The Origins of Wokeness

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Paul Graham is a billionaire frantically trying to fingerpoint and blame other people when his ilk have had an outsized influence on politics and business for years and we're no better off.

I read a tweet around 2014 that was very short and simple and stayed with me for a while and now seems prescient. It was something like "man, anti-SJW is getting worse than SJW" (using sjw as the precursor for woke). Makes me think that reactions are sometimes stronger than the actions they go against and can often be swinging too far the other way.

I think this is a fair assumption to make if you haven't been in some of the places where this has been most contentious -- in particular, I think left-wing activist circles, or segments of industry where the workplace has switched from being "apolitical" -- I know that term is contested, but I don't have a better one to use -- to shifting to an overtly social-justice-oriented space.

I've spent the last decade in these environments. My own upbringing and general disposition is left-wing, but the last few years have been stressful and much less productive.

Somebody downthread mentioned how "latinx" was just a small minority of advocates, but we had painful discussions about it, including objections from latino staff, and ended up using it.

Our (obligatory) sexual harassment training switched from a standard legal footing to one that was preceded by a long explanation of the oppressive nature of Europeans.

Group chats moved towards political conversations, and even minor questioning of the (quite sudden) norm shift led to ostracization, with two people, not including me, ultimately leaving the company because they felt uncomfortable with the social pressure.

One senior executive was pushed out because they made a joke about having pronouns in video profiles. We pursued a diverse hiring policy that ended up with patently unsuitable, but diverse, employees including an alcoholic, and someone who had a mental health breakdown in a meeting. Staff would increasingly reach for untouchably political accusations when maneuvering against other individuals at the workplace, accusing them of racism, intolerance, and harassment when there was little evidence that this was going on (none of this was from white males, but between other less privileged groups).

I move in other circles too, academic and professional, and there have been similar dynamics. Not only do I know people who have been "cancelled" (ie lost jobs or opportunities because of public statements that, while politically mainstream, went against local norms), but I also know people who did the cancelling, get cancelled in turn. None of this was about anything demonstrably and objectively offensive; sometimes it was about defending arguably offensive behaviour; sometimes it was just an uncharitable reading of an innocuous comment, taken out of context.

What I would say is that there has been a shifting and narrowing of politically acceptable statements, and a pressure to conform with the consensus in certain kinds of tech work and other high-status societal environments, which I think would make people of Paul Graham's age uncomfortable; he would definitely have seen the "worst" of it. I think part of its spread has been due to it looking, without closer examination, like what you have described. But as someone who was raised by socialists who got there largely by their empathy for others, the degree of cruelty and arbitrary punishment through social sanction has been unusually vicious and hard to bear.

I still feel I can't talk about this except with a few very close friends. This is a throwaway account.

Thank you for saying this.