4 ms·

Corporations adhering to 'woke' politics / ethics is a result of this overprotectedness that the most recent generation was subjected to. Jonathan Haidt has a l

Corporations adhering to 'woke' politics / ethics is a result of this overprotectedness that the most recent generation was subjected to. Jonathan Haidt has a lot of great work in this area. He mentions how things started to shift in earnest around 2015, and I gotta tell you, having left college at 2013, I definitely agree. I started seeing rumblings of it around that time. Eventually those people leave university and go get jobs at these corporations. The other part, and I don't know how dramatic it is, is that a lot of corporations are so terrified of losing a single nickel, that they'll support whatever trend of the moment they need to, to protect their profits.

ecmascript 6y ago
I completely disagree, I am ~30 and I believe my generation strongly dislikes woke culture and people younger than me hates it with all their hearts, except for a rare few that is into it. The main pushers of woke culture, imo, is my parents generation and generally people older than 40. My generation cares a lot more about facts than the boomer generation which cares a lot more about feelings. That is why when selling to my generation you always want to be upfront with facts and pricing and when selling to older people you want to paint how the product or service are gonna make their lives better and much more about the emotions. My generation is used to being spammed by information since we were small, my parents weren't and are much more susceptible to bullshit.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  > my generation strongly dislikes woke culture and people younger than me hates it with all their hearts, except for a rare few that is into it. My nephew has a totally different take on this... he's graduating from UT Austin, and I know that's a very liberal campus, but he's also persona non grata, being a 22 year old straight white male who got his Dad's 9/11 G.I. Bill and grew up in thoroughly middle class / lower upper middle class areas for his entire life. He had a bit of mini-breakdown when he and his girlfriend came to spend a weekend with me in Fort Worth around Christmastime. The constant barrage of "white men" being the source of the world's problems, and "recognize / check your privilege" when he would have discussions in classes over the past four years had really worn on him.
  - NinjaSaves 6y ago
    It is precisely this that mass-produces the sort of angry young white man that attacked DC. People thought I was being too dramatic when I had been saying this for the past four angry years (for everyone): Stop frivolously accusing young white men of being "racists," and being "Nazis." Don't use those words to beat people over the head with it. The political mindset that enables the use of those words as blunt weapons against those we hate is resentment-based and vengeance is its goal. The use of these terms as bludgeons in a lot of these youth cultures combined with a culture that makes young men feel increasingly isolated with its habitual treatment of them that is at best arid and at worst psychologically abusive. "They'll be alright," everyone reasons. "They have everything given to them by default." By whom? In my guesstimation, it amounts to gaslighting. Young angry white men feel deprived by society of anything to grasp, or to believe in, or to look forward to, or to work toward. Then they're told that, even though they were among the first generation that was wholly ready to forget about race and ignore it as a social factor... they were told, oh no, you're always racist. In fact, irony of ironies, you're racist by blood and birth. How sustainable is such a social environment before legions of terrified young men start picking up the label that has been thrown at their feet and wearing it as a badge of honor because it's the only possible identity they have left? "Fine, I'll give them something to treat like shit." Plus, those are not the sorts of words (racist and Nazi) we should risk over-using and numbing people to... We kinda want them to keep their sting. So, let's not morph them into a weapon to justify treating our fellow humans poorly. I think doing that might actually mass-produce neo-Nazis.
  - tanjtanjtanj 6y ago
    As someone whose time at UT Austin overlapped your nephew's and who has opportunity to work on campus with UT students regularly, my experience is nothing like his. Being a middle/upper class straight white male does not make you a persona non grata. On the Contrary, due to the automatic admission requirements the most common person you'll meet on campus is an upper/middle class person from a Houston suburb. I've never encountered the "white men being the source of the world's problem" thing in person at any point, only in characterizations online and in some people blaming some perceived slight or disadvantage on it. I even took a wide range of the "softer" liberal arts courses to supplement my CS education. I also disagree with UT Austin being a particularly liberal campus beyond a typical college campus. Austin itself is plenty liberal compared to the average city in Texas but again, due to the automatic admission requirements, UT is really a fairly average distribution of upper/middle class people throughout Texas. I've also had more professors try to sell me on the ministry of Jesus (3, insistently) than on any sort of leftist politics (1, in my Eastern Philosophy course) and had one professor that moved to UT Austin after being ejected from his prior university for in his words "being too conservative".
- secondcoming 6y ago
  Once this pandemic is over I'd like to pay a visit to your world!
  - ecmascript 6y ago
    You maybe can if you really wish. I live on a very vaccination friendly place in Sweden and I soon have a guest house that I am going to rent out ;)
esja 6y ago
And it seems many of those students have ended up in the social media departments of those large corporations, because they "understand" social media "better than older people". Meanwhile some senior managers must be asking themselves whether they'd be better off having no Twitter presence at all.
eternalban 6y ago
> a lot of corporations are so terrified of losing a single nickel, that they'll support whatever trend of the moment they need to, to protect their profits. This speculation doesn't really add up considering the historic behavior of corporations in context of the feelings of their employees, or threats to their bottom line because of employees. One rule of thumb for detecting agency (if any) behind any major social shift is to review corporate cultural products that introduce and promote the social change to a wider audiance. The key question to answer is this: Were they leading or lagging indicators? If you first encounter such shifts in advertising, TV, movies, and print, and then see gradual adoption, rest assured that it is not a 'bottom-up' phenomena.
- cambalache 6y ago
  > This speculation doesn't really add up considering the historic behavior of corporations in context of the feelings of their employees, or threats to their bottom line because of employees. On the contrary, this reinforces the idea. Big companies fuck their employees from time to time not because they are meanies, but because they think they will make money that way. If you offered all the companies a Faustian agreement of triplicating their earning but they have to support racism (with no other consequences) they will do it in a heartbeat.That's why so irritating the magnificient coup they've made in the last 5-10 years to put themselves at the forefront of "social issues", if they can control the discourse there is less chance that people will question all the bad stuff they do.

ecmascript 6y ago

I completely disagree, I am ~30 and I believe my generation strongly dislikes woke culture and people younger than me hates it with all their hearts, except for a rare few that is into it. The main pushers of woke culture, imo, is my parents generation and generally people older than 40. My generation cares a lot more about facts than the boomer generation which cares a lot more about feelings. That is why when selling to my generation you always want to be upfront with facts and pricing and when selling to older people you want to paint how the product or service are gonna make their lives better and much more about the emotions. My generation is used to being spammed by information since we were small, my parents weren't and are much more susceptible to bullshit.

cbozeman 6y ago
> my generation strongly dislikes woke culture and people younger than me hates it with all their hearts, except for a rare few that is into it. My nephew has a totally different take on this... he's graduating from UT Austin, and I know that's a very liberal campus, but he's also persona non grata, being a 22 year old straight white male who got his Dad's 9/11 G.I. Bill and grew up in thoroughly middle class / lower upper middle class areas for his entire life. He had a bit of mini-breakdown when he and his girlfriend came to spend a weekend with me in Fort Worth around Christmastime. The constant barrage of "white men" being the source of the world's problems, and "recognize / check your privilege" when he would have discussions in classes over the past four years had really worn on him.
- NinjaSaves 6y ago
  It is precisely this that mass-produces the sort of angry young white man that attacked DC. People thought I was being too dramatic when I had been saying this for the past four angry years (for everyone): Stop frivolously accusing young white men of being "racists," and being "Nazis." Don't use those words to beat people over the head with it. The political mindset that enables the use of those words as blunt weapons against those we hate is resentment-based and vengeance is its goal. The use of these terms as bludgeons in a lot of these youth cultures combined with a culture that makes young men feel increasingly isolated with its habitual treatment of them that is at best arid and at worst psychologically abusive. "They'll be alright," everyone reasons. "They have everything given to them by default." By whom? In my guesstimation, it amounts to gaslighting. Young angry white men feel deprived by society of anything to grasp, or to believe in, or to look forward to, or to work toward. Then they're told that, even though they were among the first generation that was wholly ready to forget about race and ignore it as a social factor... they were told, oh no, you're always racist. In fact, irony of ironies, you're racist by blood and birth. How sustainable is such a social environment before legions of terrified young men start picking up the label that has been thrown at their feet and wearing it as a badge of honor because it's the only possible identity they have left? "Fine, I'll give them something to treat like shit." Plus, those are not the sorts of words (racist and Nazi) we should risk over-using and numbing people to... We kinda want them to keep their sting. So, let's not morph them into a weapon to justify treating our fellow humans poorly. I think doing that might actually mass-produce neo-Nazis.
- tanjtanjtanj 6y ago
  As someone whose time at UT Austin overlapped your nephew's and who has opportunity to work on campus with UT students regularly, my experience is nothing like his. Being a middle/upper class straight white male does not make you a persona non grata. On the Contrary, due to the automatic admission requirements the most common person you'll meet on campus is an upper/middle class person from a Houston suburb. I've never encountered the "white men being the source of the world's problem" thing in person at any point, only in characterizations online and in some people blaming some perceived slight or disadvantage on it. I even took a wide range of the "softer" liberal arts courses to supplement my CS education. I also disagree with UT Austin being a particularly liberal campus beyond a typical college campus. Austin itself is plenty liberal compared to the average city in Texas but again, due to the automatic admission requirements, UT is really a fairly average distribution of upper/middle class people throughout Texas. I've also had more professors try to sell me on the ministry of Jesus (3, insistently) than on any sort of leftist politics (1, in my Eastern Philosophy course) and had one professor that moved to UT Austin after being ejected from his prior university for in his words "being too conservative".
secondcoming 6y ago
Once this pandemic is over I'd like to pay a visit to your world!
- ecmascript 6y ago
  You maybe can if you really wish. I live on a very vaccination friendly place in Sweden and I soon have a guest house that I am going to rent out ;)

esja 6y ago

And it seems many of those students have ended up in the social media departments of those large corporations, because they "understand" social media "better than older people". Meanwhile some senior managers must be asking themselves whether they'd be better off having no Twitter presence at all.

eternalban 6y ago

> a lot of corporations are so terrified of losing a single nickel, that they'll support whatever trend of the moment they need to, to protect their profits. This speculation doesn't really add up considering the historic behavior of corporations in context of the feelings of their employees, or threats to their bottom line because of employees. One rule of thumb for detecting agency (if any) behind any major social shift is to review corporate cultural products that introduce and promote the social change to a wider audiance. The key question to answer is this: Were they leading or lagging indicators? If you first encounter such shifts in advertising, TV, movies, and print, and then see gradual adoption, rest assured that it is not a 'bottom-up' phenomena.

cambalache 6y ago
> This speculation doesn't really add up considering the historic behavior of corporations in context of the feelings of their employees, or threats to their bottom line because of employees. On the contrary, this reinforces the idea. Big companies fuck their employees from time to time not because they are meanies, but because they think they will make money that way. If you offered all the companies a Faustian agreement of triplicating their earning but they have to support racism (with no other consequences) they will do it in a heartbeat.That's why so irritating the magnificient coup they've made in the last 5-10 years to put themselves at the forefront of "social issues", if they can control the discourse there is less chance that people will question all the bad stuff they do.