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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.
Non-wokes successfully built and/or bought their own websites. Wide-spread censorship thus became impossible because the US still has strong free speech norms, so extremely strong tools like direct government censorship / DOS provider bans / payment processor bans are only used in the most exceptional cases.
Trump won again, which damaged wokes' belief that the masses / the demography are already with them and they're only fighting a war against some retrograde holdouts. Mainstream Democrats began to realize that they simply would not win national elections running on an extremely woke platform. The fallout of how the Democratic Party handled Biden's health issues also showed that the Party has some profound incompetence issues at the very top, which led to calls for changes in strategy.
I think it became obvious to many people who did not realize it before that the more extreme woke law enforcement policies such as "defund the police" led to direct decreases in quality of life for the average person in affected cities. At the same time, the part of the Democratic coalition which likes sending their kids to top schools began to feel threatened by DEI policies in education.
October 7 splintered the woke-friendly coalition. However, I think that wokism was already past its peak of influence at that point.
The constant insertion of woke political messages into popular media wore people out and made wokism seem very stale, corporate, and establishment-y.
And as we're seeing in the latter case with the crackdowns in Steam and itch.io, these tools are available to non-wokes too. Hopefully this is making some people - if not wokes themselves, then relatively-neutral bystanders - realize they can be used against them as well as in support of causes they like (or at least don't mind), and people are waking up, no pun intended, to how dangerous some of the authoritarian precedents that have been set in the last few years actually are.
First they came for Kiwifarms, and I did not speak out, because fuck Kiwifarms...
That seems to have been a response to an open-letter and phone campaign by Australian feminist nonprofit Collective Shout to payment processors a week before it happened.
Open letter to payment processors profiting from rape, incest + child abuse games on Steam
Now, what makes this case unusual is that instead of their fellow SJWs rallying to support them the cascade went the other direction, with many of them insisting that Collective Shout are fake feminists or whatever. (Though the Online Hate Prevention Institute, having worked with them in the past, still sided with them and said their critics were the new Gamergate.) You can go to places like /r/GirlGamers, which previously was campaigning to get No Mercy banned by urging people to sign Collective Shout's petition and copy Collective Shout's email template, and now people think it's a "heavily conservative group...under the pretense of feminism". Factors that presumably contributed to this include that a co-founder of Collective Shout is pro-life, the censorship happened to get some bad press in left-wing spaces early on, and due to this there was rumors going around that "LGBT content" was being targeted. Also the fact that it was a big enough news story for a lot of more moderate SJW-positive people to hear about it, not just the hardcore.
Now that doesn't mean it can't lead to some changed opinions about censorship. Despite how frustrating the dishonest and self-serving narratives about it are, people's opinions on the subject are presumably generally sincere. But it does seem important that this is payment processors continuing to listen to the same sort of arguments they've been listening to for years as they censored various (mostly Japanese) storefronts, not suddenly listening to "non-wokes". Also it's hard to guess what percentage of people objecting are just going the way the winds are currently blowing in their ideological environment, and will flip back without acknowledging any contradiction if circumstances are a bit different. Hopefully it'll stick at least somewhat, among the less-ideological gamers if nothing else.
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