Patton Oswalt: Response To Geek Column Has 'Proven The Point'

'Zombie Spaceship Wasteland' author talks to MTV News about reaction to his controversial Wired article.
By Rick Marshall

Patton Oswalt
Photo: MTV News

Late last year, Patton Oswalt created quite a stir in the online world when he wrote a column for Wired calling for the annihilation of the nerd world as we know it. Just a few weeks and no small amount of controversy later, the actor/comedian says he feels vindicated by the discussion the column generated.

Titled "Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die," the column was published just days before the release of Oswalt's "Zombie Spaceship Wasteland," a collection of essays that collectively form the newly minted author's memoir.

In the Wired piece, Oswalt lamented the mainstreaming and growing accessibility of all of the things that once defined "nerd culture." With all manner of geekery now providing the fuel for popular culture, he pushed for readers to accelerate the burn, eventually forcing society to find new obsessions and exotica once everything else has been cataloged, ranked and quoted into oblivion.

"In order to save pop culture future, we've got to make the present pop culture suck, at least for a little while," he wrote.

Not surprisingly, the column prompted no small amount of online debate, and when Oswalt dropped by MTV News to discuss his new book, he offered up some thoughts on the intense back-and-forth his missive created.

"I feel like I said what I wanted to say but, if I might add, the fact that the Internet blew up the way it did might have partially proven the point that I had in the essay," he told us.

Along with calling for a pop-culture apocalypse, the actor also coined a brand-new term: Etewaf. It stands for "Everything That Ever Was — Available Forever," and according to Oswalt, making everything we loved about the past available will do no more harm than good, and reduce the desire for more of the nostalgia-filled elements of our youth that made today's "Star Wars" muscle shirts and tributes to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" on "Glee" cool in the first place.

Of course, whether he's correct is the stuff of continued debate both on the Net and offline — and that's the just the way he wants it.

"I don't want to get too deep into it, I'd rather have people try to interpret it," he continued. "Some of the arguments against it have been really eloquent and brilliant, so I'm just glad that it inspired people way smarter than me to write stuff."

What's your take on Oswalt's Etewaf theory? Tell us in the comments!

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1655832/patton-oswalt-response-geek-column-has-proven-point.jhtml

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