“For decades, nerds paid dearly for being nerds. And then one day, in the 1990s, nerds became cool. Not real nerds, of course – they’re always fucked. But the most cutting-edge, advanced, socially-successful, guaranteed-to-succeed, trendsetting-without-effort types made a point to develop a nerdish or loser narrative about themselves, since being cool was no longer cool. Even successful jocks and writers we know faked that they were losers – in order to become more successful. And it worked”