I think that nerd culture has just gone mainstream. It's far from dying.
The fact that mainstream has co-opted many of the past nerdy things doesn't mean they are gone. They have just moved to new not so visible things. And those are hard to see in sea of all the content produced. Independent podcast and comics are a thing. And then there is novels and such from China, Korea and Japan. Some of these more mainstream already lot less.
We've seen this many times. Star Trek being probably a very notable example, where the fancy new original Series was a great disappointment for many fans, while the (semi)comedy-version from a fan became the preferred love of this fans.
On video games, even simple games like BSD trek and Super-Star-Trek on Python3 have great designs and still be played. The same with roguelikes like Nethack/Slashem.
I've tried in vain to find people at parties who care about my favourite arcane programming languages and obscure political doctrine, it's impossible :(
I am still tight with my group of 7 guys from school and we are all nerds but hardly share a single interest. We are interested in hearing about each other's niche shit and that's what keeps us together.
While that's nice and all, it's not super helpful advice for people who are trying to make new friends, as we cannot go back in time and repeat school from younger days...
The point is: your friends don't have to be interested in exactly the same stuff as you, they just need to be interested in you.
It's ok to want to look for people with common interests, just as it's ok to feel it's enough to spend time with people you don't have a lot of common interests with.
If you wanna find people to talk about finance, you wouldn't attend a football match, for example. So if you wanna find programmers, you're gonna have to attend programming related events, or some related area like hardware hacking, or just generally "makers" meetup.
For political groups, there tend to be groups of those all over the world, for every affiliation, but depending on the ideology and the overall political temperature, sometimes people try to avoid letting those opinions bleed over to other areas of interest.
Eg I wanted to benchmark the CPU inside my Apple Watch last week and I couldn't find any off-the-shelf apps that do this, so I had to learn enough Swift to create a basic UI with a start button and a multiply-and-add loop that pegs a CPU core. I would never learn a new language if I didn't have to.
Another example: I couldn't find any reasonably priced tool chests so I bought a table saw with the intention of building my own tool chests out of plywood next week. When I mentioned this to nerdy/technical friends, they were all interested because they also had a metric fuckton of tools, computer hardware, solvents, etc that they wanted to store efficiently. I think if you worked on more practical projects like this you'd be a lot more popular at parties where most attendees are engineers.
Given you talk about ‘poseurs’ you sound more like a hipster than a geek.
> In conclusion, the earliest instances of this remark were anonymous. The comedians Rags Ragland and Ukie Sherin employed the quip, as did the writer John McNulty. In addition, there is some evidence that Yogi Berra employed the joke, but in all cases the jest was already in circulation.
Care to provide some examples? Most "nerd" interests like SciFi have been neutered if not completely bent out of shape while going mainstream.
Kudos to Disney that was able to completely ruin it in just a decade.
Most "nerd" interests like SciFi have been neutered if not completely bent out of shape while going mainstream
So no, it's not nerd culture that is dying, it's mainstream "nerdism" that committed suicide.
Nerd culture was never mainstream, MCU wasn't nerd culture becoming mainstream, it was "squeeze the lemon and hope it sticks".
And it did for a while, but not understanding what's the appeal of nerd culture for nerds, they went back to producing blockbusters that kinda resembles marvel if you squint hard enough, but it's actually the same thing of watching independence day set in a World where they replaced Jeff Goldblum with a guy dressed like a superhero.
Nerd are still enjoying their nerdy stuff, while completely ignoring mainstream travesties from multi-billion-dollars corporations.
MCU is not the same MCU nerds were crazy about when they were kids, in the same way kids today consider what we called nerd stuff back then as "old people garbage"
Video games have gone mainstream.
Internet has gone mainstream.
Anime has gone mainstream.
"AI" has gone mainstream.
I think it's fair to say that nerd culture does, has, and always will exist, but what nerd culture is changes with the passing sands of time. The nerds of today are not the nerds of yesteryear (read: us).
For me, a nerd is also someone who sticks to the hole and builds their own labyrinth to some degree.
There were popular D&D shows already in the 80s.
Most comic book movies are simply bad, and "real" nerds hate them.
No nerd loved the last Star Wars trilogy or Rings of power or Wonder Woman 1984 or the nth spider-verse repetition, mostly because studios take something popular among nerds and change it to please modern audience which is exactly what's wrong with the so called "nerd culture" today: it's not a culture.