I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people.
As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
and then on the other side it feels like the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that.
At least that’s what I’ve noticed online over the past few (bonkers) years
“Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
The trouble with this is that a groups idea of the “enemy” typically outlasts and often surpasses the actual enemy that idea is based off of. People on the right will write endless articles and videos about wokeness not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group.
> Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.
The trouble is that many people have decided that if you discuss "wokeness" and especially if you have a problem with some element of it, that means you're no longer on "the left".
Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.".
When a lot of this was heating up during the pandemic, I encountered two very different kinds of people.
1. Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc)
2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes
It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy.
> not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group
The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture. I think acknowledging the existence of bad faith actors and "morality police" would do more for advancing the underlying ideas often labeled "woke" than trying to focus on the fakeness of the problem.
Maybe that group is made up of squeaky wheels, but their existence is used to justify the "anti-woke" sentiment that many people push.
For me, this boils down to a tactics issue where people are behaving badly and distracting from real issues - often issues those same people claim to care about.
Sounds exhausting to live with a perceived boogeyman of problems versus seeking real problems.
Personally, I am surprised. This is a pretty unique article from a usually articulate thinker that leaves out significant details like: (1) the term originated by folks who recognize there can be structural inequality embedded in policy which, for some inequalities, has been described as structural racism since the 1970s; (2) the term got hijacked by political propaganda machines to circumspectly throw out working policies and other elements of progressive political points in the retrenchment regarding the term.
There really isn't any more detail to be had unless to sanewash the political propaganda's claims.
Another interesting perspective on this idea:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiede...
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
It was not just a small group of people. Almost all progressive Democratic politicians started working that word into all their speeches to virtue signal and most centrists also fell in line too. CEOs started saying it in company meetings and we were subjected to HR trainings that noted we should say LatinX to be inclusive of trans people, among many other performative rules.
I find it quite interesting that pg's article is so extensively uncurious and disdainful. He openly sneers at the topic he intends to explain, and tirelessly lays into a straw man (the FoxNews definition of woke) rather than the strongest interpretation (what you're doing here). Several commenters here have asked why his article has been flagged, and I must say that if it was posted as a comment, it should certainly be flagged because of its flagrant violations of the site guidelines.
I certainly wouldn't be inclined to call him a prig, but he's certainly set himself up for exactly that denunciation with his specific framing of the conversation.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
You speak about it in the past tense but it's still very much a real thing. Just last week I was listening to an Ed Zitron podcast and one of the (many, many) ads was for a podcast that featured "latinX voices".
> By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
I wish there was a book or website with such patterns and examples written down for all.
It takes a certain linguistic skill to convey the sleight of hand in display in such maneuvers. But once you're grasped it, you can easily spot it and almost predict what the next set of actions is going to be.
As an aside this applies to a wide variety of places like corporate settings, negotiations, sales meetings, city council meetings to mention a few so its generally useful to know.
It's the ultimate irony that this post is doing the exact same thing it is accusing another group of, with the only distinction being that there is no "term" attached to it.
I suppose the US politics have gone so bonkers that the left actually uses the term "conservative right" pejoratively in the same way that the right uses "woke" to describe the left.
In which case this scenario is so childishly insane that the only sane choice is to reject it all outright and focus inward.
The left doesn’t talk about “wokeness” but it certainly does talk about the individual policies that fall under that rubric. The right uses the label “woke” for the same reason the left uses the term “capitalism.” There’s a bunch of ideas and policies that stem from similar ideological premises and it’s perfectly fine to group them together under labels.
For example, Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC. There’s also race conscious hiring and promotion decisions. They are all ideologically related and add up to something quite significant.
It can be a boogeyman but it also a generic term for a bunch of different phenomena that are connected through the way they are brought up, which is mostly very paternalistic.
In some cases people tried to change or police language, mostly around the topic of gender, but it isn't restricted to that. In some countries that use "gendered" languages there were aspirations to change language to be more inclusive, with the indirect accusation that common language cannot be so. That reaches from Latinx to trying to remove any form of gendered language, a culmination of sexual and grammatical gender.
Many just saw this as a vanity project, but even language changes in some official capacity persists. Again, these isn't agreed upon language, it was paternalistically described for people to be better, allegedly.
Of course the worst aspects get the spotlight, but that isn't unusual in todays exchanges on social media.
There is also another factor of "woke" and that is where it behaves pretty similar to the "far right". These are both nebulous terms for that matter, but both promote policies that a summarized as "identity politics". Another volatile term, but I believe there is a strong connection here.
Still, just as people point to the woke excesses as being representative, the same is happening with criticism towards some of its goals and tenets.
Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend.
"Troll" is another one. It used to mean a person who posted a contentious comment that they knew would invoke a flame war so that they could sit back and wait to see who "bit." It came from fishing. These days it can just mean someone who is rude on the Internet.
You're not wrong, the "opposition" did take the word and run with it for their own use. No dispute there.
But let's not pretend that this is a conservative vs progressive thing. On the partisan isle I'm "neither." But when someone uses the word "woke", in conversation, I usually know exactly what they're getting at. And I hear it from left-leaning friends and right-leaning alike.
It's a short-cut umbrella term to mean an amalgamation of a) moral busybodies b) purity spirals c) cancel culture d) some bizarre racist philosophy that markets itself as anti-racist (critical race theory) and e) an extreme version of political correctness.
I'm not arguing whether or not left-wingers are (or aren't) using it themselves in serious conversation. Only that, colloquially, I've only encountered confusion about what it means in Internet forum discussions with like-minded nerds, such as this one. The average person I talk to has little difficulty.
And maybe that definition was shaped, wholly or in part, by the conservatives making it out to be a boogeyman. Even if so, and even if it was an unfair hijack and it's appropriate to hate on them for doing so, it doesn't change how people interpret the word in casual conversation today.
"Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum."
Yes this is very common on the left too. Really common actually.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
There are left-wing critics of "Woke", see for example the African-American Marxist Adolph L Reed Jr – https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokenin...
If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman
Or, consider that the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International published a review of the sitcom Abbott Elementary, which includes the line "In fact, in its treatment of Jacob’s wokeness, Abbott Elementary refreshingly mocks the suffocating trend of racialism in American culture" – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/01/abbo-m01.html
Similarly, read their review of John McWhorter's Woke Racism – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/14/ihjm-j14.html – in which they largely express agreement with his criticisms of the progressive "woke" ideology, but simultaneously condemn him for making those criticisms from a pro-capitalist instead of anti-capitalist perspective
And see the socialist publication Jacobin's approving review of the philosopher Susan Neiman's book Left Is Not Woke, which attacks "wokeness" from an explicitly left-wing perspective: https://jacobin.com/2024/07/wokeness-left-ideology-neiman-re...
From what I've observed, "woke" is just the latest pejorative used by the American political right. Before woke, there was "PC", "SJW", and I'm sure others that were before my time. Before too long, woke will dry up and get replaced with the next term that's broadly used in the same way.
The biggest difference that I've noticed with "woke" is that it seems to have made its way outside of online culture and into the real world, so it's possible that it will have more staying power.
If you tried to steelman woke, what would fall under it?
Kamala Harris: "Stay woke"[0][1]
Even Obama is not a fan of "woke" culture and calls it out for the hollow vapid gotcha politics that it is: https://youtu.be/qaHLd8de6nM
You don't meet many christian who say they love being religious, love feeling religious, and doing religious things.
They say they love god and his spirit.
Woke is correct, it'a just not the word you want me to use.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
Even if true, so what? People are still pushing it.
I am from Europe and from my point of view there ís really a wokeness problem in the US. The US is on average far more right wing mostly in the capitalistic sense than Europe. But it's difficult to talk to people from the US for me because anything might and will offend them at the blink of an eye. These things like trigger warnings and things. I'm always afraid I could be cancelled at any moment when talking to somebody from the US.
I don't think it's really a left-right wing thing because Europe is in general 90% left wing from a US standpoint, and we don't have it.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
As someone who most folks would indentify as “liberal”, I use this term to describe a very small but vocal group of so-called progressives who are a problem for the liberal cause writ large.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
This is a prime example. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been indignantly corrected by so-called progressives when speaking about “Latine” — note that this term is what many/most Spanish speakers (at least ones who aren’t eyeballs deep in “woke” circles) are more likely to use when they don’t want to use “Latino”.
Latinx is one of those white liberal made-up things (of many), and the language police enforcement is off-putting and shows an incredible lack boundaries.
“Woke” ideals resonate well with a narrow group of “progressives”/liberals, but the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public, including but definitely not limited to conservative extremists.
If you want to see some realpolitik on this issue, note how AOC learned (via Pelosi) to get in line with votes and messaging when it mattered even while endorsing progressive/liberal/woke ideologies.
>a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left.
The movements exist and they demonstrably stem from a common ideology
Naming a political tendency is not making a "boogeyman" out of it.
>The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
Here's CNN Business casually repeatedly using the term in 2021: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/business/netflix-diversit...
More generally, the point is that there is something to "fight against", which is causing real harm, including to people I know personally.
For example, it's fundamentally behind the idea that Tim Peters somehow "used potentially offensive language or slurs" by literally writing "XXXX" to censor a word and then providing context to enable people to figure out what word he had in mind, because it was relevant to the conversation. (I know that this was ideological because they do this for the word "slut", but not e.g. for "shit" or "fuck".)
Or the idea that he "made light of sensitive topics like workplace sexual harassment" by... claiming that workers sometimes get "training" because a higher-up did something bad. (Or the idea that "making light of a sensitive topic" is even bad in the first place.)
Or the entire bit about "reverse racism and reverse sexism" as explained at https://tim-one.github.io/psf/silly . (Incidentally, Tim, if you're reading: you cede too much ground here. "Racism" isn't a term that activists get to define. Discrimination is discrimination, and it's morally wrong in and of itself; injustice in the surrounding social conditions simply doesn't bear on that.)
It's also responsible for the fact that prominent members of the Python community are still making hay about the supposed mistreatment of Adria Richards - who, as a reminder, eavesdropped on a conversation in order to take offense to it and then went directly to social media to complain because a couple of other people were being unprofessional (although mutually completely comfortable with their conversation).
And it's behind the entire fracas around the removal of the endorsement of Strunk and White as an English style guide from PEP 8, as a supposed "relic of white supremacy". (There are public mailing list archives. I have kept many bookmarks and have quite a bit of detailed critique that wouldn't fit in the margins here. But here's just one example of the standard playbook: https://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev@python.org/msg108879... )
Outside of Python it's also fundamentally behind the plain misreading of James Damore's inoffensive and entirely reasonable takes, and his subsequent tarring and feathering. To cite just one example that sticks in my head.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses
Yes, it is an ingenious sort of strawman.
In its prior usage, to be "woke" meant to be informed, alert, and to resist being bullied or easily duped into relinquishing one's rights to object, to defend oneself, and to dissent.
In this sense -- I note with some irony -- Jordan Peterson was "woke" when he would not allow his students to coerce him into using terms of address that he rejected.
Now the usage on the "Right" in US politics in particular uses "woke" to mean hypocritical or superficial assertions, positions, and policies that serve a dubious objective or prove to have no foundation in facts -- especially if these are the opponents' views.
Flinging these accusations of hypocrisy and delusional policy-making has become more important than defending democracy itself. Herein lies the masterstroke of the messaging. Using the term "woke" to attack supposedly "woke" opponents has become a memetic (viral) behaviour that has completely devoured political and public discourse.
I have a good enough reason to call those people “woke” instead of calling them “people who believe in a cultural approach that seeks to identify and rectify invisible social inequalities based on genetic attributes like race, sex, and sexual orientation by challenging existing power structures and implementing corrective measures. “
It’s easier.
[dead]
[flagged]
The behaviors labeled as wokeness have been essentially dominant on the left for a long time though. “End whiteness” is a good example of woke rhetoric and that term was shouted for years
It's not a boogeyman and there are many liberals who have been raising the alarm for years about the dangerously illiberal and authoritarian nature of this new religion.
Not just PG, also Sam Harris, Bill Maher, JK Rowling, Richard Dawkins, and millions of lesser known liberals. Most of whom were and are still too afraid to say anything.
The left put everything under the lens of oppressor vs oppressed. That's the idea that disgusts lots of moderates. The idea came from Leninism, but nonetheless is considered woke as fuck. So, no it's not necessarily a boogeyman, unless you throw out anything you don't like from the bucket of woke (and vice versa).
Oh, CRT is also woke as fuck, unless you believe it's the right framework.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
I agree that the number of proponents of something like "LatinX", or "biological males playing women's sports" are far, far outnumbered by the people who aren't supporters of those things. But the issue is that the people who are supporters tend to be extremely vocal and generally in positions of power or better able to influence those who are, whether thats in corporate or academic administration settings. As such the small number of "woke" individuals are having outsized effects on society and culture, and the backlash is in response to the magnitude of that influence, rather than the number of people pushing for it.
You're right. It's really lazy to use the term at this point as there isn't a shared meaning assigned to it. It's mostly used as a pejorative by the right at this point, but it's original meaning was very different and indicated a positive attribute. Whenever I'm in a conversation with someone who uses the word, I stop them and ask them to define what they're talking about. Usually they end up with something vague that boils down to "stuff I don't like".
You are dismissing the issue by implying it is a right wing thing.
Obama is using the term and criticising people who do it in this clip. I in no way consider him to be right wing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM
I liked PG's attempts to define the perjorative form of "wokeness". I was disappointed that the rest of the essay didn't serve the discourse much.
What I was really hoping for was focused analysis on how to make social media more useful to the earnest helpers instead of the "loud prigs". That would have made for an interesting discussion here.
Just because "you know it when you see it" doesn't mean you don't understand it or don't have something coherent in mind.
As a non-american, reading the definition of woke I dont know what to think
If woke means progressive and politically conscious then the opposite is what, uninformed,thoughtless.
So people say they rather be ignorant than conscious?
Sometimes I think people are not actually fully conscious and tend to behave like primitive animals and they are hating everything because reverting to hate is a primitive animalistic trait that requires little thinking or consciousness.
Or its a racist thing because woke has roots in black culture?
I would advise you to ignore yapyap's definitions.
Paul Graham has defined woke in the best way I have read so far, and it is in the article we are discussing about:
Woke: An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
(Performed by a self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.)
Originally, people meant that you were inclusive and caring about all people. Except, you know, those hateful people on the right. Because fuck them. (I'm not even kidding. This is how they really felt, somehow.)
But then "the right" got ahold of the term and used it to mean the people above who went above and beyond and were actually being harmful instead of helpful, in the name of "being woke".
Personally, I think the pejorative term is a lot more accurate, especially for most people who consider themselves "woke". They drink their own koolaid and believe what they're doing is helpful, and can't see the divide that they are causing.
Of course, there are a ton of trolls (who are also probably on "the right") that use it to cause the divide as well.
So in the end, it ends up just being a way for jerks on both sides to rile each other up, instead of actually helping anyone.
> i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
Ok, I'll bite. What is having empathy for the homeless? Is allowing unconstrained immigration to increase competition for entry-level positions empathy? What about restrictions on construction that make housing completely unaffordable? Is that empathy? Is leaving the drug-addicted portion of the homeless out on the street to battle their addictions on their own empathy[1]?
Saying nice words (not having disdain) is not the same thing as helping someone.
[1] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-call-that-compassio...
While "Empathy for the homeless" can situationally mean talking nicely about them, it also means stopping, blocking, and undoing directly terrible actions against the homeless.
Bulldozing peoples' stuff is in fact pretty bad. Having laws against giving money to people is in fact pretty bad. Putting hostile architecture everywhere is in fact pretty bad. People make decisions, over and over again, to not just hurt homeless people, but also hurt the people trying to help homeless people.
Stopping people from doing that is called "empathy for the homeless". It's called that because saying and feeling bad things about people is part of the process of hurting them. It's how people agree who is and isn't okay to hurt. By stopping group efforts to make things worse, you only have to worry about random individuals trying to make things worse for other random individuals. Which is unstoppable but untargeted.
> Ok, I'll bite. What is having empathy for the homeless?
Let's start by changing how we think about housing and shelter from an investment to basic rights.
Or maybe stop criminalizing being poor.
> Is allowing unconstrained immigration to increase competition for entry-level positions empathy?
That's not a thing.
>What about restrictions on construction that make housing completely unaffordable?
Which ones? Some like quality and safety standards add cost short term but save long term.
However SFH rules hurt density, and cause grater strain on infrastructure and resources, while also driving up costs.
> Is leaving the drug-addicted portion of the homeless out on the street to battle their addictions on their own empathy[1]?
Medical safe injection sites could be part of the solution. But this requires thinking beyond "drugs are bad mkay"
Investing in diversion and rehab is another good use of resources.
> Saying nice words (not having disdain) is not the same thing as helping someone.
But if you can't even say nice words, your brain is so broken that you look at the unhoused with fear or contempt, how will you ever support investment in those same people?
I am very sympathetic to the idea that some harm-reduction policies do more to enable drug addiction among the homeless than help them.
But the immigration stuff is just right-wing nonsense. a) We don't have anything like unrestrained immigration, that's propaganda. Obama and Biden both deported more people than any other presidents in history to that point (https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-deportation-re..., https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-nu...). And b) the percentage of homeless who might compete with a Honduran immigrant for a day-laborer job is a tiny sliver.
The irony of all of this is that if you boil down the concept of 'wokeness' to simply looking past the status quo, then a lot of the things that are currently labelled 'woke' are in fact anything but. It transcends the political spectrum and simply becomes a cudgel for shit you don't like but can't explain why.
Gay marriage? It's legal, therefore status quo. Making gay marriage illegal again? Not status quo, therefore woke.
Abortion? If it's legal and you want to make it illegal, that's also changing the status quo. Woke.
Immigration? Status quo is to hire employees who are citizens or resident. Laying them off in favour of H1B workers? Woke AF.
Roe v Wade and the Chevron Doctrine? Those were status quo for decades! How woke of the Supreme Court to reverse those decisions after so many years.
Of course in each of these cases the policy is actually regressive as it reverts society back to the point before the original policies were implemented, and to that extent the argument falls apart: none of that actually seems 'woke'. Except...the people who agree with all of the above would see it as progressive towards their own aims, so it pretty much is 'woke' for them, especially as they believe their own morals to be superior (and traditionally backed by religion).
>that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
If you're going to be reductive with someone's argument, at least use the entire argument.
If we do, IDK how you can say woke is just oppositional positions when that wasn't the idea OP proposed.
"Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep. Not really a statement about your own behavior so much as an acknowledgement of what other people are doing to you—it just meant you're well-informed.
Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."
Generally the reaction is not to minorities(non-white, is what I am assuming you mean) but to people from outside of a group trying to tell a group what words to use i.e. LatinX.
An aside: If someone who is white is talking to the Spanish speaking community, would they be considered a minority? If so, then the parent premise would hold true.
> "Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep.
This is distorted history. "Woke" is just the word in a bunch of black dialects for "awake." We just say "are you woke?" instead of "are you awake?"
What happened is at some point some white woman somewhere had a black person explaining their political beliefs to her. It was likely a black person who was working for her (doing her nails, washing her clothes, or serving her food) who she had a faux friendship with and considered a spiritual guru and a connection to the real world and real suffering, in that way white people do (magical negro.) She carried these pearls of wisdom to her white friends, or to her students at the university, or to the nonprofit that she worked at, and it entered into the white lexicon as a magic word.
If a white hippie, in the middle of a righteous rant, said "you've got to stay awake, man..." as many have, it wouldn't have been so exotic and interesting to tell their white friends. Or as useful to get yourself a job as a consultant.
At that point, it became a thing that white people would use to abuse other white people as racists. The sin wasn't calling white people racists, it's that a certain self-selected white elect declared themselves to be not racist, or even anti-racist, in order to attack other white people. And they decided this gave them the right to control how other white people speak. And a government who hates the way people can talk to each other on the internet about what the government is lying about supported them whole-heartedly. Woke policing was an excellent way to use legal means to keep people asleep.
And black people got blamed, as always. Because America is racist. Black people didn't benefit an iota from any of this. Approximately 0.0% of DEI managers are black men. Black people got poorer during the entire period. Now the anti-woke are going to unleash their revenge on black people, and the ex-woke are going to resent black people for not recognizing their sainthood.
> Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."
Meanwhile, the first step of wokeness was to erase black people altogether and replace them with "minorities" and "people of color," as if the only thing important to note about black people is their lack of whiteness. Or, since sexual minorities are included in "minorities", black people now have no problems that can be distinguished from the desires of white upper-middle class transwomen. Wokeness erased slavery and Jim Crow, and all that money that white people inherit, just as much as anti-wokeness did. Now the real crime was that white people weren't feeling the right things, and weren't saying the right things. Complete Caucasian auto-fixation.
The only thing racial about black people's problems is that white people used race as the criterion to enslave. Slavery and Jim Crow were the point, and all of the freebies handed from government to people's white ancestors that weren't given to slaves and ex-slaves, and all of the labor and torture visited on slaves and ex-slaves turned into profit that went into the pockets of white people and was taxed into government coffers. There were blond-haired blue-eyed slaves; the "race" stuff is a white invention, not something they get to act like is an imposition from their ex-property. And that experience is not something that everybody non-white or non-straight gets to steal.
[flagged]
When you’re woke, it’s bad.
But when you’re red-pilled, it’s apparently good?
One thing I wanted to point out: I’ve seen a lot of people on HN and elsewhere allege that moderates or the “right” (in quotes because it is overused as a pejorative label) cannot define what “woke” is. But I disagree, and think most people who complain against this term can easily point to what ideas it represents, and what it means to them. Even if that is not very precise, it is real and meaningful. Enough so that they can find common ground with other people who use the word, even if they aren’t exact matches. The accusation that people can’t define it is itself a tactic meant to undermine the credibility of complaints against it. But is it really any less imprecise than people using broad labels of other kinds (things like liberal or conservative)?
I'd say it's hard to give a clear-cut, very specific definition of the word. It's also really hard to believe that people can't figure out the meaning given context and such.
It is by no means whatsoever a less defined term than "fascist" and the semantic problem seems missing there.
I agree. Wokeness has a very precise meaning: World is divided between oppressors and oppressed. Oppressors are white heterosexual men (white supremacy / heteropatriarchy) everyone else subjugated to them. Institutions, laws are created to perpetuate that power and must be dismantled / subverted via revolution.
Most understand it even if they can’t articulate a definition. Easy to point out when a movie or corporate initiative, behavior is woke.
> I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people.
Before that it was "social justice warrior", before that it was "political correctness". It's just a drumbeat of demonization.
https://theonion.com/woke-conservatives-define-what-it-means...
My favourite is number 5.
Woke in is when you don't play there games. Don't wanna join them beating up whoever is at the wrong end of the stick ? Woke.
See a observed phenomena as a result of complex socioeconomic circumstances instead of making a deliriously stupid absolute statements? Woke.
Defend a person that is weaker than you , has a different gender or skin color? Woke.
They are fucking bullies and if you are simple a decent, considerate person your behavior points that out . And like all bullies they hate that.
Well said.
I've long believed that racism, sexism, homophobia are basically forms of bullying. All are antisocial behavior and quite bad for society. I endured near constant bullying for a lot of my early life, as well as sporadic racism.
When I hear the word woke, I think about people who are against this kind of behavior whether its conducted by an individual, a company, a society, or a government. But all the time I wish that people would just call it what is is: bullying.
It would be much more effective than calling people racist or homophobic or sexist.
> the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that
CPG Grey’s co-dependent memes video comes to mind [1].
Each group defines wokeness (and defines how other groups define it) to maximise outrage. To the extent there is a mind virus it’s in using the term at all. (Which is where I appreciate Graham bringing the term prig into the discussion.)
Sadly, this is where we are in politics. Pick any term that you like to replace the concept and a rival campaign to redefine it will begin. Your vocabulary is just another battleground.
> not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead
[4] The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
Treating people with respect can sometimes mean learning enough about them to understand a little about what life is like in their shoes. There are a lot of different kinds of people wearing a lot of shoes. Learning about them is a lifelong process. It’s not about learning “a long list of rules” but more “learning about a lot of kinds of people and their experiences.”
There are many things on which I don’t agree with pg. But I feel he is accurate with describing wokeness as the term is commonly used currently. He doesn’t go into the history of the word in this essay.
You certainly don't use it to mean "those crazy people who are pro interacial marriage" but some do. The woke people supporting trans rights almost certainly don't support macho man randy savage chucking on a dress and that same day competing in the olympics but the characture that supports it is part of the woke mob.
People scoff and think of course I know what woke means, because the people the people they talk to/media they consume have the word at roughly the same level of meaning, not internalising the next more or less extreme group that isn't in their social circle include more or less in the meaning.
These days the word woke might as well serve the same purpose as "If by scotsman..." in that no one will disagree with you unless you get into specifics.
Insightful comment. While some of wokeness involves performative aspects like PG mentioned, it also seems to involve a genuine increase in awareness about injustice, and a desire to do something about it- which is much needed. I’m concerned that this desire to “end wokeness” will throw the baby out with the bathwater, and end us in a situation where it becomes taboo to point out or do anything about injustice.
It’s insane that PG seems to think racism isn’t a very big problem- hard to imagine he is living on the same planet I am.
Idk, he spent a good chunk of the blog post saying that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater
I see it as a clash between people who are instinctually inclined towards philosophical nominalism (woke) and people who are instinctually inclined towards realism (not-woke). Dr. Nathan A. Jacobs lays out the details and the arguments for this way of defining our current culture war here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVmPIMg4St4
Anyone using the term woke in 2025 is using the term in bad faith and to create the bogeyman you describe.
It's actually hard to find the time when anyone on the left actually used it. Seems like it was a little under a year and the term was dropped to be more specific actions.
I like this take: https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...
I think it's a farce to suggest that no one out there could be accurately described by it (identity politics being more important than class, language policing, etc)
Reading and understanding the article beyond the title, it's just a term that used to be called something else before, and will be called something else in the future. I think you're focusing too much on the actual word, rather than the "movement", which is what pg's article is really about.
Part of the problem here is that while there's a set of social and political attitudes that really do exist, a lot of the people who practice them are very reticent to label themselves, preferring to claim either that they occupy the whole space of compassionate legitimate political practice, or that they have nothing in common with other groups who are (from an outside eye) very similar.
I like Freddie deBoer's 2023 definition, which at least is framed from a left-wing point-of-view rather than the aggressive and weaponised right-wing framing:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...
You obviously didn't read the article. He calls out how virtue signallers quickly change what the rules are around which word are OK.
Here is someone who you may or may not consider to be a far right bad actor explaining what woke is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM
The VP famously used it half a dozen times in this short clip. [1] It was apparently well-known enough of a term that she didn't define it.
IIRC usage didn't really drop off until 2020 or after. That was when conservatives started using the term in a negative way and progressives abandoned it.
Kamala Harris said everyone should be more woke. Racial inequities were one of the pillars of the Biden Campaign and administration. So yes the Left was still using Woke quite a bit, until Right coopted to make it clear its actually negative
My original understanding of "woke" was similar to what in the 60s they might have called being "turned on". Being awake and seeing the actual reality of things for what they are.
Both characterizations actually mean the same thing and you said it in your description of the person on the left. Because, thinking that a right-wing solution to homelessness 'lacks empathy' and only you have empathy for the homeless is exactly the sort of self-righteousness the right correctly criticizes.
Even before the term "woke" was widespread, I noticed all my conservative friends would prefer to find the most ridiculous liberal woke example and mock it.
Rather than actually discuss policy or anything concrete, because they have nothing to offer.
>As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
I voted for Kamala, and I don't think this is accurate.
I support having empathy for homeless people. I would love to see a movement focused on actually helping homeless people, by volunteering at soup kitchens and so on.
Wokeness does not seem to be that movement. Insofar as wokeness concerns itself with homeless people, (a) it wants you to refer to them as 'unhoused' instead of homeless, (b) it wants to make sure you don't talk about it when they e.g. sexually assault you: https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1845244113249063227
I think this is a fair assumption to make if you haven't been in some of the places where this has been most contentious -- in particular, I think left-wing activist circles, or segments of industry where the workplace has switched from being "apolitical" -- I know that term is contested, but I don't have a better one to use -- to shifting to an overtly social-justice-oriented space.
I've spent the last decade in these environments. My own upbringing and general disposition is left-wing, but the last few years have been stressful and much less productive.
Somebody downthread mentioned how "latinx" was just a small minority of advocates, but we had painful discussions about it, including objections from latino staff, and ended up using it.
Our (obligatory) sexual harassment training switched from a standard legal footing to one that was preceded by a long explanation of the oppressive nature of Europeans.
Group chats moved towards political conversations, and even minor questioning of the (quite sudden) norm shift led to ostracization, with two people, not including me, ultimately leaving the company because they felt uncomfortable with the social pressure.
One senior executive was pushed out because they made a joke about having pronouns in video profiles. We pursued a diverse hiring policy that ended up with patently unsuitable, but diverse, employees including an alcoholic, and someone who had a mental health breakdown in a meeting. Staff would increasingly reach for untouchably political accusations when maneuvering against other individuals at the workplace, accusing them of racism, intolerance, and harassment when there was little evidence that this was going on (none of this was from white males, but between other less privileged groups).
I move in other circles too, academic and professional, and there have been similar dynamics. Not only do I know people who have been "cancelled" (ie lost jobs or opportunities because of public statements that, while politically mainstream, went against local norms), but I also know people who did the cancelling, get cancelled in turn. None of this was about anything demonstrably and objectively offensive; sometimes it was about defending arguably offensive behaviour; sometimes it was just an uncharitable reading of an innocuous comment, taken out of context.
What I would say is that there has been a shifting and narrowing of politically acceptable statements, and a pressure to conform with the consensus in certain kinds of tech work and other high-status societal environments, which I think would make people of Paul Graham's age uncomfortable; he would definitely have seen the "worst" of it. I think part of its spread has been due to it looking, without closer examination, like what you have described. But as someone who was raised by socialists who got there largely by their empathy for others, the degree of cruelty and arbitrary punishment through social sanction has been unusually vicious and hard to bear.
I still feel I can't talk about this except with a few very close friends. This is a throwaway account.
Since 2008, people realized that many systems are entirely broken. This created a large wave of wealth inequality awareness. This is common on both sides of the political spectrum.
At the same time, the left realized that their techniques of debate fail miserably against the monolith of the right, especially after seeing that radicals were rewarded (tea party movement.. all the way to MAGA)
So they are also imitating this pattern.
I know so, because if I dig back enough, I’ll find the comments that predicted this.
The left is radicalizing to match the political capability of republicans.
In the late 90s and 2000s there was a big thing in hiphop music about “conscious rap”. At first, rappers differentiated themselves from the mainstream by emphasising that they were “conscious” in their lyrics of the harm done by perpetuating stereotypes or promoting dysfunctional lifestyles or failing to challenge systematic oppression. Then it became passé and rappers like Taleb Kweli lamented that they were stuck with this label, which had become a term of derision. Whole thing was like an early run of “woke”.
"Woke" make as much sense as "liberal", "fascist" or "nazi" these days.
There is nothing “bad faith” about appropriating an evocative term to label ideologically connected ideas. It’s like how the left uses the term “capitalism.”
In the last few years, we have seen corporations and universities push for race-conscious hiring and promotion decisions, while schools are putting kids in racially segregated affinity groups. These are obviously ideologically related efforts. It’s perfectly fine for opponents of these efforts to group them together under the label of “woke.”
The only people who could plausibly define 'woke' as 'people who investigate their own values and have empathy' are people who consider themselves woke and are sufficiently under pg's 'prig' definition to believe that is exclusive to them, and sociopaths. What emotionally normal person would say membership of another group is defined by 'basic human decency' and 'thinking about whether their objectives are any good'?
Why and how is labelling unlikable behaviour as woke bad faith. As I understand the right using the term, they use it consistently to refer to a very specific type of behaviour they see as bad (one core aspect is prioritising signalling being virtuous over actually improving the world).
Is your complaint that this usage unfairly co-opts the original left usage of the word?
> they use it consistently to refer to a very specific type of behaviour they see as bad
I disagree that their use is consistent and specific.
Their usage is constant and is malleable enough to encompass "whatever i don't like right now".
Imagine I wrote an essay on Christianity and based it entirely on the behavior of evangelicals in the South who attend megachurchies (a very vocal minority). Surely you'd expect other Christians (all around the world) who equally claim true usage to object.
You give them far too much credit. But more importantly, ask yourself who’s really the morality police at this point? The ones screaming “woke” all the time, vowing to strip “woke” people out of positions of power, seem pretty dangerous to me.
Paul makes clear what definition he is using, so let’s discuss that instead of an unbearably boring discussion about which definition of “woke” is the real one.
The second definition is a gentrification of the first definition. They are intrinsically linked and cannot be separated.
> Paul Graham > English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist
<tinfoilhat>
I wonder why a venture capitalist would push this meaning of the word "woke"
</tinfoilhat>
Oh I'm sorry, are we now saying "woke" covers economic class issues like homelessness and poor people, instead of just social issues which both sides have used to suck all the air out of political discussion?
Now that the neoliberals are embarrassed enough to throw out "woke", are we slipping in economic concerns too?
PSA: YOU CAN STILL BE A SELF-RIGHTEOUSLY MORALISTIC PRICK, SO LONG AS IT'S BASED ON ACTUAL TANGIBLE ECONOMIC ISSUES THAT ARE SYSTEMIC AND ACTIONABLE
A friend and I love to send each other examples of ridiculous things being labeled "woke". Lately we are spoiled for choice. British tabloid newspapers are an especially good source.
In his post, pg says "Political correctness seemed to burn out in the second half of the 1990s. One reason, perhaps the main reason, was that it literally became a joke. It offered rich material for comedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action upon it."
What I remember the most from that time period was comedians making jokes about exactly this effect: At some point people started labeling everything they didn't like as "political correctness", and the phrase lost all meaning.
(I don't have particularly strong feelings about pg's essay tbh. I've personally managed to completely ignore political correctness and wokeness without anything bad happening).
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
How is this anything other than self-flattery? It's also a huge moral hazard. Once one defines themselves as "morally superior" to a group of people it becomes easy to justify truly immoral behavior against them.
> The people on the left, while far from perfect, are generally morally superior to those on the right.
Do you have evidence of this claim? If not, your stance is factually incorrect. I have evidence of the opposite [1].
> I have evidence of the opposite.
Do you? [1]
[1] https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1...
It seems the only thing this paper demonstrates is that both sides will invest in causes they believe in. It draws the conclusion that liberals support equality more because they support more institutions that talk about equality. How much those institutions actually contribute towards reducing inequality is not measured or discussed.
This seems to show the opposite: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29739293/
Feeling more empathy and doing something about it are two very different things.
Liberal =/= leftist
> I have evidence of the opposite
Respectfully, you do not. Giving to charity is not at all the marker of morality, and suggesting that is frankly absurd.
[flagged]
You're describing the difference between being inwardly moral and being outwardly a bully.
When people use "woke" in a derogatory fashion they just mean "bully."
Which is why James Lindsay's "woke right" comes across as so incomprehensible. He just means "right wing bullies."
Woke is critical construcivism.
The belief consists of two parts:
1. That truth is socially constructed thus when we see bad things, it means society created these bad things.
2. In order to determine what parts of society to cut-out to make society better, so bad things stop happening, use a critical theory to determine who should be removed from society so it can be more equitable (usually the stand in for good.
Woke normally holds that goodness is when results are equal, and if they are not equal, they have license to adjust them to equal (This is the core argument of Marxism, though woke could be said to be identity or social Marxism rather then just the economic Marxism presented, though in practice class identity was present from the start as well and expanded in practice under Mao).
But #1 is wrong and #2 is abusive.
There is no such thing as "society", just relationships between individual people. To get a better "society", you need people to act better. However, all of recorded history suggests that people are pretty universally willing to use other people as tools to benefit themselves. (Obviously not everyone does this all the time or to the same amount.) History also makes it clear that passing laws will not work: despite laws against things that are evenly timelessly non-virtuous, like stealing and murder, do not prevent murder and theft. In fact in Judeo-Christian thinking, to do this requires people receiving a "new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone" from God. (I saw "Judeo-" because the passages is from Ezekiel, which is common to both. I do not know if rabbinical thinking agrees, however.) Even if it does not require a divine gift, certainly the problem has proven intractable up to the present time.
"determine who should be removed from society" is just a scary thought. Who gets to determine that? How can we be sure they are right? What prevents them from using this as a tool to eliminate people that are competitors or whom they simply dislike? In fact, this has a name: "to purge". The Soviet Union under Stalin and the Chinese Cultural Revolution were scary times.
> "determine who should be removed from society" is just a scary thought. Who gets to determine that? How can we be sure they are right?
I am extremely socially liberal, but have a very hard time aligning myself with the left because most members of that constituency seem completely incapable of recognizing this. They're so eager to repeat the errors of the leftist policies you list (along with other clearly non leftist examples like the Salem witch trials) that they're a danger to society.
They're zealots and need to be treated accordingly.
> History also makes it clear that passing laws will not work: despite laws against things that are evenly timelessly non-virtuous, like stealing and murder, do not prevent murder and theft.
They probably reduce it a bit.
> In fact in Judeo-Christian thinking, to do this requires people receiving a "new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone" from God. (I saw "Judeo-" because the passages is from Ezekiel, which is common to both. I do not know if rabbinical thinking agrees, however.)
It doesn't. Judaism holds that the soul starts out pure, having been made in the image of G-d, and it only becomes impure through wrongdoing. All humans are born with an impulse to do evil, the Yetzer Hara, but we're also created with the power to overcome it. And when we have done evil, we have the ability to atone and return our souls to the pure state they were created in. That happens, for instance, on Yom Kippur.
The context of the verse from Ezekiel is:
> O mortal, when the House of Israel dwelt on their own soil, they defiled it with their ways and their deeds […] So I poured out My wrath on them […] I scattered them among the nations […] But when they came to those nations, they caused My holy name to be profaned, in that it was said of them, “These are GOD’s people, yet they had to leave their land.” […] Say to the House of Israel: Thus said the Sovereign GOD: Not for your sake will I act, O House of Israel, but for My holy name, which you have caused to be profaned among the nations to which you have come. […] I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle pure water upon you, and you shall be purified: I will purify you from all your defilement and from all your fetishes. And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh;" https://www.sefaria.org/Ezekiel.36.17-26
Ezekiel lived during the Babylonian exile. At face value, the text is saying that the people of Israel have been exiled because of their sins, but it makes a prophecy that G-d will cause them to stop sinning and return them to their land. That eventually did happen under Cyrus the Great. This is a constant cycle in the bible: When things are good, the Israelites forget G-d's teachings. Then something bad happens, but G-d redeems the Israelites from their suffering, which leads them to follow G-d again. Then thing get good again, and they start to forget G-d once more...
When it says that G-d will give the house of Israel a new heart, it's not (at face value) saying that individual people will literally receive new spirits (or otherwise be metaphysically transformed). Nor is it saying that G-d will literally sprinkle water on them. These are poetic ways of saying that the house of Israel will stop worshiping idols (etc), the same way that happened many times before in the Torah. You can of course add a layer of exegesis and make it about individual believers today instead of the nation of Israel in Babylonia of the 6th-century BCE. That's fine, the rabbinic tradition does that sort of thing all the time too. But at that point you're firmly in Christian territory and not in the space shared between Judaism and Christianity.
How about removing the bullies from society.
Points one and two are both functionalism, not constructivism. This is Sociology 101. The idea that all parts of society have a function, even the bad parts is not constructionist, it's structualist.
Constructivism would be that we created the idea that they are legitimate social objects (ie: they exist) and two that they have an essential moral characteristic (eg: they're bad).
Marx was a conflict theorist whose main point was that economic structures and social structures are inexorably linked. The point of Capital Vol 1 was that through a series of implications, the difference between exchange value and use value ultimately results in conflict between owners and workers.
This is where wokeism falls apart as an ideology: It is outcome driven instead of opportunity driven. Equality becomes the goal regardless of motivation, ambition or merit. Why would the best, or more broadly anyone better than average, participate in such a society? What's their incentive?
When you define woke this way, you ultimately admit that wokeism is just a veneer of identity politics layered over good old-fashioned communism. The problem with communism is that it sounds great, but doesn't work. How many times must it fail before people realize that?
I don't mind having 'equality' on the basics. I would gladly pay the taxes necessary to ensure my fellow man has access to food, housing, healthcare and maybe a few other things needed to live a life with dignity. I think that's the whole premise behind UBI, and we're going to have to make our peace with it.
There will always be 'incentive' to work and gain more than the very basics. Honestly, given how much of our science has been written by 'gentlemen scholars' who were rich enough to be able to pursue their field without worry of putting food on the table, it may well advance humanity.
> participate in such a sociehttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsty? What's their incentive?
This has never made sense to me. People don't need an external motivator. People who like to collect things or complete puzzle (including high performers), do so because they like to collect them, not because society rewards them. It generally penalizes them as it's wasted time or capital. Granted, sometimes recognition is a good motivator, but that's fleeting over a non-trivial timeline (like a season) and not specifically tied to society at large (eg the longest running game of Tag).
Woke-ism is a cult.
There is no generally accepted definition of woke, and that is largely by design to mislead others through well known psychological blindspots (Cialdini), towards inducing others to join collectivism while also inspiring disunity and hate, albeit indirectly.
The movement often couches its perspectives in power dynamics which follows elements common to Maoism and Communism, along with many other similar marxist movements. It also has elements from critical pedagogy (the critical turn), which has origins in Marxist movements.
The mind virus part of it is the same with any belief system that lends itself towards irrational delusion, inducing bitter resentment in individuals and falsely criticizing without any rational framework or basis, often ignoring objective reality for a false narrative.
Woke-ism is a cult of the semi-lucid insane brainwashed children they manage to mislead, who desperately try to poorly grapple with reality, miserably, and bitterly, while dragging everyone else down.
Its rather sad for the individuals who become both victim and perpetrator. There is no cure for insanity, nor the blindness induced.
If you want a rational discussion on this subject matter, I'd suggest checking over James Lindsay's work outing these type of movements. Your description is fairly misinformed.
https://newdiscourses.com/2023/03/workings-of-the-woke-cult/
“ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
This is accurate. A manifestation of the woke belief system. I see this bigotry all the time online whenever team blue joke about the right.
What Paul Graham misses is the "aggressively performative moralism" that appeared in response to wokeism. For those hungry for attention, it was a very useful enemy. In many ways, the narrative of what it even meant to be "woke" was quickly hijacked and controlled by those opposed to it. Deriding anyone of color in a leadership position as a DEI hire is a good example. None of this was a call for reason or to return to balance. It was an equally performative stunt to cast anything that event hinted at inclusiveness as evil intent.
I think it's much simpler than that. Woke is power, it's a moral position that can be used like a club to force others into a specific line of thinking. While it's basic mission of recognizing discrimination, etc. around us, it morphed into a political and societal weapon to force people and institutions to do certain things, like establishing DEI offices.
[flagged]
I don't think I agree. I think the counterpoint of "woke" is "fascist" or "racist". People on the right call things woke and people on the left call things fascist. But I think the difference in the meaning of these words reveals a lot about who is saying them. For example, woke people are merely self-righteously moralistic but fascists are such a severe threat that we have to end things like free speech, etc. in order to prevent a constant threat to society. That might explain some of this divide.
> i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
> people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think those are just two perspectives on the same situation. “wokeness” is realizing we should be treating people better and “anti-wokness” is people feeling called out by that.
People tend not to like it being pointed out that they are assholes, especially when they know it’s true. That’s pretty much the whole “anti-woke” thing in a nut.
>I think those are just two perspectives on the same situation. “wokeness” is realizing we should be treating people better and “anti-wokness” is people feeling called out by that.
>People tend not to like it being pointed out that they are assholes, especially when they know it’s true. That’s pretty much the whole “anti-woke” thing in a nut.
I think this is an example that accurately sums up with most normal, non-partisan people mean when say say "woke". The smug self-righteousness exhibited by those who believe themselves morally superior to others is "woke". The suggestion that somehow you are an asshole if you don't sign on completely and without question to the bizarre social and political agenda of self-appointed word and thought police. The people that you avoid like the plague because they are constantly searching for something to be offended about or some way to chide you about having transgressed against some ever-changing lexicon of acceptable terms and phrases. The people that think the world is neatly divided between "oppressors and the oppressed" and that where you fall on this insurmountable divide is based almost entirely on who your ancestors were or what your skin-tone is rather than anything you've actually done in your life. The people that think they have a monopoly on deciding what is right and wrong, and that they have been appointed the moral arbiters to decide what everyone is allowed to say.
[flagged]
You missed the point of the article completely. Wokeness (as PG defined it, which I would agree is the most commonly used definition today) isn't merely realizing we should be treating people better, it's realizing that people should be treated better and focusing on being a "prig" about completely inconsequential and tangentially relevant concerns as a result of that rather than taking meaningful action.
No. “Anti-woke” people have latched onto the “prig” aspects of social justice because being against what it’s actually about would highlight what they really have a problem with: equality.
If someone says “hey you can’t say the n-word, that’s racist” and someone’s reply is “don’t censor me!” the latter isn’t advocating for freedom of speech, they’re advocating for racism.
Defining what “woke” means in terms of the fake justifications of the “anti-woke” crowd is BS. What people labelled as “woke” want is for people to treat people better. “Anti-woke” doesn’t want that.
completely agree. The Right uses "woke" as sort of an anti-virtue-signal.
> Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase "people of color" is considered particularly enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. [...] There are no underlying principles.
To understand much of our language, Gnorts would have to already be aware that our words and symbols gain meaning from how they're used, and you couldn't, for instance, determine that a swastika is offensive (in the west) by its shape alone.
In this case, the term "colored people" gained racist connotations from its history of being used for discrimination and segregation - and avoiding it for that reason is the primary principle at play. There's also the secondary/less universal principle of preferring "person-first language".
> gained racist connotations
This passive phrasing implies a kind of universal consensus or collective decision-making process that the word has officially changed connotation. If this were the case, it would not be such a problem.
What happens in practice is that a small minority of people decide that a certain word has bad connotations. These people decide that it no longer matters what the previous connotation was, nor the speaker's intention in uttering it, it is now off-limits and subject to correction when used. People pressure others to conform, in varying degrees of politeness -- anything from a well-intentioned and friendly FYI to a public and aggressive dressing down -- and therefore the stigma surrounding the word spreads.
It's hard to believe that this terminology treadmill genuinely helps anyone, as people are perfectly capable of divining intent when they really want to (nobody is accusing the NAACP of favoring discrimination and segregation).
Add to this that the favored terms of the treadmill creators don't necessarily even reflect what the groups in question actually want. Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American (CGP Grey made a whole video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ).
So that momentary pause you feel when you almost say "Indian" and then correct it to "Native American", who is that actually serving? It's not the people in question. It's a different set of people, a set of people who have gained the cultural power to stigmatize words based on their own personal beliefs.
>Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American
Enforcing this false dilemma is what leads us to this situation. Even this CCP Grey guy is arguing for the false dilemma. Actually referring to Native Americans or Indians as a monolithic group is the problem. The many peoples forced to live in the Indian Territories(Oklahoma) have different needs than the peoples forced to live along the US-Canadian border(like Ojibway, Blackfoot, and Mohawk) and different needs than the Apache... another overloaded name[1].
This is one of the things that most fascinates me about the anti-woke.
You're advocating for people to be described in whatever term they prefer and not have a term imposed upon them from outside.
That alien visiting for mars would think "Oh, this is this wokeness I have heard of, respecting groups desires to be addressed in their preferred way".
But no, you're only bringing this up because you believe the people you think are "woke" are imposing a name on these groups from the outside.
Is it a principle or is it a pointless gotcha? I would argue this is aggressively performative anti-wokeness!
No, my position is: stop policing the well-intentioned language of others based on a treadmill of acceptable terminology.
The principle is that language should be judged based on its intention, rather than on how it conforms the arbitrary fashion imposed by the most priggish among us (to use pg’s word).
Few of the treadmills we see are actually an organic expression of group preference. Nobody was asking for Latinx or Native American. Nobody was asking for “person experiencing houselessness.” Nobody was asking for the master branch to be renamed to main. These are activist-driven efforts masquerading as authentic priorities of the groups in question. So it goes with most of the causes generally described as woke.
In all cases we should judge speech based on its intention rather than how it conforms to shifting standards. But the fact that this language policing frequently is based on externally-invented treadmills just adds insult to injury, and exposes the vacuousness of the whole enterprise.
There's a difference between respect and compel. And it's not a fine line neither. Most people are fine with respecting people's pronouns, especially when it is someone they already respect.
The issue comes when you are compelled by your company/social circle/etc. to put your own pronouns in your bio (signalling fake political allegiance), being fired for accidentally misgendering a (badly passing) trans-woman, and so on.
It doesn't help your point at all that your two examples are things that don't actually happen outside the imagination of reactionaries.
Have you ever worked at a large organization that markets themselves as progressive? If you have and don't have any experience with being pressured or outright told to comply with performative measures like email signature changes, your experience would appear to be an anomaly.
And whether you agree with it or not, there are numerous documented cases online where people were fired for misgendering someone.
Fired for accidentally misgendering someone, or fired for intentionally misgendering someone repeatedly, often for extended periods of time? The first is the situation being discussed, the second is the situation that actually happens.
> And whether you agree with it or not, there are numerous documented cases online where people were fired for misgendering someone.
Easy enough to link some then, I take it?
I have worked at multiple, and it's getting really tiring to read these hyperboles spouted constantly by people with some weird grievance.
This distinction seems to be an untraversable chasm for the prigs PG is talking about.
Anyone (whether I already respect them or not) comes to me and asks me to refer to them by a specific name or term, I'll gladly do it.
Someone comes and accuses me of being an -ist or -phobe because I didn't put my pronouns or link to the latest iteration of a corporate-speak diversity policy in my email signature or just tells me to do it without explanation or discussion, and I'll tell them to pound sand.
If that person cared to ask why I don't put them in my email signature, I'd gladly tell them that I might have if anyone bothered to ask nicely and/or explain the merit of their request but ultimately I don't care one whit what pronouns someone uses to describe me and am well aware the corporation I work for doesn't actually stand for anything in the aforementioned statement. But the prigs won't ask.
The battle over the term "tranny" in the 2010s was very eye opening. Some celebrities were being skewered for using the term, though they and a huge % of LGBT folks saw it in a positive light.
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2014/05/rupaul_s-_tran...
>So that momentary pause you feel when you almost say "Indian" and then correct it to "Native American"
Here in Canada it's "Indigenous peoples", sorry, I mean "First Nations", unless they've come up with something else now. Never mind that the people in question don't necessarily feel any kind of solidarity with other indigenous groups beyond their own.
(Also, "missing and murdered indigenous women (and children)" is a set phrase, and people will yell at you if you point out the statistics showing that something like 70% of missing and murdered indigenous people in Canada are men.)
When I went to school in Canada, the term I received in year 2000 was "aboriginals". The terminology has indeed been changing.
In fact the Gnorts would not have "a long list of rules to memorize" with "no underlying principles".
They would instead have a history and culture (or many histories and many cultures) to learn in order to contextualize words and symbols and find their actual meaning, because meaning doesn't really exist without context.
From the perspective of someone who was not raised in the culture in question, this is a distinction without a difference.
Imagine that the 2028 Democratic presidential candidate for some reason consistently uses the term "colored people".
We all know what's going to happen. The underlying history and culture would change within the span of 24 hours, and suddenly "colored people" would loose it's racist connotations.
Awareness of history and culture won't help you understand language rules. Instead, to avoid saying something racist, one must be keenly aware of political expediency.
„The Democrats control the language“ is a wild, but unsurprising take.
Owners of social networks are terrified that they're accountable to society in any way. That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades. Basically they've taken over and are making all the rules.
> That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades.
This is only a tiny part of the reason.
The main reason is that fact-checking works so well against the right, and has almost no benefit for the right.
Why?
Because almost everything the right says is a lie of one kind or another, but almost everything the left says is either mostly or wholly grounded in fact.
So “fact checking” is an almost useless tool for the right, since it rarely ever contradicts what the left says. And yet, the right can get very severely corrected by fact-checkers with almost everything they say.
Musk and Zuckerberg are killing fact checking because they NEED misinformation to carry the day. Because if we truly understood how badly the Parasite Class were bleeding the Working Class dry just for a few extra thousandths of a percentage point of wealth accumulation, we would all rise up and bring out the guillotines to dispose of them once and for all.
Misinformation is the way they control the working class.
Who do you think was employed as "fact checkers" and who paid them? If Zuck wanted biased misinformation, he could have hired people to push it as fact and fact-checked anyone else. It makes far more sense that "fact-checking" and related censorship is antithetical to the foundational principles of the US and a tool of oppression, so we are just going back to normal.
[flagged]
Please don't cross into personal attack. Note this site guideline:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
[flagged]
Please don't cross into personal attack. Note this site guideline:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
> Who do you think was employed as "fact checkers" and who paid them?
Legitimacy, or at least a thin veneer of it, so that the Biden administration wouldn’t force it upon them.
Because that was always in the cards - legislation that would legally force these companies to fact-check, or worse, for an outside bipartisan agency to do the fact-checking with no way for these companies to control the process.
>If Zuck wanted biased misinformation, he could have hired people to push it as fact and fact-checked anyone else.
Again, it had to look authentic. But Meta did the absolute minimum amount of fact-checking as possible. Just enough to appear like they were actually doing something constructive, to keep the administration from looking too deeply.
But now? Zuck is doing exactly that with AI accounts.
>It makes far more sense that "fact-checking" and related censorship is antithetical to the foundational principles of the US and a tool of oppression, so we are just going back to normal.
Checking to see if something is truthful is “antithetical to the USA and is oppression”??? That statement is misinformation _in of itself._
America is not built upon a foundation of lies and misinformation, but without fact-checking, that is exactly what Americans will get -- lies and misinformation. Because there is nothing to counteract lies and misinformation except concerted efforts to check them for factual accuracy. As in, fact-checking.
Maybe one day you will come to understand just how important facts are, and how critical it is to ALWAYS have them checked.
Because the only people afraid of fact checking are those who are threatened by facts. Just like how countries who fear the truth target journalists for elimination. There is no difference.
And the left loves facts. Because facts are a manifestation of reality, and the truth. Which is why checking for objective reality and truthfulness is so important for the left, and why the left is invariably unhurt by fact-checking.
> Because almost everything the right says is a lie of one kind or another, but almost everything the left says is either mostly or wholly grounded in fact.
I am not “right wing” by any definition but this is naive and bubbled to the point of ridiculousness. Very little political discourse on social media is grounded in fact regardless of the ideologies involved. Layman discussion based on headlines and vibes has no place in serious politics and the real danger of these platforms is that they’ve elevated that to the standard
Who deserves a voice then? The high priests of the media annointed by billions of dollars in funding? There has to be middle ground. If I have the right to print and sell a book about any political or technical topic, why can I not post on social media? Is the threat of people being heard and finding consensus really that bad? Unless these "laymen" are calling for lynchings or something, they have every right to be heard.
What is accountability? A platform picking what the truth is?
Presumably you liked the fact checkers before because they were of the same political persuasion as you. Now that Trump is in power would you prefer if Musk/Zuckerberg placed right wing fact checkers in place and punished any opinion which is outside of the platform's Overton window?
Musk removed picking fact checkers and replaced them with community notes. Zuckerberg says he'll do the same. Isn't that the societal accountability that you want?
I'm wary of the concepts of "fact-checking" and "mis-information," but there really is a lot of bullshit being said without any corresponding check on "yeah, but is that true?"
Of course, if your worldview is sufficiently different from mine, we will disagree on what is true. But lying is lying.
> Presumably you liked the fact checkers before because they were of the same political persuasion as you
Or perhaps the GP liked the fact checkers because they were on the whole doing a good job of actually checking facts.
I don't know if that's true or not; I haven't been on social media in years. But it's an incredibly weak argument to assume that someone only likes something because it aligns with their politics.
> The document explains to employees that epithets like "gays are freaks" and "immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit" are now allowed under the new policy.
but yeah, its definitely the fact checking that people are most upset about
I think these visitors from another planet would be more confused about the phrases “right/left wing _fact_ checker”…
I read Future Shock for the first time a few years ago, on about the 50th anniversary of its publication.
One of the strongest impressions I had were that there were TK-count principle topics in the story:
- The psychological impacts of an ever-increasing rate of change and information flow. Largely a dark view of the future, and one that's borne out pretty well.
- Specific technological inventions or trends. Most of these have massively under-performed, with the obvious exception of information technologies, though how that's ultimately manifested is also strongly different from what was foreseen / predicted.
- Social changes. Many of these read as laughably trite ... until I realised how absolutely profound those changes had been. The world of 1970 and of 2020 are remarkably different in gender roles, acceptance of nontraditional sexual orientations, race relations, even relationships of the young and old. I'm not saying "perfect" or "better" or "worse", or even that FS is an especially good treatment of the topic, only that the situation is different. Moreso than the other categories, the book marks a boundary of sorts between and old and new world. We live in the new world, and the old one is all but unrecognisable.
(Those in their 70s or older may well have a more visceral feel of this as they'd lived through that change as adults, though they're rapidly dying out.)
"TK-count" should of course be "three". Gah!
I can't for the life of me comprehend how PG manages to write in a style that sounds so lucid, so readable and compelling, and so authoritative, but on a substance that's so factually incorrect that it won't stand to any bit of critique.
Like the paragraph quoted above: it's just so blatantly obvious what's wrong with turns like "considered particularly enlightened", or "there are no underlying principles" that I find it hard to believe that the text as a whole sounds so friendly and convincing, unless you stop and think for a second.
I wish I could write like this about whatever mush is in my head.
From a (potentially made up [1]) letter from Freud:
> So yesterday I gave my lecture. Despite a lack of preparation, I spoke quite well and without any hesitation, which I ascribe to the cocaine I had taken beforehand. I told about my discoveries in brain anatomy, all very difficult things that the audience certainly didn’t understand, but all that matters is that they get the impression that I understand it.
Maybe pg has the same strategy. Certainly reads that way.
[1] https://www.truthorfiction.com/sigmund-freud-i-ascribe-to-th...
Cocaine is so passé. The tech oligarchs are all on ketamine these days.
I find it's super-easy to communicate this way if I pick a position I think is bad and dumb.
It frees me from giving a shit if I'm using e.g. rhetorical tricks in place of good-faith argument. Of course the argument's obviously bad, if you're any good at spotting bad arguments! So are all the others I've seen or heard supporting it. That's why I picked it—it's bad.
I can usually argue positions I disagree with far more persuasively and fluently than ones I agree with, because I'm not concerned with being correct or making it look bad to smart people, nor making myself look dumb for making a bad argument (the entire thing is an exercise in making bad arguments, there's no chance of a good one coming out). Might try that. It's kinda a fun, and/or horrifying, exercise. Drag out those slanted and context-free stats, those you-know-to-be-disproven-or-commonly-misrepesented anecdotes and studies, (mis-)define terms as something obviously bad and proceed to tear them apart in a "surely we can all agree..." way (ahem), overgeneralize the results of that already-shaky maneuver (ahem), misrepresent history in silly ways (ahem), and so on. Just cut loose. No worries about looking foolish because you already think the position's foolish.
Someone could say something similar about the large number of people who apparently reviewed this essay, who were supposed to critique it in order for him to make it stronger. It's possible he just ignored their criticism, but it's also possible they already agree with Graham and didn't think about the flawed premises, so their feedback didn't address what might be "blatantly obvious" to you or I.
Similarly, Graham almost certainly already has strong opinions on the basic premises of this essay. Thus, the process of revising and polishing his essay to make it readable and compelling doesn't help him spot any of these obvious critiques. As you quoted, he believes the people advocating "people of color" over other terms have no principles. Thus he can't apply their principles to his own essay and anticipate their criticisms. Based on how he describes "wokeness," he seems to think are generally unprincipled.
Neither he nor his reviewers are equipped to analyze the substance, which is why it can be stylistically strong but substantially weak.
I think it's called "from first principles", which is the laundered term for "disregarding context and previous work, because I don't feel other people's work is worth anything".
These are my favorite to read since it contains a full, traceable, logical path to get to a conclusion. It's much easier to understand why they think something.
On this flip side, my least favorite are when someone name drops thinkers as a way to reference an ideology. It's very hard to actually know if someone understands the ideas behind that name, so it's usually impossible to understand why they think something.
And, the names they drop often were the types to present their thoughts as the first, rarely, if ever, dropping names themselves, which I always find an amusing "they were allowed be free thinkers, but you can't!"
"Standing in the shoulders of giants is for losers! I will instead crane my neck and fail to see much of anything."
What "giants" should he be standing on in your opinion?
That's an incorrect interpretation of what I wrote.
Turns out that technical education doesn’t equip you for dealing with every discipline of inquiry, especially not when it involves social phenomena.
Of course the humanities are all usurped by the woke elites and you should look only to PG and his friends for guidance.
Having the principle of "words become bad because bad people use them" is stupid because you cede power to bad people. But really, its not a principle at all, its just a dumb cultural signaling, ie. "I'm not like those uneducated hicks".
Is that how you justify a swastika tattoo? You can also rob the bad people of the power to hide behind the words and symbols: if only bad people use them, we know the users are bad. It's definitely signaling, I don't see why it has to be "cultural".
>You can also rob the bad people of the power to hide behind the words and symbols: if only bad people use them, we know the users are bad. It's definitely signaling
No, you are just giving them the power to actually do stuff without looking like they are doing stuff.
As long as they talk the talk, they don't have to walk the walk. You don''t have to actually care about issues, that's what the DEI department is for.
I don't think a swastika tattoo would be problematic if the person doesn't impute Nazi symbolism to theirs. Even in the West, swastikas and associated symbology is used pretty heavily in neo-pagan circles, and while some of those folk are racist, most aren't.
But OPs point is broader: if you allow the bad people to just appropriate the symbol as their own, they're going to gradually take over everything. Never mind swastikas; we're at the point where making an okay sign can be misconstrued as a white nationalist gesture, and people self-censor themselves accordingly.
There's also the reverse problem here, where, if you tie such things so strongly to symbols in popular opinion, then loud condemnation of such symbols is used to "prove" that one is not a bad person. For a major ongoing example of this look at Russia with its cult of "we defeated the Nazis therefore we're definitely the good guys".
At the end of the day, it's really just a lazy shortcut. The bad people are bad because of their ideas and actions, not because of their symbols. If we always look at the ideas and actions, the symbols are irrelevant, and we don't have to surrender them to the bad guys' claims.
That doesn't really fly. The Nazis are so bad that unless you're south Asian a swastika is assumed to be a pro Nazi sign. Does it sort of suck? Yeah but it is the way it is. Plenty of slurs don't have any inherent negative meaning and are slurs because of how they tend to be used. Occasionally some minority groups partially reclaim them like with Queer but mostly polite people stop using them
Signaling is bad because anyone can signal anything they want. Everyone should be judging either other based on actions not superfluous signals. And yes, maybe you should think twice if you see a swastika tatoo on someone, people change and are multi dimensional.
Is your comment here an "action" or "superfluous signal"?
Do you have a coherent principle that separates one from the other?
Obviously its a gradient, but we can agree that "dedicate time and money" is on the action side and "typing online" being superfluous signaling. And yes, if you knew me in real life, you probably shouldn't weight my hacker news comments over what I spend time and money on.
For what it's worth, I don't think it's so much a gradient. It's that everything is always both an action and a signal. Since signals can affect the behavior of others, all signals are actions. If an action is visible, it may convey something, so all (visible) actions are signals.
> And yes, maybe you should think twice if you see a swastika tatoo on someone, people change and are multi dimensional.
Tattoos can change, too. If I had a tattoo like that, but had come to see the error of my ways, I would have it removed, or if that was too costly and time-consuming (it takes a year or so of painful, expensive, periodic laser treatments to remove a tattoo), I'd have a tattoo artist cover it up with something else.
There's no excuse for keeping a neo-Nazi tattoo if you stop being a neo-Nazi and realize that neo-Nazis are disgusting people.
Everyone "should" be vegan too but I ain't holding my breath
When the meaning of a word gets distorted by use in bad faith, it's no longer useful for its original purpose.
Switching to another word isn't ceding power to the bad people. It's taking away their power to redefine things. It's letting them have the now-useless word exclusively, which will become associated with their speech, and not the original meaning. The original meaning is reclaimed by using a new not-yet-soiled word for it, and the cycle continues.
Is there a specific other word you'd suggest? I was watching an event last week where the promoters:
* had everyone declare their pronouns
* advertised their segregated black-only event next month
* repeatedly interrupted to chant "trans rights!"
This is a very common cluster of behavior, and I'm not sure what I would call it other than "woke". If there's another word that would be better, I'm all ears. But my experience has been that proponents don't find any word acceptable, because what they object to is the very idea that this is a distinct cluster of behavior. They feel, as the source article says, that each of my bullet points is just an independent matter of respect.
No one ever said the average person is smart.
It only works because we're in a society of judging people the moment we see them. Mimicking the language of "bad people" will get that association. I don't think we'll ever truly "fix" that.
He's a smart enough person that even asking that question makes me think the whole piece is written in bad faith. Yes, language evolves and has specific context and nuance.
its not that complicated, he just doesn't think that hard about things when they support his conclusion. He's silently edited blog posts in the past to fix glaring holes that a 7th grader could catch after commenters on HN pointed them out.
Interesting point to consider. I recently questioned the validity of a statement made by a newsletter publisher related to a repeatedly-debunked conspiracy theory that he used to attempt to bolster his point. It reeked of irony.
I politely asked for a fact-check on it in the comments section, as I otherwise enjoyed and agreed with the substance of the post. He both removed the claim in question and my comment.
I was unsure of how to feel about this. Those who had already read the post online or still had the original in their inbox were left with the misinformation from what they may consider a trusted source.
I believed it would have been better to edit out the false information, leave my comment, and reply with clarification on the editing and why.
Likewise, this practice of dynamically-edited online content is actually relevant to the topic of PG's post and the role it plays in replacing the traditional constraints on printed media.
While there is room for quibbling about whether or not silently removing false information from a piece you've written is dishonest, it most certainly is not honest.
In addition to those who received an older version with the misinformation, a critical aspect of determining what is true is determining who to trust, since there is far too much to be known for any one person to determine it themselves. Silently editing your own writing to respond to good criticism of it leaves future readers less informed about your own trustworthiness.
Got some examples of articles that were edited? Should then be possible to check on iA.
https://paulgraham.com/wtax.html
There are numerous changes over the first two days, Exercise to the reader to find which HN comments inspired them.
To note: I really have no problem with him updating his piece to reflect accurate criticism, I do find issue with doing it silently, and with not reflecting on how it should influence his thoroughness in the future.
Indeed all I can think of now is Stewart Lee's bit about "political correctness gone mad"
(some strong language and racist words used so maybe not safe for work or around kids)
I was thinking about Stewart Lee as I attempted to read the article. It resonated especially strongly as I got to the part about how this awful "political correctness" is the reason that women are now able to report sexual harassment on campus. I wasn't able to make it much further. Hats off to those brave adventurers who made it through the whole thing.
The point he is making is that it's ultimately absurd to make moral judgements based on word usage.
A person who actively discriminates in hiring against black people but doesn't call anyone a slur is seen as more virtuous as someone who doesn't discriminate, yet uses the slur in jest. The first behavior is seen as more excusable than the second, although an actual reasonable moral judgement makes it evident it's not.
> A person who actively discriminates in hiring against black people but doesn't call anyone a slur is seen as more virtuous as someone who doesn't discriminate, yet uses the slur in jest. The first behavior is seen as more excusable than the second, although an actual reasonable moral judgement makes it evident it's not.
What in the world are you talking about?
Imagine company A and B.
A report comes out, turns out that a certain HR person in company A hasn't hired a single black applicant since they got there.
At the same time, a video comes out showing the equivalent person in company B saying the n word in passing.
In this situation, it's maybe considered that the person in A might be racist, while it's completely assumed the person in B is.
Depending on the number of applicants and job posts, it may be hard to prove that the person in company A discriminates.
Thanks for proving my point. This exact benefit of the doubt is not given to the other guy.
Where’s the plausible deniability to using the n word? I guess if you were singing? But I don’t think that’s the example you had in mind here.
I swear, you people make up the most creative mental gymnastics to rationalize why you should be allowed to call people the n-word.
None of that is true, sorry
Being "smart" isn't a binary, and can't describe someone in any all-encompassing ways. Someone can be smart about investing in startups but stupid about understanding social discourse around marginalized groups.
I am not surprised at all that Graham is both of those things.
The stigmatization is imagined at best. Its similar to how words to describe individuals with learning disabilities also gain a negative connotation. Its not the word its the fact that the word refers to a subset of people that a comparison to is an insult. Hence, Mongoloid -> Retard -> Special -> <whatever the new one is>
In terms of racism, its different but the same mechanism. Being compared to a minority race is not an insult (to most people). Its the fact, that racist people will use the word with vitriol. Racists and those they argue with will use the term in their arguments and gradually the use of the term will gain the conotation of a racist person. Hence, Negro -> Colored -> Person of Color -> <the next thing when PoC becomes racist>
I think _Mongoloid_ doesn't fit with the rest of your examples, as it was never originally an impartial term. There's never a time when _Mongoloid_ wasn't an offensive term to some group, whereas _retard_ & _special_ were originally impartial.
With terms for learning disabilities (and some racist terms) factual inaccuracy is also a factor.
Mongoloid, Retard, Special, individuals with learning disabilities are not entirely interchangeable (except as insults).
I think I once read on reddit that the first few votes a comment gets pretty much determines whether it will score sky-high, or get downvoted into oblivion.
In the same way "colored people" can gain these connotations, just from other few people (falsely or not) inferring that it has those connotations. There need not be a history. I've seen too many blowups over the years about the word niggardly to think otherwise (more than one of these has made national news in the last few decades).
It's not that there is a history of discrimination, it's that we've all made a public sport out of demonstrating how not-racist we are, and people are constantly trying to invent new strategies to qualify for the world championships.
> In the same way "colored people" can gain these connotations, just from other few people (falsely or not) inferring that it has those connotations. [...]
> It's not that there is a history of discrimination
In abstract theory, that would be possible.
In concrete reality, with "colored people", there is, in fact, a history of discrimination, and when the context of use is not such that there is a clear separation from that history (a separation that exists in, e.g., the NAACP continuing to use "colored people" in its name) it has become problematic because of that history.
>In concrete reality, with "colored people", there is, in fact, a history of discrimination
Such is claimed. Which are the false accusations, which are the legitimate accusations, and which are merely the mistaken accusations? And how are each of those quantified? If someone actually tells me the numbers, how do I know that those are the correct numbers? And why should I believe them? Is there a reason to believe those, other than trying to qualify for the world championship "I am not a racist" games? If my skepticism is also racism, I then lack the means to be and remain rational about the subject, and if I can't be rational about it then I am with 100% certainty being manipulated with regards to the subject.
Are you allowed to be skeptical? Do you feel as if you're allowed to be skeptical? If you do feel as if you are allowed to be skeptical, why are you not?
Yeah, I generally really liked this blog post, and I was very much steeped in "woke" culture at one point. But this part struck me as an analogy that could be improved. Lots of things about human culture and language are strange if you try to understand exactly why they came to be what they are. Think of various ways of saying Christmas: Xmas, Noel. Or Santa Claus, he is also Saint Nicholas, but Christmas is not Saint Nicholas's Day, like Saint Patrick's Day or Saint Valentine's Day, etc.
Yeah pretty sure the aliens are going to struggle more with there, they’re, and their.
It's the same with the performative moral posturing. Woke used to mean being cognizant of systemic injustice - stuff like police brutality. It came from 1970s harlem.
Then the dominant culture that was responsible for a lot of that injustice latched on to it and twisted its meaning, watering it down.
This is known as political recuperation - when radical ideas and terminology gets sanitized and deradicalized. It isnt some conspiracy either. It happens naturally, especially in America.
Just today I merged to the main branch instead of a master branch. This happened because Microsoft employees wanted to pressure Microsoft to prevent sales to ICE-the-concentration-camp-people and Microsoft wanted to throw them a bone by "avoiding the term master" while still making that sweet sale.
Rename that branch and everybody is happy, in theory right? Everybody except the people in those concentration camps, I guess.
The people in Silly valley with masters degrees and scrum master certificates can laugh and pat themselves on the back about all of this silliness, imagining that "wokeness" became stupid because of Marxism or something, rather than because of societal pressures (like the ever present profit motive) which they actually deeply approve of.
In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.
Phil Ochs
That's a brilliant quote. Thank you for sharing.
wojack-meme levels of insight
Best insights are
[flagged]
Please make your substantive points without personal attacks.
Btw your assessment could not be further from the truth. I've never met anyone who was more interested in learning or more intellectually curious than pg is.
[flagged]
Books are special cases, because they can be considered discussions. And, often, they're nonthreatening discussions. Pick up the book if you'd like, read it, think about it, respond by talking to others or writing letters. Great way to advance knowledge.
But here's a different context: I see somebody spray painting a wall in an alley. If they're painting a flower or a portrait, I might hang around or come back later to see the result. If they're painting a swastika, I'm more likely to avoid that alley from then on.
Symbols mean something. If they didn't, nobody would bother using them.
Books aren't considered special cases, as the prosecutions in Germany for using one on the cover of a book about politics show.
Your hypothetical spray painter could be using the symbol in many different ways and contexts, of course, including criticism or analogy. Whether you'd avoid it or not would probably depend on what the rest of the painting meant.
Read about semantics and social constructionism.
A symbol or word carries no inherent meaning. We give it subjective meaning. That meaning is constructed socially through a shared understanding of what that symbol means through context and intention.
The same symbol or word can have multiple, and sometimes opposite, meanings, in different contexts.
Exactly. You're not disagreeing with me.
Swastika use in Germany is heavily regulated. It is certainly not free to use symbol.
It's regulated in such a way that it's absolutely allowed to use it to criticize the political opposition, which is why Der Spiegel can not only use it but show it combined with the German flag:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
... but CJ Hopkins is prosecuted repeatedly for using it on the cover of a book that criticized COVID policies (no double jeopardy rule there!)
That is allowed use, Germans actually have fairy sane laws. Swastika is heavily regulated and that regulation allows this particular use.
So basically you are agreeing with the GP that it's regulated?
Yes but that's irrelevant to my point. If it were universally offensive it'd be just banned entirely, but in fact it's allowed to be plastered everywhere as long as you're using it in ways those in power approve of (to criticise their political opposition).
The symbol itself, therefore, isn't offensive. Otherwise Germans would be up in arms at their government for allowing it.
[flagged]
You can't post this kind of ideological flamewar (not to mention personal attack) to HN and we ban accounts that do, so please don't.
[flagged]
Posting like this will get you banned here, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. No more of this, please.
Fair enough. I see the message I replied to got the same warning. Fair play.
they’re not negroes, they’re colored
they’re not colored, they’re African-American
they’re not African-American, they’re black
they’re not black, they’re Black
they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC
I wonder what the next twist of the pretzel will look like
If you're truly mystified, and believe this is nothing more than PC linguistic gymnastics, I wonder why you started with "negroes"?
90% of this list is less the slur treadmill and more the MLA/AP Stylebook version treadmill. Nobody's going to get mad at you for writing African American, unless you work for a newspaper, it's largely motivated by MLA and AP wanting to sell new books every year or two, same as how titles were underlined when I was in grade school and now they're italicized.
I thought the underlining thing had more to do with practical limitations of (most people's) handwriting and of common typewriters. Italics, when available, have been preferred for titles as far back as I'm aware.
Why'd you leave the most notable one out of your list?
I don't think that one was ever "acceptable". That being said, literally every term after/including "African-American" in that list is socially acceptable. Not sure what they're going on about.
I'm not so sure. It sure gets used a lot in "Huckleberry Finn", even by people who aren't being malicious. (From my recollection, anyway. It's been ages since I read it.)
The current norm is that it mustn't be said, even in a discussion of that class of words.
Most of those are terms for different things.
Not all people who are black are African American.
Not all people of color are black.
Looking at Elon Musk, some African Americans are white.
I think this just demonstrates that changes to language are not sufficient to erase racism.
It can even have the opposite effect.
As long as assholes finds ways to ruin words for the rest of us, there will always be a new more sensitive / caring way to refer to traditionally oppressed people.
I know it sucks to keep up with things, but what sucks even works is not keeping up, and finding you and the neo nazis using the same language to mean different things. If you care, then you put the work in. That’s all anyone can do.
bipoc means a different thing than black. you should use the word that has the meaning you want.
But using the word he really wanted to use would totally undermine his point, not to mention getting his post flagged.
Yes exactly. The whole debate doesn't change the fact that certain people form the lower class, and those people tend to also have certain physical characteristics, and people don't like lower social class, which makes them dislike those characteristics.
I imagine they look similar to the gymnastics you did to come up with this comment.
I think we should respect someone's preferred language for their identity. It's not that hard.
Seems like you're pointing to a singular imaginary boogeyman out to annoy you?
You should try the better thing of actually considering the history of each of these.
I won't deny that it can be annoying, but considering the specific why of each one is important. Necessary even.
What, IYO, is being twisted here? What should people be called?
Personally, I took the comment to imply that we are not really solving the root issue behind what is driving the change in terminology and thus we are doomed to continue to apply the same (ineffective) solution.
Why is the changing terminology something that needs to be stopped? Does the language used to describe an identity need to be frozen in time?
> Why is the changing terminology something that needs to be stopped?
It does not. If we were merely talking about the current young person slang word for something good (e.g. rad, sick, amazeballs, etc. (don't ask me for the current one)) no one cares that the terminology changes.
But in this case each change comes with the same reasoning behind it. This indicates that the change has been ineffective and people ought to consider why that is and if there is something else that could be done instead or in addition to be more effective.
Truthfully I think that it is a dialectic process that counterintuitively perpetuates a mentality of victimhood and otherness. The neverending process of being othered//feeling othered//trying to empower oneself in one's otherness is entirely futile. To assimilate, you must assimilate.
I'm well-aware that I'm being rather evasive and I certainly don't think anyone is fooled by what I'm really saying.
Yep, just the age-old trick of creating a problem and then selling an ineffective solution. Unbounded profit!
Absolutely insane equivocation. "Negro" has always been associated with slavery and that's why it was used up until even recently by people like Malcom X. "Colored" is associated with apartheid America in the same way.
African American was a term used around return-to-africa movements and was always heavily associated with non-americanness.
> they’re not black, they’re Black
Somebody has never heard of proper nouns
> they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
Yes... nobody ever called indigenous people negroes. It's not the same thing as black. People use the phrase to talk about more than just black people.
> they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC
The I stands for indigenous.
Haven't read the article yet, skimming the comments.
Wild quote though. Does PG self censor when using the N word? Or does he say it, with the hard r?
If that word isn't part of his vocabulary, why not? Seems like it should be.
> If that word isn't part of his vocabulary, why not? Seems like it should be.
I don't get the comparison. Hard "R" or not makes little difference. You're eligible to be canceled for using either form. So not like PoC/CP.
> Hard "R" or not makes little difference
Should have told that to that teacher from decades ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz9Zy2-C_lY
Such a wild interview that Boondocks outright sampled it for an episode.
Without the r, you could maybe say it's a friendly word and hide behind that. Though generally yeah consequences socially are the same.
From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]"
Then follow to the footnote: "[14] Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying users."
This is puzzling to me because: if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.
Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
No matter what kind of media policies there are, the fact that there is limited bandwidth means that some views are going to be emphasized, and other views are going to be suppressed.
The antiwoke crusaders are just as intent on moralizing and language policing as the worst of their opponents, and in places like Florida they're actively implementing limitations on speech and academic inquiry. To the extent that Graham and his fellow travelers in tech believe in freedom of expression, they've picked dangerous allies.
The past few years has shown us who the tech titans really are. We only had an inkling before, but now they don't have any reason to maintain a facade.
They believe in oligarchy so long as they are the oligarchs. They believe in authoritarianism so long as they are the authorities. They believe in censorship so long as they are the censors.
And now that they've amassed power that will be unopposed for the foreseeable future, there's no reason to pretend their goals are elsewhere. A single party system will cause them issues like Chin has, America has 30-50 years to get to that point and presumably they all plan on emerging as the Supreme Leader when that day comes - or at least landing in the inner circle.
For your average voter, the current two party system is almost materially indistinguishable from one party pretending to be 2 parties, so the issues have already started, perhaps even for decades. Fixes for this include, but are not limited to: campaign finance reform and ranked choice voting.
"The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them."
- Julius Nyerere
> in places like Florida they're actively implementing limitations on speech...
Is this a reference to the law preventing teachers from speaking to young children about sexuality?
> ...and academic inquiry
I assume this is in reference to Florida's rejection of the College Board's AP Black History curriculum, which was rejected for containing "critical race theory" in violation of Florida Law. Surely our democratically elected state governments are better suited to have the final say in what goes into our kids heads than some NGO's Board of Trustees? Anyone who thinks educators make for less political judges than politicians is invited to review the donation history of teachers unions[0].
> Is This a reference to the law preventing teachers from speaking to young children about sexuality?
To be clear, the law that the person I am replying to is likely referring to is Florida House Bill 1557, which passed in 2022 and originally applied to kindergarten through 3rd grade. In 2023, it was expanded to apply to all grades, K-12. Here is a quote from the rule [0], this is the rule's self-summary:
"The amendment prohibits classroom instruction to students in pre-kindergarten through grade 3 on sexual orientation or gender identity. For grades 4 through 12, instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited unless such instruction is either expressly required by state academic standards as adopted in Rule 6A-1.09401, F.A.C., or is part of a reproductive health course or health lesson for which a student’s parent has the option to have his or her student not attend"
[0] https://flrules.org/Faw/FAWDocuments/FAWVOLUMEFOLDERS2023/49...
Is explaining to children that a man is married to a woman speaking about sexuality? How is that different from saying a man is married to a man?
Per the description provided above, the ban is on "classroom instruction... on sexual orientation or gender identity." It's doubtful that stating "Jim is married to Barbara" could be counted as "classroom instruction on sexual orientation" any more than stating "Jim works at the pentagon" could be counted as "classroom instruction on geometry." Nor would the statement "Jim is married to John" be considered "classroom instruction on sexual orientation". The point of the law is to encourage teachers, when fielding a question like "Why is Jim married to a boy?", to reply "Ask your mom". Parents are wary of these discussions for good reason[0].
It's truly hard to imagine allies more "dangerous" (per the parent) than those who obstruct the vital "freedom of expression" that is... teachers talking to children about sexuality.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/719685/american-adults-w...
Probably this law that erases the concept of climate change https://www.npr.org/2024/05/17/1252012825/florida-gov-desant...
Politicians do not belong in curriculum discussions unless they are content area experts.
According to DHH, the massive tech layoffs were motivated by a desire to rid companies of wokeness: "most major corporations have wound down the woke excesses while pretending it's all just a correction for "over hiring"." He goes so far as to say that's what Basecamp did and (in his opinion) it's a necessity to clean out those with the wrong political views in every tech company. Sure sounds like a politically-motivated purge to me.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/google-s-sad-ideological-capture-w...
Much like "woke" isn't really a single coherent entity, neither is "antiwoke". E.g. Bill Maher is notoriously anti-woke, but I haven't heard him demanding language policing. The part of it that does is the same people who have always done it, i.e. social conservatives - for whom it is literally a part of their platform and has always been that.
> We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers, and we reject woke ideology. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.
Is that not anti-woke?
No, it isn't. It's just a sentiment that shitty toxic tribalism masquerading as social justice (and whatever the equivalent is for the political right) has no place in legislature/schools/corporations.
It's actively detrimental to good policy/education/business if only by the virtue of drowning out people who are just going about their day to day responsibilities.
Sure. It's also a good example of a social and cultural conservative.
Hard not to interpret this:
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
as an endorsement of the social conservative elements of "antiwoke".
Elon censored me for mentioning my Mastodon handle on Twitter. Me and anyone else who did the same.
i guess pg knows one thing about it ;) https://fortune.com/2022/12/18/twitter-suspends-paul-graham-...
Was going to say the same thing. I guess some people are just firm in their beliefs. It's only data if it supports what you were otherwise going to say, or something like that.
You're using a definition of "censorship" which is so broad as to be meaningless. By your definition, when I upvote a comment on Hacker News, that's "censorship" because it makes other comments in the thread a bit less prominent.
>Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
Censorship isn't the only way to prevent the rise of bad ideas. For example: "the solution to bad speech is more speech"
I don't think that's true. When you and I up- or down-vote a comment, we are a part of expressing what will end up being the community's consensus. That's not censorship.
When Twitter's algorithm promotes certain topics and demotes others, that is a unilateral act made by a single, unaccountable entity that has full control over the platform. That is (or at least can be) censorship.
> "the solution to bad speech is more speech"
Yes, but when enough people who otherwise have little actual power get together to drown out "bad speech" with "more speech" it gets called 'cancel culture' and 'witch hunts' and is used as the primary example of 'censorship' on social media.
There's a difference between refuting someone's argument, and trying to get them fired because you don't like their conclusion.
> but without censoring either
PG should try using the term "cis" in a post.
(not arguing with you, but arguing with the statement that neither are being censored)
There is definitely censorship on Twitter these days. A local strip club has its account suspended for "hate speech"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/the-penthous...
> Twitter took action after a photo of the club's latest marquee reading, "Forever neighbours, never neighbors" went viral.
> The wording references president-elect Donald Trump's recent trolling of Canada by calling it America's 51st state, and uses the juxtaposition of the Canadian spelling of "neighbour" against the U.S. "neighbor" for political satire.
> ... the free speech social media platform shut down the club's account saying "it violates the X Hateful Profile Policy."
They simply realized reach is what you need to control, it doesn’t matter if you can write the most brilliant political content if no one will see it due to the distribution algorithm penalizing it while each single one of Musks mostly idiotic tweets reaches hundreds of millions of users. Free speech is meaningless if it can’t be heard by anyone.
Yes! I like to use the term "fair speech" for this concept. Free speech is that you are free from government retribution. But fair speech means that you also have equal opportunity to speak as others. As you said, if person A can say one million things while you are only able to say one thing, you are effectively denied speech.
Weren't a number of the accounts that Elon reinstated just overt white supremacists? Like, yes, by "not censoring" white supremacy, there are some causally correlated effects for what the far right considers "wokeness" on that platform.
You raise good points. I’m optimistic because i think the quieting of some voices (while bad) is much better than their complete silencing, as has happened through deplatforming, shadow banning, and even White House requests in the past.
I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
> I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
The problem with this logic is that for the most part, new media isn't replacing legacy media; it's simply placing new layer of filtering in front of it. The vast majority of people sharing information on these platforms aren't journalists doing their own research. Instead, they're getting their information from journalists and just applying their own filtering and spin. "Rebuting" usually just involves linking to different news sources. You were always better just reading the legacy media in the first place.
> From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]"
As has been demonstrated time and time again, especially on the Internet, unmoderated discussion boards do not scale. Trolls can naturally push out the reasonable people by increasing the noise level. Once the number of users exceeds some small threshold it is basically a guarantee that trolls will move in. Shitposting is cheap, easy, and the people who do it have all the time in the world. If you don't moderate the board will become useless for substantive discussion.
I mean this was amply demonstrated back in the Usenet era. Nothing has fundamentally change with human psyche since then, so the rule still holds true. Twitter/X is just the lastest example.
You've hit the nail on the head here. If you let the trolls in they will suck all of the air out of the room.
Twitter is not unmoderated.
I don't know how many people I muted, banned, or how many times I clicked that I don't want to see something. Over time, Twitter gets better.
This being said, I prefer doing my moderation myself instead of having somebody I extremely disagree with (former Twitter employees) to do this for me.
But you have to mute each account when trolls probably create new accounts daily just to troll people and make fake engagement between their accounts to get boosted by the algorithms.
And really bad actors are taking advantage of the removal of the block feature, which was useful to block people from easily seeing your tweets, so that it leaves one open to nonstop harassment. Or in the case of Elon, forcing people to still get surfaced his tweets even if they blocked Elon on the platform.
This is BS, Elon absolutely censored people.
The guy who drove over people in the Christmas market in Germany recently openly backed the far right and was a racist. Elon removed all tweets that didn't match with the made up story that he was an islamist.
I think the more glaring thing is that Musk has indeed directly censored twitter. Saying cis results in an auto-ban for example. But he's also just blatantly censored people for disagreeing with him.
Also, in a time when the next president of the united states is quoting hitler and also saying that Hitler "had a lot of good ideas" I hardly think a very poor multi-page screed on the word woke is the best use of time and thought.
So there was a platform called Twitter - apparently people who were 'woke' liked it and became the most loyal clients. This made the platform grow and become popular. Then came the "hero" and saved the platform from "wokeness". This is the real story. Elon came and bought something that was grown by the despised "woke" people and made it his own.
If I go into for you instead of following it's extremely heavily skewed into conspiracy theory right. So to me it looks like they are boosting the reach of that content.
if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.
Not at all - the difference here is choice. You can choose to pay or not to pay. And if you don't pay you are still seen.
There was no choice wrt visibility under the old regime, WrongSpeak was censored - you couldn't pay to be heard.
Now that doesn't mean the current situation is optimal, but it at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
> at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
This has multiple issues.
The older set up was not there to promote visibility but to provide a layer of authentification, most blue ticks were brands and recognisable people. Now its mostly scams, allowing anyone, especially potentially malicious actors, to don the mask of credibility is not "allowing the possibility of diversity of opinion" is allowing the fox in the hen house.
Secondly, if you imagine the goals of right wing people to maintain current power structures, and the left to disrupt them, then the ability to pay is already corrupted due to the current power structure being supremely lobsided. Aka those with all the money are effectively the only ones who can pay. (In law this is called 'right without a remedy', its when you technically have a right on paper but could never actually exercise it)
This whole situation also enables a problem we already know exists which are state actors. Russia was part of a disinfo campaign through FB tools in 2016 through cambridge analytica, and used bots in twitter in 2016 and 2020 through multiple state sponsored bot farms. Allowing that kind of state warfare to be amplified by spending money is really really poor choice from a platform prespective. Without those tools, organic growth is harder to achieve and getting around bot detection tools means a part of the infra would be caught before it caused damage (even under those circumstances, there was plenty of damage done). Removing all guardrails is a frankly indefensible choice in terms of public safety
The financial barrier is an excellent guardrail against bots and drivel, including those that are state-sponsored though I agree the latter will have more power to counter, but it will certainly act as a drag.
I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.
"Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.
> The financial barrier is an excellent guardrail against bots and drive
This is Musk argument but it fails on 2 important ways.
1) You had to pay to set up a bot farm to get X ammount of engagement before. Now you can pay 1 subscription and have access to the same or more engagement. So the financial burden to peddle things like Shitcoins is ludricusly lower
2) The subscription system is built ON TOP OF the system that previously meant trust. A system that still means verified in other platforms. Essentially hijacking trust through payment, which means the people who were educated on its meaning, or know about checks from a different platform are now EXRA succeptible to bad actors.
> I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.
Its not that _you can only_ pay it if youre rich. But lets say you wanna promote a specific idea, like idk "CRT is taught to children", which was an idea cooked up in a think tank to try and push for home schooling and defunding public education under the guise of some weird stuff being taught in schools.
You can easily coordinate buying accounts, talk points and the amplified attention of the subscription means you have a massive leg up. Compared to the other side, who would need to figure out what your plan is, grassroots organise, find funds for all its members to pay the subscription and then reply, without talking points and much higher risk of fucking up the response.
By virtue of having a megaphone you can pay for, you disrupt in large part the network effect of social media, and instead of consistent high quality posters you embolden and benefit people willing to pay. Its like Pay 2 Win but the whales are grifters and assholes.
> "Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.
Well the consequences were pretty negligeble compared to the alternatives. FB tried low moderation and got to support 2 genocides. New Twitter has allowed neo nazi groups to organise and platform themselves, it has allowed the Turkish goverment and Saudi to disrupt dissent at home while they carry on bombings of Kurds and Yemenis respetvely.
Or is Trump getting banned from breaking the TOS much worse than Zuck and Musk allowing the taliban, Isis and any dictator who calls them get their way?
I guess you could call turning your social media site into a toilet, causing anyone with any sense of pride or morality to leave, neutralizing “wokeness”.
[dead]
[flagged]
Society, in its grand equality, gives rich and poor alike the ability to spend their money on billboards and full page ads.
This is ignoring all of the actual algorithm changes and Elon-induced censorship of specific topics on Twitter that make Paul's point just flat-out wrong, of course.
I'm sorry, but "wokeness" until recently was on the agenda of multi-billion dollars companies such as Google, Meta, Apple and the rest of Fortune 500. Implying that left-leaning people can't afford to pay for their Twitter/X profiles is laughable.
What was that agenda exactly? The only ones that come to mind are good, actually: - Allowing more free speech internally and working towards providing a safe space for everyone to provide their ideas. - Investing in under-served communities to try and build talent to hire from.
> Allowing more free speech internally and working towards providing a safe space for everyone to provide their ideas.
As long as your ideas conform with the rest of the group. Don't you start thinking of making this an unsafe space bucko!
> The only ones that come to mind are good, actually
It's funny you say that, because my impression is that DEI allows companies to avoid criticism of their oppressive policies with token investments in a few diverse staff.
- Running sweatshops in SEA [1]? "NIKE, Inc. is building more equitable and inclusive practices to empower our employees and create the workforce of the future." [2]
- Repeated oil spills in Nigeria? [3][4] Shell's vision is to become "a place where everyone—from employees, to our customers, partners and suppliers—feels valued, respected and has a strong sense of belonging." [5]
- Exploiting unaccompanied, undocumented children in factories that make Cheerios? [6] General Mills is "committed to advancing our culture of inclusion, equity and belonging for our people, business and communities." [7] They are also happy to look the other way when their subcontractor Hearthside Food Solutions hires children to work in their factories, as long as they have plausible deniability.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_sweatshops [2] https://about.nike.com/en/impact/focus-areas/diversity-equit... [3] https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/25/africa/shell-oil-spills-niger... [4] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/12/21/timeline-oil-s... [5] https://www.shell.com/who-we-are/diversity-equity-and-inclus... [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-... https://archive.is/1sDWO [7] https://www.generalmills.com/how-we-make-it/putting-people-f...
I hope that's enough to reveal that a lot of these so-called DEI initiatives are only there to performatively assuage investors and activists, while the companies involved continue preying on the marginalized.
Pretty much any billionaire I can name has taken an "anti-woke" stance: Musk, Trump, Thiel, Graham, Zuckerberg, Andreesen, Ramaswamy... Money is definitely not on the side of the "woke", whoever they may be.
Seems like the only billionaires you can name are the ones that made the news in the past week... How about the "silent majority" of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Sergiey Brinn, Lary Page, Warren Buffet, Steve Ballmer, etc? Are they all "anti-woke" as well?
I guess my point here is: until recently "wokeness" was the mainstream ideology, basically the default setting for all the rich and powerful. Yes, recently half a dozen of billionaries switched sides, but that does not mean that wokeness doesn't still have trillions of dollars behind it.
A friend of mine pointed out that in societies like Russia and China, it is the oligarchs who are most directly under the thumb of the strongmen. They're visible and are the first to "fall" out a window, whereas if you're some nobody you might be able to get away with dissent.
Bezos's quashing of dissent at The Washington Post might not (just) be the solidarity of a real billionaire with a fake billionaire but rather the very real fear he won't get a permit for anything for the next four years. If Zuck plays along with Trump, Trump eliminates competition from a better alternative, etc.
A counterexample is Bloomberg Businessweek which trivializes racism with the mindlessly woke policy of always writing "black" (as in African-American) with a capital B right next to reviews of $350 bottles of booze and $3000/night hotel rooms.
> always writing "black" (as in African-American) with a capital B
Not really agreeing or disagreeing with your overall point, but I'm fine with this practice. I used to think it was weird, but I've come to realize some things:
1. "Black" is not acting as a descriptor of color. Black people do not have black skin. Black people with even the darkest of skin in the spectrum of "Black person" still do not have black skin. So the word is being used in a very different way than its common meaning.
2. "Black person" has become a proper noun of sorts, in parallel to "Asian person", etc. I also see most (all?) publications that capitalize "Black" to also capitalize "White" when talking about race, which seems reasonable through this lens.
Perhaps the more accurate term is "suppressing" - you can do this directly or by crowding out or deprioritizing specific content based on many attributes. Content is both literal and second-order (like paid vs. unpaid)
It's much more than that. If the government says, "only land owners can publish", regardless of content, that's still obviously censorship. In what world would "only Christians may publish" not be censorship?
I wish twitter would use LLMs to automatically censor people who abuse apostrophes. As long as they're promoting and appealing to Nazis, throw the Grammar Nazis a bone!
The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power.
Any real history of "political correctness," if we're going to use that term to mean the pursuit of social justice, will be incomplete without an accounting of the internal struggles of various activist causes when confronted with their own wrongdoing/ignorance/blindness/lack of "political correctness".
One of the best examples is the women's movement in the 70s being confronted internally by minority women blaming middle class white women for winning the right to work in an office building, when minority women had long been holding down jobs and needed other forms of championing, such as against police abuse, or the effects of poverty, or discrimination against their sexaul orientation.
It's insane to reduce the drive for political correctness to a bunch of radical students becoming tenured professors and unleashing their inner prigs against everyone else.
Thinking about progress, I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate was a lesbian. That would be unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s. Even the right is progressing and they don’t know it.
> I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate
Not only lesbian. Living with a Sri Lankan woman and raising two boys. And living not in Germany, but Switzerland.
Seems to bend herself quite a lot to gain power ...
I had a similar double-take moment reading about Breitbart editor "Milo Yiannopoulos" a few years ago.
Different racist cultures develop different ideas on what makes someone white. "Yiannopoulos" might be called a 'wog':
The slur became widely diffused in Australia with an increase in immigration from Southern Europe and the Levant after the Second World War, and the term expanded to include all immigrants from the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. These new arrivals were perceived by the majority population as contrasting with the larger predominant Anglo-Celtic Australian people. [1]
All boats rise with the tide I guess.
Yiannopoulos is an... interesting case in general. Apparently[1] he declared himself to be "ex-gay", 'demoted' his husband to housemate, and is treating his homosexuality 'like an addiction'. His future plans include 'rehabilitating conversion therapy'.
Seeing all of that, I'm really not sure his boat has been rising with the tide, so to speak. I personally don't believe anyone thinks conversion therapy is good for themselves unless they are deeply troubled.
[1] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/activist-milo-yiannopoulos...
Peter Thiel is gay and still advocates against gay marriage (He's married to a man himself).
Those people know the restrictions they push for won't apply to them, they are too powerful, quite literally above the law.
Do you have a source for the claim about Peter Thiel? I looked for one, and all I could find were several cases of Thiel donating to explicitly pro-gay-marriage political organizations.
I don't think it's fair to say that he advocates against gay marriage; it would be accurate to say he's willing to donate to politicians who advocate against gay marriage, however. Blake Masters and J. D. Vance being the obvious cases. Kris Kobach and Ted Cruz also come to mind.
Well, that's embarrassing. I read the Wikipedia article wrong, he donated $10,000 to an organization that fought against a law that would ban same-sex marriage. The double negation got me...
Nevertheless, Thiel donated a lot to Trump's campaign, one of its goals being a federal ban on gay marriage and other restrictions of the freedom of LGBT people.
Where is the evidence that Trump wants to federally ban gay marriage? You should learn more about Peter Theil. He is a libertarian.
Doesn't mean they aren't fascists, gay fascists are by definition, fascists.
They literally started sending fake "remigration" tickets to anybody with a foreign sounding family name, exactly what the nazis did to jews in the 1930s.
https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/parteien/id_...
I don't think its accurate to describe the AfD as right wing. Far right or possibly fascist
That only makes the progressive outlook more remarkable.
Im not sure why you think this is a "progressive" take that's the mainstream view of the center right Christian Democratic party of Germany.
Because I’m not making a contemporary comparison but a chronological one. Yes, women and LGBT leaders among fascists can be boringly mainstream today. It wasn’t until recently. That’s a dimension of progress.
Oh sorry I might have misinterpreted your previous comment.
I don't think its totally unknown in the past although I suppose you might say it was often done with implausible deniability. As people pointed out there's a difference between being out and being openly out.
One funny example was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhirinovsky (Putin's fascist clown who played the extremist to make Putin seem more reasonable, although it was probably close to his real views). Surprisingly the antisemitic Russian ultra nationalist had a Jewish father(who divorced his mother and moved to Israel when he was an infant) which he used to sort of deny it in a ridiculous manner saying his mother was Russian and his father was a lawyer
> unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s
Ernst Röhm, leader of the Nazi's SA forces, was gay. People did not join the Nazi movement because of the impeccable life style of their leaders, but their political program. Same with AfD or Trumpists.
Sure, the history is full of gays who were closeted or whose homosexuality were open secrets. But those have always been kept plausibly deniable towards the public, not open like this at all.
Röhm was actually known to the public to be gay for some of the time that he was in power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6hm_scandal He wasn't quite 'openly gay' in the modern sense, but he didn't really put up much of a pretense.
The fact that the title of that article includes the word "scandal" would imply that his peers weren't actually ok with his homosexuality, no?
Sure, but he wasn’t closeted and his homosexuality wasn’t a plausibly deniable secret.
The article you reference points out that, not only did Röhm lose all support in the Nazi party once he was "outed", but that Hitler had him executed due to, in part, his homosexuality. And: "After the purge, the Nazi government systematically persecuted homosexual men."
That's not an accurate summary of what the article says. There's no doubt that Röhm rose through the ranks of the SA when it was already widely known that he was gay. Even Hitler himself knew:
>Röhm's appointment was opposed from the beginning by some in the SA who saw it as cementing the subordination of the SA to the Nazi Party's political wing. His homosexuality was seized upon by those who disagreed with the organizational reforms but could not openly criticize Hitler without breaking with Nazism, because of the Führer principle. Hitler said that the personal life of a Nazi was only a concern for the party if it contradicted the fundamental principles of Nazism. The leader of the Berlin SA, Walther Stennes, rebelled against the SA leadership and declared that he and his followers would "never serve under a notorious homosexual like Röhm and his Pupenjungen (male prostitutes)". On 3 February, Hitler dismissed Stennes's objection, stating, "The SA is not a girls' boarding school."
In case it is not obvious from my original comment, I am not trying to paint Nazi party as a beacon of DEI. The Nazi state went on to murder thousands of homosexuals. But in response to the OP, Röhm was certainly not closeted and it is doubtful that his homosexuality could even be described as an 'open secret'.
It could be openly known among Nazi ranks and that's still significantly different than being publicly known. Was there any mainstream newspaper that outed his sexual preference?
It is at the top of the cited article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6hm_scandal
"Beginning in April 1931, the SPD newspaper Münchener Post published a series of front-page stories about alleged homosexuality in the SA, which turned out to be based on forgeries. SPD leaders set out to obtain authentic evidence of Röhm's sexuality and, if possible, convict him under Paragraph 175. Röhm was tried five times, but never convicted. During the German presidential election in March 1932, the SPD released a pamphlet edited by ex-Nazi Helmuth Klotz [de] with Röhm's letters to Heimsoth. This second round of disclosures sparked a plot by some Nazis to murder Röhm, which fell through and resulted in additional negative press for the party."
It cannot be more public than that. The Social Democrats used the anti-gay paragraph.
Another known gay Nazi was Rudolf Hess:
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/10/opinion/l-hess-homosexual...
And Klaus Mann wrote a novel about German actor and director Gustaf Gründgens, famous for his Mephisto role in Goethe's Faust:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephisto_(novel)
"The author Hermann Kesten suggested that he write a novel of a homosexual careerist in the Third Reich, with the director of the state theatre Gustaf Gründgens as a subject matter. Gründgens's homosexuality was widely known."
The whole selective persecution of gays began after Röhm's paramilitary SA surged to 4,000,000 members in 1934, and a couple of people including Himmler intrigued against him.
People like Hess and Gründgens were never touched or exposed even though most people knew.
Yes, but the timeline of events as a whole confirms my argument that his homosexuality was a significant problem among Nazi party and its supporters. Röhm lost Nazi Party support after he was outed and was eventually murdered by Hitler. Not an analog to AfD putting forward a gay swiss woman with a Sri Lankan partner as their candidate for chancellor. There's a huge difference between two eras.
>Röhm lost Nazi Party support after he was outed and was eventually murdered by Hitler.
He wasn't killed by Hitler because he was gay, as the article and parent comment explain. The first public disclosures of his homosexuality came in 1931. Before that, everyone who mattered in the Nazi party had already known for years. He was killed in 1934 for political reasons.
Homosexuality is also a significant problem among the AfD and its supporters. Röhm's example illustrates that it is not paradoxical for a known homosexual to rise to a position of power within a homophobic party. If even the Nazi party of the 1930s could tolerate known homosexuals within its ranks, that ought to tell us how seriously we should take the argument that the AfD can't be racist or homophobic because of Alice Weidel!
I'm reasonably certain the causality is the other way around: Once he was about to loose power his gayness was used to attack him. If he hadn't been gay he would have been attacked for some other reason. It's the change in behaviour that's relevant not the absolute facts.
It's reasonably simple: Be sufficiently powerful and your sins will be overlooked (for a recent example: See Donald Trump's "sentence" in New York). And in non-rule-of-law societies your sins-while-powerful will be used against you (this is why democracies historically always had immunity arrangements)
Vito, an important member of the New Jersey crime family DiMeo (Italian Mafia) during the early 2000s was gay as well
They actually do know it, and they’re mad that so many think they don’t. It’s why they think wokeness is a problem, it is (to them) mainly performative and insulting because progress has happened and continues to.
They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress.
> They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress.
Do you genuinely think you're presenting the "woke" side of the argument in good faith here?
I'm not trying to. I'm presenting their interpretation of it.
Yup, Graham utterly fails to get over the bare minimum bar of American social justice critique, which is "What side of the civil rights movement would your proposed ideology have landed on?"
Graham is fairly explicit that the civil rights movement wasn't priggish in the way he criticizes. He basically develops the thesis that such priggishness arises as a side effect of any ideology when it becomes sufficiently dominant, and it's worth opposing the priggishness, independent of the merits of the dominant ideology in question.
There's a big difference between these two things
* Berkeley's Free Speech Movement: https://qr.ae/pYCVXO
* "Free speech is a disease and we are the cure", from the sidebar of /r/ShitRedditSays: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/
Are you sure? He says 'And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.'
What "performative" and "social justice" would have meant in 1960 would be very different and a throwaway line to that effect does nothing to rescue the piece. But to give an example:
> A successful theory of the origin of political correctness has to be able to explain why it didn't happen earlier. Why didn't it happen during the protest movements of the 1960s, for example? They were concerned with much the same issues. [1]
> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power.
The issue is a factual one. Student protests were in fact a huge contributor to the civil rights movement which was undoubtedly very successful. Applying his theory with this correction:
"The output of progressive movements is political correctness" + "1960s student movement output civil rights" = "civil rights are political correctness"
Of course Paul Graham believes in civil rights, which is why he instead decided that the 1960s student movements must have had no power or effect. Remove the modern context/our understanding of PG and the philosophy of the piece boils down to "things progressives try to impress on society are bad". Vague asterisks in regards to the distant past don't solve that fundamental problem.
>The output of progressive movements is political correctness
???
How did you conclude that Graham believes this?
Can you quote a specific passage from Graham's essay that supports this idea?
I thought Graham was quite clear in targeting priggishness. He analogizes wokeness to Victorian prudishness. I didn't see any claim that priggishness is inherent to progressive ideology. In fact, he wrote:
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
And also:
>But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
I don't really know what you're saying but Graham is speaking against the religious zeal of woke people, especially in regards to censorship. I'm not sure what that has to do with the civil rights movement.
It shows he doesn't answer the question of "how do we know when the woke people are right?" which is an important question given they have been right about a lot of things in the past.
How does anyone know when someone else is right on moral issues?
He's presenting his own musings as some kind of historical record. Utterly unburdened by the need for data to back up his narrative.
The Internet has finally allowed the wealthy and powerful to converse at the same level and in the same space as your big brother's friend who smokes a lot of weed and knows that the government is suppressing a car that runs on water
Not all bad, then.
I have to admit it's pretty funny that all of the citations in the piece are just more of his own opinions.
Those aren't citations, they're just asides.
Yeah, it's very strange to write an "origins of" essay without citing examples (just Larry Summers?), referencing experts, or showing evidence. This article is just about his feelings. He's not an historian, or a social scientist, and frankly I don't think he's familiar enough with this topic to present an historical overview. It's an unconvincing essay.
I laughed at the beginning when he stated that student movements in the '60s didn't have any real power. Paul, please just take a sociology class or something.
You can tell who a person does and doesn't talk with when reading something like this. To write an essay of this length, on this topic, and not bring up (at a minimum) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority suggests you shouldn't be writing about it.
I was a college student in the 1990s. Not only that, I was a member and even leader of evangelical Christian groups in college. Outrage, us versus them, claims of being persecuted, and imposing standards of morality on others was the reason those groups existed. The bigger the fight you started, the better.
This is like writing an essay criticizing WalMart for paying low wages when every competing business pays the same or lower wages. Not false, but definitely not the whole truth, and obviously misleading.
I have the impression that Paul Graham does not read. His essays are such a product of echo-chamber diatribes and accolades that I cannot fathom him sitting down and reckoning with public information that contradicts his personal philosophy.
(He very well might reread his own essays and read other people's work at a 1:1 ratio. He might also simply have poor reading comprehension.)
ironically paul graham has an essay about reading journalism as a subject expert and immediately knowing that the writer is writing about subjects that they don't know much about.
[dead]
Graham doesn't mention Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority by name, but he does explicitly compare wokeness to religion:
> Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex.
> Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes.
I think it's abundantly clear that he does not condone priggishness whether it's coming from the right or the left.
> and not bring up (at a minimum) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority suggests you shouldn't be writing about it.
I think it's fine to point out that there are parallels on the right. But I don't think it is constructive to say that he is not entitled to write about a topic just because he doesn't explicitly mention something that you think is important.
> it's abundantly clear that he does not condone priggishness whether it's coming from the right or the left
He tacitly condones Musk, whose priggishness currently consists of smugly rehashing alt-right talking points.
Not to mention marking any mention of "cis" as hate speech. This is not a recognised slur, it is only treated as such on Musk's whim, because he personally dislikes it.
You’re right that he doesn’t condone it from any side, but the article would be much stronger if it spent more time on right wing forms of this problem too.
For example, any of the “go woke go broke” forms of right wing cancel culture, the ways that Christian colleges require professors to sign statements of faith, the way that sexual repression is still very much the norm in many conservative circles…
I mean, look at the paragraph surrounding this line:
> Of course [we shouldn’t require signing DEI statements]; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs.
It’s seemingly ignorant of the fact that this still happens a lot on the right! A family member had to sign something to the effect that they wouldn’t drink alcohol even off the job because the employer was religious.
A more timely example is that a core part of project 2025 is replacing bureaucratic federal workers with specifically conservative, Christian individuals.
Now, I don’t believe PG supports that. But if you spend an article mostly only attack one “side,” without acknowledging it’s somewhat of a two way street, you’re not going to convince that many people, and you can see that in this thread.
If PG’s goal, as he says, is to fight back against the prigs, he needs to better appeal to those who want to continue being respectful & progressive. And to do that, he needs to avoid being so reductive with what “woke” means.
The title is "The Origins of Wokeness". He's writing about things that many groups were doing at the time, making his explanation at best incomplete. As for Jerry Falwell, you cannot write about the origins of modern cancel culture and not mention him, since he's the one that popularized it.
I genuinely enjoy that many people think PC culture started with BLM and woke language and what not in the 00's-10's.
There's literally a movie called PCU from 1994.
[dead]
If you want some critique of the thing PG thinks he's critiquing (which, to parallel what he says about social oppression, is a problem but not of the nature or relative magnitude he thinks it is), but from people who have agendas to oppose social oppression instead of to protect it along with their own wealth and power, you could start with:
How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth?: Movement building requires a culture of listening—not mastery of the right language. by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-much-discomfort-is...
we will not cancel us. by adrienne maree brown https://adriennemareebrown.net/2018/05/10/we-will-not-cancel...
Another point, he is very invested in keeping the economy and the widening gap between the rich and everyone else out of it.
One of the big catalysts of wokeness was of course, Occupy Wall St, borne out of the 2008 financial crisis. When the bankers get bailed out and you just go underwater on your mortgage, people start to get upset and want to change things. And organizing yourselves and drilling with lots of rules and getting on the same page with people you don't otherwise have any connection to is paramount when it comes to becoming a large enough, hivemind type group that can bring about collective action. But if he brought that up in this article, people who don't care about 8 genders and fringe social issues might start backing away from the "woke = bad" message
to my mind, Occupy Wall Street and "wokeness", as it is generally depicted, are generally opposing movements. although it may have started there, "wokeness" was not primarily driven by universities and people on twitter, the overwhelming majority of it was driven by corporations and the corporate media. for businesses, it was a new way to buy credibility through moral posturing, and for the media it was a new cheap form of outrage to use to try and hold onto their dwindling readerships. further, "wokeness" is generally divisive to the working classes and far less threatening to the generally mono-cultural capital-holders. even further, it's a very nice way to distract young activists away from fighting against class structures.
to me, it's almost like the corporate classes saw Occupy Wall Street, a very very rare occurrence of genuine class consciousness and protest in the streets of America, and they realised that they needed to neutralise it somehow, and "wokeness" was how they achieved that.
thank you for the sane comment. adrienne maree brown is wonderful
edit: I realize I didn't post the adrienne marie brown piece I meant to, I was thinking of this one: https://adriennemareebrown.net/2020/07/17/unthinkable-though...
I think there’s a fascinating throughline from older Christian moral enforcement to what the essay calls “wokeness.” Historically, a lot of Christian movements had the same impulse to legislate language and behaviors—just grounded in sin rather than privilege. For instance, the 19th-century American Puritans famously policed each other’s speech and actions because the stakes were framed as eternal salvation versus damnation. That social dynamic—where the “righteous” person gains status by exposing the lapses of others—feels remarkably similar to what we see now with “cancellations” on social media.
The parallels between the "original sin" in Christian theology and "... privilege" in social justice discourse are pretty obvious.
I also find it rather amusing that the social justice movement tends to be so US-centric - i.e. focusing on the issues that are specific to or manifest most strongly in US, and then projecting that focus outwards, sometimes to the point of cultural intrusiveness (like that whole "Latinx" thing which seems to be nearly universally reviled outside of US).
At the same time many people sincerely believe that US is not just a bad country - I'm fine with this as a matter of subjective judgment, and share some of it even - but that it's particularly bad in a way that no other country is. It's almost as if someone took American exceptionalism and flipped the sign. Which kinda makes me wonder if that is really what's happening here.
> that whole "Latinx" thing which seems to be nearly universally reviled outside of US
Well, there are a few things to clear up:
1. Latino is an American word that's only useful in the US to summarize people south of the US in Latam. People in Latam don't use the word since that grouping isn't otherwise useful to them.
2. There definitely are Spanish speakers who do use the -x or -@ suffix like "tod@s" and "todxs".
The mass confusion between these two facts is responsible for most of the discourse you'll read about latinx.
Americans don't understand that #2 exists. "Woke" Mexicans, for example, do use the -x suffix.
"Non-woke" Spanish speakers think the -x suffix is dumb in their own language. But they don't represent all Spanish speakers.
>"Non-woke" Spanish speakers think the -x suffix is dumb in their own language. But they don't represent all Spanish speakers.
Active users of the suffix are a small minority: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/09/12/ho...
That article is on latinx specifically. As someone from and living in LatAm I can attest that use of todxs, tod@s, and even todes are not rare sights as replacements for "todas y todos". This is a distinct phenomenon from latinx.
>That article is on latinx specifically.
Later in the survey:
>Still, this population continues to favor the terms Hispanic and Latino over the newer terms Latinx and Latine. 52% prefer the term Hispanic to describe people who are of Hispanic or Latino origin or descent, while 29% prefer the term Latino. 2% say they prefer Latinx and 1% favor Latine.
--
>As someone from and living in LatAm
This is about people living in the US.
You specifically were replying to a section about "all Spanish speakers".
I totally get the use of a placeholder, but how do you _pronounce_ it? "Latinx" feels so weird because it's used not just in writing but in speech as well, even though it doesn't really make sense for Spanish phonologically.
Thanks for this, without someone saying this I would never have known. I didn't know the context at all, til!
The book "American Nations", whose basic idea is that the US + Canada is composed of 12 cultural "nations", also observes that the Puritans were rather intolerant. The Puritan culture influenced what he calls "Yankeedom" (New England west to Minnesota) and the "Left Coast", which was settled by Yankee shipping. My impression is that these two areas are the most "woke"; it seems that Puritan intolerance casts a long shadow, even though those areas rejected orthodox Christianity a long time ago.
My 2 cents is that this book was one of the worst excuses for historical analysis I've ever read (not that the author is even a historian; he's a journalist). It felt closer to astrology or a Buzzfeed quiz about what Harry Potter house you belong to than anything of actual value. It reminded me of a litany of corporate workshops I've experienced, where the author comes up with an interesting hook and then works backwards to support their conclusions. Great for selling a story to those looking for intellectually empty calories. Pretty much garbage otherwise.
Can you recommend a better book on the same topic?
Is it possible that this is just the nature of writing about regional cultures?
Albion’s Seed is a more rigorous work.
Right: it's worth noting the Puritans departed England in part because they were, basically, zealous pains in the butt who didn't get along well with contemporary English society.
The Pilgrims left.
The Puritans got kicked out.
It's hilarious the extent to which New England history is one of people showing up in Boston, looking around, realizing who was running the show and deciding that the frontier and the natives didn't sound all that bad.
To quote mark fisher “…It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.”
Christians are so new. I wonder why Pharisees aren't mentioned more often when bringing in this topic.
Actually, "pharisaical" is the dictionary definition for this kind of hypocrisy.
An optimistic explanation is that they don't want to be antisemitic. The present-day term for "Pharisee" is "Jew." The early rabbis who created Judaism as we know it were Pharisees, and theirs was the only first-century Jewish sect which survived until today. You can even see the alternation between "Pharisee" and "Jew" in The New Testament. For instance, in some verses it criticizes the Pharisees for washing their hands before eating, whereas in others it levies the same complaint against Jews generally: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2011%3A38%...
My guess would be because most of the audience it's said to are much more familiar with Christianity than with 0000s Judaism. If the person hearing the comparison don't know anything about the operand then for them it becomes a meaningless comparison.
If anyone's familiar with Christianism they will be also familiar with Pharisians, mentioned probably mentioned more frequently in the New Testament than the old (Jesus often recused their ways)
I was raised Christian and yes, the Pharisees were not just taught about, but a subject of focus.
This makes the modern American strain of Christianity all the more puzzling to me, with how it in many ways shares more with the Pharisees than it does with the religion's namesake, but that’s a topic for a different post.
Ehh ... it's indisputable that in $CURRENTYEAR that there are a lot of people whose only experience with Christianity is "things people said on the Internet".
If many random readers won't understand a reference to "Pharisee", and people trying to make a point stop using it as a result, then even fewer Internet-educated readers will get the reference.
Probably because this topic is American and it's the history of American Christianity that's being referenced.
The difference here is people are trying to address people’s actual life experiences instead of something they believe based on faith.
All peoples' life experiences equally matter. Just some areas more equal than others.
/s
Or so they believe
an interesting article on this topic: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/more-christian-th...
I grew up in the 80's - I felt exactly the same about evangelicals then as I feel about the woke today.
fr Nathaniel Hawthorne is immensely relevant in the present day
Everyone does moral enforcement though. Even this blog post we are commenting about (which I really agree with) is an attempt at moral enforcement. He even prescribes that wholeness be treated like a religion and gives a whole list of scenarios where one should deny the request of a woke person (same as one would a religious person). To constantly keep up this equality among all ideologies requires rules and enforcement of those rules, aka moralizing
The frequency and severity of enforcement are the distinguishing factors here.
Maybe, but where's the proof that woke was more frequently and more severely enforced than other things?
[flagged]
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""
Not exactly. The article doesn't try to draw a causative link between Christianity in particular to "wokeness".
i definitely believe in the relationship between modern wokeness and some older religious traditions of moral policing
there seems to be a territorial overlap between the two
The difference is religion’s justification is the words of a fictitious being whereas “wokeness” stems from principles of equality and tolerance.
Surely some adherents of each use it to feel righeous/superior, but in only one case is it actually justified.
I know what you're trying to say--But also, the (unintentional?) irony makes me chuckle:
"Sure, my group sounds self-righteous, but our view is justifiably superior."
Nobody wins a shouting match.
It was somewhat tongue in cheek ;) but between real, human impacting principles and made up stories about fairies I'll take the former every time.
Where do these principles of equality and tolerance come from? Are they descriptions of a stochastic processes produced by one of an infinite series of marble machines, or do they have a deeper root in something that is true for all places and times (I'll even accept roots in something that is true (not just acceptable) for this time, for all people within this time)?
Black person here.
Like most discussions of "woke" and "wokeness," this one too fails HARD by not fully and directly addressing the origins of the term -- and by "fails hard" I do mean will almost certainly do more obscuring than clarifying by starting from an information-deficient premise.
Including, e.g. "The term 'woke' has its origins in the Black American community as a signifier of awareness about ones political and social situation..." is a bare minimum.
You're right, but I don't think he's interested in the term. He's interested in the social phenomenon that (briefly) appropriated the term before the other side started using it as a negative.
There is so very little citation or substantiation in the entire essay. Even the footnotes are largely just more speculation. He presents it as some kind of historical record but it's literally just his thoughts.
It’s almost like that is the entirety of the rhetorical and argument station expectations when people comment on too much wokeness.
Vibes.
“I invented a meaning for this word that bears no resemblance to its actual meaning and then am critical of others because I think my invented definition is bad”
1. Build a strawman.
2. Beat the living hell out of the strawman.
3.”I’m sure this will trigger some people”.
4. Get a standing ovation from Elon Musk.
5. Lots of money from private capital.He didn’t even have to build his own strawman. It is a shared strawman - which is more efficient. PG out there disrupting the bad faith argument industry.
It is actually insane how far I had to scroll to see the first comment mentioning this. He has merits in his comparison to religion but this essay is a huge miss.
Edit: in this thread, the actual origin of “woke” is only mentioned 3 times, the thread has 1942 comments as I type
https://x.com/seunosewa/status/1878835480424513903
"Usage is usage. I don't make the rules."
He also clarifies he's referring to the contemporary meaning in the linked essay:
> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now?
He doesn’t even attempt to touch on the actual origins in the essay however. There are a lot of loose ends in it and this is a glaring one.
He also uses “political correctness”, which is a more precise way to describe the phenomenon he talks about. But that buzzword died a long time ago, so “the origins of woke” without actually touching on the origin of “woke” will do.
> He doesn’t even attempt to touch on the actual origins in the essay however
Because he's not talking about the terms original meaning. Plenty of people are reading the title thinking he's digging into the etymological origins of the term. He's talking about the origins of the ideas that contemporary people call "woke".
It's not an omission. Paul explicitly clarifies what he's talking about near the top of the piece. You and other readers simply wanted him to write about a different topic entirely.
Im not expecting him to dive into the history, but a brief mention that isn't 'it used to mean something else' would suffice. Either way that isn't the greatest sin(lol) of the essay, just a nit at this point
This is maybe not unknown but often intentionally avoided by people like Graham who discuss this topic with an anti-woke bias. The exercise is to create a false origin and attack that rather than address the actual history of the term and its origin.
I'm also black and growing up I had the impression that "woke" referred to left-leaning conspiracy theorists and activists. 9/11 truthers and gay rights activists were the main woke groups of the Bush era
Going to guess you're pretty young? Seems odd to have not heard it differently elsewhere first.
jrm4, yours should be the top comment.
I denounce Paul Graham's essay. At a time when our leaders - especially our thought leaders - reliably do the wrong thing, it's especially appalling that he has the wrong take on wokeness, transparently and self-evidently to appease Donald Trump and his followers in order to protect his financial ties to Y Combinator startups. That's low, bordering on unforgivable, and until he retracts his statements, I'm afraid that I've lost respect for him and his opinion in all other matters.
It's obvious that pg isn't schooled in the basic civic virtues that I assumed he was. Such as: in journalism one always punches up. That's perhaps the simplest litmus test to know if one is siding with the oppressor.
I identify as woke and progressive. I speak out against all forms of oppression. I call out othering such as sexism, racism, ableism and ageism. I watched political correctness rise and fall under the boot of capitalist authoritarianism. I witnessed the wrong people win the internet lottery and deliberately undermine everything the civil rights movement achieved since the 1960s, as well as the shared prosperity that the New Deal brought since FDR. I watched them monopolize our media, take over and corrupt symbols of what's possible like Twitter and Wikipedia, attack beloved institutions like the US Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency, divide us on wedge issues in order to enrich themselves, and capture our regulatory bodies through lobbying and packing courts with judges and justices who toe the party line. I watched the winners sell out like pg just did. I watched my heroes fall.
I thought the readership of Hacker News was with me on this stuff. But I guess I was wrong. It's apparent that too many people here just don't get it. They don't work on their unhealed traumas, they don't seek equitable solutions. They just side with concentrated wealth and power, whether out of fear over their own job security, greed by hoping to be at the top of the pyramid someday, or through simple projection by not nurturing their own dignity and the power that their voice could have to shed grace and light onto the world.
If everything I just said is performative, so be it. I'd rather be on the side of peace, love and righteousness than whatever all this is.
Because you said that this author has the "wrong take on wokeness", what do you believe to be "the right take on wokeness"?
And by the way, I do think you are being more than a little bit performative here, because it seems you're just displaying how morally superior you believe yourself to be over Paul Graham, your heroes, and the readership of HN. But I would still like to hear your answer to my question.
Apologies for my late reply. I wrote an answer the day you asked, but was hesitant to post it due to length. I just got my first "That comment was too long" error from HN.
-
In the meantime, I've been wrestling with difficult feelings around Donald Trump's inauguration and the TikTok ban. This is the darkest time in America that I've experienced since 9/11. As a whole, we made the wrong choice then, a series of wrong choices, that sent us down the wrong path onto this timeline. Now we have a chance to avoid similar mistakes, but with the powers that be asserting their dominance over us at the worst possible time by plunging us into darkness through censorship, I worry that we'll sleepwalk into a new era of regression.
I've lost respect for the elected officials who voted for the TikTok ban, that I thought were on my side. Just like I lost respect for the ones who voted to invade Iraq after 9/11.
Before I answer, let me give you an example of what it is to be truly woke:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrVF_ijzbIs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3DEmzXNn0w (alternate link in case of censorship)
https://voyagecomics.com/2020/11/03/this-captain-america-quo...
Now let me give you an example of what it is to be asleep but not realize that you are dreaming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5S8rhNCBnc (specific derogatory language at 5:15)
If Bill Maher's message resonates with you, take a moment to note the sensation of the feelings you're experiencing. That little tingle of endorphins is your ego. The ego evolved as a survival tool to keep us alive during adversity. The ego grows more powerful with every win. A win often means a loss for someone or something else. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the place we live, exists because life, energy and time were taken from people, living things and the environment. The rush you feel is you taking some measure of power from the protected groups that Bill Maher admonished by claiming that they got preferential treatment instead of focusing on the true causes of the disaster.
To blame the failed LA fire response on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is particularly offensive. It doesn't matter if there is an element of truth to anything he's saying. Because there are higher principles to aspire to.
The fires were caused by global climate change, decades of poor urban planning, greed in construction where improper materials were used to save costs, building in areas that should have been left wild because there isn't enough water, past leadership incompetence, and most importantly a lack of empathy that led to unprecidented wealth inequality which drove the tendancy to live in ivory towers as well as the lack of sympathy from spectators.
In fairness, Bill Maher mentioned these causes. But to give air time to criticizing DEI, without criticizing the criticizing of it, is ignorant. Enough so that it drove me to write this essay when some might say there are better uses for my time. Which is exactly my point. The strongest argument against wokeism is that there are more important things to do, making it appear performative. Which is no argument at all.
Ah, CNN just said that the TikTok ban has been lifted as I write this, and I see that it works again. It may seem silly to post this now, since there was optimism that the ban would be suspended. But that's not the point. Which is, that it never should have been banned in the first place.
-
Continues ->
> what do you believe to be "the right take on wokeness"?
That's a fair question, and I'll answer it. Admittedly, I thought-policed Paul Graham when I said that he had the wrong take on wokeness, taking exactly the stance that he called out. I must choose my words carefully here, because whatever I say is likely to offend someone. I'll get to that in a moment.
But first, let's look at the literal definition of woke, to try to avoid misinterpretation:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woke
1 chiefly US slang
a: aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
b: reflecting the attitudes of woke people
2 disapproving: politically liberal or progressive (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme
Before I knew what woke meant, I thought it was a reference to the Matrix movies. That awakening was about seeing the simulation, how all of this is a construct of the human mind with its habits and traditions, completely arbitrary but with subjugation as a primary goal. And that people who haven't awakened yet are effectively non-player characters (NPCs), instruments of the status quo who unwittingly perpetuate it and its inequities.
That probably came from my roots growing up in a small town of 10,000 people in the northwestern US in the 1980s. I was a computer geek who got bullied by athletes and children of ranchers who didn't know what to make of me. I felt profoundly alone and alienated. But I wasn't wrong, I just felt like a loser. And they weren't right, they just felt like winners.
When we look around at our leaders today, who do we see? Are they people who came from adversity and now pay it forward for others? Or did they win the internet lottery and pull up the ladder behind them? The important question here is: are they right, or do they just assume they are because they won? The answer to this defines the status quo.
-
So I feel that the right take on wokeness is to quite literally be woke and not act like an NPC on the side of the oppressor. A person can write in the most eloquent fashion with an air of impeccability but still be tactless. Which is just exactly what pg did.
I've never met him, but I'm certain that for the most part he's a decent person. I'd even wager that there's no discrimination in his hiring practices, for example. But he's the beneficiary of privilege as a middle-aged white man. There is power imbalance at play in his status. To pretend otherwise is an insult to people who have experienced discrimination or been otherwise suppressed in achieving their own success.
Specifically, the right way to practice wokeness is to conduct oneself in a manner which recognizes injustice without perpetuating it. What does that look like? It means never mentioning aspects of someone's personal identity or things about them that can't be changed, while being an ally to reform the systems of control that undermine them for those traits anyway.
For example, in a group with multiple races, creeds, genders, sexual orientations, differing physical abilities, ages, etc, in polite conversation one should never mention anything having to do with those things. No assumptions should be made about someone's familiarity with or stance on an issue simply because of their demographics. Everyone in the group should be given equal respect for their dignity. The group achieves power that overcomes injustice against any one member.
The key is not to concern ourselves with maintaining our image if we fail to conform to contemporary etiquette around wokeism, but to treat others as they wish to be treated and practice the golden rule so that we don't have to.
How is that different than what pg said? After all, treating everyone the same way is admirable. Why might he feel like he's walking on egg shells while I don't share his cognitive dissonance? Because I don't feel threatened by wokeism or its implications for how I got to where I am and why that might drive a need in me to project my criticism of it.
-
It's important here to distinguish between equality and equity. For example, if a company board has 9 men and 1 woman, but there are an equal number of men and women working for the company, then giving the woman 10% of the speaking time may be equal but probably isn't equitable. If I'm a board member, I'm going to put effort towards giving the woman more speaking time. I'll likely sacrifice some of my own time to achieve that. And most importantly, I'll call out other members of the board who talk over her or otherwise treat her disrespectfully, so that anyone on the fence about an issue can consider my offering in their own vote and hopefully join us in overcoming inequity.
Let's talk about why I didn't say 9 women and 1 man in my example. It's because the realities of the world in these times may make that come across as condescending. Injustice is asymmetric. This is why "both sides" and "not all men" statements may have some basis in fact but carry prejudice. Maybe men are underrepresented in other places, but in most cases the board room isn't one of them.
-
Here's where we get to the part where I've offended someone. There are countless hardworking white men who feel like they got a raw deal in life, and I'm one of them. Life can be brutally hard and unfair. My demographic shoulders insults and injustices that too often lead to a lifetime of self-doubt and self-harm. We can't always articulate the mental, emotional and physical pain we endure. That can cause us to become self-absorbed and ego-driven. Diving deep inside our misfortune and letting ourselves be vulnerable feels undignified, so we put it behind us and do our best to provide for our families, to work hard and be happy.
But it's precisely for those reasons that I speak out against injustice. Because as hard as I had it, it could have been worse. Why should it be worse? Why in the world would I want to inflict injustice on others? Revenge? A sense of control? That feeling of control would be me feeding off the same emotional energy that others used to hurt me.
That's what I meant about losing my heroes. People who I thought would work to change the status quo just sold out. Being woke means promoting self-awareness and changing one's mind when presented with new information. If the people we hold in high regard were to read all of this and still subscribe to the idea that wokeism is bad like pg was suggesting, then do they really deserve our esteem anymore?
Thank you! I'll respond to both of your comments here:
>If Bill Maher's message resonates with you...The rush you feel is you taking some measure of power from the protected groups that Bill Maher admonished by claiming that they got preferential treatment instead of focusing on the true causes of the disaster.
I chuckled once or twice, but I think it's odd to view that as a way of "taking power away from protected groups", and by these I assume you mean the "diverse" people in charge, such as the lesbian fire chief, and the other woman shown in a clip. I certainly don't feel any more powerful, or even vindicated.
For example, was "power taken away" from white police officers after George Floyd's death? Maybe perhaps in a real way, yes, since, not only is the white officer in prison, departments presumably reorganized and placed an increase emphasis on public relations (as in not appearing racist), accountability, and not killing suspects.
Perhaps, in a similarly real way, these fire departments will be restructured, and they will place a greater emphasis on preventing and stopping fires, and less emphasis on DEI in response to public outcry that may or may not be happening. In this way, you could say that "power" is being taken from "protected groups".
>To blame the failed LA fire response on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is particularly offensive. It doesn't matter if there is an element of truth to anything he's saying. Because there are higher principles to aspire to.
I would agree to that. If we're ranking principles, I would think that the preservation of human life would rank above DEI. Is that offensive to say? I can certainly see how offensive it is to blame DEI where there are plenty of other more immediate reasons why the fires were as bad as they were, but I think we should also be concerned with that "element of truth". We don't do ourselves any favors to ignore elements of truth.
For example, what if the firefighter mentioned in the clip that says "you want someone who looks like you" can't actually save a person from a burning building, because "looking like you" was prioritized over "being able to lift your weight"? Is that an element of truth we should consider before someone actually loses their life?
---
>... he's the beneficiary of privilege as a middle-aged white man... There is power imbalance at play in his status. To pretend otherwise is an insult to people who have experienced discrimination or been otherwise suppressed in achieving their own success.
>Specifically, the right way to practice wokeness is to conduct oneself in a manner which recognizes injustice without perpetuating it. What does that look like? It means never mentioning aspects of someone's personal identity or things about them that can't be changed, while being an ally to reform the systems of control that undermine them for those traits anyway.
Didn't you just mention that PG is a "middle-aged white man". Isn't that an aspect of his personal identity that can't be changed?
>For example, in a group with multiple races, creeds, genders, sexual orientations, differing physical abilities, ages, etc, in polite conversation one should never mention anything having to do with those things. No assumptions should be made about someone's familiarity with or stance on an issue simply because of their demographics. Everyone in the group should be given equal respect for their dignity. The group achieves power that overcomes injustice against any one member.
This is the first time I've ever heard of this, so thank you for that. I've actually heard, from other people who call themselves 'woke', that the opposite should actually be done. What you describe here seems more like the "color blindness" of the 1990s, which means that a person should be treated as a person, not as a 'white person' or a 'black person'. You should behave as if you don't 'see' their ethnicity.
So what I've heard from others is that you SHOULD see someone's race, and to not do that is damaging to them. You SHOULD recognize a black woman as a black woman, and not just see her the same as you would see a white man, because to treat them the same would actually be harmful or dismissive of the black woman, for example. That's what I've been told about why 'color blindness' is wrong. You touched upon that point otherwise when you said that we shouldn't pretend that PG isn't a beneficiary of privilege as a white middle-aged man.
Of course, I don't know which is 'correct', your view, or the view I've been told, or if they can be harmonized somehow.
>if a company board has 9 men and 1 woman, but there are an equal number of men and women working for the company, then giving the woman 10% of the speaking time may be equal but probably isn't equitable. If I'm a board member, I'm going to put effort towards giving the woman more speaking time.
Why? Isn't that treating her differently because she is a woman? What about the "everyone in the group should be given equal respect" part you mentioned earlier? Would this be called "equitable respect" instead? Why are the men lumped together as if they are a monolith, as if their concerns can be presumed to be shared, so that they do not individually deserve an equal 10% of the time?
I think this is what PG touches upon when he mentions the dizzying array of rules that one has to memorize to avoid committing an offense. At face value, it seems very difficult to navigate. If I were to throw my own definition of "woke" into the ring for consideration, it would be something like "someone who knows all these rules and how to navigate them".
Hey thanks for responding too. I never know if anyone actually reads these things.
When I said "you", I should have clarified that I meant the reader. Words are imperfect and I'm only human. Conversations about sensitive topics like this can feel personal. But you have a right to your opinion, regardless of my opinion of it.
I should have mentioned that the firefighter who said "you want someone who looks like you" was also in the wrong. Leaving them out could be seen as ignorant on my part. To this I would say, we can still strive for a more equitable world tomorrow even if it's imperfect now.
Also remember that people in historically oppressed groups need to be mindful of their behavior, just like people who don't want to be lumped in with the oppressor. Because they will be singled out and made examples of, which sets back the cause of liberation.
This is also why it's so important to practice nonviolence and peaceful protest. Because the battle for equality happens in everyone's heart, but the oppressor has the media. The public is insulated from news of corruption and centuries of abuse, but any impropriety by those being oppressed is broadcast for all to see, just like Bill Maher did. Which triggers a disproportionate level of violence in response, even the enabling of violence by tacit indifference, which perpetuates the status quo.
I think your arguments hinge on what happens if political correctness, wokeism and DEI go too far, and preferential treatment is given to marginalized groups to the point that it infringes on the freedoms of people not siding with oppression. That's a valid concern.
I would say, the reason that it's not a valid call to action is proportionality. Reparations for centuries of slavery would amount to trillions of dollars which have never been paid back, and maybe never will be, because the victims are long deceased and efforts to trace lineages get derailed easily. That money would come from the businesses and families that received the profits of unpaid labor. Basically the wealthiest corporations and families today, who are beneficiaries of that earlier stolen investment. And go to the descendants of families that struggled for all of those years for having the fruits of their labor stolen.
Since reparations will likely never happen or even start to happen, then concessions to that fact (like affirmative action) amount to a drop in the bucket. That's why it's disingenuous to point out the fire chief's sexual orientation and people hired as part of affirmative action in LA's hiring practices, because the injustices against them and their ancestors is far greater but left out of the conversation.
So then we can talk about, ok, what if DEI is partially responsible for the poor LA fire response? Let's think this through. If the real cause of the failure was decades of poor urban planning and little or no fire suppression infrastructure, then would the fire chief have performed better had they been a straight white man? Of course not. That's why sexual orientation is a non sequitur, and why we don't bring it up in polite conversation.
And that's why even though the goal of preserving human life ranks higher than promoting DEI, deciding between them is a false dichotomy.
So what if it's not just about the fire chief, but a pattern of hiring practices, why wouldn't we bring up DEI then? Because if we followed the money trail, we would find the specific people who voted against fire response infrastructure to save money and line their own pockets. We'd discover why insurance companies cancelled policies in the months before the fires, and who profitted by not paying claims. Using DEI as a scapegoat distracts us from the truth, the same way that making examples of recipients of affirmative action allows wealthy corporations and families to avoid paying reparations in the form of higher taxes on the rich.
And more importantly, it allows tragedies like the fire to be used as an excuse to undermine DEI efforts. This is how political capital works. When there isn't enough political will for a vote to end DEI to pass, political capital can be borrowed from public sentiment in times of crisis to get the vote passed anyway. In this way, long-term public sentiment can be overridden at points in time to sway policy away from majority rule towards minority rule. In other words, from democracy towards republicanism, authoritarianism and eventually aristocracy if left unchallenged by a governing system of checks and balances.
> So what I've heard from others is that you SHOULD see someone's race, and to not do that is damaging to them. You SHOULD recognize a black woman as a black woman, and not just see her the same as you would see a white man, because to treat them the same would actually be harmful or dismissive of the black woman, for example. That's what I've been told about why 'color blindness' is wrong. You touched upon that point otherwise when you said that we shouldn't pretend that PG isn't a beneficiary of privilege as a white middle-aged man.
You bring up a good point. How do we go about recognizing someone's identity without letting it affect our behavior in ways that might negatively impact them or someone else? I think the best way to look at this is that it is a practice. A black woman may want to achieve success on her own merits, not because of her identity. When reviewing her resume against a number of white men for example, one way to make it equitable would be to remove race and gender from the application. Of course, there are other hints that might reveal her demographics with a high likelihood, like which schools she attended or where she lived or worked. So we try to be impartial the best we can, while also weighing the needs of the community, such as having more black women represented in our company to make up for the years when they weren't.
Note that the reason the reverse consideration isn't as applicable to Paul Graham is that he is in the same demographic as the majority of business owners and wealthy people in the US. He already fits the generalization in the public's mind, which gives him inherent advantage. Devoting the same effort to his representation as a black woman's would be inherently inequitable at this time in history.
> Why? Isn't that treating her differently because she is a woman?
It sounds like you might have misunderstood me. Because the company has an equal number of men and women working for it, then having 1 woman on the board instead of 5 is inequitable. I'm not treating her differently because she's a woman. I'm giving her some of my time and the benefit of the doubt so that our voices speak for the women who aren't being represented.
I see how this can be confusing. How is it that giving her this preferential treatment, without specifically mentioning that she's a woman or why I incorporate that into my behavior, is somehow woke? Because through my actions, she can see that I identified the injustice at play and am working towards healing it. Whereas telling her that I'm doing it solely because she is a woman denegrates what she has achieved through her own efforts.
I should clarify that if she has her own motives for being on the board outside of equity, for example nepotism etc, then I will just as easily be an ally for men who vote to have more women on the board or otherwise align their vote with the needs of women working there. I'm incorporating context into my actions, but not letting demographics override my decisions.
> I think this is what PG touches upon when he mentions the dizzying array of rules that one has to memorize to avoid committing an offense.
It sounds like you might be misunderstanding how woke etiquette works. It's not about avoiding offense, but changing behavior. For example, say I don't know if someone I'm speaking with prefers the term black, african american or person of color, but the topic of conversation involves race and I must choose. Say the person is my age and I was raised with the term black in the 1980s, so maybe I say black because I'm nervous about sounding patronizing. That's ok. I watch for their reaction. They may say black in their next sentence. They may say that they prefer the term person of color. In the 1990s they might have said that they preferred the term african american. It doesn't matter which. I show respect for their dignity by using the term that they prefer from then on. No offense needs to be given or taken.
What I forgot to say most in these answers is why we're doing all of this. It's because as we all work to change our behavior on the road towards equality, the status quo changes. There are countless efforts to make the world more equitable, everything from resisting to protests to strikes. But because not enough people practice wokeism, those efforts are often suppressed. Which creates an ongoing illusion that everything is ok, when countless people are suffering under oppression. That's why wokeism looks performative to people who benefit from the status quo and don't see a problem.
So we should consider the reverse. How the actions of the rich, powerful and indifferent look to the woke. If someone is exposed to all of these concepts, yet still clings to the notion that wokeism is bad, then (to use a similar word) that behavior looks pejorative to people who don't benefit from the status quo.
Thanks again for continuing this conversation! I'm enjoying it. Also, can you recommend me a book or two to read on this subject? Thanks in advance.
>Since reparations will likely never happen or even start to happen, then concessions to that fact (like affirmative action) amount to a drop in the bucket. That's why it's disingenuous to point out the fire chief's sexual orientation and people hired as part of affirmative action in LA's hiring practices, because the injustices against them and their ancestors is far greater but left out of the conversation.
This is sort of like the concept of "original sin", isn't it? The notion that certain people have a debt that is so big that it is impossible to ever be paid back, and so they must forever remain burdened with the guilt of the sin that their ancestors committed. The scale can never be zeroed. The guilt can never go away. The transgression can never be forgiven, because the effects linger down to our day.
And this is a good example of that. You say it's disingenuous to point out the role that DEI played in LA's fire planning, prevention, and response, because of an unpaid debt that happened centuries ago. Is the concept of this "unpaid debt" a golden, reusable "get-out-of-jail-free" card that means that DEI can never be criticized?
Given a different disaster, unrelated to the LA fires, we could imagine this conversation: "Sure, we hired the wrong person for the job, but as X people, we owe an everlasting debt to the Y community for hundreds of years of suffering, so don't mourn for what you lost, it's just a drop in the bucket compared to what our ancestors did".
I'm being overly dramatic, but only half so, because this, to me, actually sounds like something someone might say.
In the case of the LA fires, and for the additional reasons you've given, I agree, DEI was not to blame and is being used as a scapegoat. I wonder, if the fire chief were instead a straight white male, and if there was no firefighter that "looked like you" but instead, was capable of saving your life, would people still have blamed DEI, or would they instead shift their focus towards the "real problems" that you mentioned? Perhaps if these people weren't in these highly visible positions to begin with, DEI would not have been undermined as it was.
>A black woman may want to achieve success on her own merits, not because of her identity. When reviewing her resume against a number of white men for example, one way to make it equitable would be to remove race and gender from the application....So we try to be impartial the best we can, while also weighing the needs of the community, such as having more black women represented in our company to make up for the years when they weren't.
That last sentence seems to be completely at odds with the first. If you give preferential treatment to black women to make up for "years" of this type of original sin, you are no longer allowing this person to succeed on her own merits. Imagine that you let this black woman see all the metrics you used to make the decision to hire her, and you showed her the section marked "We need more black women in our company in order to atone for the sins of the past". Do you think she would still feel confident that she was the best person for the job? I think she might sooner feel insulted by 'the soft bigotry of low expectations'.
Merit based is merit based. It should be simple, self-explanatory. A test score, credentials, years of experience, that sort of thing.
>I see how this can be confusing. How is it that giving her this preferential treatment, without specifically mentioning that she's a woman or why I incorporate that into my behavior, is somehow woke? Because through my actions, she can see that I identified the injustice at play and am working towards healing it. Whereas telling her that I'm doing it solely because she is a woman denegrates what she has achieved through her own efforts.
preface: I would like to think that everyone on the board has in mind the good of the entire company, and that the men don't just have in mind the considerations of men, and that the woman is not the only advocate for all the women of the company.
Given the above, what injustice is there? Assuming that everyone earned their seat on the board fairly, without nepotism, sabotage, or shady backroom deals, why do you consider there to be an injustice happening here?
The only way I can see there being an inherent injustice in a board room like this is if my initial assumptions aren't true, and that the men aren't advocating for the concerns of the women. But that would be to assume the worst of people. That sort of thinking is racist and sexist. That leads to tribal thinking, where people think that people from other demographics are similarly only looking out for "their own group".
Sure, as humans, we all have some biases and preferences towards our own "groups" and to recognize that is healthy, but to look at a group of male board members and automatically assume that there is some injustice happening towards the women of the company seems to be too extreme.
>It sounds like you might be misunderstanding how woke etiquette works. It's not about avoiding offense, but changing behavior. For example, say I don't know if someone I'm speaking with prefers the term black, african american or person of color, but the topic of conversation involves race and I must choose. Say the person is my age and I was raised with the term black in the 1980s, so maybe I say black because I'm nervous about sounding patronizing.
That anyone is nervous in this situation is already kind of ridiculous to me. I am black (but grew up with African-American), and if it makes people nervous to just pick one of the words... that's just sad. If this is what goes through the heads of certain people, the need to be lovingly reassured that they should not be made to feel this way, and that anybody who did is in the wrong.
If this is how you feel, I am sorry. This isn't how it should be. Neither should you be made to pay for the sins of your father.
>What I forgot to say most in these answers is why we're doing all of this. It's because as we all work to change our behavior on the road towards equality, the status quo changes. There are countless efforts to make the world more equitable, everything from resisting to protests to strikes. But because not enough people practice wokeism, those efforts are often suppressed. Which creates an ongoing illusion that everything is ok, when countless people are suffering under oppression. That's why wokeism looks performative to people who benefit from the status quo and don't see a problem.
Honestly? It seems that I benefit from the status quo just fine. I don't feel oppressed. I don't feel like a debt needs to be repaid to me. I'm typing on my computer from the comfort of a electrically-heated room. I don't blame anyone for what I don't have, and I would feel hurt if what I do have was given to me by someone who felt that I needed a handout.
I am part of a religion that teaches that all mankind faces, and will continue to face, suffering and injustice, and that all men are limited and inherently flawed. Though some have less than others but we are all equal. What we have does not matter since we can not take it with us. If one among us is suffering or lacks sufficient food, clothing, or shelter, of course we should help them out.
Where we differ is that it seems like you are working towards a certain 'utopia', where the various 'debts' of sin you've incurred have been paid off. In contrast, we have already been forgiven, and have already arrived at our utopia.
> Thanks again for continuing this conversation! I'm enjoying it. Also, can you recommend me a book or two to read on this subject? Thanks in advance.
Hey sorry for my late reply, I really didn't mean to waste your time, I just got super busy and spun a bit responding. Honestly I haven't read as much as I'd like to after discovering the internet around 1995, so this is mostly what I've picked up online.
To me, wokeism is fundamentally about stuff we can't unsee. It's like being friends with someone in an abusive relationship, where the other partner takes us aside and tells us that if we knew what they knew about our friend's behavior, we might not want to be friends with them anymore. The more we learn, the more that America's origin story becomes a twisted fable of revisionist history, written by the winners to cover centuries of oppression and violence. These stand out to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_slavery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_(1781_ship)#/media/File...
I went to South Carolina a few years ago and stood on a small plantation cotton field they keep preserved for tours. It was suffocatingly hot, felt like 100% humidity under intense sun, and not even the hottest time of the year. I just imagined people forced to pick cotton all day, every day, their entire lives. It was soul-crushing.
Then the tour guide called the Civil War the Northern War of Aggression and my eyebrows raised. Reality shifted and I suddenly saw the feelings from that time still running strong today.
Maybe I can relate my experience better through pop culture references..
I grew up on movies like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, Do the Right Thing, Glory, Schindler's List and Amistad, to name a few. I never read Black Like Me and never saw Soul Man. I think I may start with these, regardless of if they aged well, to get an impression of where my head is at now vs then.
This search brought back a memory, that in Short Circuit (one of my all-time favorite movies), I didn't know that Fisher Stevens wore brownface to play Indian engineer Ben Jabituya until maybe the 2000s:
https://ew.com/movies/short-circuit-fisher-stevens-regrets-p...
This just goes to show how ignorant people were (including myself) as recently as a couple of decades ago. I think that the makeup in Soul Man is forgiveable because it's explicit and the subject of the film, much like Dustin Hoffman dressing as a woman in Tootsie. Whereas Short Circuit did it for convenience, without considering that it might be offensive.
I also grew up playing with the toy car with the rebel flag on it from the Dukes of Hazzard, completely oblivious to any racist connotations.
And sexual harrassment was so prevelant that we had never even heard of it until Anita Hill vs Clarance Thomas in 1991 before he was appointed to the Supreme Court. I remember that we were really appalled by that, because it was so obvious that he was guilty of the harrassment, even if that didn't bar him from being appointed. This was just after the Rodney King beating and LA riots, but a few years before the OJ Simpson case if I remember right. Racial tensions were running high, but also there was a feeling that minorities were being kept from positions of power, so there was a lot of cognitive dissonance. There was no Me Too movement and we didn't have a words like cancel culture yet. I didn't feel at the time that he should have been appointed, because he gave me creepster vibes. I think his decisions in the time since have shown that he is very, let's just say tempted by financial favors.
> This is sort of like the concept of "original sin", isn't it? The notion that certain people have a debt that is so big that it is impossible to ever be paid back, and so they must forever remain burdened with the guilt of the sin that their ancestors committed. The scale can never be zeroed. The guilt can never go away. The transgression can never be forgiven, because the effects linger down to our day.
Ya that's a good point, I hadn't considered that. It reminds me of how young people in post-WWI Germany felt that it was impossible to pay back the war debt that their elders faced when they lost the war. So they felt oppressed by who they viewed as Jewish elites in banking, eventually using them as scapegoats and starting WWII against the countries whose loans they were defaulting on.
Which has eerie similarities with the dissilusioned feelings of young men in America today, who due to wealth inequality can't earn the level of income needed to provide for a spouse or family, as they watch women and minorities rise without them. Blaming liberal and Hollywood elites, as well as immigrants, for bruising their egos instead of the real culprit, late-stage capitalist patriarchy.
I think what we're talking about is: how can the rights of individuals be upheld when our debts to previous generations are so high that we'd lose ourselves in an attempt to pay them back?
I guess my only counter to that is, if winners and losers resulted from the inequities of previous generations, leading to the vast wealth inequality we see today, then what would healing look like? Letting it go without making ammends, or going too far with violence as a result, both seem extreme.
I feel that affirmative action and taxing the wealthy are two solid approaches. But I don't feel that either have been tried to a degree nearly approaching reparations. Because if they had, then Congress might be 50% women, we wouldn't have such a large national debt or high poverty rate, etc.
> In the case of the LA fires, and for the additional reasons you've given, I agree, DEI was not to blame and is being used as a scapegoat. I wonder, if the fire chief were instead a straight white male, and if there was no firefighter that "looked like you" but instead, was capable of saving your life, would people still have blamed DEI, or would they instead shift their focus towards the "real problems" that you mentioned? Perhaps if these people weren't in these highly visible positions to begin with, DEI would not have been undermined as it was.
Ya, DEI probably wouldn't have been blamed had the people involved in the response fit prejudiced notions of what they should look like.
It seems that we both agree that DEI wasn't the cause of the fires. But maybe we should ask if putting such priority on DEI is undermining the cause of reaching equality. With so much political manipulation happening these days, it makes for an attractive scapegoat for those wishing to distract us from the real issues.
I don't know the answer, or if DEI should be put on hold temporarily. What I do know is that with controversial issues like gun control, we can find ourselves on hold indefinitely. So I am suspicious of calls to halt DEI when the problem of discrimination in hiring still exists. It feels too opportunistic IMHO.
> preface: I would like to think that everyone on the board has in mind the good of the entire company, and that the men don't just have in mind the considerations of men, and that the woman is not the only advocate for all the women of the company.
> Given the above, what injustice is there? Assuming that everyone earned their seat on the board fairly, without nepotism, sabotage, or shady backroom deals, why do you consider there to be an injustice happening here?
> The only way I can see there being an inherent injustice in a board room like this is if my initial assumptions aren't true, and that the men aren't advocating for the concerns of the women. But that would be to assume the worst of people. That sort of thinking is racist and sexist. That leads to tribal thinking, where people think that people from other demographics are similarly only looking out for "their own group".
Ya good point about the dangers of tribalism, since that is the single greatest threat facing the US today. We've grown so divided and provincial that we can't seem to work together, and that's undermining our credibility in the eyes of the world.
And I agree that people don't just work towards their own best interest, and that assuming they do is putting them in a box.
What concerns me though is that some people only respond to authority, not what society deems common decency. So without a law in place, they will return to discriminatory practices.
Trump just issued an executive order revoking Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, promoting affirmative action in federal contracting:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/23/trump-rev...
Even though this move claims to encourage merit-based hiring, it will undoubtedly have the opposite effect. Because authoritarian-minded people will no longer be forced to practice nondescrimination. So they will hire candidates who appear to fit their own projections and stereotypes, causing them to overlook similarly-qualified candidates from other demographics.
When the laws aren't there, companies have a track record of accepting a certain level of human cost if it raises profits. Seatbelt laws, pollution laws, etc reflect the need for those regulations.
Now, we can argue whether the free market would take care of discrimination on its own. But in these times of little or no antitrust enforcement, often workers have few alternative employment options, so are at the mercy of employers. I'm not seeing politicans in favor of deregulation also calling for antitrust enforcement, so they are having their cake and eating it too, making this argument suspect.
-
Continues ->
> >It sounds like you might be misunderstanding how woke etiquette works. It's not about avoiding offense, but changing behavior. For example, say I don't know if someone I'm speaking with prefers the term black, african american or person of color, but the topic of conversation involves race and I must choose. Say the person is my age and I was raised with the term black in the 1980s, so maybe I say black because I'm nervous about sounding patronizing.
> That anyone is nervous in this situation is already kind of ridiculous to me. I am black (but grew up with African-American), and if it makes people nervous to just pick one of the words... that's just sad. If this is what goes through the heads of certain people, the need to be lovingly reassured that they should not be made to feel this way, and that anybody who did is in the wrong.
> If this is how you feel, I am sorry. This isn't how it should be. Neither should you be made to pay for the sins of your father.
I have inadvertently mansplained before, but I certainly did not expect to be talking at someone who is black about wokeism! I really have egg on my face. This is one of those teachable moments, and I certainly learned a lesson here.
This is as good a time as any to bring up white savior complex:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_savior
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_savior_narrative_in_film
Talk about performative.
I should clarify that I'm not uncomfortable with wokeism or my interactions with people outside my demographic. What I was trying to say there was, we should be confident going into any encounter if our intentions are genuine. We shouldn't be afraid to use the wrong word. Because we shouldn't let our ego get in the way if/when we are corrected. And we should stand up for ourselves if we get attacked for innocently using the wrong word.
I'm disappointed in political correctness for creating a climate of uncertainty. But I think that's a small price to pay if it gets us to the point that everyone feels included. I don't like to see crocodile tears for the people who now have to watch what they say. Because they should have already been treating people respectfully.
> Honestly? It seems that I benefit from the status quo just fine. I don't feel oppressed. I don't feel like a debt needs to be repaid to me. I'm typing on my computer from the comfort of a electrically-heated room. I don't blame anyone for what I don't have, and I would feel hurt if what I do have was given to me by someone who felt that I needed a handout.
> I am part of a religion that teaches that all mankind faces, and will continue to face, suffering and injustice, and that all men are limited and inherently flawed. Though some have less than others but we are all equal. What we have does not matter since we can not take it with us. If one among us is suffering or lacks sufficient food, clothing, or shelter, of course we should help them out.
> Where we differ is that it seems like you are working towards a certain 'utopia', where the various 'debts' of sin you've incurred have been paid off. In contrast, we have already been forgiven, and have already arrived at our utopia.
I'm going to defer to you on this. If that's how you feel, that society has reached a level of equality where affirmative action has become counterproductive, then who am I to argue?
I'm willing to acknowledge that maybe the situation has changed and I am out of touch. My embarrassment and regret over being around blue humor in my youth, and using slurs before I even knew what some of them meant, haunt me. I had horribly negative experiences working in a warehouse in my 20s where I saw people at their worst. And I've witnessed discrimination and harrassment at office jobs. Despite a lifetime of hard work, I don't feel nearly as successful as I wanted to be at this age, and I wonder where I'd be if I hadn't been held back by ageism and the mistreatment of neurodivergents by neurotypicals.
That working class hero mentality mixes with the injustices I saw and creates a kind of acquired oppression in me. Where I see my failures as handed down from oppressors instead of being due to my own lack of discipline or perseverance, or just bad luck. I see that rebelliousness reflected in the eyes of the people who voted against democrats that they see as elite for their DEI priorities. Their logic doesn't make sense to me, but their feelings do.
While I can't agree that all of this is utopia, I do want to say that I'm happy that you're able to feel creation's grace and be thankful for your blessings. I believe that the world is what we make of it, and that prayer/manifestion or whatever we call it is moving us towards forming a more perfect union.
I'd like to give you the last word, if you're inclined to share one. Otherwise I wish you well, thanks for being patient with me and taking the time to write such thoughtful responses.
Thank you! Do you mind if I "friend" you on LinkedIn?
I don't use LinkedIn all that much, I'd just like us to be friends in some way.
Not at all, the link's in my bio. It's been a real pleasure talking with you :)
Sure but that has almost nothing to do with how it’s used today.
Language and the meanings of words change over time, and it’s all but impossible to make people go back to using tre old definition.
The second definition is a gentrification of the first definition. It has everything to do with how it's used today.
It's what it meant until white people started lecturing each other on what it means, then conservatives started using it as a derisive catch-all for anything conceivably liberal or simply empathetic.
but don't you think an essay titled "the origins of wokeness" should consider that definition?
"Prig" is in the eye of the beholder. What about when the "prigs" were right? I'm sure the Quakers were seen as "prigs" by the southern slaveholders/traders. The Quakers were early to the abolition party and their opposition to slavery was based on religious zeal which made them seem like "prigs" to the people in the South who's whole society and economy was built on slavery. But we now consider the Quakers were right and the slaveholders wrong. MLK was viewed as a "prig" by many southern whites for interfering in their racism. But MLK was right.
> What about when the "prigs" were right?
I think the big take away is that being right via a lecture doesn't do anything.
If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
Instead, go out and do something. For example, defer typing up that long comment about how [x] is right and [y] is wrong, volunteer for some community service. Build shelters for people who need it. Offer pro bono services to marginalized groups.
If nothing else, simply live your way of life and out compete the people who were wrong.
But that 1000th internet comment you posted, even if it was "right", it didn't make a single lick of difference. So ask yourself why you really put it up.
> If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
Actually it's through Internet conversations and mostly online education that my mind was changed, my whole worldview in fact.
Quietly doing good is admirable. So is speaking up where people are talking. Both is even better still.
This is why the idea of wokeness was attacked. PG even describes it as a mind virus.
The very idea that your opinion would change over time terrifies people like PG. If you are useful, you must stay predictable. If you are not useful, you are a convenient target.
Stoking the classic 'us vs them' is the oldest trick in the book. Pay no attention to the man on the podium.
Quietly being your best self doesn't give us substantial change, though. Consider that all of the big gains in civil rights for various groups came from people being loud about their belief in equality, and insisting that people who felt otherwise were wrong.
> If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
i'm basically a professional social justice warrior in tech and nobody is lecturing each other. everybody just does the work.
"stop lecturing... instead, go out and do something" is a dangerous train of thought. I agree that building houses for the homeless is a good idea (imagine if you could actually just do that, though...) but most of the issues people are talking about can't be directly confronted in cozy ways like going to the soup kitchen or building a house. A lot of the issues people are "woke" over are societal ills and the "action" available to them is stuff we don't want people doing. We should be advocating for reasoned discourse instead of - to paraphrase a popular tweet I didn't like enough to screenshot - telling people to shut up and go firebomb a Wal-mart.
Or take the abortion debate. We don't want anti-abortionists "taking action" against clinics and doctors any more than we want pro-choice advocates doing back-alley abortions if we can avoid it. It's all very dangerous!
I think the basis of his arguement is a prig is incentivized by calling out the moral failures of others to make themselves feel more virtuous.
Where perhaps the quakers or MLK were doing it out of moral outrage.
> by calling out the moral failures of others to make themselves feel more virtuous.
Isn't it impossible to determine the internal motivations of others? And even if they were doing it to make themselves feel more virtuous they can still be turn out to be right on the issue, can't they? Or it's possible that there's a combination of both moral outrage and ending up feeling virtuous.
As pointed out by Uncle oxidant, this is hard to determine.
I would suggest instead that a prig deems a person to be bad/evil based on them having a different view/behavior that society is generally divided on.
Conservatives will readily confound moral outrage with virtue signaling in order to neutralize it.
Doesn’t matter ultimately. If you’re at the point of requiring loyalty oaths to get hired, you’ve already lost the plot. Way past counterproductive.
There’s a great sttng episode, the drumhead, which explores witchhunts.
I would say a lot of what drives wokeism is not priggery but ignorance and just going along with the crowd, sometimes in forms that are well meaning.
e.g. sometimes white people have some experience where they realize how much crap black people get; they might actually meet some black people or learn about history (e.g. black people have been complaining about the police in America as long as there is America, why are we supposed to remember one person's name but forget Rodney King or the Watts Riots, that people like Booker T. Washington had trouble w/ the police) but instead they chant thought-stopping slogans like "defund the police" (tell that to the black people who have gunshots in their neighborhood every night) and instead of saying something like "Black people are beautiful" they have to say "Black lives are beautiful".
The trouble is that people today are looking back 15 minutes and looking ahead 15 minutes and are up against the likes of Xi, Putin and Netanyahu who are thinking in terms of hundreds of years if not thousands. They're like children in the hands of gods.
---
There is an undercurrent of priggery in attitudes about sexuality that's a different and much more complex theme that starts w/ Baudrillard's essay at the beginning of
https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction....
and continues with experiences such as discovering that when squicky rumours are flying around it is is the former BDSM professional several steps removed from the event who goes the the police with a garbled, confused and hysterical story or that the transgenderist gatekeepers of Tildes don't know that there are 549 paraphilias (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia) and that pedophilia is just one of them in their mad rush to cancel anyone they can. In contrast the people who pray a few times a day, homeschool their kids, and volunteer on deadly cold nights at the homeless shelter, while people who hate them are sharing hateful memes online, who "seek first to understand" the way Steven Covey says you should)
For me, Urban Dictionary[0] defines this issue much more clearly:
> When this term became popularized, initially the meaning of this term was when an individual become more aware of the social injustice. Or basically, any current affairs related like biased, discrimination, or double-standards.
> However, as time passed by, people started using this term recklessly, assigning this term to themselves or someone they know to boost their confidence and reassure them that they have the moral high grounds and are fighting for the better world. And sometimes even using it as a way to protect themselves from other people's opinion, by considering the 'outsider' as non-woke. While people that are in line with their belief as woke. Meaning that those 'outsiders' have been brainwash by the society and couldn't see the truth. Thus, filtering everything that the 'outsider' gives regardless whether it is rationale or not.
> And as of now, the original meaning is slowly fading and instead, is used more often to term someone as hypocritical and think they are the 'enlightened' despite the fact that they are extremely close-minded and are unable to accept other people's criticism or different perspective. Especially considering the existence of echo chamber(media) that helped them to find other like-minded individuals, thus, further solidifying their 'progressive' opinion.
> 1st paragraph >"Damn bro, I didn't realize racism is such a major issue in our country! I'm a woke now!"
> 2nd paragraph > "I can't believe this. How are they so close-minded? Can't they see just how toxic our society is? The solution is so simple, yet they refused to change! I just don't understand!"
> 3rd paragraph > "Fatphobic?! Misogyny?! What's wrong with preferring a thin woman?! And she is morbidly obese for god sake! Why should I be attracted to her?! Why should I lower myself while she refuse to better herself?! These woke people are a bunch of ridiculous hypocrite!"
Also:
Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683826
This is a significantly better article than the wandering drivel of the original post
I came in here to see if this had been posted already. deBoer does a much better job at talking about it in a comparatively neutral way. He only adds his two cents at the very end.
Another good one that gets it even closer is from Sam Kriss. His prose is a bit less to the point than deBoer, but he outlines his idea that "wokeness" is not a political ideology but rather an etiquette. I think it's paywalled now but the archived version can be read:https://web.archive.org/web/20230324050437/https://samkriss....
It's a good writeup that doesn't require the reader to have taken a stance or agree with the author's (arguably reactionary in the case of PG's post, depending on one's perspective) politics.
I love when urban dictionary nails something well like this, it's very amusing. Like a gold nugget surrounded by trash. The only other thing that tickles me so is the occasional pseudo-profound 4chan green text.
I thought this was an interesting read. For me, it sparked the insight that wokeness parallels the rise and fall of the attention economics, with the premise that attention is the real bottleneck in social justice. It places an emphasis on awareness, and the solution is often left as an exercise to the observer.
Political correctness and language codes are not new. I think what was new is the idea that people could rally around the banner of awareness, and thereby avoid disputes about solutions. This is why many of these topics lose momentum once their followers get the attention and have to deal with the hard and less popular questions of how to fix something.
The Unabomber manifesto talks about this a surprising amount too -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
I have read it before but which part?
Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.
I see, I think that's a related but distinct point from what I was saying. That said, I agree with the quote, but would add that it applies to most people in general, not just the leftist. I would also add that the moral self-righteousness is an essential part of the attraction.
I thought that this was particularly evident in the defund the police movements, where poor minority neighborhoods actually wanted more policing and law enforcement when polled.
There was a variety of causes that gained prominence ~2015 when Bernie Sanders came much closer to challenging Hillary Clinton than anyone expected. The Democrat party establishment picked the wishy washy meaningless bits out and focused on them while keeping away from the more challenging economic issues that would actually require their ideologies to adapt
I think what most people call "woke" is probably just a reaction to the obvious emptiness of many of the things politicians like Kamala Harris chose to focus on whilst ignoring more concrete issues. A lot of it was stuff there never was a solution for.
It goes back even further than that.
There seemed to be a surge in 2011 too, when it became apparent that the Obama administration was going to let the big banks off the hook for the financial crisis.
I mean, that's part of it. The culture war is useful to both US political parties, because they both have a bourgeois class interest and need something to keep people invested in politics for the sake of their political legitimacy, but at the same time need to prevent them from gaining class consciousness or becoming involved in class politics.
Put another way: the culture war (as woke vs. anti-woke) divides the electorate, but in a way that lets them be parceled out between two factions of the ruling class, rather than aligning any of them against the ruling class.
Criminalization of homelessness is probably the most stark example of class warfare in society today. And agitation against these policies is absolutely called "woke" by the right.
The idea that wokeness is in contrast to class-based advocacy is not correct. The right will happily call class-based advocacy "woke" until the cows come home.
The right will call class-based advocacy "woke", but that doesn't mean that centrist Democrats are going to adopt it to spite them. Criminalization of homelessness is at its most vicious in cities with Democratic mayors.
Sure. The leaders within the Democratic party are not especially good advocates for the homeless. They are similarly not terribly good advocates for a lot of suffering groups. Despite all the hay about "defund the police", it didn't actually end up materializing as policy and we saw Biden explicitly reject it in a State of the Union.
It is not true that the establishment left is using "woke" advocacy to avoid having to talk about class. It is also not true that if the left stopped talking about "woke" concepts that the right would suddenly get on board with class advocacy.
This ties back to my idea that "wokeness" is an ideology that centers awareness, not solutions. Everyone in San Francisco is sufficiently aware that homelessness is a problem. Nobody really advocates for police brutality or shooting innocents as a positive good.
However, the debate constantly returns to the the question of how important these issues are on an imaginary scale that doesn't exist, instead of what we should be doing out.
Bob thinks police brutality ranks 9.8 on Bob's "importance scale". Sue thinks it ranks 7.6 on Sue's "importance scale". Arguing about the numbers and scales is completely irrelevant, and an excuse to attack someone else's position instead of proposing a solution you have to advocate for and defend. It is a strategy of taking the fight to the enemy.
I think it is reasonable to claim that there is a general bias towards awareness over material solutions among establishment liberals. I don't really think that this is "wokeness". I'd wager that almost everybody who uses the term would say that an activist who advocates for an extreme wealth tax and a ban on corporate landlording with money redistributed to the homeless is "more woke" than a mayor who funds homeless shelters to a degree but also regularly sends cops to clear out camp sites where homeless people are sleeping.
I agree with what you said, but I still think performance and moralizing is the central aspect.
In your hierarchy, I think most people would also agree that an activist blogging about using the world "unhoused" instead of "homeless" is more woke than the one advocating for the wealth tax.
Similarly, someone arguing for wealth tax and transfer on moral grounds is more woke than someone who argues the identical policy saying it will result in long term cost savings.
Why do you put more emphasis on the language than the proposed solutions. Is that to control the speech?
I'm not sure what you mean.
In my opinion, and many others, the type of speech is what wokeness is about. Particularly of the kind that are moralizing lectures explaining how Superior the speaker is.
Concrete solutions are far more preferable.
> most people would also agree that an activist blogging about using the world "unhoused" instead of "homeless" is more woke than the one advocating for the wealth tax.
Just wondering why you are allowing "homeless" to be used without retribution, but someone using "unhoused" is disparaged as woke. Seems like language policing to me.
Im describing what the definition of wokism is. I think it is performative and judgmental moralizing with a social justice focus. Using PGs language, this might be a social justice prig.
I would agree that wokeism does not have a monopoly on performative and judgmental moralizing. I suppose prigs come in different flavors. All wokeists are prigs, but not all prigs are woke. Im not sure what the central characteristic is of anti-woke prigs...
To the language policing point, I think think there is difference in views. One person might think it is important to police language because the words matter. Another person might say the words themselves are irrelevant, but the reasons for changing them foolish.
Sure. I'm not saying that a focus on language or whatever is the opposite of "woke." I'm just saying that it is a general sling thrown at left wing politics, not a thing that exists to distract from revolutionary class politics.
OK, first of all what criminalization of homelessness? Second, if I go to work every day and don’t smoke crack and pay taxes I would like my kids to be able to go to the park down the street so can someone please take a bulldozer and take all the tents and put them in the garbage. This is actually what normal mainstream people think in their minds and everyone that thinks I’m a monster is a a woke idiot.
You can think this if you want.
But this is exactly what I'm talking about. You are saying that people who advocate for leaving these tents alone are "woke idiots", so "wokeness" is clearly about class politics too.
> For me, it sparked the insight that wokeness parallels the rise and fall of the attention economics, with the premise that attention is the real bottleneck in social justice.
This was mostly my reading too. Maybe more cynical, but I walked away thinking that wokeness itself isn't good for business unless you are in the business of selling rides.
It's a well written piece. Early on, though, this caught my attention:
> As for where political correctness began, if you think about it, you probably already know the answer. Did it begin outside universities and spread to them from this external source? Obviously not; it has always been most extreme in universities. So where in universities did it begin? Did it begin in math, or the hard sciences, or engineering, and spread from there to the humanities and social sciences? Those are amusing images, but no, obviously it began in the humanities and social sciences.
He's setting up the assertion "political correctness began in university social science departments." He tries to make it look like the conclusion is an inevitable result of reason, but really it's just an assertion. I dislike this rhetorical technique.
His assertion is probably correct.
This feels like one of the weakest PG articles
The writing quality feels like that of a university student
Just lots of assertions thrown out without any real backing
Yes, that paragraph is patronising and cocky.
Spending too much time in the richest, most tolerant counties in the country can make you forget that we still have colleges that won't admit gay students, or that many people still don't believe in interracial marriage.
Yes it's a teeny tiny little bit of a shame that a college president had to step down for raising a fair academic question. It is not half as important as when a cop shoots a black person dead for dating with a white girl.
Don’t criticize obviously bad things because there are things that are even worse.
We're all here because the author is criticizing opinionated people for loudly disliking obviously bad things.
Rock meet glass house.
I'm sure you did that on purpose. I'm sure I'm the silly one here.
> we still have colleges that won't admit gay students, or that many people still don't believe in interracial marriage
1. Who cares? Those colleges are private entities and presumably this admissions discrimination means they cannot receive Federalor state funds. If admitting gay students goes against their religious beliefs, then the rest of us benefit from having the people they reject.
2. It is not up to us to tell other families who they can and can't marry, or what they can or can't think. Let the bigots be bigots in their bigoted bubble, as long as they don't hurt anyone outside it. (If their children wish to leave the bubble, we should protect and support them privately.)
3. A cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl is homicide, independent of anyone's beliefs.
>Who cares?
I believe it’s in everybody’s best interest to stand up against discrimination.
I don’t give a fuck if Bob Jones University rejects homosexuals and neither should anyone.
Well, I do. Sorry if that offends you, I guess.
Let them discriminate on acceptable characteristics, such as grades, extra curricular activities, and legacy status like every other college.
"I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People"
Well for all the whinging about how biased-to-the-left universities are, it sure seems ironic that the only colleges that explicitly banning attendance over different opinions are colleges on the right.
If somebody complains persistently about all the times the "woke" is unfair but conveniently forgets to mention a single time conservatives are unfair then I can only presume either they are not very educated about the facts of our world, or intentionally misrepresenting the facts of our world.
Right, but the problem is that consequences for a cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl don't seem to be the same as the consequences for homicide.
Can you cite a case where this happened and the consequences were unreasonably light?
There's stuff all the time:
https://eji.org/news/alabama-attorney-general-releases-white...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ...
Or here's a case where 6 officers collude to torture 2 black people to death (https://apnews.com/article/mississippi-deputies-guilty-pleas...). Surely they'll get a real sentence now that it's news, but it makes you wonder how many cases never get identified as racially-based when the investigators are the perpetrators.
And boy it sure does seem odd that further south you go the more of a problem it is... I wonder what could explain that phenomenon....
Which of these links describes "a cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl"?
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.
There are degrees of good and bad in all of it.
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.
I'm not a fan of Floyd at all. Garner was the far better martyr for that cause.
I’ll never understand this. The fact that George was a criminal doesn’t mean anything. Kneeling on him until he was dead was a criminal act.
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.
So yeah, Garner was the better martyr IMO.
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.
The backlash arose for many reasons, but this article explains the most principled one:
https://thecritic.co.uk/dylan-mulvaney-did-not-share-our-gir...
It's not priggish to take a stand against misogyny, is it?
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 "misogyny" that article purports is just... being publicly trans.
Exactly. It's fundamentally misogynistic for these men to appropriate a "woman" identity, and Mulvaney is a very typical example of this.
Think about it. If you remove the female body from the definition of woman, what else remains besides sexist stereotypes?
No
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.
This seems like extraordinarily weak writing with very little backings or substantial evidence to the claims. That in itself would be fine - if presented as opinion - but this has an air of a historical biography of the actual lineage of the term. This is anything but.
It feels like an accounting of a person who is very deeply wearing tinted glasses about the world.
Like most PG essays
This is a politically charged discussion but I think it demonstrates some of the problem. Left arguments, just like the right, devolve into a theme of you are with us or a racist. There is no middle ground. I am no longer in the Bay Area but I still remember one of the depressing defining moments of this during the BLM protests. Shop owners would throw up signs that literally would say “We are minority owned, please don’t destroy our shop”. In my mind it’s the wrong way to think about it, does that mean we are giving the ok to destroy non-minority businesses? If you were to ask that question at that time, you would get labeled quite quickly as a racist.
The shame about everything these days is you cannot have a discussion anymore, maybe it never existed. I am not a republican but I also cannot stand the outspoken left shouting over everyone else in CA. Does that mean I am antiwoke?
Let me share the perspective I have as a member of a class of people that have been subject to racism for thousands of years, including enslavement, arbitrary murder, and systematic mass murder. Please forgive me, but being quiet didn't seem to work so far.
At least hundreds of thousands of polite, quiet, reasonable, assimilated urban Jews were murdered in the holocaust. It is deeply wrong that African Americans and other minorities or mentally ill people live in a world where the police can be every bit as dangerous as the gestapo. I feel like it's wrong that millions of women have been murdered simply for not doing something a man wanted. Millions or billions of women aren't treated as if they have the same value as men.
Please look at the bully pulpit standing against us. Most of the power in American society is concentrated in the hands of a very few white men. How loud do you think someone has to be when they have to stand against the megaphone of society? When someone needs to stand up against trillions of dollars in wealth?
Pretty loud as it turns out!
I am not sure what your reply has to do with my comment. Be as loud as you yourself want to be. The issue with the left is the same that as the right in America. The handful of extra vocal folks set the tone. You are unable to have any real discussion as it’s too easy to quickly get labeled a racist or some other classification. If you don’t agree with a position, well you must be a nazi of some sort. That is/was the typical vocal left in CA.
The comparison of police being gestapo is just silly. In the general case police are underpaid for what they are tasked with. I am no fan of the police but it’s naive to think they are the gestapo. Severely under paid and undertrained to then have to take care of the same neighborhoods all the time. I also think your narrative of finger pointing does not really attack any of the issues. Instead of pointing fingers nobody wants to sit down and ask why certain communities have poorer outcomes than others. Poor police outcomes are a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
Hear, hear.
The article missed the biggest opportunity to be curious by avoiding the question: What if they're right?
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe... It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
To be fair, he does say the above, which is close enough. The problem with asking "what if they're right" is that there's no single formulation of beliefs shared universally by such large and diverse group, so you can't consider whether they are right or not, only whether each individual expression is.
But there’s this statement as well:
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be…
The whole idea of woke (in the non pejorative sense) is that you’ve done the work to perceive the actual problem.
That statement shows that he hasn’t, which I think undermines the good parts of the essay.
Except in plenty of cases, Paul's claim is demonstrably true. People vastly overestimate the racial disparity in police uses of force, for example: https://manhattan.institute/article/perceptions-are-not-real...
When people were asked whether male-dominated or female-dominated industries were sexist, they vastly overestimated the degree of gender discrimination as compared to the experimentally observed rates (and in the case of male-dominated industries, they got the direction of discrimination backwards): https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S07495978230005... from https://id.elsevier.com/as/authorization.oauth2?platSite=SD%...
The whole pattern of people saying what amounts to "the fact that you disagree with me means you haven't bothered to examine the problem" is a very unfortunate trend. Did it occur to you that perhaps he did do the work on studying the problem, and came to a different conclusion?
The Manhattan Institute is so biased that it is not worth spending the time to actually engage with their articles and determine their truth, because their game is not truth, it is politics. If what they say is true, there will likely be other, less politically-motivated groups that say the same.
Sure, there are other studies that reach the same finding: https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Rep...
But I wouldn't be surprised if this is also discarded as biased. The issue is that the allegation of bias is often justified by the outcomes of the research, thus statements like "the research showing people overestimate racism is biased" becomes tautological.
Also, do you have specific critiques of the study? Or is your dismissal solely based on the authorship of the study?
Thank you for that source, I do not discard it as biased.
While some people do, I am not choosing what sources are biased based on whether their findings align with my beliefs. I am choosing based on whether their results consistently align with a certain ideology or political stance, what their goals are, and where their money comes from.
The Manhattan Institute consistently publishes findings that align with American conservatism, their goal is explicitly to influence policy, and while we don't know exactly where their money comes from because they don't make that information public (which I think is generally a bad sign), information revealed by tax filings shows that most substantial donations are from conservatives. This is why I consider them to be biased.
I don't have any specific criticism of the study, because I did not spend the time to engage with it. I have limited lifetime, and I must choose where to spend it based on what is likely to be fruitful. I do not consider engaging with articles/studies from biased think tanks, whether liberal or conservative, likely to be fruitful.
“Less politically motivated groups” == “groups who happen to agree with what I already believe“.
It's also a little suspect when a white man talks the degree to which racism (and by extension, sexism and homophobia) is a problem. The way he writes about it is such a casual dismissal that it sounds like gas lighting to me.
Has anyone ever referred to him with a racial epithet? Has he been stopped and frisked? Racially profiled? When was he last treated as if his ideas aren't as good because of his gender? Or passed up for a promotion for any of these reasons? Was he ever treated as if he is unworthy of marriage because he loves the wrong person? Has he worried about whether or not his name sounds a little too ethnic on his resume? Has he ever been called a dirty ____?
Among other things, including being called racial epithets, and worry about whether or not my name sounds a little too ethnic, I've had to listen to contemporary American politicians talk about how my ethnic group controls lasers from space.
But no, racism is not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be? It's easy to say that when you never experienced it.
Treating ideas coming from men or white people or other oppressor classes as not as good are a central tenet of woke thought.
That’s not what is happening and I suspect you know it.
The comments have quite clearly laid out how to uninformed this perspective is because it lacks knowledge. It’s not because he’s white ir male it’s because he’s talking over people who have experienced this to tell them they are overreacting.
Gender and race are explanatory of why this is dumb but not fundamental to why it is - that is simply him being misinformed.
>When was he last treated as if his ideas aren't as good because of his gender?
In your comment.
The entire thing is an exercise in complaining about a thing that goddamn near everyone agrees is bad, then using that to complain about a much larger movement that probably aims to address a lot of legitimate issues, in such a way that you can always retreat if challenged. There's a memed name for this tactic, and it's extremely on display here.
"Well of course by 'the woke' I only meant the ones I'm talking about, and since I'm choosing what that means let's just say part of the definition includes that they think racism is an even bigger problem than it is—whatever amount you think it's a problem, they think it's a bigger one, so even you think they are wrong! So as you can see I wrote precisely and correctly and you're an idiot who can't read."
But in fact it's all nonsense. This whole essay is a bunch of mealy-mouthed gibbering, because it relies so heavily on that kind of thing. It's either saying something boring that 99% of people already agree with, or it's expressing the more controversial (and dumber) thing that's getting everyone here worked up, but accusations of the latter can be deflected by claiming it's only doing the former (in which case, why bother writing it in the first place...?)
Essays like this are one of the few things LLMs are already entirely capable of replacing us for. Bad ones that mostly lack actual content, and don't even really need to be right because they're constructed such that they can't be wrong.
Isn't that Akin to arguing if something should be a 9.8 or a 9.5 on a completely arbitrary scale with no shared definition.
From what you say, anyone who disagrees about the nature or severity of the problem hasn't done the work and is flat out wrong.
If so, then the whole idea of wokeness collapses into the state of infallible enlightenment where everything one says is correct.
Hi, you’re right - we can’t understand what the other side means without a genuine discussion.
And the polarized ends of woke and anti-woke shouting aren’t going to achieve that.
So it’s important to engage with the (non-shouty) people in our lives who we can have those discussions with.
Moreover, I think the topic of discussion is important. Arguing about how important an issue is almost always is a waste of time and a distraction.
Issues aren't in a que where the most important get done first, and there is rarely a master calculation weighing them against eachother. When there is, it is called a budget, and that come into play after people have agreed upon what they would like to do.
We dont have to fix global racical justice before a pothole in the street just because the former is more important. If you want to talk about racial justice, policy proposals are concrete. Should we have job and education quotas, should we have race based criminal sentencing, how about diversion programs? Now these are topics with some meat on the bones.
Yeah, that's where he lost me too. I get the impression that in his head the firing of a college president is a bigger problem than racism.... like bro 24% of the world lives in a caste system. I don't know if human kind will ever be capable of treating people without preference across beauty, age, race, etc.
I'd be curious how he "sizes" the import of these problems (priggishness, prejudice) and whether it's just drawn directly from personal frustrations of a wealthy white billionaire in the most progressive state in the world.
> > Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be…
Rich, coming from a rich white male. Hey, we're not lynching people anymore!
The whole point of "wokeness" is being legitimately aware of these issues and not just sweeping them under the rug with an "it's a problem, but not as bad as they say".
Therein lies the issue. Just because you believe it's a pervasive issue doesn't make it so. "Wokeness" has many parallels to the "Satanic panic" of the 1980s. People wanted others to be legitimately aware of the Satanic ritual abuse and not just sweeping them under the rug with an "it's a problem, but not as bad as they say".
We're talking about ongoing systemic and widespread social issues that are easily manifested through statistical evidence and therefore not dependent on my belief or your belief. I'm old enough to remember the 80s and no, this is not something like the "Satanic panic" and other similar panics. Not even close.
You're sounding like someone in the 60s saying "yeah, equal rights is a problem but not as bad as they say". The majority of white Americans at that time didn't think there was a problem with equal rights. In 1963, 60% of Americans had an unfavorable view of MLK's march on Washington. In 1964 a survey showed that a majority of New Yorkers felt that the "Negro civil rights movement had gone too far". etc. etc.
If you're not aware that there's a problem, __that's__ the problem.
>We're talking about ongoing systemic and widespread social issues that are easily manifested through statistical evidence and therefore not dependent on my belief or your belief.
Correlation != causation. Evidence of inequity is not evidence of inequality.
White and Asian men were systemically discriminated against for college acceptance up until a recent Supreme Court decision. That was an ongoing systemic and widespread social issue that was easily manifested through statistical evidence and therefore not dependent on my belief or your belief.
>I'm old enough to remember the 80s and no, this is not something like the "Satanic panic" and other similar panics. Not even close.
For sure, this time around it's even more detached from reality.
>You're sounding like someone in the 60s saying "yeah, equal rights is a problem but not as bad as they say".
Not at all, they were de jure discriminated against. Laws on the books, they clearly did not have equal rights, unlike now.
>If you're not aware that there's a problem, __that's__ the problem.
You haven't proven there is a problem, or that the problem is systemic, pervasive, or outsized. You believe that is the truth, and like the good Christians during the Satanic panic, you're clutching your pearls at the sight of people who don't believe your religion.
I don't have to prove anything to you, and it's clear that it wouldn't matter if I did, so no point in wasting time. One day you might want to try opening your eyes.
>I don't have to prove anything to you, and it's clear that it wouldn't matter if I did
Of course you don't, you have faith.
>One day you might want to try opening your eyes.
They're wide open, and I can clearly see you're not touching enough grass.
This is a fantastic response. Wokeism is a pseudo-religion, and Dawkins's response to the in vouge religion is timeless.
[flagged]
> with far left views that in the recent decade have become the loudest voice basically every online platform. > the same toxic far left hub that Reddit has become > shifting away from the far left messaging that has been the default
That entire post has left reality a long time ago. Honestly, this level of resentment can't be healthy.
> angry, myopic, us-vs-them extreme thinking.
You've clearly become what you're (allegedly) so vehemently against.
I think it's best to understand it in terms of entirely different separate realities that define political ideologies nowadays, like it's not just that I disagree with you, we don't even share the same plane of existence anymore. Like for example conservatives love to call Biden a marxist/far-leftist — it's incomprehensible gibberish to me, it goes against everything I believe to know about reality, but it probably makes a lot of sense to you, you might even agree with the statement. It's not a disagreement in the traditional sense, it's not something we could talk about and reach some sort of mutual understanding.
The same is true with people using the term "woke", to describe something they believe exists and is a great danger somehow, the most important political struggle of our times even perhaps. And you're right, in your perception of reality it really is scary and worth fighting against. It's just that I believe you are living in a dangerous, delusional fantasy that has nothing to do with reality. That's why finding common ground is pretty much impossible unfortunately.
Like one time I saw a conservative calling the world economic forum a far-left institution, I really don't think a productive conversation between leftists, liberals and conservatives is even possible at this point.
[flagged]
interesting example of the whole phenomenon. presumption of guilt and sentencing and dismissal without any evidence of wrongdoing.
[flagged]
I think that many people, perhaps the majority, would not draw that connection or jump to that conclusion. For myself, it seems paranoid and delusional, moreso due to your certainly. It speaks of being primed with a hair trigger to suss out and accuse people. Based on our past conversation, I know that you have deep seated emotional responses to ideas around social justice and race, and view the world in very extreme and binary terms. This is not everyone's lived experience.
Kinda like if I assumed you aware a Nazi based on your username including frog, in reference to Pepe the right wing hate symbol.
Thank you for explaining! I appreciate it
[flagged]
There is an entire cottage industry on Substack of people writing about Wokeness. It has been covered extensively and I do not feel like PG is adding anything new here.
IMO Freddie deBoer wrote the best definition of "Woke", something that many people fail to grasp.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...
The beautiful thing about essays like this is that they show you that the author has truly never known what he was talking about. Just a guy who stumbled through life at the right time. It’s a shame these people have so much power and influence. It could be wielded by people much more thoughtful and benevolent.
Graham was brilliant in the 90s. I would say this article is more like evidence that he's washed up. When you no longer have to work hard because your name alone means money, your mind turns soft.
On par with YouTubers making the newest Roblox challenge videos to stay relevant in the algorithm.
He has nothing to add except his name.
I first heard the term from my ex-wife when she was involved with black politics in Chicago in 2014. At that time their definition was firmly in the "awareness of racial and social injustice". It was seemingly later twisted to mean hypocrisy or hyper political correctness. Redefining it seems to have nerfed any effect it once had.
That is not incompatible with pg's definition, if "raising awarenesss" dominates "doing something about it".
He said the word woke *described* the "awareness of racial and social injustice". He didn't say it was a mechanism for "raising awareness".
Let me ask you this: How does one, in your mind, do "something about it?"
PG's article focuses on "woke" as a kind of performative morality and you've gone out of your way to try an unify this original definition of "woke" with Paul's performative definition.
Was "woke" being used performatively in the 1930's when black folk advised other black folk to "stay woke" when traveling in certain parts of the country that were hostile to their existence?
When does the original definition start becoming incompatible with Paul's half-assed definition in your mind?
> Let me ask you this: How does one, in your mind, do "something about it?"
There's a lot of injustice in the US criminal justice system.
One way you can do something about it is to actually get into criminal justice. Study and become a lawyer, become a public defender, maybe become a judge one day. Or at least make very precise arguments about the where criminal justice reform can take place.
Instead, a lot people stop at making a internet comment about who the current system isn't good enough, while offering no viable alternative. A common complaint is that defendants are effectively bullied into taking guilty pleas even when they are fully innocent.
I think that part is true.
However, what's the remedy? You can't simply ban people from saying "yeah I'm actually guilty let's just move on with it". Not to mention the fact that takes away their agency.
You may ask prosecutors or LEO to stop being bullies. God knows that doesn't work.
So you need some technical solution to this part of criminal (in)justice. But instead, people will simply comment at the face value statement of plea deals are abused sometimes, and then move on.
edit: thought of another technical solution: body cams. If people on hackernews feel strongly about criminal injustice, I urge you to develop some technology about better and more viable body cams, a technology that protects everyone (including LEOs).
> The danger of these rules was not just that they created land mines for the unwary
In real life, these "land mines" don't usually explode unless people think you're stepping on it intentionally.
For instance, every time I've accidentally used the wrong pronoun for someone, I've gotten a polite correction, I make a mental note, and everyone moves on. It's just not a big deal.
With a large enough audience, there will always be someone who assumes you've acted with ill intent. But if you know you've done it innocently, then you can just ignore them and move on.
Intent matters. Those performative things communicate your intent to make others feel welcome and included. So if you fly off the handle at a reasonable request that would make a group of people feel more included, you've communicated your intent accordingly.
Occasionally, there are some purely performative things that don't actually make anyone feel more included. Personally, I think it's reasonable to ask that question if you're genuinely interested in finding the answer. However, purely performative things tend to disappear in time; so sometimes the most pragmatic response is to just go with the flow and see where things land.
I think what PGs article misses, pretty much completely, is a more accurate definition of the work woke, which is:
>A word used to label another's political beliefs and activism as incorrect and foolish, particularly if that person is seen as "left leaning" or "progressive."
In other words, it's common usage has devolved to mean "you're an idiot."
This is a travesty, really, because its use erases any chance to have an honest dialogue about the topics and behaviors being labelled as "woke."
For example, people could instead say: "I disagree with X behavior, and here's why." Instead, people say: "look at that woke idiot." (And really, this is not an exaggeration.)
The normal behavior you describe, of people pointing things out, with others' responding in kind, has little to do with the common usage of the word "woke," which has simply become a form of name-calling.
And it is unfortunate, because there is much to criticize about activists on the left, but name calling is in no way helpful, and instead, drives further reductive discourse.
This is it.
Well organised and destructive conservatives across much of the western world, have conspired successfully to nullify the positive effect of a word once used to elide wide ranging ideas and discussions on the subject of social justice.
This is social media at it's most galling.
Though alongside that, we now have a wider appreciation of a long list historical crimes, and the longstanding effect of those transgressions.
In that sense, we have all become 'woke'.
> Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong. Only our initial assumption of course. If they can prove we should stop say
For example, is a discussion about the defacement of the Black Hills a 'priggish' waste of time, or a valuable lesson about the real history of the United States?
> In other words, it's common usage has devolved to mean "you're an idiot."
So liberals call conservative idiots "woke"? I think people have lost the plot here in trying to define this word.
> But if you know you've done it innocently, then you can just ignore them and move on.
For sensitive people that isn't really an option, it just causes endless stress.
The land mines do explode. Edinson Cavani got three match suspension after saying “Gracias Negrito” on social media to a teammate who just had a good game. And Spanish was his mother language.
The teammate was not offended in any way, but some authorities higher up apparently were.
[flagged]
The weirdest thing that I've run into wrt pronouns is when people object to the use of gender-neutral pronouns as "misgendering" - e.g. a person insists that you must not use "they" to refer to them but rather their preferred gendered pronoun, and if you don't, then that is "erasing their identity".
The argument that's usually made for this is that if someone's referred to as "they" while other people around them are "he" or "she", this makes them feel excluded etc. But if so, then using "they" uniformly would have been acceptable, and yet the same people insist that it is not.
Doug Hofstader in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas has a good essay on non-sexist language crica 1980 and how there was a very good case that English needed a gender-indeterminant pronoun for routine use where you did not know (or care) what the gender of a person who, say, was subject to a contract, was.
Even though there was a precisionist case for it, people interested in language reform thought it was a complete non-starter and instead focused on other sorts of reforms.
Then 10 years ago thoughtless people who thought it was OK to mislabel people with terms like "latinx" and "cisgender" suddenly thought they could engineer language (which we share) without anyone's consent and in a culture of bad faith of course you get some jackass like Musk say his pronouns are "prosecute/Fauci" because it is all in bad faith.
In cases of ambiguous gender presentation, they is common and accepted.
The idea is that yeah typically your pronouns should line up with your appearance or presentation, but sometimes it's a bit ambiguous. I've had people call me "ma'am" on the phone or in drive throughs because my voice tends higher. Or because I have long hair and from behind it tends to look feminine. It bugged me when I was younger and less used to it, at this point I don't really care. But I do appreciate it when people ask.
When it comes to common terms, they're usually pretty whatever. I've been doing a lot of work in a protocol where original terms were "master" and "slave", and while I don't really care reading it in docs I personally feel uncomfortable speaking in those terms because my brain always brings up the connotations. Especially when the pattern is just as effectively described with Client/Server.
My goal, ultimately, is just to keep the vibes positive and help people feel welcome and included and seen. Some reasonable changes to patterns of speech to support that isn't that crazy to me. It's no different than code switching when in a different country, or just talking to different groups in general.
> This type of policing is another iteration of doublespeak that we were warned about in 1984. Policing the language polices thoughts. It harms communication effectiveness. It makes it harder.
Jesus, it's really not that hard. I work full remote and I just ask people what they prefer. I'm not in office and a lot of people aren't on camera and it's a bad idea to generally assume shit based on their name anyways. If I forget I apologize and we move on.
I have literally never encountered any issues in my long career of working with people because I don't feel a need to fill my head with hot air and make a big deal about it.
[flagged]
[flagged]
> Isn't that the issue though? I healthy society should be able to challenge, object and argue (within reason), without losing jobs or being exiled?
When you're in parliamentary/house sessions (or whatever your democracy/society/state has), sure, argue and object to everything. There you have what Americans are so crazy about, "Freedom of Speech" and all that.
But outside of that, in private life, most people would find you very cumbersome to deal with if you challenge, object or argue with things that people state about themselves. If I say I'm 32 years old and you try to argue against me, I'll eventually just ignore and shun you, because who has the time to deal with such inconsequential stuff?
If someone is named Jimmy and you keep referring to him as Jimbo despite them politely asking you not to, what do you think will happen?
[flagged]
Calling a person by the wrong pronoun is insulting, simple as that. The social convention is: "I say 'he' if and only if the person in question is male". Thus, calling for instance a transgender woman 'he' or a cisgender man 'she', is saying you don't see them as a man/woman, thus denying a part of their identity, just like when you call them by the wrong name.
I'm sure you would agree that a man with long hair or whatever should be called 'he', so I also don't see why that doesn't extend to transgender men for example.
I have no problem flipping 'he' and 'she'. I find some of the asks around 'they' to be too much; it works easily in some cases but not all. The demands around 'zir' and all the other pronounisms people have come up with seem excessive to me.
What are some cases where 'they/them/their' does not work, but 'he/him/his' does?
As for neopronouns like 'zir', I don't think I ever actually encountered anyone who uses them, either online or irl, with the exception of one Twitter user who preferred 'it'. So I mostly see them as a non-issue, although if someone does prefer a neopronoun I don't see the point of making a fuss either.
It is really not hard, and it demonstrates a baseline level respect for other humans. I know plenty of people who go by alternate pronouns or have changed their pronouns over the time I've known them, and even in cases where I've slipped up _repeatedly_ and used the wrong pronoun, I apologize and make a mental note to change my behavior.
Humans have been able to handle this sort of thing long before 'woke' was ever a thing: name changes due to marriage, or social pressure or immigration, or title changes like Miss/Ms. becoming Mrs.
It may be helpful to remember that the "ask" of you is a minuscule amount of effort compared to the person making the ask, who has probably agonized and struggled with their identity, their relationships, and what sort of repercussions they may face when they ask others to change how they refer to them.
It would be more respectful for these people not to attempt to impose their absurd pronoun demands on others.
> The social convention is: "I say 'he' if and only if the person in question is male".
Yes. Therefore by that convention:
> calling for instance a transgender woman 'he'
is entirely reasonable, because "transgender women" are, by definition, of the male sex.
If you don't agree with that, maybe this article will provide some food for thought: https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns
It's not a huge ask or heavy lift.
Like stepping on an icon, no big deal.
If you go to work and deliberately call "Bob" by the wrong name "Joe" all the time, and it upsets them and they ask you to stop, you'll get fired eventually if you continue.
...but he really looks like a "Joe"! :D
I did say "within reason"... which I realise is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I think people may disagree on what "within reason" means. There are some red lines established by Title VII that cause "just asking questions" to cross into "hostile work environment." Is it reasonable to keep asking those questions?
Reasonable people can disagree on that question, but the law will protect a company that fires an individual for crossing that line while the rest of society is arguing over where the line should be. That's just how law works in general.
Easier said than done. Intent does not matter. The vocal minority will instantly peg you a racist and those whispers will continue to persist. I have personally been through it. Unfortunately we exist in a world now where the vocal left and right pollute the airwaves.
And there I was, reading a comment earlier today about how HN is better than the other places because it prefers technical articles over "politics".
If you want technical articles with less politics, try the invite-only red site.
How do you get an invite?
By asking someone you know who has one.
Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten. I don't think what pg is saying is anything new, he's always had the same sentiment around anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian/mob and pro-breaking-the-rules attitude.
It's called "hacker" news for a reason.
shrug Well I've been on HN for about 20 years, and I'm not anti-pg (he's about 50/50 by my accounting). I'm also anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian, anti-mob.
But he missed the mark here. It feels like he published a first-draft without getting any dissenting takes on one of the biggest hot-button topics on the web. I (or a million other people) would have been happy to read a draft of this and explain that he'd create offense and confusion with his... attempt to explain the history of priggishness around social justice based on his lived experience... if that's really what this is supposed to be.
NINE other millionaires read this weird, angry screed. Not a single one felt the need to gently guide Paul Graham towards the truth.
These people are willfully ignorant, but they're so arrogant that they think that they're right about everything.
[flagged]
> he'd create offense
That's sort of the point of the essay, he compares woke to a religion and explores how companies deal with various religious beliefs at work, ie: no one religion is ever allowed to suppress others no matter how righteous its believers feel or offended they may become.
I'm not sure why that's a bad thing or would create "confusion" in your mind.
The essay does much more than that. It makes a number of claims that are at best debatable and at worst unfounded, such as:
* The origin of woke-ism is university humanities departments
* Musk succeeded in "neutralising" wokeness on Twitter without censoring left-wing voices.
* Racism is (or should be) independent of linguistic context.
* That wokeness is a serious problem in the US.
He also makes liberal use of argument from incredulity, does not provide any facts, figures or citations to back up his claims, and suggests some very dubious moral standpoints (that it is wrong for university staff to get reported for sexual harassment).
That said, I do somewhat agree with you when you say "I don't think what pg is saying is anything new". In fact, he's never really said anything new, and he's always been prone to fallacious thinking. What's happened here is that he's exposed this more than ever before.
Also:
* That Bud Light was boycotted for excessive wokeness
if you create a product and it doesn't target the consumer with the right messaging you dont get sales
They targeted different consumers with different messaging. None of their typical customer base would have noticed anything except that some agitators discovered the Mulvaney video and whipped up a storm about it.
Exactly, this “hacker” news. Where does this screed from PG fit into that? If this was published by literally anyone else it wouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.
Hacking isn't just about computer programming, you could call it a philosophy.
The version of hacking I’ve grown up with for 30 plus years has always had very little space in it for bad takes from rich people.
You’re commenting on the central megaphone of one of the biggest VC components in the valley ecosystem.
That it has “hacker” is seemingly incidental. This place has always had bad takes from rich people - or takes from people who are seeking to be rich by way of tech.
No, but see, it's called the _Democratic_ People's Republic of Korea. It's right there in the name.
> That it has “hacker” is seemingly incidental. This place has always had bad takes from rich people - or takes from people who are seeking to be rich by way of tech
Right, but hacker is the culture they have wrapped themselves in, and I'm commenting on that. I'm commenting on one of the markers of validity that matters to how people in this group evaluate the credibility of an argument.
I would call hacking a culture more than a philosophy. Specifically it's a counterculture, much like the group that seems to have the ire of PG, who can (perhaps ironically) be seen here supporting the existing hegemony.
The philosophy of hacking, traditionally, aligns far more with "wokeness" (using the good faith interpretation) than with the antiwoke, redpilled, capitalist neoreactionary ideology currently wearing its skin for clout.
I think tracking vibe shifts is interesting and noteworthy.
But he's not doing that. None of this essay is based in data.
> None of this essay is based in data.
That's exactly why it's a vibe shift.
I enjoy his technical and tech culture essays, ones like this are a waste of time and mental energy. I won’t read it because I know it provides zero value.
You won't read it based off of its title I presume? On Twitter he says how so many people jumped into conclusion without even reading the essay.
Btw this falls squarely into "tech culture" category.
It's hard to take him seriously when he claims X doesn't censor, despite their very blatant and open censorship. Hacker news has not gotten anti-pg, it's more that pg has become more vocally political and is now facing the consequences of that.
Case in point, anyone else posting a screed like this would instantly be flagged and removed.
This is a significantly less good piece of writing than many of his older essays. It can be as simple as that.
I take it as more of an indicator of how much liberal sentiment has shifted over the last 15 or so years.
That plus the community having grown.
He claims to be anti-censorship, yet he can't see Twitter is just as censored as it used to be because it aligns with his world view now. The same as the Left used to be blind to Right censorship. Maybe he should try tweeting "cis".
"pro-breaking-the-rules attitude" come on. He's aligning himself with the most conservative and powerful people in the world right now. How is that a rule breaking attitude?
You can be aligned on 99% of things and still be a rule breaker. Additionally it matters a lot how big and societally ingrained the rules that you're breaking are.
> You can be aligned on 99% of things and still be a rule breaker.
No, no you cannot. That makes you someone who broke a rule, not a rule breaker. There is some nuance to it which the English language is subpar at, but it’s the difference between something you are and something you did. Like being drunk VS being an alcoholic.
You’re a rule breaker if you have a pattern of breaking rules, not if you break literally one (percent of) rule.
> Additionally, it matters a lot how big and societally ingrained the rules that you're breaking are.
It does to an extent, yes, but Paul isn’t doing anything different here. He has the same conservative opinion as his billionaire friends. He is the establishment, cosplaying as a revolutionary.
> Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten.
Frankly, I find it more concerning that anyone thinks HN should be pro Paul Graham by default. He should be judged by his ideas, not who he is.
Tech billionaire Paul Graham is the establishment.
Miss when his essays were actually about hacking!
Being anti-censorship is one thing that should, taken in isolation, have nothing to do with your object-level views. But in practice, those claims tend to correlate with very specific views, and they're applied hypocritically. Elon is the most high-profile recent example - I think it's hard to argue at this point that he had any principled anti-censorship views, given his behavior since taking over Twitter - but he's far from the only one.
You won't see PG writing an article on how homeless people in SF should be more pro-breaking-the-rules. Because it's OK to steal from your users, to inflate your growth numbers, to make false promises to build your initial userbase, but it's not OK not to shoplift from the Safeway or do drugs on the BART. That's the kind of breaking the rules that isn't cool, edgy, smart, and most importantly high status and beneficial to Paul Graham. Don't you think that double standard is a bit suspect, that he's "pro-breaking-the-rules" exactly when the rules restrain him and not others, when it's the rules he thinks are stupid and not the rules someone else thinks are stupid?
You won't see PG writing an article about how it's bad to deny a 15 year old medical information on puberty blockers. That is, undeniably, censorship in its very simplest form: it's the suppression of information out of a belief that it is in some way dangerous to let people know about it. But most of the people who claim to be so concerned with censorship won't say a word against it, and a lot actively support it, because it stops being "censorship" when it's something they like.
And, of course, the idea that the anti-woke crowd is "anti-authoritarian" is kind of laughable right now, given their response to the incoming administration.
The change isn't that his (or other tech elites') ostensible values have changed. It's that their ostensible values have become increasingly transparently hypocritical. PG hasn't become less of a hacker: it's "hacker culture" itself, especially as represented and hijacked by venture capital, that is not what we (or at least what I) hoped it was.
Rule breaking for me, and not for thee sums up my objection, I suppose.
> it's called "hacker" news for a reason.
exactly, so why is a long political opinion piece from PG on wokeness here in the first place?
ah yes an ill-informed whiny screed about wokeness is exactly the kind of content pg is good for. that's hacker content right there!
Yeah man, he's really breaking out of the mold by doing the exact same thing all the other SF billionaires are doing by sucking up to the right wing. Even braver and more punk of him, like Zuck, to only do it after the right wing won the election.
I'll give my opinion, as someone who used to hold pg in extremely high regard, but who is often surprised at just how thoroughly uninsightful pg's essays seem to me now.
The biggest problem I see with pg, and basically with all of the SV elite, is that I rarely see them question any of their assumptions or conclusions that don't lead them to "everything I've done is right, or at least the original goals of the 'SV ethos' is the best thing for society."
For example, take the concept of meritocracy. I completely agree that I think the "wokeness" of many on the left went way overboard in demonizing meritocratic processes, e.g. getting rid of advanced classes and opportunities for some students in the name of "fairness". At the same time, I rarely if ever see these SV kingpins suggest viable solutions to the fact that in the relatively new "winner take all" tech-led economy, very bad things happen if only a teeny meritocratic elite hoards all the wealth and leaves everyone else in an extremely precarious state. For a counterpoint as to someone who I do find insightful, consider Scott Galloway. He is definitely not someone who I would call woke, but he also understands some of the real problems so often ignored by the "tech utopianists".
In this particular pg essay, there is not much I disagree with, but I didn't really learn anything from it either. I'm also extremely suspect at all these SV leaders suddenly highlighting their views that are conveniently in lock step with the new administration. Like you say, pg has talked about this before, so I'm not saying his thoughts aren't genuine, I just think what Tim Sweeney said recently is pretty spot on "All these SV leaders pretended to be Democrats, and now they're pretending to be Republicans." It's similar to how I feel about Zuckerberg's recent pronouncements. When I first heard them, most of them I agreed with and they made sense to me. Then I read the actual new "hateful conduct" guidelines and I almost threw up. I'm actually fine with being able to call gay people like me mentally ill - I'm willing to debate that 9 ways to Sunday. But kindly STFU about "free speech" when only gay and transgender people had a specific carve out to allow for their denigration. Like I have to listen to all this crazy religious bullshit that in a sane world we'd recognize as symptoms of schizophrenia, yet if I said that on FB that would go against their new hateful conduct guidelines.
Frankly, I see pg largely as another uninteresting SV elite: someone very, very smart and who obviously worked very hard, but who was also obviously extremely lucky and now thinks that his thoughts are worth so much more than anyone else.
> I'm also extremely suspect at all these SV leaders suddenly highlighting their views that are conveniently in lock step with the new administration. Like you say, pg has talked about this before, so I'm not saying his thoughts aren't genuine, I just think what Tim Sweeney said recently is pretty spot on "All these SV leaders pretended to be Democrats, and now they're pretending to be Republicans."
Yep. IMO you struck right at the heart of it. My cynical POV is that pg, like many others, tries to be on the good side of who's now in power.
Everything else discussed in the article or here, as valid or interesting as it might be, looks to be a distraction from this central motivation.
This is simply bad writing. And it's also quite offensive given the origin (and ultimate conservative perversion) of the term "woke."
I thought it was more pro woke than anti pg, still I was surprised.
[dead]
[flagged]
HN has many of those who have gone through the indoctrination process in college that he describes in the essay.
It is extremely silly and in bad faith to accuse anyone to disagree with of indoctrination, but it's even sillier when every single tech bro is basically the same person, reads the same books, repeats the same topics, on the same day using the same phraseology.
You could have literally taken this essay from PG posted it on the timeline of any single one of his colleagues and you couldn't even tell who wrote it. The "anti woke" economy, if you look at the numbers accounts of that flavor do on Youtube, Twitter et al. is a magnitude if not larger than what, according to them, cannot be criticized.
The phrase "woke mind virus" also featured in this essay, is more of a literal meme or mind virus in the Dawkins sense of that term than anything it attempts to address. The lack of awareness to accuse others of indoctrination when you write an essay so generic that you can autocomplete the last 90% after reading the first 10% chatgpt style is quite something.
[flagged]
If you thought about this from your former friends' perspective, what do you think they would say about it?
They already did in the process of going off the deep end.
The most prominent incident was a friend (female, Chinese-American born to Chinese immigrants for context) who ran a guild I was in, we were like 50 members and played various games. Fun times.
It all fell apart overnight when all the sensationalizing and fearmongering about how the Right were going to round up and deport all Chinese (this was back in 2020, peak of covid lockdowns) finally got to her. She kickbanned anyone who didn't share in the fear and victimizing. She exploded on me particularly hard because I'm Japanese-American, a fellow Asian, and I guess she expected me to join the bandwagon.
She threw all manners of vitriol at me for no good reason, but I still wish her good fortune and hope she's still doing well and managed to recover from all that.
I fucking despise the Left for destroying that network of friends.
Did you ever write a letter to the Left and explain that they made 50 people not talk to you?
You're clearly not interested in conversing in good faith, but I'll indulge you:
Yeah, the letter is called a ballot and I've voted straight Red/Right/Republican/Conservative/Liberal every time.
It’s just the people online posting non-stop. The rest of us, checking in only when time allows, are not commenting 30 times in a single thread. (Check some of the posters here)
Same thing happened with the rest of the nonsense over the last 5 years. From social media you would think everyone took the clot shot. 1/3 didn’t but you’d never have known that from HN or other social media.
There is a small but loud contingent who wants to dictate our language, how we teach our children, and what we put in to our bodies. The good news is most people are not stupid and are completely rejecting it - in real life.
[flagged]
“Bro” but you did.
The federal government censored speech it didn’t like by PAYING social media to delete it. In many instances it was content that was objectively true.
Public schools are right now telling children in kindergarten they can choose their own gender. They cannot.
The federal government wanted to implement policies to require administration of an experimental gene therapy, that didn’t even work and was never even tested for protection against transmission, and many many people were forced in to taking it if they wanted to keep their job.
I’ve voted for left progressive candidates for 20 years but I can’t vote for this shit any more and judging by the recent election neither can over half of America. Have fun crying about trump for the next four years.
Requiring the vaccine wasn’t “requiring experimental gene therapy” since we had, and continue to have, old school style vaccines for COVID.
I know plenty of people that didn’t want to risk the newer stuff, but understood the collective issue of getting to herd immunity and took the normal version of the vaccine. To me this was very straightforward logic.
The covid vaccines were never tested for transmission.
How does herd immunity make any sense when it was never tested for transmission?
mRNA based vaccines also aren't gene therapy. Your DNA isn't being modified, that isn't how they work.
There isn't much point in replying to trolls like @whatwhaaaaat who claim the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines "don't even work". It's just willful ignorance at this point.
> Your DNA isn't being modified, that isn't how they work.
I know, but per your second point, arguing the semantics against willful ignorance doesn't work.
I simply opt to point out that there was and is an old-school vaccine because the focus on the mRNA side of things baffles me.
[dead]
It was obvious within weeks that there would be no herd immunity from the plain numbers of vaccinated getting infected and re-infected ("breakthrough infections" lmao).
My reddit account was permanently banned for _upvoting_ vaccine hesitancy.
> The number of true things we can't say should not increase. If it does, something is wrong.
Word.
Everyone agrees with this. Obviously, the problem is determining what is true. There is significant disagreement. This is the root of the problem, not that people are preventing other people from saying things that they themselves believe are true.
The problem comes from deciding what's true. It's factually true to say that a higher percentage of black people than white people are convicted felons. It's also grossly negligent to describe that as a cause ("black people have higher tendencies to become criminals") than as an effect ("centuries of systemic racism held higher numbers of black people in poverty, and poverty highly correlates to the kind of criminal behavior that gets you arrested, and also lower quality legal representation, which makes it more likely that the next generation will also be poor; lather, rise, repeat").
Is it a lie to say "black people are more likely to be felons"? No, but if that's all you have to say on the subject, then you're probably a jerk and shouldn't be talking about it at all.
TL;DR I'm weary of people saying things that are factually true on the face of them, but that utterly distort the conversation. See also: "scientists don't know how old the universe is" (but have a broad consensus of a narrow band of values), "vaccines can harm you" (so can water), "it's getting cooler in some places" (global climate change doesn't add X degrees to every location uniformly), etc. etc. etc.
To expound, "black people are more likely to be felons" is only true (in the truest sense of the word "true") given a clear definition of what "likely" means, and the conditions under which the statement is true.
The statement could easily be interpreted as either:
- when selecting a random black person and a random white person out of the current American population, there is a statistically higher chance that the black person is a felon than the white person
- black people are more inclined towards committing felonies than white people, and will continue to do so at a higher rate
These have very different meanings, but are both fair and natural interpretations of the information-deficient statement "black people are more likely to be felons". Given that, the statement will likely cause more confusion and argument than clarity, and so is a bad statement.
There's a term for lying with carefully selected truths: Paltering.
> Paltering is when a communicator says truthful things and in the process knowingly leads the listener to a false conclusion. It has the same effect as lying, but it allows the communicator to say truthful things and, some of our studies suggest, feel like they're not being as deceptive as liars.
It also lets the liar try to trap rebuttals with gotchas. In this case, “so you’re saying there aren’t a higher percentage of black people in prison? A-ha! Facts, not feelings!”, or something stupid like that. Then you have to waste time with that, to which they’ll reply, “so you admit they’re more likely, a-ha!”
I’ve found it more effective to just say “you’re wrong” and move on. The end result of the argument is the same, and it gets them all riled up, which is generally what they’d hoped to inflict on others.
True things which make you a jerk (to some) shouldn't be censored to avoid "distorting the conversation". Respondents can explain the context.
I would generally agree, but in many cases 1) people don't read the comments/replies, 2) interesting responses get drowned out by low-quality responses, 3) the criteria by which useful responses get highlighted can be skewed by a variety of factors, including vote brigading and algorithmic bias or sometimes just a bias towards the earliest comments (which get upvotes, which then get more views, which get more upvotes).
The flipslide is trolls will spew out the lies faster than you can rebut them. Much faster. Orders of magnitude faster. The lie is short, pithy, and requires little thought. The truth require context and effort. After a lie has been rebutted several times there is little value in allowing it to be repeated constantly. Eventually the truth tellers get worn down and the lie is allowed to live on in perpetuity, allowing more and more people to believe it over time.
So who gets to be arbiter of truth? and what is the recourse if they are wrong?
No one, and nothing.
That is a view which is entirely opposed to my own. I have no faith that there is some authoritative entity that could objectively determine what is a lie and what is the truth.
Well said. It surprises me so many people don't see the danger inherent in anointing 'fact checkers' who are supposed to adjudicate some objective "truth" around complex culture war issues along with the power to suppress other viewpoints.
Free speech isn't free. We pay for it by tolerating speech that's unpleasant, uncomfortable, wrong, insulting, offensive or hateful.
If you don't act against disinformation, you get a world that is spammed with so many statements that it's impossible for the average consumer to assess the truth of any of them.
Is that what you want?
If yes, why? If not, what's your approach?
Let people be wrong
That's great until it convinces them to make real-world decisions that affect the rest of us. For instance, vaccine misinformation talked a lot of people against getting safe (or at least safer than the illness), effective (not perfect, but effective) immunity shots for COVID. Those people are dead from being wrong.
I think someone's an idiot for denying the moon landings, but their ignorance doesn't directly affect my ability to stay alive and health. Some misinformation is worse than others.
Judges are fallible, therefore a judicial system is impossible!
The corrosive effect of suppressing potential misinformation is far worse than allowing it to spread.
I already stated my approach. Let speech be met by more speech in return. Consumers can assess the credibility of each.
But your approach results in someone who can't even conceive of the truth being identifiable. It doesn't seem like a great way to run a society.
Having the power to determine truth does not seem like a great way to run a society even if it gets you some easy wins on other fronts.
It might work at first and be effective for some time in the same way that a dictator can "get things done" but there is no free lunch.
Eventually you will get evil dictators, power hungry arbitrators of truth. It will bite you. It is only a question of when. It might be years or generations. The only winning move is not to play. Don't concentrate the power in the first place.
I am unable to connect your sentence to what I said.
> I have no faith that there is some authoritative entity that could objectively determine what is a lie and what is the truth.
I read this as "it is impossible to determine truth". If there exists a well resourced entity who's entire purpose in life is to determine objective truth and they are unable to do so what chance do I have?
You just have to use your best judgement like everybody else.
That's the problem though. Your judgement gets warped by the constant stream of lies. That's the fundamental concept behind propaganda. If you repeat a lie enough times it will be believed. Everybody thinks they're too smart to be taken in by propaganda, that's one of the reasons it works so well.
That's true, and it works both ways.
> Consumers can assess the credibility of each.
Assuming intelligence is normally distributed, then what's the plan for the bottom 50% here?
As stated.
Understood. It's an interesting long-term strategy to revive Feudalism.
More a strategy to avoid totalitarianism.
By leaving the bottom 50% to be propagandized by populists?
If we were still living in the time of thirteen channels and Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, I'd be inclined to agree with you.
An elite thinking that they know the truth and should suppress falsehoods is much more dangerous, so yes.
> Consumers can assess the credibility of each.
I ain't doing all that work. I'm picking whatever I already believe in.
/s but only kind of. That's how most people think. They aren't enlightened like you.
The opposite of “truth” is not “lie”, however.
I agree that the government should not censor statements that don't violated specific laws.
I am strongly convinced that any person or organization has the right to moderate content flowing through the systems they host. If you want to say "I don't believe the Holocaust happened", that should be your legal right. It should be my legal right to tell you, "go get your own soapbox to spout that nonsense. You're not doing it on my dime."
This presumes a high, perhaps delusional, level of faith in the public speaking space to determine what is "true."
I like to follow a statement like that up with: What exactly did you want to say that you can't anymore? Please give some specific examples.
While the sentiment sounds good on paper, in practice it far too often is someone complaining that you can't demand a black men to be lynched if they have a white girlfriend anymore because society has gone all woke.
There are lots of things that aren't 'PC' to say anymore and that doesn't mean society is failing. In fact I would argue that it is just plain old progress, especially when it is accompanied by a number of things that we can now say that used to be taboo.
Out with: "Gay people should be burned at the stake."
In with: "Contraception allows families to decide when to have children."
> I like to follow a statement like that up with: What exactly did you want to say that you can't anymore? Please give some specific examples.
At one company, we instituted "opportunistic hiring" policies. A certain portion of our engineering headcount was reserved for women. Men explicitly could not be hired using the headcount put under the "opportunistic hiring" pool. However, it was absolutelyy forbidden to mention that gender was used as a factor in hiring.
Yes, we straight up banned one gender from a portion of our head count. But nobody could say that one gender had greater headcount than the other. That was considered offensive harassment. The same managers that would hire women under their "opportunistic hiring" pool one day would admonish other people for suggesting that women were beneficiaries of discrimination the next.
Another example: 9 out of 10 people shot and killed by police are men. Is this evidence of sexism against men in police? If I say that I don't believe that the police are sexist, but rather this disparity is due to the fact that men commit proportionally more acts of violence than women, is such an opinion sexist against men?
In many circles, pointing to the fact that the racial breakdown in policy shootings matches the racial breakdown in violent crime, with the same strength of correlation as the gender breakdown in shootings, is considered racist. In fact, even acknowledging a disparity in the rates of violent crime is considered racist by many (even if one states that poverty and historic injustice are the causes of the racial disparity in crime).
I'm very curious how you came to the conclusion that Paul was thinking of statements like "gay people should be burned at the stake" when he writes, "the number of true things we can't say should not increase".
I have a specific example in mind, but I fear that if I mention it, I'll be doxxed, cancelled, fired, and burned at the stake.
What are some true things you cannot say? Enumerate some, please.
> saying "colored people" gets you fired
But not arrested.
Freedom of association is a thing.
Can you elaborate? I want to take you seriously but I don't get your point.
There are very few situations where speech leads to incarceration, and I don't think PG is talking about those, is he?
My point is that "cannot say" is pure hyperbole. Your freedom to say whatever you want is not impinged, and my equivalent freedom to shun you based on what you say is similarly unimpinged.
Usually when people complain about what you "can't say", what they actually mean is they can't say whatever they like and still have people still employ / socialise / be nice to them.
Expressing opinions that others find disagreeable is not a protected class.
Pure hyperbole is pure hyperbole.
If you want to shun me for not loudly enough pronouncing how great some sort of special privileges for certain ostensibly oppressed classes is, or for not jumping enthusiastically enough though hoops referencing people with exactly the most woke-community prescribed terminology, then chances are I don't particularly to associate with you either. That's fine.
If you start telling lies about me online and try to incite a mob to threaten or harm me and the people who do opt to socialize with me (despite or maybe even because of my opinions), or organize mobs for PR damage to pressure my boss into taking away my livelihood, that is something quite beyond exercising your right to choose your associations.
Of course that would still not literally make me unable to pronounce my woke-taboo opinion, but it should nonetheless be obvious that trying to wreck my life is a disproportionate response merely to me not toeing the line you took it upon yourself to draw. What you "can't say" is almost always graded rather than absolute, but active hostility destroying months or years of a person's life is well into the territory that constitutes a real hindrance for freely expressing an opinion.
> If you start telling lies about me online and try to incite a mob to threaten or harm me and the people who do opt to socialize with me (despite or maybe even because of my opinions),
Both of these things are already well-litigated limits on speech. I.e. - it's already illegal.
> or organize mobs for PR damage to pressure my boss into taking away my livelihood, that is something quite beyond exercising your right to choose your associations.
Either your views are so taboo that most of society doesn't want anything to do with you if you express them, or they're mainstream enough that only some people don't want to associate with you. If it's the former, then yes, you might struggle to find a sympathetic employer and that warrants some introspection. If it's the latter, then you're hardly at risk of having your livelihood taken away.
The alternative is that I should be forced to employ someone who fundamentally disagrees with my right to exist (and perhaps owns lots of guns).
Oh yes, point well taken, thanks for the extra context.
In a first instance? Unlikely.
If you KEEP saying it, despite being told that it's making your coworkers uncomfortable, then you're just being an asshole, and sorry, people don't like working with assholes.
What if the uncomfortable coworkers are wrong?
Can the people demanding more censorship ever be wrong?
[flagged]
Over the past couple of weeks there have been two heavy virtue signalers in my social circle that have turned out to be complete assholes to people around them, and I had that thought exactly. Maybe the very reason they feel the need to get approval from "virtuous" people is because they themselves are so awful.
Why are the tech elite and right so obsessed with this term? It’s such a bizarre phenomenon - I can’t wrap my head around it.
Tech elite currently enjoy disproportionately large benefits from rampantly un-balanced systems that allow them to exploit people for their work and therefore they stand to lose quite a bit from any rebalancing of said systems.
Basically, workers get nothing and CEOs get everything.
It represents something they can't control and which could ultimately be used to take them down a peg or two, if not more, by ostracizing them in the public's eyes.
tl;dr - They are afraid.
His accounting for what attracts people to wokeness is incomplete. Certainly there are prigs in the mix, but for most, I think it's that wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously. The challenge, then, is how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously without also folding that effort into an ideology with vague expansive definitions that lend themselves to actual prigs.
What attracted me to it is the idea that sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. are forms of bullying that are definitively antisocial. At its core, it should be about stopping bullying at the level of individuals, society, and institutions.
And, despite being "pro woke" or whatever it should be called, I had my own lessons to learn: I had to learn to stop interrupting women. I had to learn that interrupting them was wrong and that it was a form of sexism that I needed to address.
That’s just how the prigs justify to themselves being prigs.
> wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously.
I'm not sure that's true. Wokeness doesn't focus on actual harassment; it focuses on accusations of harassment, with a definition of "harassment" that is highly subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate very well with actual harassment.
> how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously
The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
> The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Taking it seriously is a prerequisite for any effective mechanism for reducing sexual harassment.
It’s pretty much orthogonal.
Many of the people most “taking it seriously” do the least to reduce its prevalence. Some are actually harassers.
I'm not so sure. See my response to triceratops.
I feel like when this all started out the problem was really taking it more seriously. People would talk and complain about it and no one would take them seriously. So the group managed to scrounge together enough power to force it to happen.. And then some of that power got misused. It's still better than it was before it started, though.
> It's still better than it was before it started, though.
Is it? To hear wokeness advocates talk, things have gotten worse.
Yes, it is. Unequivocally.
You might be overindexing on the loud voices.
> The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Try replacing "sexual harassment" with "murder" or "robbery" and see if it still makes sense.
Same principle applies.
Politicians claiming to take murder and robbery more seriously don’t necessarily do anything to actually reduce their prevalence.
Politicians' claims don't do anything about anything because they're words. But actually taking murder more seriously through action - allocating money to investigations, prosecutions, social services, better jobs - I'd be surprised if that had no effect.
The comment I replied to said "taking sexual harassment seriously" was pointless, not "talking about taking sexual harassment seriously" was pointless. I agree with the latter, not the former.
Yes. All analogies suck to various extents, but, "murder" and "robbery" are pretty apt analogies.
A lot of problems can only addressed systemically.
Murder? Yes, an excellent start to solving this problem is to not murder anybody. That's really the single most important thing you do.
And yet, history shows, other people are going to do murders and simply not murdering people yourself is not sufficient to deal with this problem. You need to intervene or call for help if you see somebody getting murdered, and we need some sort of system to deal with murderers and protect other people from them, etc.
If murder is too extreme a metaphor for the anti-woke crowd, how about pissing on the bathroom floor? It's great if you are not pissing on the floor, but somebody is and we all have to walk on that floor, so we need to have some kind of community standards around it, and also somebody needs to clean up that piss.
How do we take murder or robbery seriously? We say we do that by making and enforcing laws against murder and robbery. But do we actually do what we say?
How many innocent people get convicted of murder because of our desire to "take murder seriously"? (The Innocence Project has found that the answer is "quite a lot".) Note that every time an innocent person gets convicted, it means a guilty person (the actual murderer) goes free.
How many murderers get released back into society to murder again because our desire to take something else "seriously" has somehow overridden proper enforcement of our laws against murder? (I don't know if any specific study has looked at this, but my personal sense is, again, "quite a lot".)
So no, the lesson of experience appears to be that "taking it more seriously" is not a good way to reduce how often some bad thing happens, with murder just as with sexual harassment.
So, there are (at least) two axes here, right?
"How seriously we take a thing" and "how good a job are we are doing."
In the case of murder in America, I would say the answers are "extremely seriously" and "we are doing a very imperfect job."
We should certainly do a better job of it, but I don't think the answer is to be less serious about murder. And -- clearly, I'd hope -- the point of the analogy is that some (many? most?) problems are societal.
Simply choosing to not murder people yourself is a great start, but it is a society-wide issue that can't be completely addressed by people simply choosing to do the right things on an individual basis.
> "How seriously we take a thing" and "how good a job are we are doing."
Conceptually, yes, these two things are separate. However, that does not mean these two things are independent of each other.
As you note, we take murder extremely seriously, but we do a poor job of reducing the number of murders. I think that is because we think, hey, we're taking murder really seriously, so we must be reducing the number of murders. In other words, people believe that "taking it seriously" will automatically reduce the frequency of a bad thing. But in fact it doesn't--it might well do the opposite. Maybe if we paid less attention to how "seriously" we are taking murder, and more attention to actually reducing the number of murders, even if many of the things we ended up doing to accomplish that had no obvious relationship to murder and didn't look at all like "taking murder seriously", we might do a better job.
In the case of sexual harassment, similarly, "taking it seriously" does not seem to have helped in reducing its frequency; it might even have done the opposite (at least one commenter elsewhere in this thread has said they believe things have gotten worse).
> it is a society-wide issue
There is a very general society-wide issue that the things we are discussing are special cases of: how should a society deal with the fact that there will always be some proportion of people who, for a variety of reasons, don't want to behave as good members of society?
Because this issue is very general, it requires very general solutions (or maybe "mitigations" would be a better term--you can't "solve" the issue in the sense of just making such people not exist any more). But "taking seriously" particular manifestations of this general issue, like murder or sexual harassment, does not help in finding a very general solution to the very general issue. It often hinders it, by inducing people to mistake symptoms for the root cause. The root cause is not "too many people like to murder" or "too many people like to sexually harass others". The root cause is the very general one I gave above: some people just don't want to be good members of society. Society's method of dealing with this should be similarly general. Specific applications might vary in the details, but the general principle is still the same.
#/media/File:Slaveshipposter.jpg){kind=link}
In other words, people believe that "taking it seriously"
will automatically reduce the frequency of a bad thing.
But in fact it doesn't--it might well do the opposite
I agree, though, that America proves that taking it seriously certainly isn't enough to prevent it.
(It's also worth noting that per capita violent crime in America has plummeted since the 90s, with no major changes in the way we handle such things...)
But "taking seriously" particular manifestations of
this general issue, like murder or sexual harassment
For example: focusing on overly rigid standards of speech to the point where nobody wants to say anything at all, a focus on overly harsh punishment instead of education/remediation, etc.
I will also share that I, personally, have seen the devastation that a provably false #metoo accusation can wreak.
Still, I strongly object to the idea that the efforts of organizations to address the "social justice" causes lumped into the category of "wokeness" are automatically bad. I don't think that's a useful discussion. It is a thing to discuss one policy at a time.
Thank you for saying this.
Maybe I could refine it to, what motivates many people who are attracted to wokeness is an earnest desire to do good things. I do think good comes out of it, along with bad. But we can set that aside and refine the point that I don't think the majority of people who initially went along with wokeness were aggressively conventionally minded nor prigs. I think his essay would be more persuasive if he acknowledged that there is an earnest desire to do good mixed in with it, which makes it a thornier issue. Otherwise, people who were or are into wokeness who are not prigs, or merely afraid of running afoul of etiquette, will probably dismiss the essay.
> what motivates many people who are attracted to wokeness is an earnest desire to do good things
While I agree that this is true, I think the point pg makes in his article could be extended to a general rule that, if you find your earnest desire to do good things is leading you to embrace something like wokeness, you need to take a step back. The best way to do good things is to do good things--in other words, to find specific things that you can do that are good, based on your specific knowledge of particular people and particular cases, and do them. Participating in general efforts to micromanage people to make them do good things, or to stop them from doing bad things, which is what wokeness is, is a very poor way to make use of your earnest desire to good things.
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.
The problem is how to reduce how often actual
sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more
seriously" is a very vague and ineffective
way to do that.
I mean, that is "taking it more seriously."
a definition of "harassment" that is highly
subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate
very well with actual harassment.
You complain that "wokeness" has a "highly subjective" definition of harassment that "doesn't necessarily correlate well" with reality.
"Wokeness" itself is an incredibly vague and amorphous term, primarily wielded by those who oppose it. It barely exists except in the minds of its opponents, and certainly does not have some kind of governing body or like, official position on harassment or anything else.
If you feel that some specific person or institution is doing a shitty job of addressing harassment, or if you have some specific ideas of your own, those would be great things to bring to the table.
But accusing a vague and amorophous thing about being too vague and amorphous about another thing is... man, please, stop.
How much money do you have to have before your beliefs stop changing like a flag in the political wind?
To be fair to pg, he has hinted at anti-radical-left beliefs before (see the essay about moral fashions). He is probably able to voice anti-radical-left views now because the Overton Window has shifted.
pg has been pretty consistent in this position for a long time. His worldview is closest to what one could call "classical liberalism":
Free speech, economic liberalism, civil liberties, individual autonomy.
That's a worldview that is pretty idiosyncratic today (sadly).
On some topics he's "left wing" (pro palestine), on others he's "right wing" (anti affirmative action in university admissions).
PG has always been annoyingly consistent about his views on this.
For over 20 years I've been clicking on pg's essays, knowing that I can look forward to an interesting and insightful read. I can no longer assume that.
Would this have gotten front page if it wasn't pg? Because I think I know the answer to that.
It's not surprising that people come to PG's commenting site to comment on PG's writings.
Front page dynamics are complicated. I won't say you're wrong, but you might be wrong. Time of day (for instance) can have a huge effect.
I attended a corporate training on harassment where it said you can’t say “all hands” because it’s disrespectful toward people without hands. Use “town hall” instead.
On one hand, sure it’s an easy substitution to make. On the other hand, who decides these things? How does this affect our company? Do people without hands actually care? It all adds up and it’s wearisome like PG says, all these rules and you just try to avoid stepping on one.
I find this highly highly suspect as an anecdote without some supporting evidence
A quick search suggests this is a bit of a running meme used to discredit and poke fun at such trainings rather than something you’ve honestly experienced.
Here's an article that was posted here a long time ago:
https://it.wisc.edu/learn/inclusive-language-for-it/
It attempts to replace, or offer alternatives to, offensive language in IT. For example "dummy variable" is under the category of "Ableist language" in the website and should be replaced with the term "placeholder value". "master" and "slave" are other examples of language that, apparently, need to get phased out.
I don't see the problem with the comment that you responded to. It's not surprising to me.
> I don't see the problem with the comment that you responded to. It's not surprising to me.
The problem is that you provide other examples and then extrapolate from there that the original comment could be true. However, whether or not you believe it could be true is not serious evidence that it is.
Yes, offering alternative wording to offensive language is a real thing. But notice that the OP is asserting that a facially silly example is real without any support beyond a claim of personal experience. What should matter to you is whether it is real or not as opposed to whether it is surprising or not.
Fake silly examples like this are meant to sit on the line between believable and absurd specifically to make certain ideas seem ridiculous. Making up silly examples of real things is a specific technique to undermine them. It is a propaganda tool not a good faith attempt at dialogue.
C.f., people making up stories about litter boxes in schools to try and undermine efforts to protect the rights of gender non-conforming children (https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/30/how-furries-got-swept...)
So the story is highly suspect because ..... ? Because the author didn't provide you with evidence on a message board, in order to pre-emptively defend himself against your scrutiny? Because of some unrelated episode where somebody else fabricated a story as a form of propaganda? And you think that justifies your belief that the story is fake? Right. Good luck with your future conversations.
I was obviously speaking on its plausibility.
>The problem is that you provide other examples and then extrapolate from there
You mean like your link?
I giggled at what you did here! High five!
Everyone less empathetic than me is a bigot.
Everyone more empathetic than me is just virtue signaling.
Paul was on the board of, and advisor to, many of these companies that exported their culture to the world through their products and services. He wasn't the black sheep of the group whom others simply ignored and promoted their own independent political convictions.
I don't understand what this comment is trying to say, but the image of pg being on the board of companies (other than one that he founded) is pretty funny. I can't imagine him wanting to do that.
There is reason why he is writing this now. He did not get rich by having an opinion.
> I happened to be running a forum from 2007 to 2014 > our users were about three times more likely to upvote something if it outraged them.
I see how upvotes were detected. But outrage?
> a mob of angry people uniting on social media to get someone ostracized or fired
Worth noting that this arose by the specific design of the social media ownership. The "correct" side was artificially boosted and the incorrect side was censored. The outraged would have just cancelled each other out otherwise.
There’s no use in talking about the origins of something by basing it purely on subjective experience. This comment section is bigger than it needs to be and too many are taking the author’s version of history at face value.
Given that Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for murder, it feels quite shameful for the author to be unable to name his victim as anything other than "the suspect" - the sentence feels like one of endless examples of the 'past exonerative tense.' Similarly, given that up to 26 million people participated in protests over the _murder_ (not "asphyxiation"), minimizing what seem to be by any count the largest mass protest movement in US history as "riots" is nothing but a thought-terminating cliche.
Similarly, the article claims that the New York Times has become far left, but offers no evidence for this. When I think of the NYT in 2020, however, while there certainly were articles using the priggish language that Graham denounce, I immediately think of the Times's decision to feature an op-ed by Tom Cotton (right to far-right politican) suggesting that the nearly two-century long norm that the US government should not use its military to police its citizens (formalized in the post-Civil War Posse Comitatus Act) be broken in favor of an "overwhelming show of force" against "protest marches." In general, the New York Times has firmly remained a centrist (small-l liberal) newspaper, and I think claiming it has experienced massive ideological drift without providing examples says more about the writer than the paper.
In general, I feel like the essay shows a base disregard towards the concept of accurate history (suggesting that "homophobia" was a neologism invented "for the purpose [of political correctness]" during "the early 2010s" and fails to convince me of any of its points because of this.
+1
See my comment as well. The evidence PG uses to support his claim the New York Times has done this massive ideological shift is completely undone in his ninth footnote, that says the throw-away line in the article might not have even been reviewed by a senior editor. Yet PG still has gall to state it as fact.
1300 comments seems a bit... overkill. The article is overall very pragmatic and doing exactly what the title says. Ofc this is all a soft science, so there will inevitbly be some interpretations that aren't agreeable, and no "source to back it up".
just one tiny nitpick though:
>Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups,
"quietly" is indeed a way to literally silence such progress. You don't need to be prigish about it, but you should indeed be advertising yourself and the efforts of the groups. as well as what actions to take to help relive this. It's easier than ever in the age of the internet. Any charity will tell you that awareness is one of the most important aspects of their organization. Likewise here.
> Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.
It seems that the defining factor is that there was no actual authority attached to the morality of the situation. He is essentially saying that life was better when one could get away with doing whatever they wanted with no repercussions.
This is such a well-travelled path that I am surprised his intellect, nor that of the people that he claims proof-read this document, didn't protest before hitting 'publish'.
Here's a question: how can social justice actually be justice without enforcement. The US constitution coded this as the 13th amendment - is that now a woke document? Is that an example of "radicals getting tenure", or is it example of progress?
Articles like this really don't age well. Neither, it seems, does the author.
I found it extremely odd that he specifically pointed out professors being sexist as a thing that's perfectly fine to let them get away with.
I live in Europe (Germany) and we have no wokeness here. Saying something sexist or racist isn't a big deal. Some people will think you are an asshole and that's it. Our leftists go to the US and come back ranting about how oppressive wokeness is. I'm a minority myself and have experienced my fair share of racism. But I have no desire to push for somebody to get fired for making a racist joke or some such thing. I will just lower my opinion of them and move on with my life. I don't want to live in a country where a wrong word at the wrong time might mean you're fired.
Germany has laws against hate speech! There are opinions you can be jailed for in Germany that you couldn't be in the US.
I think it depends on the word and the context. If the person speaking is your boss, there might be situations where 'moving on' isn't an option and the words might have wider implication in your life.
Germany actually has several laws in place that explicitly protect people in the workplace, such as the General Equal Treatment Act (2006, with revisions to 2022) which contains an explicit treatment of Harrassment, specifically mentioning that of a sexual nature.
Going further, in a judgment dated from 06.12.2021, LAG Cologne, sexual harrassment was explicitly stated as acceptable grounds for extraordinary dismissal. So actually you already live in exactly that kind of country.
https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/de...
What I think you're trying to say, though, is that you don't experience the kind of angry fanatical discourse that seems to a big feature of social media and US discourse, where laws are being weaponised and used as blunt political instruments, with which to do as much damage to society as possible.
In this case, I agree with you and am super grateful I don't live there.
As a minority in the US, I experienced little to no overt racism from 2014 to the present, following years of derogatory comments and unsolicited "jokes" about my ethnicity from people who weren't fundamentally racist but still thought it was OK to say those things. I attribute this change directly to the rise of wokeness (read: awareness) around 2015 and thus have a soft spot in my heart for it, even if some of its excesses over the years have made me roll my eyes.
Focusing only on prevention at the bandwagon phase, and speaking from direct experience.
I was there when there was an internal thread trying to pressure management to effectively ban a book in a FAANG. I really wanted to expression my view: Censorship is more dangerous than the problem it's trying to solve. As long as it is legal publication, don't try to ban books. Let the readers decide, particularly when you strongly believe you are correct.
However there was only downside if I choose to speak up. In terms of game theory it is a 100% negative EV move. I can't say with authority whether a large number of colleagues felt the same, but given the strong filtering we tend to hire highly intelligent people, consciously choosing not to perform career ending move by saying the wrong thing isn't hard to imagine.
I don't have a concrete solution, perhaps abstractly it can be incentivized through some form of rewards and punishment tweak for the scenario above. Perhaps it can be established as a company tenant, that these speech won't affect your career (but it's not trivial since harasser attracted by those speech could hide their true intent, keep their moves subtle, it's particularly bad when these actions are usually emotionally charged). Or perhaps these ideas (truth seeking as a virtue? Be strict on yourself and forgiving on others? I can't pinpoint the most accurate words to describe it) can be reinforced stronger in education so it happens naturally.
This essay might win an award for having the most words for the simplest point made. The genuflecting and synthesized history lesson that it's the first 3/4 of it was an entirely unnecessary diversion.
There is and always will be those who take earnest and reasonable ways of describing beliefs and behaviors and turn them into hyperbolic ad-hominem at both ends of the spectrum. If we are aware of it, and use common sense and a little bit of critical thinking, there will be less of this.
Did that take pages of text? No.
I sadly suspect we’re going to see some risk adverse hiring of boring white dudes in all positions of leadership. Regardless of competence.
We’re already seeing DEI weaponized. Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not. Organizations will be risk adverse and only hire the most boring white dude they can find from central casting. Whatever you want to say about diversity initiatives this will be a pretty terrible outcome.
> Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not.
That sentiment ("any mistake is because they're a DEI hire") is obviously wrong. But didn't DEI open itself up for that accusation by lending it some truth? It's a fact that black doctors have lower GPAs than Asian doctors on average.
I think a lot of people would argue against DEI because it takes the easy way out of a real problem. The result we want is more black doctors, but the way you should get to that is not changing standards that are not inherently racist.
I think a lot of people would argue against DEI because it takes the easy way out of a real problem. The result we want is more black doctors, but the way you should get to that is not changing standards that are not inherently racist.
The easy (and right) way out was to hire the most competent doctors, not the blackest doctors. I don't want more black doctors, I want the best doctors, regardless of their skin color. If you want more black doctors, you should train better black doctors. However, if you're going to do that, don't be surprised when white trainees band together to work harder too. If it's fair for your side, it's fair for every side.
I have no idea why we went backwards from "discrimination based on skin color is never okay" to "it's okay if they're black" but there's no reason not to simply recognize the mistake, fix it, and move on.
> The easy (and right) way out was to hire the most competent doctors
What I mean by "easy" is "quick and superficial." Hiring the most competent doctors delays achieving the statistic of "more black doctors," so it's not the "easy way" I'm talking about. It takes time for education to come up to par in black communities, because they're poorer for historical reasons. The right (and harder, because it's not doable via a means that the DEI people directly control---hiring) way is to put money where it's needed for education, and "more black doctors" will be a ripple effect achieved without discrimination.
If you are going to train black doctors, then you need to enrol them in universities. If you don’t want tu use scholarships or quotas, then you must make sure that those black candidates actually do good in high school, otherwise it’s DEI.
If you are giving scholarships or subsidies to black teenagers so they can eventually get into a university, that’s also DEI, so better subsidise their families so they can get a better primary education and upbringing… but that’s also DEI.
So you keep going back and the “solution” is basically to do nothing and keep the status quo.
> If you are giving scholarships or subsidies to black teenagers so they can eventually get into a university, that’s also DEI, so better subsidise their families so they can get a better primary education and upbringing… but that’s also DEI.
Looking at this in terms of race is misguided. Don't do anything for "black people," just help "poor people" get better educations by giving more money to poor schools. A lot of "poor" schools are actually black schools, but not all, so more than just black people will benefit; and not all black people are poor, so we won't waste resources on those who already have them.
Defining DEI as "doing anything about the problem" and then saying that DEI opponents therefore don't want to do anything about the problem is a lazy bait-and-switch that I wish we would all recognize and stop doing.
I think there is a deep seated concern that this could exacerbate the problem if poor people white people are able to take advantage of that help to a greater degree than poor black people.
I dont see how doing nothing is the logical conclusion of tracing things back to the root cause, or why non-racial solutions cant be implemented at any of the levels.
What is wrong with helping poor people get better primary education? What is wrong with making university cheaper and more accessible?
These types of things should help black people, as well as hispanic, asian, or white people that start with a disadvantage.
I don't think people regard scholarships as DEI. Lowering the standards for university admissions a la SFFA v. Harvard, yes, but scholarships to pay for university is distinct from discrimination in admissions.
Also, society can tackle problems like the study time gap https://fburl.com/oa3uenrr
> Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not.
This isn't restricted to tech.
"I'm French when I score, Arab when I don't" - Karim Benzema.
LinkedIn has a DEI jobs category in their Jobs section. How is that a qualification to do a job?
Why exactly is that a terrible outcome? What's wrong with boring white dudes?
Nothing. But if people are afraid of NOT hiring boring white dudes it becomes not about competence but about avoiding the optics of not wanting to look like you’re doing a DEI thing
Things will play out differently in the public and private sectors. But if you take Trump's cabinet selections as a bellwether then there are people of a variety of races, sexes, and backgrounds.
I find it hard to take seriously the notion that anybody serious is arguing for "let's go back to all white dudes" as a response to DEI. Sure...it's going to happen because nepotism and cliques aren't going away. But on the whole, it seems people want to move towards competence/merit being the only factors in play.
Will it get there? Time will tell, but there will invariably be issues. Your execution can be wrong, even if your philosophy is right. But if your philosophy is wrong (we need x% minority engineers, x% trans engineers, x% female engineers), you'd be hard pressed to avoid bad implementation.
"We are having a hard time hiring all the people we want. It doesn't matter what they look like" John Carmack
It doesn't matter what the people want in this case, but rather what the public relations look like.
OP posits that any non-white person in a position of responsibility is going to be blamed as a "DEI hire" if something happens under their watch regardless of their actual competence, because that's the kind of headlines that drive engagement with a certain audience. And I think that's a justified fear - just look at the current brouhaha over California fires.
The whole "pale, male and stale" narrative is antiwhite racism. I don't think people should perpetuate it.
White men hold almost all the power in America. I can't reconcile this fact with the idea that there is some conspiracy against white men. Can you provide some more context on what you mean?
Nobody alleged a conspiracy.
The claim is simple: using words to mock a group, hurts that group.
This is still true when the group is one that you consider to "hold almost all the power".
Holding power is irrelevant to the harm caused by actions like insulting people or discriminating against them.
This one was staying in the Drafts folder if Kamala won.
I have no respect for the people like Graham who are only voicing their objections now that the election results provide cover.
Graham has always strongly opposed censorship, group think, purity spirals etc.
But he wasn’t willing to write an article like this until Trump’s election provides him cover. It’s funny how many moderate liberals have suddenly found their voices.
"What you can't say" (https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) is 21 years old now.
"Heresy" (https://www.paulgraham.com/heresy.html) was during Biden's tenure.
"Orthodox Privilege" (https://www.paulgraham.com/orth.html) was during the height of lockdown-era BLM.
"Keep your Identity Small" (https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html) is from the beginning of Obama's tenure.
Criticizing "wokeness" today is not at all inconsistent with PG's historically stated opinions and beliefs.
That's not fair. He's been vocal about it on Twitter for years, for example.
Btw pg is as anti-Trump as he is anti-woke. I wonder how many heads in this thread would not explode if they really took that in.
Abbot and Costello - Who's on First - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYOUFGfK4bU
SNL - Republican or Not - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h_N80qKYOM
If one desires understanding and learning about the world, one must remain curious and humble. Unfortunately curious and humble people are generally not as emotionally and more importantly, politically activated.
So a politician may go looking for a subject that will be emotionally activating to as many people as possible. It barely matters whether more people will be on their side or the other side. As long as the fight is going, they will get engagement.
It is very difficult to motivate a person towards a complex world where the other side is made of humans (sinners, but still human).
It is much easier to motivate a person towards a simple world where their own side is righteous and the other side is composed of demons.
---
So, is the other side made of sinners or demons?
In this article, Graham claims the following:
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
Bud Light was boycotted because they did a promotion with a minor trans celebrity. What is "woke" about that? It seems to me that what happened here is that Bud Light was punished for heresy, just from a different direction than Graham is choosing to condemn.
[flagged]
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?
if you cared about running a business and making money, you should know your customers well and not do anything to upset that demographic
this isn't ideology related its market driven reality in capitalist countries
Fine. But thats distinct from what Graham is saying, which is that collaborating with a trans person is "venturing too far into wokeness".
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?
[flagged]
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.
[flagged]
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 stereotypes of women that Mulvaney is acting out have been used to belittle and disparage women both now and historically.
How exactly is he "living as a woman"? He's a man calling himself a woman. This is not the same at all.
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.
Can you demonstrate that it was anything more than a single can?
“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.
Yes, that's what people actually mean when they say "woke", but would Graham openly admit that?
Did they promote "trans ideology"? Did the ad say anything about trans principles?
Or did it just have a trans person in it?
Because if you are saying employing trans people is woke, that's pretty messed up.
[dead]
Does that apply to every actor bud hires? If that actor says something personal on their feed, bud is promoting their ideology?
Tom Cruise did ads for bud, is Budweiser promoting Scientology?
If not, walk me through why one is promoting ideology and the other isn't.
[flagged]
You are avoiding the question.
And of course I'd make the same argument for Andrew Tate. Budweiser hiring Tate isn't "promoting his ideology". Because Budweiser has no ideology beyond "we think this makes us money". They chose Dylan because they thought "this makes us money", if they chose Tate it would be because they thought it makes them money. In neither case would they be promoting their actors ideologies. They are a boring mega corp, their one ideology is "sell beer".
[flagged]
Summary: Old successful man thinks the social justice movement is unnecessary and stupid. Also, twitter is better since Elon.
"When your market was determined by geography, you had to be neutral. But publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography" is interesting! I'd never thought of that being the cause of news polarization, but as a story it makes sense.
> In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white police officer ~~asphyxiated~~ a black suspect on video.
This is quite some impressive editorializing, especially when the black "suspect's" killer is currently in prison for murder. I only highlight this because it indicates a very particular viewpoint held by the author - particularly stuff like this -
> And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
So, he states very early the performativeness is the issue. But, inevitably, when you ask these same people what then should be done about inequality, whether it be racial or otherwise, the answer is often "nothing" or denying that a problem even exists. I don't pretend to know this author's view here, but I'm just pointing out that the sentence quoted here is kind of dishonest - the implication being that if performativeness regarding social justice is a problem, that you should then focus on real efforts around social justice. This isn't mentioned a single time in this nonsensical screed, getting close in parts like this answering the "what now?":
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because there will be a next thing. Prigs are prigs by nature. They need rules to obey and enforce, and now that Darwin has cut off their traditional supply of rules, they're constantly hungry for new ones. All they need is someone to meet them halfway by defining a new way to be morally pure, and we'll see the same phenomenon again.
So, this author undermines his entire "point" (if a real one existed) with stuff like this, because the obvious conclusion is that any real effort at correcting social injustice and inequality will be met by cries of "aggressive performative moralism" by people exactly like this. From my view, that's probably the point, just please don't pretend you're doing anything intellectual here.
I'll leave this, this certainly does sound very "conventionally minded" (as he uses in a derogatory manner throughout this):
> Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong
> But, inevitably, when you ask these same people what then should be done about inequality, whether it be racial or otherwise, the answer is often "nothing" or denying that a problem even exists.
That's an assumption you're making - I don't see any evidence of that viewpoint in pg's essay. Any specifics you can point to?
I can point to a specific that seems to contradict you:
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
Inevitably, someone will chime in and say that it wasn't what he said, it's what he didn't say -- arguing from someone's purported silence. But that's exactly the kind of performative nonsense he's arguing against. It ought to be possible to speak against something without being castigated for failing to pay lip service in some way to a related topic.
This line of questioning is extremely annoying, and if I can be frank, also sounds very dishonest. You already answered your own question, knowing what it is, but I'll walk you through it -
His core "thesis" or "problem" here is the performative nature of social justice initiatives. He's correct, they often are performative. This does imply, on its face, that some efforts should be done to enact real initiatives that are not performative. I'm sure we can agree there this is what is implied by his statement.
Why then, would a serious author with this problem statement, then proceed to write thousands of words bemoaning the underlying nature of the initiatives themselves (without addressing what about them makes them performative, not even a single time in this essay) or about not being able to say "negro", rather than coming up with even a single conclusion on what must be done instead? I mean, you can just take a random sampling of the comments in this thread, which honestly shocks me it's not been flagged, to see precisely how people with his same viewpoint interpreted it. Lets please not pretend here. I can't exactly get on the phone and ask him what he thinks the answer to this question is - I can only go on a huge volume of discourse that has gone on for many, many years and make some conclusions on my own based on what he spent a very large amount of words complaining about, and shocker, none of them had to do with the ineffectiveness of social justice initiatives or "wokeness" (how he defines it), but rather how it oppresses him.
Does that help?
> Why then [...] rather than coming up with even a single conclusion on what must be done instead?
Because (a) that's not the topic at hand, and (b) in American discourse, it's rather obvious what the correct (or at least default) position is with regard to racial discrimination and injustice: Don't discriminate on the basis of skin color, national origin, or any number of other things that have nothing to do with a person's character. Love your neighbor as yourself. It's even been written into law, including an amendment to our constitution.
> sounds very dishonest
I can assure you, I am sincere and not drying to deceive. What do you think my real intent is?
> Because (a) that's not the topic at hand,
What is the topic at hand? The author's true beliefs? You're also just guessing them based on stuff he hasn't written. I can make my own conclusions based on a wealth of information on similar "essays" (much of this is not original and quite regurgitated), but we can't sit here and pretend they're simply unknowable. If you really got so worked up that you'd write this many words about the performative nature of DEI/wokeness etc, then why would you so overwhelmingly focus on the things about this that impact you rather than the groups these kinds of policies actually impact? What are PG's "damages" compared to such groups? C'mon. This is why I say this kind of talk is dishonest. If I were to give you the complete benefit of the doubt here, I would tell you to simply look to what else PG has written on social media or his blog about similar topics to conclude what he actually feels about such initiatives and whether they are worth doing at all even when done correctly (spoiler, he doesn't think so). Reading his problem statement, you wouldn't immediately guess that, and that's what I believe is dishonest (not to mention cowardly).
Why this is a problem is that this person, perhaps more than several 9's of people out there in the business world, actually has the means and capacity to do something meaningful about this and instead spends all of his mental and emotional energy bitching about a problem that honestly really isn't a real problem for anyone that is actually trying to help the problem at hand here.
> and (b) in American discourse, it's rather obvious what the correct (or at least default) position is with regard to racial discrimination and injustice: Don't discriminate on the basis of skin color, national origin, or any number of other things that have nothing to do with a person's character. Love your neighbor as yourself. It's even been written into law, including an amendment to our constitution.
This is just so decidedly untrue I don't even know where to begin. This author can't even bring himself to say without dancing around the language (weird that he has no issue with terminology in this case) that George Floyd was murdered in cold blood, which is an absolute fact backed by evidence. Why do you think this? We live in a world where saying afro americans should have the same opportunities as whites is "woke propaganda." Why do you think this?
it just reads like a petulant teenager complaining he got his wrist slapped for saying the n word in class. Sorry if that's "offensive" or oppressing anyone, I'm just reading the words he literally wrote. If he has anything else to say on this matter in contradiction to what I've said, please by all means show me. Again, I can draw my own conclusions based on what similar people (and not to mention PG himself) have had to say about this topic.
> What is the topic at hand? The author's true beliefs?
The topic at hand is woke ideology, sometimes known as "identity politics" -- the worldview preached by people like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, as well as many university professors. This ideology is very distinct from the Civil Rights Movement and other ways of attacking racism and other forms of oppression, because its foundational propositions are incompatible with them, namely: (1) Everyone, whether they know it or not, is either an oppressor or oppressed. This is the most correct way of viewing society. (2) Race is the characteristic that most tends to separate people along this axis (although any aspect of identify politics also goes here -- even israel/palestine. There are people being arrested in the UK for saying or posting things that are even slightly against palestine, like "Why do we have Palestinian flags in our town square instead of a UK flag? -- which leads to a loud knock at 5am the next morning and an arrest. Just 1 example."). (3) Black people are the oppressed, and white people are the oppressors (but also add any other groups identified under identity politics).
This ideology inherits so much from Marxism - where (1) is identical, but (2) is proletariat vs bourgeoisie and (3) is capital ownership. It also tends to lead to categorically similar outcomes. In particular, it seems to tap into what I've heard described as "ancient tribal circuits in people's brains", by identifying "them" as the enemy, whoever "they" are (in anti-racist woke ideology, it's white people). Young people inculcated with these types of ideologies are literally becoming ready for tribal warfare, whether that's an intentional outcome or not.
> If you really got so worked up that you'd write this many words about the performative nature of DEI/wokeness etc, then why would you so overwhelmingly focus on the things about this that impact you rather than the groups these kinds of policies actually impact?
Because woke ideology actively inhibits healing, brotherly love, and government policy that helps people who are actually oppressed. It sets people up against each other. "Kill all of those people" is a gross overreaction. The French Revolution happened because of real, very big problems, but mass guillotining was a big overreaction that caused far more problems than it solved. If woke ideology continues unabated, we're headed for a similar outcome. MLK spoke against "the tranquilizing drug of gradualism" and I agree -- but that doesn't mean overreactions don't exist as a category. MLK and Malcolm X also spoke out against initiating violence.
I'll stop there, since I'm sure you already disagree enough with everything I said. But I hope that at least helps clarify the "anti-anti-racist" position a little. It is not pro-racist at all. Instead it's saying "marxism will make this a lot worse, so let's not go that direction."
One thing more that I should say. In the above post, I argued against woke ideology primarily from the grounds of its similarities to Marxism and its outcomes. What I left out was the assertion that its foundational propositions simply aren't true. That's the primary basis by which any system of belief ought to stand or fall.
The oppressor/oppressed axis is not the most correct or best lens through which to view society, because in truth, everyone is both. We all at times sin against others and are sinned against ourselves. We all fail to love at least some of our neighbors as fervently and generously as we ought to. In a sense, we're all in this mess together, and although helping and defending the oppressed and downtrodden is a noble and very good thing, it doesn't follow that entire demographics of people ought to be labeled as "oppressors" and opposed (in the same way that entire demographics shouldn't be intentionally discriminated against on the basis of the demographic variable itself--either directly or indirectly). Sin is individual, and should be addressed on an individual basis, since we each bear individual accountability for our behavior. From the government's perspective, individuals who have discriminated against people on the basis of race or otherwise oppressed people ought to be individually tried and sentenced through the court system. If that's not happening, hire better DAs and write better laws. If that isn't happening, engage in political campaigning and activism (with the right message), or at least support those who do.
What makes an ideology wrong isn't first whether its outcomes are bad, but whether its propositions are false. (Note the notions of good and bad themselves need to also be subjected to the truth test, which is why pure utilitarianism is fundamentally ungrounded to reality.)
Having too much money is brain poison.
I remember having a conversation with someone around a decade ago about whether "social justice warrior" pointed at anything real. My contention was that every popular moral system has its prigs and its fanatics - social justice no less than Christianity, environmentalism, socialism, etc, etc, etc.
Every decade has its new leftest boogeyman for the right to complain about, same as always. Critical Race Theory, Political Correctness, Hippies, Civil Rights Crusaders, etc... Doesn't really matter, just so long as it is an "other" that can be ostracized as a group.
The left is lucky in this regard because they get to complain about the same two boogeymen all the time: white males and Israel.
Or to boil it down even more: the rich, particularly billionaires.
I remember how a particular AI ethics reasearcher got Yann Lecun to leave Twitter. That's perfect definition of wokeness for me.
Clad in shining armor, I’ve sworn to protect all that is holy and honorable. My vow drives me forward, blade at the ready. My task today clear: to beat a dead horse, and, if that fails to satisfy the call, to lay my blows upon a dead snake, a snake that is dead.
I flipped the Bozo Bit on Paul Graham a long time ago. But if I hadn't then, I would now. I simply do not care to know what yet another tech industry financier thinks about "wokeness". Or, indeed, whatever anyone involved with startup culture thinks they know about history, culture, or philosophy of any sort - it's always just a distillation of their class interest dressed up to look profound to people who tried hard to avoid classes in the arts and sciences.
Articles like this on either side are a waste of time to write and read. Commenting on them is even worse (and here I am too...)
Zero people are receiving value from any of this energy, because it is impossible to - these are intellectual empty calories. Nobody here will be changing their mind, and these comments won't bring anybody closer to changing their mind. Literally nothing of substance is being created, and nothing will change because of any of it.
It proves that you and I are foolish that we participate in such useless activities while our short lives slip away. I'm here hypocritically yelling into the wind like an idiot right now. All of this is a sad waste of human potential.
Imagine if the time spent writing this article and all these 1400+ comments went into something simple like picking up litter where we live. What a real appreciable difference that would make. I'm going to go do that to offset the time I spent writing this stupid comment.
Thanks for this.
Thank you for the reply.
> What does it mean now? ...
> An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
> In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
Oh, great! Yeah, I think we should focus on effectively furthering social justice. Can't wait for the rest of the article.
...
If you, like me, were waiting for PG to outline some methods for furthering social justice that are effective and not performative in the rest of this article, I have bad news for you. It seems that he has given no thought to it at all!
Paul Graham complaining about societal accountability sounds a lot like a tech investor blaming users when their startup crashes and burns. “The market was just too woke for my brilliant idea!” Maybe the next essay should be titled "What You Can’t Fund Without a Backup Plan." In the startup world, if things go tits up, it’s on you—the same way words and ideas have consequences in public discourse. Play the game, take the risks, and own the fallout big man.
> optimizing for proportional representation has to come at the expense of quality
That's like saying a baseball team should try to sign a catcher if that's the best available player right now, even if they already have plenty of catchers and desperately need a shortstop. You need balance on a baseball team, just like you get a better party with a good mix of people, just like you get a more interesting university community if you bias against a monoculture.
Is there a pejorative term for performative intellectualism?
I think the conditio sine qua non of whatever social movement PG is trying to describe here is that we have become, and will become more, a low-trust culture. Social circles are wider and shallower now than ever. If I can't take the time to get to know a person, I can't assume good faith when they use some questionable word. It benefits me to impute the worst motive, because (1) it is much safer to avoid a false harm than to admit a false good, and (2) it brings me social credit.
Instead of assuming that someone is well-meaning and requiring much evidence to refute that assumption, people are marked by small infractions, because the cognitive effort of the presumption of innocence cannot be applied on such a large scale and is not worth it to us. This is the mentality behind the "believe all women" principle: women are harmed more by letting a rapist free than by jailing an innocent man, and since we can't vet all the claims of sexual assault, better just lock them all up. A metaphor frequently given by proponents of that ideology is that men are like M&Ms. Would you eat an M&M from a bowl if you knew that a few were poisoned? If even 1 in 100,000 were poisoned, would you take the risk? No. Low trust. (I've never heard someone reply that women are not all benign either and yet people don't seem to apply the same logic to them.)
You see the extremes of this in the politicians representing US political parties. Trump can say anything and supporters never waiver, because they know he's "just joking around" or whatever. Meanwhile a Democrat candidate can say something small askance with what seems to me like innocent intentions, and their career is over.
This is also why the Democrats are so fractious internally, relative to the Republicans. Republicans default to trusting each other (not saying whether that's merited or not) while Democrats only make temporary uneasy alliances.
Some people tire of this low-trust culture (because they haven't been burned by trust before) and are pushing back on it.
In my opinion, the low-trust people are going to win eventually because the higher-trust people are more local and less internet-connected. Either society will collapse into many sub-societies, or else these sub-societies will dwindle until there's nothing left of them, and all that's left is The Culture.
> these sub-societies will dwindle until there's nothing left of them, and all that's left is The Culture
This would be a terrible result. Google 'urban monoculture' A pluralistic society is more resilient to catastrophes, and preserving all these small, dwindling cultures is as important if not more as preserving species that are endangered.
> This is also why the Democrats are so fractious internally, relative to the Republicans. Republicans default to trusting each other (not saying whether that's merited or not) while Democrats only make temporary uneasy alliances
The number of votes it took for Republicans to select a Speaker of the House and the effort that Speaker has had to subsequently undertake to keep that position says otherwise.
> The number of votes it took for Republicans to select a Speaker of the House and the effort that Speaker has had to subsequently undertake to keep that position says otherwise.
It's natural that the politicians selected by this group are going to be self-serving, unable to cooperate, etc. The fractiousness I'm describing is at the level of the voter, not the politician. See the 2024 presidential election for an example.
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
Following this logic, the Emancipation Proclamation was "problematic" because the "correct" thing to do is free slaves quietly via the underground railroad, as we wouldn't want to get slave owners in trouble.
This is fundamentally an argument against systemic change, as "getting people in trouble" is both core to the genesis and the enforcement of things like the Civil Rights act.
Attacking "wokeness" with this argument is deeply problematic, and extremely tone deaf in the wake of the Meta moderation leaks, wherein their internal documents highlight that the new moderation changes allow statements like "Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”
>Following this logic, the Emancipation Proclamation was "problematic" because the "correct" thing to do is free slaves quietly via the underground railroad, as we wouldn't want to get slave owners in trouble.
Present-day racism and slavery are in completely different neighborhoods of magnitude; to the extent that the comparison borders on false equivalency.
>...the new moderation changes allow statements like "Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit."
If a platform is attempting to operate within the ethos/spirit of free speech, you 'should' be allowed to make such statements on the platform. The root of the argument is the disagreement on whether and where one should be "allowed" to say those things.
Saying it's problematic is not a trump card (no pun intended). If you can demonstrate how allowing people to say offensive/harmful things (excluding established limits on free speech regarding safety) is inconsistent with free speech, then you're adding something to the discussion. Anything else is likely a disagreement on utility of free speech vs. civility; a place where folks can agree to disagree.
> If a platform is attempting to operate within the ethos/spirit of free speech, you 'should' be allowed to make such statements on the platform.
Ah, but you aren't allowed to say "Christian men are totally useless" or "Lesbians are so stupid", so it sounds like you should take up the ethos/spirit of free speech with Meta as well.
I don't follow that logic and that is the kind of absolutism many of us disagree with. It seems like an appeal to emotion to me. I'm not sure you can characterize the EP as shallow; aggressive yes, if one considers bold to be synonymous with aggressive in this context.
I don't find any issue with people making statements like that. I also don't need to agree with it to think that you should be allowed to say it. Do you find that to be problematic?
I'm reminded of a lyric from "Mississippi Goddamn."
> Don't tell me, I tell you
> Me and my people just about due
> I've been there so I know
> They keep on saying "Go slow"
Since YC startups (culture) is the exact opposite of what PG is saying, this is just a political stance in words, nothing more.
People have been writing the same article since 2016. It’s unbearable
Ohhhh, he’s genuinely stupid. Got it.
Is this a subject Paul has expressed an interest in before, or is this another instance of tech founders cozying up to the incoming president before he's installed? There seems to be a lot of that going around in Silicon Valley lately, is something threatening their billions of dollars if they don't toe the line?
He’s been interested in how taboos influence our thought and speech for a long time: https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html .
Yet this article is the only mention of the term "woke" on his site. What a strange coincidence that it happens now even though he's been interested in the topic since at least 2004.
He's been pretty consistent about this.
I read this a few days ago. I can recall at least three groups of people mentioned: academics; DEI administrators; college students. Did he talk to any of these people? Share his thoughts, ask what they think?
This essay reminds me of when someone comes to me and says they have the perfect idea for an app and wants me to build it, and I ask them if they've done a simple, manual version of whatever the core business idea is, to validate it (similar to how PG advises founders to do things themselves in the early days), and they say no and then continue sharing the vision they've worked out in their head of why people will love it and it will be successful.
Paul would much rather make a punching bag out of straw than actually grapple with the massive inequality that he has personally helped cause. Just remember guys, the real problem our society faces is that someone was once mean to paulg on Twitter.
Hmm, this is a completely generic and unreflective rant about ‘wokeness’ that could have been cobbled together from YouTube comments and Jeremy Clarkson columns. What is PG thinking?
The most striking thing about it is that it makes absolutely no attempt to consider how there might be a link between the undeniable social progress that’s been made on race and gender over the past decades and the aspects of ‘wokeness’ that PG finds distasteful. He simply assumes that you can automatically get all of the progress without any of the stuff he doesn’t like.
In "The Age of the Essay"[0], Paul writes:
"An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
"Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
"If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them."
So there's your answer. PG is thinking "This is something I don't know; I should write an essay to figure out an answer."
It also makes sense to me that when he writes an essay connected to an area he knows well (like startups), the result is maybe full of unique perspectives and is broadly insightful/useful. Whereas an essay on wokeness isn't likely to bring much to the table to anyone who has been paying attention to diversity for several years.
Maybe it's still useful to engineers who've been living under a rock and haven't paid any attention at all; I don't know.
That's a good reason to write an essay. I think the present case illustrates that it's not a sufficient reason to publish it.
> What is PG thinking?
My assumption would be that he's doing a performative hard right turn like pretty much every other tech billionaire this week in order to make nice with the incoming lunatic administration.
he made a hard right turn a decade or more ago. Its not just now.
source: his other blog posts.
It's perceived as performative by the dominant culture because it's purpose is to bring certain injustices to light; injustices that are sometimes nuanced, but usually just obscured by history and bias.
That's about as long an essay at PG has ever written; red flag.
Imagine individuals and their experiences that "wokeness" is meant to help and notice none of that is recognized in the essay.
“An aggressively performative focus on social justice.”
Paul is giving the strawman definition (or, ironically, the PC definition) of “woke”. It’s a code word that can be anything the user doesn’t like, and isn’t anything they do like. It’s used as a weapon along with its alias, DEI.
But people aren’t using it with that “performative” definition in practice. People are using it to label social justice topics that they don’t agree with. So it’s disingenuous to try and define it in a way that is much more narrow than its practical usage.
Even Paul himself uses the word in a way that sure seems inconsistent with his definition:
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
Bud Light sent Dylan Mulvaney promotional cans of beer to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of her web series about her transition. Mulvaney had been a target of right-wing activists for some time, and those activists drove the boycott. This was just a particularly effective example of a long line of right-wing campaigns against companies that associate with trans celebrities. How does "woke" fit into this except from the perspective that "woke" just means being on one side of the culture war?
why is a beer a platform for pushing some individual's personal choices?
why should it be used to push any sort of political messaging?
why shouldn't bud light owners reject a brand that pushes those political messages?
The premise here is that the existence of trans people is inherently political, but in any case, Graham didn't define "woke" as "political", he defined it as "an aggressively performative focus on social justice". How does that describe sending beer cans to a social media influencer?
you keep moving the goal posts. im asking why its difficult to accept a poor marketing messaging that triggers the consumer base leads to bad sales as demonstrated by Bud Light's decision to feature a transvestite on their beer cans, promotional material.
If anything, djur is attempting to keep the discussion on topic. The question is whether Paul Graham is correct to claim that Bud Light did indeed "venture too far into wokeness". Whether or not boycotts are legitimate in capitalism is a separate matter.
P.S. Seeing that you are still posting in this thread, I'm keen to find out whether you can support your asssertions as per my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42708660
Right. All of the people trying to say "yes, of course supporting trans people are woke" are proving my point: the rational, classical-liberal case Graham claims to be making against "wokeness" is such a thin layer over culture war politics that even Graham can't keep it from leaking. I don't know if Graham himself has anything against trans people -- he might be one of the people under the misapprehension that Bud Light was slapping Mulvaney on all their cans and that the boycott was an organic movement of turned-off consumers. But the people he's allying with certainly do.
[flagged]
I always thought the origin had something to do with Zack de la Rocha screaming "wake up" into my ears over and over in the 90s
> You know they went after King when he spoke out on Vietnam
> He turned the power to the have-nots
> And then came the shot
My main criticism is that wokeness when applied rationally could be a social lubricant. Ban a few words and expressions at work, and suddenly your hiring pool is way bigger. People shouldn't be using words like that at work anyway.
The problem is that we didn't arrive at the new norm yet. Is banning compliments overreacting? Or is asking a coworker when she would wear skirt again, complimenting her beautiful knees, completely bonkers? Or maybe skirts are too distracting and we should ban them? Do we draw a line on a n-word or on a latinx?
We had rules of politeness before, but they didn't work out. And so we are stumbling looking for rules that would work best for tolerating each other, and of course social studies and philosophy majors would suggest most of the rules – this phenomena is right up their alley. Most of everyone else is just testing those rules out and voting about the result (latinx isn't helping anyone, banning skirts scares women from seeking employment with you, etc.).
But the thing is – we need this rules. We need people who would never share a drink in a pub to work together without distracting each other too much. So we have to endure testing for a bit longer, until the pool of stupid rules is cleaned and smart rules would be renamed from "woke" to "polite"
At no point in this long piece does the author seem to consider that people may be "woke" because they sincerely believe that they need to raise their and other people's awareness of prejudice or ways in which society puts people down. Instead it immediately assumes it's a liberal arts movement from those lefty universities.
Of course any cause or point can and likely will be distorted, and some will be performative. There are also, e.g. performative people who like to moan about lefties in universities, but this kind of low effort behaviour doesn't in itself undermine reasonable criticism about e.g. universities sometimes being too intolerant of free speech.
My point is this is fairly lazy. It starts assuming woke, which I note the author agrees is often used perjoratively (and therefore is surely used in a specific loaded way, in the same way if I call someone a piece of shit I'm not generally using it to praise the human body's ability to excrete waste effectively), is some performative nonsense and not wondering or being curious whether there's something useful or at least sincere underneath that.
This would all be fine if there was a bit more thoughtful distinction and critical appraisal of the author's work, and he wasn't treated with such uncritical reverence.
If anything, this is a useful looking glass into the minds of people who love to complain about language policing and think "censorship" is our biggest social problem.
If you're very rich, not left leaning, and have a big platform, I imagine it's very easy for censorship/woke mobs to seem like the biggest problem. Most of your needs/wants (in terms of food, shelter, safety) are met, you can mostly do what you want, but people online call you names and some of your posts might get taken down. It's one of the only problems you can feel, and it's obviously because the culture is wrong, because you feel it's empirically established that you are smart and good.
It's a little like people whose exclusive concern in the realm of sexual assault is false accusations; if you can't imagine being a victim or a perpetrator, false accusation is the only part you think can affect you, so naturally your priority is minimizing that risk. Skews your perspective a bit.
Censorship is and always has been a central threat to a free, pluralistic and democratic society.
It is always a key tool of authoritarian governments. And always starts with people thinking certain ideas are too dangerous to express.
I love that complaining about language policing is language policing
It isn’t, though.
In the same way that the police upholding the law is vigilantism?
Well, with the recent news that Facebook censored vaccine side effects by order of the government, I think we shouldn't underestimate censorship.
FB was not ordered to do this. In their words:
it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement... we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today
- Mark Zuckerberg, 26 August 2024
"News"
I'm not saying this didn't happen but I wouldn't trust Mark Zuckerberg if he said the sky was blue. He is trying to curry favor with the new administration and he is not above lying or embellishing what really happened.
Ok, so they're making that up according to you? Wouldn't they be investigated and if it turns out to be BS they would get an enormous fine? The Biden administration can easily sue them, why wouldn't they do that? Maybe because they know it's true, and they don't want to draw more attention to it, and they don't want an investigation?
1. The Biden admin is already suing them for a different reason.
2. The Biden admin won't be there to sue them in 7 days.
3. I'm not saying this didn't happen, I'm saying Zuckerberg is a habitual liar and I wouldn't believe him if he said his name was Mark.
3: Fair enough, but you also have to consider what is wise for him to say and not. You can't just make any shit up and get away with it. He might say certain things and certain other things not to aid his agenda, but I don't think he just makes this stuff up.
> You can't just make any shit up and get away with it.
Trump and Elon Musk literally just make any shit up and get away with it.
And there are clearly side effects [1], and it was already clear before this news that this was being censored. We just have confirmation from the CEO of Facebook now.
[1]: https://dailysceptic.org/2024/12/11/revealed-the-full-hidden...
Fantastic article, I loved it PG! So many prigs on here have criticized you though for violating their religion. You own one of the largest outlets for prigs around! How can you solve it?
Interesting to compare this narrative to "A history of 'wokeness'". (Specifically, it's interesting that the "origins" seem to have very little to do with the history.)
https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-hist...
Came to share the same link, much better piece than PG's
It’s interesting to me that a certain type of person is so susceptible to buying into this fable of wokeness, especially when it pertains to universities. Almost like there is a woke mind virus, but it’s not infecting the people they think it is.
I attended university in the mid 2010s, so close to peak “wokeness”, and I never witnessed or heard of anything like what pg is describing. In my experience it was totally fine to hold just about any political/ethical view as long as you were a decent human being to your fellow classmates. There certainly was no political correctness police forcing us to assimilate.
The popular perception, especially in certain circles, is that there's been a rash of "cancellations" and extensive banning of, especially, outside speakers on college campuses, and also to some extent professors, accompanied by large and successful movements there to accomplish those outcomes.
In fact, there are so comically few cases of any of that that the couple real-ish ones are always cited by those advancing that position, plus a handful that really, really aren't that sort of thing at all (always look up the full story, 100% of the time they omit context that totally reframes what was happening, this phenomenon is more reliable than most things in life).
Real data exist on things like speakers' appearances at schools being cancelled, and it's most fair to say that the trend there is it's gone from "damn near never happens" to "still damn near never happens". And it's not because controversial right-wing sorts, which we may presume would be the most likely to be banned, aren't even trying to speak on campuses when e.g. invited by friendly organizations—they are, and frequently do.
The entire phenomenon is extremely close to being imaginary. That's why you, actually being there and not just going by social media and pop-political-book and talk radio and podcast "vibes", didn't see it.
On YouTube, watch the Evergreen State College 3-part documentary by Bret Weinstein. This is much more common than you think, through your anecdote, unfortunately. Granted, this happened in 2017, so a few years after your time in college, but I would argue "peak wokeness" sits between 2016 to today, in large part due to Trump's first election win.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH2WeWgcSMk
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0W9QbkX8Cs
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vyBLCqyUes
This should make anyone's skin crawl with the way this college's faculty and staff were treated, and the childish behavior of the students to allow this to happen. This gives a reason why "college kids" are no longer considered adults.
[flagged]
> "genital mutilation of children (gender affirming surgery)"
In the past 4 years in the USA there have been:
- roughly 14.4 million children born, half of them are boys (7.2 million) and 57% of those circumcised. 4.1 million non-consenting genital mutilation surgeries on people who didn't ask for them, mostly infants.
- 4160 breast removal surgeries in minors under 17.5 years old on people who did ask for them, mostly teens.
- 660 phalloplasties in the same group.
We should definitely wonder why Republicans are fine with four million non-consensual genital mutilation surgeries every year mostly on infants, but against a thousand times smaller number of surgeries mostly teens willingly asking for them. We should wonder this in the context of Republicans pushing back against legislation raising the minimum marriage age:
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/louisiana-... - "If they’re both 16 or 15 and having a baby why wouldn’t we want them to get married?" - said representative Nancy Landry, a Republican from Lafayette
- "The West Virginia bill is an outright ban on all marriages under 18. When the House advanced it to the Senate with a resounding 84 votes in support, just over 12 Republicans voted against it" ; ""The only thing it's going to do is cause harm and trouble in young people's lives," Harrison County Delegate Keith Marple, a Republican and the lone person to speak against the state bill" - https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-make-case-child-marriag...
i.e. Republicans being fine with 15 year olds "making their own choices" when it comes to marriage.
> "stating pronouns as a performative act" ; "Continue to deny that this worldview exists, and you will continue losing elections."
This is the United States where you stand up every day in school and performatively pledge allegiance to a flag, yes? Where you stop strangers in the street to "thank them for their service"? How are you so annoyed about someone putting "he/him" next to their name (but not about them putting captain/corporal/major/doctor/reverend next to their name), and as a response you vote for a man who admits sexual assault, has been convicted of federal crimes, lies about his experience, knowledge and credentials, spent $141,000,000 of your money playing golf - mostly at his own golf clubs, used the presidency to (illegally!) promote Goya products, nepotistically sent his own children as official US representatives to meetings? A president who performatively attends church for photo shoots but doesn't regularly attend church for prayer?
It's this kind of behaviour which gives rise to the jokes "the Right will eat a shit sandwich if it means the left will catch a whiff of their breath" and which makes a mockery of the claims that it's all the left's fault; the Right is fixated on trivial bullshit, arguing for the right to be able to lie and be jerks without being fact checked or facing any consequences, without a sense of proportion of different events, obsessed with being angry about the left's feelings and calling them snowflakes, while choosing who to vote for because a film character gets black skin instead of white skin.
It's political correctness gone mad!
> I'm fairly confident that it would be possible to create new social media apps that were less driven by outrage,
How? App development needs money, which is today acquired through ads, which need eyeballs, and therefore engagement, which is easiest to get by outrage.
> and an app of this type would have a good chance of stealing users from existing ones, because the smartest people would tend to migrate to it.
Why would most normal people follow the smart people?
Just reading that he can apply the word to himself, you can't take the opposite stance of being morally superior by mocking someone for taking a moral stance.
The real "mind virus" is the fragility of mind required for people to be so damn bothered that people unlike themselves exist. This essay is as much an example of that fragility as those who cannot find any merit in critiques of "wokeness's" loudest proponents. A world where those on the end of the political spectrum better understand each other is something worth working towards. This essay doesn't get us closer to that world, nor does lording one's perceived moral superiority over others. Maybe it's time to reset.
A good portion of the comments here are people talking past each other, with seemingly no interest in mutual understanding. We've gotten so very lazy about disagreement. Its harder and more useful form involves conceding that your counterparty probably has a point, even if very small. And if you can't see it, you might not be trying.
Wokeness simply means “awake to recognize injustices”. It is a statement of empathy, of acknowledging crimes of bigotry against the powerless, of refusing to look away and ignore when hatreds are visited upon others simply because they are not a part of some random overprivileged in-group.
As in, to not intentionally sleep through, and be ignorant of, the application of evil against others.
The fact that it has become a pejorative, only highlights how inhuman and immoral and _evil_ those people who use it as a pejorative are.
Paul clearly got the memo that he wasn’t going to be invited to eat at the big boy table at Mar-A-Lago unless he turned in his homework assignment.
I thought it was going to be like the origins of corn syrup where we actually learn some history but no it's just this guy's ramblings.
And I hate the term "Politcal Correctness", what does it mean? I think it means the opposite, your politics we're previously correct and now they aren't, it's an excellent rebranding. They can always joke that we can't say things anymore but actually, you really couldn't say things or act in certain ways or even exist or you would suffer violence.
The essay was posted about 60 minutes ago but must have been removed as that post is no longer discoverable through yc search. Weird.
(This comment was originally posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683660 but we've merged that thread hither)
It got flagged to death. 50+ upvotes, 6 comments, but flag killed.
I mean, I kind of understand: The discussion is going to turn into the kind of thing that HN tries to avoid. And yet, "moralities" driving things we can't talk about is the point of the essay, so it's really ironic to have it flag killed here.
Off topic: We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more. That means that flag killing is uncorrectable - if users decide that it's inappropriate, their only recourse is to email dang. That seems to me to be a step backward - let the user base correct the overreach of others in the user base.
> We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more.
That hasn't changed. Neither has any of the other logic around voting, flagging, or vouching.
Vouching unkills [dead] posts. The current thread was dead, for example, and vouches rescued it. But a post can be [flagged] without being [dead]. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918548 for a past explanation.
It should be possible for vouch-capable users to un-vouch in order to demote obvious rage-bait like this article. I'm sorry, but no constructive or intellectually curious discussion is possible here.
Some is happening in this thread, so it's possible.
Your second paragraph is very well said. Made me chuckle but also lament.
I am in particular happy that we at least try to banish s-word from tech vocabulary. I never thought it bothered me, but someone out there cares for me before me even knowing, and I am grateful.
Is it policing speech? Yes, kind of. Can it be considered under PC umbrella? I guess so.
Priggish? Hell no. This is not priggish, this is just respect for human beings.
It's rather ironic that this is the exact priggishness he's talking about.
There’s a globally shared movement opposing anything the left considers progress—for minorities, the environment, a shift away from fossil fuels, animal rights, fairness, and other ethical causes. This opposition dismissively labels such efforts as “wokeness.” From the US to Germany, from Orbán to Erdoğan, you see this trend everywhere.
It’s largely driven by men who feel their way of life is under threat. They want to continue as they always have: eating giant tomahawk steaks, driving oversized SUVs, denying climate change, and being offended by the existence of gay people. These are the same individuals who empower fascists—whether in the US, Germany, Argentina, or Italy.
The world seems to have forgotten the lessons and the misery of the Second World War.
In other words, it is impossible for there to be excesses or incorrect opinions on the left.
My friend, I am a leftist. I guarantee you no one hates leftists more than leftists.
We fight each other to death over everything.
"Progress for the tick is not progress for the dog."
> These are the same individuals who empower fascists—whether in the US, Germany, Argentina, or Italy
Correct, madame.
Imagine that, there are also men who care about environment, who are not offended by seeing homosexual human beings, and who don’t want to have fascism.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now? I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
> An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
This sounds quite wrong to me. The people who use "woke" pejoratively don't limit their use to aggressively performative focus on social justice. They actively oppose the specific stances on social justice themselves, regardless of how aggressive or performative they think the advocates are.
If pg isn’t writing about startups, we’re all better off not reading it.
There’s nothing here but fuel for the comments section.
>and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
Type the word "cisgender" on twitter and say that again, Paul.
https://x.com/search?q=Cisgender&src=typed_query&f=live
There are many typing that word?
Try posting it yourself. See what happens.
I deleted my account long ago. What happens if you type that?
It gets immediately marked as hate speech. Due to personal whims of the company's owner, rather than some widely held belief that it is hate speech
I extra made an account and nothing extraordinary happened. How does this mark look? Is it a warning-message or symbol?
The message gets hidden and a warning placed on it saying:
"Visibility limited: this Post may violate X's rules against hateful conduct"
You then have to click "View" where you're taken to another view where the message is shown, but with the warning still present. You can't share, like, or reply to the message
Not sure if the account also receives a suspension or shadow banning.
It's policy from Elon himself: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841
You can see it play out in replies to my tweet here, where someone didn't believe it: https://twitter.com/WickyNilliams/status/1855754162102816937
I continue to be fascinated by "coded slurs" -the way people use labels like this to attack views they oppose. It feels like a shorthand, but also a way to attack the voice, not the message.
So "thats just PC|woke|SJW nonsense" is used, over time, to avoid having to address the point.
TBF it's also true "he's a fascist" is probably shorthand.
Can we all agree that this is an exemplar of the sort of priggishness that defines "wokeness"?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268
Great idea; shame about the name.
Here's the problem with using words like "bro" (however jokingly) [...]
This guy thesauruses!
He is attacking a straw man, by defining "woke" in a far narrower sense than it is actually used. Any objection to any form of prejudice, or any indication that the speaker is aware that members of some groups are better off than others, will be labelled "woke" by many commenters. It's to the point where some bigots say "woke" in the exact same places that their grandparents would say "n***-lover".
But instead Graham focuses on people who are overly concerned with specific language because those people are easier to criticize.
No that’s the most common usage now. It’s almost exclusively used pejoratively. Very few people use it in a positive sense anymore.
It’s hard to define “woke” as anything other than “something someone politically to the left of me does that I don’t like” as that’s how broadly it’s used.
It’s utterly meaningless.
What are the chances that he'll double down and also financially profit on this vector instead of accepting critique for the gaping holes in his reasoning? I'm taking bets, any takers?
I’m sure elites love that we’re spending more time arguing about tokenism in mediocre corporate franchise media and other nonsense than we are talking about economic and material concerns
This is a good write up that is sure to trigger a lot of people. The main two things I see coming out of this aggressive militant moralism is the death of public and to some degree private dialog. This is especially apparent in left-wing medias who seem to have completely cleaned up their writings to the point that now in order to get informed about what's actually going on you literally need a separate news source. Interesting discussions have also died out because there is one right way that everyone must adhere to, one correct language, one correct behavior. They died out because any voiced opinion that is slightly off is going to get canceled by the moralists so we're left with silence and private echo chambers. At this point its a religion where the tenets are more important than actual reality. As a fellow atheist I can't wait for it to dissipate.
I presume the essay went through many revisions earlier, but right now, talking about embers bursting into flame and burning hotter than ever feels a bit - awkward?
Sorry, Dang, that you have to deal with this. I definitely don't envy you. If this were written by anyone else I'm not sure it would make it to the front page.
That being said, if we're here, we're here. Paul Graham is defining wokeness as a form of performative moral superiority, so let's use that definition here. I think we can all agree that performance moral superiority is at the very least annoying, so wokeness sounds pretty bad and we should try to avoid it. So this leaves me very curious as to examples. Graham unhelpfully gives very few specific examples, but one he does give is the Bud Light controversy. This one is particularly interesting to me because I'm not sure that Bud Light ever did anything particularly priggish. As I understand it, all they did was sponsor a social media influencer who happened to be transgender and suddenly half of the country lost their minds? Mulvanney's transgender identity had nothing to do with her Bud Light advertisement. I cannot see any priggishness here. No one made any statements about how anyone else should speak or act, no one was removed from any position of power. But the right was outraged by this and Graham refers to it as wokeness despite it not matching his definition. I'll put the subtext away and just say what I'm thinking. I think Graham's wokeness is real and legitimately annoying. But I don't believe it's anywhere near the scale of problem he's claiming it is and most importantly I think he's using it as a sort of effigy for underlying leftist ideas of inclusion and diversity. Graham makes wokeness out to be just about moral pricks but not the underlying ideas, but then classifies the protests after George Floyd's death as wokeness. Similarly to the Bud Light example, I see no performance there. I think it's hard to argue that protests and riots are purely performative and not real actions designed to make change. So to me, as a reader, it feels like Graham is masking his distaste for liberal ideology behind an obviously agreeable distaste of prigs. I don't necessarily think he's even doing this consciously and I think he's projecting the frustration from threat he sees to his power by liberal ideology towards this particular target. I know the feeling. This post has been long enough but I want to at least mention that this is how I feel about a lot of propaganda (from every side, mind you). People use real problems as stand-ins for things they can't talk about and get unreasonably upset at what's on the surface, not a big problem. It's important to read critically and pay attention to your own feelings and the logic of the arguments you're reading, because at least for me, it's very easy to be manipulated into believing something that's nonsensical or inconsistent with your values.
[flagged]
Would this essay be on the HN frontpage if it was written by anyone else?
There was an essay by Ken Shirriff on the front page earlier, discussing political stuff but leaning in the opposite direction. It, at time of writing has 271pts vs this with 218pts.
No. And man, I feel like the quality of PG's essays have declined. Even if I agreed with a few points, it was so rambling, and just made so many leaps. The sheer length of it is a pretty good signal he didn't really work that hard on this.
No. Stuff like this benefits those behind HN and many who frequent this site. The political-neutral face HN puts on is a farce.
I'd like to think "no", but we've debated a lot of dumb shit written by famous-in-some-circles people over the years.
I'd also push back on HN ever having been politically neutral. I think 20 years ago it was "politically naive" or "politically ignorant", but that's not the same thing.
Did pg really think through the timing of this essay?
Whether his intention or not, releasing this right now feels like it's part of a concerted effort by the SV ultra-rich to convince their fans that Trump Is Good Actually.
> concerted effort by the SV ultra-rich to convince their fans that Trump Is Good Actually
If that was his intention, wouldn't he make an article calling for the end of wokeness and everything related to it? Instead of saying something that can be summed up as "There are bad parts of wokeness, and there are some good parts"
your summary sounds an awful lot like a "good people on both sides" variation...
That's sure a lot better variation than "those Other people are just Bad" that seems to be current on both the left and the right currently.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This is a rare case where the author and their position makes the content more important than the content itself.
It was already flagged like 8h ago
It would but not for long . politics stuff tends to get flagged fast .
Not if they're from PG apparently
No.
Sometimes it's good to know where people stand when they're shooting themselves in the foot.
...especially because this class of society is often standing on the backs of others!
We just had a day-long front page about why we need to feel shameful about using the term "Cargo Cult" because some tribe that positively no one is thinking about when they use the phrase believed a God would deliver cargo if they setup fake radio towers and used bamboo headsets. Some sort of hand wavy "why I am better than all of these fools who don't understand the real details" bit of noise. Colonialism or something. White guilt.
When I saw this PG article I wondered if that article inspired it. It is the perfect example of someone walking into something where zero people have ill intentions, and everyone understands exactly what that very useful term means, and telling us all we should stop using it because of their moral eye opening. Aren't we all better people now?
"Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one."
Thank you rich white man for letting us know racism isn't that big a problem. We did it!
Thank you for saying this.
Here are some takes on woke from the left:
The Origins of Contemporary Woke Culture ft Christian Parenti
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxdBOxl_eik
which is an excerpt from the full This is Revolution podcast episode:
The Cargo Cult of Woke ft. Christian Parenti
https://www.youtube.com/live/6TJbv45DJyk
Chris Hedges interviewed Parenti also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTpeQ4V-YeY
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/how-wokeness-kills-class-...
Those who complain about Wokeness most often can't see their own thorn in their eye. Peter Beinart wrote about this years ago:
> The theme of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was “uncancel America.” But when news broke that one of the speakers, a hip hop artist named Young Pharoah, had called Judaism “a complete lie,” CPAC cancelled him. Which led Young Pharoah to denounce CPAC for practicing “cancel culture,” which just goes to show: Denouncing “cancel culture” is a lot easier than defining what it actually is.
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/want-to-fight-cancel-cul...
In my country an artist made songs titled "Fuck children" and "Women are whores". He was cancelled (and then cried about it). Cause it's so unfair to not book artists who jokes about raping children? Who gets to cancel who? In the real world, pro-Israel "wokeists" have gotten way more people in trouble, both on and off campuses, by calling people "anti-Semites" than left-wing "wokeists" have for complaining about usage of wrong words for "non-white" people.
Like certain washed up comedians, these people are all hypocrites. They reserve the right to offend others, but when others offend them they cry.
So the society should pay attention and stamp out whatever new fad the students got up to? Never mind the concerted well-financed efforts to smear and destroy truth, reason, democracy, pretty much any values there are?
At the dawn of Project 2025 let us think how to stop the woke the next time?
It's a political distraction to keep the working class fighting themselves while the wealth class continues to pilfer.
> In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
No, in almost every usage I've seen it's people objecting to the actual social justice. There is a massive wave of reaction breaking right now. To posit that it's just (or mostly) about some annoying attitudes is absurd. This kind of strength of feeling you can only get from people feeling actually threatened – which is pretty pathetic when you pick out what the actual policies and demands of the accused "woke" are – very mild progressiveness. A desire to go a little way to redress the balance. It's a lot less than I'd favour!
Summary: Rich white guy complains that it's too much effort to figure out what we're supposed to call 'coloured people' these days. It reads like the lament of a sore winner who has been forced to think of other's feelings against his will.
And all of this is couched in a pseudo-histororical style that perhaps the author hopes will shield it from being read as an 'emotional' argument.
And you know what's the worst thing? We live in a conservative world. They set the rules of the game, the draw the chalk outlines of the playing field, they own the ball the stadium and the referees.
And now they tell us we have to be silent when they rough us up too?
Yeah I guess wokeness and cancel culture are what you complain about now when your life is so free from challenges that you have nothing else to complain about.
If anyone complains about "woke" or "DEI" it is safe to assume they're a racist, just as with paulg.
See, the thing is, @paulg does understand that there is a difference between "prigness" as he put it and the original term of "woke" which in no way means political correctness or some culture war term. Matter of fact, the only people I see use it are racists, as a dogwhistle. outside of rare "liberal arts" academics on twitter, you don't see anyone use the term "woke" to mean politically correct or anti-racism. Woke was a term black people used to to mean raising awareness to a racially complicated past, as in being "awoke", and even then it is academics not every day people that used the term.
It has been hijacked as a dogwhistle, with the purpose of propagating racist agenda.
Same with "DEI", you all know why tech CEO's are rolling it back right? they all were summoned by trump who instructed them to roll it back. and he did that because he and his backers have a racist agenda. of course "DEI" is performative b.s. to the most part, but it did help raise awareness to racial issues in the work place. It forced saying the quite part aloud. Racists also hijacked the term to essentially mean the "n-word". I recall with the crowdstrike outage, racists were using it very obviously to attack minorities as the cause (although that is a view divorced from reality in that case).
Whether it comes to "return to office" or now this, I keep meaning to afford @paulg the benefit of doubt. Perhaps he is just that disconnected from the non-rich world? but he and his ilk are too smart, and I otherwise respect them and their acheivements too much for them to be so ignorant.
This is @paulg jumping on the bandwagon and kissing trump's ring. Perhaps he is not a racist at heart, but he certainly is a racist by action, and action is all that matters.
Dear tech CEO's: May your cowardice never be forgotten and may you be crushed along with trump and share in his downfall as you have decided to lie in his bed. You lie with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
Understand that the only scenario where the world forgets your cowardice is if trump/gop succeed in installing a dictator that will rule America for decades.
HN: I'm disappointed in all of you on staying silent or afraid to speak up to these people. Who are we without principles? These CEOs and founders are nothing without your support. They need you, not the other way around.
Some attributes I don't like in people:
- Nit picking/pedantic thinking.
- Snitching.
- Keeping score/counting favors.
- Blaming.
- Attacking ad-hominem.
- Latching onto words instead of principles.
As a general principle, if you are hurt by _words_ then the problem is you and not the other person.
Those prigs exist but they're just emotionally immature and adopt a victim-cause as a means to express their frustration. If somebody is looking for a fight, if you give him a gun he's going to use it.
If you want to kill it forever, you should probably teach emotional intelligence in high school.
FWIW, my llama suggests that the original usage of the term `political correctness` was somewhat inverted:
> The term "political correctness" was first used in a political sense by Maoist factions within the American New Left movement during the 1970s. It was employed to criticize liberal critics who were perceived as compromising revolutionary principles for the sake of mainstream acceptance.
So the original sense was a too-centrist/too-mild/too-pragmatic sort of INcorrectness. I found that interesting.
Is wokeness / anti-wokeness the new heresy ? Cool beans. I'm not really interested either way.
[flagged]
This kind of "upspeaking" will probably get more accepted and popular now. Dark times ahead.
yeah, I have underestimated the lust for authoritarianism in silicon valley tbh
You all understand that this is to appease MAGA/trump right?
So what? well, are you not terrified? if they preemptively are going to such lengths to appease the racist MAGA crowd, are you not afraid of what they will do with all the data they collect and with the amount of dependency we have on tech?
Please be afraid. IDK, maybe watch star wars or something, the piece about how fear leads to anger, then hatred then violence should make you afraid. Have you ever seen CEOs an tech leaders line up to brown-nose a president before? what happens when he asks them to do even worse?
I don't find that to be true and I find your own rationale to be its own sort of performative moralism. Many normal people feel this way and it isn't to appease MAGA or Trump or whatever, including myself and many people I know who have been and/or are lifelong leftists. It is not impossible or even unlikely that people in higher positions developed these feelings on their own accord. I'm not saying your statement is always untrue, but it denies the people you're writing about much agency.
I think that what's happening is that people on all levels are now more comfortable in saying what they actually think or believe rather than saying things to avoid busting arbitrary social rules.
this has nothing to do with leftism or rightism. MAGA is not right-wing,they're fascist and authoritarian.
paulg has a reliable pattern of history, where he echoes the current trends in the tech company leadership circle. him, altman, musk, bezos,etc.. they run in the same circles. I am not even disagreeing with his sentiment of being against performative morality or equality, people on all sides of politics have been saying that for decades! the framing of anti-racist and anti-fascist people as "woke" and hijacking that conversation as a culture war item where any attempt to criticize racist and fascist systems and sentiment is classified as "woke" (they tried the term "SJW" a few years prior to "woke") is what is happening here, and it is very obvious.
You cannot plead ignorance on this!
This isn't about arbitrary social rules or saying "colored people" vs "people of color" or b.s. like that. that sort of mis-framing is mis-direction, straw-man reasoning. Someone tells you "hey, pay minorities a fair wage" and responding with "I can't call them _____, that's woke and political correctness", how sickening it is when the tech world shows its hypocrisy. Better to have performative morality many times over than willfully ignorant tolerance of hatred and prejudice. Use the terms "DEI" and "woke" in any context other than their original intended context and you're either a damn racist or an enabler.
I hope these people read this, I for one would be very vocal for calling them out and shaming them after they've drunk from the poisoned chalice of trump.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now.
Graham is really skipping over some pretty significant whys and wherefores on how a term that dates back to, at least, 1923 becomes a pejorative starting around the '80s. Perhaps it is worth considering in what publications and media it became a pejorative, and who would benefit from others thinking it should be one.
While some folks who lived through the Sixties went into academia, others went on to own media empires. Those groups didn't have particularly aligned goals.
is this just me or this post also seems to be indicating some form of "moral superiority" and bias in the author's thinking?
To me it seems like Musk's twitter takoever has done more than just "neutralize" the wokeness of twitter. It has amplified factless-ness and fake claims beyond proportion.
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2024/how-elon-musk-twi...
In general an essay writer believes his opinion is the correct one. Otherwise he wouldn’t write the essay.
> Should students and employees have to participate in woke indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No, because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way about their religion.
But a group prayer led by a school coach is, of course, totally fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Bremerton_School_Di...
Pretty sure pg would say they’re the same thing. I don’t remember him carrying water for religion.
I'm sure we are going to see his treatise on the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court any day now, right?
Were the students forced to participate though, or was it voluntary?
You don't think high schoolers would succumb to authority and peer pressure even if they didn't really want to participate?
In the US, both the Left and the Right have been taken over by their more fringe elements. For now, the Right has won.
Left strategy has been terrible for years. That's one of the consequences of the Woke movement. Far too much political capital was expended on niche issues. Gays are 3% of the US population. Trans are 0.3% of the US population. Can't win an election catering to those groups. Too few votes. (See Sex in America, the Definitive Study,[1] which selected their survey group randomly across the whole US and followed up with mailed, in person, and paid interviews, until they got >90% participation. Most other surveys have some degree of self-selection of the participants.)
Occupy Wall Street never came up with a political agenda. Black Lives Matter had a huge agenda, and one of the groups claiming to be in charge had a document over a hundred pages full of demands. Nobody was pushing hard on worker protections or labor law enforcement - not cool enough, but affects a big fraction of the population. Nobody was pushing to break up monopolies that raised prices, even in apartment rentals and health care where collusion has been proven.
This lack of focus lost elections.
The Right agenda is basically tax cuts for the rich, plus God, Family, and Guns. That's enough to form a majority.
So here we are.
[1] https://archive.org/details/sexinamericadefi00mich/mode/2up
> Nobody was pushing hard on worker protections or labor law enforcement - not cool enough, but affects a big fraction of the population.
I don't think this statement is fair. There has been unionization effort across the country throughout the years.
The difference is that corporate media is often very comfortable boosting ideas such as racial justice, but not class consciousness.
Left strategy appears to be terrible is imo because neither party is left wing. There is simply no place in the current political landscape for a labor party/wing to address the issue for the big fraction of the population you mentioned. The republicans pretends to address it, the (majority) democrats dance around it.
> I don't think this statement is fair. There has been unionization effort across the country throughout the years.
Not very successfully. Only 6.9% of private-sector US workers have a union. That peaked at 35% in 1954.
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/union-membership-data/#full-...
It seems to me that there's no place for it precisely because of what PG calls "woke". Class consciousness doesn't work if it's not reciprocal. Obama put up great working class numbers, but the modern Democratic coalition isn't willing to pander to socially conservative views, so it doesn't work so well anymore.
A pithy but I really feel important example: a party with no room for Joe Rogan in it is definitionally not a party of the working class.
> Left strategy has been terrible for years. That's one of the consequences of the Woke movement. Far too much political capital was expended on niche issues. Gays are 3% of the US population. Trans are 0.3% of the US population. Can't win an election catering to those groups.
This isn't the left's strategy. It's the right's. The right targets these small groups because they know we won't let them be attacked. We will push back. It makes it very easy to paint the left as trying to cater to LGBT folk, but that's nonsense that only sells to those completely out of the loop. Which is unfortunately most of the US electorate. And it's not about it being a strategy. It's about being an ally against bigotry. It takes a really fucked up person to abandon millions of people to increased discrimination because you think it'll help your polling with middle America.
What about bigotry against women? That is the actual effect of pro-trans policy.
The right capitalized on that because the left was too blinded by ideology to see the harm caused to women.
More nonsense. Trans women being allowed to exist in peace does not harm women and is in no way bigotry.
Yet these males are in women's prisons, women's shelters, women's sports, in social spaces intended for lesbians, and more. They're attempting to redefine "woman" everywhere they can, so they can impose themselves everywhere that was supposed to be female-only. They're getting law and policy rewritten to enforce this.
That's not existing in peace is it, it's an unwelcome assertion of male dominance over women.
You’ve not established that at all. Just spewed more unsupported nonsense. It’s not trans folk women have to worry about. Just like it isn’t drag queens. All this abuse you claim simply doesn’t exist in any meaningful numbers. If it did, it should be easy to show your supporting data. Any excuse to be hateful and exclusionary I guess.
[dead]
What a pathetic response. Across the entire world bigots have managed to scrape together a few hundred examples assuming they are even real? This is why bigots like you are driving people to suicide with your blind hate? And what kind of weirdo creates a website dedicated to things like this? What kind of weirdo is familiar with it and thinks it represents something valid? Since you like lists so much and place so much value on them, I wonder how you can support conservative politicians considering how many of them are pedophiles and rapists?
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/8/2252541/-Republica...
There are FAR more Republican sexual predators than there are "males stealing sports wins from females" in your list. And your list is international while mine is just for the US. So Republican sex pests must be much more of a concern for you right? Or is it only wrong to steal a sports victory from a woman and not to rape her and then force her to carry the baby to term?
It's a website created by feminist women to document the effect on female athletes of male-inclusive policy in women's sport. Again, not hateful - just pointing out the problem.
As I mentioned above, this is only one area of many where women are disadvantaged and harmed by such policy. Another is women's prisons. In some jurisdictions, male inmates are allowed to transfer to the female prison estate if they claim to have a so-called "female gender identity". In every prison system that has introduced this, female prisoners have been sexually assaulted, raped and even impregnated by these males.
Some examples:
- https://4w.pub/male-inmate-charged-with-raping-woman-inside-...
- https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/transgender-rikers-inmate-gets...
- https://news.wttw.com/2020/02/19/lawsuit-female-prisoner-say...
It is clear that this policy has had a horrendous impact on women prisoners. Do you agree that politicians on the left made a grave error of judgement, to say the least, in supporting and promoting it?
Criticizing the left does not imply endorsement of the right. Why do you assume I support conservative politicians? Actually I've never voted for one in my life, and don't intend to. I don't support their policy on banning abortion either.
That list you linked is very relevant to my point, however, in that every single abuser on there is male. It's the same problem I'm talking about above.
And yet you've done nothing to connect trans folk to abuse. Just that men abuse the most which is a known fact. Do you have any idea what the effect on estrogen is on the body and behaviors? Of course you don't. Because you don't want to know. You have all the bigoted answers you need and won't little things like facts get in the way of your hatred and ignorance. I'd suggest you try to be better, but we both know that's impossible.
Well if you have evidence to the contrary, do present it. I'm keen to listen.
You said:
> Do you have any idea what the effect on estrogen is on the body and behaviors?
But then you didn't explain what you meant by this, or exactly how it relates to what we were discussing in terms of policy. Could you elaborate, please?
If you can demonstrate that the points I made above were incorrect, that male-inclusive policy in the areas we've discussed actually isn't having a detrimental impact on women and girls, then I would like to know about it. Thanks.
Accusing me of being bigoted, hateful, ignorant, etc. doesn't have any effect on changing my view, by the way.
One the one hand, I think it’s great that after all these various iterations of prigs throughout human history, we’ve finally arrived at a point where the label they gave themselves has become a humorous insult. Unfortunately, this means
- they culturally appropriated “woke” from a group they believe to be systemically persecuted and turned it into a joke,
- telling someone that you don’t want to hear their racist joke is now “woke” even if you’re not playing to an audience, and
- suddenly, every little thing people don’t like is “woke” and it is beyond ridiculous.
There's prigs on both sides
> You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.
The issue with this is that it enshrines denial of identity in the same place as religion. If a trans colleague identifies a way that you disagree with, does this give you free pass to misgender them and deny their identity? That is cruel, and you would be denying a colleague their right of self-determination. This is bullying.
I'm not saying you should be stricken down for needing time to adjust to their pronouns and chosen name; I'm saying you shouldn't be cruel to them by denying them their identity, and that such cruel behavior should not be protected in society.
---
I would turn this entire discourse about "wokeness" on its head, especially the discourse from the pg's and Musk's of the world, and assert that they don't actually care about the way the ideological wind is blowing; They're afraid of the collectivist nature of it.
That many less-powerful people can band together in pursuit of social justice against them, entrenched titans of capital, those capable of steering mainstream discourse, can provide a counter-argument to their power structures, is what _really_ troubles them.
> If a trans colleague identifies a way that you disagree with, does this give you free pass to misgender them and deny their identity?
Yes, of course. If you believe that false claims of an opposite-sex identity constitute a harmful lie, why should you be compelled to endorse it?
> Yes, of course. If you believe that false claims of an opposite-sex identity constitute a harmful lie, why should you be compelled to endorse it?
Because such behavior is a direct and targeted attack on an individual or individuals, not the concept of gender identity, transness, etc.
If you believe that making false claims of an opposite-sex identity is a harmful lie, then being compelled under threat of punishment to, for example, refer to a male as "she", is also a direct and targeted attack.
Being trans is identity, but being transphobic is ideology. Being a transphobe does not alter your identity in any way, nor change how you are referred to in society. Denying someone their identity and disrespecting someone in a professional setting is toxic and hostile.
If you want to be an asshole at home, you're free to do so insofar that it is legal. But if you want to be an asshole at work, that should not be enshrined in the same way as religious belief as pg suggests.
Unless you think it should be allowed, but what level of assholery is allowed? Is assholery against trans people the only assholery allowed? Is it okay to be an asshole to disabled people too? To women? To someone of a different color?
Trans is also an ideology. It's the belief that each person has a "gender identity" which may or may not align with their sex, and that this "gender identity", rather than sex, is what makes someone a woman or a man or, somehow, neither.
By the same logic as you are presenting, it is toxic and hostile to impose this ideology upon others. If believers of this ideology want to use "preferred pronouns" and such, they should of course be free to do so.
But others who do not hold this ideological stance, including those who oppose it for whatever reason (e.g. because they see the concept and implementation of "gender identity" as fundamentally sexist), shouldn't be forced to pay lip service to it, any more than atheists should be forced to pray at work.
You call this refusal "assholery", but presumably that is because you are a believer of this ideology - including the belief that to reject it is "transphobic" (which is roughly equivalent to the religious zealots' cry of "heretic") and therefore, per this belief, reprehensible?
Let me put it another way. If you start a new job and introduce yourself as "Bob" and someone says, "haha no you're Herman. Hi Herman" and they continue to call you "Herman" at work from then on, then they're being an juvenile asshole to you. They're denying you your identity as Bob. Gender identity (including one's chosen name) is the same way.
This is not the same, because a man who introduces himself as a woman is not actually a woman. He might want everyone to pretend that he is, but it is not the reality of the situation.
It's more like if he introduced himself as being a young child or a dog. No-one should be under any obligation to play along with Bob's claims to be an infant or a canine when he is neither.
Look, I don't usually make a habit of engaging with throwaways so this will be my last reply. Feel free to take whatever internet victory points you like.
I would ask, when denying people their self-determination, does it start and end with trans people, or is there more? If someone is raised as a Muslim and converts to Christianity, do you deny them that? Who is the arbiter of who gets to decide who gets self-determination and who doesn't? I doubt billionaires, nor politicians, are the best authority for that.
Also, keep in mind that you're railing against one of the smallest, and most persecuted, minorities on the planet. Why do this? Were you harmed by a trans person in some way, or were you just told to do this by someone on social media? Have you met a trans person and talked to them about their experiences?
Are we going to see our institutions flexibly re-align themselves basically every US election cycle? Or do the recent changes at Facebook and Amazon, and this essay, herald a long-term shift to the right in USA politics?
Where individuals, institutions and society have to be flexible/whiplashed around in order to survive and thrive, it can be good from time to time, but it's not great for everyone to have too much such change on an ongoing basis.
If we're talking about the origins of wokeness, I would tend to go back further and look at Christianity as a whole. Suggest Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, which states that the morality of the day is somewhat arbitrarily dictated by those currently in power, and you had better snap to it and conform, which I think is more or less what we're seeing here?
Specifically, the idea of wokeness originates in the Christian conceptual understanding of pity, which is basically that we should sympathise with and help other people. Further, wokeness has in it that we don't accept people who work to benefit themselves and their cadres at the expense of society at large. Of course, this is ultimately incompatible with VC, which is why wokeness and tech/VC ultimately make an odd pairing, inevitably destined for a split, which we are now seeing.
So if one takes PG seriously, it’s ludicrous for him to unequivocally say “On October 11, 2020 the New York Times announced that "The paper is in the midst of an evolution from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of great narratives.", but then in the footnotes backtrack and say “It's quite possible no senior editor even approved it (the quote in question).”
Making such an absurd claim brings into question everything written on a subject he clearly knows nothing about.
>Thanks to Sam Altman, Ben Miller, Daniel Gackle, Robin Hanson, Jessica Livingston, Greg Lukianoff, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, and Tim Urban for reading drafts of this.
Can we have a conversation about the fact that Y Combinator is full of weird conservative dudes who actively lie about easily verifiable things? I mean, everyone knows "woke" originated in black culture... Except, perhaps, for out-of-touch Silicon Valley tech bros. This is just disgusting and pathetic.
This is one of Paul Graham's best essays. The historical timeline is accurate, the phrasing is much more careful than the comments here claim.
If you are 20 and in university, it will be hard to understand the historic perspective. You cannot just rip out single sentences and attack them without context.
If you disagree with everything, at least read the paragraph about Mao's cultural revolution, where he riled up young people against his political opponents. It may sound appealing if you are 20 and in university, but keep in mind that it can happen to you, too, just 8 years from now when the purity spiral has evolved.
Software organizations like Python have been taken over by shrewd manipulators who used exactly that tactic: Have a small "elite" that dictates ever changing morals, does not contribute much or anything at all and weaponizes new contributors against their opponents. The result is a dysfunctional organization where most interesting people have left, some companies still force contributions but there is virtually no organic open source activity. And a couple of "elites" have been fired by Google. That is the standard path of performative wokeness.
Anyway, a great essay and I hope that Paul Graham will treat us to more historic perspectives this year.
I didn't know that happened to Python. It happened to NixOS.
[flagged]
> I saw political correctness arise. When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it. It was still not a thing when I started grad school in 1986. It was definitely a thing in 1988 though, and by the early 1990s it seemed to pervade campus life.
> What happened? How did protest become punishment? Why were the late 1980s the point at which protests against male chauvinism (as it used to be called) morphed into formal complaints to university authorities about sexism?
Wait, what? I feel like I'm not hearing this right, but this feels a lot like implying "people should be able to complain about things, as long as there's no consequences of those complaints". It goes on with:
> A new set of moral rules to enforce was exciting news to a certain kind of student. What made it particularly exciting was that they were allowed to attack professors.
Really? You think they just like attacking professors, that this is, in and of itself, exciting, rather than... Oh, let's say: Seeing a professor who has been actively misogynist towards you face some consequences for that? They just like to attack, with no cause at all?
I agree with most of the sentiment with his post, and was enlightened to learn about his perspective on universities and research into the history of it, but the argument of language nuance itself (colored vs PoC) feels short sighted.
All language has nuance. And the language is very high on the Maslov’s hierarchy, but that’s the point. It’s a progressive discussion. Terminology has meaning and we’re growing our understanding what the meaning is.
You can have discussions and understanding or no understanding and ignorance. The problem is not the language or understanding, it’s the actions itself. Being aware and understanding is not bad. The answer is not the counter culture naivety or cancel culture.
Yes, cancel culture and prigism are abominations of high society. That’s the action. In the same turn, the term “woke” has been absolutely weaponized from the counter culture point of view. We, as a society, are figuring out its place. It’s definitely not in public schools or politics. It has, like abortion, been co-opted for power in a democratic society. Let’s focus on the action and changing our systems to enshrine cultural norms (like a public service of unbiased news) into law instead of relying on the markets.
An Internet rails against political correctness, forgetting that it's not 1996 anymore. Some Hackernews decry the woke mob. No technology is discussed.
N-gate will be missed!
RIP to a legend
For the record, there are some conservatives on YC that agree with PG.
Graham's article is persuasive on describing societal shifts around 'wokeness'. However, I'd like to see a bit more introspection on what constitute non-'religious' (to borrow his term), or foundational, principles of Western liberal democracy. There are some grounds to prohibit speech in society and also practice - much of wokeness is about practice as much as speech, which he doesn't really explore. At the edges societal norms inevitably become messy, but he doesn't acknowledge this fact. Nor that the edges move over time and, on balance, this has often been a good thing (think of civil rights for example).
In this way, and similar to a lot of simplistic economic analysis (i.e. the sort that blanketly insists free markets solve everything - ignoring the realities of imperfect information, natural monopolies, externalities, etc., and also ubiquitous government intervention even in the US), the argument lacks depth. If we take his piece as a polemic then perhaps this is intentional and not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm not sure he presents it that way.
The problem with words like "woke" is that there is no agreement on what it means. One sides it means this another says it means that. I think whatever it means to you shows truly what you believe. I don't use this word because it means nothing to me and I use more specific words to better communicate.
"Cancel Culture" has agreement on what it is, but one side says only the other side does it while doing it themselves. Give me a break. I just don't care enough about this.
Feminism, Privilege, gaslighting, toxic, DEI, etc. These words are perverted to mean whatever people want it to mean these days. Sometimes there is agreement other times there are not. DEI means inclusion spaces to one and exclusion/racism/sexism/ageism to another.
To address one part of the article about moral purity, again give me a break. We all have our compasses and will typically react with disgust to those who don't follow. Some people share some vague sense of moral compasses. You see it everywhere, not just politics. The spreading of outrage via the mainstream via internet and media outlets is really what has changed.
America, in its history, has had mobs that would be "woke" in today's culture apparently. Social media mobs are nothing fundamentally different.
Also, Twitter under Elon did censor people and ban words causing them to move to Mastodon and Threads before Bluesky, so let's not whitewash the suppression of "free speech" under him by saying that all he did was give more visibility to paying members when in fact it's what they settled on.
If PG actually wants better examples of moral purity and pushback against it, he can get in touch. Some of these examples are just not it.
If it takes a felon winning an election for you to come out and write this then you are a coward. Where were these deep thoughts when BLM was blocking public roads and emergency services. I'm impartial to both sides simply making an observation.
PG has been tweeting about woke for years.
Most people were cowards then, and now too. It's nice to finally get these leaders sharing what they actually think again. After biting their tongue for what a decade?
If you insist on casually calling the guy you voted against a felon, I don't think you're as impartial as you claim.
He is in fact a convicted felon. That is objectively, impartially true.
It not be impartial to mention it, though. PG almost certainly didn't write this essay out of cowardice because a felon got elected.
He may have written it out of cowardice because a bully got elected, though...
I erred on the side of pithy to try to avoid derailing. I've never voted for him and there's a lot that I dislike about him; however…
There's a very credible argument that the DA overcharged the case so people who dislike him can try to ostracize him as a felon and make his supporters look unhinged. If your shorthand for "the less woke candidate won" is "the felon won," you don't get to credibly claim "I'm impartial" in a conversation about wokeness.
So still a convicted felon then?
It's not a credible argument. The "overcharges" led to a guilty verdict and sentence. That could not have happened if they were truly as you portray. Believing that your less-informed opinion overrules those of everyone actually in the courtroom is pure hubris.
It is a fact that he is a convicted felon.
I think part of this is correct regarding the professors who started off as "radicals" or hippies in the 1960s but there is no mention of why the cultural revolution of the 1960s happened in here. Couldn't that be examined more closely?
In my opinion, we have been undergoing a cultural clash for power at the top of society for decades between various groups. At one point in time this country was firmly in the hands of WASPs. Waves of immigrants arrived in cities who clashed with them. There were fights about who could get into the most powerful universities which was directly related to the struggle for power between the groups. Wokeness in the US, is in my opinion, a consequence of identity politics which we have had for some time. I think identity politics is probably more natural than not having it because we see it all over the planet. I think a lot of people have created a narrative that they are fighting against identity politics but in fact have just recreated it in different terms.
I can't be the only one that sees "wokeness" and general political radicalization (on either side) as being explainable by the collapse of religion and nationality as the key sources of identity and group-inclusion.
Political identities are modern-day religions, basically.
I'm not saying it's better to be actually religious - this isn't some sob-story about how the decline of religiosity is some great evil. I'm just pointing out the parallel: that something that's consumed A LOT of human energy and attention has disappeared in 1 generation leaving a huge vacuum of meaning for most people, and people are filling that vacuum with political identities.
Doesn't this list work for both political movements and religions: shared moral frameworks, common enemies, a metaphysical value system, sense of belonging, set of virtues and sins, rigid orthodoxy, regular rituals (protests, boycotts, etc), transcendent societal goals, conflict-as-sacred-struggle, etc.
Overly simplistic, maybe; but I think I'm not too far off.
As defined in a Florida lawsuit, woke is, "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." I think that is generally true. I also agree with parts of what PG stated. More than anything, I think the term 'woke' as defined above has been twisted by both sides, and action is more important that talking.
I read a tweet around 2014 that was very short and simple and stayed with me for a while and now seems prescient. It was something like "man, anti-SJW is getting worse than SJW" (using sjw as the precursor for woke). Makes me think that reactions are sometimes stronger than the actions they go against and can often be swinging too far the other way.
I think PG is right in tracking modern political ethical standards (that he prefers to refer as wokeness) to the student movements of the 60s. It is worth reminding about the roots of 60s movements itself though.
It was spread over the whole Western world, and was basically reconsidering Western power structures and political beliefs in the aftermath of WWII. The generation of the 40s-50s was either complicit in fascism/nazism directly or have seen it as "them" problem and was more preoccupied in defeating it militarily. The generation that came after them though had more time to reflect on how it all was even possible, and found its roots not just in Germany or Italy, but all over the world including the US - in colonialism, in racism, in sexism, classism/social darwinism etc.
So I think we should understand where we are going to be heading to if we let the oligarchy declare this work and the ethics that stemmed from it outdated.
In any serious discipline, ranging from philosophy to mathematics, precision is a requirement. Here, "woke" is everything but precise. It's an umbrella term that the right uses with bad faith to discard any form of social struggle or claim for a more egalitarian society, then part of the left took ownership of the term (reverse stigma).
Then a quoted aberrations IMO,
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that.
These statements are typically what fuels some people's outrage. Who is PG to decide what is the right scale? In the US for example, too many black people lost their lives because of a systemic racism, at the scale of society (police, job, housing, ...). Is this not scaled enough? To me, it shows an incredible level of disconnection between the social class PG belongs to and the actual problems in society.
I've lived long enough to see pg turn into a boomer-ass uncle lmao.
It's also very funny that he decided to publish this _now_ of all times.
It's no coincidence that PG published this days before Trump's inauguration.
This is yet another Silicon Valley elite kowtowing to their new GOP overlords.
I understand the perception but I know pg well enough to say that I think it is very likely a coincidence. From everything I've seen, he isn't driven by such calculations.
[flagged]
You're probably limited because 75% of all of your account's posts have been flagged to death for being low-quality hate/rage posts. Read the site's rules and guidelines and be a better member.
(dang is also the main HN mod, as an FYI)
Focusing on the term “wokeness” is a bit silly. I’ve always liked to think of it (“it” being the wave of political thought that came into influence around 2013 or so) as the latest wave of the civil rights movement. I call it “social justice” since they often use that term, but of course that term has been around for decades as well. It doesn’t matter what name you use, as long as we agree on the phenomenon we’re describing.
But really, you can trace it back further than the 60’s, as far back as in the 1920’s with C Wright Mills. He was a sociologist who essentially argued that science shouldn’t pursue explanatory knowledge, but rather emancipatory knowledge. The idea was that science can’t be some external objective thing apart from human political systems.
As for why it didn’t enter the national awareness until the last decade, I have no idea. But I think it has to do with the internet, that’s my intuition.
I would have to refute the notion that wokeness is a mind virus. "Stay Woke" has a much deeper origin in African American culture, and it refers to the fact that one needs to stay vigilant about another's intentions.
The implicit message is that the "us" cannot trust the "they", and writers like Paul Graham show the reason why: Any attempt at social change can easily be labeled a virus by capitalists if it does not produce greater prosperity. It's the same prosperity that has poisoned the earth, so I hope they have answers there too.
>"Stay Woke" has a much deeper origin in African American culture, and it refers to the fact that one needs to stay vigilant about another's intentions.
Yes, this origin is correct as I remember it. I first heard the term publicly from Larry on his show a decade or so ago, mainly referring to police interactions. He presented it well using comedy, unlike the rabid versions of today. He presented it too well as today, it seems this movement has since taken over by (mostly) white college people to service their own selfish ends; that's the mind virus part.
This clip pretty much encapsulates this idea:
It's true, but one has to ask "who made woke-ism into a mind virus?". I think alt-right media say that BLM/Liberals have, but in reality it went viral when it became a favored perjorative and performative act by the alt right, a sort of gradual straw man argument that became true by its own belief. That's the textbook definition of a virus if I've ever seen one.
And it spread like no other.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
> I would have to refute the notion that wokeness is a mind virus.
So would anyone with even 4th grade critical thinking skills. Sadly the text is riddled with the kind of naive, unearned confidance that dominated Sillicon Valley in the early 2000s.
I grew up then, every kid on a computer was smarter than the entire world put together. If only things were run by engineers all the problems would be fixed. We werent racist, or sexist, as long as you used Latex for your work, and Vim for your coding and looked down on humanities you belonged.
Only problem is, engineers did end up running everything. FB replaced traditional media, and what it achieved rather than the mass of uninformed working class, the mildly educated propagandised working class and perpetrating owner class. Well you ended up with heaps of misinformation, 2 genocides (one in africa and another in asia), 2 stable countries brought to the brink of civil war with brexit and trumpism, an arab spring that led to a decade of unstable countries from Lybia to Afghanistan. And the same safeguards that have been built for traditional media are now being built for FB, just 2 decades late and with way less regulatory teeth than the goverment fines imposed to early yellow newspapers.
Uber and wework were another engineer led proyects. Transport and Offices all gonna be cheap, available and with that magic Sillicon valley sauce, where people at google use a slide to go to work. But now wework is a documentary of failure and hubris and Uber is on a long term bet for self driving cars to try and abate its unionising workers who are recreating the old taxi system without the medallions or insurance.
Tesla and Airbnb were gonna change our lives. But one is a plastic badly built car with no lidar because its owner made a bad bet a decade ago, and the other is being demonised in every city for aggravating the housing crisis while remaining less safe and more expensive than most hotels.
Engineers like PG run the show and we are recreting 100 years of guardrails, while they become billionaires over our inability to stop them and punish them. They then buy newspapers, social media platforms and think tanks and destroy words made up by marginalised communities to use as insults. Then useful idiots like PG read the insult, and not the original word and write lengthy essays with nothing interesting to say because they are attacking a strawman created by a republican think tank because some billionaire cant say the n word anymore.
Related: People wonder why English has so many weird spellings. It's a complicated answer. The Vikings seem to show up way too often (grin). One of the reasons, though, is that several hundred years ago we all thought that Latin was the bees knees. The Greeks and Romans were the model. So took words that were perfectly-well phonetically-spelled and "fixed" them, returning them to some kind of bastardized form that was "better".
For some words it didn't work -- people went back to the old ways. But for some it did.
This chaotic priggish churning in society is not new, as pg points out. I love how language, manners, idioms, and cultures interact. It can be a force for good. It can also be extremely destructive, usually in tiny ways and over centuries.
While I love these intricacies, I also always fall back on the definition of manners I was taught early on: good manners is how you act around people with poor manners. Add complexity as desired on top of that. The form of communication and behavior can never replace the actual meaning and effects of it. (There's a wonderful scene in "The Wire" where they only use the f-word. Would have worked just as well for their job to have used the n-word. 100 years ago, the n-word would have been fine and the f-word beyond the pale. Draw your lessons from that.)
ADD: I always try to be polite and abide whatever traditions are in place in any social group. One thing I've noticed, though: the more people express their politics, their priggishness, their wokeness, etc -- the crappier they seem to be in their jobs. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because this is such as easy social crutch to lean on and gain social advantage that it becomes kind of a "communications drug". Scratch a loud prude or moralizer, you find a dullard or slacker. Conversely, people who produce usable advances in mankind tend to be jerks. I suspect this relationship has held up over centuries. cf Socrates and the Sophists, etc. (A good book among many along these lines is "Galileo's Middle Finger")
The comparison between religious fanaticism and wokeness is incomplete. One big difference is that religion can be deeply meaningful to an individual without them needing to express their beliefs publicly - religion can often be an entirely private affair. Many a loud preacher of religion has retired to a private life of quiet worship. Wokeness would have no meaning at all as a private affair, it's entirely based around shaming others in the public discourse. That's why PG's proposed solution of "allowing expression of beliefs without enforcement" might work for creating religious tolerance, but will not work for combatting priggish wokeism. If you don't allow their policing of words, there's nothing left to wokeism.
I agree with Sam Kriss, "wokeness" is an etiquette: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics
> They’ll tell you that actually, there’s no such thing as wokeness. It’s not an ideology. It’s not a belief system. It’s just basic decency. It’s just being a good person.
> They’re right. Wokeness is an etiquette. There are no sects within wokeness for the same reason that there are no sects on whether you should hold a wine glass by the bowl or by the stem. It’s not really about dogmas or beliefs, in the same way that table manners are not the belief that you should only hold a fork with your left hand.
This just reads like the usual anti-intellectualism.
That’s really all Silicon Valley has to offer at this point.
They are our betters and we should follow them without question.
> They are our betters and we should follow them without question.
Wasn't this basically the messaging of the Harris/Walz campaign? Perhaps if not directly then through the commentary around it.
I’m not sure. I don’t listen to much political commentary outside of the stuff shoved in my face.
What gave you that feeling from the Harris campaign?
Trump suggested he was "anointed by God" to serve a second term. I can't think of anything that says "I'm better than you" than that.
Cartoonish displays of "wokeness" are stupid and corrosive. But I would argue that people who are loudly "Anti-woke" could also be described as "self-righteously moralistic [people] who behave as if superior to others". Both sides are impenetrably convinced that they alone are the arbiters of what is "good" behavior. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the far ends of "Woke" and "Anti-woke" people have far more in common to each other than they are to people the middle.
Ultimately, I think the problem is we separate ourselves along easy to define lines like left vs right, white vs non-white, bike vs car, and let the loudest assholes on either sides dictate terms.
Wokeness is what happens when you have socially liberal and fiscally conservative investors / executives try to please their democratic leaning employees without having to pay more taxes. It costs them nothing, so you get corporations and the media to embrace race and gender progressivism with a full clamp down on any true progressive causes like universal health care, free education and etc.
The same VCs crying about wokeness are also crying about a collapse of the manufacturing base in the US, when they're the ones responsible for offshoring all of it and not investing in any business that deal with physical goods because software are so much larger.
As an example, yes Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions.
"Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions". I think you hit the nail on the head. There is a whole chapter to be written about pro/anti "wokeness" stances used by companies / politicians to divert attention from the deeper class vs class issues.
Wokeness is also a way the media can smack down candidates like Corbin and Sanders, labeling them sexist or an antisemite for focusing on class instead of identity politics.
It is no coincidence that wokeness arose during Occupy Wall Street, and the insistence on the use of the "progressive stack" was part of what destroyed that protest movement.
> The more general problem — how to prevent similar outbreaks of aggressively performative moralism — is of course harder.
It would help to be a multi-planetary civilization, because seen from afar it's obvious wokeness, or prudishness or what-have-you is a bad idea.
Most people have antibodies to wokeness in the sense that it's easy to see it's performative. People, especially the internet generation, have finely-tuned BS detectors.
But as PG said, the majority are performing not to be lauded but to avoid being ostracized/canceled/fired.
With some physical and societal distance, say 140 million miles, perhaps that's enough of a barrier to let one society deal with the latest prudishness while the other remains healthy, then switch.
An incredibly ignorant article from someone who clearly has no concept or understanding of the topic being discussed. He defines wokeness from the perspective of those who are anti-woke. Remember, Elden Ring is a woke video game.
"Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong."
No one was prevented from saying anything. People just decided they didn't need to listen to it.
The reality is, PG is just writing this now because a new administration is coming in, and he wants to play nice with a felon. No morals to stand on, only money. Ethics be damned, I'll sell my soul and kill the children for a dollar. Sad state of affairs.
Where I live, while I was at school, the proper way to say that a person was of colour, was the word "negro" (in Portuguese, and I think also in Spanish).
At the time, using the word that directly translates to "black" in English "preto", was considered extremely offensive and was never to be used applied to a person.
Now, fast-forward a few years and the influence of American woke culture, the word "negro" is now connected with the N-word slur in English and is considered offensive. You now have people of colour demanding to be called "preto".
This is one of the many insanities that the woke movement brought us. I'm glad the world is changing away from it.
It might be helpful and interesting to expand on the history. Was this an active effort to reclaim the word? That makes all the difference. People might not choose the word you would prefer when they form their own identities.
> The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it
What did they do that was "An aggressively performative focus on social justice."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Light_boycott
Seems like they did a branded tie in with a celebrity who was trans?
Would it be woke to have an advert with a black, Jewish, female, immigrant, albino, gay, Chinese or Hispanic celebrity?
I kind of feel like it would have been at some point in the past.
Is there a list somewhere of what kinds of celebrity is "politically correct" these days so that corporations trying to advertise beer can avoid these accusations?
[flagged]
So you're saying it doesn't matter if they do it "aggressively" or "performatively" you just have a fundamental objection to trans people.
Which by PG's definition means this isn't woke. Yet he specifically gave the example of a wokeness so bad it could damage a giant multinational brewery (he doesn't mention it happening via boycotts and bomb threats and people losing jobs because that would sound like a worse version of the woke he was complaining about).
Why does woke like set people off like this?
Someone should study the anti woke they way these people focus on woke so much. I don't get it? If it's truly just words why are so bothered by them, let them go for the worthless words they are.
I think it's related to the perceived centrality of identity in the world. I see this as a natural consequence of individualism, which itself is championed by both modern capitalist and libertarian thinking, to pick two.
As the focus on the individual's happiness, wealth, values (etc.) have become more and more ubiquitous, the need to define oneself becomes more and more important. As this has matured, many systems have build that reinforce it. Representative democracy - one person, one vote, and welfare systems that address indivudual needs, are positive examples.
With this comes also a much stronger need for protecting these identities, and more weight is given to perceived categories, whether they are superficial, like skin colour, or structural, like religion or class.
So, when people talk about wokeness, they are not only trying to define the social contract, but they also aligning with it their identity, which gives a kind of existential urgency. The idea that we might be wrong about our position carries with it a sense of loss of self, which triggers most people.
Just my two cents.
This article never takes up the cause of the minorities who are being harassed and killed on a daily basis, but spends a lot of time whining about having to show even a modicum of empathy by using more inclusive language. For this reason it reeks of self-centered willful ignorance.
That's the point.
Spending time teaching people to use people of color instead of black is just performant. Actually firing a recruiter that immediately throws any black resume into the trash is real change.
This seems illustrative of the "boogeyman" points that many commenters are making. I think it is a very small number of people who don't want people to call black people "black", and that the majority of liberal people would find the notion "you can't call them black people" to be ridiculous.
Are there people who believe this? I'm sure there are, but I think they are a vocal minority.
How exactly would you go about implementing the "real change" here?
That's part of the problem, there is no silver bullet. I implement it by not being racist (or sexist or any other -ist) personally and refusing to support anyone who is.
That's largely all anyone can do (and I have a lot more ability to do something about it as a business owner than the average progressive), which I'm sure feels inadequate and leads to roving bands of thought police members looking for perceived transgressions to attack.
And how do you decide whether someone you're considering supporting is or isn't racist? Do you, by chance, use the way they talk about black people or other minorities (man that's a mouthful, maybe just shorten it to BIPOC) as a way to gauge it?
For example, if someone said the N word in front of you, or made an uncomfortable joke about a Mexican, would you decide not to support them? If so, then does that make you one of those roving thought police? You'd obviously be censoring free speech if you decided how you treat them based on what they say!
On the other hand, people are clever, they know not to be too obvious or it may cause them social issues. So, as long as they don't do something too untoward right in front of you, does that mean they gain your full support?
Of course, I won't be surprised if those proponents of free speech decide to censor me by downvoting instead of engaging speech with speech
> And how do you decide whether someone you're considering supporting is or isn't racist? Do you, by chance, use the way they talk about black people or other minorities (man that's a mouthful, maybe just shorten it to BIPOC) as a way to gauge it?
The same way I determine anyone's beliefs on any other topic, which is watching their actions over time, including what they say.
> For example, if someone said the N word in front of you, or made an uncomfortable joke about a Mexican, would you decide not to support them?
Probably, but context matters.
> If so, then does that make you one of those roving thought police? You'd obviously be censoring free speech if you decided how you treat them based on what they say!
And here we go. I'm not censoring anyone by not continuing to associate with someone I don't agree with. I'm also not digitally screaming to ostracize someone I disagree with over terminology, as is the case with cancel culture advocates.
> On the other hand, people are clever, they know not to be too obvious or it may cause them social issues. So, as long as they don't do something too untoward right in front of you, does that mean they gain your full support?
See what I said above about how I assess people. But if someone is a closet racist and I know nothing about it, what am I supposed to do?
> Of course, I won't be surprised if those proponents of free speech decide to censor me by downvoting instead of engaging speech with speech
Knock it off.
If my using the same rhetorical devices as you annoys you, maybe consider how you come across to others? Phrases like "roving bands of thought police" make you sound like a child, and makes it easy to dismiss your opinion out of hand.
You aren't using the same rhetorical devices, you're assuming a lot and pretending to be helpless.
Exactly what term would you use for the groups of terminally online people who dig through decades of social media posts looking for something like a mildly offensive tweet to blow out of proportion?
> That's largely all anyone can do
When you don't have an understanding of racism as a systemic issue, this ends up being the conclusion. Which is why "woke" people (the ones who aren't just adopting the aesthetics and being annoying) typically discuss social issues in systemic terms (prison, policing, discrimination, etc). Which requires not just individual actions but collective action.
The inability to understand this concept is really just a lack of imagination that comes from internalizing the status quo for too long. Not to the fault of anyone, it's only natural. But I think this is why "woke" looks like a bunch of nonsense from the outside.
For example: the US has 2M people in prison more than any other country. An insane number, but to live in the US is to accept that number as normal.
[flagged]
It really depends on the situation.
Sticking with the hiring situation, if you notice that a recruiter only ever recommends hiring people with say the last name Pandit then ask them about it. A lot of times people are not ashamed of their views and will just straight up tell you that they could tell the other candidates were inferior because of their name.
But as somebody else mentioned, there is no silver bullet here. Racism varies from instance to instance. A solution to fix racism in hiring isn't going to fix red-lining. You need to be keeping an eye of things and looking for patterns that don't make sense for the given sample size.
What term would you use to encompass non-white folk?
Person of color is not for "non-white", see: east asians.
The question stands, then! What's your answer?
Why are you trying to divide people based on immutable characteristics anyhow?
"People of color" is a broader term than "black people", and is meant to replace the (pretty widely accepted as) offensive "colored people", not "black people". I feel like it's useful to have a non-offensive phrase that means "nonwhites" without being defined in terms of white people, but maybe I'm just too woke to reason effectively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> phrase that means "nonwhites" without being defined in terms of white people
That does sound quite oxymoronic. (I’m not American.)
[flagged]
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style and please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle? You've been doing these things repeatedly, they're not what this site is for, and they destroy what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
From the article:
>>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
pg, and many anti-woke crusaders, employ examples of performative anti-racism to undermine the necessity of genuine anti-racism altogether.
Is it the critics of performative anti-racism or the actual performers of performative anti-racism who are undermining anti-racism?
How do the critics divine the intention here? At a certain point, we're going to get to anything short of a riot being labelled virtue signaling. I'd like to avoid riots altogether.
Do people that love Chipotle actually hate burritos? It's Sturgeon's law all the way down.
I think that inclusive language became a symbol of a step too far. If you expect me to adjust some governmental policies to make a better society that's fine, but if you expect me to change the way I express myself because you personally don't like it and you have a bunch of bullies behind you, that's just not okay and should be fought against.
Who's being killed on a daily basis? Could you provide sources?
People in Chicago?
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/01/03/chicago-homicides-...
> but spends a lot of time whining about having to show even a modicum of empathy by using more inclusive language
Inclusive language can prevent homicide? I'm so lost, what does that have to do with cold-blood murder?
No one is saying that
Yeah, and who is doing the killing?
Currently, Ukrainans are.
But I suppose the color of their skin means they don't count towards the particular argument that dude is trying to make. Not calling him racist of course. I'm not even suggesting it.
[update] Hey! Look! I was down-voted for mentioning that white people are being killed on a daily basis, what an absolute surprise :D
You might've been downvoted for bad style, irrespective of your actual argument.
Institutionalized racism, sexism, and the general idea that some lives matter less than others kills people every day through healthcare claim denials, red-lined neighborhood districts with lack of infra for safe access to food/water/health/civil services, etc. If you want explicit violence, police in the USA literally kill people at alarmingly high rates usually reserved mostly for countries with notoriously violent regimes or gangs, beating out Mexico, Sudan, Rwanda [1].
"Wokeness" is a fake bear the right has built up to distract from class issues and sow dissent amongst workers and stave off class solidarity. Progressive policy is largely embraced by the majority of Americans [2], but because the right (and its newfound grifter-billionare tech exec class like PG, Musk, Zuck, etc.) have convinced an overwhelmingly large amount of Americans that their woes are because we have gender neutral bathrooms (instead of wage theft by the C suite), it is peddled and use as a smokescreen to continually push through policy and regime changes that will only every serve the .1%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_annual_...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/majority-of-americans-suppor...
"Paul Graham is an idiot. Heres the real issue: [deliberately convoluted and unfalsifiable conspiracy theories]"
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
It seems like pg sees good parts with "wokeness", and also bad parts. He want to continue with the good parts, while getting rid of the bad parts. The essay mostly seems to speak about the historical context, and how to work with "wokeness" so the good parts can persist, rather than "whining about having to show empathy".
Lots of comments here would do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay they deem worse, as currently there seems to be a lot of handwavey-arguments based solely on the title alone.
> do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay
I mean its a pretty big train wreck from the start to the end but I will try to point some of the dumbest lines, and pg is a smart guy so this is a particularly weird miss by him.
>> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness
This is simply not true. Stay Woke is a phrase that has a long history and it mostly related to paying attention to political issues not correctness. The hashtag where it became mainstream was around the shooting of an african american man by the police. It wasn't cancelling someone for saying something dumb, it was because police brutality has a never ending history in the states.
One of the first issues it was used on was freeing P*ssy Riot an anti goverment band from Russia, again not a political correctness instance but one of censorship and violence.
>> Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.
He admits he uses the word pejoritively but does not examine why a word that begins in a marginalised community is now mostly an insult. Like that is beyond irresponsible. if you and your gf have a petname and I start using it as an insult, and I control the media and the word becomes a common word to mean dumbass and I analyse it as that, then I am 1) siding with the bully 2) being a shit reporter.
>> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
This is just stupid because "the woke" is not a real group of people, he even admits he uses it as an insult, and secondly because he has no reason to know at what scale it is a problem. Handwaving a problem that doesn't affect you is bonkers, like I'd walk in an oncology ward and say "the scale that cancer is killing you is exagerated, but its a real problem". Paul Graham is a 60 year old white dude who went to Harvard, a uni that invented Essays to admit more white kids instead of jews, sport scholarships to put more white kids than asians thorugh and that was caught admitting white kids with worse grades than asians and was sued for it. He benefits from racism in the instituion he went to, spends his life in a subject that has 0 to do with policy, politics or race and then starts a paragraph with "racism isnt so bad yall".
>> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that
They led to the crumbling of the vietnam war, the desmitification of the american military and the end of racial segregation. I know he was a kid when it all happened but the 60s movements can hardly be called failed political projects.
I could go on because its all equally unbased and plainfully dumb. But I think just pointing out the kind of basic mistakes he has in terms of how he treats the subject means you can easily spot other equally dumb conclusions or assertions.
Another dumb conclusion, specially coming from someone with a background in computer science is
>> Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect people to seek it out. But they do.
We KNOW that anger is the most potent emotion in the brain, therefore social media algorithms favour it. AI feeds based on "engagement" feed people anger, people dont seek it out. Shareholders and people like Paul Graham who think humanities are stupid do by creating machines that interact with humans in ways that are completely unethical.
In the US statistically speaking a minority is much more likely to be killed by another minority than a "white" American.
Most people are killed by someone they know. Due to redlining many minorities live in communities that are, to this day, essentially segregated. Add the disproportionate correlation of violence and poverty, adn you get a volatile cocktail.
You will find it that cities with less redlining have less srong correlation between races of victims and perpetrators than cities that are more strongly, or more recently, redlined.
Sure, for the same reasons 84% of white people are killed by white perpetrators, and most child abusers are family members of the victim. Closeness brings both opportunity and conflict, and things like redlining and white flight have ensured the white and black population are quite well segregated.
Great fact!
I wonder... why is that? Is it simply because they are non-white? What do you think is making your fact a fact?
Except the state is doing its killing as normative behavior in all of our names, whereas disorganized gang violence is already generally seen as wrong.
And yes, police unaccountability most certainly affects more than just minorities. The lawlessness of law enforcement is actually the most pressing second amendment issue of our time, but you wouldn't know it by listening to the fully-pwnt political hacks at the NRA, pushing their chosen "side" of the group-herding thought-terminating "woke" strawman like pg here (sigh). How can you claim to have a second amendment right to self defense when the police can summarily execute you for exercising that natural right, in your own home, at night? (The answer is that you can't)
Their problem with "political correctness" is that someone corrected them who them deem lesser than them.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now? I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
> minorities
Ahem! I think you mean People of the global majority? Please consider using more inclusive language in the future.
Actually I think that's exactly the problem with "wokeness" today. People care so much about minorities that we've come to a point where people will be extremely quick to cancel someone online who says something wrong but the same people turn a blind eye to the actual injustices that happen in the world like homelessness and hunger. It's easier to ban someone who says something ignorant than it is to go out and advocate for building new homes or deciding to stop buying on Amazon and Temu to curb the capitalism that people seem to hate so much.
Change needs to happen and I think the "woke" are at least working in the right direction compared to a lot of the right (who seem to be moving back a lot of progress that's been made in the last 50 years) even if their actions are woefully inadequate.
I feel like it's important to enter this part of the cycle where the absolute worst people feel comfortable entering their most heinous takes into the permanent internet record under the delusion that the social pressure to be a good person has been defeated forever.
This is effectively putting the popcorn into the popper, but it won't be served until about ten years from now.
But it's not just minorities who are being harassed and killed on a daily basis, so why should they get special consideration? That's the problem I have with it. It puts people into buckets, and then claims one bucket is more important than the others, even when that bucket is statistically insignificant compared to the others. Wokism is simply racism rebranded.
You did notice the trend of 2025 is Billionaires complaining?
If you look how many white people are killed by blacks versus blacks killed by white people, you will have a shock. Even when you account for whites being a few times more than blacks in the general population.
I really don't buy this "minorities" are being killed story.
This is how to lie with statistics. Two things can be true without contradiction. Does a black gang member randomly killing an innocent white person cancel a white cop randomly killing an innocent black man?
The original comment made it sound like minorities are just hunted down by random whites, lynching style.
But even if you look at police murders on civilians, they are killing more whites than blacks. You might argue that whites are 5x more than blacks, but police has more interaction with blacks than with whites. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
"Inclusive language" won't stop anyone from being killed or harassed, especially with Trump in power in the US again.
There will never be anything funnier than a massive article which talks about the "origin of wokeness" that fails to, at any point, talk about the actual origin of "wokeness" – Black communities online.
This is the greatest weakness of an already weak essay.
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
> Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.
Wow, PG downplaying racism and sexism was not on my 2025 bingo card.
I hear some good points and I can understand the fatigue with cancel culture; still, discussing recent movements like blm and #metoo in negative light only seems very narrow.
I guess especially for rich celebrities movements like these and the power they represent can feel limiting, threatening, to the point of feeling targeted.
[flagged]
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
> it’s now “woke” to say that multiple police officers shouldn’t kill someone by sitting on their neck for 9 minutes
He’s using the moment as a time stamp, not rendering commentary on it per se. Floyd was arguably the peak of legitimacy and acceptance of what we (and he) now calls woke culture. (I’d set the time a little later, around the ‘22 midterms, but we’re in the same ballpark.)
Using his definition, it was peak performance.
I think a key tenant to wokeness in this framework is the emphasis on awareness/alertness relative to solutions.
This is a long essay; there's a lot of really good and a lot of not so great.
One might compare the first century of Christianity, where the only way to increase the number of adherents was to personally convince each one to make a commitment which would potentially be costly to them; and the situation a few centuries later, where Christianity offered opportunities of riches and power to those who accepted it, and many of those with power succumbed to the temptation to increase the number of the faithful at the point of a sword -- although of course, all that can be imposed is compliance with certain kinds of external behavior, not an actual change of heart.
The thing about BLM and Me Too is that these things are still problems. Black people are still disproportionately killed by police officers, and it's very difficult to hold them to account. One powerful person was found by a jury, who had examined evidence which the accused person had every opportunity to rebut, to have sexually assaulted a woman; after that he was elected president of the United States.
When the only way to make people more aware of these problems ("woke") was to personally convince each person to make a commitment which would be personally costly to them, things were fine. But as Paul points out, at some point getting on the "woke" bandwagon offered opportunities for riches and power; and it became a temptation to short-cut the process of transformation with threats of punishment, rather than changing people's minds individually.
I mean, yeah, the ideological madness that refuses to have reasoned discussions, and attempts to enforce the latest complex orthodoxy (chosen by a few without the proper level of reasoned debate) with the threat of punishment rather than convincing each person one by one, needs to die. But if the result is that people in power are still not held responsible for their actions, then I think we will have lost something important.
EDIT: One thing I've tried to do when possible is to point out that bullying people into silence won't change their mind. Obviously it takes the right kind of person to hear this, but it has at least a few times seemed to help someone begining to go "woke" wake up to what it is they're actually doing.
I think the term woke is a clear and unambiguous term. I find it surprising people consider it a slur / empty insult. I consider it a substantive characterization of people and acts that reflects a genuine disagreement.
To me, as the right uses it, the term woke refers to people or movements prioritising signalling virtue (e.g., policing the words people use) over actually improving the world. One clear instances of it was the spate of scrapping standardized testing (despite this scrapping actively harming rather than helping the disenfranchised).
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that.
Au contraire, the idea that racism is a problem is now labeled "critical race theory" and it's a crime to spread this knowledge to students in multiple states.
Teachers in Oklahoma can't teach students the fact that the Tulsa Massacre was race-driven.
So Paul himself, it appears, has given himself over to the wokeness by acknowledging that racism is a genuine problem.
This is a dishonest argument. Paul can oppose an ideology without agreeing with everyone and especially extremists who also oppose that same ideology.
I dont think wokeness or paul graham are communist or fascist respectively so forgive the hysterical sound of the analogy im going to make here, but i think your argument is similar in reasoning to this one:
You oppose fascism? Well, fascism opposed gulags. If you oppose gulags I guess you were a fascist after all."
What an embarrassment. To think I once respected you. On the near eve of Trump retaking power and this poorly reasoned garbage is what you choose to post. The most generous explanation I can muster is that this is a cynical ploy to ingratiate yourself with the man who just bought the government.
Congrats on pontificating on the most serious issue of our time: why you can’t call black people negros or colored people. I’m done with HN.
Thank you pg for writing this!
The defining work on this subject is “Industrial Society and its Future” by Ted Kaczynski. Where he says “leftism” say “woke” and you have it.
This always needs to be followed by a condemnation of his violent methods, but that has been used as a way to avoid dealing with his horribly on point diagnosis of the problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_F...
This is exhausting. I don't have the emotional energy right now to lay into this properly. I hope someone else does a good job, so I don't have to waste time on it tomorrow.
All else being equal, we think it's good to avoid being a jerk, especially when you're in a position of power.
If people inform you that you're being a jerk, try to understand and follow the rules to avoid being a jerk, even if you don't understand the reasoning.
And yes, like all things, it gets out of control sometimes.
Reaction, reaction everywhere
> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
There is nothing that better demonstrates how disconnected your average ivory tower silicon valley elite is than this sentence. You would have to exist in an entirely different reality to believe this is the case.
“Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless, can't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same thing to political correctness.
…
My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a hostile work environment could constitute sex discrimination, which in turn affected universities via Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person, but since for a professor merely being the subject of a sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of things that might not be said ‘with ladies present.‘“
I’m linking two thoughts the essay doesn’t explicitly connect, but which I think is important to the thesis of why 2010-era cancel culture didn’t get cancelled itself, and that’s its almost autoimmune capacity to cancel comedians.
That said, Graham elides over how cancel culture was renamed “woke.” Was it the left or the right who did this? I suspect the latter, at which point we have to contend with the existence of two mind viruses, the cancel-culture/woke one and the anti-woke totem of the left.
Also, this requires more thought: “publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained in business fell in the direction they'd already been leaning: left.”
Why? And why have right-wing publications failed to gain comparable traction?
> My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not
See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice or start saying the only thing they care about is “Gods and Guns”.
FWIW: I was born and raised in southern GA and have only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL.
They are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian.
"woke" is believing and wanting to do the right thing before the majority see it as moral and correct
ie. Slavery abolitionists would have been harassed as "woke" if the word had existed then
It's that simple.
People just REALLY don't like being told what they are doing is wrong and that they should be more enlightened and change, change is the real showstopper.
So they've given "woke" a toxic treatment.
The real test is if "woke" costs someone nothing and yet they still refuse.
This is pretty much a canonical example of what does not belong on HN. A dumb topic, and then on top of that a dumb take on that dumb topic.
Reminder to flag the submission if you think it’s inappropriate for HN.
IMO, it doesn’t belong here.
>A dumb topic, and then on top of that a dumb take on that dumb topic.
Agreed. A dumb topic, with dumb people discussing at length.
It's like calling the word of Jesus heresy ... if pg essays don't belong on HN then the word "hacker" has lost all meaning. He's describing a system and how to change it. What else are we doing all day on these computers?
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.
I have observed Hacker News commenters to be more predominantly left-leaning and "WOKE" compared to the general population. Not sure what the reason may be, but it is possible that they are taught about woke culture in their companies or universities. Generally, compared to the founder and startup culture that we all aspire for, wokeness is more prevalent in the majority of the YC audience.
As a person who is often labeled as woke by default because of skin color: Fuck this guy. This article tells you how he really feels. He wants to be able to say and do things that some people would take offense to, and doesn't want to face consequences for any of it. Just like in the good old days.
Woke went from being a slang word to top of the Klan's most wanted list.
Reminder: these are the same people who police language about gender routinely.
"What is a woman", etc.
If you say there are more than 2 genders, they will shun you.
Woke is apart of neoliberalism, the other half is probably MAGA. It's post-political think, a fake competition that coerces you into arguing within private sector terms. If MAGA is FOX News then Woke is CNN/MSNBC. It's harder to define woke because it's built on old postmodern language-power games. The most obnoxious games that wokies play are semantic games and riddles. For example: "what is woke, you don't even know what it is." Similarly I've heard people say "how am I not myself?" A: when you're aloof. Woke is nostalgia for America's anti-Soviet propaganda. It's an antagonistic parody.
Pauly G. such a fortunate one. Just a defensive old white man. Not a good look, son.
More importantly, how do you challenge social/moral injustice or push for good change without being dismissed as "woke"? Or do we not care about that now that we're just in it for ourselves?
As we've recently established, we apparently do like to watch the world burn and maybe that's just where we're at for now, like a pressure release valve.
It's interesting that none of these anti-woke oracles can tell that they're at the center of an even greater cancel culture mob than the one they purported to be against. Wasn't PG just getting canceled a few months ago by the right for speaking up about Palestine? Give it a few years, this manifesto will look hilarious.
Of course they can tell they're at the centre of an even greater cancel culture mob, the writing of these articles is entirely with fear of avoiding cancellation in mind...
An unusually bad essay.
Yes, cancel culture is bad.
But when an entire group of people (eg women, or non-white people) says ‘this thing is a problem’, maybe take them seriously?
(Like pg would like to be taken seriously right now?)
This is an essay against introspection, against discomfort (as much as discomfort intolerance is raised as a symptom of woke), and an argument for maintaining the status quo.
Tedious moral panic.
The wokesters of Bluesky (of course) are dunking on PG's essay in their usual condescending manner: https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3lfnoikjxrc2c
if you're going to talk about history, it really helps to ground your narrative in real people, events, or statements. This all comes off as a history of vibes, and I don't remember the same vibes at all (maybe because I wasn't on twitter).
When pg does make contact with reality, it mostly doesn't even support his narrative. He mentions the George Floyd protests and the MeToo movement/Weinstein - by any measure real social justice issues where the perpetrators deserved condemnation!
He also mentions the Bud Light boycotts as a case of going "too woke", but Bud Light's actions were not an "aggressive performative focus on social justice." Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever. It was the boycott by anti-trans bigots that politicized that incident.
Also not on twitter, other than to camp my name. I disagree with your reading of the essay - he says that both of those were sort of "peaks" for their respective movements, and I would say that feels accurate to me. I'm in a mixed-race family, and George Floyd was the first and so-far only period where our family needed additional support, talk, help, considering how to respond.
I agree that Anheuser-Busch seemed to have been stunlocked by Dylan Mulvaney v. Kid Rock on the internet.
> Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever
Isn't it one of the tenets of wokeness that "nothing is apolitical"?
[flagged]
[flagged]
> He also mentions the Bud Light boycotts as a case of going "too woke", but Bud Light's actions were not an "aggressive performative focus on social justice." Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever. It was the boycott by anti-trans bigots that politicized that incident.
This is a double standard. For example, Contrapoints was cancelled for using Buck Angel to do a 10 second voice over in one video[1]. A far less politically charged association with someone than what Bud Light did. In this regard, I think the left has been the ones who primarily set the rules of engagement for the last few years. Can't complain when those same rules are used against you.
[1] https://medium.com/@rachel.orourke_88152/the-10-second-voice...
Certainly this essay is, mostly, “not wrong”. But I was hoping PG might use his powerful brain and hundreds of words to explain how one should combat structural racism and sexism without the unfortunate side effect of “wokeness”. As far as I can see, he just recommended you do it “quietly”. Disappointing.
Here’s how:
Don’t discriminate on the basis of sex and race.
For sake of argument, what if the answer truly is "do it quietly"?
What if it's most effective to live your life to the best of your ability without prejudice, and instead of preaching about what people should do, you just do what it is that you believe to be right?
I grew up in (and left behind) conservative evangelical christian circles, and the thing that always made me most uncomfortable with "wokeness" is how much it often resembles those holier-than-though people I grew up around.
It's not that I disagree with the underlying ideas behind "woke" positions as much as it is the behavior of the people who want to move those ideas forward.
Whether it's overly pious evangelical christians or "very woke" people, I think there's an underlying belief that transcends particular points of view that there's a particular way people must conduct themselves and that using various tactics ranging from moralizing to public shaming are tactics that are effective.
Except I don't think these tactics are effective at all, and while it may be unsatisfying, "try to be the best example you can be" seems far more helpful than what often emerges when people feel they're morally justified.
I sure do love VCs pontificating on life like they live the same day-to-day like the rest of us wage-slaves.
the playbook of lever up, risk it all, sell out, make billions, and then lecture people on how society should be is hilarious. Why should we listen? Because you have a B next your net worth? okay hah hard pass.
It's very telling that he gives Marxist-Leninism as an example of moral orthodoxy instead of the much more relevant Capitalist orthodoxy that exists in the U.S. which he viciously upholds. It's pretty clear that it's much more acceptable to rail against DEI, "wokeism", etc., than it is to suggest that a different economic system is possible in American society. There's very few people in power that can get away with suggesting that there can be something better than Capitalism, or even admitting that there's some problems that Capitalism just can't fix. Most of the progressives or "wokes" in power only go so far as suggesting refinements and guardrails for the current system. Meanwhile, roughly half our elected officials rabidly speak out against the "woke" with no consequences, and the media clearly props up the current system against all else.
It's just so frustrating to see guys like Paul Graham pretend like they're somehow outside of or above "orthodoxy" and "ideology", to use their own terms. "Wokeism" is a religion, but somehow "anti-wokeism" isn't? My point isn't that all of what they label "wokeism" is good or that Capitalism is all bad, it's that there is a hypocrisy in their beliefs that belies their whole argument.
Above all it's just embarrassing to see, and it kills me that they paint their obvious orthodoxy as heresy, when it's anything but.
“Anti wokeism” is to atheism what wokeism is to Christianity. It can turn into a religion in its own right sure but it’s origin is disbelief in another ideology.
I couldnt get past his definition of woke. It seems to mean "brown lady in my video game" today but the ranticle didnt seem to even care. It just wanted to hate on social justice.
The issue is this: 2010s SJWs were annoying. Gamergate, anti DEI, anti Woke people of today are even more annoying.
Used to be we just called people who went overboard promoting their beliefs assholes, or zealots, or ideologues. So many perfectly descriptive words. You'll never want for a synonym to avoid excess repetition.
Why take a perfectly good, specific, and useful word like woke and wrap it up in all this?
As an outsider, the rambling against wokeness is insufferable, even though I personally agree with some points usually brought up.
I only found out what wokeness is from people ranting against it, and never really see anyone arguing in favor of it. It has become a mania of the right.
This seems a very long way to say: "I believe that 'woke' has become dogmatic."
Merely saying that without explaining your reasoning is worthless.
I did not read till the end yet, but "woke" is also a very successfully weaponised word for anyone to help push their ideology to further extremes, both left, right, not center. Woke is also a very good detractor from rich and poor discussions.
Oh god why is pg even writing about this? Why does every aging, decrepit Silicon Valley oligarch think the world needs to hear their opinion on political correctness? It's all becoming too much. Please buy a diary and write your important thoughts there.
I admire PG's essays, but this one seems to give an origin theory about a complex societal issue without any evidence.
My pet theory is is that liberalism won the battle with conservatism and achieved everything useful that it could with it's existing instruments. But then it kept looking for something more and went into wokeness with good intentions. With women's equality and gay marriage the movement was able to convince people and also create legislation. When going into equity and inclusiveness there isn't a legislative solution (or there are, but they don't do much to fix the root of the problem). And people are already convinced that it's good in theory. The only solution is to make an incredible effort to actually help the communities that are raising the disadvantaged- an incredibly challenging task. Instead they maintained the existing approach of convincing and cancellations and DEI policies (in place of legislation).
I think the approach for liberalism to get back on track and achieve their goals is to do the hard work of helping disadvantaged children. If you want to make a difference, the Big Brothers Big Sisters program is a program that helps things at their root- improving the support structure of children in need.
This is a silly straw man argument with lots of claims and little evidence supporting them.
Few things are as performative as venture capitalists aligning their politics with the upcoming government.
I read it more as finally being safe to share his views without gross retaliation leading to a complete excommunication from every professional venture he's involved in. The powers have tilted in such a way that people no longer have to hide their true feelings. Refreshing, really.
Not even wrong
> The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case.
This seems like a good argument. It's very clear that 'wokeness'/political correctness is more about fixating on syntax (the literal words used) over semantics (the intention of the speaker). But in my book, it's the intention that matters — in fact I'd argue it's the only thing that matters. If you're choosing to wilfully misinterpret and be offended by something someone innocently said, that's completely on you. We shouldn't celebrate the act of taking offence, but at the same time we should all make an effort not to accidentally create it. Why are people who can do both seemingly so rare?
This article puts in words what I have been thinking for some time. I can't comment on the theory of when and where wokeness starts, but I can relate to people I have had experience with, especially online, especially in academic contexts, that readily correct innocuous words or jokes which were perfectly fine until yesterday, extracting the word or part of the concept out of the context, and pointing out how politically backwards you are, with added crucification from supporters.
I am coming from a left-wing perspective: always voted left and very supportive of fights for social justice, which is also why it makes me angry when the language police comes to shut me up and call me names that I am definitely not.
I think PG is right in many aspects: it's a sort of empty moralism, a way to signal virtue based on an arbitrary, ever-changing set of rules. The intention is to be inclusive but it ends being snobbish and exclusive. I hope that PG is also right about this attitude -or fashion- to be on the retreat, especially if we want to get serious about social justice again.
The timing makes me think that its just another rich guy re-aligning himself with Trump.
If this is the case it's interesting to see how each different tech figure expresses this fealty.
This post feels like Paul Graham is another billionaire(or multi-milionaire, whatever) to confess his past sins in attempt to win a seat in Trump's administration....
There were some interesting points, thanks for sharing.
One of the fallouts from this movement, is that the identity of the groups of people “wokeness” (sorry, I am using terms from his article) claimed to protect, are now intrinsically linked to this movement without their consent.
I am politically progressive, but strongly believe in free speech especially when it comes to science and research. But as a trans person, I do genuinely need help sometimes to overcome folks biases, since we make up less than 1% of the population.
My fear now is that social-justice warriors might have unintentionally made things even more difficult and complicated for me, because what I do to survive is intrinsically linked to a modern political movement.
Hopefully something that will be considered, for folks against dogmatism/puritanism who still understand bias :(
ahhhahahahaha saw the title then saw who wrote it hahahaha.
anti-woke people are more annoying than the people they criticize. yawing on like a broken robot. this is one of PG's longest essays which should say a lot about somebody who has written such great, tight, concise essays about startups.
i will not be reading this. compact has a better-written reactionary pov about wokeness if you want to read it (i don't recommend that one either though. honestly i recommend reading american history instead of some white dude's reactionary "a history of wokeness" blog post)
PG would have done well to read this rather good Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
> What does it mean now? [...] > An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
sure yup. Performative social justice bad. Now lets continue reading and see what PG thinks is performative.
> I saw political correctness arise. When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.
> There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a "hostile environment."
> In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia
> Another factor in the rise of wokeness was the Black Lives Matter movement, which started in 2013 when a white man was acquitted after killing a black teenager in Florida.
> Similarly for the Me Too Movement, which took off in 2017 after the first news stories about Harvey Weinstein's history of raping women. It accelerated wokeness
> In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video. At this point the metaphorical fire became a literal one, as violent protests broke out across America.
note: it's ok PG, you can say the cop murdered him. no one will cancel it for you (except maybe the right).
Wow you're right PG, all of this IS performative, because none of it has actually helped anyone you know and respect. It's just helped women, POC, LGBT etc.
TL;DR; PG like most billionaires hates when anyone like him is held accountable, would rather see humanity suffer than not be able to say whatever he wants.
> Thanks to Sam Altman [...] for reading drafts of this.
Ftfg.
Call me woke, but I feel like I’d be an idiot not to read between the lines here. Graham was very careful to mention acquittal when discussing the event that led to the formation of BLM, then very careful to avoid Chauvin’s conviction when he got to Floyd, in the same article where he argued against the stigmatization of the word negro. I think that’s a very unlikely framing to use if your goal is legitimate exploration.
I feel like with something this transparent, the sides are already drawn, and you either agree with Graham’s loosely disguised opinions or don’t, and this sorta makes the supposed purpose, to analyze the origins of wokeness, a pointless sidequest. I don’t particularly like moralizing lefties, but this isn’t a proper, objective analysis.
So now the ones who want to preserve the constitution and the democratic processes (aka by demanding peaceful handover of power instead of hanging the Vice President), are woke.
Strong Weimar vibes from our billionaires.
> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
You mean how twitter is censoring users who use "cracker" but not those who use the N-word.
All of "wokeness", "social justice", etc, when you look at the "forest not the trees" ends up pretty simple:
One group of people is saying: "This hurts, please stop", to which the other group says: "No".
So the first goes back to the drawing board to come up with reasons, theories, explanations, convincing arguments... and you get things like critical race theory, systemic *isms, etc.
That's pretty much it. Sure, there's other bits in there - about accomplishing the "stop", or about handling emotions around blame, or about handling your own hurt, etc - but, at the end of the day?
It's really just people saying "this hurts, please stop", and what forms around the response when the response is "No".
> One group of people is saying: "This hurts, please stop"
But the entire article you're criticizing can be summed up as "wokeness hurts, please stop". To which you say, "No".
As an extreme outsider (and mostly emotionally uninvested) to this whole scene, and having read a few of the most popular articles, I've always taken Paul Graham to be an intelligent and articulate person. This article is has made me really reevaluate my judgement.
I'm open to thinking about and discussing the points he is raising, but his arguments and the presentation feel weird and flimsy. Lots of anecdata, cherry-picked history, bad arguments propped up by debatable ideas presented as facts. And weird, almost sociopathic lack of empathy (eg: the 2020 "a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video" event)?
I mean, sure aggressive policing of speech and performance in social media is somewhat dumb, but any normal mind should be able to look behind the overreaction and realise that the underlying issues raised are valid and pressing.
Is article is just a performance piece in preparation for the incoming regime?
The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk does a really good job of tracing the history of "woke". In particular he does a good job of not lumping woke in with all left ideas.
If you're being a dick then someone will call you out for it. They can do that. You can get hung up on them being woke and woke being the problem but you were still a dick.
- a dick
Oh boy.
The timing on when this essay is being published is interesting. Are all the tech billionaires falling in line before the next administration takes over? Also, let this be a lesson that no matter how “brilliant” and rich someone is, they can have comically bad takes.
Seeing as how the left lost all three branches of government in the last election, isn't it now "politically correct" to be non "woke"?
Sorry, but at this point I don't think this article is appropriate for this website
Additionally, what's with the amount of US politics discussion increasing lately
It's not increasing - whatever you're seeing is most likely random fluctuation. HN's approach to political stories was established a long time ago and we aren't changing it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
This article reads like a just-so story. Sounds plausible, but there's so much wiggle room for the narrative. And the "solutions" to wokeness he wrote left me puzzled, questioning whether the issues he paints were thought through. He mentions two solutions to wokeness: treat wokeness like a religion and submit it to "customs", and "fight back." So... essentially fight emotivism with emotivism. What does it mean to fight back and submit to customs other than perpetuation the same thing that's being criticized.
There's a guy on X named Gad Saad writing a book called "suicidal empathy". I think this term captures it better than "wokeness".
Do I want to read an essay about PG yapping about wokeness? Is this a realistic conversation engendering 1500 comments and 500 points? Why?
When I see someone use that word, it's almost always a clear knee-jerk reaction to:
- Media featuring women who aren't exclusively an attractive love interest or a very minor character
- Media featuring non-white or non-heterosexual people in major roles
I find it difficult to have any rational discussion of this topic because it always gets drowned out by overwhelming racism and sexism. You can't talk about overcorrection or virtue signalling without an army of angry white guys present who watch hours of "(some guy) DESTROYS wokeness with FACTS and LOGIC" on youtube every day.
That said, compared to disinformation and identity politics, this is a non-issue. It's a convenient topic to focus the anger and time of straight white men so they don't notice how billionaires and opportunistic politicians are taking their futures away while pretending to care about "free speech". This will have huge consequences not just for victims of racism and sexism, but literally everyone who isn't filthy rich.
Whole article on the word "woke" and no references to Erykah Badu. I don't think he knows what the word means.
"Social justice" is a perversion of justice. Eastern Europe and other countries that tried communism used social justice as an excuse to eradicate middle and upper classes through mass murders, incarceration, confiscation of property, denial of access to education or higher-paying jobs, and promotion of lower classes to the levels of their incompetence.
No surprise that Paul is on the Elon, Mark, Trump side of things — like 99% of the American rich.
> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
In my personal experience, after Elon bought Twitter and implemented his policies, I have seen an influx of Hitler quotes and literal Nazi propoganda (advocating for the Final Solution, etc.). I literally had to leave Twitter recently because it was mentally draining to have to argue with someone over why the Holocaust was bad.
I feel like this is the most neutral, correct take on "wokeness" I've ever read on the internet. Good job!
even though I agree with much of his commentary, the piece that's missing is in the questions: were you principled and brave? how were you an example?
I know what I did, and some of it is in my comment history on this site. but I think the whole episode was a failure of moral courage. sure, it was the woke, but really, it was us. I think anyone feeling more free to speak now needs to reflect on that. Watching Zuck on Rogan was refreshing and hopeful, but that (very Harvard) oblivious affect that blows with the wind is not a foundation on which to rebuild the culture.
there's a very compelling take from the woke, which summarizes as, "you don't get to say mean and dumb shit without a cost anymore, and we're not bearing the costs of your culture that is set up to exclude us." This must be heard, and most criticisms of the totalitarian moment that seized our culture overlook that this argument was the kernel of truth that anchored the system of chaos and lies that followed.
to most of them I would respond, "you othered yourselves and when adults wouldn't listen to you, you organized to terrorize kids about their 'privilege.'" however, for our civilization to survive, there is a social re-integration of a lot of people that needs to be done so that there is an us again, and a sense of our shared protagonism.
I'm glad PG, Andreesen, Zuck, Musk, and others are addressing this stuff. Elon's massive gambit and persistent leadership, and Zuck hiring Dana White for the Meta board are very good starts.
If you want to be a part of rebuilding after this dark period, ask yourself if you had courage when it was hard, and reflect on when you didn't so that you don't fail like that again.
I did, and do, and each day I pay the price and then some.
Free speech and research is critical in order for our society to thrive. That said, it is not mutually exclusive with helping folks that need a little help to integrate and contribute when they really want to? It’s sad to see changes that helped, getting thrown out for its association with a social craze.
I find it hilarious that the prophet of modern Startup Culture and its subsequent proliferation of Y Combinator/FAANG cult practices (e.g. growth at all costs or practising agile as a copy-cat set of misunderstood tech rituals) is blind to fact that the only ones proselytising about "wokeness" these days are the same ones trying to outrage you about it (i.e. Fox News and Elon Musk) in order to distract you from the fact that wealth and resources are being hoarded by the very same companies/individuals.
Just call it "The International Woke" already. It's what this is getting at, isn't it?
It was a good analysis but definitely longer than it should have been to communicate the came thing.
A glaring omissions is overlooking the origin of the term "woke" in the context it is being used today.
It was around 2010 as a rallying call for black folk to be aware of being taking for a fool. Then the Occupy Protests and Black Lives Matter came next and as usual it was hijacked by more savvy operators.
Actually having a substantive argument about right and wrong is fraught, and so it's much easier to hide behind a combination of tone policing and armchair psychoanalysis of your opponents.
Better to accuse your (imaginary) interlocutor of being a moralist, a meaningless term that tells me much more about your feelings on being "told what to do" than it does about your actual values.
The origin of woke is not the alt-right's pejorative, nor the thing being lampooned.
It used to mean the more literal "open your eyes." As in, pay attention to the propaganda/scam/traps that you face every day.
Ironically, (or perhaps intentionally) it's been completely co-opted to the point that it's impossible to advise others to "stay woke."
A well-considered essay from PG. I thought this part, discussing a practical approach to dealing with disagreement of beliefs, was particularly insightful:
> Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.
> If we're not sure what to do about any particular manifestation of wokeness, imagine we were dealing with some other religion, like Christianity. Should we have people within organizations whose jobs are to enforce woke orthodoxy? No, because we wouldn't have people whose jobs were to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Should we censor writers or scientists whose work contradicts woke doctrines? No, because we wouldn't do this to people whose work contradicted Christian teachings. Should job candidates be required to write DEI statements? Of course not; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs. Should students and employees have to participate in woke indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No, because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way about their religion.
For better or worse, I don't think much practical possibility stems from this insight, and I wish PG had considered the possibility that the enforcement of some orthodoxy is unavoidable, and that the liberal environment he's describing is a vacuum into which some orthodoxy will inevitably insert itself.
I guess pg might have power to implement this by dictating to his companies' HR leadership through the CEOs/boards. As for the rest of us...
It's interesting that pg doesn't connect the type of thinking and indoctrination he sees in wokeness with similar types of thinking and indoctrination we currently see in followers of Trump. Crowds of people holding up "mass deportation now" signs, the governor of Texas ordering flags at full mast for the inauguration in the middle of a period of mourning [1], Republican politicians refusing to say whether or not Trump lost the 2020 election [2], Republican state legislatures trying to minimize mentions of LGBTQ topics in the classroom. Not only is much of it performative, as he complains about in the essay, but it has the feel of religion more than just a political movement. It almost seems like one could rewrite this essay with the focus on Trump instead of wokeness.
This part in particular seems misguided if only because pg fails to recognize that "the next thing" is already here and wearing a red MAGA hat.
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because there will be a next thing.
[1] https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-orders-flags...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-still-t-trump-lost-17...
With this coordinated oligarchic turn to the right I finally feel very progressive again.
If woke people are performative... then what is this incoherent nonsense meant to be?
woke wasn't bad in the beginning, but it became more powerful than needed and that power was abused. When you get people to rename universities and streets you grew up intimately with, it's very annoying.
> Article titled "The Origins of Wokeness"
> Doesn't actually discuss the origins of wokeness
> Claims to be against male chauvinism
> Publish date timed within days of right wing male chauvinist being inaugrated as American president
> Article is full of right wing male chauvinist talking points
> Author moved from United States to England in 2016, the same year that right wing male chauvinist became president for the first time
Hmmmm...
Incredible article, thank you for sharing. The parallels to unwelcome and unsolicited religious proselytizing is something I've been calling out for years, and ironically have often been met with extreme hatred and condemnation in response.
Never in my life did I think that nearly every institution, company, corporation, (you name it), would compel and coerce people into following a narrow set of societal rules that appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and grated firmly against a functional, albeit imperfect, status quo -- most of which was accepted and even celebrated by most people in Western nations.
What's terrifying to me is how acceptable it became to write and defend academic literature around these manufactured problems, specifically for "prigs" to justify their abhorrent behavior towards other people.
I'm glad more people are finally willing to have an honest discussion about this, without immediately labeling it a "right-wing talking piece", as too many so lazily love to do.
It's magnificently Paul Graham that he wrote some incredibly long essay called "The Origins Of Wokeness" without ever discussing, the origins of wokeness. Whatever you think about the current situation of "wokeness", the fact that pg manages to never once mention the origin of the term, going back to Marcus Garvey and Leadbelly, speaks to pg's monumental intellectual incuriosity.
[flagged]
That Elon/Twitter part was really out of place, like a VPN ad integration in the middle of a Youtube video. Attributing the rise of wokeness to students becoming deans and administrators sounds kinda dubious but maybe, he could use more evidence there.
Otherwise a great piece.
I want to see a reddit clone, except users can only downvote
I wonder what would happen
“Can you believe it? That colored boy wants me to call him ‘mister!’”
IMO people who whine about wokeness or, more broadly, political correctness, just don't like it when they're called out for being insensitive pricks, or for perpetuating the garbage that marginalized groups have to put up with every day.
Sure, there are people who preach wokeness and empathy and whatnot who are indeed actually prigs. That's true of every movement, good and bad. But as usual, those are the small vocal minority, while most of us just want society as a whole to stop shitting on people just because they're different from whatever the mainstream du jour is.
The blowback against wokeness is mostly due to conservatives hijacking the term and over and over and over using it to describe only the bad behavior they see, while ignoring that the bad behavior is in the minority.
I used to really enjoy Graham's writing, but this is rubbish.
Paul Graham is a billionaire frantically trying to fingerpoint and blame other people when his ilk have had an outsized influence on politics and business for years and we're no better off.
oh no
People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon. Perhaps the author is just more aware of it now, or modern technology has pushed it deeper into our lives, but it's not new.
And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue. If they care about it.
Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe? Now you're just being performative about performative people.
Perhaps the best way to lower the number of performative individuals is to... you know... resolve their issues?
> Annoyed people are whining about civil rights?
Nobody is annoyed people are whining about civil rights. We are annoyed that people a) are whining about non-issues that they have gone out of their way to be offended by, and b) are demanding that the rest of us change the world based on their blown out of proportion views.
>People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon
People have always done lots of things. The degree, intensity, and manner with which they do them varies and matters.
>And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue
They could be already focusing on the issue. Or they could be ignoring it. That's their decision. Perhaps they have problems of their own to tackle first. Nobody has to be an activist about some cause just because another wants them to.
The problem with performative justice is that (when the performative types get enough power) its bizarre demands and rituals are imposed onto and everybody else, with little recourse.
Another problem is that the performative justice diverts resources to tackle the performative insignificant or detrimental aspects instead of the real issue.
>Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe?
Wouldn't solve the issues described in the article caused by performative justice, from stiffling academic discussion, to creating an outrage factory that diverts the press from its mission and polarises society to a detrimental effect.
> People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue.
You can do both: focus on fixing performative "justice" in order to fix the issue. Particularly the part that is spinning your arguments and using them for injustice, making them appear weaker.
There's a strategy: support flawed people on your team, because they'll help your team overall. And sometimes this is good, even necessary, e.g. voting for the less-bad candidate in an election. But sometimes there are teammates who are counter-productive even for their own goals. You don't even have to eject these people, but you have to correct them, or they'll make your team worse than if they didn't exist.
When I hear conservative arguments, they rarely if ever target the points I think are reasonable and obvious. They target points that I think aren't worth defending (e.g. "illegal immigrant who commit armed robbery not deported"), and points that I think are worth defending but require nuance (which can be defended with some form of "you're correct, although..." to reveal and protect the reasonable part). Conservatives win voters by targeting the weakest points, which just about anyone previously uninformed would side against; "performative justice" creates most of these points, and attacks against attacks against performative justice protect them.
It's like a bottleneck or unstable pillar in a building. You don't want to divert everyone to fixing it, because the overall pipeline or building is the ultimate priority, but it has to be addressed. Likewise, fixing the issue is still the ultimate priority, and I don't expect everyone to address performative justice, but somebody has to do it.
// Now you're just being performative about performative people. //
Nice ricochet.
I'm grateful to Paul Graham for actually giving a definition of "woke". Really, this is the first anti-woke essay I've seen which actually tells us exactly what the author is complaining about.
And it makes it rather abundantly clear why nobody else has given a definition of exactly what the author is complaining about.
Actually, the origin of “wokeness”, the term, is right-leaning bigots who need to discount any grievance by any group of people who claim they might just possibly be suffering some systemic disadvantages in this country.
Nope. It was a term of respect and affirmation in the African American community first, and seems to have been successfully expropriated and rebranded.
the origin of wokeness was childish gambino's 2016 single "redbone" from the album "awaken my love", in this essay i will. . .
Republicans spent a lot of money and energy to poison the word "woke".
I don't know if Paul is ignorant or evil.
But an article such as his on this topic that doesn't mention the machine is not factual.
You would think these tech oligarchs might be concerned with some other problem facing th world. This is the only one they seem to care about and much of it just seems like fragile ego.
I did not expect CEOs / industry titans to fall in line with the new regime so quickly, in the few weeks since Trumps election most tech leaders have completely changed their public stance on these topics. Why are they so afraid? Or are they simply happy to drop the charade as it seems clear the wind blows the other way now?
I wasn’t feeling very positive about all the talk about making the world a better place but recently I’ve become quite cynical, it’s really just about the money it seems. I even find this whole hacker ethic quite stupid now, basically all that ethos about free software was just instrumented by corporations to extract wealth, and now that AI is seemingly around the corner they can finally drop most people building the software for them, as that was always the biggest cost center anyway.
IMO most of these CEOs are not motivated by wokeness or anti wokeness. They are motivated by money, and the freedom to take whatever action they deem appropriate both inside and outside their companies.
Biden was anti-monopoly and Trump is pro-corporate, so these CEOs are just naturally aligning according to their own motivations. And like all people, sometimes they take on the other priorities of the group, to feel that they fit in.
There's left-wing orthodoxy.
There's also right-wing orthodoxy.
On the internet right-wing orthodoxy is the prevailing one, and it's also better funded (and more politically connected).
You are not a rebel if you support the oligarchs.
I don't disagree with a lot of what he says here, but I feel like too many people in Silicon Valley are hyper-fixated on the conformity and enforcement coming from the left, while ignoring and even stoking the flames of anger and conformity on the right. Particularly his points on news, because much of the news is now heavily skewed to the right.
PG would do well to reflect similarly on the rise of the right wing equivalents and recognize that they're the ones actively stymying progress on many of the critical issues of our time.
it's not about the "meaning" of the word but more the way people use it and its connotations.
it is often code for a racist or homophobic sentiment the speaker doesn't want to own up to.
when people say "things are getting too woke" - let's be honest, they are often saying that people who were once unfairly marginalized (black people, gay people, women) are getting less marginalized.
People on the left don't like to admit it, but a lot of the left wing activism we see today growing out from the 1960s was directly influenced by the Soviet Union and it's "active measures" programs
According to the KGB defector Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, the Soviets actively encouraged colleges to focus on studies away from science and engineering, and also encouraged the "break down" of things like "religion" and "family" to make for more fertile soil for the inevitable communist takeover. At best such measures were focused on encouraging anti-nuclear activism to reduce the US capacity for nuclear retaliation in the event of a total war. At worst it led to Cultural Revolution style critiques of college faculty. Despite the Soviet Union being gone, the cultural aspects of these efforts live on (mostly in Sociology departments)
People on the right don't like to admit it, but a ton of the right wing "activism" we see TODAY is from modern Russian efforts to try the same sort of interference on the right (and still to a lesser extent on the left). There was no one from the 80s more disallusioned by the old Soviet tactics using left wing actors than Putin (who was in contact with left wing Red Army Faction terrorist groups in Germany). He's sought to try the same tactics out on the right which has been incredibly receptive to conspiracy theories of all kinds.
There's an active campaign to erode the public's faith in science (anti-vaccine movements, ivermectin being a cure-all for everything) and journalism. Spread through channels like Rogan's podcast, and perhaps even Mr. Musk himself who spreads propaganda about big lies like "Ukraine having some sort bioweapons program" unquestioningly. Gradually the goal is not to get people to believe in something, but rather to get them to not know what to believe.
The American left is too distracted by culture wars bullshit to counter blatant propaganda, and people like Paul Graham are too enamored by the success of Musk et al to see what is directly in front of them.
Good lord I cannot stand the tech-bro echo chamber.
They're just as self righteous as the "woke" just much less self aware.
Oh man … stay in your lane. Capitalism. The human condition can seem very hopeless, for sure.
Read this and understand one thing, you being anti-woke is not fighting the elite, fighting a cabal of anti-freedom leftists.
You are sided with the billionaires, politicians and justices of the Supreme Court that hold virtually all the power in this country. You are on the side of Putin and the Iranian regime, both calling out "western degeneracy".
"Wokeness" is nothing but a scarecrow used to discredit any and all progressive ideas. In the name of "anti-wokeness" women are dying of complications, giving birth to the child of their rapists. LGBT people have to hide in the closet, from fear of repercussions to being who they are, enduring massive psychological pain.
As a remedy, I would like you to hold one conversation with a trans guy/girl, hear them complain about the harassment they receive almost daily, about how difficult it was to have anyone recognize their illness and receive treatment, and realize that they are simply trying to live a life in this messed up world, like you and me.
"Wokeness" is what results in horrifying outcomes of policy like this:
https://4w.pub/male-inmate-charged-with-raping-woman-inside-...
This is a direct result of "progressive" beliefs being translated into policy.
It should be no surprise that people start to question and reject these beliefs when they begin to understand the harm they cause.
I have read this text, a treatise on what PG calls “wokeness,” and what many in my lifetime would have called simple human decency, or perhaps its performance—a pair of very different things. The essay denounces the manner in which social justice can become a strict set of rules, a shallow costume worn by self-appointed arbiters of morality. In reading these arguments, I find myself wondering about the deeper currents that made such performances necessary in the first place, and what underlying truths might be sacrificed when so many focus upon appearances instead of realities.
This nation has a long history of clinging to illusions, and that is not solely a white American failing—though it has cost Black Americans dearly. In Nashville, where I spent my earliest years trying to find the contours of my own identity, I realized that there were always people ready to lecture me about how I should dress, speak, or pray. None of that, however, changed the reality of my father’s income, or the conditions of the neighborhood around us, or the power structure that deemed our lives less worthy. So the mere spectacle of moral purity could never deliver us from oppression—only committed, genuine love of one’s fellow human being can begin that labor.
The essay’s admonition against “performative” justice is not without merit; any moral crusade that pays no heed to the living, breathing conditions of the oppressed cannot stand. But if I may say so, there is a danger here, too. If one becomes preoccupied with the shallowness of some so-called “woke” individuals, one might forget that certain communities do not have the luxury of retreating from the harsh facts of racism or sexism or homophobia. Those who have spent generations fighting for the right even to speak are indeed sensitive about words, for words have been used to degrade, exclude, and dehumanize. And if their vigilance sometimes appears shrill, we would do well to remember what America has demanded of them.
I would remind PG that while a fixation on language can obscure the underlying injustice, so too can dismissing that fixation blind us to the pain that gives rise to it. For every “prig” who delights in moral bullying, there are many more souls demanding that America acknowledge and atone for its long and brutal history of denial. These men and women—students and professors, activists and ordinary people—are not simply hungry for new battles; they have inherited a centuries-old conflict between a democracy’s exalted promises and its dreadfully unfulfilled duties.
We live, after all, in the aftershock of slavery, the betrayal of Reconstruction, the racial terror that thrived long after the Emancipation Proclamation. We have seen so many movements come and go, each bearing the hope of a more honest confrontation with power. Some movements will indeed trade genuine moral work for the easy gratification of punishing superficial infractions. But let us not confuse a moment’s self-righteous fervor with the profound and continuing necessity of building a world in which human dignity is honored. Let us not conflate every cry of outrage with mere vanity. After all, an anguished cry can be genuine proof that one is alive, and that something in this society continues to break the heart.
It is not enough to scorn “wokeness” as though it were merely the mania of a new generation. We should rather ask: Why do certain people still feel so powerless that they rely on punishing speech transgressions instead of forging true solidarity? Where does this anger come from, and what truths do they feel are perpetually denied? If our citizens are turning to moral performance instead of moral substance, we must question our entire social order, lest we merely stumble from one hollow righteousness to another.
I believe our task, now as ever, is to recognize when the clamor about words and rules drowns out the deeper music of genuine empathy, justice, and hope. But we must not abandon the moral struggle itself, for it is older than any catchphrase and deeper than any university policy. We must refuse both the tyranny of empty slogans and the tyranny of despair. Only in that refusal—dangerous, uncertain, and profoundly human—will we begin to shape an America not built upon illusions but upon the sacred fact of each person’s worth.
The rich are choosing sides for Trump era, and this is just a white flag raised.
wokeness will be discussed until morale improves... (or better said easier to rule and win elections while the masses are fighting the non-existent "culture war" and have no time to look at real problems (which whoever is ruling has no interest in solving..)
A big swing and a miss by Paul Graham for a season-losing strikeout. Above all, he begs the question in the original sense of "beg the question" - he defines the terms "woke" and "wokeness" by themselves. He uses the secondary and willful redefinitions of those who would permanently corrupt the terms. Further, he excludes the original and true meanings of "woke" and "wokeness" by denying that they are still in play or still in use merely on his say-so, perhaps because that conveniently fits his narrative. Excluding contradicting data is how you corrupt an analysis to match the thesis statement. Additionally, matching the terms to anything to do with "political correctness" is the same: borrowing the right's redefinitions in a circular question-begging fashion. It's also all rather unoriginal and tired. We've had many decades of this anti-political correctness sophistry if not so well-written. It's cud pre-chewed by a thousand dull-eyed ruminants. What is accomplished here? I think we've only learned about Paul Graham and it isn't flattering.
Eh, it’s par for the course for a blog post—some good, some inchoate, a little wrong.
I appreciate having the word “prig” to replace criticism of both wokeness and the new right Silicon Valley’s Musk-Trump worship.
So now we have pg virtue-signalling his fealty to the other old rich white guys. Great. Just great.
The only people who use the term "woke" are social conservatives, and those to their right. Everyone else talks about "justice" and "equality" and "awareness". The woke problem is a conservative problem.
Bingo! This accusation is a confession.
And what are people supposed to do about injustice? Resolve it without talking about it?
woke is over, now. Also Zuckerberg changed music
To me this seems to be the most rambling, disorganized essay I've seen him write. I normally appreciate how he structures his arguments and in this one, I struggled to get past the first few sentences.
Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way.
Wouldn't calling some a prig or woke, saying that the people are "self-righteously moralistic people who behave as if superior to others," in a way, be demonstrating the same behavior?
Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?
In that vein, I don't know what Paul's motivations were to write this post and I don't know why he lacked the normal structure with headings and such, I just hope that he's doing OK. I'm trying to understand the feelings he's experiencing, and maybe if I'm able to get through his writing I'll have a better sense. He seems a bit distraught, frustrated, ranting, not sure.
> Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way.
Just mentioned this in another comment, but historically the only people who've actually identified as "woke" are black civil rights activists, who used it to mean that someone was aware and informed. I've never seen it used in any other context (or really by other people) until the latest culture war generals co-opted it as an insult for progressives and minorities.
> Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?
You would hope so, but I'm guessing the people who use civil rights-era slang to belittle activists probably don't care about the humanity those activists are trying to highlight and fight for.
The biggest flaw imo was the deafening silence around how "wokeness" is used as a tool by corporate Dems/Repubs and state agents of capital interests to distract from material issues and keep people divided over "culture war" / identity politics issues instead of uniting their focus on the former.
No mention of how the recent resurgence coincided with the Occupy Wall St protests.
No mention of how it was used to dismantle the Bernie Sanders campaigns.
Etc.
This is a weird hill to die on for a billionaire. Is wokeness a problem? If I recast it as an assault on free speech, sure. But exactly how bad is this assault? I sure hear a lot of really rich people talk about wokeness, despite the proclaimed suppression of their speech. And is it as much of a problem as racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of bigotry endemic in our society?
I just picked this one at random today; took about a minute to find something: https://www.startribune.com/mom-ids-son-as-teen-left-with-br...
I’m relieved to read that racism isn’t as bad as I think it is.
Reading Paul Graham's musings on "wokeness" is a complete waste of time. Please find the words of other better informed people to read, who have an actual interest in addressing problems like racism and sexism.
Also, for all his complaining about people being performative, he commits the sin himself. He is doing the dance conservative fascists want him to. Paul, do us all a favor, and just skip to the ending we all know you're heading for: fall in line with Trump, lock arms with your fellow oligarchs, and take obvious active measures to suppress any threats your wealth and power.
Can someone steelman (or just represent) the argument of why Bud Light supporting Dylan Mulvaney is wokeness and not classical liberalism/free speech?
https://thecritic.co.uk/dylan-mulvaney-did-not-share-our-gir...
This article explains why.
That ad campaign was enabled by the 1st amendment but not motivated by it. You’re conflating why they wanted to do it with why they could do it
[flagged]
"No doubt he voted for Trump."
It must take a special effort to be this wrong. PG has vocally advocated for the Democratic candidate for at least the last 3 elections.
we’re flagging pg now?
Hopefully flagging is based on the content and not the writer.
This sort of thing makes me nervous. When the owner of a forum finds the masses don't unflaggingly support his take on something, what's the reaction?
Elon has recently shown us what happens on Twitter when you don't tow the line. I don't know that Zuck is meddling behind the scenes, but it could just be that he doesn't telegraph it as boldly as Musk.
Yes, why not? Why should he get a free pass for his bad takes?
> we're flagging pg now?
I assume it's because the term "woke" will almost always derail a thread.
[flagged]
And why does he post this on January 2025, not January 2024 or 2023?
Why did he magically started calling out wokeness issue only after Trump's win?
Weak
Wow! This is basically a master class in performative mediocrity.
Rewriting history was never more fun!
It’s simple, if you can do a special rain dance that makes you not have to draw back your bottom line, you will do it every day of the week whether you’re a billion dollar corporation or a 500 year old university
a lot of people here don't realize they are woke prigs
Really disappointing article, full of disingenuousness and strawmen and a few interesting points as well. For the record, while I'm on the progressive side of things, I certainly do not agree with all of the various viewpoints and practices ascribed to "wokeism."
He seems close to misunderstanding a pivotal thing, but glosses over it:
[Priggish] was not the original meaning of woke,
but it's rarely used in the original sense now.
Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.
Instead of going out into the world and quietly
helping members of marginalized groups, the
politically correct focused on getting people in
trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
I mean, I have certainly done both. There really isn't a conflict there.
Another, similar false dichotomy:
The danger of these rules was not just that
they created land mines for the unwary, but that
their elaborateness made them an effective
substitute for virtue.
It's the kind of sentence that sounds good if you don't think about it -- because of course doing good things is better than simply making rules -- but this is such an amateurish and false dichotomy.
This is about as sensical as saying that we shouldn't have code review, or coding standards, we should just focus on writing code in our own personal little vision of what good code is. Yes we should write "good code" on an individual basis, and yes we should (as a team working on a project together) have standards and reviews. If a particular team member is contributing zero code and doing nothing but toxic reviews, sure, that is a problem but that is a problem with that individual and not some kind of inherent paradox.
Some things can only be effectively tackled with both individual effort and community/systemic effort. If you feel that things like racism, sexism, etc do not fall into that category... well, I strongly disagree, but I wish people would simply say that directly than ranting and raving about this bogeyman of modern "wokeness" that is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- a mindbendingly nonspecific term. Talk ideals and policies.
There are also some real zingers in his unexplored trains of thought here. He notes that "wokeness" in academia originated in the social sciences and not, say, mathematics or engineering. He then goes on to concoct some explanation based on folks from the Sixties getting into academia and not a far more obvious explanation: our modern understanding of the ills and boons of society originated from the sciences focused on studying society.
(Sure, Paul, the physics department didn't come up with woke. They were too busy overlooking Richard Feynman hitting on every undergrad woman that came through his department).
FWIW, I also saw political correctness "rise." In my experience, it rose in the computer science department discovering that when they adjusted their approach to incoming undergrad students based on observations from the social sciences that systemic sexism was bending the nature of their pre-undergrad education, the women performed better in the computer science undergrad curriculum. There's Paul's missing evidence from the "hard sciences."
This article was written due to recent events.
- IMO it should've acknowledged that there is genuine "intolerance" of foreigners/gays/trans, not the speech/writing you hear about in the news, but specifically the physical attacks and legal discrimination in third-world countries and rarely by extremists in first-world countries. And that seemingly-mild speech can lead to blatant hate speech, then physical attacks and legal discrimination; but it's not inevitable, and analogously when society swings to the center, it can swing too far to the other side, but maybe there's friction that makes it swing less and pulls it closer to an ideal equilibrium.
- It also states that Twitter doesn't censor left-wingers, which is factually wrong, unless every case of journalists being suspended and links being auto-removed is made-up or overblown. 4chan is an example of true free speech (sans calls to violence etc.), but it doesn't help the argument for multiple reasons. I think it's too early to say that "wokeness" is being rolled back; the truth is, woke intolerance isn't as pervasive as people think it is, so you will always find examples of people who directly contradict it and prosper.
However,
I strongly agree with the core message: there will always be people who use "morals" to control others. Taken straight from the article: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce." The article applies this and the remaining parts to left-wing "social-justice warriors" but you can apply it to right-wing religious zealots.*
The reality of "free speech", "live-and-let-live", and other compromises, are that people use them for their own agenda, to get more control. But that's OK. One of the reasons we have as much free speech as we do today, is that there are groups from all sides pushing it for their own reasons, and within these groups there's an opening to express your opinion. The vast majority of people are more focused on helping themselves than they are hurting you, even when hurting you is on their agenda, which means you can benefit from compromising with even smart people who hate you.
* Also, Paul Graham isn't really saying anything that he hasn't before. See: https://paulgraham.com/heresy.html, https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html, and https://paulgraham.com/say.html, written in 2022, 2020, and 2004. For a different left-biased take, see https://paulgraham.com/pow.html, written in 2017. But even if he was, this response stands. You can pick decent messages even out of articles people far, far more "right-wing" say, although it's a lot harder, and unlike this one the message you pick out probably won't be what the writer intended.
I think it's interesting that pg references James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian in footnote 15.
These two (professional) philosophers are arguably the vanguard of philosophical opposition to identity politics; they have written extensively on it, tracing its ideological roots to Karl Marx and comparing it to the Maoist cultural revolution in China. (And it bears being said: they're certainly not prejudiced against any majority or minority group.)
Cant imagine a better person than Paul Graham to give us the history of the origins of the struggles various underprivileged groups have had over the recent decades.
Anyway the conservative reaction to “wokeness” (or “wokism” if youre an annoying european conservative) is way more annoying than “wokeness” ever was. And as far as I can tell its just them going “I am annoyed by these people so I am going to be a huge baby”
Like theres no material impact to them here. How much can a DEI team possibly cost? It’s just babies being babies.
Actually I’m going to take that back. There is a material impact to them but it is that they risk losing out by not being in Trump & friends good books. In that case Paul’s rant is not only wrong but it is hypocritical because this is just as performative! If not more! The billionaires are already the most privileged group!
> How much can a DEI team possibly cost?
I don't think opposition to "a DEI team" is about cost at all, it's about the fact that it's harmful to your company to hire and fire based on skin color or gender expression, or to harass and lecture people for not participating in the DEI religion enough. If I had a nickel for every hiring discussion I've been in where I felt pressured to thumbs-up someone with serious flaws just because we were below an unspoken but widely-understood quota, I'd have a lot of nickels.
The idea that we should pass over the best candidate if he's a certain color and pronoun, thinking that will right the wrong of centuries-old sins, that's the mind virus that some of us don't approve of.
If you want an example of why it's bad and dumb even if you're a progressive, our VP, a very unpopular candidate who ran a laughably failed campaign for president was undeniably chosen as VP for DEI reasons, then she couldn't be "passed over" when Biden changed his mind about running, due to optics, so she, a candidate who peaked at 17% in the 2019 primary, was installed as the nominee.* The DNC killed itself on the altar of DEI in this case, and then lashed out at everyone else saying things like "Latinx people are white supremacists!"
*Stipulated: Democrats have a massive shortage of popular national-level politicians, so obviously while Harris was a bad choice, I can't point to any guaranteed 'better' ones.
Not much I can say other than that was a disappointing piece of trash from Paul.
The whole tirade against wokeness by the far right is nothing more than a bizarre attempt to stigmatize those who want to improve things for segments of society.
A more legitimate article might have focused on tactics such as shaming and cancelling those who disagree which is problematic in many instances, but Graham paints with too broad of a brush and comes across as another conservative whose only interest is to discredit those who think differently.
> comes across as another conservative
Graham endorsed Harris.
The left needs to stop accusing other members of the left of being "far-right" everytime they dare to have a different opinion on a topic.
That tendency of the left to ostracise its own rather than engage in debate, is exactly what pushed people like Elon and Rogan away, along with much of the centre, and is exactly why Trump won.
on the other hand, throwing people under the bus is cheaper than spending $1M for the inauguration, you see the savvy investor!
[dead]
Fully responding to this takes more space than HN--very reasonably--allows. But here we go anyway.
> [A lot of takes on universities and journalism]
Universities and journalists became left-leaning because conservatives are wrong about almost everything. They were wrong about markets, sex, Iraq, financial regulation, climate change, al-Qaeda, race, China, Russia, health care, immigration, education, COVID, vaccines, masks, NATO, tax policy, tech policy, the Civil War, on and on and on. It's like someone's running an experiment on how many times you can be bafflingly wrong before people notice. Very few people can be both evidence-based--like most people in academia and journalism--and conservative.
> [I dislike cancel culture, it's performative, indicative of left-wind orthodoxy, and masks bad people]
- Almost no people have been canceled (more people have been killed by dogs).
- You are performatively writing a blog post. At least Steve Ballmer made a website. At least Steve Bannon has a podcast (and I guess ran a presidential campaign for at least a little while).
- You can't say your main issue is larping while also detailing how DEI is corrupting corporate and government hiring. Either it's real or it's not.
- The right has its own edge lord orthodoxy--some time in the "manosphere" would convince you if you need convincing. You can buy in by saying the N word publicly, by writing a blog post railing against wokeness, or changing your company's DEI and content moderation policies to favor the right. Well, I guess people saw right through that last one though.
- Being "the worst person in the world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than everyone who isn't" perfectly describes Donald Trump (or Andrew Tate, or David Duke).
But more broadly, we can lump all this (Larry Summers, etc.) under a pattern where a successful person confidently walks on to an issue where they're deeply ignorant, and assumes they can apply tools they're facile with to fix them. For Summers it was economics (in that keynote you referenced he made the bonkers argument that since the market hasn't corrected for discrimination it must not exist); for you and other SV VCs it's tech. Media studies and gender studies are complicated. I assure you smart people are working on them all the time. You need their help, not the other way around.
> The rise of social media and the increasing polarization of journalism reinforced one another. In fact there arose a new variety of journalism involving a loop through social media. Someone would say something controversial on social media. Within hours it would become a news story. Outraged readers would then post links to the story on social media, driving further arguments online. It was the cheapest source of clicks imaginable. You didn't have to maintain overseas news bureaus or pay for month-long investigations. All you had to do was watch Twitter for controversial remarks and repost them on your site, with some additional comments to inflame readers further.
This happened far more on the right than the left. You should visit sites like Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and Fox News.
> By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren't directly in the flow of the organization's work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it. These new administrators could often be recognized by the word "inclusion" in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an "inclusive language guide." [10]
I was pretty sure we'd get to the "communist Russia" part of the argument, but I can't say I'm not disappointed. The EEOC was established in 1965 "to administer and enforce civil rights laws against workplace discrimination." You're naive to this space, so let me tell you that one of the reasons women and members of other marginalized groups leave high-powered positions is discomfort in the workplace: microaggressions, stereotypes, etc. Simple policies like using "inclusive language" can go a long way towards making a workplace more hospitable to people you want to retain.
> [A lot of takes essentially on media studies]
The tension between "orthodoxy" and "free speech" is--I would hope obviously--facile. Let's think about some of the questions someone running a social media platform would ask:
- Can my users opine on the lab-leak hypothesis?
- Can my users opine on the Holocaust maybe not being real?
- Can my users opine on the sexuality of others?
- Can my users opine on my sexuality?
- Can my users opine on Paul Manafort being a Russian agent?
- Can my users post PII of others?
- Can my users talk up the benefits of poison (chemotherapy, nicotine)?
- Can my users brigade other users?
- Can my users track the location of my private jet at all times?
- Can my users opine on Matt Gaetz having had sex with a minor?
- Can my users blast these opinions to millions of people?
- Can my users write programs to blast these opinions to millions of people?
- Can my users hire influencers to blast these opinions to millions of people?
- Can I be lobbied to prioritize some opinions over others (sponsored posts, foreign governments, interest groups, etc.)
- Can I be made personally liable if I don't prioritize specific pieces of information (amber alerts, VAERS stats, violence against LGBTQ people, Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, how to make napalm)
> The number of true things we can't say should not increase. If it does, something is wrong.
Here are some true things:
- White men are responsible for the vast majority of white collar crime
- White men are responsible for the majority of US war crimes
- White men instituted the worst form of slavery the world's ever seen
- Men are responsible for the majority of fraud
- SV VCs are disproportionately responsible for fossil fuel consumption (data center go brrr)
- Men commit the majority of mass shootings in the US
- Europeans have killed far more Africans than Africans have killed Europeans
- Men are responsible for almost all rape
- Men are responsible for nearly all mass shootings
Should we start making policy on these kinds of things? Something like "men can't own firearms" or "white men can't be accountants" or "white men can't run businesses that receive government reimbursement" or "white men can't run US foreign policy" or... I honestly don't know what you'd do about the rape thing. Would we welcome it if some foreign country--say Russia--started paying influencers with huge reach on social media to push these policies? Would we defend these people's right to "free speech" as troll farm after troll farm pushes this agenda, after Bari Weiss and her ilk start pushing it, after SV VCs start advocating for it in their blogs?
"Free speech" sounds like a right, and it is, but it's much, much more of a responsibility. I don't expect your average person to understand "imminent lawless action" vs. "shouting fire in a crowded theater", or content-based vs. content-neutral jurisprudence. I don't expect them to understand the nuances of the Holocaust, gender studies, or epistemology. I do expect the owners of huge platforms to understand these things though. I expect smart, rich, educated people like you to understand them before trying to influence people with your platform. I earnestly implore you to do better.
Here's a ChatGPT rewrite, focusing on a different end of the political spectrum:
---
The word "puritan" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it might sound familiar. Google's version isn't bad: “A person with censorious moral beliefs, especially about pleasure and sexuality.” This sense of the word originated in the 16th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although *freedom conservatism* is a relatively recent phenomenon, it's just a modern iteration of an ancient habit.
There's a certain kind of person who is drawn to a rigid, dogmatic sense of virtue and demonstrates their superiority by policing anyone who steps out of line. Every society has these people. The only thing that changes is the rules they enforce. In Puritan New England, it was religious purity. In McCarthy's America, it was anti-communism. For the freedom conservatives, it’s about traditional values.
If you want to understand freedom conservatism, the question to ask isn’t why people act like this. Every society has moral busybodies. The question is, why are *our* moral busybodies obsessed with *these* ideas, at *this* moment?
The answer lies in the 1980s and 1990s. Freedom conservatism is a sequel to the culture wars, which started with Reagan's "family values" campaign and found new life in the early 2000s when people realized reality TV wasn't enough drama. Its second wind came with the rise of social media echo chambers, which peaked around the Great Meme Wars of the late 2010s.
What does freedom conservatism mean now? I’m often asked to define it by people who think it’s an empty buzzword, so here’s my attempt: *An aggressively performative devotion to traditional values.*
In other words, it’s people being puritans about old-fashioned ideals. The problem isn't traditional values themselves—family, patriotism, etc., have their place. The problem is the *performance.* Instead of quietly living their lives and, say, mowing their lawn while humming "God Bless America," freedom conservatives focus on getting people fired for not standing during the anthem.
And of course, freedom conservatism started in the best possible place for self-serious, inflexible ideology: academia. Did it begin in hard sciences, where people have to deal with facts? Of course not. It began in the cushy chairs of humanities departments, where abstract ideas about morality and society are debated without anyone worrying about inconvenient things like lab results.
Why did it happen in the 1980s and not earlier? Well, the answer is obvious: the hippies of the '60s got jobs. Radical students grew up, got tenure, and traded in their flower power for bow ties and flag pins. Now they were the Establishment they'd protested against, and they weren't about to let anyone disrespect their shiny new rules.
Suddenly, campus life wasn’t about free expression anymore. Now, students were encouraged to rat out professors who said something insufficiently patriotic or questioned the sanctity of heteronormative nuclear families. It was the Cultural Revolution, but make it apple pie.
And what about the rules of freedom conservatism? Oh, they’re a hoot. Imagine explaining to an alien why it’s okay to chant “freedom” while banning books. Or how “family values” means yelling at teenagers about abstinence, but having your own scandalous tabloid history is perfectly fine. The rules are neither consistent nor logical—they’re just a list of traps, perfectly designed for the self-righteous to trip others up.
Freedom conservatism thrives on outrage. And boy, does social media deliver. If outrage were a currency, Twitter would’ve been the new Fort Knox. Freedom conservatives figured out that they could rally mobs online to cancel anyone not adhering to the prescribed "values." Ironically, this led to the thing they claim to hate most: cancel culture.
And let’s not forget the administrators and HR departments hired to enforce this ideology in workplaces. Their job titles often feature words like "patriotism" or "family," but their real goal is to make sure you don’t say anything remotely critical about their flag collection or their favorite founding father.
The sad thing is that freedom conservatism is not going anywhere. The aggressively conventional-minded are like weeds—they’ll always find a crack in the pavement. But the key to stopping them is simple: stop letting them create new heresies. The next time someone tries to ban a book or a word in the name of protecting “values,” maybe, just maybe, we should push back.
Because when freedom conservatism—or any performative moralism—runs wild, the number of true things we can say shrinks. And that’s a loss for everyone, even the puritans."
I want to share a personal story.
I’m from Argentina. When I met my current wife, she volunteered at an orphanage. Her task was to take one of the children out for fun on weekends. It seemed simple, but it wasn’t. There, she met “A,” a 10-year-old girl. Some weekends with “A” were easy, but she was generally problematic. So, as we tried to understand what was happening to her, we learned a bit about her past.
Her mother was a drug addict and a criminal. Her father was likely her grandfather and was also in jail for various reasons, including abusing her.
We were heartbroken and tried to help, but we didn’t plan to adopt her. There are many other details, but I don’t want to bore you with the horrors. To summarize, this story shattered my naivety.
However, the story takes a positive turn. When Argentina legalized same-sex marriage, two women adopted “A.” It was the first adoption case involving a same-sex marriage in our country.
Things weren’t easy for them. We’re friends now and see each other occasionally. They transformed “A’s” life for good. But it’s not like the movies. Once a child has endured such trauma, recovery can take years, and sometimes, it’s not even possible.
Nowadays, we have a president in Argentina who constantly claims to be engaged in a “cultural battle.” He’s a fan of Elon Musk and Trump. The “cultural battle” primarily involves removing sexual education from schools, removing organizations dedicated to protecting women from abuse, and portraying government spending on helping the poor as communism. He frequently uses the term “woke” to denigrate people who don’t share his views.
However, this “cultural battle” is all about hate.
The entire concept of “canceling culture,” “anti-woke,” and Mark Zuckerberg removing tampons from bathrooms are distractions. The world is full of children like “A,” and the cost of proofreading this with AI is probably enough to feed one person for a day. I’m not trying to sit on a moral high ground while I write this from my iPad Pro. But, at least, we should have more empathy.
Sorry for my long comment, but I feel that this article from PG misses the point (ja! It’s my second time writing in disagreement with a PG article). I’m concerned about the direction that all this hate is taking here in Argentina, echoing the things that happen in the US.
I appreciate your story and feel for "A" and the women who adopted her. But I think we need to get beyond this idea that there are only two sides and you have to pick one or the other. I don't see why I can't agree with you and also agree with PG. I didn't feel any hate in his article and I imagine he would support the people who have been helping "A", i.e. you and your wife and her adoptive mothers.
> There are many other details, but I don’t want to bore you with the horrors. To summarize, this story shattered my naivety
I have had similar experiences and understand you.
Unfortunately he's going along with right-wing orthodoxy instead of seriously confronting modern internet cults. Graham proves himself to be a groupthinker, not an independent thinker.
(The real tragedy of "woke" is how it undermines the left; how could you ever win an election if people who seem to travel with you tell 70% (white) or 50% (men) of people that they're intrinsically bad? Worse yet those "fellow travelers" will sit out the election because they think any real politicians is a "fascist" for one reason or another.)
My son has two friends who I'll call B and C -- "wokeness" could be evoked in the case of B but you'll see it is a wrong mental model.
I knew B from elementary school and I know he's a bit out of sync with other people, like myself and my son. Call him "neurodivergent" and leave it at that. I introduced B to TTRPGs which he enjoyed greatly at the time and is an ongoing interest for him. (Unlike my transsexual friend from college, neither I nor his mother ever heard him express anything noncongruent about his gender identity as a child.)
My son met C in high school. He probably has a developmental problem too but I wont't DX it. B seemed a little depressed and withdrawn, C has always expressed hostility against people and institutions. C certainly has pathological narcissism and says that hard work is for suckers, his dad is a provost at an elite school. If he was seriously seeking a royal road he'd continue in the family business (where nepotism rules) but he hasn't talked to his dad in years, though, like B, he still lives at home. C jumped off the roof of his house one day to impress his little brother and broke his leg. His mom, who grew up in rural China and later got an MD valid in China but not here, thinks he is possessed by demons.
B works part time. C doesn't work. Neither are in school.
During the pandemic B was worked on by an "egg-hatcher" who helped B develop body dysmorphia. Last thanksgiving family plans fell through but we went to the community center in B's hamlet because we knew we'd get to meet up with B and his mom. (B uses a different pronoun and different name at work but doesn't mind if we use his old pronouns and name.) B told us all about the horrible side effects of the meds he is taking, and then got jumped on by a (seemingly mental ill) Trump supporter when I was coming out of the bathroom. B expresses a lot of hostility to the likes of J K Rowling because he's been told to.
C encountered "blackpill" incels who also talked him into body dysmorphia. (Like the transgenderists they have a language of transformation through ideology, in this case based on a scene from The Matrix.) His height is average, but that's not good enough. He stretches every day and wants to have surgery where they break his legs to extend them. He hasn't talked my with my son or myself since the time my son said what his real height was in an online chat. I had a 'Black Card' membership at Planet Fitness and made the offer to teach him how to lift weights, but he refused. Rumor has it, however. that he bought anabolic steroids online and injected them.
People who see things through an ideological lens would see B as good and C as evil or maybe C as good and B as evil. I look at them and see similar signs and symptoms and if I had to DX it would be "lack of social connection and lack of meaning"; both acquired body dysmorphia through ideology, I've got no doubt about it and I see both as victims of internet cults.
In Terry Prachett's Hogfather professors at the Unseen University discover a principle of "conservation of belief" so that when the Hogfather (like Santa but comes on Dec 32, drives a sleigh pulled by pigs, ...) is assassinated the world becomes plagued by the Hair Loss Fairy and the God of Hangovers (the "Oh God!") I see transgenderism, inceldom, evangelicals who don't go to church, BLM enthusiasts who don't personally know any black people, people senselessly adding stripes to the rainbow flag (hmmm... people in those classes have always had trouble with being confused with others... In Iran they think gay people need trans surgery, Intersex people frequently express that they've been violated when they get the same surgery that helps transexual people feel whole, etc.) , anti-vax activists and people who are obsessively pro-vax just to oppose anti-vax people as being our own Hair Loss Fairy that comes out of traditional religions failing.
Crazy and rather ironic that an essay from pg himself gets flagged no HN.
[flagged]
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it?
Yes. It requires the willpower to disengage from the performative point scoring of internet discourse. Most good conversation must now happen in private for many reasons, much of that has to do with the technology PG himself has previously supported.
Presently, you are seeing social media forking into red and blue (x and bsky and fb and truth social). This is bonkers. A superior format for discussion is a place like HN which is tightly (and opaquely) moderated. Another great development is the use of 'community notes' which, for all its imperfections, is superior to straight censorship.
Ultimately I'd like to see people like PG invest in high quality journalism where the mission is a dispassionate reporting of the best-available facts, supported where possible with data, and presented in such a way as to demonstrate transparency.
The journalism point he made hits home, hard. I'm a sunday times subscriber, and just added WSJ and Financial Times paper edition. I don't really want to add 10 substacks and parse through them all. I'd pay a lot, a lot a lot, for a quality daily briefer, known in some circles as a newspaper of record.
One that I love, deeply, is the Martha's Vineyard Gazette -- still printed on broadsheet, and with fantastic journalism -- it's what regional and local papers used to be. I wish we could have something like this in the national format.
Wow, I really hated this article. Thanks for the bad opinion, Paul.
[flagged]
Ok, but please don't break the site guidelines when posting to HN. Name-calling and personal attacks aren't allowed here, and your comment consists of nothing but.
Fair. Apologies for skirting the rules.
The sheer amount of content-less booing of political outgroups throughout the thread (overwhelmingly in one direction, unsurprisingly given the article content) has really disappointed me.
I can't help but wonder if this is intentionally ironic.
(From TFA: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules.")
I think it’s intentional and ironic. But I don’t think PG realizes what he did. I throughly believe he’s in the space of “I can do it because i am morally superior. But other folks can’t because they don’t get it like I do.” I get this feeling from reading not just this, but his other essays too.
@malcomgreaves I'm not sure you caught the intended target of @cle's comment. I believe he was talking about your comment being the thing he thought may be intentionally ironic, not PG's essay.
One of the main points in the essay: "The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so"
And your comment is a classic example of that behavior.
> I can do it because i am morally superior. But other folks can’t because they don’t get it like I do.
I think it’s more of “I can do it because I can afford it. But other folks can’t because they need their job (or something similar).”
Not sure about 'I can do it because I am morally superior'. Is it required to be morally superior to have an opposing view?
> other folks can't because they don't get it like I do
His point of view undoubtedly resonates with 'some folks'.
My respect for PG and the rest of the leadership of the tech world unfortunately seem to be headed off the same cliff.
The arrogance and lack of empathy is so disappointing and so unnecessary. Please try harder. A lot is at stake here.
Your comment, while eloquent, is totally unsubstantiated. At least PG tries to justify his perspective.
You didn't.
This comment is kinda harsh isn't it? Do you have anything specific from his words to support:
> ... mind become filled with mush
> desperate pledge of allegiance ...
I think it's just the fact he spends this much time thinking about wokeness. His whole argument is it's unimportant and performative, so then why did he spend all this time writing an article about it?
> His whole argument is it's unimportant and performative, so then why did he spend all this time writing an article about it?
Arguably because a large portion of the population doesn't agree that it's unimportant and performative. Current culture is captured by the concept and collectively spends a massive amount of time worrying about it.
If you personally feel that this is a waste of time, how else do you communicate that if not by spending time thinking and writing about it?
I also think most meetings are a complete waste of time. The fact that many other people feel meetings are important directly impacts me, and just believing that they're a waste isn't good enough. It's necessary to actively push against something if you think that thing needs to change.
Because it comes with very real consequences, sometimes even criminal now.
He doesn't argue it's unimportant. If you took that away from the essay you didn't read it closely enough because it contains sentences like:
"College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous combination."
If you're describing something as poisonous, especially if it's the behavior of a large group of people, then you're saying it's important.
> the fact he spends this much time thinking about wokeness
This is the first and only article I recall from PG about wokeness, is it part of some anthology that I've missed or where are you getting the "this much time" part from?
https://x.com/paulg/status/1878495314975277093
Here he is with receipts that he has been talking about wokeness like a weirdo for close to a decade now.
Aha, on Twitter, makes sense I'd miss it. I've mostly been thinking of Twitter as a place for posting random thoughts, and I thought most others saw it like that too, not like a place for serious thinking/discussions. I guess I was wrong.
Do you have any points of substance you can elaborate with? I would genuinely like to hear your argument.
Not OP, but personally it's just sad to see someone that you view as a historically great mind getting distracted by nonsense, like if a great mathematician suddenly stopped their research to focus on flat earth and contrails
> view as a historically great mind getting distracted by nonsense
Are you saying that thinking about "wokeness" is a distraction, regardless of the person? Or that specifically PG thinking about "wokeness" is a distraction? Or maybe even "thinking about wokeness in that way" is the distraction?
It seems like if "wokeness" is important, then having more people thinking about it is better, regardless of their outcome from thinking about it. If "wokeness" isn't important at all, I'd totally understand you, but seems there are way more people out there thinking about it more than PG, since it's the first time I see him say anything about it at all.
Thanks for engaging. Is it nonsense if it greatly affects government and workplace policies? Especially now at a time where the incoming POTUS has demonstrated a lack of respect for a wide swath of people.
(Just to be clear, despite the above comment, I do not align with "wokeness".)
I do agree with you that it seems like that and I generally agree with you, but I'm also not a fan of your comment that only addresses the mind of PG, while the words he written are right there.
Point out the parts of the blog post that shows his lack of rational thinking and research, rather than just giving some overall personal attack, as currently the comment is relatively off-topic considering the submission.
I'm sure there are good and bad parts of the blog post, while you failed to address any sides of it.
Did we read the same article? It seems like a pretty coherent and plausible explanation for the current state of political correctness.
You read a reply from a person that doesn't like the implications of PG's statements and conclusions. Which I think is further evidence of PG's claims.
Could you expand on why this article makes you believe his mind has "become filled with mush."
What points is he making (if you consider him to be making clear points), how do you think those points are flawed, etc..
He's just kissing the ring.
As a liberal/left/progressive person who agrees with many of the ideas "woke" people are pushing, I find "wokeism" extremely problematic.
We need to put to bed the notion that criticizing some aspect of a social phenomenon somehow means someone is wholly endorsing the worst elements of the opposition.
Personally, I believe "wokeism" (I hesitate to even use this word because it's poorly defined) is actually one of the largest impediments to moving society towards the ideas generally associated with the word. It's a tactics issue.
The difference between "We want the world to look more like X" and "Let's do these specific things to make the world look more like X" is critical. How you go about the latter can have a huge impact on the former.
That's just not true. He did not like wokeism, but on the other hand he's aligned with the democrats, including voting for Kamala. Like his politics or not, he is independent thinker.
Paul Graham was never smart. He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Young people in need of guidance would do well to read the classics and disregard everyone with a pulse.
Paul Graham is one of the smartest people I've met, hands down, not a close call.
If I know propositional logic, one of two things follows: either (1) I've never met any smart people, or (2) you've jumped to a false conclusion.
Either way, you shouldn't be posting personal attacks to HN.
(regardless of the merit of your criticism, this comment was at least very funny to me, so thank you for that)
In a way, this kind of ad hominem attack supports his point.
What I find funny is that PG thinks he is a thinker who breaks the rules. No PG, you and your friends write the rules. Wokeness is about acknowledging the game is rigged against black people and others. But go ahead PG, redefine it as political correctness, then write an essay about how the current system is actually good.
The reason wokeness scares the elite like PG is because it targets the system they themselves helped create.
It just amazing to see how the new Trump administration prepares to take over, all the Tech Bros suddenly are coming out of their shell.
Musk on DEI. Zuckerberg just got back to his Misogynistic persona of the first days of Facebook. Peter Thiel published an editorial in the FT last week talking about conspiracy theories on JFK, and now...The attack on Wokeness... Cherry-picking historical examples, misrepresenting real power dynamics, and dismissing genuine social concerns as mere “performative” gestures. All while coming from a privileged VC perspective that notoriously funnels opportunities to the same elite circles...
I found the essay cogent and accessible. He's very active online and engages in good faith even with his detractors.
[flagged]
This is a ridiculous comment. I don't know if you've noticed but a lot of what's happening in the entire western world politically is a result of the backlash against wokeness and leftist economics.
Without wokeness there is no Trump, and the far right in Europe would still be marginal.
Edit - it's funny, just yesterday I was listening to a podcast where Peter Thiel was lamenting the lack of introspection on the left. Lots of comments proving it correct.
The scientific method is to look at data and form models of reality from that. Not to have a model in mind and then look for evidence to support it or evidence to ignore.
Graham has a Hegelian, Panglossian view of things. In "woke" terms he is a very, very wealthy white cishet male born to an upper middle class physicist. As the relations of production and social order were created for and are controlled by his class he defends it.
To use an example - due to government mandates, the number of blacks attending Harvard Law School this year is less than half what it was last year. It does not fit into the narrative of a progressive, forward moving country which is meritocratic (although absurdly the legacies etc. taking their place is called a move to meritocracy). You can't say there is a national oppression of Africans in the US by the US, or that things are not meritocracy, so thinking starts getting very skewed. You can read this skewed thinking in Graham and others.
YC was started by a convicted felon, and it's due to his privileged birth that Graham was not convicted along with his co-founder. Meanwhile black men are killed by police for selling loose cigarettes or handing a clerk a counterfeit bill (something I unknowingly did once) to cheers from corporate media commentators and demagogues. What kind of country you live in even here in the imperial center is very much a question of what class you are in, as well as other things.
The working people and wretched of the earth are tired of being lectured to by the scions of diamond mines, Phillips Exeter graduates and the like. Even if they do know the worst case big O time for quicksort. History goes through twists and turns, and I welcome the challenges to their power we will be seeing this century.
Still can't believe we all changed our branch names from master to main.
Decades ago, when I was a teenager, and saw that “master/slave” was a technical term, it made me uncomfortable- like, it has so much baggage for a technical term.
I’m guessing that the master branch is not a master/slave reference, but “master copy”. But I think main is just as good, so I really don’t care that it got caught up in the movement. This is just language naturally evolving, which I know many people are fundamentally against on an ideological basis.
To me, fighting the changes of language over time is like yelling at the wind. Just let it go and focus on what’s truly important (almost everything else). People will advocate for changes and they will stick or they won’t. If you are an effective communicator, you really shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping up.
[flagged]
[flagged]
>Much as they tried to pretend there was no conflict between diversity and quality. But you can't simultaneously optimize for two things that aren't identical. What diversity actually means, judging from the way the term is used, is proportional representation, and unless you're selecting a group whose purpose is to be representative, like poll respondents, optimizing for proportional representation has to come at the expense of quality. This is not because of anything about representation; it's the nature of optimization; optimizing for x has to come at the expense of y unless x and y are identical.
Eh, if x and y are correlated, you can optimize for x to a point and still get y gains.
Are there viable alternatives to HN? I'm pretty sick of PG and Altman's influence.
They aren't good people.
Lobsters probably comes closest. But still invite-only (AFAIK) and you also don't bump into random programming superstars (who programmed that one childhood game you absolutely loved) there every now and then.
Besides, I feel like HN is dang's kingdom, and compared to how it used to be, pg is barely mentioned nowadays. Based on feelings only, it doesn't feel like HN skews pg/altman friendly, I'd probably say it's the opposite if I had to say anything.
PG and Altman don't have editorial influence on Hacker News, and current moderation policy is to not kill topics partaining to YC. (which is why I suspect this blogpost got rescued from being flagkilled)
100% agree. They've become a symbol of how money corrupts people.
Ycombinator is of course, involved to some extent with the creation of HN. So I get it. Tech leaders cultism sort of infests the space.
But I do tend to find HN pretty broad in topics. I do think they end up on here because they’re good at making news for themselves (not a compliment) and the sort of people posting on here, are posting tech news. I don’t see ending up on HN’s front page as any indicator of goodness, but more so, it’s at least something people are talking about and sparks some discussion, goodness-neutral on the specific topic at hand.
dang is really good at his job!
That said, I really like mastodon! Obviously it’s a different sort of platform, but you can get a similar but less-tech-thought-leader-centric experience with some light curation. (And participation by yourself!)
What influence of theirs are you seeing on HN?
With Meta, X and Hackernews right wing American now I am also struggling where to go. Sure it won't be much here or the aforementioned networks anymore.
Lobste.rs
Reddit? Not sure why you decided today is the day to move
Same but also with Dang.
[dead]
Wow, Paul Graham just kinda set the standard for cognitive dissonance on HN. In short, sins of elision, omission, and exaggeration in this post and elsewhere in his absurdly entitled world make it clear that he is himself the prig here.
[dead]
wokeness is more or less southern Baptist fire and brimstone Christianity for posh urban white people. For western minorities it functions as a kind of nationalism
I think you describe it really well. There is certainly a large pocket of black communities on social media sharing dreams of a Western takeover, ranging anywhere from outright (fraudulently) claiming inventions they never invented, brazenly replacing characters in every form of entertainment, all the way to openly proposing a white purge, let's call it. Very concerning.
What's even weirder is that this content was rarely ever flagged in the Twitter days, and still prevails on X today. Demonizing anyone of white European descent on Reddit is also completely acceptable, and doesn't result in moderation.
> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness
This is a fake news. Research shows that Twitter algorithmic amplification favored right-wing politics even before Musk made it even worse. See: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
> On the other hand, the people on the far left have only themselves to blame; they could tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted to.
Being this much clueless in pg's position is not possible. I can only assume he's consciously lying. He can see front row what Musk does with Twitter and how the "free speech" he's supposedly defending is actually "what Musk likes to hear speech", and he perfectly knows Musk is strongly aligned with the far right that he supports however he can all over the world. See for example: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2025/01/10/musk-dou...
I wish, but to be Black in America is to witness this sort of cluelessness (despite prowess in other areas) ALL THE TIME.
Domain specific knowledge is SO REAL.
(Incidentally, this is roughly why I don't believe we will ever have so called "AGI")
This feels like another VC/executive "taking a knee" towards the new administration, a vivid trend in the last few weeks. I feel like pg was particularly more left/right neutral just up until this month of inauguration.
Sorry, can you back this up with some data and specificity?
I understand that you feel Musk is aligned with the far right; my question is what exactly is Musk doing with twitter, and (other than when people take the piss against him personally) how is he removing free speech that is not "far right"?
I'm genuinely interested in the details -- and they are hard to come by.
People who lean left are choosing to leave.
Greg Lukianoff of FIRE, a free speech defender said Musk made twitter better for free speech (on balance): https://youtu.be/Er1glEAQhAo?si=2aWdSIsbKzjz0nGA&t=2853
It’s interesting to see how polarizing views about Musk have become. People often overlook the fact that Musk was, and in many ways still is, aligned with traditional liberal values. He’s been a long-time supporter of initiatives like universal basic income, environmental sustainability through the green movement ect... Yet, the moment he expresses support for ideas that deviate from the more extreme edges of left-wing ideology, he’s vilified and treated as a pariah by those who once championed him.
Regarding X, I still see plenty of left-leaning content, but the dynamic has undoubtedly shifted. What’s changed is that the platform no longer artificially amplifies one ideological perspective at the expense of others. Previously, algorithms seemed to prioritize content aligned with extreme left narratives while outright blocking opposing views. That system gave the impression of a dominant left-leaning consensus, that was entirely artificial.
At the end of the day, it's impossible to remove all bias so whatever system maximizes free speech is the best one.
Musk recently de-verified or banned a bunch of far-right accounts that were posting anti-H1B content. Musk isn't far right, he's just looking after his business interests.
I was banned from Twitter within hours of Elon having control for changing my displayed name (not my handle) to "Elon's Musk" in a reply to something unhinged that he had tweeted.
So much free speech.
[flagged]
Can you prove it? Do you have any proof that Twitter promotes right leaning views more than left leaning ones?
"When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression"
Twitter was discriminating against right leaning views. Extreme far left views (like communism) were absolutely OK and widespread on Twitter. If one had as extreme right leaning views, he would be shadowbanned, reprioritised etc.
What is Twitter now is a fair game. Every voice is heard the same. What Twitter is doing now should have been the norm the whole time.
And the same is true for all major social networks, search engines, public funded media, universities and other organizations. When only leftists get their voice heard, they got used to it. Loosing this privilege looks like discrimination, doesn't it?
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
It's amazing to see the masks come off even before trump's coronation.
I stopped reading his essays some time ago, but it feels like they keep getting dumber and dumber.
[flagged]
[flagged]
It's also with nothing that this article's title was either directly ripped from or just so happens to be identical to a YouTube video about the "party ball" in the video game super smash Bros[1].
There's lots of good criticism of the actual article to expand on here, calling someone a white supremacist because they used an incredibly common title format does not add to that.
It is also similiar to "On The Origin of Species" a far more famous book that I'm sure everyone has heard of.
"either directly ripped or just happens to be near identical" is a pretty wide disjunction—it includes every possible case!
These fringe conspiracies on the left are just as troubling as the same ones on the right. Sure it’s possible but highly unlikely that this was an intentional use of that book. I would guess for more likely he has no idea about this book like myself.
Hanania mellowed (matured? Sold out?) immensely in the last 10 years. If you are a white supremacist wanting to read him because of coltonv recommendation, be prepared to be disappointed:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1878829377338966310
> One way to understand conservative/liberal differences is to think of conservatives as the people who are intellectually limited and lazy.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/08/richard-hanania-raci...
> “I truly sucked back then,” Hanania admits, confirming that, between 2008 and 2012, he posted pseudonymously on several white-supremacist and misogynistic websites […] He confesses he “had few friends or romantic successes and no real career prospects” at the time and was projecting his “personal unhappiness onto the rest of the world.”
Do you have specific excerpts from the book to push your claim that Paul Graham's writing identifies as a white supremacist?
Not sure why you are mentioning Project 2025 or the civil rights stuff, you lost us there.
You are not trying hard enough. Sure, you managed to allude to Paul Graham being a white supremacist just for using a similar title. How many ways are there to phrase a title for an essay about this topic? But really my disappointment comes from you not being able to leap to calling him Hitler. Surely someone else in the comments will manage it anyway. 7/10
[flagged]
Could you share the parts that have been "ripped" or "identical" from this book you're talking about? Would be very interesting if true, otherwise kind of despicable to make those claims without any sort of proof whatsoever.
[flagged]
Please don't do this here.
Prime example of why woke got associated with negative connotations.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
He's the co-founder of this website
[flagged]
[flagged]
Notwithstanding your incredible lack of charity, and notwithstanding the use-mention distinction, it is in fact completely legal to refer to groups by slurs in the US, and always has been (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...).
[flagged]
this whole post reads like it came from a father who doesn't understand why his daughter doesn't talk to him anymore.
pg getting flagged on the forum he founded really holds up this analogy. Even though I don’t understand either.
"anything I don't like is a shallow fad"
I don’t see that quote anywhere in the article, or even that sentiment.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Eh. The relevant parties are largely incapable of feeling embarrassment.
[flagged]
What? Paul Graham has been making statements that people found "too right wing" for at least 20 years. I have never seen him express pro-censorship or radical DEI views like the big U.S. corporations did.
We see now that all these corporations are A-grade hypocrites, which was already clear in 2020 but forbidden to say.
You cannot accuse Paul Graham for suddenly changing his views.
As many of us here who came from less fortunate places can tell this kind of adversity is the ultimate character test. Nobody is surprised with opportunists. But even among generally nice people, those infirm will fold and prostrate even before they are asked to.
Some people are scared of what trump et al might do.
I believe we are at last seeing the person for who they really are.
Not very many profiles in courage awards going around in silicon valley these days.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
It's against HN rules to say it used to be better but looking at these replies it clearly has changed since the first days around a decade ago
Yeah it's pretty telling how much of a sacred cow this is for so many people
[flagged]
i dont think the ppl expressing their outrage here realize the screenshot of their content is being amplified and shared on other platforms not because they agree with it but purely for comedy.
so steadfast is their view point as the only possible view that they cant imagine/realize many of us are laughing at them.
coupled with the discoverability of usernames connected to their other real world profiles and the virality of their comic, it probably is unwise to be labelled far-left or 'woke' in professional circles going forward.
[flagged]
Can you please make your substantive points without resorting to the flamewar style? Your comments are standing out as more flamey than anyone else's that I've seen, so far, in the thread.
In particular, it would be good if you would note and follow the following site guidelines:
"Don't be snarky."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Your views are welcome, but we need you to express them in the intended spirit of the forum. The same, of course, is true for anyone with opposing views.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
> How does he know that the scale of the problem is what he thinks it is and not what “woke” people think it is?
Broadly speaking, there is no limit to racism that has ever been proposed by the far left. One can reasonably, trivially dismiss most infinities.
> The essay can be summed up in one sentence: There should be no meaningful consequences for men who engage is lewd behavior
There is something deeper here you’re missing. Women can generally define lewd behaviour however they want; there is no similar official mechanism in the balance. A one-way institution like that will predictably build righteous backlash against itself. That backlash is partly performative and partly justified.
> Fortunately when the aggressively conventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one thing that gives them away: they define new heresies to punish people for
If the "conventional-minded" define new heresies, against a new creed, how are they conventional? What gives Paul Graham away is what he doesn't mention and may be what bothers him more: the old heresies that the surprisingly innovative and even rebellious "conventional-minded" abolish. (Actually, they do neither, but those who believe the former also believe the latter)
As with the myth of the "cancel culture" that Graham mentions (or the similar myth of "the war on Christmas"), the problem isn't the truth of certain events that do occur. It is the exaggeration of magnitude and ignorance of context. Clearly, at no stage in human history were more people not only free but also able to widely disseminate a wider range of views as they are today. Specifically, far fewer people are "silenced" at universities today than were, say, in the 1950s (except, maybe, in super-woke Florida).
> College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous combination.
Yeah, larping in a world of Jewish cabals and weather/mind control has turned out to be far more poisonous.
Anyway, for a more interesting and astute perspective on wokeness, see https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics Kriss shows why comparing wokeness to socialism or Christianity -- as Graham does -- is a category error:
> [I]t’s not a politics, or an ideology, or a religion. If you’ve ever spent any time in a political movement, or a religious one—even a philosophical one—you’ll have noticed that these things always have sects. Small differences in doctrine turn into antagonistic little groups. There are dozens of denominations that all claim to be the universal catholic church. Put two Marxists in a room and you’ll get three different ideological schisms. ... But it’s hard to see any such thing happening in any of the movements that get described as woke. Black Lives Matter did not have a ‘left’ or a ‘right’ wing; the different rainbow flags did not belong to rival queer militia ... The spaces these movements produce might be the sites of constant churning mutual animosity and backstabbing, but the faultlines are always interpersonal and never substantive. This is very, very unusual. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the woke mind virus is so perfectly bioengineered that it’s left all its victims without any capacity for dissent whatsoever, permanently trapped in a zombielike groupthink daze. This is the kind of possibility that a lot of antiwoke types like to entertain. Let me sketch out an alternative view.
> ... Wokeness is an etiquette. There are no sects within wokeness for the same reason that there are no sects on whether you should hold a wine glass by the bowl or by the stem. It’s not really about dogmas or beliefs, in the same way that table manners are not the belief that you should only hold a fork with your left hand.
> ... What makes something woke is a very simple operation: the transmutation of political demands into basically arbitrary standards of interpersonal conduct. The goal is never to actually overcome any existing injustices; political issues are just a way to conspicuously present yourself as the right kind of person.
> ... Unlike wokeness, the word antiwokeness is still used as a self-descriptor. The antiwoke will announce themselves to you. They won’t deny that antiwokeness exists. But since there’s no fixed and generally agreed-upon account of what the object of this apophatic doctrine actually is, you could be forgiven for wondering whether it is, in fact, particularly real. Wokeness is not a politics. And antiwokeness is not a politics either. It’s a shew-stone
> Every day, the antiwoke are busy producing wokeness, catching visions of incorporeal powers, desperately willing this thing into colder and denser form. What does this look like? Hysteria over uncouth material in entertainment media. Pseudo-sociological dogshit jargon. Endless smug performances of wholesome trad virtue. To be antiwoke is to be just another type of person who mistakes etiquette for politics, putting all your energies into the terrain of gesture and appearance, obsessed with images, frothing at every new indecency, horrified, appalled. We must protect the children from harm! I’m sure that some day very soon, the antiwoke will have their own miserable cultural hegemony. Big companies organising compulsory free-speech training for their workers. An informal network of censors scrubbing the mass media of anything that smacks too much of progressive tyranny.
> What gives Paul Graham away is what he doesn't mention and may be what bothers him more: the old heresies that the surprisingly innovative and even rebellious "conventional-minded" abolish.
Can you give an example of what you mean here?
Also, when comparing the empty wokeness to the substantive protest movement of the sixties, Graham not only neglects to mention the real achievements of the former (LGBT rights, some MeToo successes) but also the performative aspects of the latter, as if radical chic never happened or a whole fashion and lifestyle (with a name that lasts to this day) -- also co-opted by corporations -- didn't emerge. I think there was even a pretty famous musical about it.
Do religious and political movements always develop such sects within a decade or so of their founding? If not then I'm not sure wokeness has existed for sufficient time (since the mid 2010s in the form it's discussed in the article I think) that the analysis you present here applies.
But I still find the analysis interesting. I think one difference between wokeness and political and religious movements is that wokeness doesn't seem to have a doctrine.
This is the wokest essay I've ever read.
I like the idea that you could think of the essay as part of the newly performative "not-hard-left" messaging. I guess maybe it is a product of its very recent times. It seems to me like there's a bit of social and cultural space for people to "speak up" that haven't felt like they can for some time. To my mind, that's all to the good, it leaves room for discussion and debate which is healthy.
Very interesting piece. Thanks for sharing!
The one thing Paul missed is Russia's role in the rise of wokeness. The Internet Research Agency controlled over 50 percent of the largest ethnic Facebook groups in 2019 and organized multiple BLM protests, including one attended by Michael Moore.
Wokeness was a state sponsored attack.
But as with most things, it isn't mono causal. The largest blame should lie with the social media platforms themselves. They created something that rewards the narcissistic, anti-intellectual and authoritarian tendencies that drive both wokeness and the alt right.
I think focusing too much on wokeness itself would be an error. We should focus on the conditions that lead to these kind of unhealthy authoritarian-leaning social movements in the first place, which is social media, inequality, inflation, etc.
wow, somehow you jumped to some next level conspiracy garbage more extravagant than the rest of the comments. 20 million people participating in protests was not a “state sponsored attack”
"And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice."
"Social justice" is inherently problematic, as explained in "Hayek: Social Justice Demands the Unequal Treatment of Individuals" https://fee.org/articles/hayek-social-justice-demands-the-un....
Telling that you believe this as Boston has to fix its deep seated racism.
Amen! Thanks for the link.
If pg wants to hang out with dt at mar a lago he's gotta have some easily googleable bona fides afterall.
I have no idea why this was shared on Hacker News (might simply be the Paul Graham connection), but it was one of the best, well-written, and researched articles I've read in years!
I can't tell if this comment is serious