| > It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed. It’s because nerds are too busy following our interests to bother attacking back. Defending oneself in general doesn’t work: attacking back does. The maxim “Never defend, always attack” is a maxim for a reason. The only real “solution” here is to attack back and bully the people who bullied you in the first place. And is that really a solution? If as nerds, we defend ourselves, then we stay in the frame of the bully. If we attack back, we become bullying nerds. Society needs scapegoats. For decades and decades, nerds have been safe to pick on. It’s not until you get an extremely aggressive nerd like Bill Gates that a member of the “nerd class” even begins to defend themselves. And aggressive nerds are rare and generally self-interested. Rather than attacking back for the “nerd class” as a whole, they attack companies competing with theirs. What is the solution to this quandary? Everyone who’s read Girard knows we need scapegoats. If not nerds — oh wait, I mean “tech Bros” — then who else can we scapegoat as a society? The answer should obviously be Wall Street IMO, but that moment seems to have passed when the Occupy movement got culturally supplanted by in-group identity politics. IMO in order to stop the bullying, we must become bullies ourselves which poses two questions: * do we really wanna do that? * and would it even work since Occupy failed so dramatically? |