We know the classic nerd stereotypes. The athletic kids shove nerds into lockers. The cool kids make nerds the butt of jokes for playing dungeons and dragons in their mom's basement. Nerds were victimized for being socially awkward, lacking style, and aesthetic appeal. They obsessed over obscure technical subjects and as a result were over-achievers, but despite their achievements, remained unsung heroes due to their lack of social appeal. During this time, there was no internet. Nerds mostly had to rely on pure fortune to find each other.
Some years back, it started becoming trendy to be a "nerd". Thanks, in part, to people like Bill Gates and Microsoft's boom, being good with computers came to be considered as highly valuable. Nerds stopped being seen purely as victimized, dopey oddballs and started being seen, at least potentially, as analogous to the ultra-prestigious innovators of the past. The movie Revenge of the Nerds wasn't just a dorky underdog's fantasy, anymore. Even in mainstream entertainment, awkward computer nerds and obsessive introverts started being widely portrayed as having a having a hidden power to be reckoned with. This, of course, all started with the advent of the internet.
Part of that process of acceptance and embrace from mainstream culture became shedding the dogma of certain hobbies. The comic book guy from The Simpsons being obsessed with children's cartoons stopped being synonymous with every "nerd". People didn't just stop batting an eye at obsessions with Star Trek, Star Wars, comic books, anime, video games and toy collectibles. In many cases, they embraced them as respectable hobbies.
Probably mistakenly, a plurality of previously unprestigious hobbies were married to the vision of a nerd possessing powerful talents and societal value. Collecting NES games does not define you as an intellectual or a technology prodigy, but the culture subconsciously started considering it to be in the same arena as something like having the discipline to learn a low-level programming language. Either way, "nerds" were now "empowered" and no longer had to be embarrassed or ashamed.
So, nerds beat the bullies and lived happily ever after?
Internet nerd cliques of today put the bullies in Revenge of the Nerds to shame. Everything from high school script kiddies doxing schoolmates, to DDoSing websites, to entertainment fanboys piling on people they don't like, to an online clique in an obsolete social media such as IRC inviting newcomers to haze them, and banning them if they don't comply. Not to say that nobody bullies a dorky kid, anymore, but kids with odd hobbies and intellectual interests were never shunned for anything other than being stereotyped as independent non-conformists whose place wasn't to taint the social order.
From college, I have a memory of a group of cartoon-level nerds on a train, with glasses, silly voices, and everything, having a conversation about a student in earshot at the other side of the car, suggesting said student was gay. That's nothing compared to what you find today on something like 4chan or its derivatives. The whole gamergate hoopla symbolizes the entitlement that "nerd culture" feels. Gamergate struck back against feminists with a vengeance.
Even if I tend to agree with the general ether of gamergate, it's worth noting that nobody would have noticed if feminists had attacked some obscure hobby other than gaming, something equivalent to NES obsession in 1987. Not just because nobody would have noticed their response, but because Sarkeesian and her cohorts would never have even bothered trolling something so insignificant. They often try to portray themselves as the underdog, despite seeming to have the upper hand.
Can you imagine if the so-called gamergaters had not stopped at attacking 'corrupt game journalism', but the entire corrupt "news" industry? Certainly some voices tried to mobilize that, to no avail. Despite all the melodrama, "gamers" called the shots, and all they wanted to do is have fun with their games, not get bored with difficult subjects.
Are gamers "nerds"? It's become a meaningless word. Or maybe "geek" is supposed to be the term for obsessive intellectuals? "Nerds" can be the cosplaying gamers, the folks that camp out to watch movies, the fanboys. "Geeks" can be the disciplined programmers, the political analysts like Nate Silver that obsess over data, the kids that are fascinated by astronomy, and the ones that grow up to work for NASA (or SpaceX, if you prefer).
Of course, a person doesn't need to be exclusively one or the other, but maybe that's how we should separate the two words. If so, not all nerds are geeks. Then, likewise, not all bullies are individually popular, and they never were. In fact, that's probably partly why they were bullied. They wanted to become popular, like a youtuber that harasses people on the street and calls it pranking, to get millions of views. Those computer nerds, uploading videos on the intertubes.
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