I’m a nerd. I’m proud of it. I even have two “Nerd Pride” pocket protectors from MIT (different designs) to provide as evidence. Because I’m a nerd, friends, co-workers, students, and acquaintances like to ask me what I think of the TV show Big Bang Theory. My answer: I hate it.
When I was in elementary and middle school, I was not one of the popular kids. I had a few friends; other kids sometimes bullied me, sometimes picked on me, but mostly left me alone. In high school, I still had only a few friends, but it was easier to ignore the kids I didn’t have anything in common with.
College was much better. I went to MIT, where just about everyone else was a nerd too. I did get bullied a little by some of the people in my dorm, but it was still a huge improvement. I guess the reason I don’t like Big Bang Theory is because the nerds are treated much like I was treated in my dorm—they’re tolerated and they do some good things, but mostly they’re stock characters who are there to be laughed at.
A more faithful representation of nerds the way we see ourselves and the way we would like the world to see us would be the 1980s movie Real Genius, or the TV show Junkyard Wars. Or the real-life roof & tunnel hackers at MIT.
I got into roof & tunnel hacking as an undergraduate. I became involved with a clandestine organization that was, at the time, the largest hacking group on campus. Shortly after I joined, the group went through some internal conflict and became defunct. A couple of years later, I helped resurrect the group, serving as its leader for two years. When I stepped down in the early 1990s, the group was thriving again, and went on to pull some of the biggest and best-known MIT hacks in recent memory. Some of these hacks cost hundreds (and in a couple of cases, over a thousand) dollars in materials, and took hundreds of man-hours to design and build. These massive projects had to be installed quickly and secretly, in a safe and non-damaging fashion, and were often taken down the same day they appeared.
People would often ask why a bunch of science and engineering students at a pressure-cooker school like MIT would carve out dozens of hours for something that they didn’t get academic credit for, that they couldn’t put on a resumé, that carried the risk of a $500 fine, and that if successful, would last but a few hours. One popular answer was that students need an outlet from the pressure of classes, but speaking as someone who was heavily involved in the pastime, that explanation doesn’t seem sufficient. Another answer was that students enjoyed the thrill of doing something that nobody thought could be done. This seems a little closer, but it doesn’t always apply. For example, a display case that contains a chamber pot and the inscription “In case of emergency, break glass.” mounted on the door of a closed-for-construction bathroom isn’t exactly ground-breaking, but it’s still a good hack. I think a large part of the thrill is that people all over campus (and sometimes, such as with the police car, all over the world) look up to and admire a good hack, and the nerds who were able to make it happen become the anonymous, unsung heroes of the event. To everyday people who couldn’t imagine how someone might illegally sneak a police car onto the roof of a ten-story building in a couple of hours in the dead of night, these nerds appear to have some kind of superpowers. They might not be the kinds of people who win Heisman trophies or become first-round draft picks in the NBA, but for a fleeting moment, each hacker gets to pat himself or herself on the back as a champion engineer.
After having had the real-life privilege of secretly being one of the nerds that everyday people wish they could be, I simply can’t bring myself to enjoy a TV show in which none of the characters is anyone that the audience might wish to identify with.
