The US is in the midst of a soft coup. The country has been restructured and restructured under Donald Trump’s second administration. It’s not Trump himself, but his billionaire special adviser and Head Elon Musk, Government Efficiency Bureau (DOGE) who is leading this change. And in Mask’s America, there is one demographic that appears to have found himself on the centre stage and quickly gained power: “geeks.”
Certainly, Marco Elez, including Musk’s Mary of Mary White and white adjacent acolite rotten bands, Gavin Kliger, Edward Coristine and Marko Elez, control a multi-billion dollar government system and fit easily into the nerdy mold.
The age of information and internet aged born in the 1990s had already seen “geeks” – a nasty, unattractive man with limited social skills but with a surprising commitment and enthusiasm for technology and STEM, has become billionaires and earned extensive respect and admiration to provide life-changing world technology. I was reminded of the otaku who first provided PCs and iMacs, then iPhones and Android.
In many articles in technology magazines and films such as Revenge of the Geek (1984), Oppenheimer (2023), Steve Jobs (2015), and Social Networks (2010), creatives portray nerds like nuclear weapons developer J. Robert Oppenheimer, Steve Jobs of Apple, and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta. Popular media have long described these nerd visionaries as complex people with incredible needs to save the world and make it a better place.
Thirty years ago, British Channel 4 and US Public Broadcasting Services (PBS) aired a three-part documentary called Triumph of the Nerds. With reference to the computer revolution, longtime technology journalist Robert X, on the set of nerds launched between 1975 and 1995, said, “The most surprising thing is that a bunch of stripped nerds happened by chance because they wanted to impress their friends.”
This perception of this billionaire nerd may now be a deeper part of our culture, but the idea that a robber baron in the late 20th century almost accidentally accumulated enormous wealth while trying to save the world is ridiculous. Especially considering the iron-fisted way that many “geek billionaires” know, particularly Jobs and Bill Gates, run capitalist ventures.
In light of the forced censorship that billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Theon have campaigned with the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times in recent months, it is clear that a class of tech-savvy billionaires would also want to control the flow of truth.
A much better explanation of the “geeks” who came to rule America under Trump was given in a single line of Lethal Weapons 2 (1989).
This quote is more than just a reference to mask’s questionable path to US citizenship through South Africa and Canada. Like the South African henchman in Lethal Weapon 2, tech nerd billionaires such as masks, and those he hired at Doge believe in apartheid, eugenics, and other racist, misogyny, and queerphobic paradigms. Certainly, many of Musk’s fanboys are engineers, who can contribute to Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink, leading to discoveries and inventions of important and useful humanity. Nevertheless, they also reposted tweets on X and other social media platforms that call women “had” or “I just want eugenic immigration policies, isn’t that asked?” They are not great role models for multicultural democracy or any workforce. And like the average white man, they don’t seem to be worried about making the world a better place for anyone other than themselves. They would too easily agree with Zuckerberg’s ridiculous claim that the tech world needs more “masculine energy” when in fact, white people continue to be the dominant demographic leading this economic sector.
I used to be part of the world of computer-obsessed nerds in the 1980s and 1990s. I studied Basic in 8th grade, earned Pascal in 11th grade, spent my first three semesters at the University of Pittsburgh as a Computer Science major before changing my path to becoming a writer and academic historian. As a research student, I worked at the Computing Lab in Pitt for two years. I’ve seen him joke about my “computer illiteracy” classmate (including regular use of the R-word). I saw male counterparts get too close to women who need to help troubleshoot computer issues. And for the past three months, on staff, I have experienced sexual and racial harassment from older white women. This is a colleague who sought this twice while I was working.
Social awkwardness can be easily portrayed in films as innocent and affectionate. However, it is rarely translated into “sweet” in a world that is socially defaulted to socially racist, misogynistic, strange, and xenophobic behaviour. All white men in a white male supremacy society, nerd or not, hold a metric ton of racial and gender privilege. Booger asks Gilbert, “Why? Does she have a penis?” – the transphobic references to his friend do not lie in the nerd’s revenge – it’s not much different to him declaring “son”, the estranged transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson, as “woke” and “lost” his “son.”
There is also an embedded assumption that technology created by the elite nerd set is always good for the world. It’s not when social media addiction has led to millions of young Americans becoming depressed, anxious and isolated. It’s not that a new generation of American men are sexually abusing and committing image-based sexual abuse of girls and women. Certainly not when AI plagiarism machines (not true artificial intelligence anyway) are tools of choice for those who don’t want to develop critical thinking, media literacy, and writing skills.
In this world of white male privilege, it’s the cool athlete of being an authoritarian and socially nasty pencil neck, an indistinguishable distinction. Geeks and their technological breakthroughs were solely intended to empower and enrich the individual world to make it even better. This is why no one at the other billionaire nerd camp uses their skills to infiltrate offshore accounts on Apple and Amazon, redistribute trillions of dollars to everyday Americans. It also did not wipe out the student debt of all students in the country. After all, these nerds want wealth and strength against marginalized people.
The views expressed in this article are the authors themselves and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.