GEEK CULTURE IS DEAD.

There's a song by Kirby Krackle called Geek Culture is Dead on their album Mutate Baby which has a line that goes "Some would say Hollywood came to be the bad guy but the truth is they turned our culture from a caterpillar to a butterfly" fundamentally, this was true. Right? We can agree on that. In the time when the song was written (around 2015 or earlier) Geek Culture was on top of the world. Generation Y had taken the Geek which had been insulted for years and made him hot and cool by showing how much money you can make after getting smart. 

This had come off the tail end of a wave or rather tsunami of building Geekdom, as the internet era began things quickly became all about the Fandom, and when Geeks are together Geeks are strong. Suddenly all those people who stayed in their basements and had no friends just connected to every other person like them and they all were living it up. Fundamentally, Geeks became the new hip thing.

Now though, things are different. What we see today isn't a culture of acceptance or community, it's a culture made up of the kind of people who would have made from of Geeks had they been born in a world where these kinds of hobbies and interests weren't popular or dominating culturally. These people, outsiders, quickly have begun to take up the role of Geeks. Suddenly everyone and their grandma knows what Dungeons and Dragons is. But the difference is now the pool is shallow.

In order to be inclusive to these people and open entryways into our spaces we must accept that as more of them come in the size of the pool becomes a game of telephone. Suddenly games like Dungeons & Dragons go from in depth roleplaying games to being viewed by wider society as a fun improv group game. The kind of thing that nobody needs to take seriously, it's a brand, not a game. It's an identifier, not a culture.

Of course good groups still exist, but they're thinned out. Nowadays many people don't even opt to play Dungeons and Dragons, with the phrase "No D&D is better than bad D&D" and subreddits like r/RPGHorrorStories making people afraid to join tables without long lists of consent agreements and session 0s. It's also led to a culture of not reading the books. In fact, this post is because I got into an argument with someone over whether beginners should read the books, one of their points was that "Reading the book is stressful and difficult" which made me pause. Because, (pardon my language) WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN READING THE BOOK IS STRESSFUL? 

So, I'd like to ask you the question, is it worth being able to fly if you can't ever touch the ground again?