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I am a longtime lurker on the site and wanted to pose a question to those that commonly post on the evils of wokeism. I have noticed that many posts seem to point to an increasingly nebulous boogeyman--one that could really use to be defined.
What is woke? What do you define as woke? Is there a difference between one that is socially conscious and someone who is woke?
For our benefit, please provide an example of where you think the word "woke" was used as a "nebulous boogeyman" and explain how you think that nebulousness reflected an "increase" from previous use cases.
Because it seems to me that "define woke" is a question posed (mostly by trolls) all the time around here. I've never actually seen this community struggle, even a tiny bit, with what is or is not "woke."
"Woke" is a convenient handle for left wing identitarianism, broadly construed. It is often in tension with left wing materialism, so e.g. Marxists are often anti-woke leftists.
This can be confusing because "woke" is predominantly what was once called "cultural Marxism" (e.g.)--before that phrase got memory-holed into an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory." Cultural Marxism, in turn, is the application of "critical theory" and redistributionist tendencies to "social capital" instead of monetary capital. This is one reason Marxists are often at odds with wokists; Marxism is a modernist and materialist philosophy, while wokism is postmodern and sociological. Classical Marxists will tell you that cultural Marxism is not even Marxism at all... but they still typically vote for the same people and policies.
One way in which "woke" may be somewhat evolved beyond cultural Marxism is that it seems to have incorporated a decentralized ethos impossible prior to the advent of social media; what counts as "woke" today can change rapidly depending on what is trending and who is getting cancelled. While "purity spirals" are evidenced in e.g. classical Marxist circles, "woke" (plus tech) seems to take this to unprecedented levels.
How would you define "socially conscious?" I am definitely conscious of the social issues that consume wokist thought, and yet it would clearly be a mistake to identify me as "woke," because I am not a left wing identitarian. Most people who are obsessed with issues of race or gender, and who regard those differences as central to all political questions, are left wing identitarians, but some are right wing identitarians, and those are not "woke" either--that's the "alt right"--or, better, the "identitarian right."
I wouldn't mind too terribly if the word "woke" went away, but in my experience the only people who would benefit from having it go away, and who really want it to go away, are left wing identitarians, and "left wing identitarian" is admittedly something of a mouthful.
We’ve had several posters trying to get people to define woke in the past couple weeks — is this just the current meme again? It seems like there’s been a large increase in trolls and insincere posters as well.
Paul Graham released an essay "The Origins of Wokeness" a few weeks ago. If you're not familiar, he's one of the co-founders of Y-Combinator and a key person in kicking off the post 2005 tech startup scene. His early 2000s essays were sort of proto-rationalist.
https://www.paulgraham.com/woke.html
He's strongly anti Trump and a prominent figure in the tech scene. I'd guess that essay got enough exposure in the leftwing tech scene that people who were used to saying "woke is just being a good person" suddenly found that they needed better arguments.
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