What Happens When Society Decides That Nerds Are Dangerous?

In Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 movie Straw Dogs, Dustin Hoffman plays an ineffectual intellectual, a mathematician, indeed, a nerd, who moves with his alluring wife to her hometown, in England. Local rowdies continually harass them, until Hoffman’s character executes a violent revenge.

The words “nerd” and “violent” do not usually go hand in hand, but the harmlessness of nerds is hardly a settled formula. Along with severe emotional disturbance, likely psychosis, and a slowly festering decision to carry out the rampage that ended in the deaths of six students, as well as his own on May 23 in Isla Vista, California, Elliot Rodger, for most of his life, fit the mold of a “nerd.” In his manifesto, “My Twisted World,” he noted that video games were his only refuge growing up: “I immersed myself entirely into my online games like World of Warcraft. I felt safe there.”

Among recent murderers and would-be murderers, Rodger wasn’t alone in his nerdish pastimes. The Newtown Connecticut school shooter, Adam Lanza, even more of a loner than Rodger, was addicted to video games, including one creepy offering called School Shooting. Two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls who, a week after the Isla Vista shootings, stabbed a friend 19 times to invoke the imaginary character Slender Man acquired their ideas from an online game, as well as the horror urban-legend forum creepypasta.com.

After the Isla Vista killings, commentators quickly linked Rodger’s worldview to his lifelong embrace of nerd-culture offerings such as Pokémon, Halo, Star Wars, World of Warcraft, and Game of Thrones. Arthur Chu, a former Jeopardy quiz-show champion, judged the mass murderer’s autobiography as “a standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto, except for the part about mass murder.” Chu posited that the sexist trappings of the video-game world abetted both Rodger’s belief that he was entitled to a “hot chick” and his vengeful ruminations when he continually failed to connect. Indeed, according to Chu, video-game graphics and storylines encourage a more general “rape culture.” He concluded it was time for fellow geeks to “grow up” and throw aside the sense of entitlement nerd culture engenders.

This is hardly the first time nerdiness has become associated with aberrant behavior. History, however, suggests that nerd panics generally say less about geek communities than they do about the people doing the panickingâ€"and the uncertainty of the times.

In 1948, during the early Cold War period, two boys, ages 11 and 12, stole and flew a plane in Oklahomaâ€"and said they’d learned how from comic books. The same year, a group of avid comic-reading kids in Indiana strung up a friend and burnt him with lit matches. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham described a visit to his New York City clinic from a distraught mother whose young daughter was continually being assaulted by neighborhood boys, none older than nine, who pushed her off her bicycle, tied her up in the basement, whipped her, hit her with guns, and tore off her panties as they reenacted comic-book scenes. Wertham sensed a genuine danger in the era’s action comic books, with their glorification of crime, sadomasochism, eroticism, and, in his view, proto-fascism. He linked comic books to youth crimes in a series of sensationalist magazine articles as well as at the 1948 symposium The Psychopathology of Comic Books.

Panic ensued. In December 1948, religious schoolchildren in Binghamton, New York, gathered up 2,000 comic books and burned them, while their parents and teachers cheered. Cities passed laws banning or censoring comics. Wertham’s 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, led to Senate hearings that year. Perhaps the high point came when William Gaines, future publisher of Mad Magazine, defended a horror comic cover that showed a man holding in one hand an axe covered with blood, and in the other, a woman’s severed head. Gaines noted, “A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it.”

Senator Estes Kefauver responded, “You have blood coming out of her mouth.” Gaines replied, “A little.” Soon after, the industry established the Comics Code Authority to monitor comics, with guidelines similar to the 1930 Hays Code for Hollywood films. Politicians had to find new explanations for juvenile delinquency and rock ’n’ roll proved useful.

A similar social panic centered on the otaku (or nerd) subculture in the late 1980s in Japan. Otaku made and swapped amateur manga (comic books) some of which were parodies, others featured romances between stylized gay men or the adventures of eroticized young girls. In 1989, police arrested Tsutomu Miyazaki, a manga and animé enthusiast with a taste for softcore porn. When the public learned that Miyazaki had abducted, mutilated, and killed four young girls, the entire otaku subculture was tainted. One Japanese social anthropologist commented, “There are over 100,000 people with the same pastimes as Mr. M.â€"we have a whole standing army of murderers.” Manga shops were raided and owners and amateur manga artists arrested and otherwise harassed. Journalists fretted that the “Otaku Tribe” was rotting society.

Such stigmatizing overlooks the fact that nerd culture may just as likely provide therapeutic havens as pathological outposts. U.S. nerd culture’s origin traces to the science-fiction fan culture that began in the mid-1920s. This subculture, which provided a refuge for brainy oddballs (mainly men, but some women), and soon included features such as fanzines, conventions, and fanciful futuristic costume play, created the template for virtually all later youth subcultures. While hardly the multicultural ideal later imagined for the crew onboard the Starship Enterprise, the early community of fans was welcoming. Ray Palmer, a longtime editor of Amazing Stories, and an early organizer of nerd culture, was hunchbacked and stood just over four feet tall, but was lampooned for his chatty writing style and braggadocioâ€"not his disabilities. While not “out” in the 1940s, some of the young devotees of science fiction became leaders of the gay-rights movement dec ades later. The speculative, malleable future of science fiction provided hope. As with other pulp magazine genres, science fiction also encouraged sexist stereotypes, with covers showing buxom women in metal bikinis threatened by space octopus. Science-fiction fandom also had its dark side. Pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard, with the aid of Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell launched what many consider the pathological and others the therapeutic movement of Dianetics, later known as Scientology. In his later years, Palmer fell victim to theories of Zionist plots for world domination.

While many benefit from fan communities, some of the farther “geeky” outreaches of the online world undoubtedly encourage pathological thought. After abandoning the online game World of Warcraft when too many hated “jock” types took it up, Rodger found a final haven in the Web site puahate.com (this name derived from adding “Hate” to the acronym PUA or “pickup artist”), where he could share postings with other “incels” (involuntary celibates) who vented their hatred of women and of PUA’s who had success with women. This bulletin board likely encouraged Rodger’s really frightening ideas about the “degeneracy” of women. Rodger concluded his manifesto with statements such as “women are like a plague that must be quarantined.” He also offered a “final solution” to his cleansing campaignâ€"proposing that all women be rounded up in concentration camps and destroyed, except a few to be kept in breeding facilities and artificially insemin ated.

Is geek culture to blame for this psychotic vision? If geek culture includes puahate.com, then the answer is a qualified yes. Yet, while troubled people may be drawn to subcultures like those of early science fiction or the otaku culture in 1980s Japan, more participants likely benefit from a sense of belonging than those who become delusional and violent. These subcultures can provide outlets for bizarre fixations.

Panics over popular culture mask other insecurities. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the Comics Code Authority was enacted, parents began to wonder if they knew who their children were or who was controlling their minds. These worries mirrored the surrounding anxieties over communism and who could be trusted. The otaku panic in Japan revealed a group of young adults at the height of the Japanese Miracle that were not only alienated but alien, not one of “us.” One aspect of the trauma inflicted by the recent mass shootings in Isla Vista is awareness of a similar social fragmentation. Mass shootings end the illusion of unity, the illusion of what individuals are safe are “us.”

Globalism and the digital-communications revolution have allowed micro-communities to bloom and the pursuits of happiness to multiply, go viral. The idea of an inclusive American identity seems dubiousâ€"at the moment there are too many channels, and too many perceived enemies, making it hard for “we” to find an “us.” In traditional Chinese culture, straw dogs were fashioned to serve as burned sacrifices in worship. Nerds have become, temporarily, a species of straw dog relied on in the ceremony to protect our dream of unity.

Fred Nadis is the author of The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey (2013), a Locus Award Finalist, and Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America (2005).