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It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology. I’ve been feeling the same way but didn’t and still don’t necessarily have enough evidence to really prove the claim. There are small bits here and there, like Shane Gillis hosting SNL again, camera men once again zooming in on attractive women in the crowd during the Euro 2024 matches, people being less afraid to say “retarded” which was approaching “faggot” levels of taboo, BLM withering into almost nothingness, Supreme Court affirmative action decision, etc.
Firstly, do you agree with the claim?
And more importantly, how much of this is driven by Elon’s takeover of twitter? Twitter in retrospect was clearly the cancellation platform par excellence, it doesn’t seem like TikTok or Instagram hold the same “weight” as image and video platforms. There was something about Twitter which had both a radical cancellation faction but still retained gravitas as a place for news and other serious topics to be discussed or announced. This meant that both boomer PMC types and terminally online radicals could congregate and the latter could influence the former. And by virtue of the fact that it was on twitter, it was more “believable” an had more gravitas. And maybe even the text-based nature of the platform prevented us from assessing the accuser in the physical realm. TikTok and IG still have commissars ready to cancel, but no gravitas and you can see who is attempting to be the canceller, they will often look crazy and we can sense their mental illness through their appearance (people like to say women have “crazy” eyes, I think this is probably a reasonable evolutionary heuristic) or how they are talking, gesturing, etc.
Was this the most well-placed takedown in history? Elon clearly did this as a way to knock woke ideology down a peg, even if it wasn’t his primary aim it sure looks to be the most successful aspect of that acquisition.
My lived experience is also that there is more pushback against woken insanity than there used to be (say, one or two years ago), and people are less afraid of being cancelled. I don't have a strong theory of why it is happening -- but if you are taking a poll, my vote is that it is happening.
In the Milgram experiment, one of the variants Milgram ran was to let the subject see two other people say 'no' before he began his own session. If that is done, Milgram observed that the percentage of people who administer all shocks drops from 65% to 10% (see the discussion of Experiment 17 here). If I had to guess the cause of the pushback, I would guess that a few visible people who are not professional talking heads standing up -- like Riley Gaines and Elon Musk, and Donald Trump for that matter -- have played the role of the "first person to say no", who gives other people the courage to also stand up and say 'no'.
On the whole, though, I am not optimistic about this being the beginning of a return to sanity. It could be more of a dead cat bounce. We are well down the road that C.S. Lewis called the "Abolition of Man"". Incidentally, I believe that Enlightenment epistemology -- which is the aspirational epistemology of The Motte -- is the root of the problem.
You ask me, the more relevant psych study is the Asch Conformity Experiments.
Those have also held up better to replication.
Check out how the results change when you add in a fellow dissenter.
Hence, Elon being a very visible source of open dissent could trigger a lot of others to cease conforming.
More visible than the fricking President of the United States? Not only did Trump have a bigger bully pulpit than Musk, his being elected was a very public single that tens of millions of normies liked what he was saying. DorseyTwitter didn't ban Trump until after Jan 6th.
Even if you ignore Trump, right-wing views that the NYT considered cancellable (e.g. "Blacks do most of the crime", "Transwomen are men" or "Hunter Biden is selling out America") were mainstream on Fox, in the WSJ and NY Post, on talk radio and on Boomer Facebook. The idea that the right was operating by samizdat until Elon bought Twitter is silly. (HBD was beyond the pale in those right-wing venues, but unobfuscated HBD still doesn't fly on ElonTwitter).
Twitter wasn't important because the masses were on Twitter. Twitter was important because aspirant elites who needed to publicly push the party line used Twitter to work out what the party line was in real time. These people . That the sort of person who had a bluecheck on DorseyTwitter hasn't changed their political views is convincing evidence that Elon buying Twitter isn't what is changing the discourse.
The simplest explanation (not necessarily the most correct one) for woke losing ground is that the elites are much more equivocal in supporting it after 10/7 when it became clear that wokestupid can turn anti-Semitic at the drop of a paraglider.
Trump has been a double-edged sword in terms of being a symbol of resistance to the blue tribe's dominance.
I guess if you want to break it down some, Trump is the totem around which Red tribe can coordinate, Musk is a similar totem for the Grey tribe that lean red or are just anti-blue.
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