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The Origins of Wokeness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#651

Post by hhh1111 »

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…

The behaviors labeled as wokeness have been essentially dominant on the left for a long time though. “End whiteness” is a good example of woke rhetoric and that term was shouted for years

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#652

Post by ddoolin »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #619

You all understand that this is to appease MAGA/trump right? So what? well, are you not terrified? if they preemptively are going to such lengths to appease the racist MAGA crowd, are you not afraid of what they will do with all the data they collect and with the amount of dependency we have on tech? Please be afraid. IDK, maybe watch star wars or something, the piece about how fear leads to anger, then hatred then v…

I don't find that to be true and I find your own rationale to be its own sort of performative moralism. Many normal people feel this way and it isn't to appease MAGA or Trump or whatever, including myself and many people I know who have been and/or are lifelong leftists. It is not impossible or even unlikely that people in higher positions developed these feelings on their own accord. I'm not saying your statement is always untrue, but it denies the people you're writing about much agency.

I think that what's happening is that people on all levels are now more comfortable in saying what they actually think or believe rather than saying things to avoid busting arbitrary social rules.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#653

Post by Animats »

In the US, both the Left and the Right have been taken over by their more fringe elements. For now, the Right has won.

Left strategy has been terrible for years. That's one of the consequences of the Woke movement. Far too much political capital was expended on niche issues. Gays are 3% of the US population. Trans are 0.3% of the US population. Can't win an election catering to those groups. Too few votes. (See Sex in America, the Definitive Study,[1] which selected their survey group randomly across the whole US and followed up with mailed, in person, and paid interviews, until they got >90% participation. Most other surveys have some degree of self-selection of the participants.)

Occupy Wall Street never came up with a political agenda. Black Lives Matter had a huge agenda, and one of the groups claiming to be in charge had a document over a hundred pages full of demands. Nobody was pushing hard on worker protections or labor law enforcement - not cool enough, but affects a big fraction of the population. Nobody was pushing to break up monopolies that raised prices, even in apartment rentals and health care where collusion has been proven.

This lack of focus lost elections.

The Right agenda is basically tax cuts for the rich, plus God, Family, and Guns. That's enough to form a majority.

So here we are.

[1] https://archive.org/details/sexinamericadefi00mich/mode/2up

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#654

Post by dearing »

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…

> 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.

This was mostly my reading too. Maybe more cynical, but I walked away thinking that wokeness itself isn't good for business unless you are in the business of selling rides.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#655

Post by joefkelley »

throwaway_2494 wrote: post #600

Summary: Rich white guy complains that it's too much effort to figure out what we're supposed to call 'coloured people' these days. It reads like the lament of a sore winner who has been forced to think of other's feelings against his will. And all of this is couched in a pseudo-histororical style that perhaps the author hopes will shield it from being read as an 'emotional' argument. And you know what's the worst th…

Yeah I guess wokeness and cancel culture are what you complain about now when your life is so free from challenges that you have nothing else to complain about.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#656

Post by tensor »

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…

I think the more glaring thing is that Musk has indeed directly censored twitter. Saying cis results in an auto-ban for example. But he's also just blatantly censored people for disagreeing with him.

Also, in a time when the next president of the united states is quoting hitler and also saying that Hitler "had a lot of good ideas" I hardly think a very poor multi-page screed on the word woke is the best use of time and thought.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#658

Post by ddoolin »

elsonrodriguez wrote: post #220

>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically co…

I don't follow that logic and that is the kind of absolutism many of us disagree with. It seems like an appeal to emotion to me. I'm not sure you can characterize the EP as shallow; aggressive yes, if one considers bold to be synonymous with aggressive in this context.

I don't find any issue with people making statements like that. I also don't need to agree with it to think that you should be allowed to say it. Do you find that to be problematic?

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#659

Post by tensor »

throwaway63467 wrote: post #256
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…

They simply realized reach is what you need to control, it doesn’t matter if you can write the most brilliant political content if no one will see it due to the distribution algorithm penalizing it while each single one of Musks mostly idiotic tweets reaches hundreds of millions of users. Free speech is meaningless if it can’t be heard by anyone.

Yes! I like to use the term "fair speech" for this concept. Free speech is that you are free from government retribution. But fair speech means that you also have equal opportunity to speak as others. As you said, if person A can say one million things while you are only able to say one thing, you are effectively denied speech.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#660

Post by tensor »

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 hard to take him seriously when he claims X doesn't censor, despite their very blatant and open censorship. Hacker news has not gotten anti-pg, it's more that pg has become more vocally political and is now facing the consequences of that.

Case in point, anyone else posting a screed like this would instantly be flagged and removed.

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