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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29321 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I strongly dislike this article because it's simply not true

https://compactmag.com/article/woke-ism-is-winding-down

Data on media outputs and “cancel-culture” incidents also suggest that a corner may have been turned. Across a range of datasets, we see apparent declines in “grassroots” attempts to censor uncomfortable speech on campus (even as there are growing attempts to suppress political scholarship from external stakeholders). Media discussion of various forms of prejudice and discrimination also seem to have declined significantly over the last year.

Within the Democratic Party, following anemic 2020 results and recalls of progressive politicians in blue states, there have been efforts to “course correct,” to avoid further alienating normie voters. The Democratic base has moved in a similar direction, broadly rejecting progressive candidates during the 2022 primaries. These countermeasures likely helped the party stave off the anticipated “red wave,” preventing extreme Republican candidates from facing Democratic challengers who were also perceived to be far out of step with mainstream America. Running moderate Democratic candidates against GOP extremists proved to be a winning move throughout the country in 2022.

Even if one can cite evidence of people turning against woke-ism, this does not change the fact that the woke still hold considerable power for a large number of institutions, at work, and various digital intellectual properties. The woke, the DEI people, BLM, etc. do not need to see the huge number of downvotes on their content (such as youtube videos , before downvotes were removed) to know that their ideology is not that popular, but this does not dissuade them: they still persevere. It has never been about popularity but about power.

When workers at Netflix attempted to cancel Dave Chappelle in late 2021, the company didn’t respond by issuing apologies and promising more programming on LGBTQ topics, as it had in the past. Instead, executives issued a memo informing protesting employees that if they weren’t open to publishing content they disagree with, they should quit. When an insufficient number of activist employees took them up on this invitation, the company proceeded with aggressive cuts apparently targeting these employees and the programming they worked on.

Too bad not all of us have the backing of a multi-billion dollar corp like Spotify or Netflix. It's not like Netflix can easily find another Chapelle or Spotify can find another Rogan. Regular people who get banned or suspended from twitter, reddit, etc or fired have far fewer recourse. It's all in the background: no one even notices or cares but the person who is affected. The marginal cost incurred by Facebook deleting an inconvenient account is zero. It has 2 billion users. No skin off its back.

I'll attempt to respond to the article's claims, mostly in order:

White liberals, the Americans whose expressed views shifted most radically over the last decade, have begun to moderate their responses to questions, for instance, about the causes and ideal remedies to racial inequalities. There have been shifts in the ways people identify themselves, too. For instance, polling and surveys suggest that “feminist” and related labels seem to have lost some of their luster in recent years

The article doesn't cite or link anything here, but I pay close attention to everything that comes out of Pew and Gallup and I have not noticed this supposed reversal. In fact, I've noticed the opposite. For example, the data in this thread, among others, by Zach Goldberg, which shows white liberals becoming more woke over time on several measures.

As for the feminist label, even if that's true I suspect it has more to do with the TERF wars.

Data on media outputs and “cancel-culture” incidents also suggest that a corner may have been turned. Across a range of datasets, we see apparent declines in “grassroots” attempts to censor uncomfortable speech on campus (even as there are growing attempts to suppress political scholarship from external stakeholders).

This would also be expected if wokeness were still ascendant or peaked, as people realize just how dangerous it is to dissent from the orthodoxy.

Media discussion of various forms of prejudice and discrimination also seem to have declined significantly over the last year.

I'd have to see the data to say more (he doesn't link anything). I'm doubtful it's significant if true.

Within the Democratic Party, following anemic 2020 results and recalls of progressive politicians in blue states, there have been efforts to “course correct,” to avoid further alienating normie voters.

This is among the better evidence, but I don't think it means much. First, the recalls were few and far between, and they happened more in places that had simply gotten so bad that it was not sustainable even for Blue normies. But regardless, I don't think wokeness has ever been that popular with normies, at least beyond costlessly nodding approvingly to right-thinking platitudes to demonstrate they're good people. The problem has never been that wokeness is popular; the problem is that wokeness has implacable and mutually reinforcing power in important institutions.

The Democratic base has moved in a similar direction, broadly rejecting progressive candidates during the 2022 primaries. These countermeasures likely helped the party stave off the anticipated “red wave,” preventing extreme Republican candidates from facing Democratic challengers who were also perceived to be far out of step with mainstream America. Running moderate Democratic candidates against GOP extremists proved to be a winning move throughout the country in 2022.

I don't get the impression that Democratic candidates in 2022 were less woke than in the last few election cycles. I think the results in 2022 were less about any sort of Democratic moderation and more about people being sick of Trump and Trumpy candidates.

According to some accounts, there is a growing appetite among Generation Z for humor and subversion, for a slackening of constraints and an expansion of horizons. The heavy moralizing around identity issues, the constant and intense surveillance and management of self and others, the incessant calls for revolution and reform—these elements of woke culture are running up against a growing sense of nihilism and ironic detachment among young adults.

There is growing discussion of a “vibe shift” among Millennials as well. Many are coming to find the culture wars both unsatisfying and rote. They are exhausted by the relentless cynicism, fear, doomsaying, and impression management that have governed much of their lives—and for what? They recognize the revolution isn’t coming anytime soon. So they are looking instead to have fun, relax, and cut loose a bit. Or, at the very least, to stop having to be so neurotic, guarded, and paranoid.

Admittedly, I don't hang out around anyone from Gen Z, but I don't buy this. I'm open to data (he didn't cite any), but almost all polling I see on any woke-adjacent topic shows younger cohorts identifying more with the woke viewpoint than older cohorts.

Companies are slackening their enforcement of post-2010 norms and expectations on identity issues. For instance, they are growing less likely to rapidly terminate or suspend employees accused of sexual misconduct based purely on the word of accusers.

That's plausible. I do think #MeToo probably peaked and is heading back down from orbit. I don't think it'll land anywhere near the status quo ante, though, for better or worse. But I think #MeToo is at best a subcomponent or offshoot of wokeism and doesn't generalize to the rest.

At the same time, they are walking back their aggressive symbolic commitments to social justice and quietly defunding the financial pledges they made to various activist groups and causes. Many are also making aggressive cuts to the DEI-related positions that ballooned in recent years.

Rather than rapidly caving to employee “social-justice” demands, as they had for much of the last decade, managers at knowledge-economy institutions are increasingly trying to reassert their authority, firing employees who attempt smear campaigns against colleagues and the companies they work for, and imposing new rules on how internal workplace channels are used.

One of the links given refers to the Washington Post firing Felicia Sonmez - a person whose petty Mean Girls-worthy feuding with coworkers spilled out into the public to great embarrassment and popcorn. I don't believe for a second that the Washington Post is becoming less woke, sorry.

A second link is about internal conflict in the New York Times between the old guard and the new woke employees. But the linked article essentially admits that the woke are winning: "On the progressive side of the ledger, the Times has installed a new administrative layer in the newsroom aimed at implementing a modern workplace culture. The new roles are neither reporters nor editors, but university-style administrators, focused variously on culture, careers, trust, strategy and DEI. Their roles amount, as one told me, to trying to enact radical cultural change at the institution — from an old, white conservative institution to a progressive, inclusive one — as slowly as possible." (emphasis mine)

Next linked is Netflix's handling of its employees protesting Dave Chappelle. Netflix essentially said they're keeping him on and employees who don't like it can quit. Admittedly, this was a nice win. But Netflix, like the tech companies the quoted paragraph alludes to more broadly, are facing increasing financial pressure in recent times. Netflix's stock, for example, was cratering for months before the Chappelle controversy came to a head. I don't think it's much consolation to the anti-woke, or much indication of wokeness waning, that companies - who exist to make profit - eventually, might, somewhat, on the margins, cull some of their more useless and obnoxious employees when the company's finances look grim.

And actually, according to another link in the quoted section, it's not clear DEI-culling is as ubiquitous as the author seems to think. The link he gives cites a study which claims that 80% of tech firms "displayed a pattern of very minimal increases in diversity" (read: increased diversity) between 2008-2016, and the remainder were a roughly even split between increased diversity and decreased. Wokeness definitely didn't peak in that timeframe, so I don't know how this supports the argument that wokeness has peaked sometime since then.

He does cite a claim that "listings for DEI roles were down 19% last year [2022]", but later on that cited article claims that DEI job postings jumped 123% after the 2020 protests. You do the math. But, hey, I guess that's consistent with peaking, technically.

[Running out of comment space for full quotes, but he spends a couple paragraphs talking about how Disney changed CEOs after getting into trouble with DeSantis in Florida, and Twitter and Facebook have reinstated Trump.]

I don't know the details of whether or how much Disney has actually changed. But if it has, it was in response to state pressure. That doesn't strike me as evidence of an organic peaking of wokeness (unless you want to cite DeSantis' efforts themselves as evidence of it, which you could). Similarly, I suspect social media companies are afraid that Republicans are going get fed up with the progressive bias and censorship on social media, so I wouldn't read too much into whatever capitulations and bone-throwing they may engage in here.

And Twitter is a terrible example for his case. It only changed because a guy with more money than God was so fucking sick of its bias that he decided to just buy it and try to fix it.

I actually don't fault the author for being unpersuasive. It's really hard to measure something abstract and amorphous like wokeness, especially over time. And the few methods that exist are easy to nitpick, as I've done. A lot of it comes down to anecdotes here and there. But there's no way the author would win a competition where one side of the ledger is anecdotes of wokeness waning and the other side is anecdotes of wokeness run amok. Granted, his claim is that wokeness is merely waning, not that it has lost. But as that aforementioned New York Times admission alludes to with its plan of slow and steady death by progressive transformation, ideologies can remain insidiously dominant in institutions and cultures longer than you or your society as you know it can remain alive, to paraphrase Keynes.

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