I vaguely remember hearing a few rumblings in my preferred corners of the internet regarding this essay by comedian-actor-geek Patton Oswalt about the simultaneous mainstreaming and death of nerd culture when it was published last December, though never managed to get around to it until very recently.

Most of the reaction to the essay was negative, asserting that Oswalt was doing little more than complaining that now that his favored club was no longer particularly exclusive, he was thinking about taking his ball and going home. I think there’s some of that there, to be sure, mostly because I come from roughly the same generational and cultural space as Oswalt, and have been known to engage in a little of that sort of complaining myself from time to time, but there’s also more to it than that.

A lot of what Oswalt was lamenting was the fact that while the explosion of the internet over the last decade and a half has made almost everything immediately accessable, which is, objectively, a good thing, it’s also made us less willing to put the kind of effort into our cultural obesssions that we once had to that made those obsessions truly special to us. To those of us who have spent our lives sifting through longboxes at swap meets and trading bootleg tapes through the mail in order to track down that “”lost”” issue of a comic or a rare live perfomance of an otherwise unreleased song, the shortcut to otaku-ness feels a bit like cheating.

But not just cheating in the sense of being able to collect and digest every episode of The Prisoner and internalize decades’ worth of theories of meaning over a weekend.* It’s of cheating oneself out of the gradual experience of discovery, of stumbling upon others working their way along the same path to geekery, and coming upon the knowledge and speculation through interaction with other kindred spirits. Somebody who just torrents everything is missing out on not just the collective experience**, but the feeling of euphoria one gets when finding the next nugget of breadcrumb along the path.***

In any case, I’m not necessarily bemoaning this development and praying for the hasty arrival of the pop-culture Singularity to the extent that Oswalt seems to be (not that I think he really is, either – the man’s a comedian known for his sarcasm, after all), but I do tend to believe that some of these newly-minted geeks, by virtue of having unfettered, easy access to all this formerly underground subcultural stuff, are missing out on some of the experience that those that came before them had, and in a sense, I feel for them a little bit.

But not enough that I’m not totally ready to tell them to get the hell off my lawn as I wave my cane around, because I totally recognize that these are the ruminations of an old man about how things were better when I was that age.

And that just makes me feel bad for me. I probably ought to start taking advantage of this overabundance of information to catch up on all those Animes and emo bands the kids are listening to, though that’ll probably just make me look desperate.

Life, it seems, is just a Kobiyashi Maru.

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* – This is almost a bad example, as I just “”discovered”” The Prisoner this year, devouring the whole series over a couple of weeks thanks to Neflix and some internet essays. I’m sure there are probably a bunch of old grognards out there who would look at me with disdain, since they found the show through a combination of late night PBS airings and basement screenings of scratched 16mm prints projected onto bedsheets over a couple of years. Perhaps a better, more personal example for me would be my years of scouring magazine articles, liner notes, and catalogs in order to track down rare Bon Jovi B-sides, non-US releases, and songwriting credits during my teens. Today, anybody with access to the internet and a couple of URLs can find everything on mp3 in one big archive file and download it in less than an hour.

** – The best and probably widest ranging example of this oral tradition? Every kid in 1980s America, it seems, even those without a subscription to Nintendo Power, eventually learned the secret of blowing on the contacts of NES cartridges through the low-tech network of out-of-state cousins and regional summer camp bunkmates.

** – You can still get that feeling, though. I had a bit of a spring in my step for weeks after finally finding a badly-dubbed VHS copy of the Corman Fantastic Four film at a flea market several years ago, or just the other weekend when I found a 2nd edition D&D monster manual at a yard sale.