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> Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017. Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 202

> Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017. Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left. The trouble is that many people have decided that if you discuss "wokeness" and especially if you have a problem with some element of it, that means you're no longer on "the left". Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.". When a lot of this was heating up during the pandemic, I encountered two very different kinds of people. 1. Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc) 2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy. > not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture. I think acknowledging the existence of bad faith actors and "morality police" would do more for advancing the underlying ideas often labeled "woke" than trying to focus on the fakeness of the problem. Maybe that group is made up of squeaky wheels, but their existence is used to justify the "anti-woke" sentiment that many people push. For me, this boils down to a tactics issue where people are behaving badly and distracting from real issues - often issues those same people claim to care about.

_bee_hive_ 2y ago
Well said, thank you for this.
kristopolous 2y ago
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- gortok 2y ago
  The humorous part to me is when folks talk badly about 'antifa' they either forget or gloss over what the 'fa' means in antifa.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    they've redefined it as "first amendment". Also they've convinced themselves that hypernationalistic fascism was somehow a project of the leftists the fascists rounded up and slaughtered. It's the same mechanism of imagining an enemy causing the negative consequences of the policies they advocate for. It's actually the core thing that connects tech startups, conspiracy theories, medical quackery, and fascism - a desire to be guided by the imaginary and construct necessary delusions to deny reality. Wildest thing is, every now and then, it works out - the most delusional Bitcoin people of 2010 are genuinely billionaires now. Most of the richest people had to deeply believe in what was, at some time, an irrational fantasy and that taking inadvisable acts of insanity would somehow work out.
    - yellowapple 2y ago
      > the most delusional Bitcoin people of 2010 are genuinely billionaires now. It seems a bit odd to call them delusional while in the same breath admitting that they were right all along.
      - kristopolous 2y ago
        Both are true. The world is complicated. You can go to the old Bitcointalk forum. Some people stocked up, for instance, because they thought the American dollar and civilization would collapse in 2012 due to the supposed Mayan apocalypse. Some bought feverishly in 2016 predicting a communist takeover by Hilary Clinton... There's many dumb reasons people bought and held. Think back about what investments you could have done to maximize your income - you'll invariably come up with things like "I should have put my life savings into Tesla before they delivered they're first car instead of $100. Then I should have held on regardless" or "I should have trusted that Steve Jobs returning to Apple after failing at Next was going to be a legendary turnaround by combining his failed NextStation into a new operating system. Then he'll come out with Apple Newton 2.0 and it will make them one of the most powerful companies in the world" If I had told you in say, 2004, to take all the high end CRTs being tossed out en masse, put them in a huge barn in the desert and then sell them for thousands each in 20 years, you'd call me nuts. These are all absurd things that happened. You can be a stupid fool and still hit it right sometimes.
KerrAvon 2y ago
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- haswell 2y ago
  Many people have decided that "woke" means one very specific and unimpeachable thing to them. The term generally means far more than "I support black people having a right to exist". By that definition, even many conservatives would have to label themselves "woke". And this is at the heart of why the topic is controversial. I've sat in on a meetings where a central team of copywriters openly shamed engineers for disagreeing about the importance of renaming certain terms that had existed in the software for decades (whitelist/blacklist/master). The engineers in question were Indian, and couldn't have been any further removed from the original context. To be clear, I'm supportive of efforts to remove racially charged language. But I found the tactics and behaviors associated with that project ridiculous, and challenge the notion that "wokeness" is limited to your definition as written.
- GenerocUsername 2y ago
  Not at all what it means to anyone. And anyone who phrases it so reduced is either lying or oblivious
- throw101010qwe 2y ago
  Is this not the best example of what a lot of people think is the problem with wokeness? You are either “woke” or a racist. It’s almost comical.
thephyber 2y ago
> It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy. The reactionaries to “woke” ideas know that (2) is a small number of vocal people and yet they still wrap the anchor around the necks of both (1) and (2). Same strategy for “communism”, “socialism”, “groomers”, “Hamas apologists”, etc. It’s convenient to do this and say all Democrats (or all non-Republicans, or non-MAGA, etc) are painted with this broad brush. What your comment misses is that the “morality police” has always existed and currently exists along different poles than in the recent past. When I grew up, the social conservatives / incredibly religious were the ones trying to bully people into moral positions. Now, we still have those people (old groups like Family Research Council and new groups like Moms For Liberty) are doing the same thing, but aren’t getting flak from the “anti-wokeness” crowd. Bad faith actors all around.
- notacoward 2y ago
  Exactly. Anyone with any reading comprehension (and honesty) can tell that PG conflates being woke with acting woke early on for exactly this purpose. He also talks a lot about polarization as though it's entirely the "woke mob's" fault, about moralizing without mentioning evangelicals, about "enforcers" without mentioning MAGA paramilitaries, etc. It's all very disingenuous, even for him.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    As a non American I don't see MAGA policing online or in tech companies, but I see a lot of woke. So while the things you talk about might be local problem to USA, the woke problem is something USA exports to the entire globe, so it seems like woke has much more power than maga and thus is a bigger problem.
    - moron4hire 2y ago
      There was a period of time on Musk's X where an internal filter would instaban anyone who wrote the letters "CIS" together.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left. We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first before there's any discussion worth a damn. As best I can tell it just means "any behavior coming from young people I don't like as a cable news viewer". Frankly, I'm at the point where if someone uses the word non-ironically I just write the speaker off as not seriously trying to communicate. Use your words! Describe specific behavior. People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.
- cle 2y ago
  TFA spends the first 7-8 paragraphs defining "woke", even a dedicated callout to a concise definition: > An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
  - tomlockwood 2y ago
    That's a pretty subjective definition. We're back where we started.
    - cle 2y ago
      Helpfully he spends most of the article elaborating on what he means by "aggressively performative".
      - tomlockwood 2y ago
        So, not such a "concise definition".
        dgfitz 2y ago
        [flagged]
likeabatterycar 2y ago
> Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc) You're making the assumption that most of that isn't performative nonsense that in reality doesn't help anything. Also known as slacktivism. It got to the point where I would see pronouns and flags and URLs to DEI policies (Click here to stop racism now! Really?) in people's email signatures that I would immediately assume they were insincere and phony. One person I knew had "LGBTQ Ally" in their professional signature. It's one step removed from writing I HAVE GAY FRIENDS and frankly I found it all really weird, fake, and reminiscent of 1940s Germany where people had to wear their pins to proclaim their allegiance. None of this has place in a professional setting.
- skywhopper 2y ago
  Why a weird, distorted take. People who put “LGBTQ Ally” in their signatures aren’t being phony. They have friends or family who are LGBTQ, and being visible is one way to support them. If it’s unprofessional to be an ally to LGBTQ friends and family then it is easy for hateful folks to claim it’s unprofessional to even be LGBTQ. Why does it offend you so much for someone to say “I support my gay friends”?
  - likeabatterycar 2y ago
    It doesn't offend me. Picture going into a restaurant, and before the hostess seats you she says "I'd like to remind you that I love black people". That's out of place it is. It doesn't offend anyone, it's just an odd thing to say. You may not perceive it so if you're inside the bubble.
    - SauciestGNU 2y ago
      I think what you're not getting is that there are lots of places in rural America that are violently queerphobic. Queer people are targets of hate crimes. There's a mainstream religion and political party in America that's tiptoeing around rhetoric of eradication of queer people. So yeah, it can't be assumed businesses are queer friendly because lots of American Christians and conservatives would prefer queer people dead, or at least back in the closet.
taurath 2y ago
> The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture. The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part. That the squeaky wheels exist is used to justify wholesale dropping of the entire train of thought. PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone. Why is wokeness noteworthy and of-our-time, but racism is not? Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem. I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex. PC culture in the 90s when he mentions it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r, even if they do it in Blazing Saddles".
- diggan 2y ago
  > PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone That doesn't seem to be supported by the essay itself, since it has the following part: > But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do. It seems to say there are real issues, there are good things coming from "the woke" (whatever that means), we shouldn't discard all ideas just because one or two are bad. > Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem. Is that something pg actually said/wrote/hinted at in any of the essays, or are you just trying to bad-faith your way out of this discussion?
  - petsfed 2y ago
    PG says >Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. What he does not explain is how big a problem of scale this is, but based on the way the rest of the essay goes, I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.
monkeycantype 2y ago
I see the problem you identify with people's behaviour and agree with the noisiness of people you refer to as group two - people who aren’t thinking deeply about what they are saying have a lot of freedom to shoot their mouth off. To be very clear, I see your comment as a sincere attempt to articulate and respond to a problem, most discussion of woke isn’t. While I do want to offer just one olive branch to people upset about woke, that yes - annoying people really are annoying, self-righteous twits truly are unbearable - but when I see someone frothing at the mouth because someone spoke about selfishness, hypocrisy or cruelty in way they didn’t like, I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them. There are idiots everywhere – even the smartest of us are part-time idiots, stupidity is just the background noise we have to talk over, rabbiting on about woke usually seems to part strategic tantrum to avoid real discussion and part real tantrum. I think I’m looking for a way to distil the ideas you’ve expressed into a response I can use when someone complains about woke : `that sounds quite annoying, but let’s discuss the idea not the idiot`
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  > when I see someone frothing at the mouth because someone spoke about selfishness, hypocrisy or cruelty in way they didn’t like, I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them I think you may be right here, but I think it's also worth looking into just why this causes people to go into a mouth frothing rage. What I see is that a lot of "woke" starts with the assumption that the audience is bad, then tries to work backwards to prove it Of course discussions about selfishness, hypocrisy and cruelty are going to infuriate people when you start from the assumption that the people you are talking to are the ones who are selfish cruel hypocrites Next time you see someone make a comment about "straight cis white men" (or any demographic, but this one comes up a lot), replace it with "selfish cruel hypocrites", that probably would give you a good idea why that demographic reacts poorly to the message
  - worthless-trash 2y ago
    Now imagine that is what you mostly hear "straight cis white men" are "selfish cruel hypocrites" over and over again.
skywhopper 2y ago
You’ve just proven the point of the author you’re responding to. The left isn’t talking about “wokeness”. But there are endless folks who are mad about someone being mean to them once who won’t shut up about how the “woke left” is destroying social cohesion. Just because some people are obnoxious doesn’t mean you’re under the thumb of a conspiracy to shut you up. Sheesh.
- astrange 2y ago
  > The left isn’t talking about “wokeness”. They are (or were throughout the 2010s), but they have a way of talking about it where they do it, but then claim it doesn't exist if anyone tries to give a name to it. So "wokeness isn't real" is a popular way to say "wokeness is real and I think it's good". Sometimes this is called Voldemorting. I personally think it's good but also think it's real.
  - antifa 2y ago
    We just call it not bring racist. We also used phrases like stay woke long before 2010 and conservative whining.
    - zahlman 2y ago
      >We just call it not bring racist. No, you do not. I know this because when I advocate for actually not being racist, members of your group call me racist for it. I am the one who seeks policies that do not take a person's race into consideration when making decisions where race is clearly a priori irrelevant. That is what it means not to be racist. Your group is the one that insists that doing so is necessary to achieve a moral outcome.
  - corimaith 2y ago
    It's called the Motte and Bailey fallacy
  - Izkata 2y ago
    > They are (or were throughout the 2010s) More thoroughly: * The online left was using terms like "social justice warrior" to describe themselves in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Some of them even used alternate terms to try and fit their kind of activism closer, one I remember being "social justice paladin". * The first big round of backlash turned SJW into an insult in the mid 2010s, so they rebranded themselves as "woke". * As the backlash grew, "woke" was also turned into an insult. * DEI was the most recent rebranding, but since that describes actions instead of the people doing the actions there wasn't really a way to turn it directly into an insult, and "progressive" isn't zing-y enough to catch on, so "woke" stuck.
pksebben 2y ago
> there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left. This perception is a constant cause of concern for the actual left, and it's created by liberal politicians attempting to co-opt the movement, because it represents a huge part of their disenfranchised base. In today's reality: - left: socialist, progressive policies and in favor of fixing the system from the ground up. Election reform and the dissolution of failed establishments find support here (i.e. "too big to fail" was capital B "Bad"). An actual leftist today would say that Trump is awful, but also that Obama probably did more damage to us in the long term. We have not had a leftist in power in any surviving generation. - liberal: most of the democratic party. Biden's a lib, so was hillary. Liberal voters (somehow) believe that the current system can (and should) be saved by incrementalism. My take is that mostly, liberal politicians are pulling a fast one and just wanna keep that campaign money flowing, which is why you get a lot of talk about campaign finance reform and no action whatsoever. Liberals are terrified of ranked-choice, and economically look a whole lot like conservatives (we used to call this neoconservative or neoliberal but the distinction has become very indistinct). There's overlap in demographic between the leftist and the liberal - so liberal politicians have frequently used the "jangling keys method" and pushed stuff like wokeness real hard when they're trying to distract from the fact that they're taking money from JPMorgan and Shell Oil. Hillary was one of the worst - refusing point-blank to talk about banking as a real problem while accusing all her detractors of being "Bernie Bros" - which was really just a hamfisted smokescreen to try and turn the party against itself (this ended predictably). To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism. I'm of the opinion that many of the folks on the actual right and actual left agree on a lot - our system is broken, politicians and the elite are the problem, inflation has gotten out of control, the economy sucks, housing is too expensive, and it's not gonna get fixed by doing what we've always been doing. Problem is, we've been divided by wedge issues (some of which are truly relevant, like the climate) that make it impossible to form a coalition to accomplish actual reform. This was done on purpose. Liberals and Conservatives are just two marketing arms for the same business - business as usual. At the risk of being accused of being 'woke' - i'd ask that the two terms (left and liberal) don't get further confused. It muddies the conversation in ways that are destructive.
- deleted 2y ago
rayiner 2y ago
> Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas No, it really is about specific ideas. I’ll discuss four: 1) Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition with common cause and shared interests. This goes back to the 1990s with the “rainbow coalition.” A lot of the way the left talks to minorities, and various things like affinity groups arise out of this idea that non-whites will bring about left-liberal changes to society. Also the antagonistic way many on the left talk about whites. But most non-whites don’t think of themselves that way, as we saw in the election. 2) Because of (1), many in the left believe in permissive approaches to policing and immigration because of the disproportionate effects of those policies on black and Hispanic people. But the public wants more policing and less immigration, including black and Hispanic people. 3) Many on the left believe in treating people of different races different to remedy past race-based harms. But the public doesn’t like this—even California voted overwhelmingly against repealing the state ban on affirmative action. 4) Related to the above, there’s a general belief on the left that, in any given issue, policy should cater to the “most marginalized.” When confronted with the burdens to the average person, their reaction is to either (a) deny such costs and accuse the other part of various “isms” and “phobias,” or (b) assert that the average person must bear the cost.
- bborud 2y ago
  > Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition What percentage of what group is “many on the left”? This does not sound plausible to me.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    Enough to normalize "white men are evil" statements, otherwise such people would get reprimanded and shunned by the other people on the left for being racists and sexists but as is they are still welcomed with open arms.
    - bborud 2y ago
      “White men are evil” does not turn everyone else into a “cohesive political coalition”.
atoav 2y ago
Wokeness is like veganism: for every person talking about being vegan you will find 10 guys who complain about vegans, typically unprompted, while eating meat. I had a work collegue who would complain every meal about vegans, although there wasn't a single vegan at the table. Wokeness is the comparable, I teach at a liberal art university, there are probably few places more "woke" than this. Even here if I count there is probably a 10:1 ratio of "people complaining about woke" vs "people demanding a woke thing". The feeling that others are judging you from a high horse is a very strong force, even if they aren't judging you at all. And strong forces can be used to manipulate people into making choices against their interest .
- charlieyu1 2y ago
  Because 1 in 10 (for examples) vegans are calling meat eaters as cruel murderers. And that becomes the image of vegans because they are the noisy ones.
  - I-M-S 2y ago
    There might be some survivorship bias at play here, as by definition you'll only get to know someone's a vegan because he's a noisy one. Those who eat in peace and leave others alone are not memorable - same goes for antivegans.
    - aziaziazi 2y ago
      Theees a comment on the exact same subject I found interesting yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682623
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > as by definition you'll only get to know someone's a vegan because he's a noisy one You never eat lunch with colleagues? Never eat dinner with family and their significant others? It is very hard to hide that you are a vegan.
  - atoav 2y ago
bjourne 2y ago
> Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.". > 2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes Who are you talking about? It seems to me that you are using very general and broad language so avoid having to defend any specific points. Who exactly shamed you and for what? Give some examples. Who exactly are you paraphrasing with "that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive"? For the record, my experience of left-wing politics (two decades+) is very different from yours and I haven't noticed the phenomena you speak of. In fact, left-wing people are generally open to divergent ideas and will debate them ad nauseam. That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas. You are using quotation marks so you must be paraphrasing someone, right? If so can you give some examples of this phenomena?
- baumy 2y ago
  > In fact, left-wing people are generally open to divergent ideas and will debate them ad nauseam. That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas. Fascinating. I'm sure you're not lying and that this is true from your perspective. And yet my experience is the exact opposite. If the "divergent ideas" are e.g. "everyone who voted for Trump is an evil nazi" vs "everyone who voted for Trump is just stupid", I'll grant that those two ideas will be entertained and debated. But if the idea falls anywhere outside the accepted orthodoxy, for instance "maybe people who voted for Trump were well informed and had good reason to do so", that idea is not tolerated at all. Granted I live in Seattle, which is probably home to a disproportionate number of more extreme progressives.
  - bjourne 2y ago
    > Fascinating. I'm sure you're not lying and that this is true from your perspective. I guess the difference is that I actually hang out with left-wing people and have been doing so for decades, whereas you base your opinions on rage bait news and internet interactions? You may think Trump voters are well-informed and you may think the moon is made of cheese. In both cases there are mountains of evidence to the contrary. I don't know what being wrong has to do with tolerance.
h0l0cube 2y ago
FTA: > There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up. But who will morality police the morality police? (Paul Graham of course!) Jokes aside, the difference between the 1) and 2) is the difference between progressivism and wokeism. But I think many here – as well as the article – miss the point by aiming squarely at 'noisy' humanities students, and not at the governments and corporations that leveraged their movements into this realm of the purely performative. That's not to say that there isn't scope for government and corporate interventions that actually make positive change to social justice outcomes. And there's also some merit to both online and meatspace activism causing many bad actors to consider their behavior (e.g., Harvey Weinstein, excessive force by law enforcement, wrongful incarcerations/executions).
- raxxor 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    > like further discrimination People who perceive themselves as losing rights will always be angry at losing their privileges. Growing up white in Brazil was great for the most part: police never stopped me, I got away of many speeding tickets just because I looked like a “good kid”, and so on. My non-white friends never had it that easy. One was charged with drug trafficking because the combined amount of pot he and his white friend were carrying went over the limit a single one could be carrying before being considered a dealer. Of course the police assumed it was the less Caucasian (in reality, it was the other guy who went to buy the pot from his dealer). Even though the white friend stated half the pot was his, the case went to trial.
    - raxxor 2y ago
      I don't think you can reframe that in a way if you introduce policies that treat people differently. And I don't believe people feel they lose rights as long as they are treated equally. As I said, rulebook of toxic middle management. Treat people differently and they fight among themselves and you don't have them on their back. Simple workplace dynamic, even if not intuitive.
nouripenny 2y ago
I agree that wokeness is a big problem on the serious left. It was analyzed in high-profile leftist's Norman Finkelstein's "I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom". Many point it's from the professional/managerial/bureaucratic class, which never was into free speech to begin with. Take pg's mention of the Soviet Union. That's actually a country where that class overthrew the capitalists to become the ruling class. (They were called "The New Class" there. In countries like the US, they're above workers but subordinate to capitalists.) And all this is a useful distraction: criticizing wokies distracts from the structure of power that leads to homelessness and working your one (1) life away under some boss. Which is ridiculous in the 21st century.
nickdothutton 2y ago
Google ngrams says Woke began climbing mid 90s, steep increase since 2005 [1]. [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=woke&year_start=1980&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=woke&year_star...

_bee_hive_ 2y ago

Well said, thank you for this.

kristopolous 2y ago

[flagged]

gortok 2y ago
The humorous part to me is when folks talk badly about 'antifa' they either forget or gloss over what the 'fa' means in antifa.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  they've redefined it as "first amendment". Also they've convinced themselves that hypernationalistic fascism was somehow a project of the leftists the fascists rounded up and slaughtered. It's the same mechanism of imagining an enemy causing the negative consequences of the policies they advocate for. It's actually the core thing that connects tech startups, conspiracy theories, medical quackery, and fascism - a desire to be guided by the imaginary and construct necessary delusions to deny reality. Wildest thing is, every now and then, it works out - the most delusional Bitcoin people of 2010 are genuinely billionaires now. Most of the richest people had to deeply believe in what was, at some time, an irrational fantasy and that taking inadvisable acts of insanity would somehow work out.
  - yellowapple 2y ago
    > the most delusional Bitcoin people of 2010 are genuinely billionaires now. It seems a bit odd to call them delusional while in the same breath admitting that they were right all along.
    - kristopolous 2y ago
      Both are true. The world is complicated. You can go to the old Bitcointalk forum. Some people stocked up, for instance, because they thought the American dollar and civilization would collapse in 2012 due to the supposed Mayan apocalypse. Some bought feverishly in 2016 predicting a communist takeover by Hilary Clinton... There's many dumb reasons people bought and held. Think back about what investments you could have done to maximize your income - you'll invariably come up with things like "I should have put my life savings into Tesla before they delivered they're first car instead of $100. Then I should have held on regardless" or "I should have trusted that Steve Jobs returning to Apple after failing at Next was going to be a legendary turnaround by combining his failed NextStation into a new operating system. Then he'll come out with Apple Newton 2.0 and it will make them one of the most powerful companies in the world" If I had told you in say, 2004, to take all the high end CRTs being tossed out en masse, put them in a huge barn in the desert and then sell them for thousands each in 20 years, you'd call me nuts. These are all absurd things that happened. You can be a stupid fool and still hit it right sometimes.

KerrAvon 2y ago

[flagged]

haswell 2y ago
Many people have decided that "woke" means one very specific and unimpeachable thing to them. The term generally means far more than "I support black people having a right to exist". By that definition, even many conservatives would have to label themselves "woke". And this is at the heart of why the topic is controversial. I've sat in on a meetings where a central team of copywriters openly shamed engineers for disagreeing about the importance of renaming certain terms that had existed in the software for decades (whitelist/blacklist/master). The engineers in question were Indian, and couldn't have been any further removed from the original context. To be clear, I'm supportive of efforts to remove racially charged language. But I found the tactics and behaviors associated with that project ridiculous, and challenge the notion that "wokeness" is limited to your definition as written.
GenerocUsername 2y ago
Not at all what it means to anyone. And anyone who phrases it so reduced is either lying or oblivious
throw101010qwe 2y ago
Is this not the best example of what a lot of people think is the problem with wokeness? You are either “woke” or a racist. It’s almost comical.

thephyber 2y ago

> It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy. The reactionaries to “woke” ideas know that (2) is a small number of vocal people and yet they still wrap the anchor around the necks of both (1) and (2). Same strategy for “communism”, “socialism”, “groomers”, “Hamas apologists”, etc. It’s convenient to do this and say all Democrats (or all non-Republicans, or non-MAGA, etc) are painted with this broad brush. What your comment misses is that the “morality police” has always existed and currently exists along different poles than in the recent past. When I grew up, the social conservatives / incredibly religious were the ones trying to bully people into moral positions. Now, we still have those people (old groups like Family Research Council and new groups like Moms For Liberty) are doing the same thing, but aren’t getting flak from the “anti-wokeness” crowd. Bad faith actors all around.

notacoward 2y ago
Exactly. Anyone with any reading comprehension (and honesty) can tell that PG conflates being woke with acting woke early on for exactly this purpose. He also talks a lot about polarization as though it's entirely the "woke mob's" fault, about moralizing without mentioning evangelicals, about "enforcers" without mentioning MAGA paramilitaries, etc. It's all very disingenuous, even for him.
- Jensson 2y ago
  As a non American I don't see MAGA policing online or in tech companies, but I see a lot of woke. So while the things you talk about might be local problem to USA, the woke problem is something USA exports to the entire globe, so it seems like woke has much more power than maga and thus is a bigger problem.
  - moron4hire 2y ago
    There was a period of time on Musk's X where an internal filter would instaban anyone who wrote the letters "CIS" together.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left. We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first before there's any discussion worth a damn. As best I can tell it just means "any behavior coming from young people I don't like as a cable news viewer". Frankly, I'm at the point where if someone uses the word non-ironically I just write the speaker off as not seriously trying to communicate. Use your words! Describe specific behavior. People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.

cle 2y ago
TFA spends the first 7-8 paragraphs defining "woke", even a dedicated callout to a concise definition: > An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
- tomlockwood 2y ago
  That's a pretty subjective definition. We're back where we started.
  - cle 2y ago
    Helpfully he spends most of the article elaborating on what he means by "aggressively performative".
    - tomlockwood 2y ago
      So, not such a "concise definition".
      - dgfitz 2y ago
        [flagged]

likeabatterycar 2y ago

> Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc) You're making the assumption that most of that isn't performative nonsense that in reality doesn't help anything. Also known as slacktivism. It got to the point where I would see pronouns and flags and URLs to DEI policies (Click here to stop racism now! Really?) in people's email signatures that I would immediately assume they were insincere and phony. One person I knew had "LGBTQ Ally" in their professional signature. It's one step removed from writing I HAVE GAY FRIENDS and frankly I found it all really weird, fake, and reminiscent of 1940s Germany where people had to wear their pins to proclaim their allegiance. None of this has place in a professional setting.

skywhopper 2y ago
Why a weird, distorted take. People who put “LGBTQ Ally” in their signatures aren’t being phony. They have friends or family who are LGBTQ, and being visible is one way to support them. If it’s unprofessional to be an ally to LGBTQ friends and family then it is easy for hateful folks to claim it’s unprofessional to even be LGBTQ. Why does it offend you so much for someone to say “I support my gay friends”?
- likeabatterycar 2y ago
  It doesn't offend me. Picture going into a restaurant, and before the hostess seats you she says "I'd like to remind you that I love black people". That's out of place it is. It doesn't offend anyone, it's just an odd thing to say. You may not perceive it so if you're inside the bubble.
  - SauciestGNU 2y ago
    I think what you're not getting is that there are lots of places in rural America that are violently queerphobic. Queer people are targets of hate crimes. There's a mainstream religion and political party in America that's tiptoeing around rhetoric of eradication of queer people. So yeah, it can't be assumed businesses are queer friendly because lots of American Christians and conservatives would prefer queer people dead, or at least back in the closet.

taurath 2y ago

> The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture. The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part. That the squeaky wheels exist is used to justify wholesale dropping of the entire train of thought. PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone. Why is wokeness noteworthy and of-our-time, but racism is not? Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem. I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex. PC culture in the 90s when he mentions it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r, even if they do it in Blazing Saddles".

diggan 2y ago
> PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone That doesn't seem to be supported by the essay itself, since it has the following part: > But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do. It seems to say there are real issues, there are good things coming from "the woke" (whatever that means), we shouldn't discard all ideas just because one or two are bad. > Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem. Is that something pg actually said/wrote/hinted at in any of the essays, or are you just trying to bad-faith your way out of this discussion?
- petsfed 2y ago
  PG says >Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. What he does not explain is how big a problem of scale this is, but based on the way the rest of the essay goes, I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.

monkeycantype 2y ago

I see the problem you identify with people's behaviour and agree with the noisiness of people you refer to as group two - people who aren’t thinking deeply about what they are saying have a lot of freedom to shoot their mouth off. To be very clear, I see your comment as a sincere attempt to articulate and respond to a problem, most discussion of woke isn’t. While I do want to offer just one olive branch to people upset about woke, that yes - annoying people really are annoying, self-righteous twits truly are unbearable - but when I see someone frothing at the mouth because someone spoke about selfishness, hypocrisy or cruelty in way they didn’t like, I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them. There are idiots everywhere – even the smartest of us are part-time idiots, stupidity is just the background noise we have to talk over, rabbiting on about woke usually seems to part strategic tantrum to avoid real discussion and part real tantrum. I think I’m looking for a way to distil the ideas you’ve expressed into a response I can use when someone complains about woke : `that sounds quite annoying, but let’s discuss the idea not the idiot`

bluefirebrand 2y ago
> when I see someone frothing at the mouth because someone spoke about selfishness, hypocrisy or cruelty in way they didn’t like, I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them I think you may be right here, but I think it's also worth looking into just why this causes people to go into a mouth frothing rage. What I see is that a lot of "woke" starts with the assumption that the audience is bad, then tries to work backwards to prove it Of course discussions about selfishness, hypocrisy and cruelty are going to infuriate people when you start from the assumption that the people you are talking to are the ones who are selfish cruel hypocrites Next time you see someone make a comment about "straight cis white men" (or any demographic, but this one comes up a lot), replace it with "selfish cruel hypocrites", that probably would give you a good idea why that demographic reacts poorly to the message
- worthless-trash 2y ago
  Now imagine that is what you mostly hear "straight cis white men" are "selfish cruel hypocrites" over and over again.

skywhopper 2y ago

You’ve just proven the point of the author you’re responding to. The left isn’t talking about “wokeness”. But there are endless folks who are mad about someone being mean to them once who won’t shut up about how the “woke left” is destroying social cohesion. Just because some people are obnoxious doesn’t mean you’re under the thumb of a conspiracy to shut you up. Sheesh.

astrange 2y ago
> The left isn’t talking about “wokeness”. They are (or were throughout the 2010s), but they have a way of talking about it where they do it, but then claim it doesn't exist if anyone tries to give a name to it. So "wokeness isn't real" is a popular way to say "wokeness is real and I think it's good". Sometimes this is called Voldemorting. I personally think it's good but also think it's real.
- antifa 2y ago
  We just call it not bring racist. We also used phrases like stay woke long before 2010 and conservative whining.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    >We just call it not bring racist. No, you do not. I know this because when I advocate for actually not being racist, members of your group call me racist for it. I am the one who seeks policies that do not take a person's race into consideration when making decisions where race is clearly a priori irrelevant. That is what it means not to be racist. Your group is the one that insists that doing so is necessary to achieve a moral outcome.
- corimaith 2y ago
  It's called the Motte and Bailey fallacy
- Izkata 2y ago
  > They are (or were throughout the 2010s) More thoroughly: * The online left was using terms like "social justice warrior" to describe themselves in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Some of them even used alternate terms to try and fit their kind of activism closer, one I remember being "social justice paladin". * The first big round of backlash turned SJW into an insult in the mid 2010s, so they rebranded themselves as "woke". * As the backlash grew, "woke" was also turned into an insult. * DEI was the most recent rebranding, but since that describes actions instead of the people doing the actions there wasn't really a way to turn it directly into an insult, and "progressive" isn't zing-y enough to catch on, so "woke" stuck.

pksebben 2y ago

> there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left. This perception is a constant cause of concern for the actual left, and it's created by liberal politicians attempting to co-opt the movement, because it represents a huge part of their disenfranchised base. In today's reality: - left: socialist, progressive policies and in favor of fixing the system from the ground up. Election reform and the dissolution of failed establishments find support here (i.e. "too big to fail" was capital B "Bad"). An actual leftist today would say that Trump is awful, but also that Obama probably did more damage to us in the long term. We have not had a leftist in power in any surviving generation. - liberal: most of the democratic party. Biden's a lib, so was hillary. Liberal voters (somehow) believe that the current system can (and should) be saved by incrementalism. My take is that mostly, liberal politicians are pulling a fast one and just wanna keep that campaign money flowing, which is why you get a lot of talk about campaign finance reform and no action whatsoever. Liberals are terrified of ranked-choice, and economically look a whole lot like conservatives (we used to call this neoconservative or neoliberal but the distinction has become very indistinct). There's overlap in demographic between the leftist and the liberal - so liberal politicians have frequently used the "jangling keys method" and pushed stuff like wokeness real hard when they're trying to distract from the fact that they're taking money from JPMorgan and Shell Oil. Hillary was one of the worst - refusing point-blank to talk about banking as a real problem while accusing all her detractors of being "Bernie Bros" - which was really just a hamfisted smokescreen to try and turn the party against itself (this ended predictably). To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism. I'm of the opinion that many of the folks on the actual right and actual left agree on a lot - our system is broken, politicians and the elite are the problem, inflation has gotten out of control, the economy sucks, housing is too expensive, and it's not gonna get fixed by doing what we've always been doing. Problem is, we've been divided by wedge issues (some of which are truly relevant, like the climate) that make it impossible to form a coalition to accomplish actual reform. This was done on purpose. Liberals and Conservatives are just two marketing arms for the same business - business as usual. At the risk of being accused of being 'woke' - i'd ask that the two terms (left and liberal) don't get further confused. It muddies the conversation in ways that are destructive.

deleted 2y ago

rayiner 2y ago

> Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas No, it really is about specific ideas. I’ll discuss four: 1) Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition with common cause and shared interests. This goes back to the 1990s with the “rainbow coalition.” A lot of the way the left talks to minorities, and various things like affinity groups arise out of this idea that non-whites will bring about left-liberal changes to society. Also the antagonistic way many on the left talk about whites. But most non-whites don’t think of themselves that way, as we saw in the election. 2) Because of (1), many in the left believe in permissive approaches to policing and immigration because of the disproportionate effects of those policies on black and Hispanic people. But the public wants more policing and less immigration, including black and Hispanic people. 3) Many on the left believe in treating people of different races different to remedy past race-based harms. But the public doesn’t like this—even California voted overwhelmingly against repealing the state ban on affirmative action. 4) Related to the above, there’s a general belief on the left that, in any given issue, policy should cater to the “most marginalized.” When confronted with the burdens to the average person, their reaction is to either (a) deny such costs and accuse the other part of various “isms” and “phobias,” or (b) assert that the average person must bear the cost.

bborud 2y ago
> Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition What percentage of what group is “many on the left”? This does not sound plausible to me.
- Jensson 2y ago
  Enough to normalize "white men are evil" statements, otherwise such people would get reprimanded and shunned by the other people on the left for being racists and sexists but as is they are still welcomed with open arms.
  - bborud 2y ago
    “White men are evil” does not turn everyone else into a “cohesive political coalition”.

atoav 2y ago

Wokeness is like veganism: for every person talking about being vegan you will find 10 guys who complain about vegans, typically unprompted, while eating meat. I had a work collegue who would complain every meal about vegans, although there wasn't a single vegan at the table. Wokeness is the comparable, I teach at a liberal art university, there are probably few places more "woke" than this. Even here if I count there is probably a 10:1 ratio of "people complaining about woke" vs "people demanding a woke thing". The feeling that others are judging you from a high horse is a very strong force, even if they aren't judging you at all. And strong forces can be used to manipulate people into making choices against their interest .

charlieyu1 2y ago
Because 1 in 10 (for examples) vegans are calling meat eaters as cruel murderers. And that becomes the image of vegans because they are the noisy ones.
- I-M-S 2y ago
  There might be some survivorship bias at play here, as by definition you'll only get to know someone's a vegan because he's a noisy one. Those who eat in peace and leave others alone are not memorable - same goes for antivegans.
  - aziaziazi 2y ago
    Theees a comment on the exact same subject I found interesting yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682623
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > as by definition you'll only get to know someone's a vegan because he's a noisy one You never eat lunch with colleagues? Never eat dinner with family and their significant others? It is very hard to hide that you are a vegan.
- atoav 2y ago

bjourne 2y ago

> Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.". > 2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes Who are you talking about? It seems to me that you are using very general and broad language so avoid having to defend any specific points. Who exactly shamed you and for what? Give some examples. Who exactly are you paraphrasing with "that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive"? For the record, my experience of left-wing politics (two decades+) is very different from yours and I haven't noticed the phenomena you speak of. In fact, left-wing people are generally open to divergent ideas and will debate them ad nauseam. That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas. You are using quotation marks so you must be paraphrasing someone, right? If so can you give some examples of this phenomena?

baumy 2y ago
> In fact, left-wing people are generally open to divergent ideas and will debate them ad nauseam. That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas. Fascinating. I'm sure you're not lying and that this is true from your perspective. And yet my experience is the exact opposite. If the "divergent ideas" are e.g. "everyone who voted for Trump is an evil nazi" vs "everyone who voted for Trump is just stupid", I'll grant that those two ideas will be entertained and debated. But if the idea falls anywhere outside the accepted orthodoxy, for instance "maybe people who voted for Trump were well informed and had good reason to do so", that idea is not tolerated at all. Granted I live in Seattle, which is probably home to a disproportionate number of more extreme progressives.
- bjourne 2y ago
  > Fascinating. I'm sure you're not lying and that this is true from your perspective. I guess the difference is that I actually hang out with left-wing people and have been doing so for decades, whereas you base your opinions on rage bait news and internet interactions? You may think Trump voters are well-informed and you may think the moon is made of cheese. In both cases there are mountains of evidence to the contrary. I don't know what being wrong has to do with tolerance.

h0l0cube 2y ago

FTA: > There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up. But who will morality police the morality police? (Paul Graham of course!) Jokes aside, the difference between the 1) and 2) is the difference between progressivism and wokeism. But I think many here – as well as the article – miss the point by aiming squarely at 'noisy' humanities students, and not at the governments and corporations that leveraged their movements into this realm of the purely performative. That's not to say that there isn't scope for government and corporate interventions that actually make positive change to social justice outcomes. And there's also some merit to both online and meatspace activism causing many bad actors to consider their behavior (e.g., Harvey Weinstein, excessive force by law enforcement, wrongful incarcerations/executions).

raxxor 2y ago
[flagged]
- rbanffy 2y ago
  > like further discrimination People who perceive themselves as losing rights will always be angry at losing their privileges. Growing up white in Brazil was great for the most part: police never stopped me, I got away of many speeding tickets just because I looked like a “good kid”, and so on. My non-white friends never had it that easy. One was charged with drug trafficking because the combined amount of pot he and his white friend were carrying went over the limit a single one could be carrying before being considered a dealer. Of course the police assumed it was the less Caucasian (in reality, it was the other guy who went to buy the pot from his dealer). Even though the white friend stated half the pot was his, the case went to trial.
  - raxxor 2y ago
    I don't think you can reframe that in a way if you introduce policies that treat people differently. And I don't believe people feel they lose rights as long as they are treated equally. As I said, rulebook of toxic middle management. Treat people differently and they fight among themselves and you don't have them on their back. Simple workplace dynamic, even if not intuitive.

nouripenny 2y ago

I agree that wokeness is a big problem on the serious left. It was analyzed in high-profile leftist's Norman Finkelstein's "I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom". Many point it's from the professional/managerial/bureaucratic class, which never was into free speech to begin with. Take pg's mention of the Soviet Union. That's actually a country where that class overthrew the capitalists to become the ruling class. (They were called "The New Class" there. In countries like the US, they're above workers but subordinate to capitalists.) And all this is a useful distraction: criticizing wokies distracts from the structure of power that leads to homelessness and working your one (1) life away under some boss. Which is ridiculous in the 21st century.

nickdothutton 2y ago

Google ngrams says Woke began climbing mid 90s, steep increase since 2005 [1]. [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=woke&year_start=1980&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=woke&year_star...