I dunno, I'm not convinced that's the case. It may be that there is some undercurrent of that, but I recall being super into WarGames in the 80s and very-very into it in the 90s. When I ran a dialup ISP, my mail servers were called wopr and norad... :P
Also, I think nerds just sometimes hate admitting they like a thing that is a caricature of themselves. I hate to admit it, but I really liked Hackers, and thought it had a lot of relevant nerd stuff going on it, ditto on The Matrix :)
