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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.
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".
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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