Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Origins of Wokeness

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 1001 posts

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#411

Post by b800h »

softwaredoug wrote: post #135

I sadly suspect we’re going to see some risk adverse hiring of boring white dudes in all positions of leadership. Regardless of competence. We’re already seeing DEI weaponized. Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not. Organizations will be risk adverse and only hire the most boring white dude they can find from central casting. Whateve…

The whole "pale, male and stale" narrative is antiwhite racism. I don't think people should perpetuate it.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#412

Post by slothtrop »

Larrikin wrote: post #345
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…

Anyone using the term woke in 2025 is using the term in bad faith and to create the bogeyman you describe. It's actually hard to find the time when anyone on the left actually used it. Seems like it was a little under a year and the term was dropped to be more specific actions.

I like this take: https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...

I think it's a farce to suggest that no one out there could be accurately described by it (identity politics being more important than class, language policing, etc)

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#413

Post by acyou »

Are we going to see our institutions flexibly re-align themselves basically every US election cycle? Or do the recent changes at Facebook and Amazon, and this essay, herald a long-term shift to the right in USA politics?

Where individuals, institutions and society have to be flexible/whiplashed around in order to survive and thrive, it can be good from time to time, but it's not great for everyone to have too much such change on an ongoing basis.

If we're talking about the origins of wokeness, I would tend to go back further and look at Christianity as a whole. Suggest Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, which states that the morality of the day is somewhat arbitrarily dictated by those currently in power, and you had better snap to it and conform, which I think is more or less what we're seeing here?

Specifically, the idea of wokeness originates in the Christian conceptual understanding of pity, which is basically that we should sympathise with and help other people. Further, wokeness has in it that we don't accept people who work to benefit themselves and their cadres at the expense of society at large. Of course, this is ultimately incompatible with VC, which is why wokeness and tech/VC ultimately make an odd pairing, inevitably destined for a split, which we are now seeing.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#414

Post by TimTheTinker »

armchairhacker wrote: post #33

This article was written due to recent events. - IMO it should've acknowledged that there is genuine "intolerance" of foreigners/gays/trans, not the speech/writing you hear about in the news, but specifically the physical attacks and legal discrimination in third-world countries and rarely by extremists in first-world countries. And that seemingly-mild speech can lead to blatant hate speech, then physical attacks and…

I think it's interesting that pg references James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian in footnote 15.

These two (professional) philosophers are arguably the vanguard of philosophical opposition to identity politics; they have written extensively on it, tracing its ideological roots to Karl Marx and comparing it to the Maoist cultural revolution in China. (And it bears being said: they're certainly not prejudiced against any majority or minority group.)

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#415

Post by tome »

jhp123 wrote: post #162

if 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…

> Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever

Isn't it one of the tenets of wokeness that "nothing is apolitical"?

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#416

Post by mrkeen »

sedatk wrote: post #337
thomassmith65 wrote: post #289

The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power. I don't know what Graham thinks 'political correctness' would have looked like in the 1960s – most Americans still thought women's lib was a joke, many Americans were fighting to preserve segregation, and nobody had heard of such a thing as a gay rights m…

Thinking about progress, I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate was a lesbian. That would be unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s. Even the right is progressing and they don’t know it.

I had a similar double-take moment reading about Breitbart editor "Milo Yiannopoulos" a few years ago.

Different racist cultures develop different ideas on what makes someone white. "Yiannopoulos" might be called a 'wog':

  The slur became widely diffused in Australia with an increase in immigration from Southern Europe and the Levant after the Second World War, and the term expanded to include all immigrants from the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. These new arrivals were perceived by the majority population as contrasting with the larger predominant Anglo-Celtic Australian people. [1]
I couldn't remember his name in order to write this up, so I went googling and stumbled across Afro-Cuban Proud Boys leader "Enrique Tarrio".

All boats rise with the tide I guess.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#417

Post by whatwhaaaaat »

soheil wrote: post #371

Unbelievable 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.

It’s just the people online posting non-stop. The rest of us, checking in only when time allows, are not commenting 30 times in a single thread. (Check some of the posters here)

Same thing happened with the rest of the nonsense over the last 5 years. From social media you would think everyone took the clot shot. 1/3 didn’t but you’d never have known that from HN or other social media.

There is a small but loud contingent who wants to dictate our language, how we teach our children, and what we put in to our bodies. The good news is most people are not stupid and are completely rejecting it - in real life.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#419

Post by cvwright »

forgotacc240419 wrote: post #171
s1artibartfast wrote: post #50

I thought this was an interesting read. For me, it sparked the insight that wokeness parallels the rise and fall of the attention economics, with the premise that attention is the real bottleneck in social justice. It places an emphasis on awareness, and the solution is often left as an exercise to the observer. Political correctness and language codes are not new. I think what was new is the idea that people could r…

There was a variety of causes that gained prominence ~2015 when Bernie Sanders came much closer to challenging Hillary Clinton than anyone expected. The Democrat party establishment picked the wishy washy meaningless bits out and focused on them while keeping away from the more challenging economic issues that would actually require their ideologies to adapt I think what most people call "woke" is probably just a rea…

It goes back even further than that.

There seemed to be a surge in 2011 too, when it became apparent that the Obama administration was going to let the big banks off the hook for the financial crisis.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#420

Post by Clubber »

jdonaldson wrote: post #281

I would have to refute the notion that wokeness is a mind virus. "Stay Woke" has a much deeper origin in African American culture, and it refers to the fact that one needs to stay vigilant about another's intentions. The implicit message is that the "us" cannot trust the "they", and writers like Paul Graham show the reason why: Any attempt at social change can easily be labeled a virus by capitalists if it does not p…

>"Stay Woke" has a much deeper origin in African American culture, and it refers to the fact that one needs to stay vigilant about another's intentions.

Yes, this origin is correct as I remember it. I first heard the term publicly from Larry on his show a decade or so ago, mainly referring to police interactions. He presented it well using comedy, unlike the rabid versions of today. He presented it too well as today, it seems this movement has since taken over by (mostly) white college people to service their own selfish ends; that's the mind virus part.

This clip pretty much encapsulates this idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAbTOcVJgM8

Post reply on HN