'We trusted them because they didn't seem to want our attention.' What happened to nerds?
An essay argues tech's founders went from product-obsessed weirdos orbiting their work to reality-TV protagonists liquidating public trust for fame. The thread's loudest reply: those people were never nerds to begin with.
The essay's exhibit A is a Founders Fund 'mafia' video where Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey and others play deception games — reality TV as a laundering technology that turns someone you'd keep at arm's length into a recurring guest.
HN's pushback reframes the whole complaint: you're describing business and management people who learned to perform, not engineers who lost their way. The split is whether 'nerd' was ever a job or always a temperament.
The argument: three eras of the founder
The essay What happened to nerds? traces a decline in three phases — founders as mysterious figures orbiting their products (through ~2007), founders as protagonists in innovation parables (2007–2015), and tech as a grift vehicle with self-promoting figureheads (2015–present). The thesis is that tech leadership cashed in accumulated public trust for celebrity and power. Its sharpest formulation:
"We trusted those people partly because they didn't seem to want our attention."
The author's exhibit is a Founders Fund "mafia" video — a reality-show bit featuring Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, Bryan Johnson, Moxie Marlinspike, Dylan Field and Ryan Petersen playing deception games — and a line about format: "Reality TV is a 30 yr old laundering technology… It takes someone you'd keep at arm's length and makes him a recurring guest in your living room." The facade, he writes, "has shattered into tiny pieces to reveal 10,000 snakes."
"None of them is a 'nerd' and never was"
The highest-rated response rejects the premise outright.
"What does any of that have to do with 'nerds'? You are complaining about business and management people in tech. None of them is a 'nerd' and never was." — a commenter redefining the term
A second voice extended it: Musk was never a nerd; the "lost nerds" the author mourns are right here on HN, "people who built the internet and the most popular tools," just not the loud ones. By this reading the essay isn't describing a fall — it's noticing that the cameras point at performers, and concluding the performers represent the field.
Money, marketing, and financialized curiosity
Where the thread agrees, it sharpens the why. The blunt version: "Money happened." Wherever big money pools, it draws the ambitious, and the prestige careers migrated from FAANG to AI research and quant finance. A subtler take pinned it on attention economics: the library with a flashy GIF of its terminal wins over the better one nobody hears about, because "we have no network of trust… we need to trust some heuristics based on shallow information." And a lawyer-founder indicted the capital structure itself: the obsession with hyper-growth and "return the fund" math "has warped our relationship with technology. Technology has been financialized."
The complaint is real; the noun is wrong
What survives the thread is a useful correction. Something did change — the public face of tech is now optimized for narrative control, and trust eroded as the optimizers took the stage. But the essay's framing smuggles in a flattering myth, that today's oligarchs are fallen geeks. The more accurate read is that the quiet builders never left; they were simply never the ones being filmed. If you want the nerds, stop watching the reality show and read the commit logs.
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