Charlie Stross
#WritersCoffeeClub March 19: What's your narrator's sense of humor like?
In The Laundry Files, our primary protagonist Bob has a very 1990s hacker-geek-culture outlook, and a darkly cynical sense of humour about his work—he explicitly notes that gallows humour is essential to his sanity. Other narrative viewpoints differ depending on who they are: by the last book, Bob is nearly 20 years older, grim, and a bit burned-out (although he refs the Mitchell & Webb "Are we the baddies?" sketch twice.)
Jacek Wesołowski
@williampietri @cstross I've been involved with the (PC side of the) video games fandom since mid-90s and I've been working in and around gamedev since 2002, and the terrible people have always been there. As much as it pains me, an archetypal hacker and a techbro are two sides of the same person. I've seen one turn into another when subjected to certain pressures.
William Pietri
@cstross Very interesting! I've often thought that the religions I admire in the abstract turn out to be just as terrible in practice if they end up socially dominant. I suppose that applies to 90s nerd culture just as well.
Charlie Stross
I'd like to add that a lot of the reason I've just turned in the LAST Bob novel, and tried to get the New Management series off the ground, was because Bob hasn't aged well culturally: he's rooted in the same culture that gave us today's contemptible techbros.
It's like waking up and realizing in 1939 that your much-loved series protagonist's elder brother is Heinrich Himmler. Oops.
Jacek Wesołowski
@williampietri @cstross The rewards were there from the start. I'm thinking about John Romero, whose "exploits" are fairly well documented, Cliff Bleszinski (whom I never met but my coworkers did since we were working for Epic at the time), Peter Molyneux (the ultimate over-promiser), Ken "let's make our voice actress cry" Levine, and many may others, and don't even get me started about pre-Witcher 3 CD Projekt.
William Pietri
@jzillw
Oh, totally agreed. The whole alpha-nerd thing is just toxic masculinity in different, less fashionable clothing. But there were a lot of entirely decent nerds too. For me part of what changed with the rise of the tech bros was that the increasing social power of tech created huge rewards for being awful.
@cstross
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