"[O]nline life today descends from where it started, as a safe harbor for the computer nerds who made it."

"They were socially awkward, concerned with machines instead of people, and devoted to the fantasy of converting their impotence into power. When that conversion was achieved, and the nerds took over the world, they adopted the bravado of the jocks they once despised.... But they didn’t stop being nerds. We, the public, never agreed to adopt their worldview as the basis for political, social, or aesthetic life. We got it nevertheless. Musk’s obsession with X as a brand... reminds us that the world’s richest man is a computer geek, but one with enormous power instead of none. It calls attention to the putrid smell that suffuses the history of the internet. I’m kind of tired of pretending that the stench does not exist, as if doing otherwise would be tantamount to expressing prejudice against neurodivergence. This is a bad culture, and it always has been. Foul nerddom is part of what invented, popularized, and profited from the internet’s commercial rise. Twitter did its part to hide all that, with its unoffending avian verbs, its adorable birds, even its charming fail whale...."

Writes Ian Bogost in "The Ugly Honesty of Elon Musk’s Twitter Rebrand/The platform’s new logo seems a little juvenile. So does the internet" (The Atlantic).

Where does this intense disgust come from? Is Ian Bogost the sort of man who felt naturally privileged to run the world before those horrible nerds broke out of their cage? Or is he being funny and he's one of the nerds? Wikipedia: 

Ian Bogost is an American academic and video game designer, most known for the game Cow Clicker. He holds a joint professorship at Washington University as director and professor of the Film and Media Studies program in Arts & Sciences and the McKelvey School of Engineering.... He is the author of Alien Phenomenology or What It's Like to be a Thing and Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism and Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogame....

It's safe to guess that he's one of the nerds, but I'll infer that he's not one of the nerds who "took over the world" and "adopted the bravado of the jocks they once despised." He's true to the original nerd position, despising the jocks, and, I'm guessing, that's where he gets his disgust for the nerds like Musk who take on the bravado of the jocks who once intimidated them. 

I know, I need to read some more of the Bogost oeuvre. Here's something else of his in The Atlantic, from a week ago, "All Soda Is Lemon-Lime Soda/It’s not a flavor; it’s a vibe." Ha ha. Great title. Small excerpt:

[In] 1772... the English chemist Joseph Priestley published his Directions for Impregnating Water With Fixed Air, the first influential manual for the artificial manufacture of carbonated water. Inheriting from the perceived health benefits of natural spa water, Priestley hoped to win over the British Admiralty on a method for improving water drunk at sea by, well, impregnating it with fixed air. Even without added flavors, carbonated water contains carbonic acid, giving it a mild taste in addition to its fizz: Plain synthetic seltzer has the sensibility of citrus.

In his treatise on artificial carbonation, Priestley makes the case for soda as a way of treating or preventing scurvy, partly on the grounds that it opposes “putrefaction” of the humors caused by dampness, poor discipline, and a noxious diet (among other factors). People were starting to recognize that citrus fruit could serve that purpose too....