Technology | 2009.10.11
Revenge of the nerds | Andrew Martin
Creative types used to run the show, but now the maths geeks have taken over the world
At my school in the 1970s there were three types of people. First were the artists: the ones who listened to John Peel and watched subtitled films. Then there were the footballers. These were usually un-academic (to put it mildly), imperious on the pitch, but amiable and amusing off it. Third, there were the nerds: the ones who were good at maths . Being inarticulate and incomprehensible, they understood the inarticulate and incomprehensible maths teacher. In maths lessons, they talked to each other in hateful, excited whispers, then they\'d put their arms around their work so the artists and footballers couldn\'t copy.
By the sixth form, the footballers had fallen by the wayside. With a fascinating magnanimity, they\'d all accepted the line peddled even by the games teacher himself: that football was only a diversion from the serious business of life. The maths lot, meanwhile, had retreated into a sort of ghetto of their own, or had left school altogether in order to go to the tech college, perhaps to study the nascent discipline of computer sciences. It was the artists who had won out. They had the longest hair and the best jokes; and whereas the footballers had had the first girlfriends, the artists now had the most glamorous ones. Above all, the artists were the types most likely to know about or indeed perform rock music . This was the shorthand for all creativity, and creativity was where it was at. There was a reverence for the process whereby a song, book or film might be manifested where none had existed before.
Well, that was then. The story of my adult years has been the ascent of the footballers and the nerds and the eclipse of the artists. To take the footballers first. If, in the 1970s, you\'d proposed a satire in which football would make up 80% of the recreational conversation of 80% of the male population, you would have been dismissed as over-imaginative. Today, you would be dismissed as insufficiently imaginative. But the hubris of the muddied oafs – the banishment of the term "dug-out" in favour of the ludicrous "technical area", for instance – can just about be dismissed as the pomposity of the arriviste.
The rise of the nerd is more sinister, since it has occurred at the direct expense of the artist. I first saw this while working in the newspaper offices of the mid-1980s. A hack\'s computer would break down, and he would humbly ask the man from the computer department if he might possibly come and look at it. The computer man would come – a pallid figure in terrible grey, plastic shoes – and he would fix the machine with contemptuous ease, perhaps deigning to mutter as he departed, "If that happens again do control X, OK? I\'m too busy to come up again."
Too busy doing what, I used to wonder. The answer was that he and his brethren were plotting a future in which all writers and musicians would be at the mercy of the mathematicians and the electronic and numerological world they have created. Art is now content. It merely embellishes a "platform" of the kind I struggle to read about in the media pages which are now indistinguishable from the technology pages.
My son boasts that he has 2,000 songs on his iPod. The question of what they are is less important to him, not least because he doesn\'t know himself. Content can be, and is, downloaded – meaning "stolen" – at will, and the mathematicians have appropriated a sinister strain of vacuous hippydom in order to justify this theft as a function of individual freedom. Accordingly, it will take the slyest sort of politician, creeping circuitously in suede shoes, to corral the "file-sharers". Fortunately, we have the right man on the job: Lord Mandelson . I assume he was one of the artists at school – his dress sense suggests this to me.
Sorry to be so partisan, but this is a war. Which side are you on?
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/02/maths-artists-school-geeks
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