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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.
Many women, even some who literally worked pro-bono for leftist NGOs, thought wokeness was nauseating crap but were too conflict avoidant to complain about it because they didn't want to make a scene. They would complain and bitch in private about the 'piety' of these people but passively uphold its hegemony in public, preface their private statements with 'you should never say this' and even look down on anyone who was actually honest in going against the consensus as a cringeworthy troublemaker. And there's an intense, seething hatred for transgender ideology too.
It's like they were hard-coded many years ago 'the left wing is good and the right sordid and smelly, good deeds include helping refugees, giving money to international charity and helping poor brown people have more political power'. They might recognize from experience that poor brown people are often stupid and can't understand the byzantine political process in a Western liberal democracy, giving them power is often an exercise in futility. Or they see that the power is taken by greedy intermediaries who pocket most of the loot. Or they know that non-Western cultures treat women poorly, importing them harms their own interests. But they then just try not to think about the incoherency between their knowledge of the world and beliefs about what should be done and lean towards various cope arguments that the media likes to put forward about why progressivism isn't working out so well.
It's like Ceausescu support withering the moment people stopped being afraid of the secret police, his support was based not on enthusiastic consent but grudging obedience. Light novel title: 'I can't believe the sex that wasn't selected for martial bravery turns out to be cowardly in their politics too!'
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