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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.

Yeah, "we've surely reached peak woke!" is the mirror counterpart to "it's only a few kids on college campuses!"

So in the spirit of the thread, I'd like to ask everyone what kind of thing would actually signify to them that we've passed "peak woke"?

For me, I think it would be mass abolishment of DEI roles in companies as useless dreck, and the default response to HR complaints about offensive jokes changing from "yes m'lady we'll fire him immediately" to "grow a thicker skin, I'm not your mother, plus he's our star engineer and we need him more than you", for example.

For me, I think it would be mass abolishment of DEI roles in companies as useless dreck, and the default response to HR complaints about offensive jokes changing from "yes m'lady we'll fire him immediately" to "grow a thicker skin, I'm not your mother, plus he's our star engineer and we need him more than you", for example.

If we're talking about "peak woke", then your standard sounds like it would be the equivalent of getting half-way down the mountain. How would you know if you were, say only a hundred meters down or so?

You don't. The point is that any one loss for the woke is meaningless. It has to be sustained and increasing, and I wouldn't feel safe in definitely saying the sea had changed until I saw something like that.

I almost totally agree, but with one caveat: things have changed in that it's no longer complete suicide to vocalize that the emperor has no clothes.

Take the new Harry Potter game controversy, for example. This is a really recent article:

https://fortune.com/2023/02/08/hogwarts-legacy-harry-potter-video-game-boycott-rowling-transphobia-warner-discovery-avalanche/

Even if this article doesn't completely come down as anti-woke, it most definitely has anti-woke elements. In this article, they point out that there is an industry-wide effort to cast this game as a hugely problematic thing, and that reviewers everywhere are afraid to touch it for fear of losing their livelihoods. They imply that this is a ridiculous situation.

3 years ago, you could never even point out that this dynamic was occurring, and now you can. I see this article as being basically on the side of the true spirit of gamergate (in that is in favor of ethics in video game journalism), whereas for actual gamergate, you'd never get any publication to admit that the other side had any point at all.

This may mean we are past the peak, I really don't know. Maybe we are in a local minimum, but the real peak is up ahead. Or maybe we are before the peak but people at least are noticing it. Who can say? But at least this does seem to be positive in that more people are speaking out against the woke machine.

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