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Notes -
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
I want them to cite concrete things that they now see as having been crazy. "X said Y in 2021 and it was all over the NYT, and on Twitter and everyone was nodding along, but actually now I realize it was crazy." And don't take some edge case lunatic, but the central cases of what people understand under woke that was everywhere. They never do that. They just say "oh yeah actually things went a bit too far, great intentions, but it was a bit over the top here and there, teehee I guess it was a wild time, quite crazy..." That's weak. If they think something was crazy they should say what precisely. And then let's see them say that into the face of social media. Because I'm pretty sure that nothing of substance has been rethought. It's just that "I guess we were too fast and it turns out we have to be more strategic about this because not as many were onboard as it seemed online, especially during the covid lockdown when all we had was online, so social media seemed representative." Was it crazy to rename master to main, blacklist to blocklist? Which cancellations and witchhunts were actually crazy? Was it crazy to insist on capitalizing Black, but not white? We'll never know. "Some mistakes were made". Which ones? (What I listed are obviously the surface presentations of much deeper assumptions, which certainly haven't been rethought, so even just removing the frivolous annoying useless stuff like the Orwellian language redesign won't address the core issues. The true reversal would be around a re-evaluation of the oppressor-oppressed axes and the woke interpretation of history, gender relations, race relations, the eternal crimes of cishet white men etc.)
How did we go from "there is no such thing as 'woke', it's just a conservative invention, there is only basic human decency" to "Woke 1" (who even invented this term? First time I'm hearing it) having been bad. Presumably implying there is "Woke 2" in the making which will be non-crazy.
Also as just one example: has Wikipedia been un-woked? If woke has been defeated?
Nope. The article for Kiwi Farms is still full of blatant lies.
It was a rhetorical question. Nothing has been willingly reversed or retreated from where the cultural power of the left is still intact. The only things where some reversal may have happened (but mostly just a reversal of the first derivative) is stuff under government control under Trump. I don't see anything else. Where Trump isn't president, e.g. in Western Europe, woke is still on the upswing.
The other big reversal is X/Twitter, because Elon.
And they reacted by making a new site (Bluesky) in an attempt to usurp X as the dominant conversation site. Thankfully it seems rather irrelevant and subject to a form of evaporative cooling that results in it being an echo chamber for crazy beliefs.
The other, bigger deal is that you can bet they won't let something like Twitter be taken over by someone like Musk ever again. I'm suspect that The Onion wanting to take over Infowars was a sort of ironic retribution for Twitter. "You take over my site, then I take over yours, and fair's fair."
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