Core tenet of anti-wokism: one must acknowledge/ pay lip service to the notion of racism and other social issues, but one must not permit any further exploration of said issue.
One interesting subtext to where tech philosophy is landing in all this is that it will be the downfalll of America if woke ideas are promoted, and it will similarly be the downfall of America if racists/sexists/etc can’t practice free speech.
Do you really believe this? It seems inconsistent with free speech and Paul Graham’s own definition of wokeness.
What other ideologies fall in this category? Or another way, what ideologies don’t fall under the category of free speech? Should we stop advertisements with gay people? All religions or just non-Christian religions? What makes an ideology woke? That the mainstream is uncomfortable with it?
It is, because why else would they deliberately pick a trans person, and moreover one who goes out of the way to make a big deal out of being trans[1], to sell beer to a demographic that's very very unlikely to be receptive to it? Wokeness is the only explanation left.
[1] There are plenty of trans people who just want to live as their desired gender, and no one would even give them a second glance.
They were trying to sell beer to the demographic that likes Dylan Mulvaney. None of the existing consumers of Bud Light were affected by the campaign until right-wing activists started promoting a boycott.
They didn't run a national campaign with Mulvaney in a swimsuit drinking Bud Light, they didn't put her on the cans, they didn't do anything but do a promotion on her channel.
Dylan was definitely on the cans. The demographic that drinks Bud Light that likes Dylan was definitely a minority as the overwhelming majority of its loyal consumers rejected it overnight.
I think its lazy to blame politics for a failed marketing campaign by creating some vilifying your own consumer base. We see the same pattern playing out in all aspects of products that have gone woke, games serving as the most recent example.
We live in a capitalist society and consumers will vote with their money and they cannot be forced to buy a product because the media and special interest groups decide to vilify and defame them publicly. This might work in a communist country but even then the effects are short lived.
Dylan was on the one can that Bud sent her, not publicly sold cans. They did similar promotions with other influencers. The reason this one struck a chord is that right-wing agitators found it a useful way to polarise and confuse the discourse.
She was definitely on the boxes and promotion materials, are you under the impression that forcefully inserting LGBTQ on people who didn't ask for it achieves the complete opposite of tolerance which the people pushing for it intends?
Are you also aware the negative impact of putting images of someone that the customer base does not identify with or find beautiful influencing sales in a capitalist environment?
> She was definitely on the boxes and promotion materials
Have you got any proof of this? Everything I've read about it says it was just a single can sent for her to promote in a single video. Your argument hinges strongly on this claim, since a single can in a video is hard to square with "pushing woke ideology".
I find this line of thought challenging, because it reminds me of what people were saying about homosexuals in the 80s and 90s. Things like "gays are fine as long as they don't kiss in public" and "I don't understand why they have to parade around in these festivals". I'm not sure what's different about transgender people in our generation.
Is it possible in your opinion to publicly support trans rights and not be woke?
Thing is, it's a test of obedience to woke dogma. You're expected to ignore the man you see before you, and proclaim that he's a woman. Even if you don't believe it, which most do not.
This is apparently the polite thing to do. But using "preferred pronouns" is not courtesy, it's conditioning.
"Trans rights" is fundamentally about compelling people to participate in a lie.
I wouldn't describe it as a "lie" so much as challenging the socially prescribed link between sex and gender. Trans people know they're biologically male, and they know you probably know it. But they're challenging the social expectations that get associated with that.
The same analogy can again be drawn with homosexuality. 100 years ago, many people believed that it was a biological fact that men preferred women and vice versa. To hear a man proclaiming that he prefers men, or a women proclaiming she prefers women, sounded to them like a lie. But as society progresses, social norms tend to relax. In fact there are people to this day who cannot quite accept the idea that homosexuals might genuinely exist. To such people, seeing a gay couple kissing feels like being expected to ignore a biological fact.
One difference is that dressing up with blackface and watermelon are historically ways in which white people have humiliated and oppressed black people. I don't think you can say the same for cross-dressing.
Another difference is that Dylan Mulvaney is actually living as a woman in their everyday life.
The crux of the problem is that the parent believes that putting a trans "woman" on a product that is intended for people who never asked for it is supposed to spread tolerance and acceptance.
The parent's view is that it is the fault of the consumer that voted against such imagery because they do not identify with its messaging because they were "nazis"
Yet seems oblivious to the fact that if it was done on to their favorite product, they would react in the exact similar manner. For instance, trying to stop the sales of a game which depicts women in a voluptuous manner, purposefully making them more "butch" because it offends a small group of people.
This is the exact issue that we recognize as wokeness that someone on the far left is incapable of tolerating. So the issue is always one side wants to force tolerance by forceful means, the other just wants to be left alone and leave it to individual tolerance.
The collective brute force method has completely backfired yet this still does not register in the mind of those that still think indoctrinating, forcing ideology on to people is going to lead to more tolerance.
“wokeness” is the current right-wing dysphemism for “not being a raging bigot against the groups the Right demands be targeted with bigotry”, and, when understood that way, it is clear that this is at least “venturing into bigotry”, and understandable how it could be “too far” from a particular speaker’s perspective.
Yes. Ultimately I'm attempting to show up the underhand meaning of the term "woke"; the definition given towards the start of Graham's essay is distinct from the way it's being applied here and later in the same essay.
It's important because conservatives will use different definitions to support different aspects of their arguments. For example, when woke means "performative and meaningless", then you can argue that it's malicious. However, when woke means "doesn't fully reject progressive causes", then you can argue that it's widespread.
Some people compare wokeness to a religion, and I think this is somewhat of an apt description. There’s a meme going around about abortion or whatever that says that it’s fine if you’re religious and you want to limit yourself, but your religion shouldn’t limit me, and this is how I feel about most social justice stuff.
I read woke/social justice stuff to shape my own understanding of the world and then use that to act to help people in substantive ways, but I don’t really believe in proselytizing. This way of thinking is not for everyone, nor should it be.
> There’s a meme going around about abortion or whatever that says that it’s fine if you’re religious and you want to limit yourself, but your religion shouldn’t limit me
It's interesting that you bring this up, because I know quite a few people who are not religious (agnostic or atheist), one of whom is myself, who still believe that abortion is, if not actual murder, at least tantamount to it, and should not be done except in extreme cases (what exactly counts as an "extreme case" can vary, but the point is that "getting pregnant because of consensual sex that unexpectedly resulted in a pregnancy, and having an abortion to avoid the inconvenience of a pregnancy and then putting the child up for adoption" is not an extreme case). I can't speak to other people's detailed grounds for this belief, but in my own case, I believe that, at some point fairly early in the development of an embryo/fetus (in an online discussion on another forum some years ago I argued that that point was implantation; another such point that was argued by, IIRC, Carl Sagan, is when the fetus first shows brain activity), the embryo/fetus has interests that deserve protection in much the same way that the interests of a very young child who can't yet recognize their own interests or take action to protect them on their own deserve protection.
In other words, I don't buy the argument made by at least a fair number of pro-abortion people that it's all about the woman's control over her own body and no other interest deserves to be weighed. I think there are reasons that even a rationalist humanist should accept, or at least give strong consideration to, for rejecting such an argument.
I'm not trying to argue for such a point of view here; I'm simply describing it to illustrate that I don't think all such disagreements can be boiled down to religious belief. There can be arguments based on considerations that are much more general, to the point where they at least have a claim to be considered by anyone who wants to be a good member of a civil society.
I don’t disagree with his definition, not disagree that it’s a problem, but it’s still feels a bit to anti-Wokey in that he calls out things that he just disagrees with. #metoo brought down some terrible people who did terrible things, I don’t think you should call metoo in and of itself woke, not overly moralistic to be mad about sexual assault, there should be some nuance there.
He also calls Bud Light woke for… acknowledging the existence of a trans woman? Again not excessively moralistic to reach out to a constituency he happens to not like.
Harvey Weinstein preyed on people. Louis CK consensually engaged in his kink with people who later said they didn't mean to consent but were embarrassed because they wanted to curry his favor. Aziz Ansari went on a bad date, and she gossiped to someone who wanted to write a hit piece.
PG says wokeness peaked with George Floyd. Surely there was priggish stupidity that came from Black Lives Matter (like banning "blacklist" as if it had racial connotations), but what happened to George Floyd was legitimately fucked up.
I'm looking forward to a day when these ideas can be openly discussed. It's not that everything done in the name of woke was bad, it's that wokeness is a dogma that silences discussion. People whisper in cafeterias "hey, can I tell you what I really think," but nobody wants to say "the emperor has no clothes" when your wellbeing depends on it. In the last decade in tech, part of your job was paying lip service to inclusivity. If you date in SF or NY, you'll notice a bonkers number of people still signal a trendy virtue in their profiles, usually BLM/ACAB or Free Palestine/watermelon.
If people worry that they can't keep a job or be invited to a social gathering or find a mate if they question the dogma, you'll end up with a bunch of people performing for the dogma, because they need access to those essentials.
> If people worry that they can't keep a job or be invited to a social gathering or find a mate if they question the dogma
And who, exactly, do you think will have to worry about being stigmatized for their beliefs in the next four years? Who will be threatening them, making laws that violate their rights, pointing guns at them? Anyone who spends their time complaining about the targets of such suppression, as though they don't have rights of free speech or association, is doing a bit of dogma enforcement themselves.
It's not that Floyd was a criminal. Garner was too though perhaps you can nitpick about degrees. It's a difference in how they were killed. The police were called on Floyd (for questionable reasons, but reasons nonetheless) whereas the police initiated contact with Garner on the basis that he wasn't giving their employer its fair cut. Floyd was killed by a rouge-ish cop who's partner didn't intervene and the system failed to hold accountable. Garner, was killed by multiple cops working together because he didn't just bend over and take it when they confronted him over a victimless crime, basically a summary execution over contempt of cop, and the institutions the cops report to thought this was fine and dandy, until people started protesting.
Yeah, that's just nuts. Let's be very specific: the issue was that Bud Light hired Dylan Mulvaney to do a social media promotion. It's not as if Dylan's face was on beer cans available in stores or anything. And this simple act caused a massive backlash. I would think that this might raise some questions about who exactly the prigs were in this instance.
So if you, in good faith, believe a behavior is oppressive, it's not priggish to take a stand against it? That would also demolish PG's entire argument.
The events that PG chooses to paint as woke say a lot about what he really thinks. By the end, I was convinced he was truly against consequences. Cries for justice should be ignored. If a lynch mob isn't being a formed, then everyone should just shut up.
I wonder if another reason for tech’s move right is more boring and traditional:
They're old.
They’re approaching middle age, the insights that they uniquely held are no longer relevant and they want to preserve their wealth and power from a new generation of thinkers who will want to take it away.
The challenge is that the better AI gets at coding the lower the barrier to entry, so being an I indie dev will be like being on YouTube. Anyone with dedication could post 300 videos a year and get thousands or tens of thousands of views, but making money? That will get harder.
I think a big question is what outcomes do you want. Let’s say a vaccine is dangerous. How many people are you willing to sacrifice on the misinformation. What if it leads to social upheaval? You could ask similar questions about say, class consciousness, immigration etc. true or not, beliefs have consequences.
But in any cases, it is not the facts, but narratives and manipulators who drive people's behaviour. There is competition between left and right propaganda machines, it happens among intellectuals working for the elite, not between the left vs right masses, masses are just that: masses, they have no conscious and no behaviour of their own, they are a product of manipulation.
I watched this debate between Destiny and a centrist influencer and the centrist influencer was really confident in their perspectives, but also said they mostly used heuristics to learn things. There’s nothing wrong with heuristics, but they played this game where Destiny tried to guess the centrist influencers perspectives on things, and came pretty close to all the opinions. And the influencer admitted their heuristics were really shallow.
One of the weirdest things I’m reckoning with is that objectivity isn’t optimal. That you’ll be most successful based on a relative positioning of beliefs (either towards or against a given common perspective) rather than being “objective” in most areas.
I suspect actually if you want to shape public opinion you do what Twitter and Meta are probably doing by the scenes, put your thumb on the scales around what goes viral. Which is much more terrifying than “fact checking”
The people who put the thumbs on the scales are subject to the same bias and relative positioning of their beliefs. Whatever the issue is with the average person sorting through information will also affect the authorities and experts. Maybe not as much, however when it does happen because they have more control it tends to be more impactful.
So in the end it amounts to the same difference, average people will believe wrong things often with little impact, experts will believe wrong things rarely with lots of impact. Additionally, it's not like experts or authorities cannot contribute, they would just be on a more equal footing and would need to do more work than in a situation where there is censorship or control of information.
One interesting subtext to where tech philosophy is landing in all this is that it will be the downfalll of America if woke ideas are promoted, and it will similarly be the downfall of America if racists/sexists/etc can’t practice free speech.