Talking back to the Geek Social Fallacies: they’re a non-intersectional analysis that doesn’t take into account how diverse our community is, and assumes we don’t have agency in our own social relationships.
Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are Evil
From the website: GSF1 is one of the most common fallacies, and one of the most deeply held. Many geeks have had horrible, humiliating, and formative experiences with ostracism, and the notion of being on the other side of the transaction is repugnant to them.
I think this is true some of the time, but not all. Here is the problem with how this is framed. The biggest problem with this (like with the rest of the analysis of the GSF) is that it’s a non-intersectional viewpoint of a diverse set of spaces that have unspoken traditional power dynamics. People outside of those dynamics - women, POC, and or LGBTQ people - talk about those dynamics *all the time.* Plenty of geek social issues aren’t individual, they’re structural.
There is a lot of geek exceptionalism here: it’s as if geek culture exists in a hermetically sealed bubble apart from the rest of society or its dynamics, pissing contests, or biases, and it’s as if problems that take place within geek space, are specific to geek space.
It’s also as if geeks don’t have agency or ever choose their friends and spaces with intention, and never reject or ostracize people. Plenty of us are geeks/nerds because we don’t hang out with just *anybody* and a lot of us really do think we are smarter and or more successful than a lot of other people in our own social class (which is part of the unspoken class anxiety in nerd/geek identity). A lot of us have defensive walls up in non-geeky spaces - but there are some of us who actively think we’re more interesting, higher class, better informed, or smarter than non-nerdy/non-geeky people.
Finally, the problem with assuming that the problem is “Ostracizers Are Evil”
assumes that geeks/nerds don’t prioritize some friendships within their group over other friendships, and ignores that structural and or unconscious biases may exist in geek/nerd space just like they do in other spaces. The person asked not to be an ostracizer is so often someone who’s expected to do emotional labor/be “the Giving Tree” or who has a more subordinate status in the group. The people we’re expected to tolerate aren’t merely some elephant in the room that everyone is working around, the group is often actively prioritizing that person over the people who don’t like that person. They’re not merely tolerating them. They put up with Jason the Creeper and Cat Piss Man because they like them and/or Jason and CPM go way back in the group!
Geek Social Fallacy #2: Friends Accept Me As I Am
The origins of GSF2 are closely allied to the origins of GSF1. After being victimized by social exclusion, many geeks experience their “tribe” as a non-judgmental haven where they can take refuge from the cruel world outside.
Well… maybe this is true for some people, but the problem is, there are power dynamics *within* geek/nerd culture. This is another case where I feel like the author isn’t seeing the forest for the trees. Plenty of people don’t find geek/nerd culture to be a haven and don’t take acceptance for granted! Just because geek/nerd culture may be a haven *for some cis het men* from some kinds of gender essentialist tropes, doesn’t mean it’s a haven for other people.
If you’re somebody who is always fighting for space in that world because it’s the only space you get to have *anywhere*, and you’re always running into the power dynamics of other groups, then it isn’t that easy to miss in geek/nerd culture.
Geek Social Fallacy #3: Friendship Before All
I’m not really arguing with this one as a common problem within geek space. I do wish analysis of it would go further, because I feel there’s often an active codependent or enabling/co-addictive process. People really do get addicted to fantasy based stuff, and to video games, and to media. Even addiction specialists acknowledge this. But there are very few people doing analysis of addictive dynamics, anti-recovery, or enabling within geek/nerd space. One of the problems is that this is really pervasive in geek/nerd space and it’s almost impossible to get away from unless you completely quit geek/nerd space altogether, at least for a while. The thing is, many cases of “Friendship Before All” aren’t necessarily that the person has a broad feeling of this, as much as it reflects a specific codependent or co-addictive relationships within the group. (The fallacy I keep seeing here is again the assumption that geeks don’t have social agency, or specific social choices.) Some geeky spaces can even get into folie a deux dynamics or cult dynamics.
The problem I had dealing with maladaptive daydreaming (which is often seen as addiction-adjacent) was that geek culture, especially tabletop gaming, was actively reinforcing it, and I actively needed to get away from that group for a while to get a handle on the maladaptive daydreaming that was taking over my life. The thing I needed to NOT do was be around people who obsessively daydreamed about their “ships,” or in any space that encouraged me to spend ten hours a day daydreaming about my RP characters. (I do RP again, but only because I’m in a space where it doesn’t take over my life.)
I had a couple of uncomfortably intense friendships that were as enmeshed as they were because they were based around us sharing the fantasy lives that neither of us could share with other people, let alone reveal to the world, and because we enabled each other’s bad escapist tendencies.
Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship Is Transitive
Every carrier of GSF4 has, at some point, said:“Wouldn’t it be great to get all my groups of friends into one place for one big happy party?!"If you groaned at that last paragraph, you may be a recovering GSF4 carrier.GSF4 is the belief that any two of your friends ought to be friends with each other, and if they’re not, something is Very Wrong.
I won’t say I’ve never seen this, but in a lot of cases, I don’t think it’s anything but the behavior of *young and socially inexperienced* people in general. It also assumes that we are talking a group of people who are all potential in-group and none of whom are ever one-down or on the business end of bias. It assumes that geeks never compartmentalize their friends, which is wrong - lots of us do, especially if we’re social climbers (which lots of geeks/nerds are and won’t admit it). (Let’s be honest, would YOU really introduce everyone you have ever gamed with, to the people at your staid/conservative job that you’re trying to get promoted at?)
GSF4 ignores the phenomenon of gatekeeping. If you’re ever the person on the other end of gatekeeping of any kind, you certainly don’t experience every geek wanting to introduce you to all of their friends. It’s another case where I feel like the author’s viewpoint is just too narrow and that their generalizations are based upon a small set of people who are themselves always the gatekeepers.
Geek Social Fallacy #5: Friends Do Everything Together
GSF5, put simply, maintains that every friend in a circle should be included in every activity to the full extent possible. This is subtly different from GSF1; GSF1 requires that no one, friend or not, be excluded, while GSF5 requires that every friend be invited. This means that to a GSF5 carrier, not being invited to something is intrinsically a snub, and will be responded to as such.
This is another case that tries to oversimplify and lump multiple kinds of situations in geek/nerd space into one Grand Unified Field Theory: experience of *young* social spaces, experience of structural bias/gatekeeping, individual neediness (or projections coming from same) that also happens outside of geek spaces, and dynamics that happen with lots of subcultural spaces.
The biggest issue I have with the author’s analysis is about the structural bias, because GSF5 totally ignores
ignores the existence of bias and structural stuff in geek/nerd spaces. And I don’t deny that GSF5 actually exists, but it has to be analyzed intersectionally. In adult spaces, I feel like I’ve seen people more often accused of some form of GSF5 to gaslight them about elitism, than I’ve seen actually being carriers of GSF5.
I mean, what if you *are* being excluded and everyone around you is saying “don’t be silly, we don’t exclude people?” What if it *is* a snub and you’re told you’re imagining things? What if you’re actually not being invited to the thing?
There *is* an issue in geek space where individual cliques of friends intersect with larger groups, and friends-of-friends, and friends-of-friends-of-friends. But plenty of geeks just associate with their specific cliques.
