Now I’m not going to pretend to have my finger on the pulse of this fine community site, but I have a sneaking suspicion that at least a few of you will enjoy this post by the world’s oldest living nerd, Sifu Tweety. I will now quote far too much of it.
Everything on the internet is always the same. Like the wingnut function, online culture is endlessly self-similar. Everything you think first happened on blogs? It’s happened at least three or four times before, and every time, it seemed as new, as exciting, and as unprecedented as it does now. The spunky, close-knit underground community that threatens to be split apart by rivalries, flame wars, and growing corporatization? That was a big worry, in 1994, in the hacker scene. It was a big deal in 1989 in the BBS scene, and in 1983 in the hacker scene, and it probably happened in 1971 when the University of Hawaii joined ARPAnet and surf punks started trolling the Jefferson Airplane forums. The crush of unprecedented media attention, the surprising thrill of that first meatspace meeting; all of that happened a thousand times over on AOL, Compuserve, GEnie, in subcultures from knitting to bass tablature to Islamic terrorism.
[…]
I mean, OK, it’s awesome. I think people on the left should get their asses motivated for politics. It’s important! They should use the internet. It’s useful! It’s exciting! I’m happy that there’s a convention in Las Vegas. I’ve been to loads of those, they’re always a good time. But have you ever been to a rock concert? If, OK, somebody handed out acid and there was an inflatable donkey flying out over the crowd, you’d be closer, but from everything I’ve heard it’s a seedy Vegas convention hall full of well-meaning internet aware forty somethings: distinctly not a rock concert. I went to that party, ten years ago, the activists were hacktivists, and it was called DefCon. Ten years before that it was called GenCon, ten years before that Rotterdam Amiga DemoCon 1981, BiMonTandyOlympics at the Ramada on the Freeway, COMDEX. Whatever. But holy crap it’s not Jamestown. We’re nerds. With a nerd hobby. We can, and should, raise money and talk about issues and push for what we believe and, importantly, make fun of dumbasses, but the conventions and the media attention and the self-congratulatory pronouncements are not only an inevitable and functionally meaningless part of the evolution of any subcultural internet nerd tribe, they are a complete distraction from the actual useful business that could be done…
He goes on to say rude things about Byron York without mentioning his hair, so be sure to read the whole thing.
