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Some time ago, I posted about how it feels like wokeism is getting less popular. I didn't have much to back it up, except some observations about a popular techie watering hole called HackerNews, so the whole exercise left me with more questions than answers.
Well, today I chanced upon "The Great Awokening Is Winding Down" by Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist from Columbia University that focuses on "how we think about, talk about, and produce knowledge about social phenomena including race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, national security, foreign policy and domestic U.S. political contests." (With that broad a scope of inquiry, I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't a fellow mottizen). Al-Gharbi puts together a compelling story: there are fewer woke-related cancellation events, fewer research papers are published related to woke ideology, newspapers are writing less often about race/racism/racists, and companies--including media companies--are not only pushing back more strongly against the demands of social justice warriors, but also closing their purses and defunding both internal DEI departments as well as financial pledges they made to the bankrupt ideals of equity just a few years ago.
While this type of news warms my heart, most of the evidence al-Gharbi provides is composed of disparate op-ed columns from American newspapers. Throughout the last ten years, there have always been dissenting voices that managed, somehow, to walk the thin line between criticizing woke ideology and not falling victim to it. So I don't see why al-Gharbi puts any trust in these pieces, even one as monumental as the Times' recent response to GLAAD.
That said, al-Gharbi's analysis provides some value when he describes the recent behavior of companies and when he provides some numbers to back up his claims. The numbers he shares seem to confirm that the public is losing both interest and tolerance for wokeish puritanism. But the numbers themselves are so remote as to heavily dilute their meaning. For example, there is the fall in the frequency of terms like "race", "racists", and "racism" in papers like NYT, LAT, WSJ, and WP. Or the falling number of scholarly articles about identity-based biases. Al-Gharbi chooses to interpret these as evidence for this theory, but doesn't take into account other factors that could be responsible for this behavior. Like, maybe papers are using fewer words like "racists", and instead using some new fangled euphemism (like homeless -> unhoused)? Or perhaps, in the scholarly article case, these topics have moved to other forums, like described in Scott's recent "Links for February" post:
The arguments that convince me the most are when al-Gharbi talks about the changes in company behavior. These are hard, reality-based events that are orchestrated by smooth talking servants of the Invisible Hand (praise thy golden touch!). You can't argue with a company that not only doesn't pander to internal activist pressure, but goes onto punish them by expelling them from its belly. This mirrors my own experience working in the corporate world where more and more people roll their eyes at DEI-sponsored programming, finding convenient excuses to skip out. Even leadership's support, once crisp and vocal, has died down in volume to a DEI-themed zoom background or a quick few words mechanically tacked on somewhere.
Emotionally, the most salient point and the one I hang my hopes on is how Gen-Z seems to be rebelling against the enforced work puritanism. It's probably my nostalgia, but as a child of the 90s, I can't help but see in this behavior the reflection of my childhood. You had gory movies like Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill. You had gory games, probably led by id titles like Doom and Quake--titles which introduced hundreds of thousands of people to online deathmatching. You had dirty grunge, whose raw scream was quickly adapted and made into Billboard Top 100 records. But you also had plenty of metal and industrial sub-genres spin off and avoid total commercialization. Let's not forget the two movies that closed out the decade, both quite clear in their anti-puritanical message: Fight Club and The Matrix.
While later on all of this was sublimated into the cheery smiles and pastel colors of the aughts, if today's teenagers feel a similar sort of anger and distrust of righty and lefty moralists, I can rest easy--the world will not end, at least not for another decade or two.
Musa al-Gharbi again? These events have always been sorta uncommon despite all the hype/attention they get on twitter when they happen. Right now, without deferring to Google, name at least four major campus protests or cancellations. Evergreen, but that a long tom ago. Middlebury, again, a long time ago. Berkeley protests over Milo? Three. Top Universities like Brown, Stanford, Harvard seem to go a long time washout any major problems despite the largely left-wing student body . For most of the year campus life is mostly uneventful, such as students going to classes , writing papers, taking exams, etc. , not protesting.
They are uncommon because cancelling an important person or even low-ranking academic always incurs a risk of backlash and defection, because of the media attention it gets (like regarding the rewriting of Roald Dahl books, which hardly anyone on the left supports even) . Cancelling someone or something important is like a nuclear weapon. Firing one is ok, fire too many and you destroy yourself in the process, too.
Rather, it's much worse in the private sector, stuff like DEI , social media censorship, being banned from platforms, etc., which is far bigger than academia and affects more people for most of their lives more so than academia or school, which is just 20-30% of one's life, and also is unseen and in the background, except occasionally when it does blow up (like the James Damore memo). The risk of being banned on Facebook, Reddit, etc. for committing 'bad speak', or even on twitter still, is still pretty bad and has not peaked. Gatekeepers on social media still command considerable power.
If you're claiming that they've stopped hammering down nails that stick up, and as evidence show that there's not much hammering happening, you also need to show that there's still nails sticking up.
they cannot hammer all of them down. it's an optimalization problem. Hammering down too many would mean losing legitimacy and support, like the backlash to re-writing/censoring Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl books.
they are still hammering nails but in the private sector , like social media or work, stuff which gets less media attention than highly visible targets. Going after highly visible targets incurs risk, so they cannot do it that often.
But this is a backlash that occurred primarily on Twitter, lasted about 48 hours, and resulted in no changes. No firings, no policy changes, not even an apology. Pretty weak tea I think.
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...We're talking about academia specifically, right? Which academic nails are sticking up, currently?
My assumption is that within academia, within the corporate world, most places run on procedure and the manipulation of procedural outcomes, they absolutely can hammer down every nail there is. I've seen pretty much nothing that leads me to think otherwise in the last seven or so years. And sure, they get pushback sometimes, on specific issues. Usually this pushback doesn't even stop them on the specific issue in question, much less roll back previous wins; most commonly, there's simply a week or two of grumbling and then people give up. Seuss and Dahl are still censored. The "pushback" lacked any meaningful substance.
"that often" is a flexible term. it seems to me that they can do it often enough to consolidate their gains in preparation for the next push. Again, the policy/procedure/rules changes aren't rolling back. What they got, they keep, what they failed to get, they'll be back for soon enough.
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Harvard canceled a Law School dean for representing Weinstein. There was also the Christakises at Yale. Then there's MITs cancellation of Sabatini for a MeTooing, and NYUs refusal to hire him. MIT also cancelled Stallman.
I suggest that if there are fewer events, it's because so many witches have already been burnt, and the remaining witches are keeping their heads down. We're not seeing a blossoming of intellectual freedom.
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