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

> 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".

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 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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

"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.

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!"

[0]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Woke

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

The article missed the biggest opportunity to be curious by avoiding the question: What if they're right?

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.

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.

> 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.

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".

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.

> The number of true things we can't say should not increase. If it does, something is wrong.

Word.

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.

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.

How much money do you have to have before your beliefs stop changing like a flag in the political wind?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.”

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?

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.

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.

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.

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...

More:

https://nitter.poast.org/paulg/status/1878761763799519595

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.

It's political correctness gone mad!

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2xpsg9

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Would this essay be on the HN frontpage if it was written by anyone else?

"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!

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?

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]

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?

> 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...

> 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...

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This just reads like the usual anti-intellectualism.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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]

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.

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?

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.