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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26052 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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The Coordinating Mechanism for Woke

From the early 2010s until roughly 2023, the prevalence of woke coded speech on the internet was constantly on the rise. There has been endless debate over the origins of it, but everyone here is likely familiar with the terms, tone, and intent of such speech. And then, suddenly, in the last 2 years, it basically vanished. Sure there are small, insular corners of the media landscape that still openly discuss such ideas. But on almost all mainstream sites, media outlets, shows, newsletters, etc, the prevalence of woke coded language has decreased by an order of magnitude.

The political reasons for this should be obvious at this point, but what I find puzzling is the speed at which this marked drop was coordinated across all types of media. I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe there is any shadowy cabal actually orchestrating this. But in the absence of any other coordination mechanism, I have a hard time understanding what has caused this. You would expect a movement that built momentum and followers steadily over a number of years to take an equal amount of time to slow down. Indeed, most other social trends follow that pattern. But in this case, the halt was sudden and ubiquitous. So, as the title implies, my question is really about how this has happened.

If I were to speculate, I'd say that any mass coordination across disparate elements of society, without any authority dictating it, has all the hallmarks of the invisible hand. And if it were only news institutions and media outlets I would give more credence to this theory. But just looking at social media postings, there has been a huge drop in people using this type of language. Attending free activities and events, this rhetoric is less prevalent. And since I have a very hard time accepting that the beliefs themselves are gone, I can't come up with a convincing explanation.

I stick with my previous hypothesis that the woke movement its own period of dealing with failed prophecies and that's why it's currently declining. The impulse behind woke was that everyone wanted it except for a few backward people on the internet. But look at what happened in 2022 ~ 2023:

  • March 2022: The interim report of the Cass Review is published lending scientific credibility to argument against "trans kids"
  • August 2022: the woke Saints Row reboot bombs
  • 2022 in general: a lot of democratic cities have to quietly walk back the "defund the police" messaging they had pushed
  • November 2022: Twitter is sold to Musk, an outcome the wokes had cheered on for months, they suddenly realize it is actually a bad outcome for them and immeditely predict Twitter will collapse within weeks, which didn't happen
  • February 2023: Forspoken is realesed and bombs, nobody defends it, Antman and the Wasp bombs, the "pandemic" cope can not be used
  • April 2023: Bud Light makes a co-promotional campaign with Dylan Mulvaney which kickstarts a boycott which depresses its stock price for months
  • November 2023: The Marvels bombs, nobody defends it.
  • November 2023: SF cleans up the streets for Xi Jin Ping simultaneously showing both how poorly the city had been kept and how easily this could be reversed

Never saw “Antman and the Wasp”. Is it a woke movie?

Not really.

Antman wasn't a particularly woke movie per see, but it was a more comedy-action movie that aligned with woke tropes for its own reasons.

Antman is first and foremost a comedy-action series in the broader MCU. This is/ was suitable / appropriate in part because the character's power set allows for distinct / unique setups, like this memorable high-stakes fight on a train(set). The core power set of size changing but keeping the pre-size 'strength' means that the choreography involves a lot of exagerated scale differences and motions, which makes better for comedy than goofy action.

The thing is, because Antman (Scott Lang) is a comedic movie protagonist, he's, well, a comedic male lead. Which, yes, is a bit awkward, goofy, makes mistakes, and so on. And this does pattern-match with the woke-tropes of belittling the male leads. Scott is often the butt of the joke, in a series where most of the cast is the butt of various jokes even in serious contexts.

For example- the opening context of the origin movie is Scott Lang, is getting out of jail as a convicted criminal. Part of his call to adventure / instigating context is that he needs money to pay child support to his beloved daughter, who lives with his divorced wife and her new husband (who happens to be a cop). Scott wants to be on the straight and narrow, but his criminal past makes that hard. So one of the early gags is him- a highly qualified engineer- failing to be able to keep an icecream job. This is tragic, but is played for laughs, even as it sets him up for the dabbling into a functional heist plot. The plot of the movie is functionally that Scott is hired by the inventor of the shrink tech precisely because he is an ex-con in order to do one more crime, which is to steal shrink tech from a dangerous corporate former partner of the inventor.

The main counterpart to Scott on the protagonist cast is the Pym family, a duo. There is Professor Hank Pym, who invented the shrink tech and has hired Scott to keep it from being used by the evil mastermind, who was his former protege. Then there is Hope Pym, Hank's daughter who is estranged with her father but reluctantly working with him because she discovered the evil villain's evil plan after she helped the evil mastermind oust Hank from his own company..

Hope can / does pattern match to the woke female protagonist tropes. She is an exceptionally competent woman, both in terms of positional authority- she outmaneuvered her own father and is doing so against the villain- and in technology- she knows her father's tech and can use elements of it far better than Scott at first- and even in martial arts- where she's the more skilled, especially for the tech.

Hope is set up as the clear 'natural' user of the tech, but this is a Antman movie titled Antman, and so comedic lead clutz is the one who has to be trained to be a hero by the reluctant, more capable woman.

But while Hope Pym does have a bit of the 'women aren't allowed to be weak' woke-ishness, and a resting bitch face, and seems to hate men, there's actually more to it on a character level. Rather, Hope's could-be-mistaken-for-woke relationship issues with men come down to the fact that she has a justified grievance / issue with the three main men of the plot for valid character reasons. The evil man is evil. Her relationship with her father is estranged because her father had a critical role in getting her mother killed, which changed their relationship, and now her father is bypassing her for the key role in the heist by trusting Scott with the suit-tech that her father's whole character is about not trusting others with. And finally, the relationship with Scott is because he's a thief (who's first encounter is stealing the shrink tech suit from their family), who is less comptent than her (not having her familiarity with the tech), who her father seems to trust more than her.

Moreover, as Hope learns new things, her relationships with the men in her life changes, or is subject to change, with her being the one to learn and change more than then. Hope shows an emotional response and sympathy when she realizes that the evil vaillain's evilness may in part be a side effect of her father's shrink tech particle, making him a victim of her family. Her relationship with her father begins to heal when her father finally shares the context of her mother's death, which is that the shrink tech failed and made her lost forever. And her relationship with Scott starts to change not only when she realizes Scott's motive of doing this for his daughter, but when Scott is the one to point out that the reason Scott is being trusted with the suit is that Scott is the expendible one if there's another incident like with her mother.

Hope, in other words, has a bit of character development when she learns new things, rather than being the one to change others by informing them.

But also- and more importantly back at the meta-structural level- Hope is the straight woman of the comedy cast. She and her father both, mostly, but Hank Pym is more dry/acerbic humor in his own right, and the rest of the cast feeds into the over-the-top comedic archetypes. So while Hope is a feminist-worthy hyper-competent character frustrated with the nonsense around her, that is not least because she is the foil for the comedic nonsense going around her in the plot.

So, even if it's woke-compatible, it works on its own merits. Still cheesy / Marvel quippy / not everyone's jam, but not forced solely for the sake of itself either.

If anything- and this is only a post if someone actually wants fanfic-worthy idea crafting- I maintain the Antman series of movies could have been improved if it leaned into LGBT themes more, and had Antman- Scott Lang- be a gay man.

I actually meant "Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania" (Antman and the Wasp would be the second of the trilogy and came out in 2018). It's one of those movies where the putative male lead in an action movie is in actuality sidelined by the strong female costar, think Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (which also came out in 2023 and also flopped and it's probably a better entry from this list than Antman).

More than just failed prophecies- the emperor had no clothes, period. When it became clear that everyone, not just rednecks, could see it- well it doesn’t take a coordination mechanism.

its own period of dealing with failed prophecies

I have seen a common thread on this: there are a few topics where what I consider to be "woke" types express epistemic certainty based on a tiny number of very small studies with results that sound really nice and politically convenient for partisans explaining the world, and occasional shouting down of alternate takes. For lots of these we've collectively thrown lots of effort and money at applying more broadly, but strangely have never gotten a good larger scale followup on those implementations. I personally have found it frustrating how slow we are to walk back claims that I suspect a good chunk of conservative-leaning people [1] thought were "too good to be true" all along.

Other examples [2] that come to mind (hopefully not too uncharitably phrased):

  • Housing-first approaches to homelessness
  • "Harm reduction" against drug addiction
  • Failing inner-city schools are that way exclusively because they are under-funded
  • "Poverty causes crime, and crime doesn't cause poverty"
  • Fat-acceptance and body positivity
  • Gender medicine, especially in children: taxpayers funded a study on the efficacy of puberty blockers that strangely hasn't been published, presumably because its conclusions aren't positive. "Trust the science", though.
  • The lab leak hypothesis for COVID
  • Almost all conflict globally can be mostly blamed on colonialism
  1. It feels to me like there is an element of ivory-tower elitism in many of these conclusions in that they feel very out-of-touch with people who have to go outside and interact with the public on a regular basis. I think this is at least an element in the ongoing political realignment.
  2. Just because these claims likely seem overplayed doesn't mean that the inverse claims are completely right. I think there is a bit of a short-term alliance between reactionaries that'd claim the inverse and nuance-enjoyers that I think will gradually fall apart while they're trying to govern as a coalition.

See here:

First, the argument from exhaustion: because we've been trying to fix these problems for the better part of a century. Many hundreds of thousands of smart, capable, hardworking people have dedicated their entire lives to solving these problems for multiple generations, across fifty different states, and have uniformly failed every single time, on every single approach to every single issue...

Second, the argument from blindness: we have no way of effectively measuring the problem we're trying to fix, other than by raw outcomes. The dominant narrative holds that bad outcomes are caused by racism, but there is no detectable racism gradient. That is, there do not appear to be places in America that are noticeably more or less racist in any coherent or useful sense, as measured by outcomes, despite a wide range of policies, populations, and cultural norms...

Third, the argument from dementia: we don't approach the problem in a systematic way, we don't learn from our failures, and we don't even keep track of what's been tried or what the outcomes were. The realities of politics, policy, media narratives and public attention span and engagement mean that there is no consistent train of thought, no effective accumulation of experience. People can and do spend their whole lives pushing solutions that were proved to be a dead-end a generation ago. For obvious reasons, this makes the previous problems much worse. It's not just that we're stuck in a maze, and it's not just that the maze is extremely vast, it's that we aren't capable of remembering what turns we took. For an example, look at the ubiquitous claims that bad educational outcomes are caused by differences in school funding between majority-white and majority-black schools. Note, halfway down that article, the following sentence:

The analysis does not include federal dollars, much of which is targeted to the poorest communities.

You will find a similar sentence in most articles on this subject, because those federal dollars completely close the gap. Less educational funding for black students looked like an obvious example of low-hanging fruit, so we fixed it by using federal money to compensate for differences in local funding from disparate tax bases. Only, the disparate outcomes didn't go away, and so people willfully ignore that the solution they're advocating has already failed...

Fourth, the argument from sociopathy: powerful institutions are incentivized to aggravate all of the above problems, because doing so provides significant short-term benefits at no appreciable short-term cost. Blacks get the soothing reassurance that all their problems are the fault of the out-group, not the inevitable result of their own bad individual choices. Progressives get a profoundly loyal block of supporters, and a massive rhetorical cudgel to beat the out-group with. And of course, the alternative is admitting "things suck, and we have no idea how to fix them", which is never going to be a winning answer, despite it being the truth. At this point, any solution is pretty clearly going to require a minimum of decades of constant effort, and the reality is that on the timescale of our existing political system, decades-long solutions are effectively impossible. Lying provides immediate and significant benefit at no cost, and not lying imposes significant costs with no compensating benefits. The result is that lying is adaptive, so our political and knowledge-production systems are absolutely overrun with liars...

Fifth, the argument from senescence: we do not get unlimited attempts at a solution to the racial justice problem. Attempted solutions burn social cohesion, and we are running out of social cohesion. Despite popular narratives, this is not primarily a problem between Conservatives and Blacks; Conservatives and Blacks mostly don't live near or exercise power over each other, so there's not all that much cause for direct, serious object-level conflict. No, the problem is between conservatives and Progressives, who are locked in a direct and extremely damaging culture war due to incompatible values...

The impulse behind woke was that everyone wanted it except for a few backward people on the internet.

Uh, no... The correct way to phrase it is that everyone in power wanted it, but wokeness was never popular among the wider population. This was confirmed in the early days by the woke themselves, endlessly whining about being spammed with criticism, or having their audience being flooded with critical videos in recommendations, every time they upload something. I think surveys that actually asked about specific ideas showed that woke beliefs are supported by something like ~10% of the population (I wish I had links, but this is something that came up in the subreddit ages ago).

You're misinterpreting him. @aaa was saying that "everyone wants it except a few backward people on the Internet" was a load-bearing untruth that was used to justify SJ's various actions.

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