Was it about twenty years ago when the fortune of the nerds started to turn? The numerically gifted and the mathematically inclined, from being the socially marginalized and the undesired, the lonely and the unseen - let's be brief and not too generous and call them the incels avant-la-lettre right away - moved closer and closer to the center of society's attention and acquired a whole new role. Maybe just a few of them had already made it to billionairedom at that time, but the development was clear. Not that long before, the nerd had been exclusively and safely occupied with crafts like building nuclear bombs and landing a job with - God permitting - Nasa. And if they did, of course, the fun would soon be over, when a spaceship had to be flown and the usual hormonally charged and not too abstractly gifted pilot had to fly the damned thing. So that was why they had been sitting alone at the parties and socially occupied some of the lower rungs - in the eyes of the socially more adept.
What changed? Computers. And the insane amount of money to be made by anybody with a mind more adapted to communicate with these things. Now smarter kids would have stopped right there, I think. They would not have ventured out in fields that had so mercilessly punished them before. Unfortunately, in line with the curiosity the breed was cursed with in the first place, they did so anyway and invented something called social media. Maybe it was just the idea that they could finally, and numerically, reverse-engineer all the secrets of the social intercourse they had never excelled in. However ill-advised this may seem now - knowing what we know, and aware that we are a vengeful species - they just had to fafo, come hell or high water.
Why does this even matter? Could not the nerds develop their pet project, too? Could they not get richer still? I'd grant them a yes on both counts, but I do wonder whether part of the social turmoil and the dramatic rifts we are seeing in societies the world over are not simply the result of ideas, of bad ideology, and of stale culture having reached the limits of its explanatory and sense-giving potential. And sure, you might say that someone like me, who is diversely gifted, and otherwise inclined, is just having trouble containing his envy at the thought of having been passed by in social relevance by the less socially adapted. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued that social media started to wreak social havoc when the 'like' and the 'retweet' were introduced. I am begging to differ. Did not the trouble start when nerdhood started to quantify and optimize their algorithms for that je-ne-sais-quoi that seems to drive and lubricate social relations? What are they called? Emotions? And what if engagement with nerdy media is driven by them? And what if the stronger, more motivational of them are negative? Hmm... emotions. They had heard a lot about them. Fear and anger became the currency of choice. Maybe social distancing did not exactly drop out of thin air. Hadn't the trial been running for some years already? And what that means for you? Go on social media and find out how binary the world seems to have become.