Where did all the white nerds from the 90s go?

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Tate McRae

kiwifarms.net
Joined
Jun 17, 2025
Pictures like these make their way around nostalgia threads all over the internet. I had friends like this in school who were into Magic and PC games, but nowadays it seems like everyone is missing. What happened to everyone? Where did everyone go? It sure seemed like we'd all be around for years continuing to play the same games we grew up with forever.

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Trooned out/got a real job and a family
Honestly I'm a little weirded out how badly the computer science cohort got hit with the tranny pills.

You had mainly white dudes with deep knowledge of IT systems with a distrust of government and they all troon out?
Seems very convenient.
 
Perhaps the social fabric and culture just changed. Nobody exists in an vacuum, not even the most extreme hermit does, and as such maybe this archetype of the nerd doesn't apply to Zoomers or Generation Alpha as much as it did for previous generations. I'm not saying they don't exist, but they got a lot rarer, like the archetype of a monk might have been applicable in the 17th century, but not to today's society. I'm talking about the Zoomers and Generation Alpha, because being a nerd inherently is juvenile thing, as in it's something you start being in your youth. The adult nerds moved on with their life, while the new generations just don't have any such people anymore.
 
Died in the console wars.
Don't make that joke. I was in the trenches, fighting against Moviebob's Beta Male Squadron in the Final Fantasy 7 Wars.


Lots of good men died in those flamewars.

Perhaps the social fabric and culture just changed. Nobody exists in an vacuum, not even the most extreme hermit does, and as such maybe this archetype of the nerd doesn't apply to Zoomers or Generation Alpha as much as it did for previous generations. I'm not saying they don't exist, but they got a lot rarer, like the archetype of a monk might have been applicable in the 17th century, but not to today's society. I'm talking about the Zoomers and Generation Alpha, because being a nerd inherently is juvenile thing, as in it's something you start being in your youth. The adult nerds moved on with their life, while the new generations just don't have any such people anymore.
Double posting but I think it just has to do with technology not being as interesting anymore due to how slow things are advancing on the hardware front. Also, it's just harder to make meaningful social connections nowadays due to most everything being online or easily done online. The factor of people hanging out and doing a common activity that isn't eating just doesn't exist any more in the younger generations. It's extremely sad honestly. They never really had a youth where they got to have fun and learn about what and who they wanted to be, but instead were just given virtual avatars and phones to fill the void.
 
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Honestly I'm a little weirded out how badly the computer science cohort got hit with the tranny pills.

You had mainly white dudes with deep knowledge of IT systems with a distrust of government and they all troon out?
Seems very convenient.
the unabomber was a 14 year old child prodigy at stanford when he was subject to severe psychological conditioning as part of the mkultra program and part of which was to make him question his gender identity and his intelligence even though he was a 14 year old enrolled in a degree program at a university.

those that built these things knew what they wrought. do not mistake their intent.
 
Perhaps the social fabric and culture just changed. Nobody exists in an vacuum, not even the most extreme hermit does, and as such maybe this archetype of the nerd doesn't apply to Zoomers or Generation Alpha as much as it did for previous generations. I'm not saying they don't exist, but they got a lot rarer, like the archetype of a monk might have been applicable in the 17th century, but not to today's society. I'm talking about the Zoomers and Generation Alpha, because being a nerd inherently is juvenile thing, as in it's something you start being in your youth. The adult nerds moved on with their life, while the new generations just don't have any such people anymore.
Stereotypical nerd shit from before the 90's was, what, star wars? star trek? lord of the rings? dungeons and dragons? i'm like thirty years old and at no point in my life were any of those things cultural capstones and definitely not on the level of importance they were presented to me as by adults - because they had been around for so long. I'm not saying they weren't relevant, they absolutely were, but my mom introduced them to me, they're not capstone pieces of media. they're the foundations for the next generation's perspective, that's just what happens. i might consider half life 2 to be one of those capstone pieces of media but someone 10 years younger than me will just think its an old game.

but i thought half life 2 was the coolest shit ever because goldeneye was the coolest shit ever. the people who made goldeneye thought doom was the coolest shit ever. the things i thought were cool were built on the things that people slightly older than me thought was cool, not things my mom thought was cool. but for some reason there's something about the period you're referring to in pop culture where everybody spent like 20, 30 years just being obsessed about the same stuff. Why is Donkey Kong simultaneously cool for 40 year old men and something my mom played in arcades when she grew up?
 
Nerds were an outlier back then. "You play computer games? Gross" or "No, I've never heard of Annie May. Is she the new girl?"

Now everyone plays computer games. Even grandma plays farm crossing heros or whatever on her phone. Anime is normal and you'll find that shit in any Walmart. D&D is no longer Satanic. Soccer moms collect Baby Yodas.

Nerds didn't disappear, everyone just became a nerd.
 
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