Intelligence, Please…

In my home state of Mississippi, a rebellion is brewing. This isn’t the Tea Party railing against the establishment, or even some governor clamoring for a return to fiscally conservative policies. No – the University of Mississippi student body is actively campaigning to make Admiral Ackbar their new mascot. For those of you who don’t know, Ackbar is a squid-looking commander of the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars’ Return of the Jedi. He became a cult icon as Internet memes spread across boundaries around his most memorable line: “It’s a trap!” There are somewhere around 20,000 students at Ole Miss, and I can’t imagine that all of them are devout Star Wars fanatics. Only 3,000 of them turned out to vote on a referendum to allow student participation in the mascot selection. So why is Admiral Ackbar getting so much press? (a quick Google search reveals that both the Washington Post and New York Times have picked it up – more links posted on notatrap.org, the campaign’s official website)

The issue is that the entire world has now succumbed to viral media tactics, and nerds are now poised to manipulate world affairs in ways never before seen.

ABC’s LOST achieved widespread commercial success because they played to that. Rather than simply create a cliffhanger show (a la 24, and hundreds of other serial TV shows), LOST decided to let nerds run free with their imaginations and helped guide the obsession with out-of-show commercials for in-show events, tailored web pages, and a “University” that helped viewers learn more information than they could possibly glean in one hour of television. DC Comics’ The Dark Knight began marketing not at a major media event, but at a comic book show. Warner Bros. then spread the movie’s marketing virally, always starting with the geeks and nerds who then spread it through the Internet. Candidates all the way from Barack Obama to the left and Ron Paul to the right levered the power of the nerd community for viral marketing, fundraising, and spreading the message to the younger generation in ways that the old political “style” barely processed.

The nerd community is now subtly powerful. There is no clear-cut leader among them: Steve Jobs perhaps fulfills the role of high priest with Steve Wozniak, Kevin Smith, Jack Dorsey and a host of others taking over as minor prophets. Social news sites like Digg or Reddit filter countless other news outlets to a compressed digest of world affairs, opinion columns, or amusing pictures and videos with such success that it is difficult to find a major news outlet now without a direct link to send the story to Digg. Ideas and news spread wildly through Twitter with a speed that cannot be matched by any of the major news networks. The community is active and engaged and more involved with the world than ever before. The relatively untapped power of the nerd populace stands to do more for the world than any loosely affiliated organization ever has.

With this new power for good, though, the capacity for evil exists as well. In the darkest corners of the Internet, Christopher Poole administers the anonymous message board 4chan.org. Heard Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” recently? That Internet meme was born on 4chan, as well as the infamous LOLcats. Memes come and go on 4chan, some savory and some…not as much. While most things posted on 4chan are harmless, others take a darker tone. 4chan has hosted a stadium dirty bomb threat, a school shooting threat, and had to explicitly state that posters of child pornography would be banned from the site after certain posts. 4chan also sprouted, for better or worse, the Anonymous movement. Anonymous was originally created to protest the Church of Scientology in a way that would make lawsuits impossible, regardless of the mode of protest. The movement has spread to micro-causes – generally whatever a small band of Anonymous protesters doesn’t like and can rebel against.

To try to prescribe a single course of action for dealing with an empowered nerd community is a futile idea. But companies and politicians have done so successfully and laid down the blueprint – mainly, that they need to be heard and engaged. The high degree of connectivity and community among nerds will only continue to strengthen, and politicians and businessmen would do well to leverage that strength.