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Patton Oswald “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die”

Patton Oswald hat für Wired einen bemerkenswerten Artikel über die uns bevorstehende Endzeit der Geek-Kultur geschrieben, darüber was es früher einmal bedeutete ein Nerd zu sein und wie jeder heutzutage “Otaku” sein möchte und kann und Dinge sofort “awesome” sind. Was es für ihn in den 80ern bedeutete alles über einen Film, ein Buch, eine Spiel zu wissen, eben Dinge die heute mit dem Internet jedermann zu Verfügung stehen. Schuld daran trägt seiner Meinung die Omnipräsenz und Verfügbarkeit von tiefsten Informationen, Mashups, Recut, Re-Edits, die sich darauf verstehen Altes zu verwerten anstatt Neues zu erschaffen. Vielleicht etwas schwarzmalerisch geschrieben, aber eben auch viel Wahres dabei.

The problem with the Internet, however, is that it lets anyone become otaku about anything instantly. In the ’80s, you couldn’t get up to speed on an entire genre in a weekend. You had to wait, month to month, for the issues of Watchmen to come out. We couldn’t BitTorrent the latest John Woo film or digitally download an entire decade’s worth of grunge or hip hop. Hell, there were a few weeks during the spring of 1991 when we couldn’t tell whether Nirvana or Tad would be the next band to break big. Imagine the terror!

But then reflect on the advantages. Waiting for the next issue, movie, or album gave you time to reread, rewatch, reabsorb whatever you loved, so you brought your own idiosyncratic love of that thing to your thought-palace. People who were obsessed with Star Trek or the Ender’s Game books were all obsessed with the same object, but its light shone differently on each person. Everyone had to create in their mind unanswered questions or what-ifs. What if Leia, not Luke, had become a Jedi? What happens after Rorschach’s journal is found at the end of Watchmen? What the hell was The Prisoner about?

None of that’s necessary anymore. When everyone has easy access to their favorite diversions and every diversion comes with a rabbit hole’s worth of extra features and deleted scenes and hidden hacks to tumble down and never emerge from, then we’re all just adding to an ever-swelling, soon-to-erupt volcano of trivia, re-contextualized and forever rebooted. We’re on the brink of Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever.

Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die. via nerdcore