Make Context Abundant Again
The art of the context switch has ruined us all.
Back in the olden days of the aughts, when the internet was still a somewhat open archipelago free of hyperscaling kingdoms, Michael Lopp published a piece called The Nerd Handbook. It's called a handbook, but it's only 2,500 words.
I remember reading it and thinking, "holy crap, how does he know me?" With the exception of the being funny part, it was a perfect fit. It was such a close read, in fact, that I made my fiancé read it. She tried to play it off with sparkling laughter — One of those,"Haha, that's not really you.. is it? Is it? IS IT?!?!"
I grew up a nerd. I didn't know it until high school, when some of the bullying and outgroup mentality of the 90s forced me out of my sport of choice (soccer). But once that happened, it became suddenly easier to hang out with the smart kids and my nerdiness blossomed. I stopped trying to hide my interest in math, physics, computers, and fantasy novels. I built school websites in the mid 90s, some for money. I was surrounded by smart people in college and my nerdiness grew an order of magnitude. ("Order of magnitude", by the way, is how a nerd says "like, a lot".) Nerdiness isn't always directed in the right ways and that's especially true during college. Nvidia graphics cards were important even back in 2000, but really only for serious first-person shooter artists— gamers. GeForce anyone?
A Brief History of Nerds
Nerds like me love computers, and nobody captured this like Michael Lopp because he explained the why. A nerd is a decent synonym for smart people interested in things — that just is what it is — and one of the primary attributes of nerds is the ability to process information quickly. Here's Lopp:
How does a nerd watch TV? Probably one of two ways. First, there’s watching TV with you where the two of you sit and watch one show. Then there’s how he watches by himself when he watches three shows at once. It looks insane. You walk into the room, and you’re watching your nerd jump between channels every five minutes.
“How can you keep track of anything?”
He keeps track of everything. See, he’s already seen all three of these movies… multiple times. He knows the compelling parts of the arcs and is mentally editing his versions while watching all three. The basic mental move here is the context switch, and your nerd is the king of the context switch.
Back in 2007 when Lopp wrote it, this did sound insane. The iPhone was still brand new and Instagram didn't exist. Today, look around any coffee shop and most people are doing the same basic move: flipping through videos as fast as their fingers will move.
The context switch is the key to all of this. Nerds are historically good at it. Then Silicon Valley blew up the entire economy and the context switch became a foundational part of the modern world. And that's what has ruined all of us, nerds included.
The idea of a nerd is a 20th century invention — maybe fifty years old at best. There were proto-nerds before this. Isaac Newton was perhaps one of the earliest. He famously retreated to his family house and obsessively invented much of classical physics and calculus in a short period. Nikola Tesla and Alan Turing were early 20th century prototypes in the same vein. Both were famous for combining high intellect, obsession, and tackling technical problems. These men were looked at as esoteric in their day, but there was no label yet. That didn't come until the dawn of the computer age. Computers and nerds, in fact, fit right together. Because computers let you intake information faster.
Let's think about history from the perspective of how much information people were exposed to in their lives. Before the 20th century, information scarcity was the norm. Books were expensive and literacy was limited. Academic pursuits were constrained mostly to the upper classes. The rare "polymath" like Newton or Goethe was revered but generally on an island of their own making, awash in a sea of data and ideas they had to pour themselves.
As the 20th century evolved, information started to explode. Literacy jumped from under 60% in 1800 to 90% in 1900 and 97% by 1950. Newspapers exploded, followed closely by radio programming, then TV.
Finally, computers entered the scene and the internet was born. And today we are awash in so much information that nobody can hope to process all of it; we drown in it.
Nerds, on average, can process more. This is the defining characteristic of a nerd. Not intellect or IQ or obsession or control or social awkwardness. Those are all secondary symptoms. The focus is on a joy and ability to brutally consume information as sensory input, usually text, which is why nerds are so tied to the evolution of the computer. Finally, here was a machine that allowed for full saturation, that provided a controllable environment where nerds could.. nerd out. And that's what they did.
It's worth noting the parallels between nerd traits and the constellation of behaviors now recognized as autism spectrum disorder. The set of traits that make up autism closely parallel those of nerds: they have heightened perception, different sensory processing, and occasionally hyperdeveloped abilities in specific domains. It's no coincidence that our understanding of autism and the prominence of nerd culture rose together during the 20th century information explosion. Research into autism didn't begin until the 1940s, and its diagnosed prevalence has increased right alongside our society's information density. Today, suggesting someone is 'on the spectrum' in tech circles has become almost a compliment— shorthand for 'processes information differently and often more effectively.' I'm not claiming a medical connection, but the correlation and frequent overlap between nerds and autists is telling: both phenomena reflect our evolving relationship with an increasingly information-saturated world. As our environment shifted from information scarcity to abundance, those with different information processing capabilities became simultaneously more visible and more valuable.
A lot has been written about the rise of the nerds. Paul Graham explains why nerds are unpopular (they care more about being smart) and why fierce nerds are important. Before about the 1990s, nerds were a very fringe group and that was mostly fine with them. But the growing utility of computers changed that.
A Step Too Far
When the internet started to really take off, the nerds were suddenly driving most of the change in the world. They gravitated to places like Silicon Valley and grouped together not to gain power or get rich (although that certainly happened) but because they were fascinated by the same problems and driven by the same puzzles. And so they began remaking the world with their own information processing capabilities in mind. This launched everything from faster spreadsheets to Google to the rise of the Cmd-Tab/Alt-Tab keyboard shortcut. I'm old enough to remember back when hardly anyone knew how to switch windows and doing it more than twice a day made you a power user. This was an OG context switch.
As Silicon Valley and computers took over much of the economy and knowledge work, the nerds reshaped the information domain to fit their framing. Speed became paramount and information was compressed for the most rapid consumption possible. Many of the technical advances we see are, in fact, advances in compression. Niche content communities on Reddit are compression. Infinite scroll saturates our time and provides compression. TikTok style fast cut editing is compression. LLMs are all about compression.
The curious thing about this is that, despite all of these changes and despite our growing ability to ingest massive sensory input, our brain's conscious bandwidth has remained the same. Our processing rate is around 10 bits per second. If we are computers, this is our CPU speed and it is evolutionarily static and quite slow. Our brains, it turns out, are incredible compression mechanisms too, filtering down a huge sensory load to the bits we can deal with and reason about.
What nerds are doing isn't actually much faster processing. They're not all IQ geniuses. Rather, nerds are capable of loading more information and loading it more quickly. Nerds filter out what doesn't matter, which often looks like obsessiveness, and only keeps what fits their patterns.
There’s a limit on this for everyone, nerds included. When we flip from context to context quickly, we're giving our brain way less input to digest and compress. This is a fairly expensive operation for humans. Each switch has both an immediate cost (around 200-500ms) and a longer-term cost in terms of depleting our cognitive resources and training our attention systems to expect frequent shifts. We can't build the patterns we need to reason and think about what we're seeing because we don't have enough data. And so the inputs remain at the level of the sensory, driven by dopamine and more autonomic processes.
Silicon Valley companies built systems driven by dopamine. You're no longer supposed to stay on one thing too long, you're supposed to swipe and flip and scroll. It is by design. At first, this was probably just nerds building the systems they wanted to exist — systems that could keep up. But then it grew into something else: a game and a challenge to grab and keep eyeballs as completely as possible with a scoreboard measured by IPO and market cap. The attention economy has its name for a good reason. Smart nerds took the idea of the context switch and used it to compress information further than anyone can keep up. And in doing so, they stole our attention by preventing us from loading enough context at any given time.
This is why deep work is so valuable. Digital technology and modern work environments encourage frequent context switching. It's the same reason a programmer often needs an hour to get into the groove before writing new code —they are literally reloading different aspects of the program into their brains so they can think about it.
It's important to note that the context switch is different from the tool switch. I've seen people marvel many times when they first see a programmer deep in their work. It looks scatter-brained; there's constant switching between code editor panels, a terminal with different directories and output, a browser tab or 50, and other tools. But this is no different than a woodworker sliding from a jointer to a planer to a mitre saw back to the jointer and then to hand tools. The context moves with the worker between tools. There's no reloading.
Context Is Scarce
The context switch has become a pervasive part of our information environment. What was once one of a nerd's greatest tools to thrive in an information-rich environment is now something else — something weaponized to steal our attention. We are now literally trained to focus on shallow sensory engagement rather than deeper reasoning and understanding.
Once we recognize this trap, we can begin reclaiming our cognitive independence. We need to deliberately create space for our minds to work and load context. We need to follow the advice of folks like Cal Newport and set aside blocks for deep work and practice what he calls digital minimalism. These movements aren't a new-age spiritualism involving computers and they are more than just productivity advice. Its focus is on cognitive self-preservation. We live in a computer age, and most of the computers around us are focused on getting our attention and holding our shallow engagement. So we must reclaim our brains and rebuild cognitive patterns that do more than simply trigger dopamine release.
In a world optimized for fractured attention, giving your mind time and space to think, allowing it to wander, to daydream, to form connections — this becomes something revolutionary. It's also deeply nerdy in the truest and most valuable sense: reveling in complexity rather than fleeing from it.
Tyler Cowen observed: "Context is that which is scarce." This has become one of his favorite maxims. The ironic twist for nerds is that our once favorite tool — context switching — has become the primary mechanism preventing our ability to build context. We've pushed it too far, rebuilding our information landscape into something vastly different from when Michael Lopp first wrote the Nerd Handbook.
The most counter-cultural thing a nerd — or anyone — can do today is to stop scrolling, silence the notifications, and spend an hour in sustained thought on a single problem. Because Cowen is right: context has become our most underrated and scarce asset: the ability to understand and to think deeply about the systems around us. Let's resolve to rebuild our brains and make context abundant.