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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:
Never saw “Antman and the Wasp”. Is it a woke movie?
Not really.
Antman wasn't a particularly woke movie per see, but it was a more comedy-action movie that aligned with woke tropes for its own reasons.
Antman is first and foremost a comedy-action series in the broader MCU. This is/ was suitable / appropriate in part because the character's power set allows for distinct / unique setups, like this memorable high-stakes fight on a train(set). The core power set of size changing but keeping the pre-size 'strength' means that the choreography involves a lot of exagerated scale differences and motions, which makes better for comedy than goofy action.
The thing is, because Antman (Scott Lang) is a comedic movie protagonist, he's, well, a comedic male lead. Which, yes, is a bit awkward, goofy, makes mistakes, and so on. And this does pattern-match with the woke-tropes of belittling the male leads. Scott is often the butt of the joke, in a series where most of the cast is the butt of various jokes even in serious contexts.
For example- the opening context of the origin movie is Scott Lang, is getting out of jail as a convicted criminal. Part of his call to adventure / instigating context is that he needs money to pay child support to his beloved daughter, who lives with his divorced wife and her new husband (who happens to be a cop). Scott wants to be on the straight and narrow, but his criminal past makes that hard. So one of the early gags is him- a highly qualified engineer- failing to be able to keep an icecream job. This is tragic, but is played for laughs, even as it sets him up for the dabbling into a functional heist plot. The plot of the movie is functionally that Scott is hired by the inventor of the shrink tech precisely because he is an ex-con in order to do one more crime, which is to steal shrink tech from a dangerous corporate former partner of the inventor.
The main counterpart to Scott on the protagonist cast is the Pym family, a duo. There is Professor Hank Pym, who invented the shrink tech and has hired Scott to keep it from being used by the evil mastermind, who was his former protege. Then there is Hope Pym, Hank's daughter who is estranged with her father but reluctantly working with him because she discovered the evil villain's evil plan after she helped the evil mastermind oust Hank from his own company..
Hope can / does pattern match to the woke female protagonist tropes. She is an exceptionally competent woman, both in terms of positional authority- she outmaneuvered her own father and is doing so against the villain- and in technology- she knows her father's tech and can use elements of it far better than Scott at first- and even in martial arts- where she's the more skilled, especially for the tech.
Hope is set up as the clear 'natural' user of the tech, but this is a Antman movie titled Antman, and so comedic lead clutz is the one who has to be trained to be a hero by the reluctant, more capable woman.
But while Hope Pym does have a bit of the 'women aren't allowed to be weak' woke-ishness, and a resting bitch face, and seems to hate men, there's actually more to it on a character level. Rather, Hope's could-be-mistaken-for-woke relationship issues with men come down to the fact that she has a justified grievance / issue with the three main men of the plot for valid character reasons. The evil man is evil. Her relationship with her father is estranged because her father had a critical role in getting her mother killed, which changed their relationship, and now her father is bypassing her for the key role in the heist by trusting Scott with the suit-tech that her father's whole character is about not trusting others with. And finally, the relationship with Scott is because he's a thief (who's first encounter is stealing the shrink tech suit from their family), who is less comptent than her (not having her familiarity with the tech), who her father seems to trust more than her.
Moreover, as Hope learns new things, her relationships with the men in her life changes, or is subject to change, with her being the one to learn and change more than then. Hope shows an emotional response and sympathy when she realizes that the evil vaillain's evilness may in part be a side effect of her father's shrink tech particle, making him a victim of her family. Her relationship with her father begins to heal when her father finally shares the context of her mother's death, which is that the shrink tech failed and made her lost forever. And her relationship with Scott starts to change not only when she realizes Scott's motive of doing this for his daughter, but when Scott is the one to point out that the reason Scott is being trusted with the suit is that Scott is the expendible one if there's another incident like with her mother.
Hope, in other words, has a bit of character development when she learns new things, rather than being the one to change others by informing them.
But also- and more importantly back at the meta-structural level- Hope is the straight woman of the comedy cast. She and her father both, mostly, but Hank Pym is more dry/acerbic humor in his own right, and the rest of the cast feeds into the over-the-top comedic archetypes. So while Hope is a feminist-worthy hyper-competent character frustrated with the nonsense around her, that is not least because she is the foil for the comedic nonsense going around her in the plot.
So, even if it's woke-compatible, it works on its own merits. Still cheesy / Marvel quippy / not everyone's jam, but not forced solely for the sake of itself either.
If anything- and this is only a post if someone actually wants fanfic-worthy idea crafting- I maintain the Antman series of movies could have been improved if it leaned into LGBT themes more, and had Antman- Scott Lang- be a gay man.
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I actually meant "Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania" (Antman and the Wasp would be the second of the trilogy and came out in 2018). It's one of those movies where the putative male lead in an action movie is in actuality sidelined by the strong female costar, think Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (which also came out in 2023 and also flopped and it's probably a better entry from this list than Antman).
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