There was a recent wrecker post that did this a lot. It comes across as reactionary to me but sometimes I see leftists doing it too. Nerd culture being associated with being childish/nostalgic and easily exploited by sanitised consumption, etc.

As an autistic person who sometimes gets hyperfixations that could be seen as childish, it feels gross to have people paint these hobbies as some kind of uniquely hyperconsumerist thing, because 90% of the time it’s just because the hobby is seen as childish and/or neurodivergent coded.

For example: I was hyperfixated on gardening for a while. It was expensive, really hard to do ethically and the industry itself is massively corporate and responsible for some of the biggest environmental problems today. It’s a nice little escapist hobby where you can turn your mind off while you pretend you aren’t fucking up your local biome because Monsanto decided it would sell more soil wetter, plant disease cures and fertilizer ifs product kills the soils ability to self regulate. I tried to do it the organic permaculture way, ended up being too expensive and half of the products were not in fact as ethical as they pretended to be. Also I have a degree in Ecology, most gardners don’t have that luxury and are not trained how to garden ethically. Never once have I ever seen anyone call gardening a vapid corporate hobby or expressed concern that I was using my fake little biome to escape from the real world. Never once have I been lumped in with the same people who invented DDT. Because it’s a socially acceptable hobby for a well adjusted adult to have.

I can’t say the same for when I had a Pokemon hyperfixation. It was a relatively cheap hobby, I mostly just played the games and the rom hacks were fun. But I stopped because who wants to be associated with grown ass adults waiting in line for cards and playing a childrens game! They must be mentally ill in some way, right? Now adults who still like a hobby they grew up with get put into the same camp as Harry Potter fans, who we have apparently now have decided are bad because Harry Potter is childish and whimsical, not because the writer is a racist transphobe.

Just something that mulls over in my head sometimes, because social dynamics that make no sense to me are another thing I like to fixate on and dissect for fun. I tend to see how the flow of popular narratives can manipulate people into adopting reactionary talking points. All you have to do is trojan something onto a socially acceptable target without outright saying the target and you have even leftists redirected to attack a target that the right want dead. People are funny.

Thanks for reading my weird rant. I could just be coming across as insecure and making myself an easy target for wreckers to get a rant from, but eh who cares if I get a reputation as someone easily baited by this subject. Someones gotta deconstruct this kind of thing so it might as well be me.