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The Origins of Wokeness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#501

Post by runlevel1 »

> The danger of these rules was not just that they created land mines for the unwary

In real life, these "land mines" don't usually explode unless people think you're stepping on it intentionally.

For instance, every time I've accidentally used the wrong pronoun for someone, I've gotten a polite correction, I make a mental note, and everyone moves on. It's just not a big deal.

With a large enough audience, there will always be someone who assumes you've acted with ill intent. But if you know you've done it innocently, then you can just ignore them and move on.

Intent matters. Those performative things communicate your intent to make others feel welcome and included. So if you fly off the handle at a reasonable request that would make a group of people feel more included, you've communicated your intent accordingly.

Occasionally, there are some purely performative things that don't actually make anyone feel more included. Personally, I think it's reasonable to ask that question if you're genuinely interested in finding the answer. However, purely performative things tend to disappear in time; so sometimes the most pragmatic response is to just go with the flow and see where things land.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#502

Post by thruway516 »

LeroyRaz wrote: post #450
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…

Why and how is labelling unlikable behaviour as woke bad faith. As I understand the right using the term, they use it consistently to refer to a very specific type of behaviour they see as bad (one core aspect is prioritising signalling being virtuous over actually improving the world). Is your complaint that this usage unfairly co-opts the original left usage of the word?

Imagine I wrote an essay on Christianity and based it entirely on the behavior of evangelicals in the South who attend megachurchies (a very vocal minority). Surely you'd expect other Christians (all around the world) who equally claim true usage to object.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#503

Post by gspencley »

cmdli wrote: post #210
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…

“Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017. Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints…

Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend.

"Troll" is another one. It used to mean a person who posted a contentious comment that they knew would invoke a flame war so that they could sit back and wait to see who "bit." It came from fishing. These days it can just mean someone who is rude on the Internet.

You're not wrong, the "opposition" did take the word and run with it for their own use. No dispute there.

But let's not pretend that this is a conservative vs progressive thing. On the partisan isle I'm "neither." But when someone uses the word "woke", in conversation, I usually know exactly what they're getting at. And I hear it from left-leaning friends and right-leaning alike.

It's a short-cut umbrella term to mean an amalgamation of a) moral busybodies b) purity spirals c) cancel culture d) some bizarre racist philosophy that markets itself as anti-racist (critical race theory) and e) an extreme version of political correctness.

I'm not arguing whether or not left-wingers are (or aren't) using it themselves in serious conversation. Only that, colloquially, I've only encountered confusion about what it means in Internet forum discussions with like-minded nerds, such as this one. The average person I talk to has little difficulty.

And maybe that definition was shaped, wholly or in part, by the conservatives making it out to be a boogeyman. Even if so, and even if it was an unfair hijack and it's appropriate to hate on them for doing so, it doesn't change how people interpret the word in casual conversation today.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#505

Post by xdennis »

coliveira wrote: post #271
Ukv wrote: post #38

> 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…

Owners of social networks are terrified that they're accountable to society in any way. That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades. Basically they've taken over and are making all the rules.

What is accountability? A platform picking what the truth is?

Presumably you liked the fact checkers before because they were of the same political persuasion as you. Now that Trump is in power would you prefer if Musk/Zuckerberg placed right wing fact checkers in place and punished any opinion which is outside of the platform's Overton window?

Musk removed picking fact checkers and replaced them with community notes. Zuckerberg says he'll do the same. Isn't that the societal accountability that you want?

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#506

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

causal wrote: post #348
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…

He's presenting his own musings as some kind of historical record. Utterly unburdened by the need for data to back up his narrative.

The Internet has finally allowed the wealthy and powerful to converse at the same level and in the same space as your big brother's friend who smokes a lot of weed and knows that the government is suppressing a car that runs on water

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#507

Post by Arainach »

BurningFrog wrote: post #97
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…

[flagged]

Society, in its grand equality, gives rich and poor alike the ability to spend their money on billboards and full page ads.

This is ignoring all of the actual algorithm changes and Elon-induced censorship of specific topics on Twitter that make Paul's point just flat-out wrong, of course.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#509

Post by dmarcos »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #470
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…

One thing I wanted to point out: I’ve seen a lot of people on HN and elsewhere allege that moderates or the “right” (in quotes because it is overused as a pejorative label) cannot define what “woke” is. But I disagree, and think most people who complain against this term can easily point to what ideas it represents, and what it means to them. Even if that is not very precise, it is real and meaningful. Enough so that…

I agree. Wokeness has a very precise meaning: World is divided between oppressors and oppressed. Oppressors are white heterosexual men (white supremacy / heteropatriarchy) everyone else subjugated to them. Institutions, laws are created to perpetuate that power and must be dismantled / subverted via revolution.

Most understand it even if they can’t articulate a definition. Easy to point out when a movie or corporate initiative, behavior is woke.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#510

Post by shitter »

As a minority in the US, I experienced little to no overt racism from 2014 to the present, following years of derogatory comments and unsolicited "jokes" about my ethnicity from people who weren't fundamentally racist but still thought it was OK to say those things. I attribute this change directly to the rise of wokeness (read: awareness) around 2015 and thus have a soft spot in my heart for it, even if some of its excesses over the years have made me roll my eyes.
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