Patton Oswalt 'WIRED' Editorial: "Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die"

Patton Oswalt is a geek.  And, I had no idea until a couple of summers ago when I saw him at Comic Con moderating both Disney panels and the TRON: Legacy showcase.  It was great to see because he was knowledgeable, funny, and totally geeking out on stage with the other thousands of fans in Hall H.

Patton Oswalt was a geek.  But, not anymore according to his recent editorial in WIRED magazine.  "Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die" explains how our everything that ever was, available forever, anytime you want it culture is making the idea of a "geek" obsolete.  And, the dude's got a point.

Hit the jump to read some excerpts and get my take.

The problem with the Internet, however, is that it lets anyone become otaku [Japanese for people who have obsessive, minute interests] 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! … 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.

I know it sounds great, but there’s a danger: Everything we have today that’s cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past.  …. Now, with everyone more or less otaku and everything immediately awesome (or, if not, just as immediately rebooted or recut as a hilarious YouTube or Funny or Die spoof), the old inner longing for more or better that made our present pop culture so amazing is dwindling. … Here’s the danger: That creates weak otakus. Etewaf doesn’t produce a new generation of artists—just an army of sated consumers. Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie? The Shining can be remade into a comedy trailer. Both movie versions of the Joker can be sent to battle each another. The Dude is in The Matrix. The coming decades—the 21st-century’s ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s—have the potential to be one long, unbroken, recut spoof in which everything in Avatar farts while Keyboard Cat plays eerily in the background.

That's just a taste, but it's enough to give you an idea of the point he's trying to make.  I personally love the part where he talks about "douches" at the gym wearing cut off tees with Boba Fett's helmet, one of the most iconic images of geek culture, plastered on the front.  Because it's so true.  If you were to go up to that guy and ask him about his shirt, 9 times out of 10 he'd be able to tell you the character was from Star Wars and that's about it.  I bet he wouldn't even know what Episode Fett first showed up in.

And that's the problem with "geek" culture now.  The skyrocketing popularity of superhero movies, video games, television shows that actually make you think have turned the things that "geeks" loved into pop culture, and a "geek" is anything but pop culture.  Five years ago, when I made my first trip to Comic Con, everyone I knew laughed in my face and told me that was such a "geek" thing to do.  Now, those same people want to share a hotel with me in San Diego next summer.

So, yes, I couldn't agree more with Oswalt that geek culture is dying.  But, is that necessarily a bad thing?  My first instinct was yes.  Comic books, and nerdy movies, and smart TV shows were mine and there's no way I was going to share them with my neighbor who dresses like Pauly D from Jersey Shore.  But then I got to thinking and realized that everything is cyclical.  This bubble will burst (Oswalt talks about washing the top soil off of us, but it's really the same idea).  Either the masses will get tired of the geek-saturation and turn to the next fad or the true geeks will just evolve their geek tastes to something too geeky for the general population to get into.  But, if neither of these things happen, geek culture truly morphs into mainstream culture forever, and Oswalt and I are both wrong, then I guess the geek will have truly inherited the Earth.

Oswalt's entire editorial is definitely worth a read, so head over to WIRED to check out the whole thing.  And how about those guys from WIRED just doin' it lately?  First they get the Tron Guy to review TRON: Legacy and now this editorial.  Props to the best geek mag in circulation now and I really can't wait to see what they do next.

Comments

[J.Bradley]

Yay! It's time it's said. Amen.

[Richard]

It bothers me that you claim that you are a geek but yet you did not know that Patton Ozwalt was one - have you not seen an episode of King of Queens? I'm just giving you a hard time - but I feel that true geeks don't care if they are geeks or not and will always love "geeky"things - who care if the current geek culture dies.

[fred]

poser