Nerd Authority

So Gizmodo has this great picture that they found of a few guys sitting by the pool for some beers and BBQ. This itself is enough hilarity to make an entire post about, but that's not why I'm here. What really interests me is the sudden surge on the Gizmodo comments page on trying prove if this is truly dangerous or not. It's everyone from the resident electrician to a freaking carnival engineer trying to outdo the other post in being the "expert" on electrical safety.

I've encountered such behavior pretty often around nerds. The one thing about being a nerd is that you'll run into a few that have this strange desire to be the absolute authority on something (or many times everything.) Gizmodo being a gadget blog attracts this sort of bunch as they scour these blogs so they can be the most up to date on happenings in the technology world. There is something frightening about this strange modern version of muscle flexing that many men do now. This reinvention of this habit of being able to say that "I'm right and you're an idiot." Last week I was a part of a dinner party and one of the guest was one of these guys. He was a perfectly nice guy, but he had this attitude about him of trying to be the biggest boy with the best toys. He spent a great deal of the night talking about his car, computer, or other type things that he could buy now that he was back in the US. I wonder if somehow it's a form of self empowerment in the form of consumerism to make up for personal feelings of a lack of control in the path of his life. I wonder as society pulls more control away from the individual will we see more of this "reclaiming" of control in the form of consumerism.