The Rise of Tech Was Never the Revenge of the Nerds

One of the more asinine aspects of the media's propaganda for "tech" has been its cultivation of the asinine "revenge of the nerds" narrative about it--the rise of the Silicon Valley billionaire a tale of the smart, hard-working kids their peers failed to treat with respect ending up the winners in the end as the jocks who bullied them wash their cars and mow their lawns and clean their pools (figuratively, perhaps literally).

The reality is that the fortunes were the revenge not of the nerds but of the rich who, never reconciled to their concessions to working people in the era of the New Deal, got their own back in the neoliberal era, when they shifted the tax burden away from themselves and onto said working people, got the regulators off their backs, broke the unions, and embarked upon an orgy of "making money from money" as "real" economic activity proved incidental and usually slight (bubbles of enterprise on a whirlpool of speculation, rather than a steady stream of enterprise carrying some bubbles of speculation in John Maynard Keynes' image). Silicon Valley was but one part of it, indeed a part whose flourishing, as James Kenneth Galbraith pointed out, cannot be understood separately from the "greed is good" triumphalism of Wall Street, all as the mega-profits of real estate, Big Oil, the health sector and the rest part of the same pack.

The talk of Tech's rise as anything else was the same old game of equating wealth with service to society, and superior wealth to superior service, with superior service enabled by superior mental gifts--by superior intelligence--diverting attention from how economies really work and how great wealth is really made, while being a little conformist-aspirationalist homily telling those who have not "made it" that his toil will pay off, his sufferings be redeemed--the better to keep them striving to be useful to those who really have the power, by virtue of money and not brains, with this version in particular "For the nerds."

Of course, this is not to deny that there have been prominent tech industry figures who in some way or other seemed to correspond to the "nerd" stereotype, which lent the narrative some credibility that it would otherwise not have had with the public. Indeed, it mattered that the man who was for so long the face of the industry, Bill Gates, might be characterizable as "looking like Central Casting's idea of a nerd," especially as it seems that no one downplayed this. Where the media, in its shameless flattery of the rich and powerful, is likely to call such persons "handsome" when they would not do so if they looked exactly the same way but had no money, no one bothered to do so in the case of Mr. Gates. Even in an age in which the largest fortunes exploded he managed to be the richest man on Earth for nearly a generation according to the listings, making him so rich that no one needed to pretend he was anything but what he was physically. Indeed, the frankness about the matter was itself an homage of sorts to his extreme wealth, while one may add that his being characterized as "handsome" would have been at odds with the "tech genius" image that was so important to his personal image as the "founder of Microsoft," the supreme icon of the tech world, and the revenge of the nerds narrative the media pushed about it because it was so very effective in distracting a credulous public from the reality that even those who prospered in Silicon Valley who seemed classifiable as nerds had other advantages far, far more important to their "success." One may see this as underlined by how those nerds who were not born to wealthy and privileged families affording capital and connections, with nothing but their brains, toil for them, proles of the digital age yielding up their labor to the Lords of Capital until it suits said Lords to replace them with others in their turn, very likely without their ever finding themselves in the "right place at the right time" to become Lords themselves. Instead they simply move on to other jobs, often in other lines of work, perhaps not infrequently less well-paid and less glamorous--the nerds themselves possibly washing cars and mowing lawns and cleaning pools, possibly for jocks who did a better job of picking their parents, as they are reminded that for most nerds there is no happy ending where "smarts" and hard work pay off, just more cruelty all the way up to the end of the tale.