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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.
The death of woke has been claimed many times. I'm not convinced.
I'm still afraid to admit to being centrist, maybe slightly right thereof, in social settings and certainly in work ones. A bit left of the modal Mottizen (someone, link the song, I've long lost it!). My close friends know, but I'd never casually admit to even a lack of antipathy for Trump in front of new people. And that's all as someone in many ways immune to censorship - I'm relatively old and well established, take me or leave me.
Concrete questions: when, if ever, will it be acceptable to express even the blander motte views in polite company? Was it ever?
"Trump? A little grating, but the country's doing fine, I don't mind him." "Trans? I mean...you do you, but you ain't a chick, and stop pushing books into the elementary school curriculum."
I agree with you because I am just like everything you described. But I have to ask the question: are we being too cautious? Once bitten twice shy. We have been in the trenches in the most awkward of warfare, and I know I've lost friends and opportunities from being too vocally centrist. I hate getting yelled at and lectured to.... So I'd rather just not start it anymore. So I keep my damn mouth shut.
But truthfully I don't think it's the case that we are being too cautious, not yet. But I must raise this question because there may come a day when society does, or could, accept centrists again, but it won't happen if centrists don't feel free to let our middle-of-the-road freak fly. If people don't start speaking up, others who agree with start suppressed themselves, due to lack of common knowledge of centrist acceptance.
So basically, I think we can say that the woke conditioning of the past 15 years was massively successful. Even when things are starting to get better, we can't go back to feeling better and acting like we used to. We've been trained to act like the woke, even though we are not, and this makes it all the harder to change society to non woke.
"Centrist" has now become one of the damned terms, like Nazi and fascist and racist and transphobe. Being a centrist apparently means not that you have a moderate view, or can see good points in the arguments by both sides, but rather you are - at best - mushy, spineless, and indulging in the 'both sides are as bad as each other' fallacy (which is a fallacy because as any fule kno there is one and only one Good Right True side and one and only one Bad Evil Monster side), or at worst you are a Nazi fascist white supremacist transphobe etc. who is lying about your Bad Evil Monster views and are only pretending to be someone reasonable.
"Filthy centrist" isn't a joke anymore, it's an opinion a lot of the online left hold.
It's meant that for a long time, at least in the US. The sentiment behind "there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos" goes back to at least 1890.
There's several different types of people who call themselves moderates or centrists, and a lot of it isn't good.
Most common is the "centrist" who considers themselves the center of the universe; they may hold any position including very radical ones but they'll still insist they are moderates.
Closely related is the "centrist" who goes along with their local consensus and thinks anyone who doesn't is bad. This local consensus, again, could be anything.
Then you've got the ones who swear they are centrists who carefully consider each of their positions, but somehow come out exactly where whatever political commentators they listen to are, and parrot those arguments without understanding. In the US this is nearly always NPR.
And you've got the ones you refer to, who take the fallacy of grey as gospel. Yes, sometimes the truth lies between the two most commonly articulated positions. But sometimes, in fact, the truth lies AT or very much more near one of those positions. Sometimes it lies BEYOND one of those positions on the same axis. Sometimes it lies off the axis. These people deserve the contempt they are given; in addition to being unthinking, they can be manipulated through one side making it's position more radical to move the middle, at least if that side can prevent the other side from responding. These are the people who just went along with woke, because the center between Ibrahim Kendi and the weaksauce opposition that was all that was allowed to be voiced was STILL woke.
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Honest question — does the fear you fear make you question whether your near group are the baddies?
Not really, maybe sometimes with regard to individual incidents, and sometimes those do result in me changing my mind on small things. But I've mostly come to terms with stuff by now.
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Ingroup you mean? Why would it?
Or the people who are around him, and putting all that fear and pressure on people? They sort of are, but it's human nature, getting too resentful of it leads towards nothing but misanthropy.
"[X] is persecuted because it's bad" should be the default assumption, despite what a lifetime of cultural conditioning tells me. Are they correct when they claim that those views have no place in a well-ordered society?
I think they're wrong to look down on those views, but I had to examine the object level to reach that conclusion. A different group of people imposing fear about a different set of opinions might be right.
Huh, so what you're saying is that the Jews really did have it coming?
I agree you should examine the object level views on a case by case basis, this is, in fact my default. I disagree with "if they're persecuted, they're bad", though persecution probably indicates a fundamental incompatibility of values.
Lol, nope. But I did check.
Cults are marginalized, criminals are jailed, and pedophiles are excluded from some jobs. Unproductive workers are fired (or at least not promoted), unpleasant people don't get invited to parties, and flaky people don't get trusted with responsibilities. I'm guessing I would agree with the consensus 90% of the time, but that last 10% is very important.
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