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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.
To be blunt, wokeism is an efflorescence of booming economic times, when companies can afford to waste money on pastel-haired persons of diverse pronouns and genders as an advertisement of their civic virtue.
Now there's a downturn, and the fat is being trimmed, and that means all the DEI stuff which doesn't make money and where boycotts won't really have an effect since people are pulling in their spending anyway, and now their decisions are not being made on "is the pasta rainbow hues?" but "is this value for money?"
I think there is a definite turn against the excesses which became very excessive, but the major engine of change is turning off the money tap.
I sort of agree with a mild version of this but I think it way overstates the case; companies are no more amenable to wasting money in good times than in bad, what may in fact be the case is that DEI departments did actually represent, or at least were perceived to represent, a reasonable investment in boom time, for any number of reasons (attracting young talent, maintaining a good public image etc.), and this is no longer to be the case in more lean times. The question was always 'is this value for money', it's just that for many the answer used to be yes, and now it's no.
If your perception of what is reasonable changes depending on how much money you have, and you are more likely to find more things to be reasonable when you have more money, and assuming the perception of what is reasonable is more tolerant towards risk when you have more money, how are you not then more susceptible to waste money when you have more money? Sure, no one couches their investments as 'waste'. But it's hard to call it anything else after the fact has been revealed that you 'invested' in a bunch of snake oil.
I don't think you represented a mild version of what was said. But rather a PR coded version that fronts the notion that companies don't waste money. I don' think the notion of a return on investment was ever on the cards for companies that hired professional racists to do in-house struggle sessions on white supremacy. I think that you could, at best, define it as a wasteful fashion statement.
That such programs are less likely to be considered value for money these days is not proof that they were at one time 'snake oil', only that different economic conditions have now rendered them less useful.
Fashion statements are not necessarily wasteful, especially if you are a very public facing company who markets their goods to the general public.
I am not saying they are less likely to be considered valuable. I am stating that they are and were always not valuable. Not as a matter of perception but as a matter of fact. That's why I likened it to snake oil. The snake oil might have been believed to be good when the prospective buyer didn't know it was snake oil but thought instead that it was a rare elixir that cured all illness. But that belief never made the snake oil a good investment. It was always snake oil and the buyer was always a fool for believing it was an elixir that could cure all illness.
Another way to say this, just because a company believed that something was valuable doesn't mean that it was. Or that the company was reasonable for having believed it was valuable in the first place. It was always a money pit designed by grifters.
But they can be. Like the wardrobe of a bored housewife of a rich husband. Sure, it might be very good for the image of the husband and wife for the wife to be well dressed at social gatherings. That fact does not preclude us from recognizing that you don't need a gigantic wardrobe filled with dresses that will never be worn to present yourself properly 4 times a year at company conventions. On top of that, buying into a bad fashion trend might hurt your company as well. Like the case with the anti-men Gillette razor commercials.
Again, just because a company believed something or did something doesn't mean it was good or smart or reasonable or anything else. Decisions are made by people. You can't shield those decisions behind the fact they were made by a company. You have to look at them as they were taken. Which is why, sometimes, companies go bankrupt and CEO's get fired. Regardless of how good they believed their decisions were at the time.
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