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The Origins of Wokeness
221–230 of 1001 posts
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#222People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon. Perhaps the author is just more aware of it now, or modern technology has pushed it deeper into our lives, but it's not new. And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue. If they care about…
> Annoyed people are whining about civil rights?
Nobody is annoyed people are whining about civil rights. We are annoyed that people a) are whining about non-issues that they have gone out of their way to be offended by, and b) are demanding that the rest of us change the world based on their blown out of proportion views.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#223if you're going to talk about history, it really helps to ground your narrative in real people, events, or statements. This all comes off as a history of vibes, and I don't remember the same vibes at all (maybe because I wasn't on twitter). When pg does make contact with reality, it mostly doesn't even support his narrative. He mentions the George Floyd protests and the MeToo movement/Weinstein - by any measure real…
Also not on twitter, other than to camp my name. I disagree with your reading of the essay - he says that both of those were sort of "peaks" for their respective movements, and I would say that feels accurate to me. I'm in a mixed-race family, and George Floyd was the first and so-far only period where our family needed additional support, talk, help, considering how to respond.
I agree that Anheuser-Busch seemed to have been stunlocked by Dylan Mulvaney v. Kid Rock on the internet.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#224[deleted]
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#225I find it hilarious that the prophet of modern Startup Culture and its subsequent proliferation of Y Combinator/FAANG cult practices (e.g. growth at all costs or practising agile as a copy-cat set of misunderstood tech rituals) is blind to fact that the only ones proselytising about "wokeness" these days are the same ones trying to outrage you about it (i.e. Fox News and Elon Musk) in order to distract you from the fact that wealth and resources are being hoarded by the very same companies/individuals.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#226Black person here.
Like most discussions of "woke" and "wokeness," this one too fails HARD by not fully and directly addressing the origins of the term -- and by "fails hard" I do mean will almost certainly do more obscuring than clarifying by starting from an information-deficient premise.
Including, e.g. "The term 'woke' has its origins in the Black American community as a signifier of awareness about ones political and social situation..." is a bare minimum.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#227> Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase "people of color" is considered particularly enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. [...] There are no underlying principles. To understand much of our language, Gnorts would have to already be aware that our words and symbols gain meaning from how they're used, and you couldn't, for instance, determine th…
they’re not negroes, they’re colored they’re not colored, they’re African-American they’re not African-American, they’re black they’re not black, they’re Black they’re not Black, they’re People of Color they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC I wonder what the next twist of the pretzel will look like
I think this just demonstrates that changes to language are not sufficient to erase racism.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#228Actually, the origin of “wokeness”, the term, is right-leaning bigots who need to discount any grievance by any group of people who claim they might just possibly be suffering some systemic disadvantages in this country.
Nope. It was a term of respect and affirmation in the African American community first, and seems to have been successfully expropriated and rebranded.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#229I did not expect CEOs / industry titans to fall in line with the new regime so quickly, in the few weeks since Trumps election most tech leaders have completely changed their public stance on these topics. Why are they so afraid? Or are they simply happy to drop the charade as it seems clear the wind blows the other way now?
I wasn’t feeling very positive about all the talk about making the world a better place but recently I’ve become quite cynical, it’s really just about the money it seems. I even find this whole hacker ethic quite stupid now, basically all that ethos about free software was just instrumented by corporations to extract wealth, and now that AI is seemingly around the corner they can finally drop most people building the software for them, as that was always the biggest cost center anyway.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#230I 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.
Ok, I'll bite. What is having empathy for the homeless? Is allowing unconstrained immigration to increase competition for entry-level positions empathy? What about restrictions on construction that make housing completely unaffordable? Is that empathy? Is leaving the drug-addicted portion of the homeless out on the street to battle their addictions on their own empathy[1]?
Saying nice words (not having disdain) is not the same thing as helping someone.
[1] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-call-that-compassio...