I've been thinking about Patton Oswalt's essay in Wired about the death of "geek culture" for a couple of days now—trying to separate what Oswalt actually said from the fleet of straw men that immediately marched out of his article and into the blogosphere.
As I read it, Oswalt is asserting that geekiness—as he knew it in the '80s, as defined as a subset of the population devoted to obsessively ferreting out the minutiae of certain books, comics videogames, and movies—is dead, thanks to an instant-gratification pop culture landscape that allows anyone to pursue any interest immediately. This easy access, he argues, leads to a watering down of experience—without the added value of the difficulty in obtaining certain items and their relative scarcity in the culture at large, the experience is diminished and the pride nerds used to take in being masters of their little corner of the universe has been stripped away. And now anyone can get anything and experience has been trivialized and that muscley dude at the gym wears a Boba Fett t-shirt and it's all just ruined.