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The Origins of Wokeness

• medion 2y ago
  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.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • throwaway314155 2y ago
    It represents something they can't control and which could ultimately be used to take them down a peg or two, if not more, by ostracizing them in the public's eyes. tl;dr - They are afraid.
  • boombabot 2y ago
    Tech elite currently enjoy disproportionately large benefits from rampantly un-balanced systems that allow them to exploit people for their work and therefore they stand to lose quite a bit from any rebalancing of said systems. Basically, workers get nothing and CEOs get everything.
• Festro 2y ago
  People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon. Perhaps the author is just more aware of it now, or modern technology has pushed it deeper into our lives, but it's not new. And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue. If they care about it. Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe? Now you're just being performative about performative people. Perhaps the best way to lower the number of performative individuals is to... you know... resolve their issues?
  • rhelz 2y ago
    // Now you're just being performative about performative people. // Nice ricochet. I'm grateful to Paul Graham for actually giving a definition of "woke". Really, this is the first anti-woke essay I've seen which actually tells us exactly what the author is complaining about. And it makes it rather abundantly clear why nobody else has given a definition of exactly what the author is complaining about.
    • _bee_hive_ 2y ago
      Me as well, having a definition is useful when trying to understand someone’s perspective and I applaud him for that. It seems that his opposition is with SJW Puritanisms and I agree with him on that point.
  • coldtea 2y ago
    >People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon People have always done lots of things. The degree, intensity, and manner with which they do them varies and matters. >And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue They could be already focusing on the issue. Or they could be ignoring it. That's their decision. Perhaps they have problems of their own to tackle first. Nobody has to be an activist about some cause just because another wants them to. The problem with performative justice is that (when the performative types get enough power) its bizarre demands and rituals are imposed onto and everybody else, with little recourse. Another problem is that the performative justice diverts resources to tackle the performative insignificant or detrimental aspects instead of the real issue. >Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe? Wouldn't solve the issues described in the article caused by performative justice, from stiffling academic discussion, to creating an outrage factory that diverts the press from its mission and polarises society to a detrimental effect.
  • armchairhacker 2y ago
    > People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue. You can do both: focus on fixing performative "justice" in order to fix the issue. Particularly the part that is spinning your arguments and using them for injustice, making them appear weaker. There's a strategy: support flawed people on your team, because they'll help your team overall. And sometimes this is good, even necessary, e.g. voting for the less-bad candidate in an election. But sometimes there are teammates who are counter-productive even for their own goals. You don't even have to eject these people, but you have to correct them, or they'll make your team worse than if they didn't exist. When I hear conservative arguments, they rarely if ever target the points I think are reasonable and obvious. They target points that I think aren't worth defending (e.g. "illegal immigrant who commit armed robbery not deported"), and points that I think are worth defending but require nuance (which can be defended with some form of "you're correct, although..." to reveal and protect the reasonable part). Conservatives win voters by targeting the weakest points, which just about anyone previously uninformed would side against; "performative justice" creates most of these points, and attacks against attacks against performative justice protect them. It's like a bottleneck or unstable pillar in a building. You don't want to divert everyone to fixing it, because the overall pipeline or building is the ultimate priority, but it has to be addressed. Likewise, fixing the issue is still the ultimate priority, and I don't expect everyone to address performative justice, but somebody has to do it.
• rhelz 2y ago
  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.
  • nomilk 2y ago
    You raise good points. I’m optimistic because i think the quieting of some voices (while bad) is much better than their complete silencing, as has happened through deplatforming, shadow banning, and even White House requests in the past. I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
    • astine 2y ago
      > I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t. The problem with this logic is that for the most part, new media isn't replacing legacy media; it's simply placing new layer of filtering in front of it. The vast majority of people sharing information on these platforms aren't journalists doing their own research. Instead, they're getting their information from journalists and just applying their own filtering and spin. "Rebuting" usually just involves linking to different news sources. You were always better just reading the legacy media in the first place.
• Symmetry 2y ago
  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.
  • jandrese 2y ago
    Every decade has its new leftest boogeyman for the right to complain about, same as always. Critical Race Theory, Political Correctness, Hippies, Civil Rights Crusaders, etc... Doesn't really matter, just so long as it is an "other" that can be ostracized as a group.
    • AlexandrB 2y ago
      The left is lucky in this regard because they get to complain about the same two boogeymen all the time: white males and Israel.
      • jandrese 2y ago
        Or to boil it down even more: the rich, particularly billionaires.
  • nthingtohide 2y ago
    I remember how a particular AI ethics reasearcher got Yann Lecun to leave Twitter. That's perfect definition of wokeness for me.
• carschno 2y ago
  This seems a very long way to say: "I believe that 'woke' has become dogmatic."
  • rapnie 2y ago
    I did not read till the end yet, but "woke" is also a very successfully weaponised word for anyone to help push their ideology to further extremes, both left, right, not center. Woke is also a very good detractor from rich and poor discussions.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • esafak 2y ago
    Merely saying that without explaining your reasoning is worthless.
• DanielBMarkham 2y ago
  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")
• hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • shafyy 2y ago
    I stopped reading his essays some time ago, but it feels like they keep getting dumber and dumber.
    • zimpenfish 2y ago
      > it feels like they keep getting dumber and dumber. Considering how dumb "Hackers and Painters" was, that's a pretty hard fall.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • bloopernova 2y ago
    It's amazing to see the masks come off even before trump's coronation.
• taylodl 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • bloopernova 2y ago
    Some people are scared of what trump et al might do.
    • taylodl 2y ago
      They'll do what we allow them to get away with. The quote "the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy" applies here. Trump is revealing who these people really are.
    • Gualdrapo 2y ago
      Saw yesterday a post on Reddit where someone proposes to change "et al" to "and gang" in academia. I think that would fit here much better.
      • bloopernova 2y ago
        Yeah, you're right. It would fit better but it's too late to edit the comment :/
    • krapp 2y ago
      Yes. What we're seeing here, and with Facebook and other platforms explicitly allowing racism and companies rolling back DEI, etc, is compliance in advance. It's a common fear response to authoritarianism. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.
  • cal85 2y ago
    https://x.com/search?q=trump+(from:paulg) https://x.com/search?q=trump+(from:paulg)
  • varjag 2y ago
    As many of us here who came from less fortunate places can tell this kind of adversity is the ultimate character test. Nobody is surprised with opportunists. But even among generally nice people, those infirm will fold and prostrate even before they are asked to.
• nomilk 2y ago
  The essay was posted about 60 minutes ago but must have been removed as that post is no longer discoverable through yc search. Weird.
  • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    It got flagged to death. 50+ upvotes, 6 comments, but flag killed. I mean, I kind of understand: The discussion is going to turn into the kind of thing that HN tries to avoid. And yet, "moralities" driving things we can't talk about is the point of the essay, so it's really ironic to have it flag killed here. Off topic: We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more. That means that flag killing is uncorrectable - if users decide that it's inappropriate, their only recourse is to email dang. That seems to me to be a step backward - let the user base correct the overreach of others in the user base.
    • nomilk 2y ago
      Your second paragraph is very well said. Made me chuckle but also lament.
    • dang 2y ago
      > We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more. That hasn't changed. Neither has any of the other logic around voting, flagging, or vouching. Vouching unkills [dead] posts. The current thread was dead, for example, and vouches rescued it. But a post can be [flagged] without being [dead]. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918548 for a past explanation.
      • archagon 2y ago
        It should be possible for vouch-capable users to un-vouch in order to demote obvious rage-bait like this article. I'm sorry, but no constructive or intellectually curious discussion is possible here.
        • 2y ago
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• hhackity 2y ago
  A well-considered essay from PG. I thought this part, discussing a practical approach to dealing with disagreement of beliefs, was particularly insightful: > Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion. > If we're not sure what to do about any particular manifestation of wokeness, imagine we were dealing with some other religion, like Christianity. Should we have people within organizations whose jobs are to enforce woke orthodoxy? No, because we wouldn't have people whose jobs were to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Should we censor writers or scientists whose work contradicts woke doctrines? No, because we wouldn't do this to people whose work contradicted Christian teachings. Should job candidates be required to write DEI statements? Of course not; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs. Should students and employees have to participate in woke indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No, because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way about their religion.
  • jollyllama 2y ago
    For better or worse, I don't think much practical possibility stems from this insight, and I wish PG had considered the possibility that the enforcement of some orthodoxy is unavoidable, and that the liberal environment he's describing is a vacuum into which some orthodoxy will inevitably insert itself.
    • ordinaryradical 2y ago
      This is great and the spiciest take buried within what you mention is the following (Christian) POV: People inherently need meaning to function and if a postmodern society insists that there is none, life is a tabula rasa, and religion is basically the projection of the mind, then people will begin building new religions and even “a-religious” religions to substitute for this lack. Personally, I disagree with the overall tack that leftism is always and inherently religious but the elements which are come from exactly the void you’ve described, just blown up to the level of society. Business leaders would be wise to set a vision for their companies that creates meaning and even, yes, acknowledges the transcendent in how they do that. People seem wired to want this and pretending we are all too reasonable to need meaning isn’t getting us anywhere.
• Bostonian 2y ago
  "And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice." "Social justice" is inherently problematic, as explained in "Hayek: Social Justice Demands the Unequal Treatment of Individuals" https://fee.org/articles/hayek-social-justice-demands-the-unequal-treatment-of-individuals/ https://fee.org/articles/hayek-social-justice-demands-the-un....
  • pmdulaney 2y ago
    Amen! Thanks for the link.
  • malcolmgreaves 2y ago
    Telling that you believe this as Boston has to fix its deep seated racism.
• gedpeck 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > How does he know that the scale of the problem is what he thinks it is and not what “woke” people think it is? Broadly speaking, there is no limit to racism that has ever been proposed by the far left. One can reasonably, trivially dismiss most infinities. > The essay can be summed up in one sentence: There should be no meaningful consequences for men who engage is lewd behavior There is something deeper here you’re missing. Women can generally define lewd behaviour however they want; there is no similar official mechanism in the balance. A one-way institution like that will predictably build righteous backlash against itself. That backlash is partly performative and partly justified.
    • scarface_74 2y ago
      I have absolutely no need to get anywhere near the line of what anyone would think of being lewd.
      • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > have absolutely no need to get anywhere near the line of what anyone would think of being lewd How is that relevant? The point is if one party can inconsequentially, to them, subjectively define lewdness and cause consequence to others through it, you will wind up with abuse and backlash. Whether it’s lewdness or moral uprightness or loyalty to a flag is besides the point.
        • gedpeck 2y ago
          [flagged]
          • scarface_74 2y ago
            When Apple announced cycle tracking for the Apple Watch. You would be surprised how many people on HN thought that was a useless niche feature when it literally is something that affects every woman of child bearing age
• m_ke 2y ago
  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.
  • nahuel0x 2y ago
    "Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions". I think you hit the nail on the head. There is a whole chapter to be written about pro/anti "wokeness" stances used by companies / politicians to divert attention from the deeper class vs class issues.
    • m_ke 2y ago
      Wokeness is also a way the media can smack down candidates like Corbin and Sanders, labeling them sexist or an antisemite for focusing on class instead of identity politics.
  • hyeonwho4 2y ago
    It is no coincidence that wokeness arose during Occupy Wall Street, and the insistence on the use of the "progressive stack" was part of what destroyed that protest movement.
• JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  “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?
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    > My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice or start saying the only thing they care about is “Gods and Guns”. FWIW: I was born and raised in southern GA and have only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL. They are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian.
• frizlab 2y ago
  > The number of true things we can't say should not increase. If it does, something is wrong. Word.
  • slowmovintarget 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • somedude895 2y ago
      Over the past couple of weeks there have been two heavy virtue signalers in my social circle that have turned out to be complete assholes to people around them, and I had that thought exactly. Maybe the very reason they feel the need to get approval from "virtuous" people is because they themselves are so awful.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • kstrauser 2y ago
    The problem comes from deciding what's true. It's factually true to say that a higher percentage of black people than white people are convicted felons. It's also grossly negligent to describe that as a cause ("black people have higher tendencies to become criminals") than as an effect ("centuries of systemic racism held higher numbers of black people in poverty, and poverty highly correlates to the kind of criminal behavior that gets you arrested, and also lower quality legal representation, which makes it more likely that the next generation will also be poor; lather, rise, repeat"). Is it a lie to say "black people are more likely to be felons"? No, but if that's all you have to say on the subject, then you're probably a jerk and shouldn't be talking about it at all. TL;DR I'm weary of people saying things that are factually true on the face of them, but that utterly distort the conversation. See also: "scientists don't know how old the universe is" (but have a broad consensus of a narrow band of values), "vaccines can harm you" (so can water), "it's getting cooler in some places" (global climate change doesn't add X degrees to every location uniformly), etc. etc. etc.
    • 2y ago
• red019 2y ago
  [flagged]
• affinepplan 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • dec0dedab0de 2y ago
    this whole post reads like it came from a father who doesn't understand why his daughter doesn't talk to him anymore. pg getting flagged on the forum he founded really holds up this analogy. Even though I don’t understand either. "anything I don't like is a shallow fad" I don’t see that quote anywhere in the article, or even that sentiment.
    • coffeecantcode 2y ago
      That’s because it is not a quote from the article or a sentiment pg upheld.
• root-user 2y ago
  [flagged]
• scarface_74 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > it’s now “woke” to say that multiple police officers shouldn’t kill someone by sitting on their neck for 9 minutes He’s using the moment as a time stamp, not rendering commentary on it per se. Floyd was arguably the peak of legitimacy and acceptance of what we (and he) now calls woke culture. (I’d set the time a little later, around the ‘22 midterms, but we’re in the same ballpark.)
    • scarface_74 2y ago
      That doesn’t exactly help. Minorities have been trying to get society to wake up to police brutality since at least as far back as NWA’s “Fuck the Police” when Tipper Gore was clutching her pearls about the affect such music had on society. It was just not until social media where minorities could get around the press and media filter.
      • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > Minorities have been trying to get society to wake up to police brutality And it happened, to a degree. Then it got overplayed, in part because the prigs Graham criticises were less concerned with police violence than they were with arguing online about it. That in turn not only animated a pro-police backlash on the right, it also sapped the police/sentencing reform movement of the legitimacy it would need to survive mistakes, e.g. Chesa.
        • scarface_74 2y ago
          The right has been pro police since day one. There is no world where the right was going to be in favor of criminal justice or police reform until it started affecting them. This is so well known that during the protest in 2021, there were “white shields” where White people would stand in front of Black protestors because everyone knows that police would not beat White people because there would be consequences. https://www.blackenterprise.com/white-protesters-form-human-barrier-to-shield-black-protesters-from-louisville-metro-police/ https://www.blackenterprise.com/white-protesters-form-human-...
• krosaen 2y ago
  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.
  • pdonis 2y ago
    > wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously. I'm not sure that's true. Wokeness doesn't focus on actual harassment; it focuses on accusations of harassment, with a definition of "harassment" that is highly subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate very well with actual harassment. > how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
    • krosaen 2y ago
      Maybe I could refine it to, what motivates many people who are attracted to wokeness is an earnest desire to do good things. I do think good comes out of it, along with bad. But we can set that aside and refine the point that I don't think the majority of people who initially went along with wokeness were aggressively conventionally minded nor prigs. I think his essay would be more persuasive if he acknowledged that there is an earnest desire to do good mixed in with it, which makes it a thornier issue. Otherwise, people who were or are into wokeness who are not prigs, or merely afraid of running afoul of etiquette, will probably dismiss the essay.
      • pdonis 2y ago
        > what motivates many people who are attracted to wokeness is an earnest desire to do good things While I agree that this is true, I think the point pg makes in his article could be extended to a general rule that, if you find your earnest desire to do good things is leading you to embrace something like wokeness, you need to take a step back. The best way to do good things is to do good things--in other words, to find specific things that you can do that are good, based on your specific knowledge of particular people and particular cases, and do them. Participating in general efforts to micromanage people to make them do good things, or to stop them from doing bad things, which is what wokeness is, is a very poor way to make use of your earnest desire to good things.
• armchairhacker 2y ago
  This article was written due to recent events. - IMO it should've acknowledged that there is genuine "intolerance" of foreigners/gays/trans, not the speech/writing you hear about in the news, but specifically the physical attacks and legal discrimination in third-world countries and rarely by extremists in first-world countries. And that seemingly-mild speech can lead to blatant hate speech, then physical attacks and legal discrimination; but it's not inevitable, and analogously when society swings to the center, it can swing too far to the other side, but maybe there's friction that makes it swing less and pulls it closer to an ideal equilibrium. - It also states that Twitter doesn't censor left-wingers, which is factually wrong, unless every case of journalists being suspended and links being auto-removed is made-up or overblown. 4chan is an example of true free speech (sans calls to violence etc.), but it doesn't help the argument for multiple reasons. I think it's too early to say that "wokeness" is being rolled back; the truth is, woke intolerance isn't as pervasive as people think it is, so you will always find examples of people who directly contradict it and prosper. However, I strongly agree with the core message: there will always be people who use "morals" to control others. Taken straight from the article: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce." The article applies this and the remaining parts to left-wing "social-justice warriors" but you can apply it to right-wing religious zealots.* The reality of "free speech", "live-and-let-live", and other compromises, are that people use them for their own agenda, to get more control. But that's OK. One of the reasons we have as much free speech as we do today, is that there are groups from all sides pushing it for their own reasons, and within these groups there's an opening to express your opinion. The vast majority of people are more focused on helping themselves than they are hurting you, even when hurting you is on their agenda, which means you can benefit from compromising with even smart people who hate you. * Also, Paul Graham isn't really saying anything that he hasn't before. See: https://paulgraham.com/heresy.html https://paulgraham.com/heresy.html, https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html, and https://paulgraham.com/say.html https://paulgraham.com/say.html, written in 2022, 2020, and 2004. For a different left-biased take, see https://paulgraham.com/pow.html https://paulgraham.com/pow.html, written in 2017. But even if he was, this response stands. You can pick decent messages even out of articles people far, far more "right-wing" say, although it's a lot harder, and unlike this one the message you pick out probably won't be what the writer intended.
• gumboshoes 2y ago
  A big swing and a miss by Paul Graham for a season-losing strikeout. Above all, he begs the question in the original sense of "beg the question" - he defines the terms "woke" and "wokeness" by themselves. He uses the secondary and willful redefinitions of those who would permanently corrupt the terms. Further, he excludes the original and true meanings of "woke" and "wokeness" by denying that they are still in play or still in use merely on his say-so, perhaps because that conveniently fits his narrative. Excluding contradicting data is how you corrupt an analysis to match the thesis statement. Additionally, matching the terms to anything to do with "political correctness" is the same: borrowing the right's redefinitions in a circular question-begging fashion. It's also all rather unoriginal and tired. We've had many decades of this anti-political correctness sophistry if not so well-written. It's cud pre-chewed by a thousand dull-eyed ruminants. What is accomplished here? I think we've only learned about Paul Graham and it isn't flattering.
  • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    Eh, it’s par for the course for a blog post—some good, some inchoate, a little wrong. I appreciate having the word “prig” to replace criticism of both wokeness and the new right Silicon Valley’s Musk-Trump worship.
    • pmdulaney 2y ago
      I agree, but I think in the context of pre-twentyfirst-century religiosity, "prig" had the connotation of a person who was, yes, a huffy moral scold, but essentially harmless. In the context of current wokeness, there is a very real intent and ability to destroy lives. (As for the new right tech bros, I'm not sure if any prigs really have the power to hurt them seriously, though certainly Elon's investment in Twitter has taken quite a hit.)
      • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > As for the new right tech bros, I'm not sure if any prigs really have the power to hurt them seriously The new right tech bros are doing their own cancellations. Silicon Valley traffics in old tweets critical of Musk or Trump like the Victorian courtesans Graham ironically criticises.
• dec0dedab0de 2y ago
  we’re flagging pg now?
  • bloopernova 2y ago
    > we're flagging pg now? I assume it's because the term "woke" will almost always derail a thread.
    • jimkleiber 2y ago
      well, people who use it to self-identify often use it in terms of being aware, a positive attribution, and I assume people who use it to identify others use it in terms of being judgmental, a negative attribution. So yeah, it's a highly charged term.
      • Daishiman 2y ago
        I have never seen anyone in a social network self-identifying as "woke". I have seen it countless times being thrown as a vague, shapeless accusatory things that can go from people being overboard in their language policing to opposing real, actual fascism.
        • rcruzeiro 2y ago
          Precisely. One commenter above got close to the point but then completely missed it: they suggested that people get into “wokeism” with good intentions, such as wanting to reduce things like sexual harassment. Then, they ponder whether there is a way to reduce sexual harassment without becoming “woke.” They fail to realize that you don’t simply declare yourself “woke.” It is a label others assign to you once you decide you are no longer going to tolerate things like sexual harassment.
        • Mountain_Skies 2y ago
          Same with SJWs. Lots of people wore that label until their actions caused it to become negative, at which point everyone who proudly wore it pretended to never have ever heard of it before their ideological enemies started using it. No doubt some new label will replace woke, be worn proudly, get tarnished by the people who wear that label, and once again they'll try fleeing from the associations they created.
• Ukv 2y ago
  > 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".
  • dfltr 2y ago
    In fact the Gnorts would not have "a long list of rules to memorize" with "no underlying principles". They would instead have a history and culture (or many histories and many cultures) to learn in order to contextualize words and symbols and find their actual meaning, because meaning doesn't really exist without context.
    • username332211 2y ago
      Imagine that the 2028 Democratic presidential candidate for some reason consistently uses the term "colored people". We all know what's going to happen. The underlying history and culture would change within the span of 24 hours, and suddenly "colored people" would loose it's racist connotations. Awareness of history and culture won't help you understand language rules. Instead, to avoid saying something racist, one must be keenly aware of political expediency.
      • kubb 2y ago
        „The Democrats control the language“ is a wild, but unsurprising take.
    • zahlman 2y ago
      From the perspective of someone who was not raised in the culture in question, this is a distinction without a difference.
• jimkleiber 2y ago
  To me this seems to be the most rambling, disorganized essay I've seen him write. I normally appreciate how he structures his arguments and in this one, I struggled to get past the first few sentences. Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way. Wouldn't calling some a prig or woke, saying that the people are "self-righteously moralistic people who behave as if superior to others," in a way, be demonstrating the same behavior? Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them? In that vein, I don't know what Paul's motivations were to write this post and I don't know why he lacked the normal structure with headings and such, I just hope that he's doing OK. I'm trying to understand the feelings he's experiencing, and maybe if I'm able to get through his writing I'll have a better sense. He seems a bit distraught, frustrated, ranting, not sure.
  • swed420 2y ago
    The biggest flaw imo was the deafening silence around how "wokeness" is used as a tool by corporate Dems/Repubs and state agents of capital interests to distract from material issues and keep people divided over "culture war" / identity politics issues instead of uniting their focus on the former. No mention of how the recent resurgence coincided with the Occupy Wall St protests. No mention of how it was used to dismantle the Bernie Sanders campaigns. Etc.
    • th19367 2y ago
      That is what most people avoid. Ramaswamy said it outright in his book but is now pro H1B. I have never heard Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray mention any economic issues ever. There seems to be a secret penalty for bringing up that subject, unless you are running for MAGA like Ramaswamy and then possibly reverse opinion once people voted for you.
    • malcolmgreaves 2y ago
      [flagged]
• jimkleiber 2y ago
  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 https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Woke
  • swed420 2y ago
    Also: Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683826
    • viccis 2y ago
      I came in here to see if this had been posted already. deBoer does a much better job at talking about it in a comparatively neutral way. He only adds his two cents at the very end. Another good one that gets it even closer is from Sam Kriss. His prose is a bit less to the point than deBoer, but he outlines his idea that "wokeness" is not a political ideology but rather an etiquette. I think it's paywalled now but the archived version can be read:https://web.archive.org/web/20230324050437/https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics https://web.archive.org/web/20230324050437/https://samkriss.... It's a good writeup that doesn't require the reader to have taken a stance or agree with the author's (arguably reactionary in the case of PG's post, depending on one's perspective) politics.
• s1artibartfast 2y ago
  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.
  • forgotacc240419 2y ago
    There was a variety of causes that gained prominence ~2015 when Bernie Sanders came much closer to challenging Hillary Clinton than anyone expected. The Democrat party establishment picked the wishy washy meaningless bits out and focused on them while keeping away from the more challenging economic issues that would actually require their ideologies to adapt I think what most people call "woke" is probably just a reaction to the obvious emptiness of many of the things politicians like Kamala Harris chose to focus on whilst ignoring more concrete issues. A lot of it was stuff there never was a solution for.
    • NoGravitas 2y ago
      I mean, that's part of it. The culture war is useful to both US political parties, because they both have a bourgeois class interest and need something to keep people invested in politics for the sake of their political legitimacy, but at the same time need to prevent them from gaining class consciousness or becoming involved in class politics. Put another way: the culture war (as woke vs. anti-woke) divides the electorate, but in a way that lets them be parceled out between two factions of the ruling class, rather than aligning any of them against the ruling class.
      • UncleMeat 2y ago
        Criminalization of homelessness is probably the most stark example of class warfare in society today. And agitation against these policies is absolutely called "woke" by the right. The idea that wokeness is in contrast to class-based advocacy is not correct. The right will happily call class-based advocacy "woke" until the cows come home.
• foldr 2y ago
  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.
  • zimpenfish 2y ago
    > What is PG thinking? My assumption would be that he's doing a performative hard right turn like pretty much every other tech billionaire this week in order to make nice with the incoming lunatic administration.
    • tappdarden 2y ago
      he made a hard right turn a decade or more ago. Its not just now. source: his other blog posts.
  • teach 2y ago
    In "The Age of the Essay"[0], Paul writes: "An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. "Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside. "If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them." So there's your answer. PG is thinking "This is something I don't know; I should write an essay to figure out an answer." It also makes sense to me that when he writes an essay connected to an area he knows well (like startups), the result is maybe full of unique perspectives and is broadly insightful/useful. Whereas an essay on wokeness isn't likely to bring much to the table to anyone who has been paying attention to diversity for several years. Maybe it's still useful to engineers who've been living under a rock and haven't paid any attention at all; I don't know. [0] https://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html https://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
• stby 2y ago
  This just reads like the usual anti-intellectualism.
  • Cornbilly 2y ago
    That’s really all Silicon Valley has to offer at this point. They are our betters and we should follow them without question.
    • AlexandrB 2y ago
      > They are our betters and we should follow them without question. Wasn't this basically the messaging of the Harris/Walz campaign? Perhaps if not directly then through the commentary around it.
      • Cornbilly 2y ago
        I’m not sure. I don’t listen to much political commentary outside of the stuff shoved in my face. What gave you that feeling from the Harris campaign?
      • n4r9 2y ago
        Trump suggested he was "anointed by God" to serve a second term. I can't think of anything that says "I'm better than you" than that.
• let_me_post_0 2y ago
  Crazy and rather ironic that an essay from pg himself gets flagged no HN.
  • forgetfreeman 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • astine 2y ago
      Presumably because he owns the site. You would think this would be the one place that PG didn't get much pushback on his opinions. I'm not too surprised though; he hasn't been very involved here for years so the culture has shifted.
      • djur 2y ago
        I don't think he would have written this 10, even 5 years ago. It only really started becoming a trendy viewpoint in his social circles recently.
        • ANewFormation 2y ago
          I think the big shift was in cancel culture, doxing, swatting, and all that stuff starting to rise, which is all relatively recent. A moralistic ideology acting holier than thou is nothing new. In the 80s (and for sure time after) evangelicals had their "Moral Majority." But nobody really cares until an ideology starts regularly driving harmful actions, at which point there starts to be a lot more push back.
          • djur 2y ago
            Swatting and doxing aren't ideologically-aligned actions, though. They certainly don't have anything in particular to do with "woke".
        • let_me_post_0 2y ago
          That's not true. PG has been ranting about wokeness for quite a long time already. I don't think you quite understand the nuance of a lot of these definitions. PG isn't a conservative MAGA guy nor a bigot. He just does not like how the woke crowd goes about trying to affect social change and how unsavory types use the woke crowd to achieve their political goals.
• Leary 2y ago
  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.
  • xkcd-sucks 2y ago
    fr Nathaniel Hawthorne is immensely relevant in the present day
  • narag 2y ago
    Christians are so new. I wonder why Pharisees aren't mentioned more often when bringing in this topic. Actually, "pharisaical" is the dictionary definition for this kind of hypocrisy.
    • freedomben 2y ago
      My guess would be because most of the audience it's said to are much more familiar with Christianity than with 0000s Judaism. If the person hearing the comparison don't know anything about the operand then for them it becomes a meaningless comparison.
      • aubanel 2y ago
        If anyone's familiar with Christianism they will be also familiar with Pharisians, mentioned probably mentioned more frequently in the New Testament than the old (Jesus often recused their ways)
        • cosmic_cheese 2y ago
          I was raised Christian and yes, the Pharisees were not just taught about, but a subject of focus. This makes the modern American strain of Christianity all the more puzzling to me, with how it in many ways shares more with the Pharisees than it does with the religion's namesake, but that’s a topic for a different post.
• Frummy 2y ago
  It’s simple, if you can do a special rain dance that makes you not have to draw back your bottom line, you will do it every day of the week whether you’re a billion dollar corporation or a 500 year old university
• malcolmgreaves 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • Mistletoe 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • veonik 2y ago
      I don't think the "be nice to everyone" is the thing people are annoyed with, rather it's the "you will be canceled if you step out of line even once" that comes along with it.
      • notahacker 2y ago
        The irony being of course, that the current wave of performative anti-woke articles from PG, Zuck et al is based mostly on fear that they'll be cancelled by the incoming administration if they appear to be too kindly disposed to minorities...
        • bigstrat2003 2y ago
          That is pure speculation on your part (flamebait speculation at that). You can't prove it nor even offer compelling evidence for it.
          • notahacker 2y ago
            I mean, it'd be a remarkable coincidence if firms queuing up to renounce their DEI initiatives and argue that the President's new bestie was doing a great job of promoting free speech were doing so without regard to the imminent inauguration date of a President who's never exactly disguised his loathing of such things and his desire to make life miserable for people he sees as "woke" (or his fondness for recalcitrant critics for that matter). Even PG himself is busy observing (on Twitter) the trend of removing pronouns from profiles. In fairness to PG, unlike Zuckerberg he's not actually rolling back anything he's been doing for most of the past couple of decades, but it'd be a helluva surprise if he'd just forgotten who was in charge when he got suspended from Twitter in his haste to lavish praise on the president's right hand man for doing such a great job of removing censorship from Twitter
• drcongo 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • dang 2y ago
    Please don't do this here.
  • Mountain_Skies 2y ago
    Prime example of why woke got associated with negative connotations.
• wrs 2y ago
  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.
  • haswell 2y ago
    For sake of argument, what if the answer truly is "do it quietly"? What if it's most effective to live your life to the best of your ability without prejudice, and instead of preaching about what people should do, you just do what it is that you believe to be right? I grew up in (and left behind) conservative evangelical christian circles, and the thing that always made me most uncomfortable with "wokeness" is how much it often resembles those holier-than-though people I grew up around. It's not that I disagree with the underlying ideas behind "woke" positions as much as it is the behavior of the people who want to move those ideas forward. Whether it's overly pious evangelical christians or "very woke" people, I think there's an underlying belief that transcends particular points of view that there's a particular way people must conduct themselves and that using various tactics ranging from moralizing to public shaming are tactics that are effective. Except I don't think these tactics are effective at all, and while it may be unsatisfying, "try to be the best example you can be" seems far more helpful than what often emerges when people feel they're morally justified.
    • wrs 2y ago
      There is a particular way people should conduct themselves. For example, they shouldn’t murder other people, damage public property, or systematically discriminate against other people based on gender or “race”. We aren’t “quiet” about the first two.
      • haswell 2y ago
        The trouble is that many of the issues now under the "woke" umbrella are not nearly as simple/obvious as the examples you've chosen. To raise just one example: for most people, terms like "whitelist" and "blacklist" held no racist connotations. When they uttered those words, they felt no animus towards another person or race. If they were asked to speculate why those words exist or how they originated, there's a good chance they'd point out that "light" and "dark" have longstanding associations often evoking religious imagery of good vs evil. And indeed, if you investigate the history of these words, they don't seem to have a problematic racial history (which can't be said for all words). But due to the potential for racial connotations, replacing these words was part of a widespread campaign. Resisting the removal of these words would result in someone being labeled a racist/bigot etc. Personally, I've chosen to remove those words from my vocabulary because they offend some people in neutral settings and it's not a big deal to say "allowlist/denylist". But I'm not taking it upon myself to scold other people for not doing the same thing. On the other hand, if someone started using the n word, I wouldn't be quiet about it. My general point was that acting as if all "woke" issues rise to the level of murder, property rights or racial discrimination is exactly the problem. People stop taking the "you must live this particular way" people seriously when the issues up for discussion are complex and not obvious.
• femiagbabiaka 2y ago
  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.
  • notahacker 2y ago
    Of course they can tell they're at the centre of an even greater cancel culture mob, the writing of these articles is entirely with fear of avoiding cancellation in mind...
• esharte 2y ago
  [flagged]
• languagehacker 2y ago
  Wow, I really hated this article. Thanks for the bad opinion, Paul.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• marstall 2y ago
  it's not about the "meaning" of the word but more the way people use it and its connotations. it is often code for a racist or homophobic sentiment the speaker doesn't want to own up to. when people say "things are getting too woke" - let's be honest, they are often saying that people who were once unfairly marginalized (black people, gay people, women) are getting less marginalized.
• not2b 2y ago
  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.
  • badgersnake 2y ago
    It’s hard to define “woke” as anything other than “something someone politically to the left of me does that I don’t like” as that’s how broadly it’s used. It’s utterly meaningless.
  • jimbokun 2y ago
    No that’s the most common usage now. It’s almost exclusively used pejoratively. Very few people use it in a positive sense anymore.
• NeutralForest 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • forgotacc240419 2y ago
    He's the co-founder of this website
    • NeutralForest 2y ago
      Then I wish we had a higher bar for content.
• yapyap 2y ago
  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
  • spondylosaurus 2y ago
    "Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep. Not really a statement about your own behavior so much as an acknowledgement of what other people are doing to you—it just meant you're well-informed. Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."
    • themaninthedark 2y ago
      Generally the reaction is not to minorities(non-white, is what I am assuming you mean) but to people from outside of a group trying to tell a group what words to use i.e. LatinX. An aside: If someone who is white is talking to the Spanish speaking community, would they be considered a minority? If so, then the parent premise would hold true.
      • spondylosaurus 2y ago
        I mean any kind of minority, although I would generally say "marginalized group" instead of "minority." But this is HN, so trying to stick to more commonly-known terminology :P I also think the "latinx" thing is overblown and generally used as an "anti-woke" shibboleth by people who want to get mad at something. Literally never seen an Anglophone yelling at a Spanish speaker about it before, only queer Spanish speakers who use it to refer to themselves. Also worth noting that there have been other variations that predate "latinx" and have seen more widespread usage. There's "latine," and "latin@", although the former is both easier to write and to pronounce.
• commandlinefan 2y ago
  > 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.
• etchalon 2y ago
  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.
  • fatbird 2y ago
    This is the greatest weakness of an already weak essay.
• pohl 2y ago
  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-history-origin-evolution-controversy https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-hist...
  • verdverm 2y ago
    Came to share the same link, much better piece than PG's
• tantalor 2y ago
  This is the wokest essay I've ever read.
  • vessenes 2y ago
    I like the idea that you could think of the essay as part of the newly performative "not-hard-left" messaging. I guess maybe it is a product of its very recent times. It seems to me like there's a bit of social and cultural space for people to "speak up" that haven't felt like they can for some time. To my mind, that's all to the good, it leaves room for discussion and debate which is healthy.
• pron 2y ago
  > Fortunately when the aggressively conventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one thing that gives them away: they define new heresies to punish people for If the "conventional-minded" define new heresies, against a new creed, how are they conventional? What gives Paul Graham away is what he doesn't mention and may be what bothers him more: the old heresies that the surprisingly innovative and even rebellious "conventional-minded" abolish. (Actually, they do neither, but those who believe the former also believe the latter) As with the myth of the "cancel culture" that Graham mentions (or the similar myth of "the war on Christmas"), the problem isn't the truth of certain events that do occur. It is the exaggeration of magnitude and ignorance of context. Clearly, at no stage in human history were more people not only free but also able to widely disseminate a wider range of views as they are today. Specifically, far fewer people are "silenced" at universities today than were, say, in the 1950s (except, maybe, in super-woke Florida). > College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous combination. Yeah, larping in a world of Jewish cabals and weather/mind control has turned out to be far more poisonous. Anyway, for a more interesting and astute perspective on wokeness, see https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics Kriss shows why comparing wokeness to socialism or Christianity -- as Graham does -- is a category error: > [I]t’s not a politics, or an ideology, or a religion. If you’ve ever spent any time in a political movement, or a religious one—even a philosophical one—you’ll have noticed that these things always have sects. Small differences in doctrine turn into antagonistic little groups. There are dozens of denominations that all claim to be the universal catholic church. Put two Marxists in a room and you’ll get three different ideological schisms. ... But it’s hard to see any such thing happening in any of the movements that get described as woke. Black Lives Matter did not have a ‘left’ or a ‘right’ wing; the different rainbow flags did not belong to rival queer militia ... The spaces these movements produce might be the sites of constant churning mutual animosity and backstabbing, but the faultlines are always interpersonal and never substantive. This is very, very unusual. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the woke mind virus is so perfectly bioengineered that it’s left all its victims without any capacity for dissent whatsoever, permanently trapped in a zombielike groupthink daze. This is the kind of possibility that a lot of antiwoke types like to entertain. Let me sketch out an alternative view. > ... Wokeness is an etiquette. There are no sects within wokeness for the same reason that there are no sects on whether you should hold a wine glass by the bowl or by the stem. It’s not really about dogmas or beliefs, in the same way that table manners are not the belief that you should only hold a fork with your left hand. > ... What makes something woke is a very simple operation: the transmutation of political demands into basically arbitrary standards of interpersonal conduct. The goal is never to actually overcome any existing injustices; political issues are just a way to conspicuously present yourself as the right kind of person. > ... Unlike wokeness, the word antiwokeness is still used as a self-descriptor. The antiwoke will announce themselves to you. They won’t deny that antiwokeness exists. But since there’s no fixed and generally agreed-upon account of what the object of this apophatic doctrine actually is, you could be forgiven for wondering whether it is, in fact, particularly real. Wokeness is not a politics. And antiwokeness is not a politics either. It’s a shew-stone > Every day, the antiwoke are busy producing wokeness, catching visions of incorporeal powers, desperately willing this thing into colder and denser form. What does this look like? Hysteria over uncouth material in entertainment media. Pseudo-sociological dogshit jargon. Endless smug performances of wholesome trad virtue. To be antiwoke is to be just another type of person who mistakes etiquette for politics, putting all your energies into the terrain of gesture and appearance, obsessed with images, frothing at every new indecency, horrified, appalled. We must protect the children from harm! I’m sure that some day very soon, the antiwoke will have their own miserable cultural hegemony. Big companies organising compulsory free-speech training for their workers. An informal network of censors scrubbing the mass media of anything that smacks too much of progressive tyranny.
• RangerScience 2y ago
  All of "wokeness", "social justice", etc, when you look at the "forest not the trees" ends up pretty simple: One group of people is saying: "This hurts, please stop", to which the other group says: "No". So the first goes back to the drawing board to come up with reasons, theories, explanations, convincing arguments... and you get things like critical race theory, systemic *isms, etc. That's pretty much it. Sure, there's other bits in there - about accomplishing the "stop", or about handling emotions around blame, or about handling your own hurt, etc - but, at the end of the day? It's really just people saying "this hurts, please stop", and what forms around the response when the response is "No".
  • commandlinefan 2y ago
    > One group of people is saying: "This hurts, please stop" But the entire article you're criticizing can be summed up as "wokeness hurts, please stop". To which you say, "No".
• _1tem 2y ago
  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.
  • AlexandrB 2y ago
    I agree with Sam Kriss, "wokeness" is an etiquette: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics > They’ll tell you that actually, there’s no such thing as wokeness. It’s not an ideology. It’s not a belief system. It’s just basic decency. It’s just being a good person. > They’re right. Wokeness is an etiquette. There are no sects within wokeness for the same reason that there are no sects on whether you should hold a wine glass by the bowl or by the stem. It’s not really about dogmas or beliefs, in the same way that table manners are not the belief that you should only hold a fork with your left hand.
• p4bl0 2y ago
  > Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness This is a fake news. Research shows that Twitter algorithmic amplification favored right-wing politics even before Musk made it even worse. See: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119 > On the other hand, the people on the far left have only themselves to blame; they could tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted to. Being this much clueless in pg's position is not possible. I can only assume he's consciously lying. He can see front row what Musk does with Twitter and how the "free speech" he's supposedly defending is actually "what Musk likes to hear speech", and he perfectly knows Musk is strongly aligned with the far right that he supports however he can all over the world. See for example: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2025/01/10/musk-doubles-down-on-support-for-german-far-right-leader_6736883_143.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2025/01/10/musk-dou...
  • jiriknesl 2y ago
    Can you prove it? Do you have any proof that Twitter promotes right leaning views more than left leaning ones? "When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression" Twitter was discriminating against right leaning views. Extreme far left views (like communism) were absolutely OK and widespread on Twitter. If one had as extreme right leaning views, he would be shadowbanned, reprioritised etc. What is Twitter now is a fair game. Every voice is heard the same. What Twitter is doing now should have been the norm the whole time. And the same is true for all major social networks, search engines, public funded media, universities and other organizations. When only leftists get their voice heard, they got used to it. Loosing this privilege looks like discrimination, doesn't it?
    • apsec112 2y ago
      Based on looking at the "Latest" feed (which shouldn't be biased by the algorithm), and on what newly created accounts see, right-wing posts on Twitter outnumber left-wing posts something like 10:1.
    • 650REDHAIR 2y ago
      "What is Twitter now is a fair game. Every voice is heard the same. What Twitter is doing now should have been the norm the whole time." Where is your proof for that being true? I was a left-leaning voice that was banned from Twitter after changing my display name (not handle) to "Elon's Musk". How is that free speech?
• OrvalWintermute 2y ago
  [flagged]
• douglee650 2y ago
  Oh man … stay in your lane. Capitalism. The human condition can seem very hopeless, for sure.
• 23B1 2y ago
  > In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it? Yes. It requires the willpower to disengage from the performative point scoring of internet discourse. Most good conversation must now happen in private for many reasons, much of that has to do with the technology PG himself has previously supported. Presently, you are seeing social media forking into red and blue (x and bsky and fb and truth social). This is bonkers. A superior format for discussion is a place like HN which is tightly (and opaquely) moderated. Another great development is the use of 'community notes' which, for all its imperfections, is superior to straight censorship. Ultimately I'd like to see people like PG invest in high quality journalism where the mission is a dispassionate reporting of the best-available facts, supported where possible with data, and presented in such a way as to demonstrate transparency.
  • vessenes 2y ago
    The journalism point he made hits home, hard. I'm a sunday times subscriber, and just added WSJ and Financial Times paper edition. I don't really want to add 10 substacks and parse through them all. I'd pay a lot, a lot a lot, for a quality daily briefer, known in some circles as a newspaper of record. One that I love, deeply, is the Martha's Vineyard Gazette -- still printed on broadsheet, and with fantastic journalism -- it's what regional and local papers used to be. I wish we could have something like this in the national format.
• dymk 2y ago
  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".
  • NoGravitas 2y ago
    If you want technical articles with less politics, try the invite-only red site.
    • layer8 2y ago
      How do you get an invite?
      • makeworld 2y ago
        By asking someone you know who has one.
• tayo42 2y ago
  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.
  • willguest 2y ago
    I think it's related to the perceived centrality of identity in the world. I see this as a natural consequence of individualism, which itself is championed by both modern capitalist and libertarian thinking, to pick two. As the focus on the individual's happiness, wealth, values (etc.) have become more and more ubiquitous, the need to define oneself becomes more and more important. As this has matured, many systems have build that reinforce it. Representative democracy - one person, one vote, and welfare systems that address indivudual needs, are positive examples. With this comes also a much stronger need for protecting these identities, and more weight is given to perceived categories, whether they are superficial, like skin colour, or structural, like religion or class. So, when people talk about wokeness, they are not only trying to define the social contract, but they also aligning with it their identity, which gives a kind of existential urgency. The idea that we might be wrong about our position carries with it a sense of loss of self, which triggers most people. Just my two cents.
• 752963e64 2y ago
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• skepticATX 2y ago
  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.
  • Dig1t 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • jodrellblank 2y ago
      > "genital mutilation of children (gender affirming surgery)" In the past 4 years in the USA there have been: - roughly 14.4 million children born, half of them are boys (7.2 million) and 57% of those circumcised. 4.1 million non-consenting genital mutilation surgeries on people who didn't ask for them, mostly infants. - 4160 breast removal surgeries in minors under 17.5 years old on people who did ask for them, mostly teens. - 660 phalloplasties in the same group. We should definitely wonder why Republicans are fine with four million non-consensual genital mutilation surgeries every year mostly on infants, but against a thousand times smaller number of surgeries mostly teens willingly asking for them. We should wonder this in the context of Republicans pushing back against legislation raising the minimum marriage age: - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/louisiana-age-consent-marriage-child-bride-republican-us-a8942781.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/louisiana-... - "If they’re both 16 or 15 and having a baby why wouldn’t we want them to get married?" - said representative Nancy Landry, a Republican from Lafayette - "The West Virginia bill is an outright ban on all marriages under 18. When the House advanced it to the Senate with a resounding 84 votes in support, just over 12 Republicans voted against it" ; ""The only thing it's going to do is cause harm and trouble in young people's lives," Harrison County Delegate Keith Marple, a Republican and the lone person to speak against the state bill" - https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-make-case-child-marriage-1786476 https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-make-case-child-marriag... i.e. Republicans being fine with 15 year olds "making their own choices" when it comes to marriage. > "stating pronouns as a performative act" ; "Continue to deny that this worldview exists, and you will continue losing elections." This is the United States where you stand up every day in school and performatively pledge allegiance to a flag, yes? Where you stop strangers in the street to "thank them for their service"? How are you so annoyed about someone putting "he/him" next to their name (but not about them putting captain/corporal/major/doctor/reverend next to their name), and as a response you vote for a man who admits sexual assault, has been convicted of federal crimes, lies about his experience, knowledge and credentials, spent $141,000,000 of your money playing golf - mostly at his own golf clubs, used the presidency to (illegally!) promote Goya products, nepotistically sent his own children as official US representatives to meetings? A president who performatively attends church for photo shoots but doesn't regularly attend church for prayer? It's this kind of behaviour which gives rise to the jokes "the Right will eat a shit sandwich if it means the left will catch a whiff of their breath" and which makes a mockery of the claims that it's all the left's fault; the Right is fixated on trivial bullshit, arguing for the right to be able to lie and be jerks without being fact checked or facing any consequences, without a sense of proportion of different events, obsessed with being angry about the left's feelings and calling them snowflakes, while choosing who to vote for because a film character gets black skin instead of white skin.
• willguest 2y ago
  > 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.
  • let_me_post_0 2y ago
    I live in Europe (Germany) and we have no wokeness here. Saying something sexist or racist isn't a big deal. Some people will think you are an asshole and that's it. Our leftists go to the US and come back ranting about how oppressive wokeness is. I'm a minority myself and have experienced my fair share of racism. But I have no desire to push for somebody to get fired for making a racist joke or some such thing. I will just lower my opinion of them and move on with my life. I don't want to live in a country where a wrong word at the wrong time might mean you're fired.
    • djur 2y ago
      Germany has laws against hate speech! There are opinions you can be jailed for in Germany that you couldn't be in the US.
    • willguest 2y ago
      I think it depends on the word and the context. If the person speaking is your boss, there might be situations where 'moving on' isn't an option and the words might have wider implication in your life. Germany actually has several laws in place that explicitly protect people in the workplace, such as the General Equal Treatment Act (2006, with revisions to 2022) which contains an explicit treatment of Harrassment, specifically mentioning that of a sexual nature. Going further, in a judgment dated from 06.12.2021, LAG Cologne, sexual harrassment was explicitly stated as acceptable grounds for extraordinary dismissal. So actually you already live in exactly that kind of country. https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/detail/extraordinary-dismissal-for-sexual-harassment-in-the-workplace.html https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/de... What I think you're trying to say, though, is that you don't experience the kind of angry fanatical discourse that seems to a big feature of social media and US discourse, where laws are being weaponised and used as blunt political instruments, with which to do as much damage to society as possible. In this case, I agree with you and am super grateful I don't live there.
• toastercat 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • red019 2y ago
    [dead]
    • torlok 2y ago
      Who's "they"? Peterson couldn't name a single person when pushed.
• kelseyfrog 2y ago
  The article missed the biggest opportunity to be curious by avoiding the question: What if they're right?
  • karaterobot 2y ago
    > But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe... It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do. To be fair, he does say the above, which is close enough. The problem with asking "what if they're right" is that there's no single formulation of beliefs shared universally by such large and diverse group, so you can't consider whether they are right or not, only whether each individual expression is.
    • rukuu001 2y ago
      But there’s this statement as well: > Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be… The whole idea of woke (in the non pejorative sense) is that you’ve done the work to perceive the actual problem. That statement shows that he hasn’t, which I think undermines the good parts of the essay.
      • zug_zug 2y ago
        Yeah, that's where he lost me too. I get the impression that in his head the firing of a college president is a bigger problem than racism.... like bro 24% of the world lives in a caste system. I don't know if human kind will ever be capable of treating people without preference across beauty, age, race, etc. I'd be curious how he "sizes" the import of these problems (priggishness, prejudice) and whether it's just drawn directly from personal frustrations of a wealthy white billionaire in the most progressive state in the world.
      • s1artibartfast 2y ago
        Isn't that Akin to arguing if something should be a 9.8 or a 9.5 on a completely arbitrary scale with no shared definition. From what you say, anyone who disagrees about the nature or severity of the problem hasn't done the work and is flat out wrong. If so, then the whole idea of wokeness collapses into the state of infallible enlightenment where everything one says is correct.
• TheEggMan 2y ago
  For the record, there are some conservatives on YC that agree with PG.
• softwaredoug 2y ago
  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.
  • tines 2y ago
    > Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not. That sentiment ("any mistake is because they're a DEI hire") is obviously wrong. But didn't DEI open itself up for that accusation by lending it some truth? It's a fact that black doctors have lower GPAs than Asian doctors on average. I think a lot of people would argue against DEI because it takes the easy way out of a real problem. The result we want is more black doctors, but the way you should get to that is not changing standards that are not inherently racist.
    • jimbob45 2y ago
      I think a lot of people would argue against DEI because it takes the easy way out of a real problem. The result we want is more black doctors, but the way you should get to that is not changing standards that are not inherently racist. The easy (and right) way out was to hire the most competent doctors, not the blackest doctors. I don't want more black doctors, I want the best doctors, regardless of their skin color. If you want more black doctors, you should train better black doctors. However, if you're going to do that, don't be surprised when white trainees band together to work harder too. If it's fair for your side, it's fair for every side. I have no idea why we went backwards from "discrimination based on skin color is never okay" to "it's okay if they're black" but there's no reason not to simply recognize the mistake, fix it, and move on.
      • tines 2y ago
        > The easy (and right) way out was to hire the most competent doctors What I mean by "easy" is "quick and superficial." Hiring the most competent doctors delays achieving the statistic of "more black doctors," so it's not the "easy way" I'm talking about. It takes time for education to come up to par in black communities, because they're poorer for historical reasons. The right (and harder, because it's not doable via a means that the DEI people directly control---hiring) way is to put money where it's needed for education, and "more black doctors" will be a ripple effect achieved without discrimination.
• motohagiography 2y ago
  even though I agree with much of his commentary, the piece that's missing is in the questions: were you principled and brave? how were you an example? I know what I did, and some of it is in my comment history on this site. but I think the whole episode was a failure of moral courage. sure, it was the woke, but really, it was us. I think anyone feeling more free to speak now needs to reflect on that. Watching Zuck on Rogan was refreshing and hopeful, but that (very Harvard) oblivious affect that blows with the wind is not a foundation on which to rebuild the culture. there's a very compelling take from the woke, which summarizes as, "you don't get to say mean and dumb shit without a cost anymore, and we're not bearing the costs of your culture that is set up to exclude us." This must be heard, and most criticisms of the totalitarian moment that seized our culture overlook that this argument was the kernel of truth that anchored the system of chaos and lies that followed. to most of them I would respond, "you othered yourselves and when adults wouldn't listen to you, you organized to terrorize kids about their 'privilege.'" however, for our civilization to survive, there is a social re-integration of a lot of people that needs to be done so that there is an us again, and a sense of our shared protagonism. I'm glad PG, Andreesen, Zuck, Musk, and others are addressing this stuff. Elon's massive gambit and persistent leadership, and Zuck hiring Dana White for the Meta board are very good starts. If you want to be a part of rebuilding after this dark period, ask yourself if you had courage when it was hard, and reflect on when you didn't so that you don't fail like that again.
  • _bee_hive_ 2y ago
    I did, and do, and each day I pay the price and then some. Free speech and research is critical in order for our society to thrive. That said, it is not mutually exclusive with helping folks that need a little help to integrate and contribute when they really want to? It’s sad to see changes that helped, getting thrown out for its association with a social craze.
• camcaine 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • qoez 2y ago
    It's against HN rules to say it used to be better but looking at these replies it clearly has changed since the first days around a decade ago
    • jodrellblank 2y ago
      > "the first days around a decade ago" Your calendar's missing a few years; HN is from Feb 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News
  • pkkkzip 2y ago
    i dont think the ppl expressing their outrage here realize the screenshot of their content is being amplified and shared on other platforms not because they agree with it but purely for comedy. so steadfast is their view point as the only possible view that they cant imagine/realize many of us are laughing at them. coupled with the discoverability of usernames connected to their other real world profiles and the virality of their comic, it probably is unwise to be labelled far-left or 'woke' in professional circles going forward.
    • djur 2y ago
      You're saying that the heretics will be suppressed?
      • pkkkzip 2y ago
        has anybody suppressed anyone from making a fool of themselves?
        • djur 2y ago
          You're saying people will face professional consequences for their political opinions. That seems like the kind of thing Graham is complaining about to me.
• pavlov 2y ago
  Would this essay be on the HN frontpage if it was written by anyone else?
  • paulpauper 2y ago
    It would but not for long . politics stuff tends to get flagged fast .
    • bbzealot 2y ago
      Not if they're from PG apparently
  • redundantly 2y ago
    No. Stuff like this benefits those behind HN and many who frequent this site. The political-neutral face HN puts on is a farce.
    • pavlov 2y ago
      Did pg really think through the timing of this essay? Whether his intention or not, releasing this right now feels like it's part of a concerted effort by the SV ultra-rich to convince their fans that Trump Is Good Actually.
      • diggan 2y ago
        > concerted effort by the SV ultra-rich to convince their fans that Trump Is Good Actually If that was his intention, wouldn't he make an article calling for the end of wokeness and everything related to it? Instead of saying something that can be summed up as "There are bad parts of wokeness, and there are some good parts"
        • dowager_dan99 2y ago
          your summary sounds an awful lot like a "good people on both sides" variation...
• tantalor 2y ago
  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.
  • grahamj 2y ago
    I love that complaining about language policing is language policing
    • layer8 2y ago
      It isn’t, though.
    • xanderlewis 2y ago
      In the same way that the police upholding the law is vigilantism?
  • gitaarik 2y ago
    Well, with the recent news that Facebook censored vaccine side effects by order of the government, I think we shouldn't underestimate censorship.
    • ColdTakes 2y ago
      "News" I'm not saying this didn't happen but I wouldn't trust Mark Zuckerberg if he said the sky was blue. He is trying to curry favor with the new administration and he is not above lying or embellishing what really happened.
      • gitaarik 2y ago
        Ok, so they're making that up according to you? Wouldn't they be investigated and if it turns out to be BS they would get an enormous fine? The Biden administration can easily sue them, why wouldn't they do that? Maybe because they know it's true, and they don't want to draw more attention to it, and they don't want an investigation?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• gatane 2y ago
  [flagged]
• tonetheman 2y ago
  [dead]
• i_love_retros 2y ago
  It's political correctness gone mad! https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2xpsg9 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2xpsg9
• jhp123 2y ago
  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.
  • vessenes 2y ago
    Also not on twitter, other than to camp my name. I disagree with your reading of the essay - he says that both of those were sort of "peaks" for their respective movements, and I would say that feels accurate to me. I'm in a mixed-race family, and George Floyd was the first and so-far only period where our family needed additional support, talk, help, considering how to respond. I agree that Anheuser-Busch seemed to have been stunlocked by Dylan Mulvaney v. Kid Rock on the internet.
    • jhp123 2y ago
      I didn't mean to imply that pg was saying that these incidents were unjustified or performative. I just think it's telling that the actual real-world events he discusses are not examples of the supposed overwhelming trend he's trying to diagnose. I think if he tried to actually discuss the main events of cancel culture, it would give the game away, because it would be a lot of penny-ante whining about minor setbacks in people's professional lives. Like, who is the most prominent example of an unjustly cancelled person? Larry Summers, who had to leave his job at Harvard almost 20 years ago, and later served a prominent role in the Obama administration? I'm inclined to take Summers' side in the controversy, but if that is a historically significant injustice in your worldview then you might be suffering an advanced case of brainrot.
• alganet 2y ago
  Just call it "The International Woke" already. It's what this is getting at, isn't it?
• excerionsforte 2y ago
  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.
• deleted 2y ago
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• _uhtu 2y ago
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  • diggan 2y ago
    Could you share the parts that have been "ripped" or "identical" from this book you're talking about? Would be very interesting if true, otherwise kind of despicable to make those claims without any sort of proof whatsoever.
    • ColdTakes 2y ago
      The title. >It's worth noting that the title of this article
  • NoGravitas 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • TinkersW 2y ago
    It is also similiar to "On The Origin of Species" a far more famous book that I'm sure everyone has heard of.
  • pkkkzip 2y ago
    Do you have specific excerpts from the book to push your claim that Paul Graham's writing identifies as a white supremacist? Not sure why you are mentioning Project 2025 or the civil rights stuff, you lost us there.
    • UncleMeat 2y ago
      Hanania's book is called "The Origins of Woke" and specifically calls for massive changes to Title 7 and jurisprudence surrounding it. Hanania has a record of contributing to explicitly white supremacist web sites. Though they claim to have softened their beliefs, they continue to cite other contributors to these sites. It is possible that PG is not aware of Hanania's book. But I think the connection is worth interrogating.
  • 2y ago
• NoGravitas 2y ago
  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.
• 650REDHAIR 2y ago
  Are there viable alternatives to HN? I'm pretty sick of PG and Altman's influence. They aren't good people.
  • pkkkzip 2y ago
    Reddit? Not sure why you decided today is the day to move
    • 650REDHAIR 2y ago
      Really? In a thread discussing PG's most recent brain fart you can't understand why today would be the day?
    • bowsamic 2y ago
      Probably because of the blog post that it is a comment to
    • dowager_dan99 2y ago
      lots of things reach a breaking point: dams, pollution assimilation, BS jobs, social media sites...
    • sedatk 2y ago
      I stopped using Reddit after the 3rd party app massacre. I don’t even do it out of protest, it’s just I don’t feel like it anymore. I guess that’s how powerful habits are.
  • coliveira 2y ago
    100% agree. They've become a symbol of how money corrupts people.
    • diggan 2y ago
      > They've become a symbol of how money corrupts people Become? I've read at least one of pg's books, and probably 10s of the essays, and even when I first read it (probably close to 2012 sometime) it was evidentially clear he is mostly about money. If the job (VC) didn't make it clear, the essays makes it even clearer. In short, most people involved in the VC/startup ecosystem are mostly about money. They will say they care about other things too, but they mostly say that because they care about money. If there is no way to make money saying/doing a thing, then they won't do that thing.
• fidotron 2y ago
  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_Future https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_F...
• thih9 2y ago
  > 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.
• justinrstout 2y ago
  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.
  • logicchains 2y ago
    In the US statistically speaking a minority is much more likely to be killed by another minority than a "white" American.
    • mindslight 2y ago
      Except the state is doing its killing as normative behavior in all of our names, whereas disorganized gang violence is already generally seen as wrong. And yes, police unaccountability most certainly affects more than just minorities. The lawlessness of law enforcement is actually the most pressing second amendment issue of our time, but you wouldn't know it by listening to the fully-pwnt political hacks at the NRA, pushing their chosen "side" of the group-herding thought-terminating "woke" strawman like pg here (sigh). How can you claim to have a second amendment right to self defense when the police can summarily execute you for exercising that natural right, in your own home, at night? (The answer is that you can't)
    • fatbird 2y ago
      Statistically true. What's your point?
    • ceejayoz 2y ago
      Sure, for the same reasons 84% of white people are killed by white perpetrators, and most child abusers are family members of the victim. Closeness brings both opportunity and conflict, and things like redlining and white flight have ensured the white and black population are quite well segregated.
    • Arkhaine_kupo 2y ago
      Most people are killed by someone they know. Due to redlining many minorities live in communities that are, to this day, essentially segregated. Add the disproportionate correlation of violence and poverty, adn you get a volatile cocktail. You will find it that cities with less redlining have less srong correlation between races of victims and perpetrators than cities that are more strongly, or more recently, redlined.
• bdangubic 2y ago
  wokeness will be discussed until morale improves... (or better said easier to rule and win elections while the masses are fighting the non-existent "culture war" and have no time to look at real problems (which whoever is ruling has no interest in solving..)
• _bee_hive_ 2y ago
  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 :(
• Devasta 2y ago
  If woke people are performative... then what is this incoherent nonsense meant to be?
• elschneider 2y ago
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  • _def 2y ago
    This kind of "upspeaking" will probably get more accepted and popular now. Dark times ahead.
    • elschneider 2y ago
      yeah, I have underestimated the lust for authoritarianism in silicon valley tbh
• khazhoux 2y ago
  Actually, the origin of “wokeness”, the term, is right-leaning bigots who need to discount any grievance by any group of people who claim they might just possibly be suffering some systemic disadvantages in this country.
  • vessenes 2y ago
    Nope. It was a term of respect and affirmation in the African American community first, and seems to have been successfully expropriated and rebranded.
    • khazhoux 2y ago
      I understand your point, but I don’t think anyone used the word “wokeness” before the Right started it as insult.
      • vessenes 2y ago
        That sounds right to me, too. Five years ago someone of color could say to a white guy "if you're not down, you're at least woke" and mean it as a compliment. Not sure what the new way to say that would be.
• mlsu 2y ago
  > 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!
• elsonrodriguez 2y ago
  >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.”
  • Bearstrike 2y ago
    >Following this logic, the Emancipation Proclamation was "problematic" because the "correct" thing to do is free slaves quietly via the underground railroad, as we wouldn't want to get slave owners in trouble. Present-day racism and slavery are in completely different neighborhoods of magnitude; to the extent that the comparison borders on false equivalency. >...the new moderation changes allow statements like "Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit." If a platform is attempting to operate within the ethos/spirit of free speech, you 'should' be allowed to make such statements on the platform. The root of the argument is the disagreement on whether and where one should be "allowed" to say those things. Saying it's problematic is not a trump card (no pun intended). If you can demonstrate how allowing people to say offensive/harmful things (excluding established limits on free speech regarding safety) is inconsistent with free speech, then you're adding something to the discussion. Anything else is likely a disagreement on utility of free speech vs. civility; a place where folks can agree to disagree.
    • magicalist 2y ago
      > If a platform is attempting to operate within the ethos/spirit of free speech, you 'should' be allowed to make such statements on the platform. Ah, but you aren't allowed to say "Christian men are totally useless" or "Lesbians are so stupid", so it sounds like you should take up the ethos/spirit of free speech with Meta as well.
• deleted 2y ago
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• lenova 2y ago
  I find it hilarious that the prophet of modern Startup Culture and its subsequent proliferation of Y Combinator/FAANG cult practices (e.g. growth at all costs or practising agile as a copy-cat set of misunderstood tech rituals) is blind to fact that the only ones proselytising about "wokeness" these days are the same ones trying to outrage you about it (i.e. Fox News and Elon Musk) in order to distract you from the fact that wealth and resources are being hoarded by the very same companies/individuals.
• jrm4 2y ago
  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.
  • causal 2y ago
    There is so very little citation or substantiation in the entire essay. Even the footnotes are largely just more speculation. He presents it as some kind of historical record but it's literally just his thoughts.
    • avs733 2y ago
      It’s almost like that is the entirety of the rhetorical and argument station expectations when people comment on too much wokeness. Vibes. “I invented a meaning for this word that bears no resemblance to its actual meaning and then am critical of others because I think my invented definition is bad”
      • kubb 2y ago
        1. Build a strawman. 2. Beat the living hell out of the strawman. 3.”I’m sure this will trigger some people”. 4. Get a standing ovation from Elon Musk. 5. Lots of money from private capital.
        • avs733 2y ago
          He didn’t even have to build his own strawman. It is a shared strawman - which is more efficient. PG out there disrupting the bad faith argument industry.
  • blast 2y ago
    You're right, but I don't think he's interested in the term. He's interested in the social phenomenon that (briefly) appropriated the term before the other side started using it as a negative.
• throwaway63467 2y ago
  I did not expect CEOs / industry titans to fall in line with the new regime so quickly, in the few weeks since Trumps election most tech leaders have completely changed their public stance on these topics. Why are they so afraid? Or are they simply happy to drop the charade as it seems clear the wind blows the other way now? I wasn’t feeling very positive about all the talk about making the world a better place but recently I’ve become quite cynical, it’s really just about the money it seems. I even find this whole hacker ethic quite stupid now, basically all that ethos about free software was just instrumented by corporations to extract wealth, and now that AI is seemingly around the corner they can finally drop most people building the software for them, as that was always the biggest cost center anyway.
  • lostdog 2y ago
    IMO most of these CEOs are not motivated by wokeness or anti wokeness. They are motivated by money, and the freedom to take whatever action they deem appropriate both inside and outside their companies. Biden was anti-monopoly and Trump is pro-corporate, so these CEOs are just naturally aligning according to their own motivations. And like all people, sometimes they take on the other priorities of the group, to feel that they fit in.
    • throwaway63467 2y ago
      The fact they do this is not very surprising, what I find surprising is the velocity of the change of sentiment in large parts of the tech industry. It seems a lot of people were fed up caring about these topics and feel safe to openly say so now. That wasn’t the case during the first Trump administration, so I wonder what affected this change of heart now?
      • int_19h 2y ago
        I would imagine it's the fact that during the first Trump admin, the political elites were still mostly old-school and only giving token support to MAGA talking points to score some easy points with their electorate. Given that the admin was mostly run by those same people in practice until very late into his first term, I think it wasn't seen as something serious. But this time around, we're looking at a full term by an admin that is staffed for the most part by die-hard Trumpists who make it very loud and clear that this particular topic is of utmost concern to them. Republicans in Congress are also much more in line with that. Perhaps even more importantly, this change of sentiment didn't start with tech - it started with prominent figures among the establishment liberals publicly calling out "excesses", and while this narrative received some pushback already, it has received way more support among the rank and file. This is a signal that the next Dem administration, should there be one, is likely to be much more hands-off in these regards. So, then, why would big tech stick to their guns on DEI if it disadvantages them immediately with no clear advantage to hope for in the future? I agree that velocity is surprising, though. Mostly because it makes it very clear that any talk of "values" has always been bullshit, so why would this new take be an exception? MAGA folk don't seem particularly convinced that e.g. Zuck is sincere, and I can't blame them.
• uludag 2y ago
  This article reads like a just-so story. Sounds plausible, but there's so much wiggle room for the narrative. And the "solutions" to wokeness he wrote left me puzzled, questioning whether the issues he paints were thought through. He mentions two solutions to wokeness: treat wokeness like a religion and submit it to "customs", and "fight back." So... essentially fight emotivism with emotivism. What does it mean to fight back and submit to customs other than perpetuation the same thing that's being criticized.
• throw4847285 2y ago
  Actually having a substantive argument about right and wrong is fraught, and so it's much easier to hide behind a combination of tone policing and armchair psychoanalysis of your opponents. Better to accuse your (imaginary) interlocutor of being a moralist, a meaningless term that tells me much more about your feelings on being "told what to do" than it does about your actual values.
• dole 2y ago
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• deleted 2y ago
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• archagon 2y ago
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  • justin66 2y ago
    Eh. The relevant parties are largely incapable of feeling embarrassment.
• JohnMakin 2y ago
  > 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
  • TimTheTinker 2y ago
    > But, inevitably, when you ask these same people what then should be done about inequality, whether it be racial or otherwise, the answer is often "nothing" or denying that a problem even exists. That's an assumption you're making - I don't see any evidence of that viewpoint in pg's essay. Any specifics you can point to? I can point to a specific that seems to contradict you: > But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do. Inevitably, someone will chime in and say that it wasn't what he said, it's what he didn't say -- arguing from someone's purported silence. But that's exactly the kind of performative nonsense he's arguing against. It ought to be possible to speak against something without being castigated for failing to pay lip service in some way to a related topic.
• torlok 2y ago
  How much money do you have to have before your beliefs stop changing like a flag in the political wind?
  • hyeonwho4 2y ago
    To be fair to pg, he has hinted at anti-radical-left beliefs before (see the essay about moral fashions). He is probably able to voice anti-radical-left views now because the Overton Window has shifted.
  • elbasti 2y ago
    pg has been pretty consistent in this position for a long time. His worldview is closest to what one could call "classical liberalism": Free speech, economic liberalism, civil liberties, individual autonomy. That's a worldview that is pretty idiosyncratic today (sadly). On some topics he's "left wing" (pro palestine), on others he's "right wing" (anti affirmative action in university admissions).
  • spprashant 2y ago
    PG has always been annoyingly consistent about his views on this.
• jrochkind1 2y ago
  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-the-whole-world-worth/ 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-us/ https://adriennemareebrown.net/2018/05/10/we-will-not-cancel...
  • ajbt200128 2y ago
    thank you for the sane comment. adrienne maree brown is wonderful
  • aprilthird2021 2y ago
    Another point, he is very invested in keeping the economy and the widening gap between the rich and everyone else out of it. One of the big catalysts of wokeness was of course, Occupy Wall St, borne out of the 2008 financial crisis. When the bankers get bailed out and you just go underwater on your mortgage, people start to get upset and want to change things. And organizing yourselves and drilling with lots of rules and getting on the same page with people you don't otherwise have any connection to is paramount when it comes to becoming a large enough, hivemind type group that can bring about collective action. But if he brought that up in this article, people who don't care about 8 genders and fringe social issues might start backing away from the "woke = bad" message
    • permo-w 2y ago
      to my mind, Occupy Wall Street and "wokeness", as it is generally depicted, are generally opposing movements. although it may have started there, "wokeness" was not primarily driven by universities and people on twitter, the overwhelming majority of it was driven by corporations and the corporate media. for businesses, it was a new way to buy credibility through moral posturing, and for the media it was a new cheap form of outrage to use to try and hold onto their dwindling readerships. further, "wokeness" is generally divisive to the working classes and far less threatening to the generally mono-cultural capital-holders. even further, it's a very nice way to distract young activists away from fighting against class structures. to me, it's almost like the corporate classes saw Occupy Wall Street, a very very rare occurrence of genuine class consciousness and protest in the streets of America, and they realised that they needed to neutralise it somehow, and "wokeness" was how they achieved that.
• evmar 2y ago
  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.
  • ipnon 2y ago
    It's like calling the word of Jesus heresy ... if pg essays don't belong on HN then the word "hacker" has lost all meaning. He's describing a system and how to change it. What else are we doing all day on these computers?
  • quacker 2y ago
    Reminder to flag the submission if you think it’s inappropriate for HN. IMO, it doesn’t belong here.
    • throwaway314155 2y ago
      With how long it's been on the front page, how controversial it is, and the fact that it was posted earlier and that post _was_ flagged... I would be willing to bet a moderator has somehow disabled the ability for this post specifically to be actually flagged and is simply ignoring those that click the flag button. I'm sure that seems conspiratorial but the guy writing the post effectively "cuts the checks" for the moderation staff here.
      • dang 2y ago
        It's not conspiratorial, it's how HN works: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20turn%20off%20flags&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... But it has nothing to do with "cutting checks". PG hasn't been doing that, nor influencing HN, nor even reading HN as far as I know, for many years.
        • throwaway314155 2y ago
          That's not the point - the point is there is a clear conflict of interest between users and moderation when it comes to unflagging a post from the forum's creator. Even if you are somehow totally impartial (and it's hard to imagine from my point of view, due to information asymmetry and very mild cynicism) it would still be wise to "recuse yourself" - similar to the guidelines about how moderation happens less when it comes to topics directly discussing ycombinator. This seems obvious to me. I'm not even particularly fond of the user flagging system. It's so clearly ripe for misuse by people trying to effectively censor topics they personally don't like. But if that system is in place, and another system is used to occasionally remove it- the latter system should be used with more care than has been done here. Not because you're definitely corrupt- but because the optics on it are not in your favor at all and it would be challenging if not impossible to alleviate those concerns.
• sorenjan 2y ago
  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?
  • gdwatson 2y ago
    He’s been interested in how taboos influence our thought and speech for a long time: https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html .
    • sorenjan 2y ago
      Yet this article is the only mention of the term "woke" on his site. What a strange coincidence that it happens now even though he's been interested in the topic since at least 2004.
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  • commandlinefan 2y ago
    He's been pretty consistent about this.
• projectileboy 2y ago
  This is a weird hill to die on for a billionaire. Is wokeness a problem? If I recast it as an assault on free speech, sure. But exactly how bad is this assault? I sure hear a lot of really rich people talk about wokeness, despite the proclaimed suppression of their speech. And is it as much of a problem as racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of bigotry endemic in our society?
  • projectileboy 2y ago
    I just picked this one at random today; took about a minute to find something: https://www.startribune.com/mom-ids-son-as-teen-left-with-brain-injuries-from-ymca-ambush-by-fellow-edina-high-school-students/601204968 https://www.startribune.com/mom-ids-son-as-teen-left-with-br... I’m relieved to read that racism isn’t as bad as I think it is.
    • Chilko 2y ago
      > This is a weird hill to die on for a billionaire But that's the thing, it's not a hill to die on for him. This is simply 'anti-woke' virtue signalling intended to show his alignment with the growing right-wing sentiments that seem to be a backlash to certain perceptions of the American left-wing, without really contributing anything novel to the discourse. To me, this 'anti-woke' sentiment is as much of a mind-virus as 'wokeness' supposedly is, and it's a convenient distraction from many of the underlying issues that the 'woke left' actually care about.
• mullingitover 2y ago
  > 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.
  • hhh1111 2y ago
    This is a dishonest argument. Paul can oppose an ideology without agreeing with everyone and especially extremists who also oppose that same ideology. I dont think wokeness or paul graham are communist or fascist respectively so forgive the hysterical sound of the analogy im going to make here, but i think your argument is similar in reasoning to this one: You oppose fascism? Well, fascism opposed gulags. If you oppose gulags I guess you were a fascist after all."
    • mullingitover 2y ago
      > Paul can oppose an ideology without agreeing with everyone and especially extremists who also oppose that same ideology. He's doing it by conflating 'priggishness' (puritanical moral conservatism) with a movement that's advocating for equity and trying to dismantle structural oppression. He's deftly sidestepping the power dynamics at play, which fundamentally distinguish these two things. It just so happens that he's in a class of people who sit at the top of a tower of structural advantages benefitting him as he tut-tuts people who are pointing out that they're oppressive to some groups. Ultimately he's just building a massive wall of text strawman for things he doesn't grasp and attacking it. We're fully in the era of this lazy take, like a dam breaking loose, lots of people who have been threatened by those movements are finally feeling free to attack them en masse.
      • hhh1111 2y ago
        >a movement thats advocating for equity and trying to dismantle structural oppression. Well, for years those advocates did so with censorship, gaslighting, destruction of property, threats and calls for violence, etc. They had a hysterical fervor and lack of rationality that did often seem quasi religious. I dont think Paul's understanding is perfect but the parallels to religious puritanism are quite obviously there.
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• Sandworm5639 2y ago
  That Elon/Twitter part was really out of place, like a VPN ad integration in the middle of a Youtube video. Attributing the rise of wokeness to students becoming deans and administrators sounds kinda dubious but maybe, he could use more evidence there. Otherwise a great piece.
• jdonaldson 2y ago
  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.
  • Clubber 2y ago
    >"Stay Woke" has a much deeper origin in African American culture, and it refers to the fact that one needs to stay vigilant about another's intentions. Yes, this origin is correct as I remember it. I first heard the term publicly from Larry on his show a decade or so ago, mainly referring to police interactions. He presented it well using comedy, unlike the rabid versions of today. He presented it too well as today, it seems this movement has since taken over by (mostly) white college people to service their own selfish ends; that's the mind virus part. This clip pretty much encapsulates this idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAbTOcVJgM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAbTOcVJgM8
    • jdonaldson 2y ago
      It's true, but one has to ask "who made woke-ism into a mind virus?". I think alt-right media say that BLM/Liberals have, but in reality it went viral when it became a favored perjorative and performative act by the alt right, a sort of gradual straw man argument that became true by its own belief. That's the textbook definition of a virus if I've ever seen one.
      • Kye 2y ago
        And it spread like no other. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fg%2F11ddxplprk,%2Fm%2F05s4m,%2Fg%2F11cmgnhggj&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
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• tompagenet2 2y ago
  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.
• thomassmith65 2y ago
  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. I don't know what Graham thinks 'political correctness' would have looked like in the 1960s – most Americans still thought women's lib was a joke, many Americans were fighting to preserve segregation, and nobody had heard of such a thing as a gay rights movement.
  • sedatk 2y ago
    Thinking about progress, I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate was a lesbian. That would be unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s. Even the right is progressing and they don’t know it.
    • mrkeen 2y ago
      I had a similar double-take moment reading about Breitbart editor "Milo Yiannopoulos" a few years ago. Different racist cultures develop different ideas on what makes someone white. "Yiannopoulos" might be called a 'wog': The slur became widely diffused in Australia with an increase in immigration from Southern Europe and the Levant after the Second World War, and the term expanded to include all immigrants from the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. These new arrivals were perceived by the majority population as contrasting with the larger predominant Anglo-Celtic Australian people. [1] I couldn't remember his name in order to write this up, so I went googling and stumbled across Afro-Cuban Proud Boys leader "Enrique Tarrio". All boats rise with the tide I guess. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog
      • ColonelPhantom 2y ago
        Yiannopoulos is an... interesting case in general. Apparently[1] he declared himself to be "ex-gay", 'demoted' his husband to housemate, and is treating his homosexuality 'like an addiction'. His future plans include 'rehabilitating conversion therapy'. Seeing all of that, I'm really not sure his boat has been rising with the tide, so to speak. I personally don't believe anyone thinks conversion therapy is good for themselves unless they are deeply troubled. [1] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/activist-milo-yiannopoulos-is-now-ex-gay-consecrating-his-life-to-st-joseph https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/activist-milo-yiannopoulos...
• black_13 2y ago
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• lbrito 2y ago
  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.
• Dowwie 2y ago
  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.
  • timeon 2y ago
    There is reason why he is writing this now. He did not get rich by having an opinion.
  • dang 2y ago
    I don't understand what this comment is trying to say, but the image of pg being on the board of companies (other than one that he founded) is pretty funny. I can't imagine him wanting to do that.
• nicebyte 2y ago
  I've lived long enough to see pg turn into a boomer-ass uncle lmao.
  • nicebyte 2y ago
    It's also very funny that he decided to publish this _now_ of all times.
    • driggs 2y ago
      It's no coincidence that PG published this days before Trump's inauguration. This is yet another Silicon Valley elite kowtowing to their new GOP overlords.
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      • dang 2y ago
        I understand the perception but I know pg well enough to say that I think it is very likely a coincidence. From everything I've seen, he isn't driven by such calculations.
        • toe666nail 2y ago
          [flagged]
          • slater 2y ago
            (dang is also the main HN mod, as an FYI)
          • thegrim33 2y ago
            You're probably limited because 75% of all of your account's posts have been flagged to death for being low-quality hate/rage posts. Read the site's rules and guidelines and be a better member.
• ergonaught 2y ago
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• sedatk 2y ago
  The rich are choosing sides for Trump era, and this is just a white flag raised.
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• csours 2y ago
  Abbot and Costello - Who's on First - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYOUFGfK4bU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYOUFGfK4bU SNL - Republican or Not - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h_N80qKYOM 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?
• aklemm 2y ago
  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.
• skyyler 2y ago
  >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.
  • ralfd 2y ago
    https://x.com/search?q=Cisgender&src=typed_query&f=live https://x.com/search?q=Cisgender&src=typed_query&f=live There are many typing that word?
    • skyyler 2y ago
      Try posting it yourself. See what happens.
      • kstrauser 2y ago
        I deleted my account long ago. What happens if you type that?
        • WickyNilliams 2y ago
          It gets immediately marked as hate speech. Due to personal whims of the company's owner, rather than some widely held belief that it is hate speech
          • ralfd 2y ago
            I extra made an account and nothing extraordinary happened. How does this mark look? Is it a warning-message or symbol?
            • WickyNilliams 2y ago
              The message gets hidden and a warning placed on it saying: "Visibility limited: this Post may violate X's rules against hateful conduct" You then have to click "View" where you're taken to another view where the message is shown, but with the warning still present. You can't share, like, or reply to the message Not sure if the account also receives a suspension or shadow banning. It's policy from Elon himself: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841 You can see it play out in replies to my tweet here, where someone didn't believe it: https://twitter.com/WickyNilliams/status/1855754162102816937 https://twitter.com/WickyNilliams/status/1855754162102816937
• gm678 2y ago
  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.
  • hckrnrd 2y ago
    +1 See my comment as well. The evidence PG uses to support his claim the New York Times has done this massive ideological shift is completely undone in his ninth footnote, that says the throw-away line in the article might not have even been reviewed by a senior editor. Yet PG still has gall to state it as fact.
• Karupan 2y ago
  The timing on when this essay is being published is interesting. Are all the tech billionaires falling in line before the next administration takes over? Also, let this be a lesson that no matter how “brilliant” and rich someone is, they can have comically bad takes.
• santoshalper 2y ago
  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.
• aspenmayer 2y ago
  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 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 https://www.youtube.com/live/6TJbv45DJyk Chris Hedges interviewed Parenti also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTpeQ4V-YeY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTpeQ4V-YeY https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/how-wokeness-kills-class-politics https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/how-wokeness-kills-class-...
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• whatever1 2y ago
  So now the ones who want to preserve the constitution and the democratic processes (aka by demanding peaceful handover of power instead of hanging the Vice President), are woke. Strong Weimar vibes from our billionaires.
• soheil 2y ago
  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.
  • bpt3 2y ago
    I take it as more of an indicator of how much liberal sentiment has shifted over the last 15 or so years.
    • dang 2y ago
      That plus the community having grown.
  • whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
    It’s just the people online posting non-stop. The rest of us, checking in only when time allows, are not commenting 30 times in a single thread. (Check some of the posters here) Same thing happened with the rest of the nonsense over the last 5 years. From social media you would think everyone took the clot shot. 1/3 didn’t but you’d never have known that from HN or other social media. There is a small but loud contingent who wants to dictate our language, how we teach our children, and what we put in to our bodies. The good news is most people are not stupid and are completely rejecting it - in real life.
    • stahtops 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • commandlinefan 2y ago
        My reddit account was permanently banned for _upvoting_ vaccine hesitancy.
      • whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
        “Bro” but you did. The federal government censored speech it didn’t like by PAYING social media to delete it. In many instances it was content that was objectively true. Public schools are right now telling children in kindergarten they can choose their own gender. They cannot. The federal government wanted to implement policies to require administration of an experimental gene therapy, that didn’t even work and was never even tested for protection against transmission, and many many people were forced in to taking it if they wanted to keep their job. I’ve voted for left progressive candidates for 20 years but I can’t vote for this shit any more and judging by the recent election neither can over half of America. Have fun crying about trump for the next four years.
• unsupp0rted 2y ago
  > 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.
• throw101010qwe 2y ago
  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?
  • moshegramovsky 2y ago
    Let me share the perspective I have as a member of a class of people that have been subject to racism for thousands of years, including enslavement, arbitrary murder, and systematic mass murder. Please forgive me, but being quiet didn't seem to work so far. At least hundreds of thousands of polite, quiet, reasonable, assimilated urban Jews were murdered in the holocaust. It is deeply wrong that African Americans and other minorities or mentally ill people live in a world where the police can be every bit as dangerous as the gestapo. I feel like it's wrong that millions of women have been murdered simply for not doing something a man wanted. Millions or billions of women aren't treated as if they have the same value as men. Please look at the bully pulpit standing against us. Most of the power in American society is concentrated in the hands of a very few white men. How loud do you think someone has to be when they have to stand against the megaphone of society? When someone needs to stand up against trillions of dollars in wealth? Pretty loud as it turns out!
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    • rsanheim 2y ago
      Hear, hear.
• arh68 2y ago
  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.
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• dj_gitmo 2y ago
  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://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/of-course-you-know-what-woke-means https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...
• slowhadoken 2y ago
  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.
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• frenchmajesty 2y ago
  Very interesting piece. Thanks for sharing!
• pera 2y ago
  Few things are as performative as venture capitalists aligning their politics with the upcoming government.
  • docmars 2y ago
    I read it more as finally being safe to share his views without gross retaliation leading to a complete excommunication from every professional venture he's involved in. The powers have tilted in such a way that people no longer have to hide their true feelings. Refreshing, really.
• rukuu001 2y ago
  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.
• acaloiar 2y ago
  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.
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  Unfortunately he's going along with right-wing orthodoxy instead of seriously confronting modern internet cults. Graham proves himself to be a groupthinker, not an independent thinker. (The real tragedy of "woke" is how it undermines the left; how could you ever win an election if people who seem to travel with you tell 70% (white) or 50% (men) of people that they're intrinsically bad? Worse yet those "fellow travelers" will sit out the election because they think any real politicians is a "fascist" for one reason or another.) My son has two friends who I'll call B and C -- "wokeness" could be evoked in the case of B but you'll see it is a wrong mental model. I knew B from elementary school and I know he's a bit out of sync with other people, like myself and my son. Call him "neurodivergent" and leave it at that. I introduced B to TTRPGs which he enjoyed greatly at the time and is an ongoing interest for him. (Unlike my transsexual friend from college, neither I nor his mother ever heard him express anything noncongruent about his gender identity as a child.) My son met C in high school. He probably has a developmental problem too but I wont't DX it. B seemed a little depressed and withdrawn, C has always expressed hostility against people and institutions. C certainly has pathological narcissism and says that hard work is for suckers, his dad is a provost at an elite school. If he was seriously seeking a royal road he'd continue in the family business (where nepotism rules) but he hasn't talked to his dad in years, though, like B, he still lives at home. C jumped off the roof of his house one day to impress his little brother and broke his leg. His mom, who grew up in rural China and later got an MD valid in China but not here, thinks he is possessed by demons. B works part time. C doesn't work. Neither are in school. During the pandemic B was worked on by an "egg-hatcher" who helped B develop body dysmorphia. Last thanksgiving family plans fell through but we went to the community center in B's hamlet because we knew we'd get to meet up with B and his mom. (B uses a different pronoun and different name at work but doesn't mind if we use his old pronouns and name.) B told us all about the horrible side effects of the meds he is taking, and then got jumped on by a (seemingly mental ill) Trump supporter when I was coming out of the bathroom. B expresses a lot of hostility to the likes of J K Rowling because he's been told to. C encountered "blackpill" incels who also talked him into body dysmorphia. (Like the transgenderists they have a language of transformation through ideology, in this case based on a scene from The Matrix.) His height is average, but that's not good enough. He stretches every day and wants to have surgery where they break his legs to extend them. He hasn't talked my with my son or myself since the time my son said what his real height was in an online chat. I had a 'Black Card' membership at Planet Fitness and made the offer to teach him how to lift weights, but he refused. Rumor has it, however. that he bought anabolic steroids online and injected them. People who see things through an ideological lens would see B as good and C as evil or maybe C as good and B as evil. I look at them and see similar signs and symptoms and if I had to DX it would be "lack of social connection and lack of meaning"; both acquired body dysmorphia through ideology, I've got no doubt about it and I see both as victims of internet cults. In Terry Prachett's Hogfather professors at the Unseen University discover a principle of "conservation of belief" so that when the Hogfather (like Santa but comes on Dec 32, drives a sleigh pulled by pigs, ...) is assassinated the world becomes plagued by the Hair Loss Fairy and the God of Hangovers (the "Oh God!") I see transgenderism, inceldom, evangelicals who don't go to church, BLM enthusiasts who don't personally know any black people, people senselessly adding stripes to the rainbow flag (hmmm... people in those classes have always had trouble with being confused with others... In Iran they think gay people need trans surgery, Intersex people frequently express that they've been violated when they get the same surgery that helps transexual people feel whole, etc.) , anti-vax activists and people who are obsessively pro-vax just to oppose anti-vax people as being our own Hair Loss Fairy that comes out of traditional religions failing.
• hnlurker22 2y ago
  Since YC startups (culture) is the exact opposite of what PG is saying, this is just a political stance in words, nothing more.
• doccodo 2y ago
  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.
  • hhh1111 2y ago
    “Anti wokeism” is to atheism what wokeism is to Christianity. It can turn into a religion in its own right sure but it’s origin is disbelief in another ideology.
• acyou 2y ago
  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.
• zug_zug 2y ago
  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.
  • hyeonwho4 2y ago
    > we still have colleges that won't admit gay students, or that many people still don't believe in interracial marriage 1. Who cares? Those colleges are private entities and presumably this admissions discrimination means they cannot receive Federalor state funds. If admitting gay students goes against their religious beliefs, then the rest of us benefit from having the people they reject. 2. It is not up to us to tell other families who they can and can't marry, or what they can or can't think. Let the bigots be bigots in their bigoted bubble, as long as they don't hurt anyone outside it. (If their children wish to leave the bubble, we should protect and support them privately.) 3. A cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl is homicide, independent of anyone's beliefs.
    • LeafItAlone 2y ago
      >Who cares? I believe it’s in everybody’s best interest to stand up against discrimination.
      • slantaclaus 2y ago
        I don’t give a fuck if Bob Jones University rejects homosexuals and neither should anyone.
        • LeafItAlone 2y ago
          Well, I do. Sorry if that offends you, I guess. Let them discriminate on acceptable characteristics, such as grades, extra curricular activities, and legacy status like every other college.
• Seattle3503 2y ago
  The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk does a really good job of tracing the history of "woke". In particular he does a good job of not lumping woke in with all left ideas.
• billiam 2y ago
  Wow, Paul Graham just kinda set the standard for cognitive dissonance on HN. In short, sins of elision, omission, and exaggeration in this post and elsewhere in his absurdly entitled world make it clear that he is himself the prig here.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• dwb 2y ago
  > 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!
• JohnBooty 2y ago
  Really disappointing article, full of disingenuousness and strawmen and a few interesting points as well. For the record, while I'm on the progressive side of things, I certainly do not agree with all of the various viewpoints and practices ascribed to "wokeism." He seems close to misunderstanding a pivotal thing, but glosses over it: [Priggish] was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. He then moves on to spend hundreds of words talking about why wokeness is bad, never really recognizing that for most of its relatively short lifespan the modern incarnation of "woke" has been defined and used almost exclusively by conservatives as sort of an amorphous blanket term for "various progressive ideas they dislike" and is not useful as a basis for any discussion or essay. 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. This is a glaringly bad false dichotomy. Apparently we can talk about good things or do good things, but not both? I mean, I have certainly done both. There really isn't a conflict there. Another, similar false dichotomy: The danger of these rules was not just that they created land mines for the unwary, but that their elaborateness made them an effective substitute for virtue. We can't have rules and virtue? It's the kind of sentence that sounds good if you don't think about it -- because of course doing good things is better than simply making rules -- but this is such an amateurish and false dichotomy. This is about as sensical as saying that we shouldn't have code review, or coding standards, we should just focus on writing code in our own personal little vision of what good code is. Yes we should write "good code" on an individual basis, and yes we should (as a team working on a project together) have standards and reviews. If a particular team member is contributing zero code and doing nothing but toxic reviews, sure, that is a problem but that is a problem with that individual and not some kind of inherent paradox. Some things can only be effectively tackled with both individual effort and community/systemic effort. If you feel that things like racism, sexism, etc do not fall into that category... well, I strongly disagree, but I wish people would simply say that directly than ranting and raving about this bogeyman of modern "wokeness" that is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- a mindbendingly nonspecific term. Talk ideals and policies.
  • shadowgovt 2y ago
• a022311 2y ago
  I feel like this is the most neutral, correct take on "wokeness" I've ever read on the internet. Good job!
• gerg354r 2y ago
  [dead]
• andyjohnson0 2y ago
  So now we have pg virtue-signalling his fealty to the other old rich white guys. Great. Just great. The only people who use the term "woke" are social conservatives, and those to their right. Everyone else talks about "justice" and "equality" and "awareness". The woke problem is a conservative problem.
  • rexpop 2y ago
    Bingo! This accusation is a confession. And what are people supposed to do about injustice? Resolve it without talking about it?
• valicord 2y ago
  > 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_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Bremerton_School_Di...
  • commandlinefan 2y ago
    Were the students forced to participate though, or was it voluntary?
    • valicord 2y ago
      You don't think high schoolers would succumb to authority and peer pressure even if they didn't really want to participate?
  • jimbokun 2y ago
    Pretty sure pg would say they’re the same thing. I don’t remember him carrying water for religion.
    • valicord 2y ago
      I'm sure we are going to see his treatise on the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court any day now, right?
• wcfrobert 2y ago
  Everyone less empathetic than me is a bigot. Everyone more empathetic than me is just virtue signaling.
• tines 2y ago
  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.
  • tzs 2y ago
    > This is also why the Democrats are so fractious internally, relative to the Republicans. Republicans default to trusting each other (not saying whether that's merited or not) while Democrats only make temporary uneasy alliances The number of votes it took for Republicans to select a Speaker of the House and the effort that Speaker has had to subsequently undertake to keep that position says otherwise.
• obelos 2y ago
  “Can you believe it? That colored boy wants me to call him ‘mister!’”
• shadowgovt 2y ago
  > 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.
• xanderlewis 2y ago
  > 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?
• gregwebs 2y ago
  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.
• phibz 2y ago
  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.
  • hyeonwho4 2y ago
    That is not incompatible with pg's definition, if "raising awarenesss" dominates "doing something about it".
    • steego 2y ago
      He said the word woke *described* the "awareness of racial and social injustice". He didn't say it was a mechanism for "raising awareness". Let me ask you this: How does one, in your mind, do "something about it?" PG's article focuses on "woke" as a kind of performative morality and you've gone out of your way to try an unify this original definition of "woke" with Paul's performative definition. Was "woke" being used performatively in the 1930's when black folk advised other black folk to "stay woke" when traveling in certain parts of the country that were hostile to their existence? When does the original definition start becoming incompatible with Paul's half-assed definition in your mind?
      • gretch 2y ago
        > Let me ask you this: How does one, in your mind, do "something about it?" There's a lot of injustice in the US criminal justice system. One way you can do something about it is to actually get into criminal justice. Study and become a lawyer, become a public defender, maybe become a judge one day. Or at least make very precise arguments about the where criminal justice reform can take place. Instead, a lot people stop at making a internet comment about who the current system isn't good enough, while offering no viable alternative. A common complaint is that defendants are effectively bullied into taking guilty pleas even when they are fully innocent. I think that part is true. However, what's the remedy? You can't simply ban people from saying "yeah I'm actually guilty let's just move on with it". Not to mention the fact that takes away their agency. You may ask prosecutors or LEO to stop being bullies. God knows that doesn't work. So you need some technical solution to this part of criminal (in)justice. But instead, people will simply comment at the face value statement of plea deals are abused sometimes, and then move on. edit: thought of another technical solution: body cams. If people on hackernews feel strongly about criminal injustice, I urge you to develop some technology about better and more viable body cams, a technology that protects everyone (including LEOs).
• UncleOxidant 2y ago
  "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.
  • tflinton 2y ago
    I think the basis of his arguement is a prig is incentivized by calling out the moral failures of others to make themselves feel more virtuous. Where perhaps the quakers or MLK were doing it out of moral outrage.
    • UncleOxidant 2y ago
      > by calling out the moral failures of others to make themselves feel more virtuous. Isn't it impossible to determine the internal motivations of others? And even if they were doing it to make themselves feel more virtuous they can still be turn out to be right on the issue, can't they? Or it's possible that there's a combination of both moral outrage and ending up feeling virtuous.
    • archagon 2y ago
      Conservatives will readily confound moral outrage with virtue signaling in order to neutralize it.
    • maniacwhat 2y ago
      As pointed out by Uncle oxidant, this is hard to determine. I would suggest instead that a prig deems a person to be bad/evil based on them having a different view/behavior that society is generally divided on.
  • PaulHoule 2y ago
    I would say a lot of what drives wokeism is not priggery but ignorance and just going along with the crowd, sometimes in forms that are well meaning. e.g. sometimes white people have some experience where they realize how much crap black people get; they might actually meet some black people or learn about history (e.g. black people have been complaining about the police in America as long as there is America, why are we supposed to remember one person's name but forget Rodney King or the Watts Riots, that people like Booker T. Washington had trouble w/ the police) but instead they chant thought-stopping slogans like "defund the police" (tell that to the black people who have gunshots in their neighborhood every night) and instead of saying something like "Black people are beautiful" they have to say "Black lives are beautiful". The trouble is that people today are looking back 15 minutes and looking ahead 15 minutes and are up against the likes of Xi, Putin and Netanyahu who are thinking in terms of hundreds of years if not thousands. They're like children in the hands of gods. --- There is an undercurrent of priggery in attitudes about sexuality that's a different and much more complex theme that starts w/ Baudrillard's essay at the beginning of https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction.... and continues with experiences such as discovering that when squicky rumours are flying around it is is the former BDSM professional several steps removed from the event who goes the the police with a garbled, confused and hysterical story or that the transgenderist gatekeepers of Tildes don't know that there are 549 paraphilias (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia) and that pedophilia is just one of them in their mad rush to cancel anyone they can. In contrast the people who pray a few times a day, homeschool their kids, and volunteer on deadly cold nights at the homeless shelter, while people who hate them are sharing hateful memes online, who "seek first to understand" the way Steven Covey says you should)
• surfingdino 2y ago
  "Social justice" is a perversion of justice. Eastern Europe and other countries that tried communism used social justice as an excuse to eradicate middle and upper classes through mass murders, incarceration, confiscation of property, denial of access to education or higher-paying jobs, and promotion of lower classes to the levels of their incompetence.
• danielvaughn 2y ago
  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.
• tomlockwood 2y ago
  [flagged]
• corry 2y ago
  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.
• lux 2y ago
  I don't disagree with a lot of what he says here, but I feel like too many people in Silicon Valley are hyper-fixated on the conformity and enforcement coming from the left, while ignoring and even stoking the flames of anger and conformity on the right. Particularly his points on news, because much of the news is now heavily skewed to the right. PG would do well to reflect similarly on the rise of the right wing equivalents and recognize that they're the ones actively stymying progress on many of the critical issues of our time.
• moskie 2y ago
  Reading Paul Graham's musings on "wokeness" is a complete waste of time. Please find the words of other better informed people to read, who have an actual interest in addressing problems like racism and sexism. Also, for all his complaining about people being performative, he commits the sin himself. He is doing the dance conservative fascists want him to. Paul, do us all a favor, and just skip to the ending we all know you're heading for: fall in line with Trump, lock arms with your fellow oligarchs, and take obvious active measures to suppress any threats your wealth and power.
• h43z 2y ago
  Still can't believe we all changed our branch names from master to main.
  • craigmcnamara 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • jadodev 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • JasserInicide 2y ago
      Still can't believe that people don't understand that words can have multiple meanings depending on their context and don't instantly start thinking about politics when they use them
    • anonfordays 2y ago
      There was no "slave" terminology in git, there are no concepts of "slave" branches, tags, nothing. It is "master" as in "master recording." Still can't believe people were upset over that.
  • jacobjjacob 2y ago
    Decades ago, when I was a teenager, and saw that “master/slave” was a technical term, it made me uncomfortable- like, it has so much baggage for a technical term. I’m guessing that the master branch is not a master/slave reference, but “master copy”. But I think main is just as good, so I really don’t care that it got caught up in the movement. This is just language naturally evolving, which I know many people are fundamentally against on an ideological basis. To me, fighting the changes of language over time is like yelling at the wind. Just let it go and focus on what’s truly important (almost everything else). People will advocate for changes and they will stick or they won’t. If you are an effective communicator, you really shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping up.
• fzeroracer 2y ago
  > 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.
• battle-racket 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • hhh1111 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • djeastm 2y ago
      On what basis do you make that claim? They might not have time to write more.
      • hhh1111 2y ago
        This is a really funny response
    • battle-racket 2y ago
      He doesn’t have an argument. He’s simply stating his opinion on something he’s never experienced. It’s a bit like someone saying “The California wildfires aren’t that bad” but they live in Sweden.
      • hhh1111 2y ago
        That person would be wrong because there is objective, verifiable evidence to the contrary. There is none for the ubiquity and material impact of racism in 2025, sorry. So its more like him claiming Lyme disease or trench foot isn’t a societal problem - is he allowed to make that claim without personal experience?
        • oytis 2y ago
          > There is none for the ubiquity and material impact of racism in 2025 What do you mean? Many ways in which people of color are being disadvantaged (net worth, income, representation in positions of power etc.) are very measurable, in 2025 as much as in 1990.
• tqi 2y ago
  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.
• onetimeusename 2y ago
  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.
• jacobjjacob 2y ago
  “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.
  • djur 2y ago
    Even Paul himself uses the word in a way that sure seems inconsistent with his definition: "Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it." Bud Light sent Dylan Mulvaney promotional cans of beer to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of her web series about her transition. Mulvaney had been a target of right-wing activists for some time, and those activists drove the boycott. This was just a particularly effective example of a long line of right-wing campaigns against companies that associate with trans celebrities. How does "woke" fit into this except from the perspective that "woke" just means being on one side of the culture war?
    • aaaaon 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • pkkkzip 2y ago
      why is a beer a platform for pushing some individual's personal choices? why should it be used to push any sort of political messaging? why shouldn't bud light owners reject a brand that pushes those political messages?
      • djur 2y ago
        The premise here is that the existence of trans people is inherently political, but in any case, Graham didn't define "woke" as "political", he defined it as "an aggressively performative focus on social justice". How does that describe sending beer cans to a social media influencer?
• ajbt200128 2y ago
  > 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.
• kieferbc 2y ago
  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.
• runlevel1 2y ago
  > 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.
  • JFingleton 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • ceejayoz 2y ago
      If you go to work and deliberately call "Bob" by the wrong name "Joe" all the time, and it upsets them and they ask you to stop, you'll get fired eventually if you continue.
      • JFingleton 2y ago
        ...but he really looks like a "Joe"! :D I did say "within reason"... which I realise is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
    • fzeroracer 2y ago
      If someone is named Jimmy and you keep referring to him as Jimbo despite them politely asking you not to, what do you think will happen?
• ParetoOptimal 2y ago
  > Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. You mean how twitter is censoring users who use "cracker" but not those who use the N-word.
• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  oh no
• s1110 2y ago
  This guy thesauruses!
• shitter 2y ago
  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.
• submeta 2y ago
  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.
  • jvandreae 2y ago
    "Progress for the tick is not progress for the dog." > These are the same individuals who empower fascists—whether in the US, Germany, Argentina, or Italy Correct, madame.
    • submeta 2y ago
      Imagine that, there are also men who care about environment, who are not offended by seeing homosexual human beings, and who don’t want to have fascism.
  • jimbokun 2y ago
    In other words, it is impossible for there to be excesses or incorrect opinions on the left.
    • ternnoburn 2y ago
      My friend, I am a leftist. I guarantee you no one hates leftists more than leftists. We fight each other to death over everything.
• leftcenterright 2y ago
  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-twitter-takeover-accelerated-misinformation/ https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2024/how-elon-musk-twi...
  • jimbokun 2y ago
    In general an essay writer believes his opinion is the correct one. Otherwise he wouldn’t write the essay.
• moskie 2y ago
  Having too much money is brain poison.
• segasaturn 2y ago
  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.
• bachmeier 2y ago
  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.
  • Loughla 2y ago
    I genuinely enjoy that many people think PC culture started with BLM and woke language and what not in the 00's-10's. There's literally a movie called PCU from 1994.
  • freetime2 2y ago
    Graham doesn't mention Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority by name, but he does explicitly compare wokeness to religion: > Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex. > Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. I think it's abundantly clear that he does not condone priggishness whether it's coming from the right or the left. > and not bring up (at a minimum) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority suggests you shouldn't be writing about it. I think it's fine to point out that there are parallels on the right. But I don't think it is constructive to say that he is not entitled to write about a topic just because he doesn't explicitly mention something that you think is important.
    • n4r9 2y ago
      > it's abundantly clear that he does not condone priggishness whether it's coming from the right or the left He tacitly condones Musk, whose priggishness currently consists of smugly rehashing alt-right talking points.
• jasonlotito 2y ago
  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.
• Detrytus 2y ago
  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....
• djur 2y ago
  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.
  • userbinator 2y ago
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    • throwaway314155 2y ago
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    • ternnoburn 2y ago
      Did they promote "trans ideology"? Did the ad say anything about trans principles? Or did it just have a trans person in it? Because if you are saying employing trans people is woke, that's pretty messed up.
      • stringss 2y ago
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        • ternnoburn 2y ago
          Does that apply to every actor bud hires? If that actor says something personal on their feed, bud is promoting their ideology? Tom Cruise did ads for bud, is Budweiser promoting Scientology? If not, walk me through why one is promoting ideology and the other isn't.
          • stringss 2y ago
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• chrisjj 2y ago
  > 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?
• MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
  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.
  • n4r9 2y ago
    Yes, that paragraph is patronising and cocky.
  • arduinomancer 2y ago
    This feels like one of the weakest PG articles The writing quality feels like that of a university student Just lots of assertions thrown out without any real backing
• glangdale 2y ago
  It's magnificently Paul Graham that he wrote some incredibly long essay called "The Origins Of Wokeness" without ever discussing, the origins of wokeness. Whatever you think about the current situation of "wokeness", the fact that pg manages to never once mention the origin of the term, going back to Marcus Garvey and Leadbelly, speaks to pg's monumental intellectual incuriosity.
  • jvandreae 2y ago
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• ck2 2y ago
  "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.
• wargames 2y ago
  I have no idea why this was shared on Hacker News (might simply be the Paul Graham connection), but it was one of the best, well-written, and researched articles I've read in years!
  • Upvoter33 2y ago
    I can't tell if this comment is serious
• antgonzales 2y ago
  Whole article on the word "woke" and no references to Erykah Badu. I don't think he knows what the word means.
• j_crick 2y ago
  Rewriting history was never more fun!
• drawkward 2y ago
  >Much as they tried to pretend there was no conflict between diversity and quality. But you can't simultaneously optimize for two things that aren't identical. What diversity actually means, judging from the way the term is used, is proportional representation, and unless you're selecting a group whose purpose is to be representative, like poll respondents, optimizing for proportional representation has to come at the expense of quality. This is not because of anything about representation; it's the nature of optimization; optimizing for x has to come at the expense of y unless x and y are identical. Eh, if x and y are correlated, you can optimize for x to a point and still get y gains.
• novemp 2y ago
  An Internet rails against political correctness, forgetting that it's not 1996 anymore. Some Hackernews decry the woke mob. No technology is discussed.
  • spacechild1 2y ago
    N-gate will be missed!
    • novemp 2y ago
      RIP to a legend
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• m3kw9 2y ago
  woke wasn't bad in the beginning, but it became more powerful than needed and that power was abused. When you get people to rename universities and streets you grew up intimately with, it's very annoying.
• peppertree 2y ago
  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.
  • fullshark 2y ago
    Most people were cowards then, and now too. It's nice to finally get these leaders sharing what they actually think again. After biting their tongue for what a decade?
  • tim333 2y ago
    PG has been tweeting about woke for years.
    • deleted 2y ago
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  • bsimpson 2y ago
    If you insist on casually calling the guy you voted against a felon, I don't think you're as impartial as you claim.
    • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      He is in fact a convicted felon. That is objectively, impartially true. It not be impartial to mention it, though. PG almost certainly didn't write this essay out of cowardice because a felon got elected. He may have written it out of cowardice because a bully got elected, though...
      • bsimpson 2y ago
        I erred on the side of pithy to try to avoid derailing. I've never voted for him and there's a lot that I dislike about him; however… There's a very credible argument that the DA overcharged the case so people who dislike him can try to ostracize him as a felon and make his supporters look unhinged. If your shorthand for "the less woke candidate won" is "the felon won," you don't get to credibly claim "I'm impartial" in a conversation about wokeness.
• nirava 2y ago
  As an extreme outsider (and mostly emotionally uninvested) to this whole scene, and having read a few of the most popular articles, I've always taken Paul Graham to be an intelligent and articulate person. This article is has made me really reevaluate my judgement. I'm open to thinking about and discussing the points he is raising, but his arguments and the presentation feel weird and flimsy. Lots of anecdata, cherry-picked history, bad arguments propped up by debatable ideas presented as facts. And weird, almost sociopathic lack of empathy (eg: the 2020 "a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video" event)? I mean, sure aggressive policing of speech and performance in social media is somewhat dumb, but any normal mind should be able to look behind the overreaction and realise that the underlying issues raised are valid and pressing. Is article is just a performance piece in preparation for the incoming regime?
• gkoz 2y ago
  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?
• thrance 2y ago
  Read this and understand one thing, you being anti-woke is not fighting the elite, fighting a cabal of anti-freedom leftists. You are sided with the billionaires, politicians and justices of the Supreme Court that hold virtually all the power in this country. You are on the side of Putin and the Iranian regime, both calling out "western degeneracy". "Wokeness" is nothing but a scarecrow used to discredit any and all progressive ideas. In the name of "anti-wokeness" women are dying of complications, giving birth to the child of their rapists. LGBT people have to hide in the closet, from fear of repercussions to being who they are, enduring massive psychological pain. As a remedy, I would like you to hold one conversation with a trans guy/girl, hear them complain about the harassment they receive almost daily, about how difficult it was to have anyone recognize their illness and receive treatment, and realize that they are simply trying to live a life in this messed up world, like you and me.
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  • zapidr 2y ago
    "Wokeness" is what results in horrifying outcomes of policy like this: https://4w.pub/male-inmate-charged-with-raping-woman-inside-california-womens-prison-cdcr-confirms-pregnancy https://4w.pub/male-inmate-charged-with-raping-woman-inside-... This is a direct result of "progressive" beliefs being translated into policy. It should be no surprise that people start to question and reject these beliefs when they begin to understand the harm they cause.
    • thrance 2y ago
      Please do not let the kind of news you linked inform your opinion on genuine transgender persons. Obviously that law wasn't thought out well enough, and this guy abused it, causing tremendous harm. One in two transgender person is victim of sexual assault at some point in their life [1]. That is the very real and statistically significant result of "anti-wokeness". [1] https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/pubs/forge/sexual_numbers.html https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/pubs/forge...
• tshaddox 2y ago
  > 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.
• gigatexal 2y ago
  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.
• 63 2y ago
  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.
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• stanleykm 2y ago
  Cant imagine a better person than Paul Graham to give us the history of the origins of the struggles various underprivileged groups have had over the recent decades. Anyway the conservative reaction to “wokeness” (or “wokism” if youre an annoying european conservative) is way more annoying than “wokeness” ever was. And as far as I can tell its just them going “I am annoyed by these people so I am going to be a huge baby” Like theres no material impact to them here. How much can a DEI team possibly cost? It’s just babies being babies. Actually I’m going to take that back. There is a material impact to them but it is that they risk losing out by not being in Trump & friends good books. In that case Paul’s rant is not only wrong but it is hypocritical because this is just as performative! If not more! The billionaires are already the most privileged group!
  • xp84 2y ago
    > How much can a DEI team possibly cost? I don't think opposition to "a DEI team" is about cost at all, it's about the fact that it's harmful to your company to hire and fire based on skin color or gender expression, or to harass and lecture people for not participating in the DEI religion enough. If I had a nickel for every hiring discussion I've been in where I felt pressured to thumbs-up someone with serious flaws just because we were below an unspoken but widely-understood quota, I'd have a lot of nickels. The idea that we should pass over the best candidate if he's a certain color and pronoun, thinking that will right the wrong of centuries-old sins, that's the mind virus that some of us don't approve of. If you want an example of why it's bad and dumb even if you're a progressive, our VP, a very unpopular candidate who ran a laughably failed campaign for president was undeniably chosen as VP for DEI reasons, then she couldn't be "passed over" when Biden changed his mind about running, due to optics, so she, a candidate who peaked at 17% in the 2019 primary, was installed as the nominee.* The DNC killed itself on the altar of DEI in this case, and then lashed out at everyone else saying things like "Latinx people are white supremacists!" *Stipulated: Democrats have a massive shortage of popular national-level politicians, so obviously while Harris was a bad choice, I can't point to any guaranteed 'better' ones.
• rayiner 2y ago
  I have no respect for the people like Graham who are only voicing their objections now that the election results provide cover.
  • scarab92 2y ago
    Graham has always strongly opposed censorship, group think, purity spirals etc.
    • rayiner 2y ago
      But he wasn’t willing to write an article like this until Trump’s election provides him cover. It’s funny how many moderate liberals have suddenly found their voices.
      • dang 2y ago
        He's been vocal about it on Twitter for years, for example. Btw pg is as anti-Trump as he is anti-woke. I wonder how many heads in this thread would not explode if they really took that in.
      • zahlman 2y ago
        "What you can't say" (https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) is 21 years old now. "Heresy" (https://www.paulgraham.com/heresy.html https://www.paulgraham.com/heresy.html) was during Biden's tenure. "Orthodox Privilege" (https://www.paulgraham.com/orth.html https://www.paulgraham.com/orth.html) was during the height of lockdown-era BLM. "Keep your Identity Small" (https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html) is from the beginning of Obama's tenure. Criticizing "wokeness" today is not at all inconsistent with PG's historically stated opinions and beliefs.
• arghandugh 2y ago
  Ohhhh, he’s genuinely stupid. Got it.
• throwaway_2494 2y ago
  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?
  • joefkelley 2y ago
    Yeah I guess wokeness and cancel culture are what you complain about now when your life is so free from challenges that you have nothing else to complain about.
• Kye 2y ago
  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?
• ramon156 2y ago
  Would this have gotten front page if it wasn't pg? Because I think I know the answer to that.
  • ggm 2y ago
    Front page dynamics are complicated. I won't say you're wrong, but you might be wrong. Time of day (for instance) can have a huge effect.
  • bsimpson 2y ago
    It's not surprising that people come to PG's commenting site to comment on PG's writings.
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• hckrnrd 2y ago
  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.
• notepad0x90 2y ago
  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.
• notepad0x90 2y ago
  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?
  • ddoolin 2y ago
    I don't find that to be true and I find your own rationale to be its own sort of performative moralism. Many normal people feel this way and it isn't to appease MAGA or Trump or whatever, including myself and many people I know who have been and/or are lifelong leftists. It is not impossible or even unlikely that people in higher positions developed these feelings on their own accord. I'm not saying your statement is always untrue, but it denies the people you're writing about much agency. I think that what's happening is that people on all levels are now more comfortable in saying what they actually think or believe rather than saying things to avoid busting arbitrary social rules.
    • notepad0x90 2y ago
      this has nothing to do with leftism or rightism. MAGA is not right-wing,they're fascist and authoritarian. paulg has a reliable pattern of history, where he echoes the current trends in the tech company leadership circle. him, altman, musk, bezos,etc.. they run in the same circles. I am not even disagreeing with his sentiment of being against performative morality or equality, people on all sides of politics have been saying that for decades! the framing of anti-racist and anti-fascist people as "woke" and hijacking that conversation as a culture war item where any attempt to criticize racist and fascist systems and sentiment is classified as "woke" (they tried the term "SJW" a few years prior to "woke") is what is happening here, and it is very obvious. You cannot plead ignorance on this! This isn't about arbitrary social rules or saying "colored people" vs "people of color" or b.s. like that. that sort of mis-framing is mis-direction, straw-man reasoning. Someone tells you "hey, pay minorities a fair wage" and responding with "I can't call them _____, that's woke and political correctness", how sickening it is when the tech world shows its hypocrisy. Better to have performative morality many times over than willfully ignorant tolerance of hatred and prejudice. Use the terms "DEI" and "woke" in any context other than their original intended context and you're either a damn racist or an enabler. I hope these people read this, I for one would be very vocal for calling them out and shaming them after they've drunk from the poisoned chalice of trump.
• jongjong 2y ago
  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.
• hhh1111 2y ago
  wokeness is more or less southern Baptist fire and brimstone Christianity for posh urban white people. For western minorities it functions as a kind of nationalism
  • docmars 2y ago
    I think you describe it really well. There is certainly a large pocket of black communities on social media sharing dreams of a Western takeover, ranging anywhere from outright (fraudulently) claiming inventions they never invented, brazenly replacing characters in every form of entertainment, all the way to openly proposing a white purge, let's call it. Very concerning. What's even weirder is that this content was rarely ever flagged in the Twitter days, and still prevails on X today. Demonizing anyone of white European descent on Reddit is also completely acceptable, and doesn't result in moderation.
    • hhh1111 2y ago
      "what did you think decolonization meant? Vibes, essays, papers? Losers."
• digger495 2y ago
  > Thanks to Sam Altman [...] for reading drafts of this. Ftfg.
• energy123 2y ago
  The one thing Paul missed is Russia's role in the rise of wokeness. The Internet Research Agency controlled over 50 percent of the largest ethnic Facebook groups in 2019 and organized multiple BLM protests, including one attended by Michael Moore. Wokeness was a state sponsored attack. But as with most things, it isn't mono causal. The largest blame should lie with the social media platforms themselves. They created something that rewards the narcissistic, anti-intellectual and authoritarian tendencies that drive both wokeness and the alt right. I think focusing too much on wokeness itself would be an error. We should focus on the conditions that lead to these kind of unhealthy authoritarian-leaning social movements in the first place, which is social media, inequality, inflation, etc.
  • jadodev 2y ago
    wow, somehow you jumped to some next level conspiracy garbage more extravagant than the rest of the comments. 20 million people participating in protests was not a “state sponsored attack”
    • energy123 2y ago
      > 20 million people participating in protests was not a “state sponsored attack” It was partly that, though. Read the section "Rallies and protests organized by IRA in the United States" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency Also: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook... These troll farms exploited genuine grievances in order to stoke as much chaos as possible. I'm not trying to say this was the main cause, my comment "wokeness was state sponsored attack" was rhetorical in nature. While a state sponsored attack did happen (see above links...) it isn't the main explanation.
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• AJRF 2y ago
  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.
  • boombabot 2y ago
    It feels like an accounting of a person who is very deeply wearing tinted glasses about the world.
  • yellow_lead 2y ago
    Like most PG essays
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• ggm 2y ago
  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.
• LeroyRaz 2y ago
  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).
• Animats 2y ago
  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 https://archive.org/details/sexinamericadefi00mich/mode/2up
  • TwoFerMaggie 2y ago
    > Nobody was pushing hard on worker protections or labor law enforcement - not cool enough, but affects a big fraction of the population. I don't think this statement is fair. There has been unionization effort across the country throughout the years. The difference is that corporate media is often very comfortable boosting ideas such as racial justice, but not class consciousness. Left strategy appears to be terrible is imo because neither party is left wing. There is simply no place in the current political landscape for a labor party/wing to address the issue for the big fraction of the population you mentioned. The republicans pretends to address it, the (majority) democrats dance around it.
    • Animats 2y ago
      > I don't think this statement is fair. There has been unionization effort across the country throughout the years. Not very successfully. Only 6.9% of private-sector US workers have a union. That peaked at 35% in 1954. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/union-membership-data/#full-report https://www.epi.org/publication/union-membership-data/#full-...
• qanksahft 2y ago
  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 https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3lfnoikjxrc2c
• LastTrain 2y ago
  Seeing as how the left lost all three branches of government in the last election, isn't it now "politically correct" to be non "woke"?
• freesheep 2y ago
  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.
• resters 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • alvah 2y ago
    "No doubt he voted for Trump." It must take a special effort to be this wrong. PG has vocally advocated for the Democratic candidate for at least the last 3 elections.
    • resters 2y ago
      So he’s an anti-woke California Democrat. That would make him a republican in most other states.
• hr_land 2y ago
  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.
  • bsimpson 2y ago
    I didn't know that happened to Python. It happened to NixOS.
  • toe666nail 2y ago
    [flagged]
• techfeathers 2y ago
  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.
  • bsimpson 2y ago
    There are degrees of good and bad in all of it. Harvey Weinstein preyed on people. Louis CK consensually engaged in his kink with people who later said they didn't mean to consent but were embarrassed because they wanted to curry his favor. Aziz Ansari went on a bad date, and she gossiped to someone who wanted to write a hit piece. PG says wokeness peaked with George Floyd. Surely there was priggish stupidity that came from Black Lives Matter (like banning "blacklist" as if it had racial connotations), but what happened to George Floyd was legitimately fucked up. I'm looking forward to a day when these ideas can be openly discussed. It's not that everything done in the name of woke was bad, it's that wokeness is a dogma that silences discussion. People whisper in cafeterias "hey, can I tell you what I really think," but nobody wants to say "the emperor has no clothes" when your wellbeing depends on it. In the last decade in tech, part of your job was paying lip service to inclusivity. If you date in SF or NY, you'll notice a bonkers number of people still signal a trendy virtue in their profiles, usually BLM/ACAB or Free Palestine/watermelon. If people worry that they can't keep a job or be invited to a social gathering or find a mate if they question the dogma, you'll end up with a bunch of people performing for the dogma, because they need access to those essentials.
    • potato3732842 2y ago
      I'm not a fan of Floyd at all. Garner was the far better martyr for that cause.
      • e40 2y ago
• maxerickson 2y ago
  Is there a pejorative term for performative intellectualism?
• fumeux_fume 2y ago
  If pg wants to hang out with dt at mar a lago he's gotta have some easily googleable bona fides afterall.
• johnnyanmac 2y ago
  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.
• ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  > 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 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?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • didiop 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • ZeroGravitas 2y ago
      So you're saying it doesn't matter if they do it "aggressively" or "performatively" you just have a fundamental objection to trans people. Which by PG's definition means this isn't woke. Yet he specifically gave the example of a wokeness so bad it could damage a giant multinational brewery (he doesn't mention it happening via boycotts and bomb threats and people losing jobs because that would sound like a worse version of the woke he was complaining about).
• joeldg 2y ago
  [dead]
• thinkingtoilet 2y ago
  "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!
  • moshegramovsky 2y ago
    Thank you for saying this.
• tomlockwood 2y ago
  Paul Graham is a billionaire frantically trying to fingerpoint and blame other people when his ilk have had an outsized influence on politics and business for years and we're no better off.
• LeroyRaz 2y ago
  "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.
• lz400 2y ago
  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.
• jokoon 2y ago
  I want to see a reddit clone, except users can only downvote I wonder what would happen
• James_K 2y ago
  [flagged]
• docmars 2y ago
  Incredible article, thank you for sharing. The parallels to unwelcome and unsolicited religious proselytizing is something I've been calling out for years, and ironically have often been met with extreme hatred and condemnation in response. Never in my life did I think that nearly every institution, company, corporation, (you name it), would compel and coerce people into following a narrow set of societal rules that appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and grated firmly against a functional, albeit imperfect, status quo -- most of which was accepted and even celebrated by most people in Western nations. What's terrifying to me is how acceptable it became to write and defend academic literature around these manufactured problems, specifically for "prigs" to justify their abhorrent behavior towards other people. I'm glad more people are finally willing to have an honest discussion about this, without immediately labeling it a "right-wing talking piece", as too many so lazily love to do.
• LarsDu88 2y ago
  People on the left don't like to admit it, but a lot of the left wing activism we see today growing out from the 1960s was directly influenced by the Soviet Union and it's "active measures" programs According to the KGB defector Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, the Soviets actively encouraged colleges to focus on studies away from science and engineering, and also encouraged the "break down" of things like "religion" and "family" to make for more fertile soil for the inevitable communist takeover. At best such measures were focused on encouraging anti-nuclear activism to reduce the US capacity for nuclear retaliation in the event of a total war. At worst it led to Cultural Revolution style critiques of college faculty. Despite the Soviet Union being gone, the cultural aspects of these efforts live on (mostly in Sociology departments) People on the right don't like to admit it, but a ton of the right wing "activism" we see TODAY is from modern Russian efforts to try the same sort of interference on the right (and still to a lesser extent on the left). There was no one from the 80s more disallusioned by the old Soviet tactics using left wing actors than Putin (who was in contact with left wing Red Army Faction terrorist groups in Germany). He's sought to try the same tactics out on the right which has been incredibly receptive to conspiracy theories of all kinds. There's an active campaign to erode the public's faith in science (anti-vaccine movements, ivermectin being a cure-all for everything) and journalism. Spread through channels like Rogan's podcast, and perhaps even Mr. Musk himself who spreads propaganda about big lies like "Ukraine having some sort bioweapons program" unquestioningly. Gradually the goal is not to get people to believe in something, but rather to get them to not know what to believe. The American left is too distracted by culture wars bullshit to counter blatant propaganda, and people like Paul Graham are too enamored by the success of Musk et al to see what is directly in front of them.
• bjourne 2y ago
  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-culture-start 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.
• Upvoter33 2y ago
  Here's a ChatGPT rewrite, focusing on a different end of the political spectrum: --- The word "puritan" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it might sound familiar. Google's version isn't bad: “A person with censorious moral beliefs, especially about pleasure and sexuality.” This sense of the word originated in the 16th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although *freedom conservatism* is a relatively recent phenomenon, it's just a modern iteration of an ancient habit. There's a certain kind of person who is drawn to a rigid, dogmatic sense of virtue and demonstrates their superiority by policing anyone who steps out of line. Every society has these people. The only thing that changes is the rules they enforce. In Puritan New England, it was religious purity. In McCarthy's America, it was anti-communism. For the freedom conservatives, it’s about traditional values. If you want to understand freedom conservatism, the question to ask isn’t why people act like this. Every society has moral busybodies. The question is, why are *our* moral busybodies obsessed with *these* ideas, at *this* moment? The answer lies in the 1980s and 1990s. Freedom conservatism is a sequel to the culture wars, which started with Reagan's "family values" campaign and found new life in the early 2000s when people realized reality TV wasn't enough drama. Its second wind came with the rise of social media echo chambers, which peaked around the Great Meme Wars of the late 2010s. What does freedom conservatism mean now? I’m often asked to define it by people who think it’s an empty buzzword, so here’s my attempt: *An aggressively performative devotion to traditional values.* In other words, it’s people being puritans about old-fashioned ideals. The problem isn't traditional values themselves—family, patriotism, etc., have their place. The problem is the *performance.* Instead of quietly living their lives and, say, mowing their lawn while humming "God Bless America," freedom conservatives focus on getting people fired for not standing during the anthem. And of course, freedom conservatism started in the best possible place for self-serious, inflexible ideology: academia. Did it begin in hard sciences, where people have to deal with facts? Of course not. It began in the cushy chairs of humanities departments, where abstract ideas about morality and society are debated without anyone worrying about inconvenient things like lab results. Why did it happen in the 1980s and not earlier? Well, the answer is obvious: the hippies of the '60s got jobs. Radical students grew up, got tenure, and traded in their flower power for bow ties and flag pins. Now they were the Establishment they'd protested against, and they weren't about to let anyone disrespect their shiny new rules. Suddenly, campus life wasn’t about free expression anymore. Now, students were encouraged to rat out professors who said something insufficiently patriotic or questioned the sanctity of heteronormative nuclear families. It was the Cultural Revolution, but make it apple pie. And what about the rules of freedom conservatism? Oh, they’re a hoot. Imagine explaining to an alien why it’s okay to chant “freedom” while banning books. Or how “family values” means yelling at teenagers about abstinence, but having your own scandalous tabloid history is perfectly fine. The rules are neither consistent nor logical—they’re just a list of traps, perfectly designed for the self-righteous to trip others up. Freedom conservatism thrives on outrage. And boy, does social media deliver. If outrage were a currency, Twitter would’ve been the new Fort Knox. Freedom conservatives figured out that they could rally mobs online to cancel anyone not adhering to the prescribed "values." Ironically, this led to the thing they claim to hate most: cancel culture. And let’s not forget the administrators and HR departments hired to enforce this ideology in workplaces. Their job titles often feature words like "patriotism" or "family," but their real goal is to make sure you don’t say anything remotely critical about their flag collection or their favorite founding father. The sad thing is that freedom conservatism is not going anywhere. The aggressively conventional-minded are like weeds—they’ll always find a crack in the pavement. But the key to stopping them is simple: stop letting them create new heresies. The next time someone tries to ban a book or a word in the name of protecting “values,” maybe, just maybe, we should push back. Because when freedom conservatism—or any performative moralism—runs wild, the number of true things we can say shrinks. And that’s a loss for everyone, even the puritans."
• rekabis 2y ago
  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.
• steele 2y ago
  [flagged]
• yowayb 2y ago
  There's a guy on X named Gad Saad writing a book called "suicidal empathy". I think this term captures it better than "wokeness".
• spacecadet 2y ago
  Pauly G. such a fortunate one. Just a defensive old white man. Not a good look, son.
• jshaqaw 2y ago
  You would think these tech oligarchs might be concerned with some other problem facing th world. This is the only one they seem to care about and much of it just seems like fragile ego.
• fromMars 2y ago
  Not much I can say other than that was a disappointing piece of trash from Paul. The whole tirade against wokeness by the far right is nothing more than a bizarre attempt to stigmatize those who want to improve things for segments of society. A more legitimate article might have focused on tactics such as shaming and cancelling those who disagree which is problematic in many instances, but Graham paints with too broad of a brush and comes across as another conservative whose only interest is to discredit those who think differently.
  • scarab92 2y ago
    > comes across as another conservative Graham endorsed Harris. The left needs to stop accusing other members of the left of being "far-right" everytime they dare to have a different opinion on a topic. That tendency of the left to ostracise its own rather than engage in debate, is exactly what pushed people like Elon and Rogan away, along with much of the centre, and is exactly why Trump won.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • fromMars 2y ago
      Whether he endorsed Harris or not is irrelevant to my point. It was a poorly written article. I am actually very sympathetic with some of the pushback against some things associated with wokeness, like poorly implemented DEI policies that don't address root causes for representation disparities. And you have no evidence that any of this is why Trump won. From the people I know who supported Trump, they did it for much different reasons.
  • croisillon 2y ago
    on the other hand, throwing people under the bus is cheaper than spending $1M for the inauguration, you see the savvy investor!
• steve_taylor 2y ago
  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.
• felizuno 2y ago
  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.
  • parasti 2y ago
    Thanks for this.
    • KwisatzHaderack 2y ago
      Thank you for the reply.
• nutanc 2y ago
  [flagged]
• mattigames 2y ago
  [flagged]
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• jccalhoun 2y ago
  This is a silly straw man argument with lots of claims and little evidence supporting them.
• kiitos 2y ago
  Wow! This is basically a master class in performative mediocrity.
• qarl 2y ago
  Good lord I cannot stand the tech-bro echo chamber. They're just as self righteous as the "woke" just much less self aware.
• yellowapple 2y ago
  [flagged]
• burntalmonds 2y ago
  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.
• OoTheNigerian 2y ago
  It was a good analysis but definitely longer than it should have been to communicate the came thing. A glaring omissions is overlooking the origin of the term "woke" in the context it is being used today. It was around 2010 as a rallying call for black folk to be aware of being taking for a fool. Then the Occupy Protests and Black Lives Matter came next and as usual it was hijacked by more savvy operators.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• paulcole 2y ago
  This one was staying in the Drafts folder if Kamala won.
• fud101 2y ago
  Do I want to read an essay about PG yapping about wokeness? Is this a realistic conversation engendering 1500 comments and 500 points? Why?
• breakyerself 2y ago
  There's prigs on both sides
• walterburns 2y ago
  Oh boy.
• diegof79 2y ago
  I want to share a personal story. I’m from Argentina. When I met my current wife, she volunteered at an orphanage. Her task was to take one of the children out for fun on weekends. It seemed simple, but it wasn’t. There, she met “A,” a 10-year-old girl. Some weekends with “A” were easy, but she was generally problematic. So, as we tried to understand what was happening to her, we learned a bit about her past. Her mother was a drug addict and a criminal. Her father was likely her grandfather and was also in jail for various reasons, including abusing her. We were heartbroken and tried to help, but we didn’t plan to adopt her. There are many other details, but I don’t want to bore you with the horrors. To summarize, this story shattered my naivety. However, the story takes a positive turn. When Argentina legalized same-sex marriage, two women adopted “A.” It was the first adoption case involving a same-sex marriage in our country. Things weren’t easy for them. We’re friends now and see each other occasionally. They transformed “A’s” life for good. But it’s not like the movies. Once a child has endured such trauma, recovery can take years, and sometimes, it’s not even possible. Nowadays, we have a president in Argentina who constantly claims to be engaged in a “cultural battle.” He’s a fan of Elon Musk and Trump. The “cultural battle” primarily involves removing sexual education from schools, removing organizations dedicated to protecting women from abuse, and portraying government spending on helping the poor as communism. He frequently uses the term “woke” to denigrate people who don’t share his views. However, this “cultural battle” is all about hate. The entire concept of “canceling culture,” “anti-woke,” and Mark Zuckerberg removing tampons from bathrooms are distractions. The world is full of children like “A,” and the cost of proofreading this with AI is probably enough to feed one person for a day. I’m not trying to sit on a moral high ground while I write this from my iPad Pro. But, at least, we should have more empathy. Sorry for my long comment, but I feel that this article from PG misses the point (ja! It’s my second time writing in disagreement with a PG article). I’m concerned about the direction that all this hate is taking here in Argentina, echoing the things that happen in the US.
  • blast 2y ago
    I appreciate your story and feel for "A" and the women who adopted her. But I think we need to get beyond this idea that there are only two sides and you have to pick one or the other. I don't see why I can't agree with you and also agree with PG. I didn't feel any hate in his article and I imagine he would support the people who have been helping "A", i.e. you and your wife and her adoptive mothers. > There are many other details, but I don’t want to bore you with the horrors. To summarize, this story shattered my naivety I have had similar experiences and understand you.
• VikingCoder 2y ago
  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.
• rTX5CMRXIfFG 2y ago
  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.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• bcd3169 2y ago
  People have been writing the same article since 2016. It’s unbearable
• habosa 2y ago
  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.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  [flagged]
• ineedaj0b 2y ago
  a lot of people here don't realize they are woke prigs
• jayd16 2y ago
  The origin of woke is not the alt-right's pejorative, nor the thing being lampooned. It used to mean the more literal "open your eyes." As in, pay attention to the propaganda/scam/traps that you face every day. Ironically, (or perhaps intentionally) it's been completely co-opted to the point that it's impossible to advise others to "stay woke."
• looneysquash 2y ago
  Republicans spent a lot of money and energy to poison the word "woke". I don't know if Paul is ignorant or evil. But an article such as his on this topic that doesn't mention the machine is not factual.
• burgerrito 2y ago
  Sorry, but at this point I don't think this article is appropriate for this website Additionally, what's with the amount of US politics discussion increasing lately
  • dang 2y ago
    It's not increasing - whatever you're seeing is most likely random fluctuation. HN's approach to political stories was established a long time ago and we aren't changing it. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
    • ternnoburn 2y ago
      What's intellectually interesting here? This article is mindless pap you could get anywhere online with some quick searching for anti woke. I don't mind political content if it's saying something novel, but this.... there's nothing here.
      • rubzah 2y ago
        Paul Graham is an important figure in tech (and arguably even more so on this site). If he comes out on one side or another of an important issue, it is interesting to this community. IMHO. If Zuckerberg had written TFA, I'd be interested too.
        • ternnoburn 2y ago
          If Paul Graham published his list of favorite la croix flavors, would it be interesting because of who he is? I don't understand celebrity worship in the slightest -- if a celebrity says something, why does that make it valuable to listen? Especially if it's poorly written drivel.
          • 2y ago
• cycrutchfield 2y ago
  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.
• jazzypants 2y ago
  >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.
• acd10j 2y ago
  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.
• protocolture 2y ago
  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.
• xivzgrev 2y ago
  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.
  • avs733 2y ago
    I find this highly highly suspect as an anecdote without some supporting evidence A quick search suggests this is a bit of a running meme used to discredit and poke fun at such trainings rather than something you’ve honestly experienced.
    • zero-sharp 2y ago
      Here's an article that was posted here a long time ago: https://it.wisc.edu/learn/inclusive-language-for-it/ https://it.wisc.edu/learn/inclusive-language-for-it/ It attempts to replace, or offer alternatives to, offensive language in IT. For example "dummy variable" is under the category of "Ableist language" in the website and should be replaced with the term "placeholder value". "master" and "slave" are other examples of language that, apparently, need to get phased out. I don't see the problem with the comment that you responded to. It's not surprising to me.
      • avs733 2y ago
        > I don't see the problem with the comment that you responded to. It's not surprising to me. The problem is that you provide other examples and then extrapolate from there that the original comment could be true. However, whether or not you believe it could be true is not serious evidence that it is. Yes, offering alternative wording to offensive language is a real thing. But notice that the OP is asserting that a facially silly example is real without any support beyond a claim of personal experience. What should matter to you is whether it is real or not as opposed to whether it is surprising or not. Fake silly examples like this are meant to sit on the line between believable and absurd specifically to make certain ideas seem ridiculous. Making up silly examples of real things is a specific technique to undermine them. It is a propaganda tool not a good faith attempt at dialogue. C.f., people making up stories about litter boxes in schools to try and undermine efforts to protect the rights of gender non-conforming children (https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/30/how-furries-got-swept-up-in-anti-trans-litter-box-rumors/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/30/how-furries-got-swept...)
• m2024 2y ago
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• mwkaufma 2y ago
  Tedious moral panic.
• cowpig 2y ago
  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
• kelnos 2y ago
  IMO people who whine about wokeness or, more broadly, political correctness, just don't like it when they're called out for being insensitive pricks, or for perpetuating the garbage that marginalized groups have to put up with every day. Sure, there are people who preach wokeness and empathy and whatnot who are indeed actually prigs. That's true of every movement, good and bad. But as usual, those are the small vocal minority, while most of us just want society as a whole to stop shitting on people just because they're different from whatever the mainstream du jour is. The blowback against wokeness is mostly due to conservatives hijacking the term and over and over and over using it to describe only the bad behavior they see, while ignoring that the bad behavior is in the minority. I used to really enjoy Graham's writing, but this is rubbish.
• raldi 2y ago
  > 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.
• deleted 2y ago
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• hamilyon2 2y ago
  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.
  • EnergyAmy 2y ago
    It's rather ironic that this is the exact priggishness he's talking about.
• EnergyAmy 2y ago
  Can we all agree that this is an exemplar of the sort of priggishness that defines "wokeness"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268 Great idea; shame about the name. Here's the problem with using words like "bro" (however jokingly) [...] It's self-righteous mindrot whose time has passed. Another great example is the master -> main renaming. People on the left are sick of being associated with this bullshit, we care about actually helping working class people not this fuckery.
• tipiirai 2y ago
  No surprise that Paul is on the Elon, Mark, Trump side of things — like 99% of the American rich.
• ahardison 2y ago
  I have read this text, a treatise on what PG calls “wokeness,” and what many in my lifetime would have called simple human decency, or perhaps its performance—a pair of very different things. The essay denounces the manner in which social justice can become a strict set of rules, a shallow costume worn by self-appointed arbiters of morality. In reading these arguments, I find myself wondering about the deeper currents that made such performances necessary in the first place, and what underlying truths might be sacrificed when so many focus upon appearances instead of realities. This nation has a long history of clinging to illusions, and that is not solely a white American failing—though it has cost Black Americans dearly. In Nashville, where I spent my earliest years trying to find the contours of my own identity, I realized that there were always people ready to lecture me about how I should dress, speak, or pray. None of that, however, changed the reality of my father’s income, or the conditions of the neighborhood around us, or the power structure that deemed our lives less worthy. So the mere spectacle of moral purity could never deliver us from oppression—only committed, genuine love of one’s fellow human being can begin that labor. The essay’s admonition against “performative” justice is not without merit; any moral crusade that pays no heed to the living, breathing conditions of the oppressed cannot stand. But if I may say so, there is a danger here, too. If one becomes preoccupied with the shallowness of some so-called “woke” individuals, one might forget that certain communities do not have the luxury of retreating from the harsh facts of racism or sexism or homophobia. Those who have spent generations fighting for the right even to speak are indeed sensitive about words, for words have been used to degrade, exclude, and dehumanize. And if their vigilance sometimes appears shrill, we would do well to remember what America has demanded of them. I would remind PG that while a fixation on language can obscure the underlying injustice, so too can dismissing that fixation blind us to the pain that gives rise to it. For every “prig” who delights in moral bullying, there are many more souls demanding that America acknowledge and atone for its long and brutal history of denial. These men and women—students and professors, activists and ordinary people—are not simply hungry for new battles; they have inherited a centuries-old conflict between a democracy’s exalted promises and its dreadfully unfulfilled duties. We live, after all, in the aftershock of slavery, the betrayal of Reconstruction, the racial terror that thrived long after the Emancipation Proclamation. We have seen so many movements come and go, each bearing the hope of a more honest confrontation with power. Some movements will indeed trade genuine moral work for the easy gratification of punishing superficial infractions. But let us not confuse a moment’s self-righteous fervor with the profound and continuing necessity of building a world in which human dignity is honored. Let us not conflate every cry of outrage with mere vanity. After all, an anguished cry can be genuine proof that one is alive, and that something in this society continues to break the heart. It is not enough to scorn “wokeness” as though it were merely the mania of a new generation. We should rather ask: Why do certain people still feel so powerless that they rely on punishing speech transgressions instead of forging true solidarity? Where does this anger come from, and what truths do they feel are perpetually denied? If our citizens are turning to moral performance instead of moral substance, we must question our entire social order, lest we merely stumble from one hollow righteousness to another. I believe our task, now as ever, is to recognize when the clamor about words and rules drowns out the deeper music of genuine empathy, justice, and hope. But we must not abandon the moral struggle itself, for it is older than any catchphrase and deeper than any university policy. We must refuse both the tyranny of empty slogans and the tyranny of despair. Only in that refusal—dangerous, uncertain, and profoundly human—will we begin to shape an America not built upon illusions but upon the sacred fact of each person’s worth.
• buovjaga 2y ago
  PG would have done well to read this rather good Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
• webprofusion 2y ago
  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.
• mbs159 2y ago
  > Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. In my personal experience, after Elon bought Twitter and implemented his policies, I have seen an influx of Hitler quotes and literal Nazi propoganda (advocating for the Final Solution, etc.). I literally had to leave Twitter recently because it was mentally draining to have to argue with someone over why the Holocaust was bad.
• _l7dh 2y ago
  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.
• W0lfEagle 2y ago
  If you're being a dick then someone will call you out for it. They can do that. You can get hung up on them being woke and woke being the problem but you were still a dick. - a dick
• lesostep 2y ago
  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"
• dariosalvi78 2y ago
  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.
• secretsatan 2y ago
  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.
• secretsatan 2y ago
  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.
• crnkofe 2y ago
  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.
• deleted 2y ago
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• airdroper 2y ago
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• eunonia12 2y ago
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• cynusx 2y ago
  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.
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• antifa 2y ago
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  • zahlman 2y ago
    Notwithstanding your incredible lack of charity, and notwithstanding the use-mention distinction, it is in fact completely legal to refer to groups by slurs in the US, and always has been (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...).
• ajuc 2y ago
  There's left-wing orthodoxy. There's also right-wing orthodoxy. On the internet right-wing orthodoxy is the prevailing one, and it's also better funded (and more politically connected). You are not a rebel if you support the oligarchs.
• gwd 2y ago
  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.
• red_admiral 2y ago
  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?
• ch_sm 2y ago
  Summary: Old successful man thinks the social justice movement is unnecessary and stupid. Also, twitter is better since Elon.
• kolektiv 2y ago
  > 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?
• samirillian 2y ago
  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.
• camgunz 2y ago
  Fully responding to this takes more space than HN--very reasonably--allows. But here we go anyway. > [A lot of takes on universities and journalism] Universities and journalists became left-leaning because conservatives are wrong about almost everything. They were wrong about markets, sex, Iraq, financial regulation, climate change, al-Qaeda, race, China, Russia, health care, immigration, education, COVID, vaccines, masks, NATO, tax policy, tech policy, the Civil War, on and on and on. It's like someone's running an experiment on how many times you can be bafflingly wrong before people notice. Very few people can be both evidence-based--like most people in academia and journalism--and conservative. > [I dislike cancel culture, it's performative, indicative of left-wind orthodoxy, and masks bad people] - Almost no people have been canceled (more people have been killed by dogs). - You are performatively writing a blog post. At least Steve Ballmer made a website. At least Steve Bannon has a podcast (and I guess ran a presidential campaign for at least a little while). - You can't say your main issue is larping while also detailing how DEI is corrupting corporate and government hiring. Either it's real or it's not. - The right has its own edge lord orthodoxy--some time in the "manosphere" would convince you if you need convincing. You can buy in by saying the N word publicly, by writing a blog post railing against wokeness, or changing your company's DEI and content moderation policies to favor the right. Well, I guess people saw right through that last one though. - Being "the worst person in the world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than everyone who isn't" perfectly describes Donald Trump (or Andrew Tate, or David Duke). But more broadly, we can lump all this (Larry Summers, etc.) under a pattern where a successful person confidently walks on to an issue where they're deeply ignorant, and assumes they can apply tools they're facile with to fix them. For Summers it was economics (in that keynote you referenced he made the bonkers argument that since the market hasn't corrected for discrimination it must not exist); for you and other SV VCs it's tech. Media studies and gender studies are complicated. I assure you smart people are working on them all the time. You need their help, not the other way around. > The rise of social media and the increasing polarization of journalism reinforced one another. In fact there arose a new variety of journalism involving a loop through social media. Someone would say something controversial on social media. Within hours it would become a news story. Outraged readers would then post links to the story on social media, driving further arguments online. It was the cheapest source of clicks imaginable. You didn't have to maintain overseas news bureaus or pay for month-long investigations. All you had to do was watch Twitter for controversial remarks and repost them on your site, with some additional comments to inflame readers further. This happened far more on the right than the left. You should visit sites like Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and Fox News. > By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren't directly in the flow of the organization's work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it. These new administrators could often be recognized by the word "inclusion" in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an "inclusive language guide." [10] I was pretty sure we'd get to the "communist Russia" part of the argument, but I can't say I'm not disappointed. The EEOC was established in 1965 "to administer and enforce civil rights laws against workplace discrimination." You're naive to this space, so let me tell you that one of the reasons women and members of other marginalized groups leave high-powered positions is discomfort in the workplace: microaggressions, stereotypes, etc. Simple policies like using "inclusive language" can go a long way towards making a workplace more hospitable to people you want to retain. > [A lot of takes essentially on media studies] The tension between "orthodoxy" and "free speech" is--I would hope obviously--facile. Let's think about some of the questions someone running a social media platform would ask: - Can my users opine on the lab-leak hypothesis? - Can my users opine on the Holocaust maybe not being real? - Can my users opine on the sexuality of others? - Can my users opine on my sexuality? - Can my users opine on Paul Manafort being a Russian agent? - Can my users post PII of others? - Can my users talk up the benefits of poison (chemotherapy, nicotine)? - Can my users brigade other users? - Can my users track the location of my private jet at all times? - Can my users opine on Matt Gaetz having had sex with a minor? - Can my users blast these opinions to millions of people? - Can my users write programs to blast these opinions to millions of people? - Can my users hire influencers to blast these opinions to millions of people? - Can I be lobbied to prioritize some opinions over others (sponsored posts, foreign governments, interest groups, etc.) - Can I be made personally liable if I don't prioritize specific pieces of information (amber alerts, VAERS stats, violence against LGBTQ people, Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, how to make napalm) > The number of true things we can't say should not increase. If it does, something is wrong. Here are some true things: - White men are responsible for the vast majority of white collar crime - White men are responsible for the majority of US war crimes - White men instituted the worst form of slavery the world's ever seen - Men are responsible for the majority of fraud - SV VCs are disproportionately responsible for fossil fuel consumption (data center go brrr) - Men commit the majority of mass shootings in the US - Europeans have killed far more Africans than Africans have killed Europeans - Men are responsible for almost all rape - Men are responsible for nearly all mass shootings Should we start making policy on these kinds of things? Something like "men can't own firearms" or "white men can't be accountants" or "white men can't run businesses that receive government reimbursement" or "white men can't run US foreign policy" or... I honestly don't know what you'd do about the rape thing. Would we welcome it if some foreign country--say Russia--started paying influencers with huge reach on social media to push these policies? Would we defend these people's right to "free speech" as troll farm after troll farm pushes this agenda, after Bari Weiss and her ilk start pushing it, after SV VCs start advocating for it in their blogs? "Free speech" sounds like a right, and it is, but it's much, much more of a responsibility. I don't expect your average person to understand "imminent lawless action" vs. "shouting fire in a crowded theater", or content-based vs. content-neutral jurisprudence. I don't expect them to understand the nuances of the Holocaust, gender studies, or epistemology. I do expect the owners of huge platforms to understand these things though. I expect smart, rich, educated people like you to understand them before trying to influence people with your platform. I earnestly implore you to do better.
• room271 2y ago
  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.
• wtcactus 2y ago
  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.
  • Kye 2y ago
    It might be helpful and interesting to expand on the history. Was this an active effort to reclaim the word? That makes all the difference. People might not choose the word you would prefer when they form their own identities.
• DrWhax 2y ago
  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.
• oytis 2y ago
  With this coordinated oligarchic turn to the right I finally feel very progressive again.
• oytis 2y ago
  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.
• greenie_beans 2y ago
  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)
• betageek 2y ago
  Not even wrong
• boombabot 2y ago
  Reaction, reaction everywhere
• capital_guy 2y ago
  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.
  • segasaturn 2y ago
    Graham was brilliant in the 90s. I would say this article is more like evidence that he's washed up. When you no longer have to work hard because your name alone means money, your mind turns soft.
    • dookofnewyork 2y ago
      On par with YouTubers making the newest Roblox challenge videos to stay relevant in the algorithm. He has nothing to add except his name.
• techfeathers 2y ago
  Can someone steelman (or just represent) the argument of why Bud Light supporting Dylan Mulvaney is wokeness and not classical liberalism/free speech?
  • hhh1111 2y ago
    That ad campaign was enabled by the 1st amendment but not motivated by it. You’re conflating why they wanted to do it with why they could do it
  • blasorast 2y ago
    https://thecritic.co.uk/dylan-mulvaney-did-not-share-our-girlhood https://thecritic.co.uk/dylan-mulvaney-did-not-share-our-gir... This article explains why.
• toe666nail 2y ago
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• techfeathers 2y ago
  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.
• Netcob 2y ago
  When I see someone use that word, it's almost always a clear knee-jerk reaction to: - Media featuring women who aren't exclusively an attractive love interest or a very minor character - Media featuring non-white or non-heterosexual people in major roles I find it difficult to have any rational discussion of this topic because it always gets drowned out by overwhelming racism and sexism. You can't talk about overcorrection or virtue signalling without an army of angry white guys present who watch hours of "(some guy) DESTROYS wokeness with FACTS and LOGIC" on youtube every day. That said, compared to disinformation and identity politics, this is a non-issue. It's a convenient topic to focus the anger and time of straight white men so they don't notice how billionaires and opportunistic politicians are taking their futures away while pretending to care about "free speech". This will have huge consequences not just for victims of racism and sexism, but literally everyone who isn't filthy rich.
• throwaway_2494 2y ago
  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.
• teddyh 2y ago
  > 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?
• eunice 2y ago
  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
• d23 2y ago
  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.
• tantalor 2y ago
  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.
• BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  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.
• 5cott0 2y ago
  the origin of wokeness was childish gambino's 2016 single "redbone" from the album "awaken my love", in this essay i will. . .
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  More: https://nitter.poast.org/paulg/status/1878761763799519595 https://nitter.poast.org/paulg/status/1878761763799519595
• HumblyTossed 2y ago
  It's a political distraction to keep the working class fighting themselves while the wealth class continues to pilfer.
• r33b33 2y ago
  And why does he post this on January 2025, not January 2024 or 2023? Why did he magically started calling out wokeness issue only after Trump's win? Weak
• sigy 2y ago
  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.
• epicureanideal 2y ago
  Thank you pg for writing this!
• gnkyfrg 2y ago
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• Pfhortune 2y ago
  > 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.
  • susemani 2y ago
    > If a trans colleague identifies a way that you disagree with, does this give you free pass to misgender them and deny their identity? Yes, of course. If you believe that false claims of an opposite-sex identity constitute a harmful lie, why should you be compelled to endorse it?
    • Pfhortune 2y ago
      > Yes, of course. If you believe that false claims of an opposite-sex identity constitute a harmful lie, why should you be compelled to endorse it? Because such behavior is a direct and targeted attack on an individual or individuals, not the concept of gender identity, transness, etc.
      • susemani 2y ago
        If you believe that making false claims of an opposite-sex identity is a harmful lie, then being compelled under threat of punishment to, for example, refer to a male as "she", is also a direct and targeted attack.
• gradientsrneat 2y ago
  > Article titled "The Origins of Wokeness" > Doesn't actually discuss the origins of wokeness > Claims to be against male chauvinism > Publish date timed within days of right wing male chauvinist being inaugrated as American president > Article is full of right wing male chauvinist talking points > Author moved from United States to England in 2016, the same year that right wing male chauvinist became president for the first time Hmmmm...
• grigio 2y ago
  woke is over, now. Also Zuckerberg changed music
• utbabya 2y ago
  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.
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• cropcirclbureau 2y ago
  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?
• toobulkeh 2y ago
  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.
• silexia 2y ago
  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?
• sandinmyjoints 2y ago
  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.
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• dookofnewyork 2y ago
  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.