Reading 03: The “Popular” Nerd
According to both Steven Levy and Paul Graham, hackers are disobedient “makers” trying to “make good things.” Graham calls hackers “unruly,” and I find this to be compatible with Levy’s description of a hacker — in both his hackers’ physical descriptions and their hacking styles. In “Hackers and Painters,” Graham draws parallels between hacking and painting, but despite this, I still have no desire to be a hacker. Like painting, both talent and skill are necessary to be considered a good hacker — sure, I can spend hours honing my skills as a hacker, but realistically speaking, I’ll never have the skill of a talented hacker because talent is natural. I’ve always been able to see the difference between a talented artist and a skilled one. Talented artist’s works are effortless and uncoerced; their works leave you in awe and stupefied. With skill, you admire the artist’s competence and ingenuity, but it’s apparent that he/she had to work for it. Deep down, we all desire to be talented, but some of us will have to settle for just being skilled, and that’s still perfectly okay.
While I found “Hackers and Painters” to be thought-provoking, Graham’s “Why Nerds are Unpopular” seems misguided to me. All throughout middle and high school, I was a nerd, but I was also the most well-known kid in school. I participated in every nerdy club that I could: mathletes, marching band, science club, children’s theatre, scholastic bowl, foreign language club, etc. — you name it. I was a nerd, but people liked me — or at least tolerated me. Sure, I had the highest GPA in both middle and high school, but that didn’t make me unpopular. In fact, I truly believe that being smart and a nerd had everything to do with my popularity. Maybe I was popular because no one saw my “intelligence” as a threat (I was always telling people that I wasn’t as smart as they made me out to be), or maybe it’s because I constantly made self-deprecating jokes about how nerdy I was (honestly, everyone was probably laughing at me and not with me); I was very self-aware. That’s not to say I didn’t experience my fair share of bullies, because I did. But I never asked to be popular, and by no means did I actively seek out and maintain popularity by attending parties and hanging out with athletes and “cool kids”. I didn’t have to work for my popularity, and I would have been perfectly content living in my nerdy bubble with my nerdy friends (yeah, I get that I can say that because I had the privilege of being popular throughout both middle and high school). Using Graham’s words, my popularity was not “something I made myself” — consciously, anyway. I recognize that my experience is very unique and that not all “nerds” were as “popular” as me, but I cannot put my finger on what it is that makes a nerd unpopular, because according to Graham, I should have been the most unpopular kid in school, but ironically, I was the most popular kid in school.
On the other hand, I found Graham’s “What You Can’t Say” to be the most eye-opening and compelling. In particular, his discussion of The Conformist Test made me question whether my thoughts and opinions are my own or if I just think what I’m told (spoiler alert: it’s the latter). From now on, I am going to make more of an effort to question everything I am told before forming an opinion.
