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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.
Woke was never more widespread than ten or fifteen percent of the population. They just control the federal bureaucracy, academia, the billions of NGOs with their trillions of billionaire bribes and taxpayer cash, the legal profession, the intelligence agencies and through those mechanisms, the tech platforms.
This is always a temporary state, this happened in the Seventies and Nineties too. People don't like being lectured by hectoring feminist church ladies any more than christian ones. Once the backlash built sufficiently, the left exposed their complete intellectual and moral inversions during Covid, and Elon broke their biggest silo, the whole thing started to slide. It wasn't fast, it took five years and still isn't complete.
Furthermore, it hasn't gone away. Just like PC followed Days of Rage, and Woke followed PC, set your watches. The next one is coming in ten or fifteen years. You'll start hearing about it in five to seven years. All those people still hold all those same basic hatreds, they aren't going to be fired in any real numbers, and this whole thing will happen again and again and again. Not even Sulla can stop it. Hatred of the (western) nation and its population is the basic building block of lefty ideology.
Hear me now, believe me later. The next one will be even more stupid, and even more hateful.
I mean it seems like the basic difference here is that a much larger percentage of the population thinks the latter has some sort of moral authority to make lectures, even if those lectures are often unpleasant and they’re not going to change their behavior.
Give them twenty years of the sort of power the lefty cult has had, and they'll sing a different tune. Such are the tides of society.
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I'd say there's a variation. Let's take BLM for example. Some guy dies after a cop puts a knee on his neck for several minutes and he's asking for help. This has enough scandalous accusations in it to generate discourse. So somewhere between 15 and 26 million people protest. There are a range of views someone might hold regarding police in America. Here are some:
Police in America rarely face consequences when they commit bad behavior.
Police in America often commit bad behavior.
When one police officer commits bad behavior, others protect him from punishment.
This bad behavior disproportionately affects minorities.
Police in America are racist, often intentionally so.
All structures in America are racist
America requires radical transformation to resolve racist structures.
...and so on.
Where I'm going with this is there are clearly escalating claims being made. But what happened to George Floyd and people's general beliefs are such that a lot of the populace believes at least some of these claims. And the amount of outrage was enough that people were willing to tolerate or overlook the stronger claims (especially with a friendly media) because they wanted to see some sort of reform when it comes to police accountability.
I think you can repeat that with a lot of progressive arguments. The general public is probably sympathetic to the weaker, saner versions of progressive arguments. And that's enough for the left to get by, usually. However, some cracks appear. When it comes to trans issues for instance, the Overton window is probably centered around the point of, "I don't really think trans women are women, but if I'm just casually talking with someone and not sleeping with them, I don't want the other person to be unhappy and it's no big deal to say "she" instead of "he." " But the progressive activist is only happy with that status quo to the extent that they think there's enough goodwill to push it further. But what if there isn't enough goodwill there? The activist has to keep pushing, but the public is tired of being pushed. Combine that with a Biden administration that seemed to care more about student loan forgiveness than raising inflation, and you get Trump.
Is it a big deal to do 5 daily prayers to make your Muslim friends happy?
It is, actually. Coincidentally I'm not friends with the kind of queer people who insist on different neopronouns for each of vaeir plural headmates. On the other hand I can accept the minor inconvenience of having grace said over my dinner before I eat at a Christian friend's house.
If the deal was that I have to listen without objection to other people using preferred pronouns, and only when I'm in a trans person's house, I think that would be more than reasonable.
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I didn't say it was my opinion. I said it's where I think a large amount of the people around the political center are at. And this analogy doesn't work, because performing a prayer is an additional task, whereas you were probably referring to someone with a pronoun regardless. This is more comparable to the euphemism treadmill.
Wouldn't that mean it would be wrong to force someone who doesn't pray, to pray to Allah, but ok to force someone who does pray 5 times a day, but to a different god?
Seems kinda backwards to me.
A better analogy, but still flawed. Everyone agrees that male and female exist (though I suppose there's room there when talking about nonbinary). However the left has has turned the desire to be acknowledged and respected into an obsession, something to be asserted rather than established. And the easiest way to do that is to do something loud yet easily packaged. It's not "I think therefore I am," it's "I act therefore I am." They aren't so much trying to force you to acknowledge a god, they're trying to get you to acknowledge them as a unique person by making you acknowledge how they act.
The standard vocabulary dogma is that between male and female is intersex, and between man and woman (or boy and girl) is nonbinary.
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The activist that has to fundraise needs a live conflict. They can't take yes for answer
Hence Dave Chapelle's admonition to the LGBT coalition that they ought to cash their chips in and go home before the crap out.
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Sure, and that's not wrong either. But the over-reaction at the time had me shaking my head, and that was before I recently saw a video from the time where - gold-plated coffin? what is to all intents and purposes a state funeral? the mayor kneeling and weeping as if at the tomb of a martyred saint? What the hell???
That's way more than "let's have a national conversation about the police and if they do get too much leeway".
Eh. OTOH, the widespread adoption of body-worn cameras has been a nearly unalloyed good (a rare culture-war thing!). It's reduced excessive force, it's vindicated cases w/ justified use of force and it's shed light that neither totalizing view was remotely correct.
I'm not sure we would have gotten them in an alternate timeline without that national conversation.
But the conversation would still have been possible without the deification of Floyd, who - whatever sort of death he suffered - was indeed a petty criminal engaging in fraud at the time of his death. I am not saying he deserved to die or that any one should be treated in that way, but the over-reaction afterwards was indeed like he was some martyr for religion. He wasn't a good guy. Bad guys also have human rights and shouldn't be killed by ignorance or malice, but the immediate emotional reaction was something like the death of Princess Diana where the real person got lost in this persona built up by a lot of hysteria and neediness, and has collapsed in the same way (Floyd's worship much faster than Diana's worship).
And worship is indeed the only word that I can find to fit - the mayor weeping while kneeling before the coffin, touching it like it's a relic? That's the kind of display that would have drawn the attention of Thomas Cromwell and invited a visitation from his commissioners about superstition and idolatry.
I'm not sure that conversation would have been possible at a policy level without the (largely, I agree, bullshit) personal angle. American politics doesn't seem to work at such a wonkish level. Without being too cynical, it seems at least possible that it just never happened otherwise.
The parallels to Trump are also interesting: would it have been possible to get conservative politics and a retreat of the worst of the LGBT (not that I want to roll back some level of acceptance, but surely high school locker rooms were a bridge way too far) without the personal angle of a thrice-married adulterer?
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I think it's a bit early to say that. Haven't a lot of places been starting to struggle with poor police recruitment on a similar timeline to rolling out body cameras?
It could be that the loss of privacy from body cameras isn't relevant to the recruitment problems. Body cameras could even be helping recruitment by reducing officer concern over false accusations. But until someone identifies and fixes the cause of the recruitment problems I'd be reluctant to conclude body cameras aren't relevant.
Personally, I think I'd find it quite unpleasant to have a camera and microphone active for most of the time I spend at work. Especially when those recordings could be released to the public.
The cops wanted the body cameras because they thought it would clear up false accusations/spurious complaints. Police recruitment problems have to do with hollowing out of the native working class male population through brain drain and low fertility and the need for police recruits to be super squeaky clean goody-goody two shoes- driving problems, drug tests, gambling debt(it's thought to cause susceptibility to bribery), MIPs exclude a huge portion of the population that finds police work appealing.
At least that's what my police officer friends tell me.
That doesn't match what I remember. Why did it take a national conversation to get body cameras in place if both police officers and reform advocates wanted them? Who else could have been getting in the way?
Additionally, unions in multiple large cities have demanded raises for wearing body cameras. This would be a very strange move by the unions if officers in these locations wanted body cameras.
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Yeah... you don't think the social movement to demonize the police might be more relevant here? Especially since it was the same movement that demanded the body cams, and thus explaining the timing?
Indeed, the prevalence of body cam footage has undermined the demonize-the-police movement considerably.
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Possibly! If we fix that problem, keep the body cameras, and the recruitment crisis goes away then the body cameras were probably an unalloyed good.
But as all three happened around the same time it's hard to untangle how much each of the former two contribute to the latter. Police certainly don't seem to have all-positive opinions of body cameras and I can see a number of reasons why even a good cop would hate wearing one.
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The problem is not just that trans activists aren't content with this, it's that it's an inherently unstable position. It is a big deal to say "he" or "she", much of society is built around there being men and women and it being easy to tell which is which.
Thinking back on the vast majority of the interactions I've had in the last week or two, I can't think of that many in which it did matter. The clerk at the store, the other parents at the park, coworkers, friends. If it wasn't easy to tell which were biologically fe/male, I don't think it would have made my life that much harder.
Society is built on reproducing pairs, which is an inexorable function of biology -- but not a ton of day to day life impinges on that.
For people who are members of the demographic most likely to be sexually assaulted, it matters to them a great deal to know if the people in their vicinity are members of the demographic most likely to sexually assault them.
Indeed. Now what percentage of the time is sexual assault a really salient risk: when alone with someone, in a sensitive place like a locker room, at a club or other place where lots of inebriated people congregate.
Those are real, but they don't comprise anything close to a plurality of situations that the modal human being faces.
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Human societies are much richer than just "reproducing pairs" and gender is expressed . Tearing down the structures of existing society has been a long term project of the left, for which project the politics of transexuality is but the most recent of many tools.
Well, if the claim is that even a plurality of daily interactions don't depend at all on the sex of those interacting, then that seems evidently true whether or not it's part of a larger project of the left.
[ This is a pet peeve of mine, even wrong movements are very often correct on at least something, even if it's embedded in a vast edifice of incorrect claims. They can't be wrong about everything all the time. ]
If society is richer than reproducing pairs, and the majority of that richness doesn't actually need to care about the biology (or anything else) of sex, then that's a fact we ought to understand & integrate.
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Not any more. What percentage of people goes to church compared to college or works in a corporate environment with HR lectures?
As I've heard it told, the culture war battles of the '80s with the Moral Majority didn't confine themselves to the pews. The likes of Tipper Gore and Jack Thompson were at least perceived as coming for your Black Sabbath CD's, Natural Born Killers on VHS, and Grand Theft Auto games because they were influencing corruptible young minds to commit school shootings (several of those examples pre-date Columbine) and other acts of mayhem.
Although from my chair here today, that historical kulturekampf feels almost quaint.
The striking thing about those battles is about how badly they failed. Wokeness got all the confederate flags removed in an instant, Cops and Roseanne canceled, and Dr. Seuss unpublished, and didn't even break a sweat doing it. The peak bipartisan efforts of the PMRC got a label on records saying "Buy this, your parents will hate it".
You're comparing the successes of woke in its ascendancy compared to the final days of the nagging god-botherers regime. I would say in the US you could chalk up Prohibition at least as an example of their powers of priggishness and moral busybodying, but I'm sure there are a lot more if you bother to look back.
Prohibition was as much feminism and public order as it was religious though. Probably more.
The main complaints about alcohol were that drunks were beating their wives, neglecting their wives, and/or being disorderly on the street and slovenly at the workplace.
Indeed, and there was a lot of overlap between the Prohibitionists and the suffragettes.
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How much of that improved cancelation capability is due to social media, online visibility (by choice or by callout) and the melding of "US culture" into one big category?
I think the Internet as a global coordination platform here is undersold: it's so much easier to run a nationwide campaign on any issue today. In 1990 you'd do what, post letters and long-distance phone calls? More expensive in money and time than starting a subreddit, Facebook group, or even newsgroup or email list.
On the plus side, it's done wonders for semi-niche hobbies, though.
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Aside from the slanted playing field, monthly church attendance is quite a bit higher than weekly.
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That's a playing field so slanted it may as well be a mountain cliff. Everyone in church getting lectured by hectoring church ladies is there voluntarily, while college and HR talks are mandatory for anyone who doesn't want to be prole.
The average person in the west still sees pastors and priests as having some residual moral authority, which is why leftist activists still try to infiltrate churches. Respect for woke equivalents is mostly (thought not entirely! The piety of towards George Floyd, etc. is heartfelt) a reflexive and instinctive accommodation to power.
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