Marx always asked Engels for money to feed his Pokemon card habit.

But seriously, gods forbid people have hobbies. What the fuck am I supposed to do? Live in a ditch and poke at centipedes while chewing grass? What do these people expect us to do to keep sane in this hellhole we were all thrust into? Never understood this expectation of asceticism from us.

Communism is when no fun at all and the less fun there is the more communismer it is

You continue to be correct about these things, couldn’t agree more.

To add to this, yes, we have seen a massive right wing mobilization in nerd spaces since Gamergate and due to overlap with other hobby communities, it has long spread to literature, movie, anime and manga fandoms, TTRPGs, furry spaces and so on. And as you say, a lot of these communities used to be safe-ish for all kinds of people that didn’t fit in during their highschool years and that aren’t white cishet dudes, be it queer and gendernonconforming people or PoC that did not have a community of similarly racialized people to rely on. These people are still nerds, we feel that our established offline and online hobby spaces are becoming increasingly hostile and get nazified by members who’ve fallen down the Gamergate rabbit hole and we usually lack the institutional power to stop them, as the people running these spaces way too often think they can “keep politics out of the hobby”. I’ve left established forums, like, actual phpbb forums that were still up and running and had a very active community grown since the early 2000s, because i was tired of arguing with reactionaries about race, gender and sexuality and then was sanctioned for “politicizing the discussion” while their reactionary talking points were deemed fine as they aligned with the status quo. And i noticed over and over again that i received an outpuring of support from the community, that we outnumbered the reactionaries, but that we lacked the clout and structural power to win out over them and that we were also not numerous enough to create a split that was more than a discord with one or two dozen people.

This is because the left has failed to engage with nerd culture in ways that aren’t derisive and structurally ableist, because of the exact things you outline. Yes, also because the Epstein camarilla runs 4chan and was able to organize brigades, but they could in no small part do that because we lacked an organized leftist presence in such spaces. We may have partially lost the Gamergate front because of the desire to “just be normal”. We are anarchists and communists, we are by definition not normal mainstream members of a western society and the dirtbag left’s edgy version of respectability politics will not get us anywhere.

We can’t turn a blind eye to the subcultural fronts. We must bash back in all nerd and fandom spaces that aren’t already lost to nazism.

MLs railing against nerds is very funny
you know we’re the nerdiest tendency right?
you are required to read a bunch of dry as fuck political theory to even be a marxist-leninist
if that aint nerd shit, then i don’t know what is

people enjoying hobbies that i’m not into are anti-revolutionary and people who are enjoying hobbies that i’m into are the vanguard, actually

Yes I read Marxist theory!

I’m someone who felt really insecure about playing video games so naturally I ended up quitting them and I quit painting because Marxists told me it’s a waste of time, but then I notice a lot of double standards. Why is it okay to hit the Gym, when that’s a fitness industrial complex? If you want muscle you can be a real proletariat and get a job that builds your muscle. Why is it okay to listen to music and that sort of stuff? Music industry is designed to release chemicals you could be releasing while working.

Now most reasonable people will ultimately accept that active rest, aka hobbies, is okay to engage in or they’re going to be hypocrites. Can you imagine what would happen if someone got into power and declared that anyone engaging in a hobby and not working is a traitor to the workers?

Ppl will get this🤏 close to calling something “deg*nerate art” and think that makes them more leftist

fixation on aesthetic coolness which just so happens to peer pressure people away from the same “weak beta soy male” traits right-wingers hate

Wow we wonder if any of those traits might be commonly associated w femininity and/or queerness

Actually thanks to nerds I can play retro games for free, therefore making me spend less money.

I have seen a couple of things in my lifetime, cishet neurotypical folks are the most boring part of any hobbyist community, I think there’s something popular culture confuses and so do the people, nerds are often seen as these week unpopular people who get amazing grades and aren’t sociable. Popular culture confuses the high achievers with nerds often which leads to a distortion in people’s thinking about what the life of actual outcasts are like. The folks portrayed as nerds in popular media are the high-achievers of the school in real life who get top scholarship and top placements, they are one of the ‘popular kids’ in real life. Actual outcasts like neurodivergent people are often silent and invisible to the eyes of everyone, because they’re outcasts and only scene when either they get in trouble or some other bad thing happens to them. What popular culture calls ‘nerds’ are (often) white, cishet, middle class, able-bodied, neurotypical, no-kink people who breeze through the school and can fuck up as much of their life but their parents’ money will always keep them on track and they’ll have the nuclear family with a stable career with some pets, if archetype of nerds fits anyone that’s the neurodivergent folks, the disabled people, many non-assimilated queer people, invisible people scorned upon by everyone from peers to teachers, and treated like trash in the world.

Some of the meanest, biggest bigots are also nerds and some of the nicest most accepting people are the supposed Chads and Staceys. I agree about the uselessness of typical high school cliques. The biggest determinants of behavior are class, and demographic identity is immediately downstream of that. Hobbies are only relevant as far as their class characteristics are concerned.

Humans are supposed to have toys.

I’ve heard a lot of parents say that one of the perks of having kids is that it gives them an excuse to play with toys/enjoy children’s media as an adult. I’ve always thought that if so many people are looking for and using this excuse, maybe that says something about our society’s expectations of what an adult is supposed to be.

It’s like P2W (pay to win) but for hobbies. Someone can be “nerdy” but not a nerd.

There is a difference between someone with a bunch of money buying a complete set of model trains just for the hell of it, versus a nerd who hyperfixates on trains and can tell you everything about those same models.

The waters are muddied because the nerdy aesthetic is a booming industry, a vector for marketing expensive shit to young professionals in the tech sector who, if they had not begrudgingly studied compsci in the 2010s, would have no interest in computers. This is the opposite direction from which so-called actual nerds approach the same hobbies, starting from the bottom and saving up for the expensive shit, and certainly long before it was cool and mainstream.

It makes me very uncomfortable that the people publicly defending/defining nerdome are the likes of Paul Graham.

This sounds too close to saying we should accept gamers, I’m out of here

When people say “nerd” they probably mean someone like Linus Torvalds, but the real nerd is Richard Stallman and they hate each other.