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Notes -
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:
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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