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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.
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.
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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