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TO THE CORNFIELD WITH YOU!

Revenge of the Sadistic Nerds

Andrew Jaye
6 min readFeb 14, 2025

Incels want to “rm -rf *” the middle class

Photo by cottonbro studio

I always knew it. I got out of the software development world because I felt something was not quite right in the head with a few of my co-workers. And the further I moved away from spending my work days staring at code, the clearer it became.

I can even trace it back to the nerds I befriended growing up. I recognized they were offbeat and seemed to have learned obscure ideas — usually involving computers or board games or science. I kind of admired this tribe, which was not popular or athletic but would accept an introvert like me.

Still, there was something noticeably off with them.

While they couldn’t throw a baseball, they could wangle the DEC PDP-11 — which our high-school somehow had purchased — to play practical jokes on other classmates. One day the math teacher Mr. Molinaro commented on the 50,000 “HaHa”s that might show up in our files and overwriting our homework assignments in Basic.

Much later, I realized one of the teen computer jocks had read the operating system manuals piled next to the DEC mini and learned a shell hack to pipe output into our files. Wowee.

The teacher told us how to set something called read-write permissions to block…

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Andrew Jaye
Andrew Jaye

Written by Andrew Jaye

Former privacy and data security blogger. Part-time workplace sociologist. Opinions are for better or worse his own. More about me at metaphorly.com.

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