Woke is apart of neoliberalism, the other half is probably MAGA. It's post-political think, a fake competition that coerces you into arguing within private sector terms. If MAGA is FOX News then Woke is CNN/MSNBC. It's harder to define woke because it's built on old postmodern language-power games. The most obnoxious games that wokies play are semantic games and riddles. For example: "what is woke, you don't even know what it is." Similarly I've heard people say "how am I not myself?" A: when you're aloof. Woke is nostalgia for America's anti-Soviet propaganda. It's an antagonistic parody.
The Origins of Wokeness
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Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#392[deleted]
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#393if 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…
> He also mentions the Bud Light boycotts as a case of going "too woke", but Bud Light's actions were not an "aggressive performative focus on social justice." Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever. It was the boycott by anti-trans bigots that politicized that incident.
This is a double standard. For example, Contrapoints was cancelled for using Buck Angel to do a 10 second voice over in one video[1]. A far less politically charged association with someone than what Bud Light did. In this regard, I think the left has been the ones who primarily set the rules of engagement for the last few years. Can't complain when those same rules are used against you.
[1] https://medium.com/@rachel.orourke_88152/the-10-second-voice...
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#394Very interesting piece. Thanks for sharing!
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#395From 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…
if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech. Not at all - the difference here is choice . You can choose to pay or not to pay. And if you don't pay you are still seen. There was no choice wrt visibility under the old regime, WrongSpeak was censored - you co…
> at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
This has multiple issues.
The older set up was not there to promote visibility but to provide a layer of authentification, most blue ticks were brands and recognisable people. Now its mostly scams, allowing anyone, especially potentially malicious actors, to don the mask of credibility is not "allowing the possibility of diversity of opinion" is allowing the fox in the hen house.
Secondly, if you imagine the goals of right wing people to maintain current power structures, and the left to disrupt them, then the ability to pay is already corrupted due to the current power structure being supremely lobsided. Aka those with all the money are effectively the only ones who can pay. (In law this is called 'right without a remedy', its when you technically have a right on paper but could never actually exercise it)
This whole situation also enables a problem we already know exists which are state actors. Russia was part of a disinfo campaign through FB tools in 2016 through cambridge analytica, and used bots in twitter in 2016 and 2020 through multiple state sponsored bot farms. Allowing that kind of state warfare to be amplified by spending money is really really poor choice from a platform prespective. Without those tools, organic growth is harder to achieve and getting around bot detection tools means a part of the infra would be caught before it caused damage (even under those circumstances, there was plenty of damage done). Removing all guardrails is a frankly indefensible choice in terms of public safety
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#396> 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…
Having the principle of "words become bad because bad people use them" is stupid because you cede power to bad people. But really, its not a principle at all, its just a dumb cultural signaling, ie. "I'm not like those uneducated hicks".
When the meaning of a word gets distorted by use in bad faith, it's no longer useful for its original purpose.
Switching to another word isn't ceding power to the bad people. It's taking away their power to redefine things. It's letting them have the now-useless word exclusively, which will become associated with their speech, and not the original meaning. The original meaning is reclaimed by using a new not-yet-soiled word for it, and the cycle continues.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#397Few things are as performative as venture capitalists aligning their politics with the upcoming government.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#398Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten. I don't think what pg is saying is anything new, he's always had the same sentiment around anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian/mob and pro-breaking-the-rules attitude. It's called "hacker" news for a reason.
I take it as more of an indicator of how much liberal sentiment has shifted over the last 15 or so years.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#399I 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…
You're right. It's really lazy to use the term at this point as there isn't a shared meaning assigned to it. It's mostly used as a pejorative by the right at this point, but it's original meaning was very different and indicated a positive attribute. Whenever I'm in a conversation with someone who uses the word, I stop them and ask them to define what they're talking about. Usually they end up with something vague th…
I liked PG's attempts to define the perjorative form of "wokeness". I was disappointed that the rest of the essay didn't serve the discourse much.
What I was really hoping for was focused analysis on how to make social media more useful to the earnest helpers instead of the "loud prigs". That would have made for an interesting discussion here.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#400An unusually bad essay.
Yes, cancel culture is bad.
But when an entire group of people (eg women, or non-white people) says ‘this thing is a problem’, maybe take them seriously?
(Like pg would like to be taken seriously right now?)
This is an essay against introspection, against discomfort (as much as discomfort intolerance is raised as a symptom of woke), and an argument for maintaining the status quo.