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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.
In my view is that coordinating effect of Twitter trends can't be underestimated in my view. The activists lost the thumb on the algorithmic scale when Elon kicked out the activists. And the ensuing exodus of the most extreme voices the decline was cemented. They are trying to recreate the feel with bluesky and mastodon, but they can't artificially create culture war with trends with the same way anymore.
But there is another aspect to it. So if we go back to the credit crunch of 2008 and after a couple of years(2011) after was the Occupy Wall Street movement. Now not many people remember or care to know that mainstream media was making fun of the woke groups that was part of the protests. Clips are near impossible to find with google(or maybe I suck at googling). Those segments that I saw on Comedy Central was the first contact I got with woke terms. I've gotten the distinct impression that the most extreme activists derailed the whole occupy movement. And for some reason Blackrock and Vanguard started pushing ESG and most of the talking points that where made fun of became holy for the mainstream media. Strange that.
The last thing that I also think is contributing to the decline: Rob Henderson's Luxury Beliefs is really well named and that a bunch of people can't afford to hold luxury because they simply can't afford it anymore, since people can't be bullied anymore because of lack of coordination and less usage of ESG scores. Regular people speak up with less fear because of the political climate and layoffs that affect non-producing departments like HR and DEI initiatives.
Broken forbes link.
Who thought Twitter was this influential? I still kind of don't believe it. But I'm open to believing it. It still seems kind of crazy for Elon to have bought it.
Ok, I'll post an archive link and edit my post to point to it. https://archive.ph/CXqXE thank you!
You don't have to believe it, you can try to search for proof to the contrary or you can try to find other aspects that might prove my claim. Absence of other things that might disprove the thesis that the coordination happened on Twitter.
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You don't remember the Blue Check stuff? How after Musk bought Twitter, all the scrambling was to deny it ever happened, no, having a blue check just mean you were a verified account, nobody thought it was a big deal.
Conveniently forgetting, or desperately whitewashing, that Blue Checks were treated as the last word in authoritative sources, regularly cited in arguments, and used as "shut up" debate stoppers when A quoted "well Blue Check Z said..." and that was it. A bit like Wikipedia with what it treats as reliable sources, which can then be weaponised by the interested so that statement X is a reliable source but statement Y is not.
I honestly was not in any communities where a blue check was considered anything other than an indicator of Twitter prestige. I truly can't remember people citing Blue Check said so-and-so with the same authority as a Wikipedia article on the topic.
To me blue checks had the same valence as CNN covering a bridge collapse and cutting away to, say, a gangster rapper and asking him to react. Entertaining but also worthless. But maybe I wasn't paying enough attention.
Tell me more!
I wasn't on Twitter at the time, but a lot of people on social media where I was involved did have a habit of going "Well so-and-so said this/contradicted what you are saying, and they're Blue Check, so they must be right and you must be wrong". The idea, so far as I could see, was not so much "this is a factual authority" as "this person has a badge of right thinking and being on the right side of history".
I see. If this was particularly common the project for regime change at Twitter makes a lot more sense.
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I recall that the Blue Check system was utterly corrupt. Money exchanged hands for that little icon. It was status that needed to be guarded if you wanted to keep it. Making it a virtual panopticon where anyone not demonstration the right opinion they where severely punished with a loss of status and possibly economically at the workplace by informal ESG-auditors.
A friend of mine got a Blue Check just for being cool, AFAICT. He wasn't a celebrity or an authority, just some kind of jetsetter guy who knew everyone.
It was totally arbitrary and there where so called "journalists" that needed it for their "job". Because the blue check came with increased visibility and access to other blue checks. So your jetsetting friend was probably interesting enough to be someone to write a post about or since knowing everyone could be a way to get access to someone. When Elon bought Twitter and started messing with the blue check people like Stephen King started whinging that they lost their two tier Twitter and the plebs was going to show up on their timeline. So much for equity...
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Also conveniently forgetting that people got deverified for badthink. That kind of put the nail in the coffin for the claims of "objective notability" for verified status.
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Zvi Mowshowitz had been spruiking it as a potential EA cause area.
I was rather surprised at the effectiveness, too, though.
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Crazy like a fox. 🦊
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