Summary: Old successful man thinks the social justice movement is unnecessary and stupid. Also, twitter is better since Elon.
The Origins of Wokeness
891–900 of 1001 posts
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#892> I saw political correctness arise. When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it. It was still not a thing when I started grad school in 1986. It was definitely a thing in 1988 though, and by the early 1990s it seemed to pervade campus life.
> What happened? How did protest become punishment? Why were the late 1980s the point at which protests against male chauvinism (as it used to be called) morphed into formal complaints to university authorities about sexism?
Wait, what? I feel like I'm not hearing this right, but this feels a lot like implying "people should be able to complain about things, as long as there's no consequences of those complaints". It goes on with:
> A new set of moral rules to enforce was exciting news to a certain kind of student. What made it particularly exciting was that they were allowed to attack professors.
Really? You think they just like attacking professors, that this is, in and of itself, exciting, rather than... Oh, let's say: Seeing a professor who has been actively misogynist towards you face some consequences for that? They just like to attack, with no cause at all?
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#893I 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…
It can be a boogeyman but it also a generic term for a bunch of different phenomena that are connected through the way they are brought up, which is mostly very paternalistic.
In some cases people tried to change or police language, mostly around the topic of gender, but it isn't restricted to that. In some countries that use "gendered" languages there were aspirations to change language to be more inclusive, with the indirect accusation that common language cannot be so. That reaches from Latinx to trying to remove any form of gendered language, a culmination of sexual and grammatical gender.
Many just saw this as a vanity project, but even language changes in some official capacity persists. Again, these isn't agreed upon language, it was paternalistically described for people to be better, allegedly.
Of course the worst aspects get the spotlight, but that isn't unusual in todays exchanges on social media.
There is also another factor of "woke" and that is where it behaves pretty similar to the "far right". These are both nebulous terms for that matter, but both promote policies that a summarized as "identity politics". Another volatile term, but I believe there is a strong connection here.
Still, just as people point to the woke excesses as being representative, the same is happening with criticism towards some of its goals and tenets.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#894You can tell who a person does and doesn't talk with when reading something like this. To write an essay of this length, on this topic, and not bring up (at a minimum) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority suggests you shouldn't be writing about it. I was a college student in the 1990s. Not only that, I was a member and even leader of evangelical Christian groups in college. Outrage, us versus them, claims of being pe…
I have the impression that Paul Graham does not read. His essays are such a product of echo-chamber diatribes and accolades that I cannot fathom him sitting down and reckoning with public information that contradicts his personal philosophy.
(He very well might reread his own essays and read other people's work at a 1:1 ratio. He might also simply have poor reading comprehension.)
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#895I thought it was going to be like the origins of corn syrup where we actually learn some history but no it's just this guy's ramblings.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#896Fully responding to this takes more space than HN--very reasonably--allows. But here we go anyway.
> [A lot of takes on universities and journalism]
Universities and journalists became left-leaning because conservatives are wrong about almost everything. They were wrong about markets, sex, Iraq, financial regulation, climate change, al-Qaeda, race, China, Russia, health care, immigration, education, COVID, vaccines, masks, NATO, tax policy, tech policy, the Civil War, on and on and on. It's like someone's running an experiment on how many times you can be bafflingly wrong before people notice. Very few people can be both evidence-based--like most people in academia and journalism--and conservative.
> [I dislike cancel culture, it's performative, indicative of left-wind orthodoxy, and masks bad people]
- Almost no people have been canceled (more people have been killed by dogs).
- You are performatively writing a blog post. At least Steve Ballmer made a website. At least Steve Bannon has a podcast (and I guess ran a presidential campaign for at least a little while).
- You can't say your main issue is larping while also detailing how DEI is corrupting corporate and government hiring. Either it's real or it's not.
- The right has its own edge lord orthodoxy--some time in the "manosphere" would convince you if you need convincing. You can buy in by saying the N word publicly, by writing a blog post railing against wokeness, or changing your company's DEI and content moderation policies to favor the right. Well, I guess people saw right through that last one though.
- Being "the worst person in the world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than everyone who isn't" perfectly describes Donald Trump (or Andrew Tate, or David Duke).
But more broadly, we can lump all this (Larry Summers, etc.) under a pattern where a successful person confidently walks on to an issue where they're deeply ignorant, and assumes they can apply tools they're facile with to fix them. For Summers it was economics (in that keynote you referenced he made the bonkers argument that since the market hasn't corrected for discrimination it must not exist); for you and other SV VCs it's tech. Media studies and gender studies are complicated. I assure you smart people are working on them all the time. You need their help, not the other way around.
> The rise of social media and the increasing polarization of journalism reinforced one another. In fact there arose a new variety of journalism involving a loop through social media. Someone would say something controversial on social media. Within hours it would become a news story. Outraged readers would then post links to the story on social media, driving further arguments online. It was the cheapest source of clicks imaginable. You didn't have to maintain overseas news bureaus or pay for month-long investigations. All you had to do was watch Twitter for controversial remarks and repost them on your site, with some additional comments to inflame readers further.
This happened far more on the right than the left. You should visit sites like Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and Fox News.
> By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren't directly in the flow of the organization's work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it. These new administrators could often be recognized by the word "inclusion" in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an "inclusive language guide." [10]
I was pretty sure we'd get to the "communist Russia" part of the argument, but I can't say I'm not disappointed. The EEOC was established in 1965 "to administer and enforce civil rights laws against workplace discrimination." You're naive to this space, so let me tell you that one of the reasons women and members of other marginalized groups leave high-powered positions is discomfort in the workplace: microaggressions, stereotypes, etc. Simple policies like using "inclusive language" can go a long way towards making a workplace more hospitable to people you want to retain.
> [A lot of takes essentially on media studies]
The tension between "orthodoxy" and "free speech" is--I would hope obviously--facile. Let's think about some of the questions someone running a social media platform would ask:
- Can my users opine on the lab-leak hypothesis?
- Can my users opine on the Holocaust maybe not being real?
- Can my users opine on the sexuality of others?
- Can my users opine on my sexuality?
- Can my users opine on Paul Manafort being a Russian agent?
- Can my users post PII of others?
- Can my users talk up the benefits of poison (chemotherapy, nicotine)?
- Can my users brigade other users?
- Can my users track the location of my private jet at all times?
- Can my users opine on Matt Gaetz having had sex with a minor?
- Can my users blast these opinions to millions of people?
- Can my users write programs to blast these opinions to millions of people?
- Can my users hire influencers to blast these opinions to millions of people?
- Can I be lobbied to prioritize some opinions over others (sponsored posts, foreign governments, interest groups, etc.)
- Can I be made personally liable if I don't prioritize specific pieces of information (amber alerts, VAERS stats, violence against LGBTQ people, Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, how to make napalm)
> The number of true things we can't say should not increase. If it does, something is wrong.
Here are some true things:
- White men are responsible for the vast majority of white collar crime
- White men are responsible for the majority of US war crimes
- White men instituted the worst form of slavery the world's ever seen
- Men are responsible for the majority of fraud
- SV VCs are disproportionately responsible for fossil fuel consumption (data center go brrr)
- Men commit the majority of mass shootings in the US
- Europeans have killed far more Africans than Africans have killed Europeans
- Men are responsible for almost all rape
- Men are responsible for nearly all mass shootings
Should we start making policy on these kinds of things? Something like "men can't own firearms" or "white men can't be accountants" or "white men can't run businesses that receive government reimbursement" or "white men can't run US foreign policy" or... I honestly don't know what you'd do about the rape thing. Would we welcome it if some foreign country--say Russia--started paying influencers with huge reach on social media to push these policies? Would we defend these people's right to "free speech" as troll farm after troll farm pushes this agenda, after Bari Weiss and her ilk start pushing it, after SV VCs start advocating for it in their blogs?
"Free speech" sounds like a right, and it is, but it's much, much more of a responsibility. I don't expect your average person to understand "imminent lawless action" vs. "shouting fire in a crowded theater", or content-based vs. content-neutral jurisprudence. I don't expect them to understand the nuances of the Holocaust, gender studies, or epistemology. I do expect the owners of huge platforms to understand these things though. I expect smart, rich, educated people like you to understand them before trying to influence people with your platform. I earnestly implore you to do better.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#897I 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…
As a non-american, reading the definition of woke I dont know what to think If woke means progressive and politically conscious then the opposite is what, uninformed,thoughtless. So people say they rather be ignorant than conscious? Sometimes I think people are not actually fully conscious and tend to behave like primitive animals and they are hating everything because reverting to hate is a primitive animalistic tra…
Originally, people meant that you were inclusive and caring about all people. Except, you know, those hateful people on the right. Because fuck them. (I'm not even kidding. This is how they really felt, somehow.)
But then "the right" got ahold of the term and used it to mean the people above who went above and beyond and were actually being harmful instead of helpful, in the name of "being woke".
Personally, I think the pejorative term is a lot more accurate, especially for most people who consider themselves "woke". They drink their own koolaid and believe what they're doing is helpful, and can't see the divide that they are causing.
Of course, there are a ton of trolls (who are also probably on "the right") that use it to cause the divide as well.
So in the end, it ends up just being a way for jerks on both sides to rile each other up, instead of actually helping anyone.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#898> Fortunately when the aggressively conventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one thing that gives them away: they define new heresies to punish people for If the "conventional-minded" define new heresies, against a new creed, how are they conventional? What gives Paul Graham away is what he doesn't mention and may be what bothers him more: the old heresies that the surprisingly innovative and even rebelli…
Also, when comparing the empty wokeness to the substantive protest movement of the sixties, Graham not only neglects to mention the real achievements of the former (LGBT rights, some MeToo successes) but also the performative aspects of the latter, as if radical chic never happened or a whole fashion and lifestyle (with a name that lasts to this day) -- also co-opted by corporations -- didn't emerge. I think there was even a pretty famous musical about it.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#899Graham's article is persuasive on describing societal shifts around 'wokeness'. However, I'd like to see a bit more introspection on what constitute non-'religious' (to borrow his term), or foundational, principles of Western liberal democracy. There are some grounds to prohibit speech in society and also practice - much of wokeness is about practice as much as speech, which he doesn't really explore. At the edges societal norms inevitably become messy, but he doesn't acknowledge this fact. Nor that the edges move over time and, on balance, this has often been a good thing (think of civil rights for example).
In this way, and similar to a lot of simplistic economic analysis (i.e. the sort that blanketly insists free markets solve everything - ignoring the realities of imperfect information, natural monopolies, externalities, etc., and also ubiquitous government intervention even in the US), the argument lacks depth. If we take his piece as a polemic then perhaps this is intentional and not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm not sure he presents it that way.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#900Where I live, while I was at school, the proper way to say that a person was of colour, was the word "negro" (in Portuguese, and I think also in Spanish).
At the time, using the word that directly translates to "black" in English "preto", was considered extremely offensive and was never to be used applied to a person.
Now, fast-forward a few years and the influence of American woke culture, the word "negro" is now connected with the N-word slur in English and is considered offensive. You now have people of colour demanding to be called "preto".
This is one of the many insanities that the woke movement brought us. I'm glad the world is changing away from it.