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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 personally date peak woke to October 7th 2023, and I believe that though there were trends that had started slowing the rise before then, the actual inflection point can be traced to Hamas's attack on Israel. Why something so seemingly specific and unrelated? It opened up a deep schism within woke between (to be as charitable as possible) those who support violent anti-colonial resistance by Palestinians, and those who object to Palestinian antisemitism. This rift is irreparable, as woke demands strident anti-racism as a core tenant which you cannot diverge on. Both sides now have mutually incompatible definitions of racism, and mutually accuse each other of being genocidally racist. Unlike previous splits, which tended to involve salami slicing off the least radical faction, this time they've split down the middle enough for all the energy woke once held to be consumed by infighting. It's unsustainable to be woke and a blood and soil ultranationalist at the same time.
I obviously can't speak for everyone but peak woke to me has to be June 2020, and frankly I'm shocked that anyone feels differently.
After the summer of George, things definitely cooled down. Yes, woke still existed, yes, Biden was in charge, but overall the public insanity was definitely trending downwards, especially on the issues most identifiably 'woke' (race, transgenderism, economic redistribution). By 2023, it was somewhat acceptable to start questioning the 'official' narrative of transgender ideology, and BLM was basically gone.
I see the Biden (and then Kamala) 2024 campaign as decidedly not woke in the vein of prior Democratic politics.
Summer of George was a time when a woke got a lot of attention. Corporations poured billions into it financing DEI efforts folding to woke activists en- masse. Just as an example take Hollywood, where even now you have projects finishing that were introduced and proposed in 2020.
Nevertheless I do not believe in the whole "peak woke" terminology. This thing comes in cycles going way back at least into birthing of the New Left movement - if we do not want to go back to French Revolution or something like that. You had peak woke of 60ies in form of Days of Rage after which came Regans 80s marked with yuppie capitalism. You had rise of the Woke especially in Education up until 9/11 and wave of neocon patriotism and neverending wars. Then you had third revival especially during and after second Obama term up until the most recent peak woke ending probably with second term of Donald Trump, which demoralized the woke.
But I am sure that this trend will continue, there will be new resurgences and peaks.
I agree with your point overall, and I think we may live to see peak woke yet, but 2020 was definitely the local maximum, with the aftereffects continuing to ripple on. It would not surprise me if by 2030 we're more woke than we ever were before.
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I agree. As in most things, the situation for wokeness went bad at first slowly after 2020, then very fast. My purely vibes based reading is that we're only months into the very fast part. We'll see what mutation replaces it.
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