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The Origins of Wokeness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#181

Post by grahamj »

yapyap wrote: post #99

I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people. As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead. and then on the other side it feels like…

> i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.

> people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”

I think those are just two perspectives on the same situation. “wokeness” is realizing we should be treating people better and “anti-wokness” is people feeling called out by that.

People tend not to like it being pointed out that they are assholes, especially when they know it’s true. That’s pretty much the whole “anti-woke” thing in a nut.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#184

Post by belter »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #66

[flagged]

It just amazing to see how the new Trump administration prepares to take over, all the Tech Bros suddenly are coming out of their shell.

Musk on DEI. Zuckerberg just got back to his Misogynistic persona of the first days of Facebook. Peter Thiel published an editorial in the FT last week talking about conspiracy theories on JFK, and now...The attack on Wokeness... Cherry-picking historical examples, misrepresenting real power dynamics, and dismissing genuine social concerns as mere “performative” gestures. All while coming from a privileged VC perspective that notoriously funnels opportunities to the same elite circles...

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#185

Post by glitchc »

Apreche wrote: post #174
yapyap wrote: post #99

I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people. As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead. and then on the other side it feels like…

[dead]

> The people on the left, while far from perfect, are generally morally superior to those on the right.

Do you have evidence of this claim? If not, your stance is factually incorrect. I have evidence of the opposite [1].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34429211/

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#186

Post by NoGravitas »

I flipped the Bozo Bit on Paul Graham a long time ago. But if I hadn't then, I would now. I simply do not care to know what yet another tech industry financier thinks about "wokeness". Or, indeed, whatever anyone involved with startup culture thinks they know about history, culture, or philosophy of any sort - it's always just a distillation of their class interest dressed up to look profound to people who tried hard to avoid classes in the arts and sciences.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#187

Post by plagiarist »

rhelz wrote: post #5

From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]" Then follow to the footnote: "[14] Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying u…

Weren't a number of the accounts that Elon reinstated just overt white supremacists? Like, yes, by "not censoring" white supremacy, there are some causally correlated effects for what the far right considers "wokeness" on that platform.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#188

Post by vessenes »

p4bl0 wrote: post #114

> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness This is a fake news. Research shows that Twitter algorithmic amplification favored right-wing politics even before Musk made it even worse. See: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119 > On the other hand, the people on the far left have only themselves to blame; they could tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted to. Being this much clueless in…

Sorry, can you back this up with some data and specificity?

I understand that you feel Musk is aligned with the far right; my question is what exactly is Musk doing with twitter, and (other than when people take the piss against him personally) how is he removing free speech that is not "far right"?

I'm genuinely interested in the details -- and they are hard to come by.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#189

Post by Dig1t »

skepticATX wrote: post #127

It’s interesting to me that a certain type of person is so susceptible to buying into this fable of wokeness, especially when it pertains to universities. Almost like there is a woke mind virus, but it’s not infecting the people they think it is. I attended university in the mid 2010s, so close to peak “wokeness”, and I never witnessed or heard of anything like what pg is describing. In my experience it was totally f…

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