Is Geek Culture Dead? (Not Quite A BW Versus article)

It has never been easy for people labeled “geek”.

Geeks were never the cool kids but weren’t considered smart enough to be nerds. So while they weren’t forced to do some lazy dumb jock’s homework they were still getting the abuse. Perhaps moreso because they were worthless. And yet the geeks were telling the sci-fi stories the jocks would even support like certain science fiction shows, though of course anything brainer than Star Trek that didn’t at least have a no-nonsense captain macking on the ladies were still considered dumb…which just shows how stupid they are calling a smart movie dumb. I risk digression.

While looking for topics this week I stumbled upon an article by author Brian Niemeier that I’ll save for later in the week. He pointed out an article by another author that’s the focus of this commentary. In this article by JD Cowan, he writes about geek culture, making the point that the culture isn’t just dead but never really existed. I both agree and disagree with him on this point because I think the question is what actually qualifies as “geek culture” or what Midnight’s Edge’s Andre Einherjar refers to as “genre media”? Is geek culture real? Am I real? Are you real? Let’s examine…the geek culture part. I’m afraid I can’t help your identity crisis when I’m dealing with my own. Maybe I am being dreamed up by a butterfly. I bet his name is Ned.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe the mid-90s was thirty years ago. It definitely doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, and in the grand scheme of things I suppose it hasn’t. Nonetheless, it is an entire lifetime away from the world in 2024.

This year has been a very bizarre one so far. I’ve noticed a trend with the “younger” generations, particularly as half of Gen X has now reached their 50s, half of Gen Y has now reached their 40s, half of Millennials have reached their 30s, and half of Zoomers have reached their 20s. That pattern being either internal implosion, or a tightening of grit and effort to move beyond the failed past and build something new. It’s one or the other, not much in the way of variety.

The ones that have imploded the worst, I’ve found, are the ones still clinging to Geek Culture as their only real identity and questioning why that emptiness rules inside of them. The hole that only the Boomers seemingly could ignore, refuses to be filled by materialism.

Remember that second paragraph for when I get to Niemeier later this week. This may be strange to think about, the existence or otherwise of “geek culture” seeing as how prominent “geek media” is at the moment. Science fiction, fantasy, and superheroes are making big leaps and everyone is talking about them. From butchered Tolkien, to shows like House Of Dragons and Stranger Things, to all the superhero programs on streaming and movies, genres shoved into “geek circles” are doing quite well, isn’t it?

Let’s get a bit more philosophical: what IS a geek? Someone who has useless trivia? What’s “useless”? Superman’s favorite snack? Babe Ruth’s RBI average in 1976? Your favorite boy band member’s touring hobby? How many cakes you can put in a stack (before Lex Luthor steals them, which is terrible) and shape into a dragon for a client? Okay, that last one would be your job if your a pastry chef, but not if you’re just watching Cake Boss and can’t even use a box mix. I couldn’t tell you anything about Tiger King but somebody can. Someone remembers what couples survived in a particular soap opera (a short list to be sure). I can get a smartphone app to work provided I don’t have to do any coding. Is that geek enough?

It’s been over a quarter of a century since Cultural Ground Zero and there are many lessons we have learned from it. I’ve written about many of them here, and there is little sense rehashing any of it now. However, there is one part of it that does need to be reiterated because it is holding back an entire sector of Western Culture from regaining any footing. That is the continuation of the myth of Geek Culture and its harmful legacy on both art and general lifestyles. If anything ever hopes to improve, we’re going to have to finally shed this dead weight and accept a very important truth.

Here it is: Geek Culture isn’t real, and it never was. Clinging to a lie, a false identity, prevents any growth or change from happening. It’s been said many times, but it has to be reiterated here, because very slowly are people from these relatively younger, but aging, generations. The key to growth is to have something sturdy to build on, something your ancestors could build on before you rejected it for what replacement the TV and then internet told you to believe in instead. It is time to admit that experiment was a failure and get in line with reality again.

I don’t know if there’s NO geek culture. It’s like saying there’s no cowboy culture, no preppy culture, no elitist culture. In these cases it’s not the same as African culture (and which part of Africa gets to define what that even means) but it has become a culture, a group of people with shared interests who follow those interests in a similar manner. That might not be a dictionary definition but here’s one from Boston University:

Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called “the way of life for an entire society.” As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, art.

Those of us who are classified or identify as geek have a similar manner. We only dress up for particular events but may sneak in a Godzilla tie that blends in, or Pac-Man socks or something. We gather at conventions that cater to our shared interests. Geeks have subgroups, each with their own culture. People who lean towards anime aren’t the same as “toon heads” that lean towards Looney Tune fare. American superheroes and Japanese superheroes are usually different, but there are Japanese shows like Gatchaman, My Hero Academia, and Tiger And Bunny that take more inspiration from US heroes while American heroes can take cues from Ultraman and Super Sentai for the same reason: try something new and experiment with a take that interests the creators.

Basically, saying there’s no geek culture is to say there are no geeks, or at least not the people who group together with those interests. That isn’t to say a “normie” can’t enjoy a science fantasy superhero adventure but in the same vein geeks can enjoy sports or farm life. Beauty And The Geek, one of the few reality shows I like and miss, showed that we aren’t all that different just because someone is more interested in fashion and someone else in mathematics.

Why beat this drum? Surely everyone reading this now knows that modernity and materialism has to go, and everyone knows it is a crutch for the absolute failure that was the 2010s for those so-called younger generations to claim what their parents said was theirs. When you see just what happened to those formerly misled kids, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to stay on this track. There is nothing ahead but misery and death.

The wake up call of the 2020s is to finally accept the way things are, not the way things could be, and especially not the way things dying corporations and media apparatuses tell you they should be. What is coming ahead is not an era that will be gotten through by spouting knowledge on zombie mega franchises from the 1980s–it is one that will require you to even remember what that era was like in the first place in order to carry on into the future. And you will have to do is break free of the influence of people who hate you.

Archangels is cool on it’s own, but is also a good Christian comic.

That’s what’s happening. From creative geeks and story lovers (who may not be geeks but are still creative storytellers or want to be), the “parallel economy” as Rippaverse founder Eric July calls it, or the “Iron Age” of comics as coined by July’s fellow YouTube commentator Razorfist, has been trying to do just that, create an alternative. The Church has been trying to do so for years, but far too many fall into the trap of making “this but Christian” rather than tell a good story or make a good game from a Christian perspective. The ones who get it right make some great content enjoyed even by nonbelievers. I can find you atheists who let their  little kids watch Veggietales, and not just the secular version that NBC and Qubo aired that’s considered not as good.

From there the author goes into Baby Boomer ways of thinking and the effect on the general culture I won’t get into here. I’m interested in storytelling, and any comments I make on geek culture should come from that perspective since that’s what this site is about.

It took a long time to get to the overall point, so here it is. The mass media culture that was built up starting in the 1960s and up to the early 90s or so was built by Greatest Generation money funding Baby Boomer projects. Much of the so-called importance and mass market profitability was due to the fact that A) there were no other options for audiences, and B) they were built on then accepted societal truths everyone shared and a frame they all operated in. Neither of these are the reality of how things are done today.

In fact, there are now too many options, to the point that art is completely disposable to most people and consumed passively as if it were oatmeal. Gotta watch something when you come home after work, right? Who cares what it is as long as it hits the broad minimum barrier for Current Year moral acceptability. It’s hard to be ambitious when no one cares about ambition.

I don’t know if they don’t care about ambition, although I can easily find bunch of creators who want this to be easy and not put effort into it, or are only in it for the paycheck or for some sociopolitical message and lack real talent. Some of them are just not interested in the projects they’re working on and are in it for the “exposure” or the money, with a few so sure they have a “better” idea on how it should be done (aka, catering to their own personal tastes and values). The studios and publishers don’t want to give them the chance to create something original and their egos won’t settle for anything less than the top right now. So they warp some nostalgic property or adaptation to suit the story they really want to make with the people they want to make them with. They have ambition, but not for what they’re supposed to be working on.

As for societal truths, well, I don’t think I have to point any of that out. We are currently at the point where words and notions spoken by people from a mere decade ago is now taboo. I grew up in a world where 80s kids watched things from the 1950s without blinking and now there are full grown adults who can’t even process movies made before 1995. (Seriously, do a search in any search engine and marvel at the amount of people who can’t watch anything before that time period–it’s an epidemic). Forget anything older than the 1960s (the saying “Don’t Read Anything Before 1940” exists for a reason, after all), which severely limits the scope of “acceptable” art in Current Year–we are being taught that everything old has an expiry date on relevance, and that is very dangerous.

Some of this is cultural, as in the current culture war, but the studios are willing to grab for it. Watching something new will in theory make more money than something old. There are people who need something that has the best graphics, the best coloring, the best effects, and won’t give some black and white movie where they had to hand draw effects and isn’t in 4K HD widescreen a chance. Sometimes this does lead to something good. I’m watching PlayFrame going through the second installment of the Final Fantasy VII remake and while being a story people loved, the presentation is very dated even by my open standards. Dan even recently played the original game, and you can see how the advances in technology and pacing allows for a more fleshed out story and better looking characters, thus making them easier to connect to even if you are just watching someone else play the game like I am.

On the other hand, I love classic serials, radio dramas, and other productions from before “my time” because they’re still good this far out. If you think you can’t find young people who do the same, check out the return not just of vinyl records but doo-wop music.

That’s a doo-wop cover of Hanson’s “MMMbop” from seven years prior to this article’s original writing. I grabbed it because it amused me, but I’ve seen other young men bringing the style back with original songs. The Barbershop Quartet may not perform at my barbershop but it continues on. Lackadaisy may be about cat people but they’re cat people in prohibition era and people are STILL talking about the pilot, which features music that would fit in that time period. Everything old is new again, and there are people discovering these and updating them not for the “modern audiences” that the activists chase but for audiences in modern times who find this all a new experience and find a new love for it. Someone needs to tell Hollywood this. Even sidescrolling pixel games are still being made and finding fans, and only most of them are nostalgic for the 8-bit days.

Pair these above problems together and you get a greater sense of how things became what they are today. While art is more readily available and has greater reach than ever before, the audience is also simultaneously less and more picky about what ends up on their plate because it exists as more convenience before anything else, as long as it follows the formula dying megacorps have set out for them as acceptable.

Who’s promoting those old shows? Go to even the ad-sponsored streaming sites and while you’ll find a section for classic shows and certain streaming channels for shows like The Rifleman and I Love Lucy, my dad isn’t watching those and he grew up with those shows. He also doesn’t know how to use streaming apps and doesn’t even use the On Demand feature from the cable or satellite companies we’ve used for TV. If you don’t know they’re there it’s tough to find them an audience. Sometimes the truth is those old shows weren’t able to do sci-fi and superheroes the way we can now except in books, comics, and cartoons. Maybe the media snobs should stop looking down on those. (Not Cowan of course, since he’s an author, though I don’t know how he feels about comics, animation, and video games.)

At the same time, they have been trained to funnel only modern corporate product down the belt-line in order to avoid encountering anything outside the acceptable societal frame (Hence, the “Don’t Read Anything Before 1940” year becomes “1980” and, more recently, “2000”). What this leads to is exactly what the old industries now are, living in a detached void from the past and the wider world, and it’s why they are dying.

It’s up to us to show today’s fans what the past looked like and show them why the modern stuff can still appreciate it.

And that’s why they don’t promote the old stuff, despite Disney+ buying Fox and other companies for their vast library. Meanwhile the “we can make it better” types see something they can “fix”, and usually create an inferior product. Marketing told the bigwigs they need to make it new and “modern” and the end result isn’t as good, but because they want “their” version to be the one everyone remembers for the sake of their own ego, the older version gets pushed away. The 1980s actually did this as well. Look at the story of Legend Of The Lone Ranger, and how it treated Clayton Moore. It’s still used in plots by those who remember it, while Kylo Ren tells us to “let the past die, kill it if you must”. There’s an active movement to replace the past in both pop culture and just American culture in general, and that should be pushed back against while still making new stories.

What’s coming next? Well, that is what we must prepare for, and the best way to prepare for it is to get an early start by ditching the system everyone knows is already dying. Cultural Ground Zero is unavoidable now to anyone with ears and eyes, but it’s still clung to because there is no obvious path forward. While that may be true, it is obvious that pretending this dead system is still viable only leads to mental stress and eventual self-destruction. You know it’s dead, I know it’s dead. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise. It is the 2020s, not the 1980s–mass media is not going to lead you to utopia. In fact, it is currently trying to lead you to the grave.

What we need is a better system to organize all of these old and new stories. We only have so many hours in our day between work, sleep, and other activities both for fun and to keep up our various responsibilities as people living on this planet. Making a stronger variety of shows, showing proper respect to the past, and better curating centuries worth of stories going back to long before The Iliad, and finding audiences for those stories is one way. Properly archiving them is another. So many movies, TV shows, radio dramas, novel and short stories…all being lost to time and video games, despite being only three generations old as a player in media, are starting to go the same way because the publishers want you to buy the new games they think will make them more money. What we need is to get the corporations out of our media; not just geek media but in our long history of storytelling.

The greater point here is that this is not culture. “Geek Culture” is not real. Just like Progress, it is also built on a lie.

Geek Culture is a mutation of 1960s to 2000s Baby Boomer mass media consumption twisted in a way to fill multiple purposes that Art was never meant to fulfil. What was originally supposed to be a way to distribute art and entertainment on a wider scale to more people became a way to shape tastes, opinions, and beliefs, of the people consuming it in new and increasingly warped ways. It’s no coincidence more people live off pills and medicine than ever before.

If you doubt it then find yourself a modern Hollywood movie where every character doesn’t have the same general beliefs and worldview (and the villains don’t all have the same bland motivation and lack of drive beyond wanting to be mean for mean’s sake), or a historical film where people who lived differently than the superior people of today aren’t treated as two dimensional cartoons we’re meant to “learn from” and look down on from our superior modern lens that isn’t color tinted to murky colors and made overly ugly. It’s all the same.

There is a backlash against this, as fans of those old media are pushing back both in pointing things out and countering the Hollywood meta narrative that worked its way into comics and games and in creating the stories that the corporate system and the activists who snuck into the proper positions stopped making. It’s not dying but it is changing. Not according to Cowan if I read this paragraph right.

Everything in mass culture, OldPub, Hollywood, Big Tech / Silicon Valley, and AAA video games, are all run by groups that want to control thought and change public morals and discourse. They do this because they hate people as they are. Just the fact that Sweet Baby Inc exists, a group that offers no value to art or entertainment except to enforce corporate morality on projects they didn’t create, should be proof enough that quality is not the factor here: thought control is. The whole reason they can do this in the first place when decades ago it would have been pointed out for what it is, is simply because entropy has rotted away at the foundations of what once was. You cannot sneer at Jack Thompson while accepting someone doing the same thing as him, just from a different political position. In fact, within a few years I’m sure many will soften on him, as well. That’s how decline and decay works, after all. We’re on a downhill slide.

The old properties are dying. Ask any classic Star Wars and Marvel fan and they’ll tell you. However, there are people working around the corporations and bringing back traditional heroism through new properties, tapping into everything they love about the old properties and bringing them back. Sweet Baby Inc is being exposed and soon their business “kinfolk” will follow since the current media culture is trying to protect them rather than sacrificing them, which may happen if it looks like other “consultant” groups like them start getting exposed as well.

This system is only kept alive by those who refuse to move on. This leaves the Geek Culture adherents, the ones that haven’t yet been filtered into this death cult still fighting the pointless fight to roll the clock back before it imploded as the last holdouts on this dead system. And at this juncture, it has to emphasized to these poor souls: it’s over, bro. You need to move on and take your business elsewhere. You are no longer the customers of this rickety system. They don’t want customers–they want cultists for their lifestyle brands new religion, and they don’t need to be reminded that you exist. Because for all intents and purposes, you don’t exist to them. You’re a relic of a bygone age that is not coming back, one that was used as a stepping stone to get to where they are today. Either get in line, or be destroyed by Progress.

I keep hearing this and I’m not ready to give up. We may lose Superman but if we get a hero that stands for what he stands for, is treated with respect rather than being evil analogue #265 (though I’m sure we already sailed past that number by now), and take his place in mythology, all the character will need is to take his spot in the culture as the corporate style of “creativity” starts to die, sadly taking our childhood favorites with them. Although since Superman and friends taught me to not give up and be a better person under writers who cared, I’m not ready to give up on them, either. I just don’t know how to fix that problem so outside of pointing out why those characters work all I can do is take those lessons and make my own. The current corporate fakery is not geek culture, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It means hiring the “cool kids” to take it over is a bad idea.

But it can be better if you fight for it.

And now is the best time to be fighting.

New platforms and ideas are springing up everyday. New creators and audiences are showing up to the scene all the time. The old system might still be around, but it’s irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, and, as we’ve just discussed many times, is over.

Artificiality always eventually falls away. No man can maintain an illusion all the time, and all tricks wear thin after extended usage. What we are seeing now is what happens when something is stretched out past its expiration date instead of being allowed to die a peaceful death. You are left with cultural necromancers who cannot create, who only live to prolong the shadow-play of their corporate masters further. And that is not going to end anywhere good.

What can be done is to put things in their place and accept the world we have now instead of trying to revive an era long since gone and dead. There are creators right now trying to create while dead corporations are rehashing dead IP with no new ideas. The gap between the two has never been more obvious before, and never before has it been easier to move on to greener pastures. It is time to finally let the dead rest.

I enjoyed the original Fox run and radio dramas, anyway.

Wait…what are we talking about then? New things can still create geek culture. Geek culture isn’t what the corporations are trying to define it as, because they’re run by the cool kids, the counterculture people who don’t realize they ARE “the Man” now, and other people who aren’t geeks. They just want to “make it better” but they’re still the same people who looked down on us as teenagers and in college. The old avenues of geek culture were taken over but that doesn’t mean the culture doesn’t exist, or that it can’t evolve. When Superman the character enters public domain (with certain caveats because copywrite and trademarks are two different things) we may end up with something akin to the Winnie-The-Pooh serial killer stories but we might also see stories by people who were writing better Superman without Superman retake the cultural icon that despite Batman’s current status is the guy we think of when we think of superheroes.

Geek culture isn’t fake and it isn’t dead. It just isn’t what the current stewards think it is. That’s why it’s failing, but with the avenues we’ve both talked about, we have the ability to take it back through crowdfunding, YouTube, webcomics, audio plays, and every option we used to have through a new technological lens. Indie game developers still get stuff out there. The indie comic scene may well bring the “Iron Age” to life. Streaming and hosting sites still offer ways to get your product out through YouTube or Vimeo. I’m also not ruling out “our people” start finding a way to take back the properties by waking up and trying to find a way to retake those positions if we can beat them at their own games well enough. If not we can take our stuff back through new IP, and find people among the masses who will enjoy it and help it thrive. It will take time and patience, something the other side used to be good at but they’re quest for using branding to push their stories rather than take time to let their original ideas find a place apart from where it doesn’t belong shows there’s potential for those who know how to exploit it.

The genie is out of the bottle and they may never take our properties, but they won’t get rid of us.