerds born or are they made? The author of "American Nerd" discusses the history of the geek, from greasy-haired overachiever to Dungeons & Dragons lover to blogging hipster.

By Eryn Loeb

Read more: Books, Technology & Business, Geeks, Steve Jobs, Interviews, Autism, Authors, Books Interviews

May 20, 2008 | The information age has been good to nerds. No longer are they relegated to getting sand kicked in their faces by that other familiar archetype, the jock. We've gotten used to watching Steve Jobs grin awkwardly as he announces the latest hot techie toy, and when it comes to pop culture, nerds like "Superbad" writer/star Seth Rogen are increasingly in control of their own image. But even with the cultural cachet that comes with having your achievements validated by the masses, nerds are still high school losers.

In his absorbing new book, "American Nerd: The Story of My People," Benjamin Nugent chronicles this underdog class. He considers the etymology of the word "nerd" -- possible origins include the name of a creature in Dr. Seuss' 1950 book "If I Ran the Zoo," and a bucktoothed ventriloquist dummy dubbed "Mortimer Snerd" -- and explores the world of hipsters, "an androgynous paradise where adults of both sexes look like enlarged spelling-bee champions." He traces popular representations of nerds, from Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," to Gilda Radner and Bill Murray's sketches on "Saturday Night Live," to "Napoleon Dynamite." And he asks what a person's race has to do with their chances of being a nerd. Are nerds born, or are they made? According to Nugent, it's both.

Appropriately, the whole thing is a pretty nerdy undertaking. It's also a personal one. Nugent, a journalist and author of a 2004 critical biography of the late musician Elliott Smith, was himself a nerdy kid, and he laces this wide-ranging cultural investigation with bittersweet bits of his own story. Perhaps most poignantly, he tracks down two of his childhood friends and asks them to reflect on formative years filled with Dungeons & Dragons and self-loathing. His encounters with them reveal that being a nerd is not something everyone experiences the same way.

For Nugent, nerdiness is a complicated state of being that should be challenged at least as much as it's celebrated. Salon spoke to him about what ham radio fanatics have in common with debate team enthusiasts, and why people with Asperger's syndrome may just be diagnosed nerds.

You write at the beginning of the book that you "empathize with nerds and antinerds alike," and even say there are reasons to despise your younger, nerdy self. With that mix of sympathies, what did you set out to find or explain?

I wanted to find out what makes someone nerdy in the eyes of their peers, and also what compels them to keep doing the nerdy activities: what they get out of it, what urges it fulfills, whether it was a voluntary decision for them to be nerds, or whether it was foisted upon them. I wanted to give the reader a window into the heads of nerds, and into the heads of people who hate nerds.

Do you feel like nerds are an especially misunderstood class of people?

I actually think people are pretty good at understanding what makes a nerd a nerd, on a gut level. But they aren't in touch with why they hate nerds. They haven't examined their prejudices and their own feelings vis-à-vis nerdiness.

Your examples of nerdy individuals and endeavors are pretty wide-ranging. How did you refine your idea of what a nerd is?

After spending a lot of time with different subcultures that I intuitively knew were nerdy, I figured out what they all had in common: a love of rules, a love of hierarchies that were meritocratic and open to everybody, and in some cases the affectation of rationalism (whether computer programming or math). Ham radio operators kept using Morse code long after they had to, because they saw it as a purely rational form of language. That seems to me to be a common trait of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and kids on debate teams, and computer programmers.

"Nerd" really implies being an outsider, being picked on as a kid, social awkwardness.

What makes people insiders in high school is their ability to intuitively figure out how the hierarchies work. Some nerds can't follow the hierarchies, don't know how, and sometimes don't even perceive them. Other nerds are unwilling to follow them. But in general most of the people we consider nerds are people who are oblivious to or incompetent at following the hierarchies.

Can you explain the connection you draw between the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome and people who might be thought of as nerds?

People with Asperger's syndrome tend to be good at what psychologists call systemic thinking. They tend to be bad at what the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen calls empathic thinking, which is the kind you need to interpret nonverbal social cues, the kind you need to program a computer. I think a lot of people we've historically called nerds would have been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, had Asperger's been around at the time.

One of the slightly frightening things about the explosion of Asperger's diagnoses is that because Asperger's syndrome refers to a hard-wired neurological state, kids are essentially being told that they are hard-wired to be nerds. It's a really fraught diagnosis. I wonder if there are kids who would've benefited from just being able to think of themselves as nerdy, and then gone on to become something else, instead of being told when they're young, "You have Asperger's syndrome, you're always going to be a socially awkward systemic thinker."

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