> it felt like there was not a teenage girl in a hundred miles who had read A Game of Thrones

> I feel a certain lack, an empty space where a particular kind of person should be—all those who used to read comic books

The author describes how there are so few nerds in their ideal, nostalgic time, yet there is somehow a void where there should now be a bountiful amount of nerds in the modern times?

Anecdata tells me the nerds are there. They're just in their own spaces. Out of the public eye.

With the internet the way it is now (bots, scams, AI, overrun of nerd spaces, clamping down of internet speech) I don't blame any of them. You can't be on the public internet anymore and have a good time. The platforms got too big, the rules so impersonal. The interesting people went elsewhere. Left with this hallow "majority". Or as the author says

> it’s problematic that the taste of the majority is swamping out the minority

The "intellectual nerd", the minority, is just elsewhere. If you want to find them, you have to put in the time and the effort to move your eyes or your self there. Cultivate your social surroundings.