If 2008 was any indication, all of you should be prepared for nerds taking over your world. No longer are football jocks and beauty queens in power, the geeks that run the world behind the scenes are stepping to the forefront…are you ready?

Let’s think about the nerd invasion that was 2008.

The Macy’s Parade Rick Roll

Oh, don’t know what a Rick Roll is? Do you use the internet?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rick+roll

Words don’t describe how awesome this was. I was watching it live and couldn’t believe I was being Rick Rolled- in real life. I think I blew a funny fuse.

The New York Met’s Rick Roll

The Mets this year held an online vote for the song they would play in the stadium. There were five options I believe, none of which was Rick Astley’s tune. But the interwebs took over and launched a writein Rick Roll campaign, and they effin won. Another real life Rick Roll. The lines between virtual and real world are being blurred before our eyes.

Anonymous Versus Scientology

Members of the 4chan boards and others formed the world’s largest flash mob to take on the cult while wearing V for Vendetta masks, making international news in the proce- covered by all news outlets, staging global protests at Scientology “churches”, and making Scientology a global accepted ideological mockery.

The Dark Knight

Comic books are loud, brightly-colored, fun bits of eye candy; a temporary distraction from real movies that are somber and serious,talk about big issues and feature Meryl Streep. While always performing well at the box office (The Nerd masses are growing!), no notable critics even thought of mentioning a comic book movie in any Oscar sense. Then The Dark Knight came along, a record-breaking, critically and commercially successful, bona fide phenomenon. If you didn’t see it opening weekend, you were weird.

It was directed by a real director and written by a real writer (both had Academy Award nominations to their name).

For the first time, the creators acted like they weren’t ashamed of the material. They didn’t make it campy or self-referential, to let their cool friends know they were above it all. For once, they were treating the material as seriously as the fans did. The result was a comic book movie that will get serious Oscar consideration. Already there are two Golden Globe nominations for Heath Ledger, to go with nominations for awards from the Screen Actors Guild, and both the Chicago and LA Film Critics.

Now the Nerds are taking over movies too?

Old People Are Getting Noticably Confused, and Hence, Pissed Off

In 2008, two books were published within five months of each other about how geek culture was going to destroy the world. Susan Jacoby was inspired to write The Age of American Unreason after spending the night in a modern college dorm. The students chatted online with headphones stuffed in their ears instead of actually interacting with one another. She ultimately decided that the students had wrapped themselves in an “iPod coccoon” that was responsible for “a new species of semi-conscious anti-rationalism.”

The book immediately became a bestseller. At first, this must have looked like a problem to yet another writer (Mark Baurlein) who was about to publish a book that basically said the same thing.

But he soon realized there was room for improvement, as she had failed to explicitly call an entire group of people retarded in the title. So in July he published The Dumbest Generation, which used a barrage of startling claims and an absurdly long subtitle to explain (deep breath) How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30).

But like I said, they are just getting confused and left behind, so are responding with anger. Young people don’t much like old people, and vice-versa. Look at the election alone for what kind of generational gaping differences there are in America.

A Newsweek article disputed these books pointing out that cognitive scientists believe information technology is making us smarter and also pointed out that IQ scores have been on the rise since the 1930′s.

Academics have a long proud history of freaking out in the face of progress. They have studied a topic for so many years they know all the ‘facts’ there is to know, and anything other than those facts are wrong. Isaac Newton’s laws of mechanics was called “a rape manual” by the academics of his day.

The Newspaper is Dead- And Most Print Media is in ICU

2008 was all about mainstream media being flooded with eulogies for the newspaper. (A newspaper is a bunch of sheets of low grade wood pulp that used to give people their information–think the Drudge Report, but slower and without flashing graphics that told you which story was actually important). In case you haven’t seen one in awhile.

I happen to love the idea of newspapers, and what they once stood for. But its over. Information is too quickly and readily available than every morning. You’re reading a blog right now by some kid with only bootstrapped communications credibility. And you’re learning, more than an Op-Ed from some Professor at Brockport.

As media mogul Rupert Murdoch put it, the newspapers spent the last 15 years “remarkably, unaccountably complacent . . . quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along.” In other words, they called the digital revolution’s bluff, and lost, hard.

I am sorry that people are losing their jobs in print, but they are in a lot of industries. Adapt and react. The local Democrat and Chronicle would actually probably succeed if they adopted a more conservative view in a conservative area. Just saying. It would suck, but they might survive.

And last, but certainly not least.

We elected this man:

A Blackberry addicted, Star Trek watching, YouTube addressing, Presidential GEEK. Geeks come from all political spectrums. From those who thought Sarah Palin was “fucking retarded” and those who thought she was merely “retarded”, her condition not rising to a level that would require the “fucking” modifier.

A lot of football jocks and beauty queens enjoyed the “ignorant and damned proud of it!” attitude from Palin, as she smirked and winked and demonstrated what seemed to be a high schooler’s grasp of politics. But what’s important is that many, many American elections have been won with that shrugging, “aw shucks, I’m just common folk with no use for that high falutin’ fancy book-learnin’” act. Not this time.

We elected W. twice over brainiac Democratic nominees Al Gore and John Kerry. Somewhere along the way we equated honesty with low intelligence and that goofy neighbors are the people we want running our country. Not me! I want Columbia and Harvard educated brainiacs making the decisions for the commonwealth.

In 2008, that same stage was set again. The white, elderly, self-effacing war hero who boasted that he finished at the bottom of his class in the Academy. The small town beauty queen. American as Springsteen at the Super Bowl.

They were matched up against a young, not-white guy with a foreign name who did not run on his humble roots, could not boast that he was a war hero, and  would probably go into a violent seizure if his Blackberry were taken away.

Then he threw the switch on an online fund raising machine that drowned the campaign in cash (or more accurately, drowned McCain’s campaign with it) and mobilized a high-tech “ground game” that will be studied by every future campaign, volunteers dispatched by advanced databases that tracked every voter.

That’s right: he simply out-geeked McCain.

McCain’s campaign fought back with the most advanced tactics in its own arsenal: the “our opponent is a closet Commie” tactic that worked so well for Eisenhower.

They seemed shocked to find the world had changed in the last 56 years, and it was in the absolute ass-beating that occurred on election day we saw how stark was the divide between generations that I mentioned above.

McCain won 1 age group: Over 65 years old.

Everyone else went Obama by increasingly higher percentages as you get younger (he more than doubled McCain’s margin among 18-29 year-olds, 66% to 32%).

The ones who had the highest stake in the future–because they are still going to be alive to see it–overwhelmingly voted one way. And the future is what the Geek is all about. That’s why we love technology and gadgets and sci-fi. It’s about looking forward and embracing what’s coming, unafraid.

This is a huge change; we grew up hearing grown-ups talk about the past in glowing terms, dreaming of returning to old-time values and an era when all was right with the world, when there was no crime or gays, when women knew their place and America dominated the globe.

The geek, on the other hand, looks back and sees a time when couples on TV couldn’t be shown sleeping in the same bed, when calculations were done with pencil and paper and having a friend in Japan meant waiting eight weeks for a letter to arrive.

The Nerds are taking over, and it’s about damn time.