Dork Theory

I recently realized that I hold strong, unexamined opinions about the differences between nerds and dorks, and, moreover, that I think the dorks are in charge now. I’ve been noodling around and have come to better understand what I think about this. Please note that this post is about sorting my ideas, not a researched claim.

Here’s how my brain divides the two: nerds are sincere and hyperfocused on their special interests while dorks are insincere and hyperfocused on audience. A nerd will fight about the difference between two fake spaceships because he cares to the point of cringe. A dork will have that same fight because he wants to dominate and to be seen as an expert.

Revenge of the Nerds

Nerd culture was always focused on the popular, but until the early 21st century the popular objects of nerd focus were at the fringes rather than the center of pop culture. Nerd sincerity makes nerds vulnerable; they care too much to let things go and that made them easy to bully.

That care and sincerity also led them to expertise. Sure, it was expertise in things that 20th-century society deemed unserious, but it’s why even the negative stereotype of nerds includes intelligence. Nerds, in eighties and nineties pop culture, were not fun to be around, but they could solve problems.

Nerds tended to be culturally coded as white boys and they were allowed to avoid developing the social and masking skills that girls of all races and kids of color are forced to develop even if neurodivergent. That led to a lot of rejection, but it also kept them within the societal circle.

The early 21st century saw white male nerd interests shift from the fringes to the center of pop culture at the same time as the tech industry became the biggest site of financial growth in the economy. The nerd stereotype suddenly included “rich.” And the stigma of being a nerd started to fall away, although the men who grew up when their interests were stigmatized held on to the aggrieved outsider rage they’d developed in youth.

The nerds won and they didn’t love it. It turns out that while you might feel rejected, there’s something special about being an outsider. You’re part of an exclusive club based on expertise, and now everyone thinks they can come in? Even the jocks and the preps and the girls who didn’t want to date you? What the hell.

But nerd interests were valuable, literally. They dominated the box office and the economy and they made some nerds cool. And when a group becomes cool and rich, there are always the people who want in but don’t want to do the work.

The Dorks

Dorks, like nerds, care a lot, but what they care about is how they’re perceived. Like nerds, dorks tend to be men who lack social skills. They have also experienced a lot of rejection. However, they lack the expertise of nerds because they were more focused not just on fitting in, but on dominating.

A nerd might become fixated on a video game and play it incessantly until he becomes the best at it. A dork sees that a particular video game is popular within his social circles and he wants to be seen as the best at it. If he’s got the means, he’ll pay a nerd to grind on his behalf and then show off the stats as if they’re his own. He is sincere only in his intense desire to be seen as an expert.

A nerd might found a company and work 20-hour days because he’s fixated on a task. A dork might buy that company and claim that he founded it. A nerd knows all the terminology for his special interest because it is his special interest. A dork learned as much of the terminology as he needs to know to sound like he knows something. A real expert might be able to tell that he’s using the term incorrectly, but that’s okay because the real experts can’t keep up with people who are willing to take shortcuts.

Smash Culture

I think all the time about how easy it is to achieve goals if you don’t actually care about anything. For instance, if you don’t actually care about society but you love to be in charge, you can point out all the ways society doesn’t work. There are a lot of them! Someone who cared would have to come up with ways to fix what doesn’t work, and that’s hard. Someone who doesn’t care can just propose destroying all the organizations that don’t work quite right and they don’t need to come up with a replacement because the goal isn’t to fix society but to dominate it.

 I can smash a watch in seconds, but I cannot personally put one together, let alone straighten and repair the smashed pieces of a watch that’s been deliberately destroyed. If you set destructive goals, you’re going to meet them, and you’re going to be someone who achieved results. And quickly, at that!

“The post office doesn’t always deliver packages efficiently,” you might say, correctly. “It’s not doing what we need it to do. We should get rid of the post office and replace it with private companies.” And then you get rid of it! Now we have no post office, but you did what you said you’d do.

That’s far easier than diagnosing the cause of the efficiency gap and taking the steps necessary to fix it. And even that is easier than recreating the post office from scratch. If we lose the post office and we all realize that not having a post office is worse than having one that doesn’t work perfectly, the person who proposes bringing it back will have a harder time achieving results than the guy who got rid of it.

A nerd might have skewed and cruel ideas, but they will always lose to dorks because they do the work. Dorks just need to achieve symbolic status to accomplish goals. Elon Musk or Sam Altman can openly lie about what their companies are working on or about to release and the line will go up because it’s easier to make that line go up if you’re willing to lie. And you’re willing to lie because you don’t care.

Donald Trump might seem like a strange candidate for dork status because he’s contemptuous of nerd culture. But what he has always had in common with other dorks is a striver’s desperation to be perceived as an expert. Financial experts have always regarded him as a fraud and a failure, but he has never stopped trying to convince us that he’s actually the richest and most successful man ever. He paid other people to write books in his name. He worked tirelessly, calling gossip columnists and pretending to be someone else in order to plant stories about how handsome and successful Donald Trump is. He succeeded, even before he gained real power, in becoming the American stereotype of a rich guy, even when he was actually broke. He forced himself into pop culture, and even if we were laughing at him, we knew who he was. And if we weren’t paying much attention, we’d probably assume that while he was crass and boorish, he sure was good at making money.

Elon Musk is the king of the dorks. More than anything, this man in his fifties wants to be seen as cool, funny, smart, and dominant. While evil nerds have been content to sink into the backgrounds of their companies, to do the work of achieving their ends while remaining inconspicuous (the better to enact their evil plans), Musk wants us to look at him. It’s okay if we hate him—supervillains are cool, after all—as long as we’re impressed.

But he’s also someone who has been allowed to go through life without developing even a passable mimicry of the social skills that make someone cool. That’s not his autism; a ton of autistic people are very cool and are recognized by others as cool. Sincerity can be extremely cool. So can detached disinterest. What cannot be cool is sweaty desperation, and Musk walks around drenched in flop sweat 24/7. He visibly cares too much about how he is perceived while he cares so little about actually developing the expertise he wants you to see that even non experts can often see through him. Sure, he fools a lot of people, but like Trump, he’s not fooling the people he wants to fool. Musk brags a lot about what he could have done but didn’t do because it’s easier to say you could have done something than to do it. And people who did those things can tell that he doesn’t know anything about them. Nerds get PhDs. Dorks brag about getting accepted into a PhD program they never attended or about dropping out of a good college. Being accepted at all proves that they are worthy even though they never did the work.

Dorks seek to punish people who can see through their façade. The worst people are the people you really wanted to impress, the true experts. They’re the people who are withholding what you deserve.

And we’re living in a world ruled by dorks. They’re on Joe Rogan’s podcast saying things in authoritative voices. They’re on YouTube just asking questions. They’re on social media organizing crusades against the real experts. They’re in charge of major corporations, making moves that make no sense and lose people money and jobs because to admit that you made a mistake is worse than running a company into the ground.

When I was a kid, there was a false etymology for dork floating around the playground. Dork is the scientific name for a whale’s penis, we’d say authoritatively, exactly like a dork would.