Nerd Culture is still alive...you just have to look in the right places.

So recently I've been seeing a ton of "Nerd Culture is dead cuz mainstream" or "Capitalism killed geek culture" etc. For a while, I had this opinion, that because anime and the MCU and video games are so accessible these days, the content itself has become watered down and as a result, the communities have lost their sense of belonging.

I've been thinking about this more, and have come to a more optimistic conclusion(quite odd for myself). Nerd Culture has always been about passion. Passion for the weird, the intellectual, the esoteric. We nerds ourselves have fought back, with FOSS and piracy, even modding and fanfic, its about love for ttrpgs and anime, not just mindless consumption. Look at the lemmyverse, or even current tumblr(sort of reverted into a niche imo), nerds will always find places to hide from capitalism.

In games, we have indies, which are seen as alternative to the copy-paste sports cod AAA franchise bullshit. I think once people get tired of the same type of anime being mass-marketed similar things will occur. No matter what, nerds will thrive and there will be a community. Maybe we can find different anime than the same 4 shounen on netflix, maybe we can play celeste over fifa, maybe we can find alternative ttrpg solutions to dnd, maybe we can read more indie comics.

We nerds are still here, you just have to look for us.