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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.
Maybe a few more elements:
the transgender craze made the virtue signaling instrumental to progressivism unpalatable to normal people
COVID hysteria also made virtue signaling unpalatable
the shift to short form video content made people assess physiognomy more than before, and the silly trends eat up more cognitive space than before (which was open to news)
Red Scare and Kill Tony became very popular, and both were anti-progressive; the subreddit of the former constantly goes viral indirectly via screenshots
the war in Gaza shifted the moral concern toward Palestinians and anti-Israel rhetoric
Tik Tok’s popularity made other platforms compete by decreasing censorship; the things you now see on Instagram reels would have been a front page news story about racism in 2015
there may literally be a shadowy cabal influencing algorithms; for instance, Trump influencing Zuckerberg means that his platforms are less censored
Personally I think the CIA made the septum piercing a shibboleth within SJW circles specifically to reduce memetic potential because it’s so fucking ugly and has a 90% chance of coinciding with SJW viewpoints
I found it quite telling the moment trump decapitated USAID all the usual lock step nonsense from mass US media went all over the place, they were like chickens flailing around after decapitation without a unified purpose. Maybe trump also managed to find and pull the plug on some unnamed psyops division? Idk, I don't read reddit anymore but we do know its swarming with glowies literally on the military's payroll, so why not the rest of the internet. How much of the woke hysteria on twitter and tumblr was organic.
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