Meet the Nu-Nerds

Poverty, racism, war? What about global warming? “I’m concerned, it’s an issue, and it needs to be dealt with,” he says. David always says issue instead of problem, and the most negative word he’ll use is annoying. Not only does he hate nothing, but he claims he has no regrets, worries, insecurities, or recurring bad thoughts. The most personal thing he’ll tell me is that he’s allergic to the orange part of muenster cheese. He won’t even take a public stance on Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosures, except to say, “I object to massive spying programs.”

Maybe it’s not surprising that a security obsessive would be an uncrackable cipher of niceness. But is he just a naturally private person, like he claims? Does it only seem natural because he has grown up in an era when secrecy is a healthy norm? Or is he posing as a do-gooder for the lulz? Should I be reassured or terrified that he isn’t worried about anything? Maybe he’s just young. Or I’m old.

Before I can probe further, the Sthacks guys reenter with laptops in hand. Lest you picture some Revenge of the Nerds tableau, they wear the archetype lightly—no snort-laughs or Comic-Con merch; only one pair of glasses, tapeless. They’re dressed in T-shirts and cargo shorts. Some have girlfriends, all make eye contact. These NU freshmen are what you might call Nu-Nerd—confident, articulate, nonneurotic, and sharp as katanas. They’re all, in their own ways, just as whizzy as David: There’s Sam, a chatty former competitive League of Legends player; he argues constantly with Peter, a pugnacious arch capitalist who pulls in five figures a year with a web design business. Jacob is a deadpan wiseacre; the soft-spoken Taha is considering pursuing three minors and two majors (he dropped a third, mechanical engineering, because he figures he can pick it up on his own). David’s roommate, Alec, knows three languages, plays three instruments, and has a penchant for tie-dye and sweatpants. And Matt, a baby-faced Ping-Pong enthusiast with an 11-o’clock shadow, is the only one whose pants fit properly.

This goes on for hours; according to Sam, their conversations are “about 70 percent technologies, 20 percent morals and the implications on society of that kind of stuff, and then 10 percent where do we want to go eat for the night.” Matt amuses himself by scraping public user data off of the video­game platform Steam and putting it all up onscreen so his monitor looks like a midnight blizzard. Sam enjoys running multiple antivirus programs simultaneously, which causes them to battle against and eventually destroy one another—“I just like watching everything burn,” he says. Peter talks about a Google search query that leads to lists of devices with default certifications, where you can log on and make ghost noises come out of strangers’ baby monitors. Their conversations are frequently sidetracked by Google fact-checking: the merits of polyphasic sleep; the difference between tint and hue; how many lines of code were in the original Linux kernel.

Anyway, to focus on what they’re doing obscures what they’re not doing. Most people under late capitalism identify, at least in part, by what they consume: their media preferences, possessions, fashion. But David doesn’t listen to music. Nobody’s huge on Silicon Valley or Mr. Robot, but they’re cultists for Westworld (which happens to be about whitehat and blackhat cowboys in a futuristic simulation of the Wild West). Nobody smokes dabs or vapes or snorts study drugs. The only thing I see them consume, in medically unsound amounts, is candy—David’s trash can is stuffed with Kit Kat and Twix wrappers, and Alec is on his second 5-pound sack of gummy bears this semester.

Most surprisingly, none of them use social media, except for occasional event invites. To them, putting information online for no practical purpose is senseless and boring. “I get depressed when I look at Facebook,” Alec says. “It makes you compare the highlights of everyone else’s lives to your unedited reel.” The Sthacks members have a group chat channel on Discord, but other than that they meet in person, usually in this room in Stetson West. This is their network. And when I leave for the night, they finally take a break from hacking to watch a YouTube video of John McAfee snorting bath salts through a crazy straw. It’s 3 am, and they are wide awake.