I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people.
As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
and then on the other side it feels like the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that.
At least that’s what I’ve noticed online over the past few (bonkers) years
“Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
The trouble with this is that a groups idea of the “enemy” typically outlasts and often surpasses the actual enemy that idea is based off of. People on the right will write endless articles and videos about wokeness not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group.
> Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.
The trouble is that many people have decided that if you discuss "wokeness" and especially if you have a problem with some element of it, that means you're no longer on "the left".
Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.".
When a lot of this was heating up during the pandemic, I encountered two very different kinds of people.
1. Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc)
2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes
It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy.
> not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group
The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture. I think acknowledging the existence of bad faith actors and "morality police" would do more for advancing the underlying ideas often labeled "woke" than trying to focus on the fakeness of the problem.
Maybe that group is made up of squeaky wheels, but their existence is used to justify the "anti-woke" sentiment that many people push.
For me, this boils down to a tactics issue where people are behaving badly and distracting from real issues - often issues those same people claim to care about.
Sounds exhausting to live with a perceived boogeyman of problems versus seeking real problems.
Personally, I am surprised. This is a pretty unique article from a usually articulate thinker that leaves out significant details like: (1) the term originated by folks who recognize there can be structural inequality embedded in policy which, for some inequalities, has been described as structural racism since the 1970s; (2) the term got hijacked by political propaganda machines to circumspectly throw out working policies and other elements of progressive political points in the retrenchment regarding the term.
There really isn't any more detail to be had unless to sanewash the political propaganda's claims.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
It was not just a small group of people. Almost all progressive Democratic politicians started working that word into all their speeches to virtue signal and most centrists also fell in line too. CEOs started saying it in company meetings and we were subjected to HR trainings that noted we should say LatinX to be inclusive of trans people, among many other performative rules.
I find it quite interesting that pg's article is so extensively uncurious and disdainful. He openly sneers at the topic he intends to explain, and tirelessly lays into a straw man (the FoxNews definition of woke) rather than the strongest interpretation (what you're doing here). Several commenters here have asked why his article has been flagged, and I must say that if it was posted as a comment, it should certainly be flagged because of its flagrant violations of the site guidelines.
I certainly wouldn't be inclined to call him a prig, but he's certainly set himself up for exactly that denunciation with his specific framing of the conversation.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
You speak about it in the past tense but it's still very much a real thing. Just last week I was listening to an Ed Zitron podcast and one of the (many, many) ads was for a podcast that featured "latinX voices".
I wish there was a book or website with such patterns and examples written down for all.
It takes a certain linguistic skill to convey the sleight of hand in display in such maneuvers. But once you're grasped it, you can easily spot it and almost predict what the next set of actions is going to be.
As an aside this applies to a wide variety of places like corporate settings, negotiations, sales meetings, city council meetings to mention a few so its generally useful to know.
It's the ultimate irony that this post is doing the exact same thing it is accusing another group of, with the only distinction being that there is no "term" attached to it.
I suppose the US politics have gone so bonkers that the left actually uses the term "conservative right" pejoratively in the same way that the right uses "woke" to describe the left.
In which case this scenario is so childishly insane that the only sane choice is to reject it all outright and focus inward.
The left doesn’t talk about “wokeness” but it certainly does talk about the individual policies that fall under that rubric. The right uses the label “woke” for the same reason the left uses the term “capitalism.” There’s a bunch of ideas and policies that stem from similar ideological premises and it’s perfectly fine to group them together under labels.
For example, Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC. There’s also race conscious hiring and promotion decisions. They are all ideologically related and add up to something quite significant.
It can be a boogeyman but it also a generic term for a bunch of different phenomena that are connected through the way they are brought up, which is mostly very paternalistic.
In some cases people tried to change or police language, mostly around the topic of gender, but it isn't restricted to that. In some countries that use "gendered" languages there were aspirations to change language to be more inclusive, with the indirect accusation that common language cannot be so. That reaches from Latinx to trying to remove any form of gendered language, a culmination of sexual and grammatical gender.
Many just saw this as a vanity project, but even language changes in some official capacity persists. Again, these isn't agreed upon language, it was paternalistically described for people to be better, allegedly.
Of course the worst aspects get the spotlight, but that isn't unusual in todays exchanges on social media.
There is also another factor of "woke" and that is where it behaves pretty similar to the "far right". These are both nebulous terms for that matter, but both promote policies that a summarized as "identity politics". Another volatile term, but I believe there is a strong connection here.
Still, just as people point to the woke excesses as being representative, the same is happening with criticism towards some of its goals and tenets.
Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend.
"Troll" is another one. It used to mean a person who posted a contentious comment that they knew would invoke a flame war so that they could sit back and wait to see who "bit." It came from fishing. These days it can just mean someone who is rude on the Internet.
You're not wrong, the "opposition" did take the word and run with it for their own use. No dispute there.
But let's not pretend that this is a conservative vs progressive thing. On the partisan isle I'm "neither." But when someone uses the word "woke", in conversation, I usually know exactly what they're getting at. And I hear it from left-leaning friends and right-leaning alike.
It's a short-cut umbrella term to mean an amalgamation of a) moral busybodies b) purity spirals c) cancel culture d) some bizarre racist philosophy that markets itself as anti-racist (critical race theory) and e) an extreme version of political correctness.
I'm not arguing whether or not left-wingers are (or aren't) using it themselves in serious conversation. Only that, colloquially, I've only encountered confusion about what it means in Internet forum discussions with like-minded nerds, such as this one. The average person I talk to has little difficulty.
And maybe that definition was shaped, wholly or in part, by the conservatives making it out to be a boogeyman. Even if so, and even if it was an unfair hijack and it's appropriate to hate on them for doing so, it doesn't change how people interpret the word in casual conversation today.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman
Or, consider that the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International published a review of the sitcom Abbott Elementary, which includes the line "In fact, in its treatment of Jacob’s wokeness, Abbott Elementary refreshingly mocks the suffocating trend of racialism in American culture" – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/01/abbo-m01.html
Similarly, read their review of John McWhorter's Woke Racism – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/14/ihjm-j14.html – in which they largely express agreement with his criticisms of the progressive "woke" ideology, but simultaneously condemn him for making those criticisms from a pro-capitalist instead of anti-capitalist perspective
"Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum."
Yes this is very common on the left too. Really common actually.
From what I've observed, "woke" is just the latest pejorative used by the American political right. Before woke, there was "PC", "SJW", and I'm sure others that were before my time. Before too long, woke will dry up and get replaced with the next term that's broadly used in the same way.
The biggest difference that I've noticed with "woke" is that it seems to have made its way outside of online culture and into the real world, so it's possible that it will have more staying power.
I am from Europe and from my point of view there ís really a wokeness problem in the US. The US is on average far more right wing mostly in the capitalistic sense than Europe. But it's difficult to talk to people from the US for me because anything might and will offend them at the blink of an eye. These things like trigger warnings and things. I'm always afraid I could be cancelled at any moment when talking to somebody from the US.
I don't think it's really a left-right wing thing because Europe is in general 90% left wing from a US standpoint, and we don't have it.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
As someone who most folks would indentify as “liberal”, I use this term to describe a very small but vocal group of so-called progressives who are a problem for the liberal cause writ large.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
This is a prime example. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been indignantly corrected by so-called progressives when speaking about “Latine” — note that this term is what many/most Spanish speakers (at least ones who aren’t eyeballs deep in “woke” circles) are more likely to use when they don’t want to use “Latino”.
Latinx is one of those white liberal made-up things (of many), and the language police enforcement is off-putting and shows an incredible lack boundaries.
“Woke” ideals resonate well with a narrow group of “progressives”/liberals, but the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public, including but definitely not limited to conservative extremists.
If you want to see some realpolitik on this issue, note how AOC learned (via Pelosi) to get in line with votes and messaging when it mattered even while endorsing progressive/liberal/woke ideologies.
>a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left.
The movements exist and they demonstrably stem from a common ideology
Naming a political tendency is not making a "boogeyman" out of it.
>The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
More generally, the point is that there is something to "fight against", which is causing real harm, including to people I know personally.
For example, it's fundamentally behind the idea that Tim Peters somehow "used potentially offensive language or slurs" by literally writing "XXXX" to censor a word and then providing context to enable people to figure out what word he had in mind, because it was relevant to the conversation. (I know that this was ideological because they do this for the word "slut", but not e.g. for "shit" or "fuck".)
Or the idea that he "made light of sensitive topics like workplace sexual harassment" by... claiming that workers sometimes get "training" because a higher-up did something bad. (Or the idea that "making light of a sensitive topic" is even bad in the first place.)
Or the entire bit about "reverse racism and reverse sexism" as explained at https://tim-one.github.io/psf/silly . (Incidentally, Tim, if you're reading: you cede too much ground here. "Racism" isn't a term that activists get to define. Discrimination is discrimination, and it's morally wrong in and of itself; injustice in the surrounding social conditions simply doesn't bear on that.)
It's also responsible for the fact that prominent members of the Python community are still making hay about the supposed mistreatment of Adria Richards - who, as a reminder, eavesdropped on a conversation in order to take offense to it and then went directly to social media to complain because a couple of other people were being unprofessional (although mutually completely comfortable with their conversation).
And it's behind the entire fracas around the removal of the endorsement of Strunk and White as an English style guide from PEP 8, as a supposed "relic of white supremacy". (There are public mailing list archives. I have kept many bookmarks and have quite a bit of detailed critique that wouldn't fit in the margins here. But here's just one example of the standard playbook: https://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev@python.org/msg108879... )
Outside of Python it's also fundamentally behind the plain misreading of James Damore's inoffensive and entirely reasonable takes, and his subsequent tarring and feathering. To cite just one example that sticks in my head.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses
Yes, it is an ingenious sort of strawman.
In its prior usage, to be "woke" meant to be informed, alert, and to resist being bullied or easily duped into relinquishing one's rights to object, to defend oneself, and to dissent.
In this sense -- I note with some irony -- Jordan Peterson was "woke" when he would not allow his students to coerce him into using terms of address that he rejected.
Now the usage on the "Right" in US politics in particular uses "woke" to mean hypocritical or superficial assertions, positions, and policies that serve a dubious objective or prove to have no foundation in facts -- especially if these are the opponents' views.
Flinging these accusations of hypocrisy and delusional policy-making has become more important than defending democracy itself. Herein lies the masterstroke of the messaging. Using the term "woke" to attack supposedly "woke" opponents has become a memetic (viral) behaviour that has completely devoured political and public discourse.
The behaviors labeled as wokeness have been essentially dominant on the left for a long time though. “End whiteness” is a good example of woke rhetoric and that term was shouted for years
It's not a boogeyman and there are many liberals who have been raising the alarm for years about the dangerously illiberal and authoritarian nature of this new religion.
Not just PG, also Sam Harris, Bill Maher, JK Rowling, Richard Dawkins, and millions of lesser known liberals. Most of whom were and are still too afraid to say anything.
The left put everything under the lens of oppressor vs oppressed. That's the idea that disgusts lots of moderates. The idea came from Leninism, but nonetheless is considered woke as fuck. So, no it's not necessarily a boogeyman, unless you throw out anything you don't like from the bucket of woke (and vice versa).
Oh, CRT is also woke as fuck, unless you believe it's the right framework.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
I agree that the number of proponents of something like "LatinX", or "biological males playing women's sports" are far, far outnumbered by the people who aren't supporters of those things. But the issue is that the people who are supporters tend to be extremely vocal and generally in positions of power or better able to influence those who are, whether thats in corporate or academic administration settings. As such the small number of "woke" individuals are having outsized effects on society and culture, and the backlash is in response to the magnitude of that influence, rather than the number of people pushing for it.
You're right. It's really lazy to use the term at this point as there isn't a shared meaning assigned to it. It's mostly used as a pejorative by the right at this point, but it's original meaning was very different and indicated a positive attribute. Whenever I'm in a conversation with someone who uses the word, I stop them and ask them to define what they're talking about. Usually they end up with something vague that boils down to "stuff I don't like".
I liked PG's attempts to define the perjorative form of "wokeness". I was disappointed that the rest of the essay didn't serve the discourse much.
What I was really hoping for was focused analysis on how to make social media more useful to the earnest helpers instead of the "loud prigs". That would have made for an interesting discussion here.
As a non-american, reading the definition of woke I dont know what to think
If woke means progressive and politically conscious then the opposite is what, uninformed,thoughtless.
So people say they rather be ignorant than conscious?
Sometimes I think people are not actually fully conscious and tend to behave like primitive animals and they are hating everything because reverting to hate is a primitive animalistic trait that requires little thinking or consciousness.
Or its a racist thing because woke has roots in black culture?
Originally, people meant that you were inclusive and caring about all people. Except, you know, those hateful people on the right. Because fuck them. (I'm not even kidding. This is how they really felt, somehow.)
But then "the right" got ahold of the term and used it to mean the people above who went above and beyond and were actually being harmful instead of helpful, in the name of "being woke".
Personally, I think the pejorative term is a lot more accurate, especially for most people who consider themselves "woke". They drink their own koolaid and believe what they're doing is helpful, and can't see the divide that they are causing.
Of course, there are a ton of trolls (who are also probably on "the right") that use it to cause the divide as well.
So in the end, it ends up just being a way for jerks on both sides to rile each other up, instead of actually helping anyone.
> i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
Ok, I'll bite. What is having empathy for the homeless? Is allowing unconstrained immigration to increase competition for entry-level positions empathy? What about restrictions on construction that make housing completely unaffordable? Is that empathy? Is leaving the drug-addicted portion of the homeless out on the street to battle their addictions on their own empathy[1]?
Saying nice words (not having disdain) is not the same thing as helping someone.
While "Empathy for the homeless" can situationally mean talking nicely about them, it also means stopping, blocking, and undoing directly terrible actions against the homeless.
Bulldozing peoples' stuff is in fact pretty bad.
Having laws against giving money to people is in fact pretty bad.
Putting hostile architecture everywhere is in fact pretty bad.
People make decisions, over and over again, to not just hurt homeless people, but also hurt the people trying to help homeless people.
Stopping people from doing that is called "empathy for the homeless". It's called that because saying and feeling bad things about people is part of the process of hurting them. It's how people agree who is and isn't okay to hurt. By stopping group efforts to make things worse, you only have to worry about random individuals trying to make things worse for other random individuals. Which is unstoppable but untargeted.
> Ok, I'll bite. What is having empathy for the homeless?
Let's start by changing how we think about housing and shelter from an investment to basic rights.
Or maybe stop criminalizing being poor.
> Is allowing unconstrained immigration to increase competition for entry-level positions empathy?
That's not a thing.
>What about restrictions on construction that make housing completely unaffordable?
Which ones? Some like quality and safety standards add cost short term but save long term.
However SFH rules hurt density, and cause grater strain on infrastructure and resources, while also driving up costs.
> Is leaving the drug-addicted portion of the homeless out on the street to battle their addictions on their own empathy[1]?
Medical safe injection sites could be part of the solution. But this requires thinking beyond "drugs are bad mkay"
Investing in diversion and rehab is another good use of resources.
> Saying nice words (not having disdain) is not the same thing as helping someone.
But if you can't even say nice words, your brain is so broken that you look at the unhoused with fear or contempt, how will you ever support investment in those same people?
The irony of all of this is that if you boil down the concept of 'wokeness' to simply looking past the status quo, then a lot of the things that are currently labelled 'woke' are in fact anything but. It transcends the political spectrum and simply becomes a cudgel for shit you don't like but can't explain why.
Gay marriage? It's legal, therefore status quo. Making gay marriage illegal again? Not status quo, therefore woke.
Abortion? If it's legal and you want to make it illegal, that's also changing the status quo. Woke.
Immigration? Status quo is to hire employees who are citizens or resident. Laying them off in favour of H1B workers? Woke AF.
Roe v Wade and the Chevron Doctrine? Those were status quo for decades! How woke of the Supreme Court to reverse those decisions after so many years.
Of course in each of these cases the policy is actually regressive as it reverts society back to the point before the original policies were implemented, and to that extent the argument falls apart: none of that actually seems 'woke'. Except...the people who agree with all of the above would see it as progressive towards their own aims, so it pretty much is 'woke' for them, especially as they believe their own morals to be superior (and traditionally backed by religion).
>that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
If you're going to be reductive with someone's argument, at least use the entire argument.
If we do, IDK how you can say woke is just oppositional positions when that wasn't the idea OP proposed.
"Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep. Not really a statement about your own behavior so much as an acknowledgement of what other people are doing to you—it just meant you're well-informed.
Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."
Generally the reaction is not to minorities(non-white, is what I am assuming you mean) but to people from outside of a group trying to tell a group what words to use i.e. LatinX.
An aside: If someone who is white is talking to the Spanish speaking community, would they be considered a minority? If so, then the parent premise would hold true.
> "Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep.
This is distorted history. "Woke" is just the word in a bunch of black dialects for "awake." We just say "are you woke?" instead of "are you awake?"
What happened is at some point some white woman somewhere had a black person explaining their political beliefs to her. It was likely a black person who was working for her (doing her nails, washing her clothes, or serving her food) who she had a faux friendship with and considered a spiritual guru and a connection to the real world and real suffering, in that way white people do (magical negro.) She carried these pearls of wisdom to her white friends, or to her students at the university, or to the nonprofit that she worked at, and it entered into the white lexicon as a magic word.
If a white hippie, in the middle of a righteous rant, said "you've got to stay awake, man..." as many have, it wouldn't have been so exotic and interesting to tell their white friends. Or as useful to get yourself a job as a consultant.
At that point, it became a thing that white people would use to abuse other white people as racists. The sin wasn't calling white people racists, it's that a certain self-selected white elect declared themselves to be not racist, or even anti-racist, in order to attack other white people. And they decided this gave them the right to control how other white people speak. And a government who hates the way people can talk to each other on the internet about what the government is lying about supported them whole-heartedly. Woke policing was an excellent way to use legal means to keep people asleep.
And black people got blamed, as always. Because America is racist. Black people didn't benefit an iota from any of this. Approximately 0.0% of DEI managers are black men. Black people got poorer during the entire period. Now the anti-woke are going to unleash their revenge on black people, and the ex-woke are going to resent black people for not recognizing their sainthood.
> Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."
Meanwhile, the first step of wokeness was to erase black people altogether and replace them with "minorities" and "people of color," as if the only thing important to note about black people is their lack of whiteness. Or, since sexual minorities are included in "minorities", black people now have no problems that can be distinguished from the desires of white upper-middle class transwomen. Wokeness erased slavery and Jim Crow, and all that money that white people inherit, just as much as anti-wokeness did. Now the real crime was that white people weren't feeling the right things, and weren't saying the right things. Complete Caucasian auto-fixation.
The only thing racial about black people's problems is that white people used race as the criterion to enslave. Slavery and Jim Crow were the point, and all of the freebies handed from government to people's white ancestors that weren't given to slaves and ex-slaves, and all of the labor and torture visited on slaves and ex-slaves turned into profit that went into the pockets of white people and was taxed into government coffers. There were blond-haired blue-eyed slaves; the "race" stuff is a white invention, not something they get to act like is an imposition from their ex-property. And that experience is not something that everybody non-white or non-straight gets to steal.
One thing I wanted to point out: I’ve seen a lot of people on HN and elsewhere allege that moderates or the “right” (in quotes because it is overused as a pejorative label) cannot define what “woke” is. But I disagree, and think most people who complain against this term can easily point to what ideas it represents, and what it means to them. Even if that is not very precise, it is real and meaningful. Enough so that they can find common ground with other people who use the word, even if they aren’t exact matches. The accusation that people can’t define it is itself a tactic meant to undermine the credibility of complaints against it. But is it really any less imprecise than people using broad labels of other kinds (things like liberal or conservative)?
I'd say it's hard to give a clear-cut, very specific definition of the word. It's also really hard to believe that people can't figure out the meaning given context and such.
It is by no means whatsoever a less defined term than "fascist" and the semantic problem seems missing there.
I agree. Wokeness has a very precise meaning: World is divided between oppressors and oppressed. Oppressors are white heterosexual men (white supremacy / heteropatriarchy) everyone else subjugated to them. Institutions, laws are created to perpetuate that power and must be dismantled / subverted via revolution.
Most understand it even if they can’t articulate a definition. Easy to point out when a movie or corporate initiative, behavior is woke.
I've long believed that racism, sexism, homophobia are basically forms of bullying. All are antisocial behavior and quite bad for society. I endured near constant bullying for a lot of my early life, as well as sporadic racism.
When I hear the word woke, I think about people who are against this kind of behavior whether its conducted by an individual, a company, a society, or a government. But all the time I wish that people would just call it what is is: bullying.
It would be much more effective than calling people racist or homophobic or sexist.
> the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that
CPG Grey’s co-dependent memes video comes to mind [1].
Each group defines wokeness (and defines how other groups define it) to maximise outrage. To the extent there is a mind virus it’s in using the term at all. (Which is where I appreciate Graham bringing the term prig into the discussion.)
Sadly, this is where we are in politics. Pick any term that you like to replace the concept and a rival campaign to redefine it will begin. Your vocabulary is just another battleground.
> not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead
[4] The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
Treating people with respect can sometimes mean learning enough about them to understand a little about what life is like in their shoes. There are a lot of different kinds of people wearing a lot of shoes. Learning about them is a lifelong process. It’s not about learning “a long list of rules” but more “learning about a lot of kinds of people and their experiences.”
I see it as a clash between people who are instinctually inclined towards philosophical nominalism (woke) and people who are instinctually inclined towards realism (not-woke). Dr. Nathan A. Jacobs lays out the details and the arguments for this way of defining our current culture war here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVmPIMg4St4
There are many things on which I don’t agree with pg. But I feel he is accurate with describing wokeness as the term is commonly used currently. He doesn’t go into the history of the word in this essay.
You certainly don't use it to mean "those crazy people who are pro interacial marriage" but some do. The woke people supporting trans rights almost certainly don't support macho man randy savage chucking on a dress and that same day competing in the olympics but the characture that supports it is part of the woke mob.
People scoff and think of course I know what woke means, because the people the people they talk to/media they consume have the word at roughly the same level of meaning, not internalising the next more or less extreme group that isn't in their social circle include more or less in the meaning.
These days the word woke might as well serve the same purpose as "If by scotsman..." in that no one will disagree with you unless you get into specifics.
Insightful comment. While some of wokeness involves performative aspects like PG mentioned, it also seems to involve a genuine increase in awareness about injustice, and a desire to do something about it- which is much needed. I’m concerned that this desire to “end wokeness” will throw the baby out with the bathwater, and end us in a situation where it becomes taboo to point out or do anything about injustice.
It’s insane that PG seems to think racism isn’t a very big problem- hard to imagine he is living on the same planet I am.
Anyone using the term woke in 2025 is using the term in bad faith and to create the bogeyman you describe.
It's actually hard to find the time when anyone on the left actually used it. Seems like it was a little under a year and the term was dropped to be more specific actions.
I think it's a farce to suggest that no one out there could be accurately described by it (identity politics being more important than class, language policing, etc)
Reading and understanding the article beyond the title, it's just a term that used to be called something else before, and will be called something else in the future. I think you're focusing too much on the actual word, rather than the "movement", which is what pg's article is really about.
Part of the problem here is that while there's a set of social and political attitudes that really do exist, a lot of the people who practice them are very reticent to label themselves, preferring to claim either that they occupy the whole space of compassionate legitimate political practice, or that they have nothing in common with other groups who are (from an outside eye) very similar.
I like Freddie deBoer's 2023 definition, which at least is framed from a left-wing point-of-view rather than the aggressive and weaponised right-wing framing:
The VP famously used it half a dozen times in this short clip. [1] It was apparently well-known enough of a term that she didn't define it.
IIRC usage didn't really drop off until 2020 or after. That was when conservatives started using the term in a negative way and progressives abandoned it.
Kamala Harris said everyone should be more woke. Racial inequities were one of the pillars of the Biden Campaign and administration. So yes the Left was still using Woke quite a bit, until Right coopted to make it clear its actually negative
My original understanding of "woke" was similar to what in the 60s they might have called being "turned on". Being awake and seeing the actual reality of things for what they are.
Even before the term "woke" was widespread, I noticed all my conservative friends would prefer to find the most ridiculous liberal woke example and mock it.
Rather than actually discuss policy or anything concrete, because they have nothing to offer.
Both characterizations actually mean the same thing and you said it in your description of the person on the left. Because, thinking that a right-wing solution to homelessness 'lacks empathy' and only you have empathy for the homeless is exactly the sort of self-righteousness the right correctly criticizes.
>As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
I voted for Kamala, and I don't think this is accurate.
I support having empathy for homeless people. I would love to see a movement focused on actually helping homeless people, by volunteering at soup kitchens and so on.
Wokeness does not seem to be that movement. Insofar as wokeness concerns itself with homeless people, (a) it wants you to refer to them as 'unhoused' instead of homeless, (b) it wants to make sure you don't talk about it when they e.g. sexually assault you: https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1845244113249063227
I think this is a fair assumption to make if you haven't been in some of the places where this has been most contentious -- in particular, I think left-wing activist circles, or segments of industry where the workplace has switched from being "apolitical" -- I know that term is contested, but I don't have a better one to use -- to shifting to an overtly social-justice-oriented space.
I've spent the last decade in these environments. My own upbringing and general disposition is left-wing, but the last few years have been stressful and much less productive.
Somebody downthread mentioned how "latinx" was just a small minority of advocates, but we had painful discussions about it, including objections from latino staff, and ended up using it.
Our (obligatory) sexual harassment training switched from a standard legal footing to one that was preceded by a long explanation of the oppressive nature of Europeans.
Group chats moved towards political conversations, and even minor questioning of the (quite sudden) norm shift led to ostracization, with two people, not including me, ultimately leaving the company because they felt uncomfortable with the social pressure.
One senior executive was pushed out because they made a joke about having pronouns in video profiles. We pursued a diverse hiring policy that ended up with patently unsuitable, but diverse, employees including an alcoholic, and someone who had a mental health breakdown in a meeting. Staff would increasingly reach for untouchably political accusations when maneuvering against other individuals at the workplace, accusing them of racism, intolerance, and harassment when there was little evidence that this was going on (none of this was from white males, but between other less privileged groups).
I move in other circles too, academic and professional, and there have been similar dynamics. Not only do I know people who have been "cancelled" (ie lost jobs or opportunities because of public statements that, while politically mainstream, went against local norms), but I also know people who did the cancelling, get cancelled in turn. None of this was about anything demonstrably and objectively offensive; sometimes it was about defending arguably offensive behaviour; sometimes it was just an uncharitable reading of an innocuous comment, taken out of context.
What I would say is that there has been a shifting and narrowing of politically acceptable statements, and a pressure to conform with the consensus in certain kinds of tech work and other high-status societal environments, which I think would make people of Paul Graham's age uncomfortable; he would definitely have seen the "worst" of it. I think part of its spread has been due to it looking, without closer examination, like what you have described. But as someone who was raised by socialists who got there largely by their empathy for others, the degree of cruelty and arbitrary punishment through social sanction has been unusually vicious and hard to bear.
I still feel I can't talk about this except with a few very close friends. This is a throwaway account.
Since 2008, people realized that many systems are entirely broken. This created a large wave of wealth inequality awareness. This is common on both sides of the political spectrum.
At the same time, the left realized that their techniques of debate fail miserably against the monolith of the right, especially after seeing that radicals were rewarded (tea party movement.. all the way to MAGA)
So they are also imitating this pattern.
I know so, because if I dig back enough, I’ll find the comments that predicted this.
The left is radicalizing to match the political capability of republicans.
In the late 90s and 2000s there was a big thing in hiphop music about “conscious rap”. At first, rappers differentiated themselves from the mainstream by emphasising that they were “conscious” in their lyrics of the harm done by perpetuating stereotypes or promoting dysfunctional lifestyles or failing to challenge systematic oppression. Then it became passé and rappers like Taleb Kweli lamented that they were stuck with this label, which had become a term of derision. Whole thing was like an early run of “woke”.
There is nothing “bad faith” about appropriating an evocative term to label ideologically connected ideas. It’s like how the left uses the term “capitalism.”
In the last few years, we have seen corporations and universities push for race-conscious hiring and promotion decisions, while schools are putting kids in racially segregated affinity groups. These are obviously ideologically related efforts. It’s perfectly fine for opponents of these efforts to group them together under the label of “woke.”
The only people who could plausibly define 'woke' as 'people who investigate their own values and have empathy' are people who consider themselves woke and are sufficiently under pg's 'prig' definition to believe that is exclusive to them, and sociopaths. What emotionally normal person would say membership of another group is defined by 'basic human decency' and 'thinking about whether their objectives are any good'?
Why and how is labelling unlikable behaviour as woke bad faith. As I understand the right using the term, they use it consistently to refer to a very specific type of behaviour they see as bad (one core aspect is prioritising signalling being virtuous over actually improving the world).
Is your complaint that this usage unfairly co-opts the original left usage of the word?
Imagine I wrote an essay on Christianity and based it entirely on the behavior of evangelicals in the South who attend megachurchies (a very vocal minority). Surely you'd expect other Christians (all around the world) who equally claim true usage to object.
You give them far too much credit. But more importantly, ask yourself who’s really the morality police at this point? The ones screaming “woke” all the time, vowing to strip “woke” people out of positions of power, seem pretty dangerous to me.
Paul makes clear what definition he is using, so let’s discuss that instead of an unbearably boring discussion about which definition of “woke” is the real one.
Oh I'm sorry, are we now saying "woke" covers economic class issues like homelessness and poor people, instead of just social issues which both sides have used to suck all the air out of political discussion?
Now that the neoliberals are embarrassed enough to throw out "woke", are we slipping in economic concerns too?
PSA: YOU CAN STILL BE A SELF-RIGHTEOUSLY MORALISTIC PRICK, SO LONG AS IT'S BASED ON ACTUAL TANGIBLE ECONOMIC ISSUES THAT ARE SYSTEMIC AND ACTIONABLE
A friend and I love to send each other examples of ridiculous things being labeled "woke". Lately we are spoiled for choice. British tabloid newspapers are an especially good source.
In his post, pg says "Political correctness seemed to burn out in the second half of the 1990s. One reason, perhaps the main reason, was that it literally became a joke. It offered rich material for comedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action upon it."
What I remember the most from that time period was comedians making jokes about exactly this effect: At some point people started labeling everything they didn't like as "political correctness", and the phrase lost all meaning.
(I don't have particularly strong feelings about pg's essay tbh. I've personally managed to completely ignore political correctness and wokeness without anything bad happening).
How is this anything other than self-flattery? It's also a huge moral hazard. Once one defines themselves as "morally superior" to a group of people it becomes easy to justify truly immoral behavior against them.
1. That truth is socially constructed thus when we see bad things, it means society created these bad things.
2. In order to determine what parts of society to cut-out to make society better, so bad things stop happening, use a critical theory to determine who should be removed from society so it can be more equitable (usually the stand in for good.
Woke normally holds that goodness is when results are equal, and if they are not equal, they have license to adjust them to equal (This is the core argument of Marxism, though woke could be said to be identity or social Marxism rather then just the economic Marxism presented, though in practice class identity was present from the start as well and expanded in practice under Mao).
There is no such thing as "society", just relationships between individual people. To get a better "society", you need people to act better. However, all of recorded history suggests that people are pretty universally willing to use other people as tools to benefit themselves. (Obviously not everyone does this all the time or to the same amount.) History also makes it clear that passing laws will not work: despite laws against things that are evenly timelessly non-virtuous, like stealing and murder, do not prevent murder and theft. In fact in Judeo-Christian thinking, to do this requires people receiving a "new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone" from God. (I saw "Judeo-" because the passages is from Ezekiel, which is common to both. I do not know if rabbinical thinking agrees, however.) Even if it does not require a divine gift, certainly the problem has proven intractable up to the present time.
"determine who should be removed from society" is just a scary thought. Who gets to determine that? How can we be sure they are right? What prevents them from using this as a tool to eliminate people that are competitors or whom they simply dislike? In fact, this has a name: "to purge". The Soviet Union under Stalin and the Chinese Cultural Revolution were scary times.
Points one and two are both functionalism, not constructivism. This is Sociology 101. The idea that all parts of society have a function, even the bad parts is not constructionist, it's structualist.
Constructivism would be that we created the idea that they are legitimate social objects (ie: they exist) and two that they have an essential moral characteristic (eg: they're bad).
Marx was a conflict theorist whose main point was that economic structures and social structures are inexorably linked. The point of Capital Vol 1 was that through a series of implications, the difference between exchange value and use value ultimately results in conflict between owners and workers.
This is where wokeism falls apart as an ideology: It is outcome driven instead of opportunity driven. Equality becomes the goal regardless of motivation, ambition or merit. Why would the best, or more broadly anyone better than average, participate in such a society? What's their incentive?
When you define woke this way, you ultimately admit that wokeism is just a veneer of identity politics layered over good old-fashioned communism. The problem with communism is that it sounds great, but doesn't work. How many times must it fail before people realize that?
There is no generally accepted definition of woke, and that is largely by design to mislead others through well known psychological blindspots (Cialdini), towards inducing others to join collectivism while also inspiring disunity and hate, albeit indirectly.
The movement often couches its perspectives in power dynamics which follows elements common to Maoism and Communism, along with many other similar marxist movements. It also has elements from critical pedagogy (the critical turn), which has origins in Marxist movements.
The mind virus part of it is the same with any belief system that lends itself towards irrational delusion, inducing bitter resentment in individuals and falsely criticizing without any rational framework or basis, often ignoring objective reality for a false narrative.
Woke-ism is a cult of the semi-lucid insane brainwashed children they manage to mislead, who desperately try to poorly grapple with reality, miserably, and bitterly, while dragging everyone else down.
Its rather sad for the individuals who become both victim and perpetrator.
There is no cure for insanity, nor the blindness induced.
If you want a rational discussion on this subject matter, I'd suggest checking over James Lindsay's work outing these type of movements. Your description is fairly misinformed.
What Paul Graham misses is the "aggressively performative moralism" that appeared in response to wokeism. For those hungry for attention, it was a very useful enemy. In many ways, the narrative of what it even meant to be "woke" was quickly hijacked and controlled by those opposed to it. Deriding anyone of color in a leadership position as a DEI hire is a good example.
None of this was a call for reason or to return to balance. It was an equally performative stunt to cast anything that event hinted at inclusiveness as evil intent.
I think it's much simpler than that. Woke is power, it's a moral position that can be used like a club to force others into a specific line of thinking. While it's basic mission of recognizing discrimination, etc. around us, it morphed into a political and societal weapon to force people and institutions to do certain things, like establishing DEI offices.
I don't think I agree. I think the counterpoint of "woke" is "fascist" or "racist". People on the right call things woke and people on the left call things fascist. But I think the difference in the meaning of these words reveals a lot about who is saying them. For example, woke people are merely self-righteously moralistic but fascists are such a severe threat that we have to end things like free speech, etc. in order to prevent a constant threat to society. That might explain some of this divide.
> i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
> people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think those are just two perspectives on the same situation. “wokeness” is realizing we should be treating people better and “anti-wokness” is people feeling called out by that.
People tend not to like it being pointed out that they are assholes, especially when they know it’s true. That’s pretty much the whole “anti-woke” thing in a nut.
>I think those are just two perspectives on the same situation. “wokeness” is realizing we should be treating people better and “anti-wokness” is people feeling called out by that.
>People tend not to like it being pointed out that they are assholes, especially when they know it’s true. That’s pretty much the whole “anti-woke” thing in a nut.
I think this is an example that accurately sums up with most normal, non-partisan people mean when say say "woke". The smug self-righteousness exhibited by those who believe themselves morally superior to others is "woke". The suggestion that somehow you are an asshole if you don't sign on completely and without question to the bizarre social and political agenda of self-appointed word and thought police. The people that you avoid like the plague because they are constantly searching for something to be offended about or some way to chide you about having transgressed against some ever-changing lexicon of acceptable terms and phrases. The people that think the world is neatly divided between "oppressors and the oppressed" and that where you fall on this insurmountable divide is based almost entirely on who your ancestors were or what your skin-tone is rather than anything you've actually done in your life. The people that think they have a monopoly on deciding what is right and wrong, and that they have been appointed the moral arbiters to decide what everyone is allowed to say.
You missed the point of the article completely. Wokeness (as PG defined it, which I would agree is the most commonly used definition today) isn't merely realizing we should be treating people better, it's realizing that people should be treated better and focusing on being a "prig" about completely inconsequential and tangentially relevant concerns as a result of that rather than taking meaningful action.
> 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".
This passive phrasing implies a kind of universal consensus or collective decision-making process that the word has officially changed connotation. If this were the case, it would not be such a problem.
What happens in practice is that a small minority of people decide that a certain word has bad connotations. These people decide that it no longer matters what the previous connotation was, nor the speaker's intention in uttering it, it is now off-limits and subject to correction when used. People pressure others to conform, in varying degrees of politeness -- anything from a well-intentioned and friendly FYI to a public and aggressive dressing down -- and therefore the stigma surrounding the word spreads.
It's hard to believe that this terminology treadmill genuinely helps anyone, as people are perfectly capable of divining intent when they really want to (nobody is accusing the NAACP of favoring discrimination and segregation).
Add to this that the favored terms of the treadmill creators don't necessarily even reflect what the groups in question actually want. Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American (CGP Grey made a whole video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ).
So that momentary pause you feel when you almost say "Indian" and then correct it to "Native American", who is that actually serving? It's not the people in question. It's a different set of people, a set of people who have gained the cultural power to stigmatize words based on their own personal beliefs.
>Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American
Enforcing this false dilemma is what leads us to this situation. Even this CCP Grey guy is arguing for the false dilemma. Actually referring to Native Americans or Indians as a monolithic group is the problem. The many peoples forced to live in the Indian Territories(Oklahoma) have different needs than the peoples forced to live along the US-Canadian border(like Ojibway, Blackfoot, and Mohawk) and different needs than the Apache... another overloaded name[1].
This is one of the things that most fascinates me about the anti-woke.
You're advocating for people to be described in whatever term they prefer and not have a term imposed upon them from outside.
That alien visiting for mars would think "Oh, this is this wokeness I have heard of, respecting groups desires to be addressed in their preferred way".
But no, you're only bringing this up because you believe the people you think are "woke" are imposing a name on these groups from the outside.
Is it a principle or is it a pointless gotcha? I would argue this is aggressively performative anti-wokeness!
The battle over the term "tranny" in the 2010s was very eye opening. Some celebrities were being skewered for using the term, though they and a huge % of LGBT folks saw it in a positive light.
>So that momentary pause you feel when you almost say "Indian" and then correct it to "Native American"
Here in Canada it's "Indigenous peoples", sorry, I mean "First Nations", unless they've come up with something else now. Never mind that the people in question don't necessarily feel any kind of solidarity with other indigenous groups beyond their own.
(Also, "missing and murdered indigenous women (and children)" is a set phrase, and people will yell at you if you point out the statistics showing that something like 70% of missing and murdered indigenous people in Canada are men.)
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.
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.
I read Future Shock for the first time a few years ago, on about the 50th anniversary of its publication.
One of the strongest impressions I had were that there were TK-count principle topics in the story:
- The psychological impacts of an ever-increasing rate of change and information flow. Largely a dark view of the future, and one that's borne out pretty well.
- Specific technological inventions or trends. Most of these have massively under-performed, with the obvious exception of information technologies, though how that's ultimately manifested is also strongly different from what was foreseen / predicted.
- Social changes. Many of these read as laughably trite ... until I realised how absolutely profound those changes had been. The world of 1970 and of 2020 are remarkably different in gender roles, acceptance of nontraditional sexual orientations, race relations, even relationships of the young and old. I'm not saying "perfect" or "better" or "worse", or even that FS is an especially good treatment of the topic, only that the situation is different. Moreso than the other categories, the book marks a boundary of sorts between and old and new world. We live in the new world, and the old one is all but unrecognisable.
(Those in their 70s or older may well have a more visceral feel of this as they'd lived through that change as adults, though they're rapidly dying out.)
Owners of social networks are terrified that they're accountable to society in any way. That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades. Basically they've taken over and are making all the rules.
What is accountability? A platform picking what the truth is?
Presumably you liked the fact checkers before because they were of the same political persuasion as you. Now that Trump is in power would you prefer if Musk/Zuckerberg placed right wing fact checkers in place and punished any opinion which is outside of the platform's Overton window?
Musk removed picking fact checkers and replaced them with community notes. Zuckerberg says he'll do the same. Isn't that the societal accountability that you want?
> That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades.
This is only a tiny part of the reason.
The main reason is that fact-checking works so well against the right, and has almost no benefit for the right.
Why?
Because almost everything the right says is a lie of one kind or another, but almost everything the left says is either mostly or wholly grounded in fact.
So “fact checking” is an almost useless tool for the right, since it rarely ever contradicts what the left says. And yet, the right can get very severely corrected by fact-checkers with almost everything they say.
Musk and Zuckerberg are killing fact checking because they NEED misinformation to carry the day. Because if we truly understood how badly the Parasite Class were bleeding the Working Class dry just for a few extra thousandths of a percentage point of wealth accumulation, we would all rise up and bring out the guillotines to dispose of them once and for all.
Misinformation is the way they control the working class.
I can't for the life of me comprehend how PG manages to write in a style that sounds so lucid, so readable and compelling, and so authoritative, but on a substance that's so factually incorrect that it won't stand to any bit of critique.
Like the paragraph quoted above: it's just so blatantly obvious what's wrong with turns like "considered particularly enlightened", or "there are no underlying principles" that I find it hard to believe that the text as a whole sounds so friendly and convincing, unless you stop and think for a second.
I wish I could write like this about whatever mush is in my head.
From a (potentially made up [1]) letter from Freud:
> So yesterday I gave my lecture. Despite a lack of preparation, I spoke quite well and without any hesitation, which I ascribe to the cocaine I had taken beforehand. I told about my discoveries in brain anatomy, all very difficult things that the audience certainly didn’t understand, but all that matters is that they get the impression that I understand it.
Maybe pg has the same strategy. Certainly reads that way.
I find it's super-easy to communicate this way if I pick a position I think is bad and dumb.
It frees me from giving a shit if I'm using e.g. rhetorical tricks in place of good-faith argument. Of course the argument's obviously bad, if you're any good at spotting bad arguments! So are all the others I've seen or heard supporting it. That's why I picked it—it's bad.
I can usually argue positions I disagree with far more persuasively and fluently than ones I agree with, because I'm not concerned with being correct or making it look bad to smart people, nor making myself look dumb for making a bad argument (the entire thing is an exercise in making bad arguments, there's no chance of a good one coming out). Might try that. It's kinda a fun, and/or horrifying, exercise. Drag out those slanted and context-free stats, those you-know-to-be-disproven-or-commonly-misrepesented anecdotes and studies, (mis-)define terms as something obviously bad and proceed to tear them apart in a "surely we can all agree..." way (ahem), overgeneralize the results of that already-shaky maneuver (ahem), misrepresent history in silly ways (ahem), and so on. Just cut loose. No worries about looking foolish because you already think the position's foolish.
Someone could say something similar about the large number of people who apparently reviewed this essay, who were supposed to critique it in order for him to make it stronger. It's possible he just ignored their criticism, but it's also possible they already agree with Graham and didn't think about the flawed premises, so their feedback didn't address what might be "blatantly obvious" to you or I.
Similarly, Graham almost certainly already has strong opinions on the basic premises of this essay. Thus, the process of revising and polishing his essay to make it readable and compelling doesn't help him spot any of these obvious critiques. As you quoted, he believes the people advocating "people of color" over other terms have no principles. Thus he can't apply their principles to his own essay and anticipate their criticisms. Based on how he describes "wokeness," he seems to think are generally unprincipled.
Neither he nor his reviewers are equipped to analyze the substance, which is why it can be stylistically strong but substantially weak.
I think it's called "from first principles", which is the laundered term for "disregarding context and previous work, because I don't feel other people's work is worth anything".
Having the principle of "words become bad because bad people use them" is stupid because you cede power to bad people. But really, its not a principle at all, its just a dumb cultural signaling, ie. "I'm not like those uneducated hicks".
Is that how you justify a swastika tattoo? You can also rob the bad people of the power to hide behind the words and symbols: if only bad people use them, we know the users are bad. It's definitely signaling, I don't see why it has to be "cultural".
When the meaning of a word gets distorted by use in bad faith, it's no longer useful for its original purpose.
Switching to another word isn't ceding power to the bad people. It's taking away their power to redefine things. It's letting them have the now-useless word exclusively, which will become associated with their speech, and not the original meaning. The original meaning is reclaimed by using a new not-yet-soiled word for it, and the cycle continues.
It only works because we're in a society of judging people the moment we see them. Mimicking the language of "bad people" will get that association. I don't think we'll ever truly "fix" that.
He's a smart enough person that even asking that question makes me think the whole piece is written in bad faith. Yes, language evolves and has specific context and nuance.
its not that complicated, he just doesn't think that hard about things when they support his conclusion. He's silently edited blog posts in the past to fix glaring holes that a 7th grader could catch after commenters on HN pointed them out.
The point he is making is that it's ultimately absurd to make moral judgements based on word usage.
A person who actively discriminates in hiring against black people but doesn't call anyone a slur is seen as more virtuous as someone who doesn't discriminate, yet uses the slur in jest. The first behavior is seen as more excusable than the second, although an actual reasonable moral judgement makes it evident it's not.
Being "smart" isn't a binary, and can't describe someone in any all-encompassing ways. Someone can be smart about investing in startups but stupid about understanding social discourse around marginalized groups.
I am not surprised at all that Graham is both of those things.
The stigmatization is imagined at best. Its similar to how words to describe individuals with learning disabilities also gain a negative connotation. Its not the word its the fact that the word refers to a subset of people that a comparison to is an insult. Hence, Mongoloid -> Retard -> Special -> <whatever the new one is>
In terms of racism, its different but the same mechanism. Being compared to a minority race is not an insult (to most people). Its the fact, that racist people will use the word with vitriol. Racists and those they argue with will use the term in their arguments and gradually the use of the term will gain the conotation of a racist person. Hence, Negro -> Colored -> Person of Color -> <the next thing when PoC becomes racist>
I think _Mongoloid_ doesn't fit with the rest of your examples, as it was never originally an impartial term. There's never a time when _Mongoloid_ wasn't an offensive term to some group, whereas _retard_ & _special_ were originally impartial.
I think I once read on reddit that the first few votes a comment gets pretty much determines whether it will score sky-high, or get downvoted into oblivion.
In the same way "colored people" can gain these connotations, just from other few people (falsely or not) inferring that it has those connotations. There need not be a history. I've seen too many blowups over the years about the word niggardly to think otherwise (more than one of these has made national news in the last few decades).
It's not that there is a history of discrimination, it's that we've all made a public sport out of demonstrating how not-racist we are, and people are constantly trying to invent new strategies to qualify for the world championships.
> In the same way "colored people" can gain these connotations, just from other few people (falsely or not) inferring that it has those connotations. [...]
> It's not that there is a history of discrimination
In abstract theory, that would be possible.
In concrete reality, with "colored people", there is, in fact, a history of discrimination, and when the context of use is not such that there is a clear separation from that history (a separation that exists in, e.g., the NAACP continuing to use "colored people" in its name) it has become problematic because of that history.
Yeah, I generally really liked this blog post, and I was very much steeped in "woke" culture at one point. But this part struck me as an analogy that could be improved. Lots of things about human culture and language are strange if you try to understand exactly why they came to be what they are. Think of various ways of saying Christmas: Xmas, Noel. Or Santa Claus, he is also Saint Nicholas, but Christmas is not Saint Nicholas's Day, like Saint Patrick's Day or Saint Valentine's Day, etc.
It's the same with the performative moral posturing. Woke used to mean being cognizant of systemic injustice - stuff like police brutality. It came from 1970s harlem.
Then the dominant culture that was responsible for a lot of that injustice latched on to it and twisted its meaning, watering it down.
This is known as political recuperation - when radical ideas and terminology gets sanitized and deradicalized. It isnt some conspiracy either. It happens naturally, especially in America.
Just today I merged to the main branch instead of a master branch. This happened because Microsoft employees wanted to pressure Microsoft to prevent sales to ICE-the-concentration-camp-people and Microsoft wanted to throw them a bone by "avoiding the term master" while still making that sweet sale.
Rename that branch and everybody is happy, in theory right? Everybody except the people in those concentration camps, I guess.
The people in Silly valley with masters degrees and scrum master certificates can laugh and pat themselves on the back about all of this silliness, imagining that "wokeness" became stupid because of Marxism or something, rather than because of societal pressures (like the ever present profit motive) which they actually deeply approve of.
In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.
Please make your substantive points without personal attacks.
Btw your assessment could not be further from the truth. I've never met anyone who was more interested in learning or more intellectually curious than pg is.
Books are special cases, because they can be considered discussions. And, often, they're nonthreatening discussions. Pick up the book if you'd like, read it, think about it, respond by talking to others or writing letters. Great way to advance knowledge.
But here's a different context: I see somebody spray painting a wall in an alley. If they're painting a flower or a portrait, I might hang around or come back later to see the result. If they're painting a swastika, I'm more likely to avoid that alley from then on.
Symbols mean something. If they didn't, nobody would bother using them.
A symbol or word carries no inherent meaning. We give it subjective meaning. That meaning is constructed socially through a shared understanding of what that symbol means through context and intention.
The same symbol or word can have multiple, and sometimes opposite, meanings, in different contexts.
90% of this list is less the slur treadmill and more the MLA/AP Stylebook version treadmill. Nobody's going to get mad at you for writing African American, unless you work for a newspaper, it's largely motivated by MLA and AP wanting to sell new books every year or two, same as how titles were underlined when I was in grade school and now they're italicized.
As long as assholes finds ways to ruin words for the rest of us, there will always be a new more sensitive / caring way to refer to traditionally oppressed people.
I know it sucks to keep up with things, but what sucks even works is not keeping up, and finding you and the neo nazis using the same language to mean different things. If you care, then you put the work in. That’s all anyone can do.
Yes exactly. The whole debate doesn't change the fact that certain people form the lower class, and those people tend to also have certain physical characteristics, and people don't like lower social class, which makes them dislike those characteristics.
Absolutely insane equivocation. "Negro" has always been associated with slavery and that's why it was used up until even recently by people like Malcom X. "Colored" is associated with apartheid America in the same way.
African American was a term used around return-to-africa movements and was always heavily associated with non-americanness.
> they’re not black, they’re Black
Somebody has never heard of proper nouns
> they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
Yes... nobody ever called indigenous people negroes. It's not the same thing as black. People use the phrase to talk about more than just black people.
From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]"
Then follow to the footnote: "[14] Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying users."
This is puzzling to me because: if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.
Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
No matter what kind of media policies there are, the fact that there is limited bandwidth means that some views are going to be emphasized, and other views are going to be suppressed.
The antiwoke crusaders are just as intent on moralizing and language policing as the worst of their opponents, and in places like Florida they're actively implementing limitations on speech and academic inquiry. To the extent that Graham and his fellow travelers in tech believe in freedom of expression, they've picked dangerous allies.
The past few years has shown us who the tech titans really are. We only had an inkling before, but now they don't have any reason to maintain a facade.
They believe in oligarchy so long as they are the oligarchs. They believe in authoritarianism so long as they are the authorities. They believe in censorship so long as they are the censors.
And now that they've amassed power that will be unopposed for the foreseeable future, there's no reason to pretend their goals are elsewhere.
A single party system will cause them issues like Chin has, America has 30-50 years to get to that point and presumably they all plan on emerging as the Supreme Leader when that day comes - or at least landing in the inner circle.
> in places like Florida they're actively implementing limitations on speech...
Is this a reference to the law preventing teachers from speaking to young children about sexuality?
> ...and academic inquiry
I assume this is in reference to Florida's rejection of the College Board's AP Black History curriculum, which was rejected for containing "critical race theory" in violation of Florida Law. Surely our democratically elected state governments are better suited to have the final say in what goes into our kids heads than some NGO's Board of Trustees? Anyone who thinks educators make for less political judges than politicians is invited to review the donation history of teachers unions[0].
According to DHH, the massive tech layoffs were motivated by a desire to rid companies of wokeness: "most major corporations have wound down the woke excesses while pretending it's all just a correction for "over hiring"." He goes so far as to say that's what Basecamp did and (in his opinion) it's a necessity to clean out those with the wrong political views in every tech company. Sure sounds like a politically-motivated purge to me.
Much like "woke" isn't really a single coherent entity, neither is "antiwoke". E.g. Bill Maher is notoriously anti-woke, but I haven't heard him demanding language policing. The part of it that does is the same people who have always done it, i.e. social conservatives - for whom it is literally a part of their platform and has always been that.
You're using a definition of "censorship" which is so broad as to be meaningless. By your definition, when I upvote a comment on Hacker News, that's "censorship" because it makes other comments in the thread a bit less prominent.
>Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
Censorship isn't the only way to prevent the rise of bad ideas. For example: "the solution to bad speech is more speech"
I don't think that's true. When you and I up- or down-vote a comment, we are a part of expressing what will end up being the community's consensus. That's not censorship.
When Twitter's algorithm promotes certain topics and demotes others, that is a unilateral act made by a single, unaccountable entity that has full control over the platform. That is (or at least can be) censorship.
Yes, but when enough people who otherwise have little actual power get together to drown out "bad speech" with "more speech" it gets called 'cancel culture' and 'witch hunts' and is used as the primary example of 'censorship' on social media.
> Twitter took action after a photo of the club's latest marquee reading, "Forever neighbours, never neighbors" went viral.
> The wording references president-elect Donald Trump's recent trolling of Canada by calling it America's 51st state, and uses the juxtaposition of the Canadian spelling of "neighbour" against the U.S. "neighbor" for political satire.
> ... the free speech social media platform shut down the club's account saying "it violates the X Hateful Profile Policy."
They simply realized reach is what you need to control, it doesn’t matter if you can write the most brilliant political content if no one will see it due to the distribution algorithm penalizing it while each single one of Musks mostly idiotic tweets reaches hundreds of millions of users. Free speech is meaningless if it can’t be heard by anyone.
Yes! I like to use the term "fair speech" for this concept. Free speech is that you are free from government retribution. But fair speech means that you also have equal opportunity to speak as others. As you said, if person A can say one million things while you are only able to say one thing, you are effectively denied speech.
Weren't a number of the accounts that Elon reinstated just overt white supremacists? Like, yes, by "not censoring" white supremacy, there are some causally correlated effects for what the far right considers "wokeness" on that platform.
You raise good points. I’m optimistic because i think the quieting of some voices (while bad) is much better than their complete silencing, as has happened through deplatforming, shadow banning, and even White House requests in the past.
I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
> I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
The problem with this logic is that for the most part, new media isn't replacing legacy media; it's simply placing new layer of filtering in front of it. The vast majority of people sharing information on these platforms aren't journalists doing their own research. Instead, they're getting their information from journalists and just applying their own filtering and spin. "Rebuting" usually just involves linking to different news sources. You were always better just reading the legacy media in the first place.
The guy who drove over people in the Christmas market in Germany recently openly backed the far right and was a racist. Elon removed all tweets that didn't match with the made up story that he was an islamist.
> From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]"
As has been demonstrated time and time again, especially on the Internet, unmoderated discussion boards do not scale. Trolls can naturally push out the reasonable people by increasing the noise level. Once the number of users exceeds some small threshold it is basically a guarantee that trolls will move in. Shitposting is cheap, easy, and the people who do it have all the time in the world. If you don't moderate the board will become useless for substantive discussion.
I mean this was amply demonstrated back in the Usenet era. Nothing has fundamentally change with human psyche since then, so the rule still holds true. Twitter/X is just the lastest example.
You've hit the nail on the head here. If you let the trolls in they will suck all of the air out of the room.
I don't know how many people I muted, banned, or how many times I clicked that I don't want to see something. Over time, Twitter gets better.
This being said, I prefer doing my moderation myself instead of having somebody I extremely disagree with (former Twitter employees) to do this for me.
I think the more glaring thing is that Musk has indeed directly censored twitter. Saying cis results in an auto-ban for example. But he's also just blatantly censored people for disagreeing with him.
Also, in a time when the next president of the united states is quoting hitler and also saying that Hitler "had a lot of good ideas" I hardly think a very poor multi-page screed on the word woke is the best use of time and thought.
So there was a platform called Twitter - apparently people who were 'woke' liked it and became the most loyal clients. This made the platform grow and become popular. Then came the "hero" and saved the platform from "wokeness". This is the real story. Elon came and bought something that was grown by the despised "woke" people and made it his own.
If I go into for you instead of following it's extremely heavily skewed into conspiracy theory right. So to me it looks like they are boosting the reach of that content.
if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.
Not at all - the difference here is choice. You can choose to pay or not to pay. And if you don't pay you are still seen.
There was no choice wrt visibility under the old regime, WrongSpeak was censored - you couldn't pay to be heard.
Now that doesn't mean the current situation is optimal, but it at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
> at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
This has multiple issues.
The older set up was not there to promote visibility but to provide a layer of authentification, most blue ticks were brands and recognisable people. Now its mostly scams, allowing anyone, especially potentially malicious actors, to don the mask of credibility is not "allowing the possibility of diversity of opinion" is allowing the fox in the hen house.
Secondly, if you imagine the goals of right wing people to maintain current power structures, and the left to disrupt them, then the ability to pay is already corrupted due to the current power structure being supremely lobsided. Aka those with all the money are effectively the only ones who can pay. (In law this is called 'right without a remedy', its when you technically have a right on paper but could never actually exercise it)
This whole situation also enables a problem we already know exists which are state actors. Russia was part of a disinfo campaign through FB tools in 2016 through cambridge analytica, and used bots in twitter in 2016 and 2020 through multiple state sponsored bot farms. Allowing that kind of state warfare to be amplified by spending money is really really poor choice from a platform prespective. Without those tools, organic growth is harder to achieve and getting around bot detection tools means a part of the infra would be caught before it caused damage (even under those circumstances, there was plenty of damage done). Removing all guardrails is a frankly indefensible choice in terms of public safety
I guess you could call turning your social media site into a toilet, causing anyone with any sense of pride or morality to leave, neutralizing “wokeness”.
Society, in its grand equality, gives rich and poor alike the ability to spend their money on billboards and full page ads.
This is ignoring all of the actual algorithm changes and Elon-induced censorship of specific topics on Twitter that make Paul's point just flat-out wrong, of course.
Perhaps the more accurate term is "suppressing" - you can do this directly or by crowding out or deprioritizing specific content based on many attributes. Content is both literal and second-order (like paid vs. unpaid)
It's much more than that. If the government says, "only land owners can publish", regardless of content, that's still obviously censorship. In what world would "only Christians may publish" not be censorship?
I wish twitter would use LLMs to automatically censor people who abuse apostrophes. As long as they're promoting and appealing to Nazis, throw the Grammar Nazis a bone!
The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power.
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.
Any real history of "political correctness," if we're going to use that term to mean the pursuit of social justice, will be incomplete without an accounting of the internal struggles of various activist causes when confronted with their own wrongdoing/ignorance/blindness/lack of "political correctness".
One of the best examples is the women's movement in the 70s being confronted internally by minority women blaming middle class white women for winning the right to work in an office building, when minority women had long been holding down jobs and needed other forms of championing, such as against police abuse, or the effects of poverty, or discrimination against their sexaul orientation.
It's insane to reduce the drive for political correctness to a bunch of radical students becoming tenured professors and unleashing their inner prigs against everyone else.
Thinking about progress, I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate was a lesbian. That would be unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s. Even the right is progressing and they don’t know it.
I 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".
Doesn't mean they aren't fascists, gay fascists are by definition, fascists.
They literally started sending fake "remigration" tickets to anybody with a foreign sounding family name, exactly what the nazis did to jews in the 1930s.
Ernst Röhm, leader of the Nazi's SA forces, was gay. People did not join the Nazi movement because of the impeccable life style of their leaders, but their political program. Same with AfD or Trumpists.
They actually do know it, and they’re mad that so many think they don’t. It’s why they think wokeness is a problem, it is (to them) mainly performative and insulting because progress has happened and continues to.
They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress.
Yup, Graham utterly fails to get over the bare minimum bar of American social justice critique, which is "What side of the civil rights movement would your proposed ideology have landed on?"
Graham is fairly explicit that the civil rights movement wasn't priggish in the way he criticizes. He basically develops the thesis that such priggishness arises as a side effect of any ideology when it becomes sufficiently dominant, and it's worth opposing the priggishness, independent of the merits of the dominant ideology in question.
The Internet has finally allowed the wealthy and powerful to converse at the same level and in the same space as your big brother's friend who smokes a lot of weed and knows that the government is suppressing a car that runs on water
You can tell who a person does and doesn't talk with when reading something like this. To write an essay of this length, on this topic, and not bring up (at a minimum) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority suggests you shouldn't be writing about it.
I was a college student in the 1990s. Not only that, I was a member and even leader of evangelical Christian groups in college. Outrage, us versus them, claims of being persecuted, and imposing standards of morality on others was the reason those groups existed. The bigger the fight you started, the better.
This is like writing an essay criticizing WalMart for paying low wages when every competing business pays the same or lower wages. Not false, but definitely not the whole truth, and obviously misleading.
I have the impression that Paul Graham does not read. His essays are such a product of echo-chamber diatribes and accolades that I cannot fathom him sitting down and reckoning with public information that contradicts his personal philosophy.
(He very well might reread his own essays and read other people's work at a 1:1 ratio. He might also simply have poor reading comprehension.)
ironically paul graham has an essay about reading journalism as a subject expert and immediately knowing that the writer is writing about subjects that they don't know much about.
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.
You’re right that he doesn’t condone it from any side, but the article would be much stronger if it spent more time on right wing forms of this problem too.
For example, any of the “go woke go broke” forms of right wing cancel culture, the ways that Christian colleges require professors to sign statements of faith, the way that sexual repression is still very much the norm in many conservative circles…
I mean, look at the paragraph surrounding this line:
> Of course [we shouldn’t require signing DEI statements]; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs.
It’s seemingly ignorant of the fact that this still happens a lot on the right! A family member had to sign something to the effect that they wouldn’t drink alcohol even off the job because the employer was religious.
A more timely example is that a core part of project 2025 is replacing bureaucratic federal workers with specifically conservative, Christian individuals.
Now, I don’t believe PG supports that. But if you spend an article mostly only attack one “side,” without acknowledging it’s somewhat of a two way street, you’re not going to convince that many people, and you can see that in this thread.
If PG’s goal, as he says, is to fight back against the prigs, he needs to better appeal to those who want to continue being respectful & progressive. And to do that, he needs to avoid being so reductive with what “woke” means.
The title is "The Origins of Wokeness". He's writing about things that many groups were doing at the time, making his explanation at best incomplete. As for Jerry Falwell, you cannot write about the origins of modern cancel culture and not mention him, since he's the one that popularized it.
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:
Another point, he is very invested in keeping the economy and the widening gap between the rich and everyone else out of it.
One of the big catalysts of wokeness was of course, Occupy Wall St, borne out of the 2008 financial crisis. When the bankers get bailed out and you just go underwater on your mortgage, people start to get upset and want to change things. And organizing yourselves and drilling with lots of rules and getting on the same page with people you don't otherwise have any connection to is paramount when it comes to becoming a large enough, hivemind type group that can bring about collective action. But if he brought that up in this article, people who don't care about 8 genders and fringe social issues might start backing away from the "woke = bad" message
to my mind, Occupy Wall Street and "wokeness", as it is generally depicted, are generally opposing movements. although it may have started there, "wokeness" was not primarily driven by universities and people on twitter, the overwhelming majority of it was driven by corporations and the corporate media. for businesses, it was a new way to buy credibility through moral posturing, and for the media it was a new cheap form of outrage to use to try and hold onto their dwindling readerships. further, "wokeness" is generally divisive to the working classes and far less threatening to the generally mono-cultural capital-holders. even further, it's a very nice way to distract young activists away from fighting against class structures.
to me, it's almost like the corporate classes saw Occupy Wall Street, a very very rare occurrence of genuine class consciousness and protest in the streets of America, and they realised that they needed to neutralise it somehow, and "wokeness" was how they achieved that.
I think there’s a fascinating throughline from older Christian moral enforcement to what the essay calls “wokeness.” Historically, a lot of Christian movements had the same impulse to legislate language and behaviors—just grounded in sin rather than privilege. For instance, the 19th-century American Puritans famously policed each other’s speech and actions because the stakes were framed as eternal salvation versus damnation. That social dynamic—where the “righteous” person gains status by exposing the lapses of others—feels remarkably similar to what we see now with “cancellations” on social media.
The parallels between the "original sin" in Christian theology and "... privilege" in social justice discourse are pretty obvious.
I also find it rather amusing that the social justice movement tends to be so US-centric - i.e. focusing on the issues that are specific to or manifest most strongly in US, and then projecting that focus outwards, sometimes to the point of cultural intrusiveness (like that whole "Latinx" thing which seems to be nearly universally reviled outside of US).
At the same time many people sincerely believe that US is not just a bad country - I'm fine with this as a matter of subjective judgment, and share some of it even - but that it's particularly bad in a way that no other country is. It's almost as if someone took American exceptionalism and flipped the sign. Which kinda makes me wonder if that is really what's happening here.
> that whole "Latinx" thing which seems to be nearly universally reviled outside of US
Well, there are a few things to clear up:
1. Latino is an American word that's only useful in the US to summarize people south of the US in Latam. People in Latam don't use the word since that grouping isn't otherwise useful to them.
2. There definitely are Spanish speakers who do use the -x or -@ suffix like "tod@s" and "todxs".
The mass confusion between these two facts is responsible for most of the discourse you'll read about latinx.
Americans don't understand that #2 exists. "Woke" Mexicans, for example, do use the -x suffix.
"Non-woke" Spanish speakers think the -x suffix is dumb in their own language. But they don't represent all Spanish speakers.
The book "American Nations", whose basic idea is that the US + Canada is composed of 12 cultural "nations", also observes that the Puritans were rather intolerant. The Puritan culture influenced what he calls "Yankeedom" (New England west to Minnesota) and the "Left Coast", which was settled by Yankee shipping. My impression is that these two areas are the most "woke"; it seems that Puritan intolerance casts a long shadow, even though those areas rejected orthodox Christianity a long time ago.
My 2 cents is that this book was one of the worst excuses for historical analysis I've ever read (not that the author is even a historian; he's a journalist). It felt closer to astrology or a Buzzfeed quiz about what Harry Potter house you belong to than anything of actual value. It reminded me of a litany of corporate workshops I've experienced, where the author comes up with an interesting hook and then works backwards to support their conclusions. Great for selling a story to those looking for intellectually empty calories. Pretty much garbage otherwise.
Right: it's worth noting the Puritans departed England in part because they were, basically, zealous pains in the butt who didn't get along well with contemporary English society.
To quote mark fisher “…It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.”
An optimistic explanation is that they don't want to be antisemitic. The present-day term for "Pharisee" is "Jew." The early rabbis who created Judaism as we know it were Pharisees, and theirs was the only first-century Jewish sect which survived until today. You can even see the alternation between "Pharisee" and "Jew" in The New Testament. For instance, in some verses it criticizes the Pharisees for washing their hands before eating, whereas in others it levies the same complaint against Jews generally: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2011%3A38%...
My guess would be because most of the audience it's said to are much more familiar with Christianity than with 0000s Judaism. If the person hearing the comparison don't know anything about the operand then for them it becomes a meaningless comparison.
Everyone does moral enforcement though. Even this blog post we are commenting about (which I really agree with) is an attempt at moral enforcement. He even prescribes that wholeness be treated like a religion and gives a whole list of scenarios where one should deny the request of a woke person (same as one would a religious person). To constantly keep up this equality among all ideologies requires rules and enforcement of those rules, aka moralizing
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""
Where do these principles of equality and tolerance come from? Are they descriptions of a stochastic processes produced by one of an infinite series of marble machines, or do they have a deeper root in something that is true for all places and times (I'll even accept roots in something that is true (not just acceptable) for this time, for all people within this time)?
Like most discussions of "woke" and "wokeness," this one too fails HARD by not fully and directly addressing the origins of the term -- and by "fails hard" I do mean will almost certainly do more obscuring than clarifying by starting from an information-deficient premise.
Including, e.g. "The term 'woke' has its origins in the Black American community as a signifier of awareness about ones political and social situation..." is a bare minimum.
You're right, but I don't think he's interested in the term. He's interested in the social phenomenon that (briefly) appropriated the term before the other side started using it as a negative.
There is so very little citation or substantiation in the entire essay. Even the footnotes are largely just more speculation. He presents it as some kind of historical record but it's literally just his thoughts.
It’s almost like that is the entirety of the rhetorical and argument station expectations when people comment on too much wokeness.
Vibes.
“I invented a meaning for this word that bears no resemblance to its actual meaning and then am critical of others because I think my invented definition is bad”
It is actually insane how far I had to scroll to see the first comment mentioning this. He has merits in his comparison to religion but this essay is a huge miss.
Edit: in this thread, the actual origin of “woke” is only mentioned 3 times, the thread has 1942 comments as I type
He also clarifies he's referring to the contemporary meaning in the linked essay:
> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now?
This is maybe not unknown but often intentionally avoided by people like Graham who discuss this topic with an anti-woke bias. The exercise is to create a false origin and attack that rather than address the actual history of the term and its origin.
I'm also black and growing up I had the impression that "woke" referred to left-leaning conspiracy theorists and activists. 9/11 truthers and gay rights activists were the main woke groups of the Bush era
I denounce Paul Graham's essay. At a time when our leaders - especially our thought leaders - reliably do the wrong thing, it's especially appalling that he has the wrong take on wokeness, transparently and self-evidently to appease Donald Trump and his followers in order to protect his financial ties to Y Combinator startups. That's low, bordering on unforgivable, and until he retracts his statements, I'm afraid that I've lost respect for him and his opinion in all other matters.
It's obvious that pg isn't schooled in the basic civic virtues that I assumed he was. Such as: in journalism one always punches up. That's perhaps the simplest litmus test to know if one is siding with the oppressor.
I identify as woke and progressive. I speak out against all forms of oppression. I call out othering such as sexism, racism, ableism and ageism. I watched political correctness rise and fall under the boot of capitalist authoritarianism. I witnessed the wrong people win the internet lottery and deliberately undermine everything the civil rights movement achieved since the 1960s, as well as the shared prosperity that the New Deal brought since FDR. I watched them monopolize our media, take over and corrupt symbols of what's possible like Twitter and Wikipedia, attack beloved institutions like the US Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency, divide us on wedge issues in order to enrich themselves, and capture our regulatory bodies through lobbying and packing courts with judges and justices who toe the party line. I watched the winners sell out like pg just did. I watched my heroes fall.
I thought the readership of Hacker News was with me on this stuff. But I guess I was wrong. It's apparent that too many people here just don't get it. They don't work on their unhealed traumas, they don't seek equitable solutions. They just side with concentrated wealth and power, whether out of fear over their own job security, greed by hoping to be at the top of the pyramid someday, or through simple projection by not nurturing their own dignity and the power that their voice could have to shed grace and light onto the world.
If everything I just said is performative, so be it. I'd rather be on the side of peace, love and righteousness than whatever all this is.
Because you said that this author has the "wrong take on wokeness", what do you believe to be "the right take on wokeness"?
And by the way, I do think you are being more than a little bit performative here, because it seems you're just displaying how morally superior you believe yourself to be over Paul Graham, your heroes, and the readership of HN. But I would still like to hear your answer to my question.
It's what it meant until white people started lecturing each other on what it means, then conservatives started using it as a derisive catch-all for anything conceivably liberal or simply empathetic.
"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.
I think the big take away is that being right via a lecture doesn't do anything.
If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
Instead, go out and do something. For example, defer typing up that long comment about how [x] is right and [y] is wrong, volunteer for some community service. Build shelters for people who need it. Offer pro bono services to marginalized groups.
If nothing else, simply live your way of life and out compete the people who were wrong.
But that 1000th internet comment you posted, even if it was "right", it didn't make a single lick of difference. So ask yourself why you really put it up.
> If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
Actually it's through Internet conversations and mostly online education that my mind was changed, my whole worldview in fact.
Quietly doing good is admirable. So is speaking up where people are talking. Both is even better still.
Quietly being your best self doesn't give us substantial change, though. Consider that all of the big gains in civil rights for various groups came from people being loud about their belief in equality, and insisting that people who felt otherwise were wrong.
> If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
i'm basically a professional social justice warrior in tech and nobody is lecturing each other. everybody just does the work.
"stop lecturing... instead, go out and do something" is a dangerous train of thought. I agree that building houses for the homeless is a good idea (imagine if you could actually just do that, though...) but most of the issues people are talking about can't be directly confronted in cozy ways like going to the soup kitchen or building a house. A lot of the issues people are "woke" over are societal ills and the "action" available to them is stuff we don't want people doing. We should be advocating for reasoned discourse instead of - to paraphrase a popular tweet I didn't like enough to screenshot - telling people to shut up and go firebomb a Wal-mart.
Or take the abortion debate. We don't want anti-abortionists "taking action" against clinics and doctors any more than we want pro-choice advocates doing back-alley abortions if we can avoid it. It's all very dangerous!
> 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.
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
and continues with experiences such as discovering that when squicky rumours are flying around it is is the former BDSM professional several steps removed from the event who goes the the police with a garbled, confused and hysterical story or that the transgenderist gatekeepers of Tildes don't know that there are 549 paraphilias (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia) and that pedophilia is just one of them in their mad rush to cancel anyone they can. In contrast the people who pray a few times a day, homeschool their kids, and volunteer on deadly cold nights at the homeless shelter, while people who hate them are sharing hateful memes online, who "seek first to understand" the way Steven Covey says you should)
For me, Urban Dictionary[0] defines this issue much more clearly:
> When this term became popularized, initially the meaning of this term was when an individual become more aware of the social injustice. Or basically, any current affairs related like biased, discrimination, or double-standards.
> However, as time passed by, people started using this term recklessly, assigning this term to themselves or someone they know to boost their confidence and reassure them that they have the moral high grounds and are fighting for the better world. And sometimes even using it as a way to protect themselves from other people's opinion, by considering the 'outsider' as non-woke. While people that are in line with their belief as woke. Meaning that those 'outsiders' have been brainwash by the society and couldn't see the truth. Thus, filtering everything that the 'outsider' gives regardless whether it is rationale or not.
> And as of now, the original meaning is slowly fading and instead, is used more often to term someone as hypocritical and think they are the 'enlightened' despite the fact that they are extremely close-minded and are unable to accept other people's criticism or different perspective. Especially considering the existence of echo chamber(media) that helped them to find other like-minded individuals, thus, further solidifying their 'progressive' opinion.
> 1st paragraph
>"Damn bro, I didn't realize racism is such a major issue in our country! I'm a woke now!"
> 2nd paragraph
> "I can't believe this. How are they so close-minded? Can't they see just how toxic our society is? The solution is so simple, yet they refused to change! I just don't understand!"
> 3rd paragraph
> "Fatphobic?! Misogyny?! What's wrong with preferring a thin woman?! And she is morbidly obese for god sake! Why should I be attracted to her?! Why should I lower myself while she refuse to better herself?! These woke people are a bunch of ridiculous hypocrite!"
I came in here to see if this had been posted already. deBoer does a much better job at talking about it in a comparatively neutral way. He only adds his two cents at the very end.
Another good one that gets it even closer is from Sam Kriss. His prose is a bit less to the point than deBoer, but he outlines his idea that "wokeness" is not a political ideology but rather an etiquette. I think it's paywalled now but the archived version can be read:https://web.archive.org/web/20230324050437/https://samkriss....
It's a good writeup that doesn't require the reader to have taken a stance or agree with the author's (arguably reactionary in the case of PG's post, depending on one's perspective) politics.
I love when urban dictionary nails something well like this, it's very amusing. Like a gold nugget surrounded by trash. The only other thing that tickles me so is the occasional pseudo-profound 4chan green text.
I thought this was an interesting read. For me, it sparked the insight that wokeness parallels the rise and fall of the attention economics, with the premise that attention is the real bottleneck in social justice. It places an emphasis on awareness, and the solution is often left as an exercise to the observer.
Political correctness and language codes are not new. I think what was new is the idea that people could rally around the banner of awareness, and thereby avoid disputes about solutions. This is why many of these topics lose momentum once their followers get the attention and have to deal with the hard and less popular questions of how to fix something.
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.
There seemed to be a surge in 2011 too, when it became apparent that the Obama administration was going to let the big banks off the hook for the financial crisis.
I mean, that's part of it. The culture war is useful to both US political parties, because they both have a bourgeois class interest and need something to keep people invested in politics for the sake of their political legitimacy, but at the same time need to prevent them from gaining class consciousness or becoming involved in class politics.
Put another way: the culture war (as woke vs. anti-woke) divides the electorate, but in a way that lets them be parceled out between two factions of the ruling class, rather than aligning any of them against the ruling class.
> For me, it sparked the insight that wokeness parallels the rise and fall of the attention economics, with the premise that attention is the real bottleneck in social justice.
This was mostly my reading too. Maybe more cynical, but I walked away thinking that wokeness itself isn't good for business unless you are in the business of selling rides.
It's a well written piece. Early on, though, this caught my attention:
> As for where political correctness began, if you think about it, you probably already know the answer. Did it begin outside universities and spread to them from this external source? Obviously not; it has always been most extreme in universities. So where in universities did it begin? Did it begin in math, or the hard sciences, or engineering, and spread from there to the humanities and social sciences? Those are amusing images, but no, obviously it began in the humanities and social sciences.
He's setting up the assertion "political correctness began in university social science departments." He tries to make it look like the conclusion is an inevitable result of reason, but really it's just an assertion. I dislike this rhetorical technique.
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.
> 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.
Right, but the problem is that consequences for a cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl don't seem to be the same as the consequences for homicide.
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.
Harvey Weinstein preyed on people. Louis CK consensually engaged in his kink with people who later said they didn't mean to consent but were embarrassed because they wanted to curry his favor. Aziz Ansari went on a bad date, and she gossiped to someone who wanted to write a hit piece.
PG says wokeness peaked with George Floyd. Surely there was priggish stupidity that came from Black Lives Matter (like banning "blacklist" as if it had racial connotations), but what happened to George Floyd was legitimately fucked up.
I'm looking forward to a day when these ideas can be openly discussed. It's not that everything done in the name of woke was bad, it's that wokeness is a dogma that silences discussion. People whisper in cafeterias "hey, can I tell you what I really think," but nobody wants to say "the emperor has no clothes" when your wellbeing depends on it. In the last decade in tech, part of your job was paying lip service to inclusivity. If you date in SF or NY, you'll notice a bonkers number of people still signal a trendy virtue in their profiles, usually BLM/ACAB or Free Palestine/watermelon.
If people worry that they can't keep a job or be invited to a social gathering or find a mate if they question the dogma, you'll end up with a bunch of people performing for the dogma, because they need access to those essentials.
> If people worry that they can't keep a job or be invited to a social gathering or find a mate if they question the dogma
And who, exactly, do you think will have to worry about being stigmatized for their beliefs in the next four years? Who will be threatening them, making laws that violate their rights, pointing guns at them? Anyone who spends their time complaining about the targets of such suppression, as though they don't have rights of free speech or association, is doing a bit of dogma enforcement themselves.
The events that PG chooses to paint as woke say a lot about what he really thinks. By the end, I was convinced he was truly against consequences. Cries for justice should be ignored. If a lynch mob isn't being a formed, then everyone should just shut up.
Yeah, that's just nuts. Let's be very specific: the issue was that Bud Light hired Dylan Mulvaney to do a social media promotion. It's not as if Dylan's face was on beer cans available in stores or anything. And this simple act caused a massive backlash. I would think that this might raise some questions about who exactly the prigs were in this instance.
This seems like extraordinarily weak writing with very little backings or substantial evidence to the claims. That in itself would be fine - if presented as opinion - but this has an air of a historical biography of the actual lineage of the term. This is anything but.
This is a politically charged discussion but I think it demonstrates some of the problem. Left arguments, just like the right, devolve into a theme of you are with us or a racist. There is no middle ground. I am no longer in the Bay Area but I still remember one of the depressing defining moments of this during the BLM protests. Shop owners would throw up signs that literally would say “We are minority owned, please don’t destroy our shop”. In my mind it’s the wrong way to think about it, does that mean we are giving the ok to destroy non-minority businesses? If you were to ask that question at that time, you would get labeled quite quickly as a racist.
The shame about everything these days is you cannot have a discussion anymore, maybe it never existed. I am not a republican but I also cannot stand the outspoken left shouting over everyone else in CA. Does that mean I am antiwoke?
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?
I am not sure what your reply has to do with my comment. Be as loud as you yourself want to be. The issue with the left is the same that as the right in America. The handful of extra vocal folks set the tone. You are unable to have any real discussion as it’s too easy to quickly get labeled a racist or some other classification. If you don’t agree with a position, well you must be a nazi of some sort. That is/was the typical vocal left in CA.
The comparison of police being gestapo is just silly. In the general case police are underpaid for what they are tasked with. I am no fan of the police but it’s naive to think they are the gestapo. Severely under paid and undertrained to then have to take care of the same neighborhoods all the time. I also think your narrative of finger pointing does not really attack any of the issues. Instead of pointing fingers nobody wants to sit down and ask why certain communities have poorer outcomes than others. Poor police outcomes are a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
> 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.
> with far left views that in the recent decade have become the loudest voice basically every online platform.
> the same toxic far left hub that Reddit has become
> shifting away from the far left messaging that has been the default
That entire post has left reality a long time ago. Honestly, this level of resentment can't be healthy.
> angry, myopic, us-vs-them extreme thinking.
You've clearly become what you're (allegedly) so vehemently against.
I think it's best to understand it in terms of entirely different separate realities that define political ideologies nowadays, like it's not just that I disagree with you, we don't even share the same plane of existence anymore. Like for example conservatives love to call Biden a marxist/far-leftist — it's incomprehensible gibberish to me, it goes against everything I believe to know about reality, but it probably makes a lot of sense to you, you might even agree with the statement. It's not a disagreement in the traditional sense, it's not something we could talk about and reach some sort of mutual understanding.
The same is true with people using the term "woke", to describe something they believe exists and is a great danger somehow, the most important political struggle of our times even perhaps. And you're right, in your perception of reality it really is scary and worth fighting against. It's just that I believe you are living in a dangerous, delusional fantasy that has nothing to do with reality. That's why finding common ground is pretty much impossible unfortunately.
Like one time I saw a conservative calling the world economic forum a far-left institution, I really don't think a productive conversation between leftists, liberals and conservatives is even possible at this point.
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.
The beautiful thing about essays like this is that they show you that the author has truly never known what he was talking about. Just a guy who stumbled through life at the right time. It’s a shame these people have so much power and influence. It could be wielded by people much more thoughtful and benevolent.
Graham was brilliant in the 90s. I would say this article is more like evidence that he's washed up. When you no longer have to work hard because your name alone means money, your mind turns soft.
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.
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?
> The danger of these rules was not just that they created land mines for the unwary
In real life, these "land mines" don't usually explode unless people think you're stepping on it intentionally.
For instance, every time I've accidentally used the wrong pronoun for someone, I've gotten a polite correction, I make a mental note, and everyone moves on. It's just not a big deal.
With a large enough audience, there will always be someone who assumes you've acted with ill intent. But if you know you've done it innocently, then you can just ignore them and move on.
Intent matters. Those performative things communicate your intent to make others feel welcome and included. So if you fly off the handle at a reasonable request that would make a group of people feel more included, you've communicated your intent accordingly.
Occasionally, there are some purely performative things that don't actually make anyone feel more included. Personally, I think it's reasonable to ask that question if you're genuinely interested in finding the answer. However, purely performative things tend to disappear in time; so sometimes the most pragmatic response is to just go with the flow and see where things land.
I think what PGs article misses, pretty much completely, is a more accurate definition of the work woke, which is:
>A word used to label another's political beliefs and activism as incorrect and foolish, particularly if that person is seen as "left leaning" or "progressive."
In other words, it's common usage has devolved to mean "you're an idiot."
This is a travesty, really, because its use erases any chance to have an honest dialogue about the topics and behaviors being labelled as "woke."
For example, people could instead say: "I disagree with X behavior, and here's why." Instead, people say: "look at that woke idiot." (And really, this is not an exaggeration.)
The normal behavior you describe, of people pointing things out, with others' responding in kind, has little to do with the common usage of the word "woke," which has simply become a form of name-calling.
And it is unfortunate, because there is much to criticize about activists on the left, but name calling is in no way helpful, and instead, drives further reductive discourse.
Well organised and destructive conservatives across much of the western world, have conspired successfully to nullify the positive effect of a word once used to elide wide ranging ideas and discussions on the subject of social justice.
This is social media at it's most galling.
Though alongside that, we now have a wider appreciation of a long list historical crimes, and the longstanding effect of those transgressions.
The land mines do explode. Edinson Cavani got three match suspension after saying “Gracias Negrito” on social media to a teammate who just had a good game. And Spanish was his mother language.
The teammate was not offended in any way, but some authorities higher up apparently were.
The weirdest thing that I've run into wrt pronouns is when people object to the use of gender-neutral pronouns as "misgendering" - e.g. a person insists that you must not use "they" to refer to them but rather their preferred gendered pronoun, and if you don't, then that is "erasing their identity".
The argument that's usually made for this is that if someone's referred to as "they" while other people around them are "he" or "she", this makes them feel excluded etc. But if so, then using "they" uniformly would have been acceptable, and yet the same people insist that it is not.
In cases of ambiguous gender presentation, they is common and accepted.
The idea is that yeah typically your pronouns should line up with your appearance or presentation, but sometimes it's a bit ambiguous. I've had people call me "ma'am" on the phone or in drive throughs because my voice tends higher. Or because I have long hair and from behind it tends to look feminine. It bugged me when I was younger and less used to it, at this point I don't really care. But I do appreciate it when people ask.
When it comes to common terms, they're usually pretty whatever. I've been doing a lot of work in a protocol where original terms were "master" and "slave", and while I don't really care reading it in docs I personally feel uncomfortable speaking in those terms because my brain always brings up the connotations. Especially when the pattern is just as effectively described with Client/Server.
My goal, ultimately, is just to keep the vibes positive and help people feel welcome and included and seen. Some reasonable changes to patterns of speech to support that isn't that crazy to me. It's no different than code switching when in a different country, or just talking to different groups in general.
> This type of policing is another iteration of doublespeak that we were warned about in 1984. Policing the language polices thoughts. It harms communication effectiveness. It makes it harder.
Jesus, it's really not that hard. I work full remote and I just ask people what they prefer. I'm not in office and a lot of people aren't on camera and it's a bad idea to generally assume shit based on their name anyways. If I forget I apologize and we move on.
I have literally never encountered any issues in my long career of working with people because I don't feel a need to fill my head with hot air and make a big deal about it.
> Isn't that the issue though? I healthy society should be able to challenge, object and argue (within reason), without losing jobs or being exiled?
When you're in parliamentary/house sessions (or whatever your democracy/society/state has), sure, argue and object to everything. There you have what Americans are so crazy about, "Freedom of Speech" and all that.
But outside of that, in private life, most people would find you very cumbersome to deal with if you challenge, object or argue with things that people state about themselves. If I say I'm 32 years old and you try to argue against me, I'll eventually just ignore and shun you, because who has the time to deal with such inconsequential stuff?
If 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.
I think people may disagree on what "within reason" means. There are some red lines established by Title VII that cause "just asking questions" to cross into "hostile work environment." Is it reasonable to keep asking those questions?
Reasonable people can disagree on that question, but the law will protect a company that fires an individual for crossing that line while the rest of society is arguing over where the line should be. That's just how law works in general.
Easier said than done. Intent does not matter. The vocal minority will instantly peg you a racist and those whispers will continue to persist. I have personally been through it. Unfortunately we exist in a world now where the vocal left and right pollute the airwaves.
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.
shrug Well I've been on HN for about 20 years, and I'm not anti-pg (he's about 50/50 by my accounting). I'm also anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian, anti-mob.
But he missed the mark here. It feels like he published a first-draft without getting any dissenting takes on one of the biggest hot-button topics on the web. I (or a million other people) would have been happy to read a draft of this and explain that he'd create offense and confusion with his... attempt to explain the history of priggishness around social justice based on his lived experience... if that's really what this is supposed to be.
That's sort of the point of the essay, he compares woke to a religion and explores how companies deal with various religious beliefs at work, ie: no one religion is ever allowed to suppress others no matter how righteous its believers feel or offended they may become.
I'm not sure why that's a bad thing or would create "confusion" in your mind.
Exactly, this “hacker” news. Where does this screed from PG fit into that? If this was published by literally anyone else it wouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.
I enjoy his technical and tech culture essays, ones like this are a waste of time and mental energy. I won’t read it because I know it provides zero value.
It's hard to take him seriously when he claims X doesn't censor, despite their very blatant and open censorship. Hacker news has not gotten anti-pg, it's more that pg has become more vocally political and is now facing the consequences of that.
Case in point, anyone else posting a screed like this would instantly be flagged and removed.
He claims to be anti-censorship, yet he can't see Twitter is just as censored as it used to be because it aligns with his world view now. The same as the Left used to be blind to Right censorship. Maybe he should try tweeting "cis".
"pro-breaking-the-rules attitude" come on. He's aligning himself with the most conservative and powerful people in the world right now. How is that a rule breaking attitude?
You can be aligned on 99% of things and still be a rule breaker. Additionally it matters a lot how big and societally ingrained the rules that you're breaking are.
Being anti-censorship is one thing that should, taken in isolation, have nothing to do with your object-level views. But in practice, those claims tend to correlate with very specific views, and they're applied hypocritically. Elon is the most high-profile recent example - I think it's hard to argue at this point that he had any principled anti-censorship views, given his behavior since taking over Twitter - but he's far from the only one.
You won't see PG writing an article on how homeless people in SF should be more pro-breaking-the-rules. Because it's OK to steal from your users, to inflate your growth numbers, to make false promises to build your initial userbase, but it's not OK not to shoplift from the Safeway or do drugs on the BART. That's the kind of breaking the rules that isn't cool, edgy, smart, and most importantly high status and beneficial to Paul Graham. Don't you think that double standard is a bit suspect, that he's "pro-breaking-the-rules" exactly when the rules restrain him and not others, when it's the rules he thinks are stupid and not the rules someone else thinks are stupid?
You won't see PG writing an article about how it's bad to deny a 15 year old medical information on puberty blockers. That is, undeniably, censorship in its very simplest form: it's the suppression of information out of a belief that it is in some way dangerous to let people know about it. But most of the people who claim to be so concerned with censorship won't say a word against it, and a lot actively support it, because it stops being "censorship" when it's something they like.
And, of course, the idea that the anti-woke crowd is "anti-authoritarian" is kind of laughable right now, given their response to the incoming administration.
The change isn't that his (or other tech elites') ostensible values have changed. It's that their ostensible values have become increasingly transparently hypocritical. PG hasn't become less of a hacker: it's "hacker culture" itself, especially as represented and hijacked by venture capital, that is not what we (or at least what I) hoped it was.
Rule breaking for me, and not for thee sums up my objection, I suppose.
Yeah man, he's really breaking out of the mold by doing the exact same thing all the other SF billionaires are doing by sucking up to the right wing. Even braver and more punk of him, like Zuck, to only do it after the right wing won the election.
I'll give my opinion, as someone who used to hold pg in extremely high regard, but who is often surprised at just how thoroughly uninsightful pg's essays seem to me now.
The biggest problem I see with pg, and basically with all of the SV elite, is that I rarely see them question any of their assumptions or conclusions that don't lead them to "everything I've done is right, or at least the original goals of the 'SV ethos' is the best thing for society."
For example, take the concept of meritocracy. I completely agree that I think the "wokeness" of many on the left went way overboard in demonizing meritocratic processes, e.g. getting rid of advanced classes and opportunities for some students in the name of "fairness". At the same time, I rarely if ever see these SV kingpins suggest viable solutions to the fact that in the relatively new "winner take all" tech-led economy, very bad things happen if only a teeny meritocratic elite hoards all the wealth and leaves everyone else in an extremely precarious state. For a counterpoint as to someone who I do find insightful, consider Scott Galloway. He is definitely not someone who I would call woke, but he also understands some of the real problems so often ignored by the "tech utopianists".
In this particular pg essay, there is not much I disagree with, but I didn't really learn anything from it either. I'm also extremely suspect at all these SV leaders suddenly highlighting their views that are conveniently in lock step with the new administration. Like you say, pg has talked about this before, so I'm not saying his thoughts aren't genuine, I just think what Tim Sweeney said recently is pretty spot on "All these SV leaders pretended to be Democrats, and now they're pretending to be Republicans." It's similar to how I feel about Zuckerberg's recent pronouncements. When I first heard them, most of them I agreed with and they made sense to me. Then I read the actual new "hateful conduct" guidelines and I almost threw up. I'm actually fine with being able to call gay people like me mentally ill - I'm willing to debate that 9 ways to Sunday. But kindly STFU about "free speech" when only gay and transgender people had a specific carve out to allow for their denigration. Like I have to listen to all this crazy religious bullshit that in a sane world we'd recognize as symptoms of schizophrenia, yet if I said that on FB that would go against their new hateful conduct guidelines.
Frankly, I see pg largely as another uninteresting SV elite: someone very, very smart and who obviously worked very hard, but who was also obviously extremely lucky and now thinks that his thoughts are worth so much more than anyone else.
> I'm also extremely suspect at all these SV leaders suddenly highlighting their views that are conveniently in lock step with the new administration. Like you say, pg has talked about this before, so I'm not saying his thoughts aren't genuine, I just think what Tim Sweeney said recently is pretty spot on "All these SV leaders pretended to be Democrats, and now they're pretending to be Republicans."
Yep. IMO you struck right at the heart of it. My cynical POV is that pg, like many others, tries to be on the good side of who's now in power.
Everything else discussed in the article or here, as valid or interesting as it might be, looks to be a distraction from this central motivation.
It is extremely silly and in bad faith to accuse anyone to disagree with of indoctrination, but it's even sillier when every single tech bro is basically the same person, reads the same books, repeats the same topics, on the same day using the same phraseology.
You could have literally taken this essay from PG posted it on the timeline of any single one of his colleagues and you couldn't even tell who wrote it. The "anti woke" economy, if you look at the numbers accounts of that flavor do on Youtube, Twitter et al. is a magnitude if not larger than what, according to them, cannot be criticized.
The phrase "woke mind virus" also featured in this essay, is more of a literal meme or mind virus in the Dawkins sense of that term than anything it attempts to address. The lack of awareness to accuse others of indoctrination when you write an essay so generic that you can autocomplete the last 90% after reading the first 10% chatgpt style is quite something.
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.
The one thing I'll never understand are people using self-aggrandizing titles on things that are otherwise vacuous shitposts. It happens more with blogs than it does with actual, hardcover published books. Maybe "Ferromagnetism" by Bozorth but at least he discovered/invented a particular combination that works well so he gets a free pass by the virtue of it.
(to be clear i'm not calling Bozorth's work a shitpost, but you have to got to have balls to slam that kind of title on a textbook)
Everyone agrees with this. Obviously, the problem is determining what is true. There is significant disagreement. This is the root of the problem, not that people are preventing other people from saying things that they themselves believe are true.
The problem comes from deciding what's true. It's factually true to say that a higher percentage of black people than white people are convicted felons. It's also grossly negligent to describe that as a cause ("black people have higher tendencies to become criminals") than as an effect ("centuries of systemic racism held higher numbers of black people in poverty, and poverty highly correlates to the kind of criminal behavior that gets you arrested, and also lower quality legal representation, which makes it more likely that the next generation will also be poor; lather, rise, repeat").
Is it a lie to say "black people are more likely to be felons"? No, but if that's all you have to say on the subject, then you're probably a jerk and shouldn't be talking about it at all.
TL;DR I'm weary of people saying things that are factually true on the face of them, but that utterly distort the conversation. See also: "scientists don't know how old the universe is" (but have a broad consensus of a narrow band of values), "vaccines can harm you" (so can water), "it's getting cooler in some places" (global climate change doesn't add X degrees to every location uniformly), etc. etc. etc.
To expound, "black people are more likely to be felons" is only true (in the truest sense of the word "true") given a clear definition of what "likely" means, and the conditions under which the statement is true.
The statement could easily be interpreted as either:
- when selecting a random black person and a random white person out of the current American population, there is a statistically higher chance that the black person is a felon than the white person
- black people are more inclined towards committing felonies than white people, and will continue to do so at a higher rate
These have very different meanings, but are both fair and natural interpretations of the information-deficient statement "black people are more likely to be felons". Given that, the statement will likely cause more confusion and argument than clarity, and so is a bad statement.
There's a term for lying with carefully selected truths: Paltering.
> Paltering is when a communicator says truthful things and in the process knowingly leads the listener to a false conclusion. It has the same effect as lying, but it allows the communicator to say truthful things and, some of our studies suggest, feel like they're not being as deceptive as liars.
I like to follow a statement like that up with: What exactly did you want to say that you can't anymore? Please give some specific examples.
While the sentiment sounds good on paper, in practice it far too often is someone complaining that you can't demand a black men to be lynched if they have a white girlfriend anymore because society has gone all woke.
There are lots of things that aren't 'PC' to say anymore and that doesn't mean society is failing. In fact I would argue that it is just plain old progress, especially when it is accompanied by a number of things that we can now say that used to be taboo.
Out with: "Gay people should be burned at the stake."
In with: "Contraception allows families to decide when to have children."
> I like to follow a statement like that up with: What exactly did you want to say that you can't anymore? Please give some specific examples.
At one company, we instituted "opportunistic hiring" policies. A certain portion of our engineering headcount was reserved for women. Men explicitly could not be hired using the headcount put under the "opportunistic hiring" pool. However, it was absolutelyy forbidden to mention that gender was used as a factor in hiring.
Yes, we straight up banned one gender from a portion of our head count. But nobody could say that one gender had greater headcount than the other. That was considered offensive harassment. The same managers that would hire women under their "opportunistic hiring" pool one day would admonish other people for suggesting that women were beneficiaries of discrimination the next.
Another example: 9 out of 10 people shot and killed by police are men. Is this evidence of sexism against men in police? If I say that I don't believe that the police are sexist, but rather this disparity is due to the fact that men commit proportionally more acts of violence than women, is such an opinion sexist against men?
In many circles, pointing to the fact that the racial breakdown in policy shootings matches the racial breakdown in violent crime, with the same strength of correlation as the gender breakdown in shootings, is considered racist. In fact, even acknowledging a disparity in the rates of violent crime is considered racist by many (even if one states that poverty and historic injustice are the causes of the racial disparity in crime).
I'm very curious how you came to the conclusion that Paul was thinking of statements like "gay people should be burned at the stake" when he writes, "the number of true things we can't say should not increase".
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.
Tech elite currently enjoy disproportionately large benefits from rampantly un-balanced systems that allow them to exploit people for their work and therefore they stand to lose quite a bit from any rebalancing of said systems.
Basically, workers get nothing and CEOs get everything.
It represents something they can't control and which could ultimately be used to take them down a peg or two, if not more, by ostracizing them in the public's eyes.
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.
His accounting for what attracts people to wokeness is incomplete. Certainly there are prigs in the mix, but for most, I think it's that wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously. The challenge, then, is how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously without also folding that effort into an ideology with vague expansive definitions that lend themselves to actual prigs.
What attracted me to it is the idea that sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. are forms of bullying that are definitively antisocial. At its core, it should be about stopping bullying at the level of individuals, society, and institutions.
And, despite being "pro woke" or whatever it should be called, I had my own lessons to learn: I had to learn to stop interrupting women. I had to learn that interrupting them was wrong and that it was a form of sexism that I needed to address.
> 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.
I feel like when this all started out the problem was really taking it more seriously. People would talk and complain about it and no one would take them seriously. So the group managed to scrounge together enough power to force it to happen.. And then some of that power got misused. It's still better than it was before it started, though.
> The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Try replacing "sexual harassment" with "murder" or "robbery" and see if it still makes sense.
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.
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.
Why do you perceive some sort of conflict or paradox between "taking it more seriously" and coming up with an effective way to prevent it?
I mean, that is "taking it more seriously."
a definition of "harassment" that is highly
subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate
very well with actual harassment.
I swear, this whole topic is just an ouroboros of people talking over each other about vaguely defined terms.
You complain that "wokeness" has a "highly subjective" definition of harassment that "doesn't necessarily correlate well" with reality.
"Wokeness" itself is an incredibly vague and amorphous term, primarily wielded by those who oppose it. It barely exists except in the minds of its opponents, and certainly does not have some kind of governing body or like, official position on harassment or anything else.
If you feel that some specific person or institution is doing a shitty job of addressing harassment, or if you have some specific ideas of your own, those would be great things to bring to the table.
But accusing a vague and amorophous thing about being too vague and amorphous about another thing is... man, please, stop.
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.
I attended a corporate training on harassment where it said you can’t say “all hands” because it’s disrespectful toward people without hands. Use “town hall” instead.
On one hand, sure it’s an easy substitution to make. On the other hand, who decides these things? How does this affect our company? Do people without hands actually care? It all adds up and it’s wearisome like PG says, all these rules and you just try to avoid stepping on one.
I find this highly highly suspect as an anecdote without some supporting evidence
A quick search suggests this is a bit of a running meme used to discredit and poke fun at such trainings rather than something you’ve honestly experienced.
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.
Paul was on the board of, and advisor to, many of these companies that exported their culture to the world through their products and services. He wasn't the black sheep of the group whom others simply ignored and promoted their own independent political convictions.
I don't understand what this comment is trying to say, but the image of pg being on the board of companies (other than one that he founded) is pretty funny. I can't imagine him wanting to do that.
There’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.
> 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.
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it?
Yes. It requires the willpower to disengage from the performative point scoring of internet discourse. Most good conversation must now happen in private for many reasons, much of that has to do with the technology PG himself has previously supported.
Presently, you are seeing social media forking into red and blue (x and bsky and fb and truth social). This is bonkers. A superior format for discussion is a place like HN which is tightly (and opaquely) moderated. Another great development is the use of 'community notes' which, for all its imperfections, is superior to straight censorship.
Ultimately I'd like to see people like PG invest in high quality journalism where the mission is a dispassionate reporting of the best-available facts, supported where possible with data, and presented in such a way as to demonstrate transparency.
The journalism point he made hits home, hard. I'm a sunday times subscriber, and just added WSJ and Financial Times paper edition. I don't really want to add 10 substacks and parse through them all. I'd pay a lot, a lot a lot, for a quality daily briefer, known in some circles as a newspaper of record.
One that I love, deeply, is the Martha's Vineyard Gazette -- still printed on broadsheet, and with fantastic journalism -- it's what regional and local papers used to be. I wish we could have something like this in the national format.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.
It seems that the defining factor is that there was no actual authority attached to the morality of the situation. He is essentially saying that life was better when one could get away with doing whatever they wanted with no repercussions.
This is such a well-travelled path that I am surprised his intellect, nor that of the people that he claims proof-read this document, didn't protest before hitting 'publish'.
Here's a question: how can social justice actually be justice without enforcement. The US constitution coded this as the 13th amendment - is that now a woke document? Is that an example of "radicals getting tenure", or is it example of progress?
Articles like this really don't age well. Neither, it seems, does the author.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I sadly suspect we’re going to see some risk adverse hiring of boring white dudes in all positions of leadership. Regardless of competence.
We’re already seeing DEI weaponized. Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not. Organizations will be risk adverse and only hire the most boring white dude they can find from central casting. Whatever you want to say about diversity initiatives this will be a pretty terrible outcome.
> Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not.
That sentiment ("any mistake is because they're a DEI hire") is obviously wrong. But didn't DEI open itself up for that accusation by lending it some truth? It's a fact that black doctors have lower GPAs than Asian doctors on average.
I think a lot of people would argue against DEI because it takes the easy way out of a real problem. The result we want is more black doctors, but the way you should get to that is not changing standards that are not inherently racist.
I think a lot of people would argue against DEI because it takes the easy way out of a real problem. The result we want is more black doctors, but the way you should get to that is not changing standards that are not inherently racist.
The easy (and right) way out was to hire the most competent doctors, not the blackest doctors. I don't want more black doctors, I want the best doctors, regardless of their skin color. If you want more black doctors, you should train better black doctors. However, if you're going to do that, don't be surprised when white trainees band together to work harder too. If it's fair for your side, it's fair for every side.
I have no idea why we went backwards from "discrimination based on skin color is never okay" to "it's okay if they're black" but there's no reason not to simply recognize the mistake, fix it, and move on.
Nothing. But if people are afraid of NOT hiring boring white dudes it becomes not about competence but about avoiding the optics of not wanting to look like you’re doing a DEI thing
White men hold almost all the power in America. I can't reconcile this fact with the idea that there is some conspiracy against white men. Can you provide some more context on what you mean?
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.
"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.
"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.
Do you really believe this? It seems inconsistent with free speech and Paul Graham’s own definition of wokeness.
What other ideologies fall in this category? Or another way, what ideologies don’t fall under the category of free speech? Should we stop advertisements with gay people? All religions or just non-Christian religions? What makes an ideology woke? That the mainstream is uncomfortable with it?
> In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white police officer ~~asphyxiated~~ a black suspect on video.
This is quite some impressive editorializing, especially when the black "suspect's" killer is currently in prison for murder. I only highlight this because it indicates a very particular viewpoint held by the author - particularly stuff like this -
> And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
So, he states very early the performativeness is the issue. But, inevitably, when you ask these same people what then should be done about inequality, whether it be racial or otherwise, the answer is often "nothing" or denying that a problem even exists. I don't pretend to know this author's view here, but I'm just pointing out that the sentence quoted here is kind of dishonest - the implication being that if performativeness regarding social justice is a problem, that you should then focus on real efforts around social justice. This isn't mentioned a single time in this nonsensical screed, getting close in parts like this answering the "what now?":
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because there will be a next thing. Prigs are prigs by nature. They need rules to obey and enforce, and now that Darwin has cut off their traditional supply of rules, they're constantly hungry for new ones. All they need is someone to meet them halfway by defining a new way to be morally pure, and we'll see the same phenomenon again.
So, this author undermines his entire "point" (if a real one existed) with stuff like this, because the obvious conclusion is that any real effort at correcting social injustice and inequality will be met by cries of "aggressive performative moralism" by people exactly like this. From my view, that's probably the point, just please don't pretend you're doing anything intellectual here.
I'll leave this, this certainly does sound very "conventionally minded" (as he uses in a derogatory manner throughout this):
> Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong
> But, inevitably, when you ask these same people what then should be done about inequality, whether it be racial or otherwise, the answer is often "nothing" or denying that a problem even exists.
That's an assumption you're making - I don't see any evidence of that viewpoint in pg's essay. Any specifics you can point to?
I can point to a specific that seems to contradict you:
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
Inevitably, someone will chime in and say that it wasn't what he said, it's what he didn't say -- arguing from someone's purported silence. But that's exactly the kind of performative nonsense he's arguing against. It ought to be possible to speak against something without being castigated for failing to pay lip service in some way to a related topic.
This line of questioning is extremely annoying, and if I can be frank, also sounds very dishonest. You already answered your own question, knowing what it is, but I'll walk you through it -
His core "thesis" or "problem" here is the performative nature of social justice initiatives. He's correct, they often are performative. This does imply, on its face, that some efforts should be done to enact real initiatives that are not performative. I'm sure we can agree there this is what is implied by his statement.
Why then, would a serious author with this problem statement, then proceed to write thousands of words bemoaning the underlying nature of the initiatives themselves (without addressing what about them makes them performative, not even a single time in this essay) or about not being able to say "negro", rather than coming up with even a single conclusion on what must be done instead? I mean, you can just take a random sampling of the comments in this thread, which honestly shocks me it's not been flagged, to see precisely how people with his same viewpoint interpreted it. Lets please not pretend here. I can't exactly get on the phone and ask him what he thinks the answer to this question is - I can only go on a huge volume of discourse that has gone on for many, many years and make some conclusions on my own based on what he spent a very large amount of words complaining about, and shocker, none of them had to do with the ineffectiveness of social justice initiatives or "wokeness" (how he defines it), but rather how it oppresses him.
Clad in shining armor, I’ve sworn to protect all that is holy and honorable. My vow drives me forward, blade at the ready. My task today clear: to beat a dead horse, and, if that fails to satisfy the call, to lay my blows upon a dead snake, a snake that is dead.
I 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.
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.
I remember having a conversation with someone around a decade ago about whether "social justice warrior" pointed at anything real. My contention was that every popular moral system has its prigs and its fanatics - social justice no less than Christianity, environmentalism, socialism, etc, etc, etc.
Every decade has its new leftest boogeyman for the right to complain about, same as always. Critical Race Theory, Political Correctness, Hippies, Civil Rights Crusaders, etc... Doesn't really matter, just so long as it is an "other" that can be ostracized as a group.
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.
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.
> 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!
> 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.
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.
> This is also why the Democrats are so fractious internally, relative to the Republicans. Republicans default to trusting each other (not saying whether that's merited or not) while Democrats only make temporary uneasy alliances
The number of votes it took for Republicans to select a Speaker of the House and the effort that Speaker has had to subsequently undertake to keep that position says otherwise.
> The number of votes it took for Republicans to select a Speaker of the House and the effort that Speaker has had to subsequently undertake to keep that position says otherwise.
It's natural that the politicians selected by this group are going to be self-serving, unable to cooperate, etc. The fractiousness I'm describing is at the level of the voter, not the politician. See the 2024 presidential election for an example.
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
Following this logic, the Emancipation Proclamation was "problematic" because the "correct" thing to do is free slaves quietly via the underground railroad, as we wouldn't want to get slave owners in trouble.
This is fundamentally an argument against systemic change, as "getting people in trouble" is both core to the genesis and the enforcement of things like the Civil Rights act.
Attacking "wokeness" with this argument is deeply problematic, and extremely tone deaf in the wake of the Meta moderation leaks, wherein their internal documents highlight that the new moderation changes allow statements like "Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”
>Following this logic, the Emancipation Proclamation was "problematic" because the "correct" thing to do is free slaves quietly via the underground railroad, as we wouldn't want to get slave owners in trouble.
Present-day racism and slavery are in completely different neighborhoods of magnitude; to the extent that the comparison borders on false equivalency.
>...the new moderation changes allow statements like "Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit."
If a platform is attempting to operate within the ethos/spirit of free speech, you 'should' be allowed to make such statements on the platform. The root of the argument is the disagreement on whether and where one should be "allowed" to say those things.
Saying it's problematic is not a trump card (no pun intended). If you can demonstrate how allowing people to say offensive/harmful things (excluding established limits on free speech regarding safety) is inconsistent with free speech, then you're adding something to the discussion. Anything else is likely a disagreement on utility of free speech vs. civility; a place where folks can agree to disagree.
> If a platform is attempting to operate within the ethos/spirit of free speech, you 'should' be allowed to make such statements on the platform.
Ah, but you aren't allowed to say "Christian men are totally useless" or "Lesbians are so stupid", so it sounds like you should take up the ethos/spirit of free speech with Meta as well.
I don't follow that logic and that is the kind of absolutism many of us disagree with. It seems like an appeal to emotion to me. I'm not sure you can characterize the EP as shallow; aggressive yes, if one considers bold to be synonymous with aggressive in this context.
I don't find any issue with people making statements like that. I also don't need to agree with it to think that you should be allowed to say it. Do you find that to be problematic?
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?
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
“An aggressively performative focus on social justice.”
Paul is giving the strawman definition (or, ironically, the PC definition) of “woke”. It’s a code word that can be anything the user doesn’t like, and isn’t anything they do like. It’s used as a weapon along with its alias, DEI.
But people aren’t using it with that “performative” definition in practice. People are using it to label social justice topics that they don’t agree with. So it’s disingenuous to try and define it in a way that is much more narrow than its practical usage.
Even Paul himself uses the word in a way that sure seems inconsistent with his definition:
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
Bud Light sent Dylan Mulvaney promotional cans of beer to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of her web series about her transition. Mulvaney had been a target of right-wing activists for some time, and those activists drove the boycott. This was just a particularly effective example of a long line of right-wing campaigns against companies that associate with trans celebrities. How does "woke" fit into this except from the perspective that "woke" just means being on one side of the culture war?
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.
> 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?
If anything, this is a useful looking glass into the minds of people who love to complain about language policing and think "censorship" is our biggest social problem.
If you're very rich, not left leaning, and have a big platform, I imagine it's very easy for censorship/woke mobs to seem like the biggest problem.
Most of your needs/wants (in terms of food, shelter, safety) are met, you can mostly do what you want, but people online call you names and some of your posts might get taken down. It's one of the only problems you can feel, and it's obviously because the culture is wrong, because you feel it's empirically established that you are smart and good.
It's a little like people whose exclusive concern in the realm of sexual assault is false accusations; if you can't imagine being a victim or a perpetrator, false accusation is the only part you think can affect you, so naturally your priority is minimizing that risk. Skews your perspective a bit.
it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement... we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
It got flagged to death. 50+ upvotes, 6 comments, but flag killed.
I mean, I kind of understand: The discussion is going to turn into the kind of thing that HN tries to avoid. And yet, "moralities" driving things we can't talk about is the point of the essay, so it's really ironic to have it flag killed here.
Off topic: We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more. That means that flag killing is uncorrectable - if users decide that it's inappropriate, their only recourse is to email dang. That seems to me to be a step backward - let the user base correct the overreach of others in the user base.
> We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more.
That hasn't changed. Neither has any of the other logic around voting, flagging, or vouching.
Vouching unkills [dead] posts. The current thread was dead, for example, and vouches rescued it. But a post can be [flagged] without being [dead]. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918548 for a past explanation.
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.
Imagine that, there are also men who care about environment, who are not offended by seeing homosexual human beings, and who don’t want to have fascism.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now? I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
> An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
This sounds quite wrong to me. The people who use "woke" pejoratively don't limit their use to aggressively performative focus on social justice. They actively oppose the specific stances on social justice themselves, regardless of how aggressive or performative they think the advocates are.
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.
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.
It’s interesting to me that a certain type of person is so susceptible to buying into this fable of wokeness, especially when it pertains to universities. Almost like there is a woke mind virus, but it’s not infecting the people they think it is.
I attended university in the mid 2010s, so close to peak “wokeness”, and I never witnessed or heard of anything like what pg is describing. In my experience it was totally fine to hold just about any political/ethical view as long as you were a decent human being to your fellow classmates. There certainly was no political correctness police forcing us to assimilate.
The popular perception, especially in certain circles, is that there's been a rash of "cancellations" and extensive banning of, especially, outside speakers on college campuses, and also to some extent professors, accompanied by large and successful movements there to accomplish those outcomes.
In fact, there are so comically few cases of any of that that the couple real-ish ones are always cited by those advancing that position, plus a handful that really, really aren't that sort of thing at all (always look up the full story, 100% of the time they omit context that totally reframes what was happening, this phenomenon is more reliable than most things in life).
Real data exist on things like speakers' appearances at schools being cancelled, and it's most fair to say that the trend there is it's gone from "damn near never happens" to "still damn near never happens". And it's not because controversial right-wing sorts, which we may presume would be the most likely to be banned, aren't even trying to speak on campuses when e.g. invited by friendly organizations—they are, and frequently do.
The entire phenomenon is extremely close to being imaginary. That's why you, actually being there and not just going by social media and pop-political-book and talk radio and podcast "vibes", didn't see it.
On YouTube, watch the Evergreen State College 3-part documentary by Bret Weinstein. This is much more common than you think, through your anecdote, unfortunately. Granted, this happened in 2017, so a few years after your time in college, but I would argue "peak wokeness" sits between 2016 to today, in large part due to Trump's first election win.
This should make anyone's skin crawl with the way this college's faculty and staff were treated, and the childish behavior of the students to allow this to happen. This gives a reason why "college kids" are no longer considered adults.
> "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:
- "The West Virginia bill is an outright ban on all marriages under 18. When the House advanced it to the Senate with a resounding 84 votes in support, just over 12 Republicans voted against it" ; ""The only thing it's going to do is cause harm and trouble in young people's lives," Harrison County Delegate Keith Marple, a Republican and the lone person to speak against the state bill" - https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-make-case-child-marriag...
i.e. Republicans being fine with 15 year olds "making their own choices" when it comes to marriage.
> "stating pronouns as a performative act" ; "Continue to deny that this worldview exists, and you will continue losing elections."
This is the United States where you stand up every day in school and performatively pledge allegiance to a flag, yes? Where you stop strangers in the street to "thank them for their service"? How are you so annoyed about someone putting "he/him" next to their name (but not about them putting captain/corporal/major/doctor/reverend next to their name), and as a response you vote for a man who admits sexual assault, has been convicted of federal crimes, lies about his experience, knowledge and credentials, spent $141,000,000 of your money playing golf - mostly at his own golf clubs, used the presidency to (illegally!) promote Goya products, nepotistically sent his own children as official US representatives to meetings? A president who performatively attends church for photo shoots but doesn't regularly attend church for prayer?
It's this kind of behaviour which gives rise to the jokes "the Right will eat a shit sandwich if it means the left will catch a whiff of their breath" and which makes a mockery of the claims that it's all the left's fault; the Right is fixated on trivial bullshit, arguing for the right to be able to lie and be jerks without being fact checked or facing any consequences, without a sense of proportion of different events, obsessed with being angry about the left's feelings and calling them snowflakes, while choosing who to vote for because a film character gets black skin instead of white skin.
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.
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.
I’m sure elites love that we’re spending more time arguing about tokenism in mediocre corporate franchise media and other nonsense than we are talking about economic and material concerns
This is a good write up that is sure to trigger a lot of people. The main two things I see coming out of this aggressive militant moralism is the death of public and to some degree private dialog. This is especially apparent in left-wing medias who seem to have completely cleaned up their writings to the point that now in order to get informed about what's actually going on you literally need a separate news source. Interesting discussions have also died out because there is one right way that everyone must adhere to, one correct language, one correct behavior. They died out because any voiced opinion that is slightly off is going to get canceled by the moralists so we're left with silence and private echo chambers. At this point its a religion where the tenets are more important than actual reality. As a fellow atheist I can't wait for it to dissipate.
I presume the essay went through many revisions earlier, but right now, talking about embers bursting into flame and burning hotter than ever feels a bit - awkward?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There was an essay by Ken Shirriff on the front page earlier, discussing political stuff but leaning in the opposite direction. It, at time of writing has 271pts vs this with 218pts.
No. And man, I feel like the quality of PG's essays have declined. Even if I agreed with a few points, it was so rambling, and just made so many leaps. The sheer length of it is a pretty good signal he didn't really work that hard on this.
I'd like to think "no", but we've debated a lot of dumb shit written by famous-in-some-circles people over the years.
I'd also push back on HN ever having been politically neutral. I think 20 years ago it was "politically naive" or "politically ignorant", but that's not the same thing.
Did pg really think through the timing of this essay?
Whether his intention or not, releasing this right now feels like it's part of a concerted effort by the SV ultra-rich to convince their fans that Trump Is Good Actually.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
We just had a day-long front page about why we need to feel shameful about using the term "Cargo Cult" because some tribe that positively no one is thinking about when they use the phrase believed a God would deliver cargo if they setup fake radio towers and used bamboo headsets. Some sort of hand wavy "why I am better than all of these fools who don't understand the real details" bit of noise. Colonialism or something. White guilt.
When I saw this PG article I wondered if that article inspired it. It is the perfect example of someone walking into something where zero people have ill intentions, and everyone understands exactly what that very useful term means, and telling us all we should stop using it because of their moral eye opening. Aren't we all better people now?
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?
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.
> 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!
> 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.
Summary: Rich white guy complains that it's too much effort to figure out what we're supposed to call 'coloured people' these days. It reads like the lament of a sore winner who has been forced to think of other's feelings against his will.
And all of this is couched in a pseudo-histororical style that perhaps the author hopes will shield it from being read as an 'emotional' argument.
And you know what's the worst thing? We live in a conservative world. They set the rules of the game, the draw the chalk outlines of the playing field, they own the ball the stadium and the referees.
And now they tell us we have to be silent when they rough us up too?
Yeah I guess wokeness and cancel culture are what you complain about now when your life is so free from challenges that you have nothing else to complain about.
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.
You all understand that this is to appease MAGA/trump right?
So what? well, are you not terrified? if they preemptively are going to such lengths to appease the racist MAGA crowd, are you not afraid of what they will do with all the data they collect and with the amount of dependency we have on tech?
Please be afraid. IDK, maybe watch star wars or something, the piece about how fear leads to anger, then hatred then violence should make you afraid. Have you ever seen CEOs an tech leaders line up to brown-nose a president before? what happens when he asks them to do even worse?
I don't find that to be true and I find your own rationale to be its own sort of performative moralism. Many normal people feel this way and it isn't to appease MAGA or Trump or whatever, including myself and many people I know who have been and/or are lifelong leftists. It is not impossible or even unlikely that people in higher positions developed these feelings on their own accord. I'm not saying your statement is always untrue, but it denies the people you're writing about much agency.
I think that what's happening is that people on all levels are now more comfortable in saying what they actually think or believe rather than saying things to avoid busting arbitrary social rules.
this has nothing to do with leftism or rightism. MAGA is not right-wing,they're fascist and authoritarian.
paulg has a reliable pattern of history, where he echoes the current trends in the tech company leadership circle. him, altman, musk, bezos,etc.. they run in the same circles. I am not even disagreeing with his sentiment of being against performative morality or equality, people on all sides of politics have been saying that for decades! the framing of anti-racist and anti-fascist people as "woke" and hijacking that conversation as a culture war item where any attempt to criticize racist and fascist systems and sentiment is classified as "woke" (they tried the term "SJW" a few years prior to "woke") is what is happening here, and it is very obvious.
You cannot plead ignorance on this!
This isn't about arbitrary social rules or saying "colored people" vs "people of color" or b.s. like that. that sort of mis-framing is mis-direction, straw-man reasoning. Someone tells you "hey, pay minorities a fair wage" and responding with "I can't call them _____, that's woke and political correctness", how sickening it is when the tech world shows its hypocrisy. Better to have performative morality many times over than willfully ignorant tolerance of hatred and prejudice. Use the terms "DEI" and "woke" in any context other than their original intended context and you're either a damn racist or an enabler.
I hope these people read this, I for one would be very vocal for calling them out and shaming them after they've drunk from the poisoned chalice of trump.
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.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now.
Graham is really skipping over some pretty significant whys and wherefores on how a term that dates back to, at least, 1923 becomes a pejorative starting around the '80s. Perhaps it is worth considering in what publications and media it became a pejorative, and who would benefit from others thinking it should be one.
While some folks who lived through the Sixties went into academia, others went on to own media empires. Those groups didn't have particularly aligned goals.
is this just me or this post also seems to be indicating some form of "moral superiority" and bias in the author's thinking?
To me it seems like Musk's twitter takoever has done more than just "neutralize" the wokeness of twitter. It has amplified factless-ness and fake claims beyond proportion.
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.
> 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.
It seems to me that there's no place for it precisely because of what PG calls "woke". Class consciousness doesn't work if it's not reciprocal. Obama put up great working class numbers, but the modern Democratic coalition isn't willing to pander to socially conservative views, so it doesn't work so well anymore.
A pithy but I really feel important example: a party with no room for Joe Rogan in it is definitionally not a party of the working class.
> Left strategy has been terrible for years. That's one of the consequences of the Woke movement. Far too much political capital was expended on niche issues. Gays are 3% of the US population. Trans are 0.3% of the US population. Can't win an election catering to those groups.
This isn't the left's strategy. It's the right's. The right targets these small groups because they know we won't let them be attacked. We will push back. It makes it very easy to paint the left as trying to cater to LGBT folk, but that's nonsense that only sells to those completely out of the loop. Which is unfortunately most of the US electorate. And it's not about it being a strategy. It's about being an ally against bigotry. It takes a really fucked up person to abandon millions of people to increased discrimination because you think it'll help your polling with middle America.
> 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?
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An Internet rails against political correctness, forgetting that it's not 1996 anymore. Some Hackernews decry the woke mob. No technology is discussed.
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.
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.
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?
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.
In any serious discipline, ranging from philosophy to mathematics, precision is a requirement. Here, "woke" is everything but precise. It's an umbrella term that the right uses with bad faith to discard any form of social struggle or claim for a more egalitarian society, then part of the left took ownership of the term (reverse stigma).
Then a quoted aberrations IMO,
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that.
These statements are typically what fuels some people's outrage. Who is PG to decide what is the right scale? In the US for example, too many black people lost their lives because of a systemic racism, at the scale of society (police, job, housing, ...). Is this not scaled enough? To me, it shows an incredible level of disconnection between the social class PG belongs to and the actual problems in society.
I read a tweet around 2014 that was very short and simple and stayed with me for a while and now seems prescient. It was something like "man, anti-SJW is getting worse than SJW" (using sjw as the precursor for woke). Makes me think that reactions are sometimes stronger than the actions they go against and can often be swinging too far the other way.
I think part of this is correct regarding the professors who started off as "radicals" or hippies in the 1960s but there is no mention of why the cultural revolution of the 1960s happened in here. Couldn't that be examined more closely?
In my opinion, we have been undergoing a cultural clash for power at the top of society for decades between various groups. At one point in time this country was firmly in the hands of WASPs. Waves of immigrants arrived in cities who clashed with them. There were fights about who could get into the most powerful universities which was directly related to the struggle for power between the groups. Wokeness in the US, is in my opinion, a consequence of identity politics which we have had for some time. I think identity politics is probably more natural than not having it because we see it all over the planet. I think a lot of people have created a narrative that they are fighting against identity politics but in fact have just recreated it in different terms.
I can't be the only one that sees "wokeness" and general political radicalization (on either side) as being explainable by the collapse of religion and nationality as the key sources of identity and group-inclusion.
Political identities are modern-day religions, basically.
I'm not saying it's better to be actually religious - this isn't some sob-story about how the decline of religiosity is some great evil. I'm just pointing out the parallel: that something that's consumed A LOT of human energy and attention has disappeared in 1 generation leaving a huge vacuum of meaning for most people, and people are filling that vacuum with political identities.
Doesn't this list work for both political movements and religions: shared moral frameworks, common enemies, a metaphysical value system, sense of belonging, set of virtues and sins, rigid orthodoxy, regular rituals (protests, boycotts, etc), transcendent societal goals, conflict-as-sacred-struggle, etc.
Overly simplistic, maybe; but I think I'm not too far off.
As defined in a Florida lawsuit, woke is, "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." I think that is generally true. I also agree with parts of what PG stated. More than anything, I think the term 'woke' as defined above has been twisted by both sides, and action is more important that talking.
Focusing on the term “wokeness” is a bit silly. I’ve always liked to think of it (“it” being the wave of political thought that came into influence around 2013 or so) as the latest wave of the civil rights movement. I call it “social justice” since they often use that term, but of course that term has been around for decades as well. It doesn’t matter what name you use, as long as we agree on the phenomenon we’re describing.
But really, you can trace it back further than the 60’s, as far back as in the 1920’s with C Wright Mills. He was a sociologist who essentially argued that science shouldn’t pursue explanatory knowledge, but rather emancipatory knowledge. The idea was that science can’t be some external objective thing apart from human political systems.
As for why it didn’t enter the national awareness until the last decade, I have no idea. But I think it has to do with the internet, that’s my intuition.
I would have to refute the notion that wokeness is a mind virus. "Stay Woke" has a much deeper origin in African American culture, and it refers to the fact that one needs to stay vigilant about another's intentions.
The implicit message is that the "us" cannot trust the "they", and writers like Paul Graham show the reason why: Any attempt at social change can easily be labeled a virus by capitalists if it does not produce greater prosperity. It's the same prosperity that has poisoned the earth, so I hope they have answers there too.
>"Stay Woke" has a much deeper origin in African American culture, and it refers to the fact that one needs to stay vigilant about another's intentions.
Yes, this origin is correct as I remember it. I first heard the term publicly from Larry on his show a decade or so ago, mainly referring to police interactions. He presented it well using comedy, unlike the rabid versions of today. He presented it too well as today, it seems this movement has since taken over by (mostly) white college people to service their own selfish ends; that's the mind virus part.
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.
> I would have to refute the notion that wokeness is a mind virus.
So would anyone with even 4th grade critical thinking skills. Sadly the text is riddled with the kind of naive, unearned confidance that dominated Sillicon Valley in the early 2000s.
I grew up then, every kid on a computer was smarter than the entire world put together. If only things were run by engineers all the problems would be fixed. We werent racist, or sexist, as long as you used Latex for your work, and Vim for your coding and looked down on humanities you belonged.
Only problem is, engineers did end up running everything. FB replaced traditional media, and what it achieved rather than the mass of uninformed working class, the mildly educated propagandised working class and perpetrating owner class. Well you ended up with heaps of misinformation, 2 genocides (one in africa and another in asia), 2 stable countries brought to the brink of civil war with brexit and trumpism, an arab spring that led to a decade of unstable countries from Lybia to Afghanistan. And the same safeguards that have been built for traditional media are now being built for FB, just 2 decades late and with way less regulatory teeth than the goverment fines imposed to early yellow newspapers.
Uber and wework were another engineer led proyects. Transport and Offices all gonna be cheap, available and with that magic Sillicon valley sauce, where people at google use a slide to go to work. But now wework is a documentary of failure and hubris and Uber is on a long term bet for self driving cars to try and abate its unionising workers who are recreating the old taxi system without the medallions or insurance.
Tesla and Airbnb were gonna change our lives. But one is a plastic badly built car with no lidar because its owner made a bad bet a decade ago, and the other is being demonised in every city for aggravating the housing crisis while remaining less safe and more expensive than most hotels.
Engineers like PG run the show and we are recreting 100 years of guardrails, while they become billionaires over our inability to stop them and punish them. They then buy newspapers, social media platforms and think tanks and destroy words made up by marginalised communities to use as insults. Then useful idiots like PG read the insult, and not the original word and write lengthy essays with nothing interesting to say because they are attacking a strawman created by a republican think tank because some billionaire cant say the n word anymore.
Where I live, while I was at school, the proper way to say that a person was of colour, was the word "negro" (in Portuguese, and I think also in Spanish).
At the time, using the word that directly translates to "black" in English "preto", was considered extremely offensive and was never to be used applied to a person.
Now, fast-forward a few years and the influence of American woke culture, the word "negro" is now connected with the N-word slur in English and is considered offensive. You now have people of colour demanding to be called "preto".
This is one of the many insanities that the woke movement brought us. I'm glad the world is changing away from it.
It might be helpful and interesting to expand on the history. Was this an active effort to reclaim the word? That makes all the difference. People might not choose the word you would prefer when they form their own identities.
The 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.
> 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.
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")
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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).
Wokeness is what happens when you have socially liberal and fiscally conservative investors / executives try to please their democratic leaning employees without having to pay more taxes. It costs them nothing, so you get corporations and the media to embrace race and gender progressivism with a full clamp down on any true progressive causes like universal health care, free education and etc.
The same VCs crying about wokeness are also crying about a collapse of the manufacturing base in the US, when they're the ones responsible for offshoring all of it and not investing in any business that deal with physical goods because software are so much larger.
As an example, yes Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions.
"Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions". I think you hit the nail on the head. There is a whole chapter to be written about pro/anti "wokeness" stances used by companies / politicians to divert attention from the deeper class vs class issues.
Wokeness is also a way the media can smack down candidates like Corbin and Sanders, labeling them sexist or an antisemite for focusing on class instead of identity politics.
It is no coincidence that wokeness arose during Occupy Wall Street, and the insistence on the use of the "progressive stack" was part of what destroyed that protest movement.
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.
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.
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.
Someone should study the anti woke they way these people focus on woke so much. I don't get it? If it's truly just words why are so bothered by them, let them go for the worthless words they are.
I think it's related to the perceived centrality of identity in the world. I see this as a natural consequence of individualism, which itself is championed by both modern capitalist and libertarian thinking, to pick two.
As the focus on the individual's happiness, wealth, values (etc.) have become more and more ubiquitous, the need to define oneself becomes more and more important. As this has matured, many systems have build that reinforce it. Representative democracy - one person, one vote, and welfare systems that address indivudual needs, are positive examples.
With this comes also a much stronger need for protecting these identities, and more weight is given to perceived categories, whether they are superficial, like skin colour, or structural, like religion or class.
So, when people talk about wokeness, they are not only trying to define the social contract, but they also aligning with it their identity, which gives a kind of existential urgency. The idea that we might be wrong about our position carries with it a sense of loss of self, which triggers most people.
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.
Spending time teaching people to use people of color instead of black is just performant. Actually firing a recruiter that immediately throws any black resume into the trash is real change.
This seems illustrative of the "boogeyman" points that many commenters are making. I think it is a very small number of people who don't want people to call black people "black", and that the majority of liberal people would find the notion "you can't call them black people" to be ridiculous.
Are there people who believe this? I'm sure there are, but I think they are a vocal minority.
"People of color" is a broader term than "black people", and is meant to replace the (pretty widely accepted as) offensive "colored people", not "black people". I feel like it's useful to have a non-offensive phrase that means "nonwhites" without being defined in terms of white people, but maybe I'm just too woke to reason effectively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think that inclusive language became a symbol of a step too far. If you expect me to adjust some governmental policies to make a better society that's fine, but if you expect me to change the way I express myself because you personally don't like it and you have a bunch of bullies behind you, that's just not okay and should be fought against.
But I suppose the color of their skin means they don't count towards the particular argument that dude is trying to make. Not calling him racist of course. I'm not even suggesting it.
[update] Hey! Look! I was down-voted for mentioning that white people are being killed on a daily basis, what an absolute surprise :D
Institutionalized racism, sexism, and the general idea that some lives matter less than others kills people every day through healthcare claim denials, red-lined neighborhood districts with lack of infra for safe access to food/water/health/civil services, etc. If you want explicit violence, police in the USA literally kill people at alarmingly high rates usually reserved mostly for countries with notoriously violent regimes or gangs, beating out Mexico, Sudan, Rwanda [1].
"Wokeness" is a fake bear the right has built up to distract from class issues and sow dissent amongst workers and stave off class solidarity. Progressive policy is largely embraced by the majority of Americans [2], but because the right (and its newfound grifter-billionare tech exec class like PG, Musk, Zuck, etc.) have convinced an overwhelmingly large amount of Americans that their woes are because we have gender neutral bathrooms (instead of wage theft by the C suite), it is peddled and use as a smokescreen to continually push through policy and regime changes that will only every serve the .1%.
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
It seems like pg sees good parts with "wokeness", and also bad parts. He want to continue with the good parts, while getting rid of the bad parts. The essay mostly seems to speak about the historical context, and how to work with "wokeness" so the good parts can persist, rather than "whining about having to show empathy".
Lots of comments here would do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay they deem worse, as currently there seems to be a lot of handwavey-arguments based solely on the title alone.
> do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay
I mean its a pretty big train wreck from the start to the end but I will try to point some of the dumbest lines, and pg is a smart guy so this is a particularly weird miss by him.
>> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness
This is simply not true. Stay Woke is a phrase that has a long history and it mostly related to paying attention to political issues not correctness. The hashtag where it became mainstream was around the shooting of an african american man by the police. It wasn't cancelling someone for saying something dumb, it was because police brutality has a never ending history in the states.
One of the first issues it was used on was freeing P*ssy Riot an anti goverment band from Russia, again not a political correctness instance but one of censorship and violence.
>> Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.
He admits he uses the word pejoritively but does not examine why a word that begins in a marginalised community is now mostly an insult. Like that is beyond irresponsible. if you and your gf have a petname and I start using it as an insult, and I control the media and the word becomes a common word to mean dumbass and I analyse it as that, then I am 1) siding with the bully 2) being a shit reporter.
>> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
This is just stupid because "the woke" is not a real group of people, he even admits he uses it as an insult, and secondly because he has no reason to know at what scale it is a problem. Handwaving a problem that doesn't affect you is bonkers, like I'd walk in an oncology ward and say "the scale that cancer is killing you is exagerated, but its a real problem". Paul Graham is a 60 year old white dude who went to Harvard, a uni that invented Essays to admit more white kids instead of jews, sport scholarships to put more white kids than asians thorugh and that was caught admitting white kids with worse grades than asians and was sued for it. He benefits from racism in the instituion he went to, spends his life in a subject that has 0 to do with policy, politics or race and then starts a paragraph with "racism isnt so bad yall".
>> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that
They led to the crumbling of the vietnam war, the desmitification of the american military and the end of racial segregation. I know he was a kid when it all happened but the 60s movements can hardly be called failed political projects.
I could go on because its all equally unbased and plainfully dumb. But I think just pointing out the kind of basic mistakes he has in terms of how he treats the subject means you can easily spot other equally dumb conclusions or assertions.
Another dumb conclusion, specially coming from someone with a background in computer science is
>> Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect people to seek it out. But they do.
We KNOW that anger is the most potent emotion in the brain, therefore social media algorithms favour it. AI feeds based on "engagement" feed people anger, people dont seek it out. Shareholders and people like Paul Graham who think humanities are stupid do by creating machines that interact with humans in ways that are completely unethical.
Most people are killed by someone they know. Due to redlining many minorities live in communities that are, to this day, essentially segregated. Add the disproportionate correlation of violence and poverty, adn you get a volatile cocktail.
You will find it that cities with less redlining have less srong correlation between races of victims and perpetrators than cities that are more strongly, or more recently, redlined.
Sure, for the same reasons 84% of white people are killed by white perpetrators, and most child abusers are family members of the victim. Closeness brings both opportunity and conflict, and things like redlining and white flight have ensured the white and black population are quite well segregated.
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)
> 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.
In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
It bothers me so much that Paul Graham people thinks it's performative. He can't imagine anyone actually, sincerely holding those beliefs, because he doesn't hold them himself. If someone is trying to modify their beliefs and then their behaviour, say, by mild self-censorship, he's got a list of insults ready for that person trying to better themselves: prig, politically correct, woke.
It's not performative. We really do believe that there are injustices and that if we can begin by changing the language, we can change the behaviour.
Just because Paul Graham can't imagine himself sincerely believing in self improvement followed by social improvement doesn't mean we don't believe it in ourselves.
Actually I think that's exactly the problem with "wokeness" today. People care so much about minorities that we've come to a point where people will be extremely quick to cancel someone online who says something wrong but the same people turn a blind eye to the actual injustices that happen in the world like homelessness and hunger. It's easier to ban someone who says something ignorant than it is to go out and advocate for building new homes or deciding to stop buying on Amazon and Temu to curb the capitalism that people seem to hate so much.
Change needs to happen and I think the "woke" are at least working in the right direction compared to a lot of the right (who seem to be moving back a lot of progress that's been made in the last 50 years) even if their actions are woefully inadequate.
I feel like it's important to enter this part of the cycle where the absolute worst people feel comfortable entering their most heinous takes into the permanent internet record under the delusion that the social pressure to be a good person has been defeated forever.
This is effectively putting the popcorn into the popper, but it won't be served until about ten years from now.
But it's not just minorities who are being harassed and killed on a daily basis, so why should they get special consideration? That's the problem I have with it. It puts people into buckets, and then claims one bucket is more important than the others, even when that bucket is statistically insignificant compared to the others. Wokism is simply racism rebranded.
I think they don't care at all, this is just signalling, different camp has the power to rule the country now and suddenly all of them are changing their minds
If you look how many white people are killed by blacks versus blacks killed by white people, you will have a shock. Even when you account for whites being a few times more than blacks in the general population.
I really don't buy this "minorities" are being killed story.
This is how to lie with statistics. Two things can be true without contradiction. Does a black gang member randomly killing an innocent white person cancel a white cop randomly killing an innocent black man?
There will never be anything funnier than a massive article which talks about the "origin of wokeness" that fails to, at any point, talk about the actual origin of "wokeness" – Black communities online.
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
> Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.
Wow, PG downplaying racism and sexism was not on my 2025 bingo card.
I hear some good points and I can understand the fatigue with cancel culture; still, discussing recent movements like blm and #metoo in negative light only seems very narrow.
I guess especially for rich celebrities movements like these and the power they represent can feel limiting, threatening, to the point of feeling targeted.
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).
> 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.)
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.
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that.
Au contraire, the idea that racism is a problem is now labeled "critical race theory" and it's a crime to spread this knowledge to students in multiple states.
Teachers in Oklahoma can't teach students the fact that the Tulsa Massacre was race-driven.
So Paul himself, it appears, has given himself over to the wokeness by acknowledging that racism is a genuine problem.
This is a dishonest argument. Paul can oppose an ideology without agreeing with everyone and especially extremists who also oppose that same ideology.
I dont think wokeness or paul graham are communist or fascist respectively so forgive the hysterical sound of the analogy im going to make here, but i think your argument is similar in reasoning to this one:
You oppose fascism? Well, fascism opposed gulags. If you oppose gulags I guess you were a fascist after all."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
“Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless, can't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same thing to political correctness.
…
My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a hostile work environment could constitute sex discrimination, which in turn affected universities via Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person, but since for a professor merely being the subject of a sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of things that might not be said ‘with ladies present.‘“
I’m linking two thoughts the essay doesn’t explicitly connect, but which I think is important to the thesis of why 2010-era cancel culture didn’t get cancelled itself, and that’s its almost autoimmune capacity to cancel comedians.
That said, Graham elides over how cancel culture was renamed “woke.” Was it the left or the right who did this? I suspect the latter, at which point we have to contend with the existence of two mind viruses, the cancel-culture/woke one and the anti-woke totem of the left.
Also, this requires more thought: “publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained in business fell in the direction they'd already been leaning: left.”
Why? And why have right-wing publications failed to gain comparable traction?
> My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not
See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice or start saying the only thing they care about is “Gods and Guns”.
FWIW: I was born and raised in southern GA and have only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL.
They are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian.
I don't disagree, but I do think it's important to note whether the person is mocking the southern accent or just imitating it as a form of flattery. Often it's the former rather than the latter. The (vast) majority of the time I hear someone doing a southern accent it's for purposes of making fun of them, especially for being stupid/redneck. I don't think it's unreasonable to be offended when somebody is mocking you.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's interesting that none of these anti-woke oracles can tell that they're at the center of an even greater cancel culture mob than the one they purported to be against. Wasn't PG just getting canceled a few months ago by the right for speaking up about Palestine? Give it a few years, this manifesto will look hilarious.
Of course they can tell they're at the centre of an even greater cancel culture mob, the writing of these articles is entirely with fear of avoiding cancellation in mind...
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.
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.
if you're going to talk about history, it really helps to ground your narrative in real people, events, or statements. This all comes off as a history of vibes, and I don't remember the same vibes at all (maybe because I wasn't on twitter).
When pg does make contact with reality, it mostly doesn't even support his narrative. He mentions the George Floyd protests and the MeToo movement/Weinstein - by any measure real social justice issues where the perpetrators deserved condemnation!
He also mentions the Bud Light boycotts as a case of going "too woke", but Bud Light's actions were not an "aggressive performative focus on social justice." Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever. It was the boycott by anti-trans bigots that politicized that incident.
Also not on twitter, other than to camp my name. I disagree with your reading of the essay - he says that both of those were sort of "peaks" for their respective movements, and I would say that feels accurate to me. I'm in a mixed-race family, and George Floyd was the first and so-far only period where our family needed additional support, talk, help, considering how to respond.
I agree that Anheuser-Busch seemed to have been stunlocked by Dylan Mulvaney v. Kid Rock on the internet.
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.
> He also mentions the Bud Light boycotts as a case of going "too woke", but Bud Light's actions were not an "aggressive performative focus on social justice." Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever. It was the boycott by anti-trans bigots that politicized that incident.
This is a double standard. For example, Contrapoints was cancelled for using Buck Angel to do a 10 second voice over in one video[1]. A far less politically charged association with someone than what Bud Light did. In this regard, I think the left has been the ones who primarily set the rules of engagement for the last few years. Can't complain when those same rules are used against you.
Contrapoints, her defenders, and her critics (mostly) were all on the left. I don't know the person you linked to, but she seems to be defending Contrapoints from a left theoretical perspective. It's deeply disingenuous to argue that bigoted right-wing campaigns are justified by some subset of people on the left being cruel to other people on the left.
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.
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.
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.
> For sake of argument, what if the answer truly is "do it quietly"?
Then why is the richest man in the world buying a social media platform? Why is Bezos buying newspapers?
Why are christian preachers shouting at everyone all the time?
Why are republican think tanks and lobbysits spending their entire career fighting tooth and nail against public education and healthcare?
Why are those preachings not demonised, or considered a problem and why is no one asking them to do it quietly?
> Except I don't think these tactics are effective at all
The loudest president of all time just won re election despite being a convicted felon, he will walk next week into the white house with his wife the ex playboy model voted by Evangelicals who say gay people are the devil.
Idk it seems like empirically the attempts to demonise wokeness as a loud abbrasive movement that "doesnt work" is an attempt to disuade the fact that it DOES work the only issue is one side is much much much louder due to owning the means of communication and can create consent around their behaviour.
Or is Zuck coming out and saying " we need more masculine energy" and removing all DEI iniatives at FB a week before trump takes office not the same kind of pandering behaviour just "anti woke"? Or Elon talking about how we need "Christian values", when he has 11 children from 7 women, 3 of whom worked for him, he has more money than god and wont share it with any good causes, while he buys a social media platform to force everyone to hear each one of his brain farts not the same kind of pandering?
That aint quiet, subtle or living anyones best life. Yet PG is not writting an essay about their behaviour, or calling that pandering and katowing to anti intellectualism which is a much worse cause than social justice btw
> "What if it's most effective to .. instead of preaching about what people should do, you just do what it is that you believe to be right?"
It isn't. See these LessWrong articles[1,2,3] about charitable giving for more reasoning. People take ideas, understanding of the world, behavioural cues, from what we see around us. From the first link, a charitable fund raise over a mailing list involved quiet private donations without fanfare, and public mailing list posts about why (other) people were not going to donate, why it was a bad idea. None of the donators posted publicly in support of donating.
I could make up any number of examples, but here[4] is a recent news article about two young lesbian women living together who "had been spat at in the street and received anonymous messages - including abuse scrawled across their front door on Christmas Day". What good does it do them if everyone who supports them does it quietly, and everyone who hates them does it loudly and publicly? What world does it lead to when spitting on someone in the street is fine, but speaking out against it is "woke leftist moralizing"? What world does it lead to when people who are not involved looking around to see how others are behaving (bystander effect) see LGBT hate enacted, written, spoken, and don't see or hear anyone around them speaking against it?
Would the young women care if someone vocally complaining about it at the pub is genuinely annoyed or just performatively status grabbing?
Seems pretty clear from history that just quietly living your life while horrors whirl around you is a personally comfortable way to live your life, but is not an effective way to change any of the horrors. Whereas taking arms against the horrors can be an effective way to change the horrors regardless of whether you're doing it because you really want to, or because you were peer pressured into it, or because you are just going along with what everyone else is doing.
It's very telling that he gives Marxist-Leninism as an example of moral orthodoxy instead of the much more relevant Capitalist orthodoxy that exists in the U.S. which he viciously upholds. It's pretty clear that it's much more acceptable to rail against DEI, "wokeism", etc., than it is to suggest that a different economic system is possible in American society. There's very few people in power that can get away with suggesting that there can be something better than Capitalism, or even admitting that there's some problems that Capitalism just can't fix. Most of the progressives or "wokes" in power only go so far as suggesting refinements and guardrails for the current system. Meanwhile, roughly half our elected officials rabidly speak out against the "woke" with no consequences, and the media clearly props up the current system against all else.
It's just so frustrating to see guys like Paul Graham pretend like they're somehow outside of or above "orthodoxy" and "ideology", to use their own terms. "Wokeism" is a religion, but somehow "anti-wokeism" isn't? My point isn't that all of what they label "wokeism" is good or that Capitalism is all bad, it's that there is a hypocrisy in their beliefs that belies their whole argument.
Above all it's just embarrassing to see, and it kills me that they paint their obvious orthodoxy as heresy, when it's anything but.
“Anti wokeism” is to atheism what wokeism is to Christianity. It can turn into a religion in its own right sure but it’s origin is disbelief in another ideology.
Used to be we just called people who went overboard promoting their beliefs assholes, or zealots, or ideologues. So many perfectly descriptive words. You'll never want for a synonym to avoid excess repetition.
Why take a perfectly good, specific, and useful word like woke and wrap it up in all this?
As an outsider, the rambling against wokeness is insufferable, even though I personally agree with some points usually brought up.
I only found out what wokeness is from people ranting against it, and never really see anyone arguing in favor of it. It has become a mania of the right.
Oh god why is pg even writing about this? Why does every aging, decrepit Silicon Valley oligarch think the world needs to hear their opinion on political correctness? It's all becoming too much. Please buy a diary and write your important thoughts there.
I admire PG's essays, but this one seems to give an origin theory about a complex societal issue without any evidence.
My pet theory is is that liberalism won the battle with conservatism and achieved everything useful that it could with it's existing instruments. But then it kept looking for something more and went into wokeness with good intentions. With women's equality and gay marriage the movement was able to convince people and also create legislation. When going into equity and inclusiveness there isn't a legislative solution (or there are, but they don't do much to fix the root of the problem). And people are already convinced that it's good in theory. The only solution is to make an incredible effort to actually help the communities that are raising the disadvantaged- an incredibly challenging task. Instead they maintained the existing approach of convincing and cancellations and DEI policies (in place of legislation).
I think the approach for liberalism to get back on track and achieve their goals is to do the hard work of helping disadvantaged children. If you want to make a difference, the Big Brothers Big Sisters program is a program that helps things at their root- improving the support structure of children in need.
This 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case.
This seems like a good argument. It's very clear that 'wokeness'/political correctness is more about fixating on syntax (the literal words used) over semantics (the intention of the speaker). But in my book, it's the intention that matters — in fact I'd argue it's the only thing that matters. If you're choosing to wilfully misinterpret and be offended by something someone innocently said, that's completely on you. We shouldn't celebrate the act of taking offence, but at the same time we should all make an effort not to accidentally create it. Why are people who can do both seemingly so rare?
This post feels like Paul Graham is another billionaire(or multi-milionaire, whatever) to confess his past sins in attempt to win a seat in Trump's administration....
There were some interesting points, thanks for sharing.
One of the fallouts from this movement, is that the identity of the groups of people “wokeness” (sorry, I am using terms from his article) claimed to protect, are now intrinsically linked to this movement without their consent.
I am politically progressive, but strongly believe in free speech especially when it comes to science and research. But as a trans person, I do genuinely need help sometimes to overcome folks biases, since we make up less than 1% of the population.
My fear now is that social-justice warriors might have unintentionally made things even more difficult and complicated for me, because what I do to survive is intrinsically linked to a modern political movement.
Hopefully something that will be considered, for folks against dogmatism/puritanism who still understand bias :(
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
As an extreme outsider (and mostly emotionally uninvested) to this whole scene, and having read a few of the most popular articles, I've always taken Paul Graham to be an intelligent and articulate person. This article is has made me really reevaluate my judgement.
I'm open to thinking about and discussing the points he is raising, but his arguments and the presentation feel weird and flimsy. Lots of anecdata, cherry-picked history, bad arguments propped up by debatable ideas presented as facts. And weird, almost sociopathic lack of empathy (eg: the 2020 "a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video" event)?
I mean, sure aggressive policing of speech and performance in social media is somewhat dumb, but any normal mind should be able to look behind the overreaction and realise that the underlying issues raised are valid and pressing.
Is article is just a performance piece in preparation for the incoming regime?
The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk does a really good job of tracing the history of "woke". In particular he does a good job of not lumping woke in with all left ideas.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
even though I agree with much of his commentary, the piece that's missing is in the questions: were you principled and brave? how were you an example?
I know what I did, and some of it is in my comment history on this site. but I think the whole episode was a failure of moral courage. sure, it was the woke, but really, it was us. I think anyone feeling more free to speak now needs to reflect on that. Watching Zuck on Rogan was refreshing and hopeful, but that (very Harvard) oblivious affect that blows with the wind is not a foundation on which to rebuild the culture.
there's a very compelling take from the woke, which summarizes as, "you don't get to say mean and dumb shit without a cost anymore, and we're not bearing the costs of your culture that is set up to exclude us." This must be heard, and most criticisms of the totalitarian moment that seized our culture overlook that this argument was the kernel of truth that anchored the system of chaos and lies that followed.
to most of them I would respond, "you othered yourselves and when adults wouldn't listen to you, you organized to terrorize kids about their 'privilege.'" however, for our civilization to survive, there is a social re-integration of a lot of people that needs to be done so that there is an us again, and a sense of our shared protagonism.
I'm glad PG, Andreesen, Zuck, Musk, and others are addressing this stuff. Elon's massive gambit and persistent leadership, and Zuck hiring Dana White for the Meta board are very good starts.
If you want to be a part of rebuilding after this dark period, ask yourself if you had courage when it was hard, and reflect on when you didn't so that you don't fail like that again.
I did, and do, and each day I pay the price and then some.
Free speech and research is critical in order for our society to thrive. That said, it is not mutually exclusive with helping folks that need a little help to integrate and contribute when they really want to? It’s sad to see changes that helped, getting thrown out for its association with a social craze.
I find it hilarious that the prophet of modern Startup Culture and its subsequent proliferation of Y Combinator/FAANG cult practices (e.g. growth at all costs or practising agile as a copy-cat set of misunderstood tech rituals) is blind to fact that the only ones proselytising about "wokeness" these days are the same ones trying to outrage you about it (i.e. Fox News and Elon Musk) in order to distract you from the fact that wealth and resources are being hoarded by the very same companies/individuals.
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.
A well-considered essay from PG. I thought this part, discussing a practical approach to dealing with disagreement of beliefs, was particularly insightful:
> Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.
> If we're not sure what to do about any particular manifestation of wokeness, imagine we were dealing with some other religion, like Christianity. Should we have people within organizations whose jobs are to enforce woke orthodoxy? No, because we wouldn't have people whose jobs were to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Should we censor writers or scientists whose work contradicts woke doctrines? No, because we wouldn't do this to people whose work contradicted Christian teachings. Should job candidates be required to write DEI statements? Of course not; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs. Should students and employees have to participate in woke indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No, because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way about their religion.
For better or worse, I don't think much practical possibility stems from this insight, and I wish PG had considered the possibility that the enforcement of some orthodoxy is unavoidable, and that the liberal environment he's describing is a vacuum into which some orthodoxy will inevitably insert itself.
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.
It's interesting that pg doesn't connect the type of thinking and indoctrination he sees in wokeness with similar types of thinking and indoctrination we currently see in followers of Trump. Crowds of people holding up "mass deportation now" signs, the governor of Texas ordering flags at full mast for the inauguration in the middle of a period of mourning [1], Republican politicians refusing to say whether or not Trump lost the 2020 election [2], Republican state legislatures trying to minimize mentions of LGBTQ topics in the classroom. Not only is much of it performative, as he complains about in the essay, but it has the feel of religion more than just a political movement. It almost seems like one could rewrite this essay with the focus on Trump instead of wokeness.
This part in particular seems misguided if only because pg fails to recognize that "the next thing" is already here and wearing a red MAGA hat.
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because there will be a next thing.
Interesting. But that shouldn't surprise us. "Performative" means you're doing something to be seen, not because it's really "you". Well, when the power shifts, then who it's worth being performative for also shifts. I wonder if that's what we've been seeing in the shifts since November.
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.
Incredible article, thank you for sharing. The parallels to unwelcome and unsolicited religious proselytizing is something I've been calling out for years, and ironically have often been met with extreme hatred and condemnation in response.
Never in my life did I think that nearly every institution, company, corporation, (you name it), would compel and coerce people into following a narrow set of societal rules that appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and grated firmly against a functional, albeit imperfect, status quo -- most of which was accepted and even celebrated by most people in Western nations.
What's terrifying to me is how acceptable it became to write and defend academic literature around these manufactured problems, specifically for "prigs" to justify their abhorrent behavior towards other people.
I'm glad more people are finally willing to have an honest discussion about this, without immediately labeling it a "right-wing talking piece", as too many so lazily love to do.
It's magnificently Paul Graham that he wrote some incredibly long essay called "The Origins Of Wokeness" without ever discussing, the origins of wokeness. Whatever you think about the current situation of "wokeness", the fact that pg manages to never once mention the origin of the term, going back to Marcus Garvey and Leadbelly, speaks to pg's monumental intellectual incuriosity.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, the origin of “wokeness”, the term, is right-leaning bigots who need to discount any grievance by any group of people who claim they might just possibly be suffering some systemic disadvantages in this country.
Nope. It was a term of respect and affirmation in the African American community first, and seems to have been successfully expropriated and rebranded.
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?
Nobody is annoyed people are whining about civil rights. We are annoyed that people a) are whining about non-issues that they have gone out of their way to be offended by, and b) are demanding that the rest of us change the world based on their blown out of proportion views.
>People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon
People have always done lots of things. The degree, intensity, and manner with which they do them varies and matters.
>And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue
They could be already focusing on the issue. Or they could be ignoring it. That's their decision. Perhaps they have problems of their own to tackle first. Nobody has to be an activist about some cause just because another wants them to.
The problem with performative justice is that (when the performative types get enough power) its bizarre demands and rituals are imposed onto and everybody else, with little recourse.
Another problem is that the performative justice diverts resources to tackle the performative insignificant or detrimental aspects instead of the real issue.
>Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe?
Wouldn't solve the issues described in the article caused by performative justice, from stiffling academic discussion, to creating an outrage factory that diverts the press from its mission and polarises society to a detrimental effect.
> People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue.
You can do both: focus on fixing performative "justice" in order to fix the issue. Particularly the part that is spinning your arguments and using them for injustice, making them appear weaker.
There's a strategy: support flawed people on your team, because they'll help your team overall. And sometimes this is good, even necessary, e.g. voting for the less-bad candidate in an election. But sometimes there are teammates who are counter-productive even for their own goals. You don't even have to eject these people, but you have to correct them, or they'll make your team worse than if they didn't exist.
When I hear conservative arguments, they rarely if ever target the points I think are reasonable and obvious. They target points that I think aren't worth defending (e.g. "illegal immigrant who commit armed robbery not deported"), and points that I think are worth defending but require nuance (which can be defended with some form of "you're correct, although..." to reveal and protect the reasonable part). Conservatives win voters by targeting the weakest points, which just about anyone previously uninformed would side against; "performative justice" creates most of these points, and attacks against attacks against performative justice protect them.
It's like a bottleneck or unstable pillar in a building. You don't want to divert everyone to fixing it, because the overall pipeline or building is the ultimate priority, but it has to be addressed. Likewise, fixing the issue is still the ultimate priority, and I don't expect everyone to address performative justice, but somebody has to do it.
// Now you're just being performative about performative people. //
Nice ricochet.
I'm grateful to Paul Graham for actually giving a definition of "woke". Really, this is the first anti-woke essay I've seen which actually tells us exactly what the author is complaining about.
And it makes it rather abundantly clear why nobody else has given a definition of exactly what the author is complaining about.
You would think these tech oligarchs might be concerned with some other problem facing th world. This is the only one they seem to care about and much of it just seems like fragile ego.
I did not expect CEOs / industry titans to fall in line with the new regime so quickly, in the few weeks since Trumps election most tech leaders have completely changed their public stance on these topics. Why are they so afraid? Or are they simply happy to drop the charade as it seems clear the wind blows the other way now?
I wasn’t feeling very positive about all the talk about making the world a better place but recently I’ve become quite cynical, it’s really just about the money it seems. I even find this whole hacker ethic quite stupid now, basically all that ethos about free software was just instrumented by corporations to extract wealth, and now that AI is seemingly around the corner they can finally drop most people building the software for them, as that was always the biggest cost center anyway.
IMO most of these CEOs are not motivated by wokeness or anti wokeness. They are motivated by money, and the freedom to take whatever action they deem appropriate both inside and outside their companies.
Biden was anti-monopoly and Trump is pro-corporate, so these CEOs are just naturally aligning according to their own motivations. And like all people, sometimes they take on the other priorities of the group, to feel that they fit in.
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?
I don't disagree with a lot of what he says here, but I feel like too many people in Silicon Valley are hyper-fixated on the conformity and enforcement coming from the left, while ignoring and even stoking the flames of anger and conformity on the right. Particularly his points on news, because much of the news is now heavily skewed to the right.
PG would do well to reflect similarly on the rise of the right wing equivalents and recognize that they're the ones actively stymying progress on many of the critical issues of our time.
it's not about the "meaning" of the word but more the way people use it and its connotations.
it is often code for a racist or homophobic sentiment the speaker doesn't want to own up to.
when people say "things are getting too woke" - let's be honest, they are often saying that people who were once unfairly marginalized (black people, gay people, women) are getting less marginalized.
People on the left don't like to admit it, but a lot of the left wing activism we see today growing out from the 1960s was directly influenced by the Soviet Union and it's "active measures" programs
According to the KGB defector Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, the Soviets actively encouraged colleges to focus on studies away from science and engineering, and also encouraged the "break down" of things like "religion" and "family" to make for more fertile soil for the inevitable communist takeover. At best such measures were focused on encouraging anti-nuclear activism to reduce the US capacity for nuclear retaliation in the event of a total war. At worst it led to Cultural Revolution style critiques of college faculty. Despite the Soviet Union being gone, the cultural aspects of these efforts live on (mostly in Sociology departments)
People on the right don't like to admit it, but a ton of the right wing "activism" we see TODAY is from modern Russian efforts to try the same sort of interference on the right (and still to a lesser extent on the left). There was no one from the 80s more disallusioned by the old Soviet tactics using left wing actors than Putin (who was in contact with left wing Red Army Faction terrorist groups in Germany). He's sought to try the same tactics out on the right which has been incredibly receptive to conspiracy theories of all kinds.
There's an active campaign to erode the public's faith in science (anti-vaccine movements, ivermectin being a cure-all for everything) and journalism. Spread through channels like Rogan's podcast, and perhaps even Mr. Musk himself who spreads propaganda about big lies like "Ukraine having some sort bioweapons program" unquestioningly. Gradually the goal is not to get people to believe in something, but rather to get them to not know what to believe.
The American left is too distracted by culture wars bullshit to counter blatant propaganda, and people like Paul Graham are too enamored by the success of Musk et al to see what is directly in front of them.
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.
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.
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".
wokeness will be discussed until morale improves... (or better said easier to rule and win elections while the masses are fighting the non-existent "culture war" and have no time to look at real problems (which whoever is ruling has no interest in solving..)
A big swing and a miss by Paul Graham for a season-losing strikeout. Above all, he begs the question in the original sense of "beg the question" - he defines the terms "woke" and "wokeness" by themselves. He uses the secondary and willful redefinitions of those who would permanently corrupt the terms. Further, he excludes the original and true meanings of "woke" and "wokeness" by denying that they are still in play or still in use merely on his say-so, perhaps because that conveniently fits his narrative. Excluding contradicting data is how you corrupt an analysis to match the thesis statement. Additionally, matching the terms to anything to do with "political correctness" is the same: borrowing the right's redefinitions in a circular question-begging fashion. It's also all rather unoriginal and tired. We've had many decades of this anti-political correctness sophistry if not so well-written. It's cud pre-chewed by a thousand dull-eyed ruminants. What is accomplished here? I think we've only learned about Paul Graham and it isn't flattering.
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.)
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.
To me this seems to be the most rambling, disorganized essay I've seen him write. I normally appreciate how he structures his arguments and in this one, I struggled to get past the first few sentences.
Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way.
Wouldn't calling some a prig or woke, saying that the people are "self-righteously moralistic people who behave as if superior to others," in a way, be demonstrating the same behavior?
Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?
In that vein, I don't know what Paul's motivations were to write this post and I don't know why he lacked the normal structure with headings and such, I just hope that he's doing OK. I'm trying to understand the feelings he's experiencing, and maybe if I'm able to get through his writing I'll have a better sense. He seems a bit distraught, frustrated, ranting, not sure.
> Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way.
Just mentioned this in another comment, but historically the only people who've actually identified as "woke" are black civil rights activists, who used it to mean that someone was aware and informed. I've never seen it used in any other context (or really by other people) until the latest culture war generals co-opted it as an insult for progressives and minorities.
> Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?
You would hope so, but I'm guessing the people who use civil rights-era slang to belittle activists probably don't care about the humanity those activists are trying to highlight and fight for.
The biggest flaw imo was the deafening silence around how "wokeness" is used as a tool by corporate Dems/Repubs and state agents of capital interests to distract from material issues and keep people divided over "culture war" / identity politics issues instead of uniting their focus on the former.
No mention of how the recent resurgence coincided with the Occupy Wall St protests.
No mention of how it was used to dismantle the Bernie Sanders campaigns.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
This sort of thing makes me nervous. When the owner of a forum finds the masses don't unflaggingly support his take on something, what's the reaction?
Elon has recently shown us what happens on Twitter when you don't tow the line. I don't know that Zuck is meddling behind the scenes, but it could just be that he doesn't telegraph it as boldly as Musk.
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.
It's my impression that geeks are prigs at a higher rate than society as a whole, but their priggishness is generally directed in random directions which makes it harmless and even quaint or endearing.
Surely you've experienced the one person on the team who will lecture endlessly on why robertson screw drive are so much better than torx, yadda yadda... or something similar. it's not a question of having a point or not-- they might or might not-- it's the haughty air of superiority, the perspective that countering perspectives don't exist or at least couldn't have any merit, that their pet issue couldn't ever be too irrelevant to worry about.
"System of rules that you can use to bludgeon people with instead of considering and empathizing? Sign me up!"
Maybe before you didn't notice it because more of them agreed with you or because enough of their priggishness was uncorrelated. Like a ferromagnetic material, if the domains are pointed in random directions you get no net field.
It's probably even just an effect of online forums in general. If you are of the view that many ideas are valid and that your preferences aren't so important, you tend to not comment at all.
In any case, if you're bothered by the net-prig-field there is a remark in PG's essay which might provide some advice: The priggishness is amplified when membership can be self selected by ideology rather than geography. If you just mix a diverse collection of people together their prig field will tends to cancel out, views will be normalized, extreme positions suppressed. So seek out venues where the structure of participation doesn't lend itself to polarization, or at least polarization incompatible with yours.
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
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.
There are also some real zingers in his unexplored trains of thought here. He notes that "wokeness" in academia originated in the social sciences and not, say, mathematics or engineering. He then goes on to concoct some explanation based on folks from the Sixties getting into academia and not a far more obvious explanation: our modern understanding of the ills and boons of society originated from the sciences focused on studying society.
(Sure, Paul, the physics department didn't come up with woke. They were too busy overlooking Richard Feynman hitting on every undergrad woman that came through his department).
FWIW, I also saw political correctness "rise." In my experience, it rose in the computer science department discovering that when they adjusted their approach to incoming undergrad students based on observations from the social sciences that systemic sexism was bending the nature of their pre-undergrad education, the women performed better in the computer science undergrad curriculum. There's Paul's missing evidence from the "hard sciences."
He notes that "wokeness" in academia originated in
the social sciences and not, say, mathematics or
engineering.
Yeah, what's up with that? Is this supposed to be evidence for why (what he defines as) "wokeness" is bad? Ideas worth considering... can't come from the social sciences? Can they only come from STEM fields? That is uh, certainly a viewpoint for him to have.
- IMO it should've acknowledged that there is genuine "intolerance" of foreigners/gays/trans, not the speech/writing you hear about in the news, but specifically the physical attacks and legal discrimination in third-world countries and rarely by extremists in first-world countries. And that seemingly-mild speech can lead to blatant hate speech, then physical attacks and legal discrimination; but it's not inevitable, and analogously when society swings to the center, it can swing too far to the other side, but maybe there's friction that makes it swing less and pulls it closer to an ideal equilibrium.
- It also states that Twitter doesn't censor left-wingers, which is factually wrong, unless every case of journalists being suspended and links being auto-removed is made-up or overblown. 4chan is an example of true free speech (sans calls to violence etc.), but it doesn't help the argument for multiple reasons. I think it's too early to say that "wokeness" is being rolled back; the truth is, woke intolerance isn't as pervasive as people think it is, so you will always find examples of people who directly contradict it and prosper.
However,
I strongly agree with the core message: there will always be people who use "morals" to control others. Taken straight from the article: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce." The article applies this and the remaining parts to left-wing "social-justice warriors" but you can apply it to right-wing religious zealots.*
The reality of "free speech", "live-and-let-live", and other compromises, are that people use them for their own agenda, to get more control. But that's OK. One of the reasons we have as much free speech as we do today, is that there are groups from all sides pushing it for their own reasons, and within these groups there's an opening to express your opinion. The vast majority of people are more focused on helping themselves than they are hurting you, even when hurting you is on their agenda, which means you can benefit from compromising with even smart people who hate you.
* Also, Paul Graham isn't really saying anything that he hasn't before. See: https://paulgraham.com/heresy.html, https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html, and https://paulgraham.com/say.html, written in 2022, 2020, and 2004. For a different left-biased take, see https://paulgraham.com/pow.html, written in 2017. But even if he was, this response stands. You can pick decent messages even out of articles people far, far more "right-wing" say, although it's a lot harder, and unlike this one the message you pick out probably won't be what the writer intended.
I think it's interesting that pg references James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian in footnote 15.
These two (professional) philosophers are arguably the vanguard of philosophical opposition to identity politics; they have written extensively on it, tracing its ideological roots to Karl Marx and comparing it to the Maoist cultural revolution in China. (And it bears being said: they're certainly not prejudiced against any majority or minority group.)
Cant imagine a better person than Paul Graham to give us the history of the origins of the struggles various underprivileged groups have had over the recent decades.
Anyway the conservative reaction to “wokeness” (or “wokism” if youre an annoying european conservative) is way more annoying than “wokeness” ever was. And as far as I can tell its just them going “I am annoyed by these people so I am going to be a huge baby”
Like theres no material impact to them here. How much can a DEI team possibly cost? It’s just babies being babies.
Actually I’m going to take that back. There is a material impact to them but it is that they risk losing out by not being in Trump & friends good books. In that case Paul’s rant is not only wrong but it is hypocritical because this is just as performative! If not more! The billionaires are already the most privileged group!
I don't think opposition to "a DEI team" is about cost at all, it's about the fact that it's harmful to your company to hire and fire based on skin color or gender expression, or to harass and lecture people for not participating in the DEI religion enough. If I had a nickel for every hiring discussion I've been in where I felt pressured to thumbs-up someone with serious flaws just because we were below an unspoken but widely-understood quota, I'd have a lot of nickels.
The idea that we should pass over the best candidate if he's a certain color and pronoun, thinking that will right the wrong of centuries-old sins, that's the mind virus that some of us don't approve of.
If you want an example of why it's bad and dumb even if you're a progressive, our VP, a very unpopular candidate who ran a laughably failed campaign for president was undeniably chosen as VP for DEI reasons, then she couldn't be "passed over" when Biden changed his mind about running, due to optics, so she, a candidate who peaked at 17% in the 2019 primary, was installed as the nominee.* The DNC killed itself on the altar of DEI in this case, and then lashed out at everyone else saying things like "Latinx people are white supremacists!"
*Stipulated: Democrats have a massive shortage of popular national-level politicians, so obviously while Harris was a bad choice, I can't point to any guaranteed 'better' ones.
Not much I can say other than that was a disappointing piece of trash from Paul.
The whole tirade against wokeness by the far right is nothing more than a bizarre attempt to stigmatize those who want to improve things for segments of society.
A more legitimate article might have focused on tactics such as shaming and cancelling those who disagree which is problematic in many instances, but Graham paints with too broad of a brush and comes across as another conservative whose only interest is to discredit those who think differently.
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.
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.
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.
I’m from Argentina. When I met my current wife, she volunteered at an orphanage. Her task was to take one of the children out for fun on weekends. It seemed simple, but it wasn’t. There, she met “A,” a 10-year-old girl. Some weekends with “A” were easy, but she was generally problematic. So, as we tried to understand what was happening to her, we learned a bit about her past.
Her mother was a drug addict and a criminal. Her father was likely her grandfather and was also in jail for various reasons, including abusing her.
We were heartbroken and tried to help, but we didn’t plan to adopt her. There are many other details, but I don’t want to bore you with the horrors. To summarize, this story shattered my naivety.
However, the story takes a positive turn. When Argentina legalized same-sex marriage, two women adopted “A.” It was the first adoption case involving a same-sex marriage in our country.
Things weren’t easy for them. We’re friends now and see each other occasionally. They transformed “A’s” life for good. But it’s not like the movies. Once a child has endured such trauma, recovery can take years, and sometimes, it’s not even possible.
Nowadays, we have a president in Argentina who constantly claims to be engaged in a “cultural battle.” He’s a fan of Elon Musk and Trump. The “cultural battle” primarily involves removing sexual education from schools, removing organizations dedicated to protecting women from abuse, and portraying government spending on helping the poor as communism. He frequently uses the term “woke” to denigrate people who don’t share his views.
However, this “cultural battle” is all about hate.
The entire concept of “canceling culture,” “anti-woke,” and Mark Zuckerberg removing tampons from bathrooms are distractions.
The world is full of children like “A,” and the cost of proofreading this with AI is probably enough to feed one person for a day. I’m not trying to sit on a moral high ground while I write this from my iPad Pro. But, at least, we should have more empathy.
Sorry for my long comment, but I feel that this article from PG misses the point (ja! It’s my second time writing in disagreement with a PG article). I’m concerned about the direction that all this hate is taking here in Argentina, echoing the things that happen in the US.
I appreciate your story and feel for "A" and the women who adopted her. But I think we need to get beyond this idea that there are only two sides and you have to pick one or the other. I don't see why I can't agree with you and also agree with PG. I didn't feel any hate in his article and I imagine he would support the people who have been helping "A", i.e. you and your wife and her adoptive mothers.
> There are many other details, but I don’t want to bore you with the horrors. To summarize, this story shattered my naivety
I have had similar experiences and understand you.
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."
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.
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.
Appeal to authority needs to be used with prudence. I wouldn't trust pg on a medical topic, but I have no issue hearing what he has to say on this particular topic because as far as I am concerned academic credentials do not give you a better understanding of the contemporary social climate.
For that matter Trump and MAGA have no degrees in psychology and sociology. Despite this, they were much more in tune with the American public than the Democrats with their fake intellectualism.
Ok, but please don't break the site guidelines when posting to HN. Name-calling and personal attacks aren't allowed here, and your comment consists of nothing but.
The sheer amount of content-less booing of political outgroups throughout the thread (overwhelmingly in one direction, unsurprisingly given the article content) has really disappointed me.
I can't help but wonder if this is intentionally ironic.
(From TFA: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules.")
I think it’s intentional and ironic. But I don’t think PG realizes what he did. I throughly believe he’s in the space of “I can do it because i am morally superior. But other folks can’t because they don’t get it like I do.” I get this feeling from reading not just this, but his other essays too.
I think it's just the fact he spends this much time thinking about wokeness. His whole argument is it's unimportant and performative, so then why did he spend all this time writing an article about it?
Not OP, but personally it's just sad to see someone that you view as a historically great mind getting distracted by nonsense, like if a great mathematician suddenly stopped their research to focus on flat earth and contrails
I do agree with you that it seems like that and I generally agree with you, but I'm also not a fan of your comment that only addresses the mind of PG, while the words he written are right there.
Point out the parts of the blog post that shows his lack of rational thinking and research, rather than just giving some overall personal attack, as currently the comment is relatively off-topic considering the submission.
I'm sure there are good and bad parts of the blog post, while you failed to address any sides of it.
You read a reply from a person that doesn't like the implications of PG's statements and conclusions. Which I think is further evidence of PG's claims.
As a liberal/left/progressive person who agrees with many of the ideas "woke" people are pushing, I find "wokeism" extremely problematic.
We need to put to bed the notion that criticizing some aspect of a social phenomenon somehow means someone is wholly endorsing the worst elements of the opposition.
Personally, I believe "wokeism" (I hesitate to even use this word because it's poorly defined) is actually one of the largest impediments to moving society towards the ideas generally associated with the word. It's a tactics issue.
The difference between "We want the world to look more like X" and "Let's do these specific things to make the world look more like X" is critical. How you go about the latter can have a huge impact on the former.
That's just not true. He did not like wokeism, but on the other hand he's aligned with the democrats, including voting for Kamala. Like his politics or not, he is independent thinker.
Paul Graham was never smart. He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Young people in need of guidance would do well to read the classics and disregard everyone with a pulse.
I'm assuming you're exaggerating for effect at least a little but with that caveat I couldn't agree more. CS Lewis has a great argument for this in his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation. Paraphrasing his argument: Time naturally filters out the nonsense and what we're left with are the books that are worth reading by virtue of the fact that they have stood the test of time. Truth or at least the closest we can get to it naturally bubbles up to the surface over time.
> He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Agreed. People seem to think that success is deterministic, so following the advice of successful people will lead them to success, rather than there being any number of other factors that might make someone who might make choices with the highest chance of success end up not succeeding, or someone who might make choices that aren't actually that smart end up becoming successful in spite of that. The worst part of this is that it's not just the students who naively believe this, but the successful people themselves. When someone mistakenly thinks that their own success is solely attributable to your own superior intellect or work ethic, it's not surprising that they end up advocating for policies that treat people in unfortunate circumstances as being not worth trying to help.
Graham's early essays on, say, the ambitions of cities or hackers and painters, were interesting, original, were grounded in his personal experiences, and were focused in scope.
This latest mush makes extravagant claims about the evolution of society over the course over a 70 year period, seems shocked that news rooms might have style guides, and suggests that recent campus life can somehow be meaningfully be compared to the Cultural Revolution.
It observes many trends, perhaps some accurately, but observes everything superficially.
Pragmatically, what Graham suggests at the end is reasonable--pluralism combined with openness to the ideas of others about morality. I don't know that we needed 6000 words of vague dyspeptic musings to get there.
He has demonstrated the ability to write and think more clearly than this. It is reasonable for someone to observe this and be disappointed.
Both of you are attacking pg's character, yet he's done no wrong here.
> 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."
As an LGBT Latino, I feel gross when people step up to "include" me. The "LatinX" thing is just sick, and the fake "pride" bullshit makes me feel unbelievably cheapened. Not all gays or bis are the same. I don't go around screaming "yass qween", listen to Beyonce, or watch Ru Paul. But we're token represented like that. I hate everything about it.
Superficial facets of my "identity" have been commoditized and weaponized. (I'd say "appropriated", but that'd only be the case if this wasn't a complete cartoon representation.)
I've been called a "fag" once in public for kissing a guy. Whatever.
My wife has been called cis-scum (despite the fact she's trans!), I've been made to write software to deny grants to whites and men [1], I've been told I can't recommend people for hire because they weren't "diverse", I've been taught by my company my important "LatinX heritage" and even got some swag for it, I've had a ton of completely irrelevant people make my "identity" into a battle ground, etc. etc etc. I can't count the number of times this surfaces in my life in an abrasive and intrusive way.
I felt more at home in the world before 2010 than in the world today that supposedly "embraces my diversity".
He's smart about startups and tech but as soon as he starts to talk about politics or philosophy he gets very 2 dimensional very quickly.
In much the same way people who build useless startups never talk to any actual customers, Paul Graham wouldnt be seen dead with the types of 1970s black activists from Harlem who actually originated the term "woke" (to refer to e.g. police brutality).
Im sure he knows plenty of the rich, white moral posturers who run large corporations and pride themselves on making a rainbow version of their company's logo for use outside of middle eastern markets, though.
Whatever else you think of him, he's an incredibly concise and persuasive writer. Even on topic I disagree with him on, I can't fault his reasoning or presentation.
What I find funny is that PG thinks he is a thinker who breaks the rules. No PG, you and your friends write the rules. Wokeness is about acknowledging the game is rigged against black people and others. But go ahead PG, redefine it as political correctness, then write an essay about how the current system is actually good.
The reason wokeness scares the elite like PG is because it targets the system they themselves helped create.
It doesn’t even have any kind of real power to unseat these dorks. They have enough capital and connections to hold on to power for life. It attempts to delegitimize them, question their worldview and expose them to other viewpoints and their reaction is to lash out against it. Very fragile identities.
It just amazing to see how the new Trump administration prepares to take over, all the Tech Bros suddenly are coming out of their shell.
Musk on DEI. Zuckerberg just got back to his Misogynistic persona of the first days of Facebook. Peter Thiel published an editorial in the FT last week talking about conspiracy theories on JFK, and now...The attack on Wokeness... Cherry-picking historical examples, misrepresenting real power dynamics, and dismissing genuine social concerns as mere “performative” gestures. All while coming from a privileged VC perspective that notoriously funnels opportunities to the same elite circles...
I 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.
You're clearly passionate about social justice. But pretending it's just 'being nice' and everyone who disagrees is evil? That's exactly the kind of oversimplified thinking that stops real progress and actually causes evil.
Movements for social change are messy. They involve hard trade-offs, heated debates about methods, and yeah, sometimes people on 'your side' screw up or take things too far. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
And the history is just wrong - 'stay woke' wasn't forced on anyone. People chose it proudly before it became contentious. You're rewriting history to avoid engaging with actual criticism.
You can fight for what you believe in without pretending you're in a morality play where the good guys are pure and the bad guys twirl their mustaches. Real life is more complicated than that.
There's much more ideology attached to "wokeness" than just "be nice" and "be respectful", such as the concepts around gender and neurodiversity spectrums.
Just using the word itself evokes immediate reactions from those aligned with particular political "sides". I've formed this opinion after my many, mandatory DEI trainings at work.
I think all good people can agree that being nice and being respectful of people who aren't hurting others is a no-brainer.
Edit: Note that this comment is being downvoted to oblivion and illustrates my point.
I don't understand this wokery-as-politeness argument. Politeness obviously has a place, but if you're trying to solve real social problems while also being unable to discuss the actual problem, because speaking frankly about it is impolite, then clearly is counter-productive if your goal is to solve actual social problems. As far as I can tell, wokery functions as a straight jacket on language that is designed to make only one solution to a given problem (generally the solution that blames white people) even sayable.
I don't think it is politeness, I think its a political power play to control language that sounds nice to first-order-thinking left wing types.
This is a ridiculous comment. I don't know if you've noticed but a lot of what's happening in the entire western world politically is a result of the backlash against wokeness and leftist economics.
Without wokeness there is no Trump, and the far right in Europe would still be marginal.
Edit - it's funny, just yesterday I was listening to a podcast where Peter Thiel was lamenting the lack of introspection on the left. Lots of comments proving it correct.
This comment is historically and intellectually uninformed, i.e., devoid of understanding about the antecedents and relationships between what is driving todays rise of the right, which is a populist counterrevolution to the 60s and beyond’s postmodernism-fueled culture wars, which elevated the marginalized and women, and served as a strategic distraction while the elite locked in wealth extract ion from below and minority rule by manufacturing a pervasive epistemic crisis.
Same for yours, You can hardly call the free market and privatization policies that the western europe has been going through these last three decades "Leftish economics"
Are you accusing the people who fight against Trump's politics and who vote against him to have put him in power? Also, what "leftist economics" are you talking about?
Now this is a ridiculous comment.
It reads just like "antifascists are the new fascists" discourses. It's absurd.
Trump came to power on the back of a populist anger at the wealthy elite and the consequences of neo-liberal economics (which is pretty fucking far from e.g. Marx. Regardless of the entirety of his meaning, certainly some of Alex Jones' hatred of "globalists" springs from the fact that they outsource jobs to where the labor is cheaper). Insofar as "wokeness" factors into Trump's power, it was to harness that anger and direct it at some wealthy elites, but not others. That is, he claimed that these wealthy elites are being performatively sanctimonious and are trying to rob you of your freedom, money, power, etc, but those wealthy elites have your best interests at heart. Even though the two wealthy elites are kissing cousins (to whit, Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump Jr. both engaged in a committed long-term relationships with the same woman, albeit at different times) and don't actually care either way.
"Woke" in the traditional sense is realizing that no matter what they say, both groups are wealthy elites, and that neither actually has the interests of anyone but the elites at heart.
There are definitely moments of "are we really prioritizing this right now?" with modern social justice movements. But even on the subject of trans kids, the question for me is not "are we encouraging the wrong ideas around gender?" but rather "are we doing everything that's necessary to keep kids from committing suicide?"
The other day there was a post about fascists vs. rakes, and I really do feel like the the discussion around wokeness comes down to a similar misunderstanding about the intentions and moral principles of the two sides of the discussion.
Without wokeness, Trump et al would've already steamrolled us.
Being woke is to be aware of inequalities between ethnicities, religions, and classes. Being woke is to be aware of the fact that the planet is overheating due to our unfettered capitalism.
You calling something ridiculous is what is ridiculous, friend.
Yeah, what the rich need is more tax breaks {sarcasm}.
The world is full of people too stupid to know how stupid they are. They need to wake the fuck up.
The scientific method is to look at data and form models of reality from that. Not to have a model in mind and then look for evidence to support it or evidence to ignore.
Graham has a Hegelian, Panglossian view of things. In "woke" terms he is a very, very wealthy white cishet male born to an upper middle class physicist. As the relations of production and social order were created for and are controlled by his class he defends it.
To use an example - due to government mandates, the number of blacks attending Harvard Law School this year is less than half what it was last year. It does not fit into the narrative of a progressive, forward moving country which is meritocratic (although absurdly the legacies etc. taking their place is called a move to meritocracy). You can't say there is a national oppression of Africans in the US by the US, or that things are not meritocracy, so thinking starts getting very skewed. You can read this skewed thinking in Graham and others.
YC was started by a convicted felon, and it's due to his privileged birth that Graham was not convicted along with his co-founder. Meanwhile black men are killed by police for selling loose cigarettes or handing a clerk a counterfeit bill (something I unknowingly did once) to cheers from corporate media commentators and demagogues. What kind of country you live in even here in the imperial center is very much a question of what class you are in, as well as other things.
The working people and wretched of the earth are tired of being lectured to by the scions of diamond mines, Phillips Exeter graduates and the like. Even if they do know the worst case big O time for quicksort. History goes through twists and turns, and I welcome the challenges to their power we will be seeing this century.
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.
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
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.
Lobsters probably comes closest. But still invite-only (AFAIK) and you also don't bump into random programming superstars (who programmed that one childhood game you absolutely loved) there every now and then.
Besides, I feel like HN is dang's kingdom, and compared to how it used to be, pg is barely mentioned nowadays. Based on feelings only, it doesn't feel like HN skews pg/altman friendly, I'd probably say it's the opposite if I had to say anything.
PG and Altman don't have editorial influence on Hacker News, and current moderation policy is to not kill topics partaining to YC. (which is why I suspect this blogpost got rescued from being flagkilled)
> 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.
Ycombinator is of course, involved to some extent with the creation of HN. So I get it. Tech leaders cultism sort of infests the space.
But I do tend to find HN pretty broad in topics. I do think they end up on here because they’re good at making news for themselves (not a compliment) and the sort of people posting on here, are posting tech news. I don’t see ending up on HN’s front page as any indicator of goodness, but more so, it’s at least something people are talking about and sparks some discussion, goodness-neutral on the specific topic at hand.
dang is really good at his job!
That said, I really like mastodon! Obviously it’s a different sort of platform, but you can get a similar but less-tech-thought-leader-centric experience with some light curation. (And participation by yourself!)
With Meta, X and Hackernews right wing American now I am also struggling where to go. Sure it won't be much here or the aforementioned networks anymore.
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.
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.
wokeness is more or less southern Baptist fire and brimstone Christianity for posh urban white people. For western minorities it functions as a kind of nationalism
I think you describe it really well. There is certainly a large pocket of black communities on social media sharing dreams of a Western takeover, ranging anywhere from outright (fraudulently) claiming inventions they never invented, brazenly replacing characters in every form of entertainment, all the way to openly proposing a white purge, let's call it. Very concerning.
What's even weirder is that this content was rarely ever flagged in the Twitter days, and still prevails on X today. Demonizing anyone of white European descent on Reddit is also completely acceptable, and doesn't result in moderation.
This is a fake news. Research shows that Twitter algorithmic amplification favored right-wing politics even before Musk made it even worse. See: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
> On the other hand, the people on the far left have only themselves to blame; they could tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted to.
Being this much clueless in pg's position is not possible. I can only assume he's consciously lying. He can see front row what Musk does with Twitter and how the "free speech" he's supposedly defending is actually "what Musk likes to hear speech", and he perfectly knows Musk is strongly aligned with the far right that he supports however he can all over the world. See for example: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2025/01/10/musk-dou...
Calling this "cluelessness" is being more charitable that parent, and on the balance of evidence, mayn not be the correct explanation.
If one were sceptical of this synchronized "political awakening" in the tech industry, that incidentally is aligned to an incoming presidential administration, one might call it some sort of gratuitous signaling of virtues. Which is hilariously ironic, and shows either a lack of self-awareness, or profound levels of shamelessness.
This feels like another VC/executive "taking a knee" towards the new administration, a vivid trend in the last few weeks. I feel like pg was particularly more left/right neutral just up until this month of inauguration.
Sorry, can you back this up with some data and specificity?
I understand that you feel Musk is aligned with the far right; my question is what exactly is Musk doing with twitter, and (other than when people take the piss against him personally) how is he removing free speech that is not "far right"?
I'm genuinely interested in the details -- and they are hard to come by.
Elon suspended PG's account just for lightly alluding that another social media platform exists. I'm not sure why you're even bringing up the idea of free speech on Twitter. Can you imagine Discord suspending your account for lightly alluding that Slack exists?
This is by Twitter itself, before Musk: "Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend: In six out of seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
This is more recent: "We observe a right-leaning bias in exposure for new accounts within their default timelines."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01852
Now from personal experience (I've been on Twitter since 2007 and used it virtually everyday since then):
I've heard and read a lot of such testimony in particular from user who don't post much or at all and only follow a few accounts. In the last two years they've been exposed to a lot of far right content.
I've seen how the moderation team at twitter took action before musk when reporting (often illegal) hate speech and now just respond by saying that it doesn't violates the platform rules.
I've seen on the contrary people (even journalists) and political or news organization getting locked out of their account following a far right online mob against them, and then having a hard time (sometimes to the point of giving up) getting it back because the moderation team did not act.
I can. Before he owned twitter, if someone called me the n-word or other racial slurs, action was taken. Now when that happens and I report it, they reply to tell me no rules were broken
Its interesting how doing something is immediately equated with 'removing not far right' free speech.
The idea is he promotes the talking points that benefit the right and the Republicans. Both personally and in changing the platforms algorithms [1].
There have been reports of people disagreeing with that general 'platform' loosing their blue check marks [2], accounts being disabled, followers dropped [3] and so on to reduce the reach of left/liberal people.
He doesn't need to remove speech he disagrees with, he can drown it and amplify the messages he wants to be heard and significantly control the narrative and discussion that way.
If your position is that awareness of Musk’s alignment with the far right is a matter of feeling rather than well-documented fact [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] then no amount of easily-accessible and readily-available detail will convince you to adjust that position.
As for an example of Elon making Twitter rules around speech he doesn’t like, here[8] is one that is very public and not hard to come by.
Elevating tweets of folks that pay the troll under the bridge, where folks on the left are going to avoid that fee (why would someone on the left materially support a right wing pundit?) is one very obvious way.
Just go check out that man's X (twitter?) feed. Elon constantly says the quiet part out loud. I'm from genx and if you're younger I'm going to give you all some solid life advice. When someone tells you who they are, listen.
Create a new account and find out. If you create a new account, without any other information, twitter will recommend you follow Musk, Don Jr (President's right wing son), and Babylong Bee, a right wing fake news joke site.
Go ahead, do the experiment and come back and tell me what you see.
He tweeted 150x a day in support of Trump leading up to the election. Just go look at his timeline.
Edit: lol at this getting downvoted. Some of you free speech purists really don't want to hear basic facts. Seriously. Just go look at the timeline. 150x a day is not an exaggeration. All of it in direct support of Trump, or attacking DEI and anything else associated with Democrats.
It’s interesting to see how polarizing views about Musk have become. People often overlook the fact that Musk was, and in many ways still is, aligned with traditional liberal values. He’s been a long-time supporter of initiatives like universal basic income, environmental sustainability through the green movement ect... Yet, the moment he expresses support for ideas that deviate from the more extreme edges of left-wing ideology, he’s vilified and treated as a pariah by those who once championed him.
Regarding X, I still see plenty of left-leaning content, but the dynamic has undoubtedly shifted. What’s changed is that the platform no longer artificially amplifies one ideological perspective at the expense of others. Previously, algorithms seemed to prioritize content aligned with extreme left narratives while outright blocking opposing views. That system gave the impression of a dominant left-leaning consensus, that was entirely artificial.
At the end of the day, it's impossible to remove all bias so whatever system maximizes free speech is the best one.
Also, it's just not true that "Previously, algorithms seemed to prioritize content aligned with extreme left narratives while outright blocking opposing views". It's a lie. Twitter's research itself revealed their algorithm favored right wing politics even before Musk. And it became a lot more true since he took power. See: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Musk recently de-verified or banned a bunch of far-right accounts that were posting anti-H1B content. Musk isn't far right, he's just looking after his business interests.
Well like any political descriptor, "far right" is a generalization that applies to several groups. In this case, Elon is part of the corporate-techno-authoritarian far right that supported trump, while figures like Loomer who were posting the anti-H1B content are part of the white-nationalist/christian-nationalist far right (that also supported trump).
I was banned from Twitter within hours of Elon having control for changing my displayed name (not my handle) to "Elon's Musk" in a reply to something unhinged that he had tweeted.
The easiest thing for a truly evil person to do is lie. They lie about being good, first and foremost. That most people are just a bunch of willfully ignorant rubes works very well for them, unfortunately.
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?
Are you aware you are asking parent to “prove it” to the claims you don’t agree with, and then make similar claims in the opposite direction without “proving it”?
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.
"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".
It's also with nothing that this article's title was either directly ripped from or just so happens to be identical to a YouTube video about the "party ball" in the video game super smash Bros[1].
There's lots of good criticism of the actual article to expand on here, calling someone a white supremacist because they used an incredibly common title format does not add to that.
These fringe conspiracies on the left are just as troubling as the same ones on the right. Sure it’s possible but highly unlikely that this was an intentional use of that book. I would guess for more likely he has no idea about this book like myself.
Hanania mellowed (matured? Sold out?) immensely in the last 10 years. If you are a white supremacist wanting to read him because of coltonv recommendation, be prepared to be disappointed:
> “I truly sucked back then,” Hanania admits, confirming that, between 2008 and 2012, he posted pseudonymously on several white-supremacist and misogynistic websites […] He confesses he “had few friends or romantic successes and no real career prospects” at the time and was projecting his “personal unhappiness onto the rest of the world.”
He still cites people who contribute to these websites that he describes as "white-supremacist and misogynistic", though. That seems awfully odd for somebody who claims that these beliefs are odious. I also really don't know how else to interpret a call to overturn Griggs v Duke.
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.
You are not trying hard enough. Sure, you managed to allude to Paul Graham being a white supremacist just for using a similar title. How many ways are there to phrase a title for an essay about this topic?
But really my disappointment comes from you not being able to leap to calling him Hitler. Surely someone else in the comments will manage it anyway.
7/10
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.
Notwithstanding your incredible lack of charity, and notwithstanding the use-mention distinction, it is in fact completely legal to refer to groups by slurs in the US, and always has been (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...).
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.
What? Paul Graham has been making statements that people found "too right wing" for at least 20 years. I have never seen him express pro-censorship or radical DEI views like the big U.S. corporations did.
We see now that all these corporations are A-grade hypocrites, which was already clear in 2020 but forbidden to say.
You cannot accuse Paul Graham for suddenly changing his views.
Timing is everything. There's been a procession of tech leaders prostrating themselves before Trump, and Trump hasn't even had his coronation. Now Paul Graham has joined the fray.
So excuse me if I see it as a pathetic capitulation. A "me too" moment following all the other so-called tech leaders.
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.
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.
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.
Substanceless empty comment that has likely been copy-posted by Mildred under a pro-vaccination video on YouTube, written into the newspaper letters page about climate change by Capt. Black, and in the tabloid news article comments section about immigration.
Do I really have to waste my life pointing out that you are making solely an ad-hom comment, while whining about ad-hom comments?
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.
Can you please make your substantive points without resorting to the flamewar style? Your comments are standing out as more flamey than anyone else's that I've seen, so far, in the thread.
In particular, it would be good if you would note and follow the following site guidelines:
"Don't be snarky."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Your views are welcome, but we need you to express them in the intended spirit of the forum. The same, of course, is true for anyone with opposing views.
In Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement, he notes that articulate forms of name-calling are still name-calling.
When Graham opens his essay by providing a definition of 'prig' but then using that pejorative over and over again to refer to his conceptual opposition in this essay, how are those who are responding to the essay to respond? It seems we put ourselves on a field disadvantage if we are to argue a point with an author who is immediately resorting to name-calling with one arm tied behind our backs.
I respect this site tries to be something else than other online fora. But it is a site still inextricably tied to Graham and his legacy, so when he drops an essay like this it's reasonable to either expect people responding to it will take the same tone as the founder of this site, or that we should be very, very clear that this site has become something not at all associated with its founding.
I’ve been on the site since the beginning under various usernames. I agree with your point overall but sometimes something said truly is “bad” (idiotic, foolish, whatever) and is deserving of being called so.
I believe writing “after the riots of 2020” and framing what happened as “wokeness” qualifies as idiotic.
I made my points and haven’t responded further. I don’t believe I’ve said anything else that can be considered flamewar style commentary. I’ll keep in mind what you’ve said.
> How does he know that the scale of the problem is what he thinks it is and not what “woke” people think it is?
Broadly speaking, there is no limit to racism that has ever been proposed by the far left. One can reasonably, trivially dismiss most infinities.
> The essay can be summed up in one sentence: There should be no meaningful consequences for men who engage is lewd behavior
There is something deeper here you’re missing. Women can generally define lewd behaviour however they want; there is no similar official mechanism in the balance. A one-way institution like that will predictably build righteous backlash against itself. That backlash is partly performative and partly justified.
> Fortunately when the aggressively conventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one thing that gives them away: they define new heresies to punish people for
If the "conventional-minded" define new heresies, against a new creed, how are they conventional? What gives Paul Graham away is what he doesn't mention and may be what bothers him more: the old heresies that the surprisingly innovative and even rebellious "conventional-minded" abolish. (Actually, they do neither, but those who believe the former also believe the latter)
As with the myth of the "cancel culture" that Graham mentions (or the similar myth of "the war on Christmas"), the problem isn't the truth of certain events that do occur. It is the exaggeration of magnitude and ignorance of context. Clearly, at no stage in human history were more people not only free but also able to widely disseminate a wider range of views as they are today. Specifically, far fewer people are "silenced" at universities today than were, say, in the 1950s (except, maybe, in super-woke Florida).
> College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous combination.
Yeah, larping in a world of Jewish cabals and weather/mind control has turned out to be far more poisonous.
Anyway, for a more interesting and astute perspective on wokeness, see https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics Kriss shows why comparing wokeness to socialism or Christianity -- as Graham does -- is a category error:
> [I]t’s not a politics, or an ideology, or a religion. If you’ve ever spent any time in a political movement, or a religious one—even a philosophical one—you’ll have noticed that these things always have sects. Small differences in doctrine turn into antagonistic little groups. There are dozens of denominations that all claim to be the universal catholic church. Put two Marxists in a room and you’ll get three different ideological schisms. ... But it’s hard to see any such thing happening in any of the movements that get described as woke. Black Lives Matter did not have a ‘left’ or a ‘right’ wing; the different rainbow flags did not belong to rival queer militia ... The spaces these movements produce might be the sites of constant churning mutual animosity and backstabbing, but the faultlines are always interpersonal and never substantive. This is very, very unusual. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the woke mind virus is so perfectly bioengineered that it’s left all its victims without any capacity for dissent whatsoever, permanently trapped in a zombielike groupthink daze. This is the kind of possibility that a lot of antiwoke types like to entertain. Let me sketch out an alternative view.
> ... Wokeness is an etiquette. There are no sects within wokeness for the same reason that there are no sects on whether you should hold a wine glass by the bowl or by the stem. It’s not really about dogmas or beliefs, in the same way that table manners are not the belief that you should only hold a fork with your left hand.
> ... What makes something woke is a very simple operation: the transmutation of political demands into basically arbitrary standards of interpersonal conduct. The goal is never to actually overcome any existing injustices; political issues are just a way to conspicuously present yourself as the right kind of person.
> ... Unlike wokeness, the word antiwokeness is still used as a self-descriptor. The antiwoke will announce themselves to you. They won’t deny that antiwokeness exists. But since there’s no fixed and generally agreed-upon account of what the object of this apophatic doctrine actually is, you could be forgiven for wondering whether it is, in fact, particularly real. Wokeness is not a politics. And antiwokeness is not a politics either. It’s a shew-stone
> Every day, the antiwoke are busy producing wokeness, catching visions of incorporeal powers, desperately willing this thing into colder and denser form. What does this look like? Hysteria over uncouth material in entertainment media. Pseudo-sociological dogshit jargon. Endless smug performances of wholesome trad virtue. To be antiwoke is to be just another type of person who mistakes etiquette for politics, putting all your energies into the terrain of gesture and appearance, obsessed with images, frothing at every new indecency, horrified, appalled. We must protect the children from harm! I’m sure that some day very soon, the antiwoke will have their own miserable cultural hegemony. Big companies organising compulsory free-speech training for their workers. An informal network of censors scrubbing the mass media of anything that smacks too much of progressive tyranny.
> What gives Paul Graham away is what he doesn't mention and may be what bothers him more: the old heresies that the surprisingly innovative and even rebellious "conventional-minded" abolish.
I'll try, but it's a little tricky because, again, I don't think wokeness (whatever it is, although I agree with Graham that the term is usually applied to some superficial performance) actually does much of anything. Graham and other centrists latch on to cases where "heretics" are banished, but the sparsity of these cases only demonstrates how few of them are punished. Furthermore, centrists often emphasise how productive and useful past movements were in contrast to excessive and ineffectual current ones (I would say that the use of such a claim is the defining characteristic of the centrist). Of course, they say this at any point in time, and because the effect of current and recent movements is often yet to be seen, the centrists are always vindicated in the present. If a movement does happen to be effective relatively quickly -- say, support of gay marriage -- the centrist retroactively excludes it from the PC category (note that the most significant successes in the gay rights movement coincided with Graham's wokeness, but he doesn't even mention that).
Anyway, to answer your question: the same people who make up new heresies also challenge old creeds. In the case of wokeness, what's being challenged is the centre's (neoliberal or neocon) belief in its rationality, meritocracy, and objectivity. For example, Graham mentions "woke agendas", highlighting DEI (never mind that DEI is a new version -- and an aspirationally less excessive one -- of the 60s' affirmative action), but while he focuses on the ineffective performative aspects, he ignores the underlying claim which remains a heresy to him: That the old meritocracy is not what it claims to be, and that it, too, is missing out on "Einsteins" (to use his terminology) due to its ingrained biases.
Also, when comparing the empty wokeness to the substantive protest movement of the sixties, Graham not only neglects to mention the real achievements of the former (LGBT rights, some MeToo successes) but also the performative aspects of the latter, as if radical chic never happened or a whole fashion and lifestyle (with a name that lasts to this day) -- also co-opted by corporations -- didn't emerge. I think there was even a pretty famous musical about it.
Do religious and political movements always develop such sects within a decade or so of their founding? If not then I'm not sure wokeness has existed for sufficient time (since the mid 2010s in the form it's discussed in the article I think) that the analysis you present here applies.
But I still find the analysis interesting. I think one difference between wokeness and political and religious movements is that wokeness doesn't seem to have a doctrine.
It's questionable in what way wokeness exists at all without a clear definition. Graham's definition is more personal judgment than definition, but according to him, whatever he thinks it is seems to be about 30 years old. Bolshevik-Mensheviks and Trotskyists-Stalinists sects appeared faster than that (the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks split a mere 5 years after the creation of the party).
Also, I think Sam Kriss's point about sects and splits was meant to be taken in humour. Funnily enough, both Kriss and Graham seem obsessed with convincing the reader they're not boring. But whereas Graham's writing is predictable though he repeatedly insists on telling the reader that his old-school conventionalism is the true rebelliousness, Kriss writes provocatively in a way that's supposed to make you unsure of whether he's serious or not. In any event, Kriss's writing is at least always entertaining even when it isn't interesting.
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.
The one thing Paul missed is Russia's role in the rise of wokeness. The Internet Research Agency controlled over 50 percent of the largest ethnic Facebook groups in 2019 and organized multiple BLM protests, including one attended by Michael Moore.
Wokeness was a state sponsored attack.
But as with most things, it isn't mono causal. The largest blame should lie with the social media platforms themselves. They created something that rewards the narcissistic, anti-intellectual and authoritarian tendencies that drive both wokeness and the alt right.
I think focusing too much on wokeness itself would be an error. We should focus on the conditions that lead to these kind of unhealthy authoritarian-leaning social movements in the first place, which is social media, inequality, inflation, etc.
wow, somehow you jumped to some next level conspiracy garbage more extravagant than the rest of the comments. 20 million people participating in protests was not a “state sponsored attack”
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.
I have no idea why this was shared on Hacker News (might simply be the Paul Graham connection), but it was one of the best, well-written, and researched articles I've read in years!
I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people.
As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
and then on the other side it feels like the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that.
At least that’s what I’ve noticed online over the past few (bonkers) years
“Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
The trouble with this is that a groups idea of the “enemy” typically outlasts and often surpasses the actual enemy that idea is based off of. People on the right will write endless articles and videos about wokeness not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group.
> Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.
The trouble is that many people have decided that if you discuss "wokeness" and especially if you have a problem with some element of it, that means you're no longer on "the left".
Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.".
When a lot of this was heating up during the pandemic, I encountered two very different kinds of people.
1. Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc)
2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes
It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy.
> not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group
The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture. I think acknowledging the existence of bad faith actors and "morality police" would do more for advancing the underlying ideas often labeled "woke" than trying to focus on the fakeness of the problem.
Maybe that group is made up of squeaky wheels, but their existence is used to justify the "anti-woke" sentiment that many people push.
For me, this boils down to a tactics issue where people are behaving badly and distracting from real issues - often issues those same people claim to care about.
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Sounds exhausting to live with a perceived boogeyman of problems versus seeking real problems.
Personally, I am surprised. This is a pretty unique article from a usually articulate thinker that leaves out significant details like: (1) the term originated by folks who recognize there can be structural inequality embedded in policy which, for some inequalities, has been described as structural racism since the 1970s; (2) the term got hijacked by political propaganda machines to circumspectly throw out working policies and other elements of progressive political points in the retrenchment regarding the term.
There really isn't any more detail to be had unless to sanewash the political propaganda's claims.
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Another interesting perspective on this idea:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiede...
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> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
It was not just a small group of people. Almost all progressive Democratic politicians started working that word into all their speeches to virtue signal and most centrists also fell in line too. CEOs started saying it in company meetings and we were subjected to HR trainings that noted we should say LatinX to be inclusive of trans people, among many other performative rules.
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I find it quite interesting that pg's article is so extensively uncurious and disdainful. He openly sneers at the topic he intends to explain, and tirelessly lays into a straw man (the FoxNews definition of woke) rather than the strongest interpretation (what you're doing here). Several commenters here have asked why his article has been flagged, and I must say that if it was posted as a comment, it should certainly be flagged because of its flagrant violations of the site guidelines.
I certainly wouldn't be inclined to call him a prig, but he's certainly set himself up for exactly that denunciation with his specific framing of the conversation.
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> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
You speak about it in the past tense but it's still very much a real thing. Just last week I was listening to an Ed Zitron podcast and one of the (many, many) ads was for a podcast that featured "latinX voices".
> By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
I wish there was a book or website with such patterns and examples written down for all.
It takes a certain linguistic skill to convey the sleight of hand in display in such maneuvers. But once you're grasped it, you can easily spot it and almost predict what the next set of actions is going to be.
As an aside this applies to a wide variety of places like corporate settings, negotiations, sales meetings, city council meetings to mention a few so its generally useful to know.
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It's the ultimate irony that this post is doing the exact same thing it is accusing another group of, with the only distinction being that there is no "term" attached to it.
I suppose the US politics have gone so bonkers that the left actually uses the term "conservative right" pejoratively in the same way that the right uses "woke" to describe the left.
In which case this scenario is so childishly insane that the only sane choice is to reject it all outright and focus inward.
The left doesn’t talk about “wokeness” but it certainly does talk about the individual policies that fall under that rubric. The right uses the label “woke” for the same reason the left uses the term “capitalism.” There’s a bunch of ideas and policies that stem from similar ideological premises and it’s perfectly fine to group them together under labels.
For example, Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC. There’s also race conscious hiring and promotion decisions. They are all ideologically related and add up to something quite significant.
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It can be a boogeyman but it also a generic term for a bunch of different phenomena that are connected through the way they are brought up, which is mostly very paternalistic.
In some cases people tried to change or police language, mostly around the topic of gender, but it isn't restricted to that. In some countries that use "gendered" languages there were aspirations to change language to be more inclusive, with the indirect accusation that common language cannot be so. That reaches from Latinx to trying to remove any form of gendered language, a culmination of sexual and grammatical gender.
Many just saw this as a vanity project, but even language changes in some official capacity persists. Again, these isn't agreed upon language, it was paternalistically described for people to be better, allegedly.
Of course the worst aspects get the spotlight, but that isn't unusual in todays exchanges on social media.
There is also another factor of "woke" and that is where it behaves pretty similar to the "far right". These are both nebulous terms for that matter, but both promote policies that a summarized as "identity politics". Another volatile term, but I believe there is a strong connection here.
Still, just as people point to the woke excesses as being representative, the same is happening with criticism towards some of its goals and tenets.
Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend.
"Troll" is another one. It used to mean a person who posted a contentious comment that they knew would invoke a flame war so that they could sit back and wait to see who "bit." It came from fishing. These days it can just mean someone who is rude on the Internet.
You're not wrong, the "opposition" did take the word and run with it for their own use. No dispute there.
But let's not pretend that this is a conservative vs progressive thing. On the partisan isle I'm "neither." But when someone uses the word "woke", in conversation, I usually know exactly what they're getting at. And I hear it from left-leaning friends and right-leaning alike.
It's a short-cut umbrella term to mean an amalgamation of a) moral busybodies b) purity spirals c) cancel culture d) some bizarre racist philosophy that markets itself as anti-racist (critical race theory) and e) an extreme version of political correctness.
I'm not arguing whether or not left-wingers are (or aren't) using it themselves in serious conversation. Only that, colloquially, I've only encountered confusion about what it means in Internet forum discussions with like-minded nerds, such as this one. The average person I talk to has little difficulty.
And maybe that definition was shaped, wholly or in part, by the conservatives making it out to be a boogeyman. Even if so, and even if it was an unfair hijack and it's appropriate to hate on them for doing so, it doesn't change how people interpret the word in casual conversation today.
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> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
There are left-wing critics of "Woke", see for example the African-American Marxist Adolph L Reed Jr – https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokenin...
If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman
Or, consider that the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International published a review of the sitcom Abbott Elementary, which includes the line "In fact, in its treatment of Jacob’s wokeness, Abbott Elementary refreshingly mocks the suffocating trend of racialism in American culture" – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/01/abbo-m01.html
Similarly, read their review of John McWhorter's Woke Racism – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/14/ihjm-j14.html – in which they largely express agreement with his criticisms of the progressive "woke" ideology, but simultaneously condemn him for making those criticisms from a pro-capitalist instead of anti-capitalist perspective
And see the socialist publication Jacobin's approving review of the philosopher Susan Neiman's book Left Is Not Woke, which attacks "wokeness" from an explicitly left-wing perspective: https://jacobin.com/2024/07/wokeness-left-ideology-neiman-re...
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"Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum."
Yes this is very common on the left too. Really common actually.
From what I've observed, "woke" is just the latest pejorative used by the American political right. Before woke, there was "PC", "SJW", and I'm sure others that were before my time. Before too long, woke will dry up and get replaced with the next term that's broadly used in the same way.
The biggest difference that I've noticed with "woke" is that it seems to have made its way outside of online culture and into the real world, so it's possible that it will have more staying power.
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If you tried to steelman woke, what would fall under it?
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Kamala Harris: "Stay woke"[0][1]
[0], https://youtube.com/shorts/emY0ig9LDsc
[1], https://youtu.be/9RH54QmQozY
Even Obama is not a fan of "woke" culture and calls it out for the hollow vapid gotcha politics that it is: https://youtu.be/qaHLd8de6nM
You don't meet many christian who say they love being religious, love feeling religious, and doing religious things.
They say they love god and his spirit.
Woke is correct, it'a just not the word you want me to use.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
Even if true, so what? People are still pushing it.
I am from Europe and from my point of view there ís really a wokeness problem in the US. The US is on average far more right wing mostly in the capitalistic sense than Europe. But it's difficult to talk to people from the US for me because anything might and will offend them at the blink of an eye. These things like trigger warnings and things. I'm always afraid I could be cancelled at any moment when talking to somebody from the US.
I don't think it's really a left-right wing thing because Europe is in general 90% left wing from a US standpoint, and we don't have it.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
As someone who most folks would indentify as “liberal”, I use this term to describe a very small but vocal group of so-called progressives who are a problem for the liberal cause writ large.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
This is a prime example. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been indignantly corrected by so-called progressives when speaking about “Latine” — note that this term is what many/most Spanish speakers (at least ones who aren’t eyeballs deep in “woke” circles) are more likely to use when they don’t want to use “Latino”.
Latinx is one of those white liberal made-up things (of many), and the language police enforcement is off-putting and shows an incredible lack boundaries.
“Woke” ideals resonate well with a narrow group of “progressives”/liberals, but the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public, including but definitely not limited to conservative extremists.
If you want to see some realpolitik on this issue, note how AOC learned (via Pelosi) to get in line with votes and messaging when it mattered even while endorsing progressive/liberal/woke ideologies.
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>a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left.
The movements exist and they demonstrably stem from a common ideology
Naming a political tendency is not making a "boogeyman" out of it.
>The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
Here's CNN Business casually repeatedly using the term in 2021: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/business/netflix-diversit...
More generally, the point is that there is something to "fight against", which is causing real harm, including to people I know personally.
For example, it's fundamentally behind the idea that Tim Peters somehow "used potentially offensive language or slurs" by literally writing "XXXX" to censor a word and then providing context to enable people to figure out what word he had in mind, because it was relevant to the conversation. (I know that this was ideological because they do this for the word "slut", but not e.g. for "shit" or "fuck".)
Or the idea that he "made light of sensitive topics like workplace sexual harassment" by... claiming that workers sometimes get "training" because a higher-up did something bad. (Or the idea that "making light of a sensitive topic" is even bad in the first place.)
Or the entire bit about "reverse racism and reverse sexism" as explained at https://tim-one.github.io/psf/silly . (Incidentally, Tim, if you're reading: you cede too much ground here. "Racism" isn't a term that activists get to define. Discrimination is discrimination, and it's morally wrong in and of itself; injustice in the surrounding social conditions simply doesn't bear on that.)
It's also responsible for the fact that prominent members of the Python community are still making hay about the supposed mistreatment of Adria Richards - who, as a reminder, eavesdropped on a conversation in order to take offense to it and then went directly to social media to complain because a couple of other people were being unprofessional (although mutually completely comfortable with their conversation).
And it's behind the entire fracas around the removal of the endorsement of Strunk and White as an English style guide from PEP 8, as a supposed "relic of white supremacy". (There are public mailing list archives. I have kept many bookmarks and have quite a bit of detailed critique that wouldn't fit in the margins here. But here's just one example of the standard playbook: https://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev@python.org/msg108879... )
Outside of Python it's also fundamentally behind the plain misreading of James Damore's inoffensive and entirely reasonable takes, and his subsequent tarring and feathering. To cite just one example that sticks in my head.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses
Yes, it is an ingenious sort of strawman.
In its prior usage, to be "woke" meant to be informed, alert, and to resist being bullied or easily duped into relinquishing one's rights to object, to defend oneself, and to dissent.
In this sense -- I note with some irony -- Jordan Peterson was "woke" when he would not allow his students to coerce him into using terms of address that he rejected.
Now the usage on the "Right" in US politics in particular uses "woke" to mean hypocritical or superficial assertions, positions, and policies that serve a dubious objective or prove to have no foundation in facts -- especially if these are the opponents' views.
Flinging these accusations of hypocrisy and delusional policy-making has become more important than defending democracy itself. Herein lies the masterstroke of the messaging. Using the term "woke" to attack supposedly "woke" opponents has become a memetic (viral) behaviour that has completely devoured political and public discourse.
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The behaviors labeled as wokeness have been essentially dominant on the left for a long time though. “End whiteness” is a good example of woke rhetoric and that term was shouted for years
It's not a boogeyman and there are many liberals who have been raising the alarm for years about the dangerously illiberal and authoritarian nature of this new religion.
Not just PG, also Sam Harris, Bill Maher, JK Rowling, Richard Dawkins, and millions of lesser known liberals. Most of whom were and are still too afraid to say anything.
The left put everything under the lens of oppressor vs oppressed. That's the idea that disgusts lots of moderates. The idea came from Leninism, but nonetheless is considered woke as fuck. So, no it's not necessarily a boogeyman, unless you throw out anything you don't like from the bucket of woke (and vice versa).
Oh, CRT is also woke as fuck, unless you believe it's the right framework.
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> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
I agree that the number of proponents of something like "LatinX", or "biological males playing women's sports" are far, far outnumbered by the people who aren't supporters of those things. But the issue is that the people who are supporters tend to be extremely vocal and generally in positions of power or better able to influence those who are, whether thats in corporate or academic administration settings. As such the small number of "woke" individuals are having outsized effects on society and culture, and the backlash is in response to the magnitude of that influence, rather than the number of people pushing for it.
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You're right. It's really lazy to use the term at this point as there isn't a shared meaning assigned to it. It's mostly used as a pejorative by the right at this point, but it's original meaning was very different and indicated a positive attribute. Whenever I'm in a conversation with someone who uses the word, I stop them and ask them to define what they're talking about. Usually they end up with something vague that boils down to "stuff I don't like".
You are dismissing the issue by implying it is a right wing thing.
Obama is using the term and criticising people who do it in this clip. I in no way consider him to be right wing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM
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I liked PG's attempts to define the perjorative form of "wokeness". I was disappointed that the rest of the essay didn't serve the discourse much.
What I was really hoping for was focused analysis on how to make social media more useful to the earnest helpers instead of the "loud prigs". That would have made for an interesting discussion here.
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Just because "you know it when you see it" doesn't mean you don't understand it or don't have something coherent in mind.
As a non-american, reading the definition of woke I dont know what to think
If woke means progressive and politically conscious then the opposite is what, uninformed,thoughtless.
So people say they rather be ignorant than conscious?
Sometimes I think people are not actually fully conscious and tend to behave like primitive animals and they are hating everything because reverting to hate is a primitive animalistic trait that requires little thinking or consciousness.
Or its a racist thing because woke has roots in black culture?
I would advise you to ignore yapyap's definitions.
Paul Graham has defined woke in the best way I have read so far, and it is in the article we are discussing about:
Woke: An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
(Performed by a self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.)
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Originally, people meant that you were inclusive and caring about all people. Except, you know, those hateful people on the right. Because fuck them. (I'm not even kidding. This is how they really felt, somehow.)
But then "the right" got ahold of the term and used it to mean the people above who went above and beyond and were actually being harmful instead of helpful, in the name of "being woke".
Personally, I think the pejorative term is a lot more accurate, especially for most people who consider themselves "woke". They drink their own koolaid and believe what they're doing is helpful, and can't see the divide that they are causing.
Of course, there are a ton of trolls (who are also probably on "the right") that use it to cause the divide as well.
So in the end, it ends up just being a way for jerks on both sides to rile each other up, instead of actually helping anyone.
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> i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
Ok, I'll bite. What is having empathy for the homeless? Is allowing unconstrained immigration to increase competition for entry-level positions empathy? What about restrictions on construction that make housing completely unaffordable? Is that empathy? Is leaving the drug-addicted portion of the homeless out on the street to battle their addictions on their own empathy[1]?
Saying nice words (not having disdain) is not the same thing as helping someone.
[1] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-call-that-compassio...
While "Empathy for the homeless" can situationally mean talking nicely about them, it also means stopping, blocking, and undoing directly terrible actions against the homeless.
Bulldozing peoples' stuff is in fact pretty bad. Having laws against giving money to people is in fact pretty bad. Putting hostile architecture everywhere is in fact pretty bad. People make decisions, over and over again, to not just hurt homeless people, but also hurt the people trying to help homeless people.
Stopping people from doing that is called "empathy for the homeless". It's called that because saying and feeling bad things about people is part of the process of hurting them. It's how people agree who is and isn't okay to hurt. By stopping group efforts to make things worse, you only have to worry about random individuals trying to make things worse for other random individuals. Which is unstoppable but untargeted.
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> Ok, I'll bite. What is having empathy for the homeless?
Let's start by changing how we think about housing and shelter from an investment to basic rights.
Or maybe stop criminalizing being poor.
> Is allowing unconstrained immigration to increase competition for entry-level positions empathy?
That's not a thing.
>What about restrictions on construction that make housing completely unaffordable?
Which ones? Some like quality and safety standards add cost short term but save long term.
However SFH rules hurt density, and cause grater strain on infrastructure and resources, while also driving up costs.
> Is leaving the drug-addicted portion of the homeless out on the street to battle their addictions on their own empathy[1]?
Medical safe injection sites could be part of the solution. But this requires thinking beyond "drugs are bad mkay"
Investing in diversion and rehab is another good use of resources.
> Saying nice words (not having disdain) is not the same thing as helping someone.
But if you can't even say nice words, your brain is so broken that you look at the unhoused with fear or contempt, how will you ever support investment in those same people?
I am very sympathetic to the idea that some harm-reduction policies do more to enable drug addiction among the homeless than help them.
But the immigration stuff is just right-wing nonsense. a) We don't have anything like unrestrained immigration, that's propaganda. Obama and Biden both deported more people than any other presidents in history to that point (https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-deportation-re..., https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-nu...). And b) the percentage of homeless who might compete with a Honduran immigrant for a day-laborer job is a tiny sliver.
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The irony of all of this is that if you boil down the concept of 'wokeness' to simply looking past the status quo, then a lot of the things that are currently labelled 'woke' are in fact anything but. It transcends the political spectrum and simply becomes a cudgel for shit you don't like but can't explain why.
Gay marriage? It's legal, therefore status quo. Making gay marriage illegal again? Not status quo, therefore woke.
Abortion? If it's legal and you want to make it illegal, that's also changing the status quo. Woke.
Immigration? Status quo is to hire employees who are citizens or resident. Laying them off in favour of H1B workers? Woke AF.
Roe v Wade and the Chevron Doctrine? Those were status quo for decades! How woke of the Supreme Court to reverse those decisions after so many years.
Of course in each of these cases the policy is actually regressive as it reverts society back to the point before the original policies were implemented, and to that extent the argument falls apart: none of that actually seems 'woke'. Except...the people who agree with all of the above would see it as progressive towards their own aims, so it pretty much is 'woke' for them, especially as they believe their own morals to be superior (and traditionally backed by religion).
>that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
If you're going to be reductive with someone's argument, at least use the entire argument.
If we do, IDK how you can say woke is just oppositional positions when that wasn't the idea OP proposed.
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"Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep. Not really a statement about your own behavior so much as an acknowledgement of what other people are doing to you—it just meant you're well-informed.
Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."
Generally the reaction is not to minorities(non-white, is what I am assuming you mean) but to people from outside of a group trying to tell a group what words to use i.e. LatinX.
An aside: If someone who is white is talking to the Spanish speaking community, would they be considered a minority? If so, then the parent premise would hold true.
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> "Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep.
This is distorted history. "Woke" is just the word in a bunch of black dialects for "awake." We just say "are you woke?" instead of "are you awake?"
What happened is at some point some white woman somewhere had a black person explaining their political beliefs to her. It was likely a black person who was working for her (doing her nails, washing her clothes, or serving her food) who she had a faux friendship with and considered a spiritual guru and a connection to the real world and real suffering, in that way white people do (magical negro.) She carried these pearls of wisdom to her white friends, or to her students at the university, or to the nonprofit that she worked at, and it entered into the white lexicon as a magic word.
If a white hippie, in the middle of a righteous rant, said "you've got to stay awake, man..." as many have, it wouldn't have been so exotic and interesting to tell their white friends. Or as useful to get yourself a job as a consultant.
At that point, it became a thing that white people would use to abuse other white people as racists. The sin wasn't calling white people racists, it's that a certain self-selected white elect declared themselves to be not racist, or even anti-racist, in order to attack other white people. And they decided this gave them the right to control how other white people speak. And a government who hates the way people can talk to each other on the internet about what the government is lying about supported them whole-heartedly. Woke policing was an excellent way to use legal means to keep people asleep.
And black people got blamed, as always. Because America is racist. Black people didn't benefit an iota from any of this. Approximately 0.0% of DEI managers are black men. Black people got poorer during the entire period. Now the anti-woke are going to unleash their revenge on black people, and the ex-woke are going to resent black people for not recognizing their sainthood.
> Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."
Meanwhile, the first step of wokeness was to erase black people altogether and replace them with "minorities" and "people of color," as if the only thing important to note about black people is their lack of whiteness. Or, since sexual minorities are included in "minorities", black people now have no problems that can be distinguished from the desires of white upper-middle class transwomen. Wokeness erased slavery and Jim Crow, and all that money that white people inherit, just as much as anti-wokeness did. Now the real crime was that white people weren't feeling the right things, and weren't saying the right things. Complete Caucasian auto-fixation.
The only thing racial about black people's problems is that white people used race as the criterion to enslave. Slavery and Jim Crow were the point, and all of the freebies handed from government to people's white ancestors that weren't given to slaves and ex-slaves, and all of the labor and torture visited on slaves and ex-slaves turned into profit that went into the pockets of white people and was taxed into government coffers. There were blond-haired blue-eyed slaves; the "race" stuff is a white invention, not something they get to act like is an imposition from their ex-property. And that experience is not something that everybody non-white or non-straight gets to steal.
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When you’re woke, it’s bad.
But when you’re red-pilled, it’s apparently good?
One thing I wanted to point out: I’ve seen a lot of people on HN and elsewhere allege that moderates or the “right” (in quotes because it is overused as a pejorative label) cannot define what “woke” is. But I disagree, and think most people who complain against this term can easily point to what ideas it represents, and what it means to them. Even if that is not very precise, it is real and meaningful. Enough so that they can find common ground with other people who use the word, even if they aren’t exact matches. The accusation that people can’t define it is itself a tactic meant to undermine the credibility of complaints against it. But is it really any less imprecise than people using broad labels of other kinds (things like liberal or conservative)?
I'd say it's hard to give a clear-cut, very specific definition of the word. It's also really hard to believe that people can't figure out the meaning given context and such.
It is by no means whatsoever a less defined term than "fascist" and the semantic problem seems missing there.
I agree. Wokeness has a very precise meaning: World is divided between oppressors and oppressed. Oppressors are white heterosexual men (white supremacy / heteropatriarchy) everyone else subjugated to them. Institutions, laws are created to perpetuate that power and must be dismantled / subverted via revolution.
Most understand it even if they can’t articulate a definition. Easy to point out when a movie or corporate initiative, behavior is woke.
> I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people.
Before that it was "social justice warrior", before that it was "political correctness". It's just a drumbeat of demonization.
https://theonion.com/woke-conservatives-define-what-it-means...
My favourite is number 5.
Woke in is when you don't play there games. Don't wanna join them beating up whoever is at the wrong end of the stick ? Woke.
See a observed phenomena as a result of complex socioeconomic circumstances instead of making a deliriously stupid absolute statements? Woke.
Defend a person that is weaker than you , has a different gender or skin color? Woke.
They are fucking bullies and if you are simple a decent, considerate person your behavior points that out . And like all bullies they hate that.
Well said.
I've long believed that racism, sexism, homophobia are basically forms of bullying. All are antisocial behavior and quite bad for society. I endured near constant bullying for a lot of my early life, as well as sporadic racism.
When I hear the word woke, I think about people who are against this kind of behavior whether its conducted by an individual, a company, a society, or a government. But all the time I wish that people would just call it what is is: bullying.
It would be much more effective than calling people racist or homophobic or sexist.
> the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that
CPG Grey’s co-dependent memes video comes to mind [1].
Each group defines wokeness (and defines how other groups define it) to maximise outrage. To the extent there is a mind virus it’s in using the term at all. (Which is where I appreciate Graham bringing the term prig into the discussion.)
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
Sadly, this is where we are in politics. Pick any term that you like to replace the concept and a rival campaign to redefine it will begin. Your vocabulary is just another battleground.
> not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead
[4] The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
Treating people with respect can sometimes mean learning enough about them to understand a little about what life is like in their shoes. There are a lot of different kinds of people wearing a lot of shoes. Learning about them is a lifelong process. It’s not about learning “a long list of rules” but more “learning about a lot of kinds of people and their experiences.”
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I see it as a clash between people who are instinctually inclined towards philosophical nominalism (woke) and people who are instinctually inclined towards realism (not-woke). Dr. Nathan A. Jacobs lays out the details and the arguments for this way of defining our current culture war here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVmPIMg4St4
There are many things on which I don’t agree with pg. But I feel he is accurate with describing wokeness as the term is commonly used currently. He doesn’t go into the history of the word in this essay.
You certainly don't use it to mean "those crazy people who are pro interacial marriage" but some do. The woke people supporting trans rights almost certainly don't support macho man randy savage chucking on a dress and that same day competing in the olympics but the characture that supports it is part of the woke mob.
People scoff and think of course I know what woke means, because the people the people they talk to/media they consume have the word at roughly the same level of meaning, not internalising the next more or less extreme group that isn't in their social circle include more or less in the meaning.
These days the word woke might as well serve the same purpose as "If by scotsman..." in that no one will disagree with you unless you get into specifics.
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Insightful comment. While some of wokeness involves performative aspects like PG mentioned, it also seems to involve a genuine increase in awareness about injustice, and a desire to do something about it- which is much needed. I’m concerned that this desire to “end wokeness” will throw the baby out with the bathwater, and end us in a situation where it becomes taboo to point out or do anything about injustice.
It’s insane that PG seems to think racism isn’t a very big problem- hard to imagine he is living on the same planet I am.
Idk, he spent a good chunk of the blog post saying that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater
Anyone using the term woke in 2025 is using the term in bad faith and to create the bogeyman you describe.
It's actually hard to find the time when anyone on the left actually used it. Seems like it was a little under a year and the term was dropped to be more specific actions.
I like this take: https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...
I think it's a farce to suggest that no one out there could be accurately described by it (identity politics being more important than class, language policing, etc)
Reading and understanding the article beyond the title, it's just a term that used to be called something else before, and will be called something else in the future. I think you're focusing too much on the actual word, rather than the "movement", which is what pg's article is really about.
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Part of the problem here is that while there's a set of social and political attitudes that really do exist, a lot of the people who practice them are very reticent to label themselves, preferring to claim either that they occupy the whole space of compassionate legitimate political practice, or that they have nothing in common with other groups who are (from an outside eye) very similar.
I like Freddie deBoer's 2023 definition, which at least is framed from a left-wing point-of-view rather than the aggressive and weaponised right-wing framing:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...
You obviously didn't read the article. He calls out how virtue signallers quickly change what the rules are around which word are OK.
Here is someone who you may or may not consider to be a far right bad actor explaining what woke is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM
The VP famously used it half a dozen times in this short clip. [1] It was apparently well-known enough of a term that she didn't define it.
IIRC usage didn't really drop off until 2020 or after. That was when conservatives started using the term in a negative way and progressives abandoned it.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53A6wcgbxEM
Kamala Harris said everyone should be more woke. Racial inequities were one of the pillars of the Biden Campaign and administration. So yes the Left was still using Woke quite a bit, until Right coopted to make it clear its actually negative
My original understanding of "woke" was similar to what in the 60s they might have called being "turned on". Being awake and seeing the actual reality of things for what they are.
Even before the term "woke" was widespread, I noticed all my conservative friends would prefer to find the most ridiculous liberal woke example and mock it.
Rather than actually discuss policy or anything concrete, because they have nothing to offer.
Both characterizations actually mean the same thing and you said it in your description of the person on the left. Because, thinking that a right-wing solution to homelessness 'lacks empathy' and only you have empathy for the homeless is exactly the sort of self-righteousness the right correctly criticizes.
>As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
I voted for Kamala, and I don't think this is accurate.
I support having empathy for homeless people. I would love to see a movement focused on actually helping homeless people, by volunteering at soup kitchens and so on.
Wokeness does not seem to be that movement. Insofar as wokeness concerns itself with homeless people, (a) it wants you to refer to them as 'unhoused' instead of homeless, (b) it wants to make sure you don't talk about it when they e.g. sexually assault you: https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1845244113249063227
I think this is a fair assumption to make if you haven't been in some of the places where this has been most contentious -- in particular, I think left-wing activist circles, or segments of industry where the workplace has switched from being "apolitical" -- I know that term is contested, but I don't have a better one to use -- to shifting to an overtly social-justice-oriented space.
I've spent the last decade in these environments. My own upbringing and general disposition is left-wing, but the last few years have been stressful and much less productive.
Somebody downthread mentioned how "latinx" was just a small minority of advocates, but we had painful discussions about it, including objections from latino staff, and ended up using it.
Our (obligatory) sexual harassment training switched from a standard legal footing to one that was preceded by a long explanation of the oppressive nature of Europeans.
Group chats moved towards political conversations, and even minor questioning of the (quite sudden) norm shift led to ostracization, with two people, not including me, ultimately leaving the company because they felt uncomfortable with the social pressure.
One senior executive was pushed out because they made a joke about having pronouns in video profiles. We pursued a diverse hiring policy that ended up with patently unsuitable, but diverse, employees including an alcoholic, and someone who had a mental health breakdown in a meeting. Staff would increasingly reach for untouchably political accusations when maneuvering against other individuals at the workplace, accusing them of racism, intolerance, and harassment when there was little evidence that this was going on (none of this was from white males, but between other less privileged groups).
I move in other circles too, academic and professional, and there have been similar dynamics. Not only do I know people who have been "cancelled" (ie lost jobs or opportunities because of public statements that, while politically mainstream, went against local norms), but I also know people who did the cancelling, get cancelled in turn. None of this was about anything demonstrably and objectively offensive; sometimes it was about defending arguably offensive behaviour; sometimes it was just an uncharitable reading of an innocuous comment, taken out of context.
What I would say is that there has been a shifting and narrowing of politically acceptable statements, and a pressure to conform with the consensus in certain kinds of tech work and other high-status societal environments, which I think would make people of Paul Graham's age uncomfortable; he would definitely have seen the "worst" of it. I think part of its spread has been due to it looking, without closer examination, like what you have described. But as someone who was raised by socialists who got there largely by their empathy for others, the degree of cruelty and arbitrary punishment through social sanction has been unusually vicious and hard to bear.
I still feel I can't talk about this except with a few very close friends. This is a throwaway account.
Since 2008, people realized that many systems are entirely broken. This created a large wave of wealth inequality awareness. This is common on both sides of the political spectrum.
At the same time, the left realized that their techniques of debate fail miserably against the monolith of the right, especially after seeing that radicals were rewarded (tea party movement.. all the way to MAGA)
So they are also imitating this pattern.
I know so, because if I dig back enough, I’ll find the comments that predicted this.
The left is radicalizing to match the political capability of republicans.
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In the late 90s and 2000s there was a big thing in hiphop music about “conscious rap”. At first, rappers differentiated themselves from the mainstream by emphasising that they were “conscious” in their lyrics of the harm done by perpetuating stereotypes or promoting dysfunctional lifestyles or failing to challenge systematic oppression. Then it became passé and rappers like Taleb Kweli lamented that they were stuck with this label, which had become a term of derision. Whole thing was like an early run of “woke”.
"Woke" make as much sense as "liberal", "fascist" or "nazi" these days.
There is nothing “bad faith” about appropriating an evocative term to label ideologically connected ideas. It’s like how the left uses the term “capitalism.”
In the last few years, we have seen corporations and universities push for race-conscious hiring and promotion decisions, while schools are putting kids in racially segregated affinity groups. These are obviously ideologically related efforts. It’s perfectly fine for opponents of these efforts to group them together under the label of “woke.”
The only people who could plausibly define 'woke' as 'people who investigate their own values and have empathy' are people who consider themselves woke and are sufficiently under pg's 'prig' definition to believe that is exclusive to them, and sociopaths. What emotionally normal person would say membership of another group is defined by 'basic human decency' and 'thinking about whether their objectives are any good'?
Why and how is labelling unlikable behaviour as woke bad faith. As I understand the right using the term, they use it consistently to refer to a very specific type of behaviour they see as bad (one core aspect is prioritising signalling being virtuous over actually improving the world).
Is your complaint that this usage unfairly co-opts the original left usage of the word?
> they use it consistently to refer to a very specific type of behaviour they see as bad
I disagree that their use is consistent and specific.
Their usage is constant and is malleable enough to encompass "whatever i don't like right now".
Imagine I wrote an essay on Christianity and based it entirely on the behavior of evangelicals in the South who attend megachurchies (a very vocal minority). Surely you'd expect other Christians (all around the world) who equally claim true usage to object.
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You give them far too much credit. But more importantly, ask yourself who’s really the morality police at this point? The ones screaming “woke” all the time, vowing to strip “woke” people out of positions of power, seem pretty dangerous to me.
Paul makes clear what definition he is using, so let’s discuss that instead of an unbearably boring discussion about which definition of “woke” is the real one.
The second definition is a gentrification of the first definition. They are intrinsically linked and cannot be separated.
> Paul Graham > English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist
<tinfoilhat>
I wonder why a venture capitalist would push this meaning of the word "woke"
</tinfoilhat>
Oh I'm sorry, are we now saying "woke" covers economic class issues like homelessness and poor people, instead of just social issues which both sides have used to suck all the air out of political discussion?
Now that the neoliberals are embarrassed enough to throw out "woke", are we slipping in economic concerns too?
PSA: YOU CAN STILL BE A SELF-RIGHTEOUSLY MORALISTIC PRICK, SO LONG AS IT'S BASED ON ACTUAL TANGIBLE ECONOMIC ISSUES THAT ARE SYSTEMIC AND ACTIONABLE
A friend and I love to send each other examples of ridiculous things being labeled "woke". Lately we are spoiled for choice. British tabloid newspapers are an especially good source.
In his post, pg says "Political correctness seemed to burn out in the second half of the 1990s. One reason, perhaps the main reason, was that it literally became a joke. It offered rich material for comedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action upon it."
What I remember the most from that time period was comedians making jokes about exactly this effect: At some point people started labeling everything they didn't like as "political correctness", and the phrase lost all meaning.
(I don't have particularly strong feelings about pg's essay tbh. I've personally managed to completely ignore political correctness and wokeness without anything bad happening).
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How is this anything other than self-flattery? It's also a huge moral hazard. Once one defines themselves as "morally superior" to a group of people it becomes easy to justify truly immoral behavior against them.
> The people on the left, while far from perfect, are generally morally superior to those on the right.
Do you have evidence of this claim? If not, your stance is factually incorrect. I have evidence of the opposite [1].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34429211/
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You're describing the difference between being inwardly moral and being outwardly a bully.
When people use "woke" in a derogatory fashion they just mean "bully."
Which is why James Lindsay's "woke right" comes across as so incomprehensible. He just means "right wing bullies."
Woke is critical construcivism.
The belief consists of two parts:
1. That truth is socially constructed thus when we see bad things, it means society created these bad things.
2. In order to determine what parts of society to cut-out to make society better, so bad things stop happening, use a critical theory to determine who should be removed from society so it can be more equitable (usually the stand in for good.
Woke normally holds that goodness is when results are equal, and if they are not equal, they have license to adjust them to equal (This is the core argument of Marxism, though woke could be said to be identity or social Marxism rather then just the economic Marxism presented, though in practice class identity was present from the start as well and expanded in practice under Mao).
But #1 is wrong and #2 is abusive.
There is no such thing as "society", just relationships between individual people. To get a better "society", you need people to act better. However, all of recorded history suggests that people are pretty universally willing to use other people as tools to benefit themselves. (Obviously not everyone does this all the time or to the same amount.) History also makes it clear that passing laws will not work: despite laws against things that are evenly timelessly non-virtuous, like stealing and murder, do not prevent murder and theft. In fact in Judeo-Christian thinking, to do this requires people receiving a "new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone" from God. (I saw "Judeo-" because the passages is from Ezekiel, which is common to both. I do not know if rabbinical thinking agrees, however.) Even if it does not require a divine gift, certainly the problem has proven intractable up to the present time.
"determine who should be removed from society" is just a scary thought. Who gets to determine that? How can we be sure they are right? What prevents them from using this as a tool to eliminate people that are competitors or whom they simply dislike? In fact, this has a name: "to purge". The Soviet Union under Stalin and the Chinese Cultural Revolution were scary times.
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Points one and two are both functionalism, not constructivism. This is Sociology 101. The idea that all parts of society have a function, even the bad parts is not constructionist, it's structualist.
Constructivism would be that we created the idea that they are legitimate social objects (ie: they exist) and two that they have an essential moral characteristic (eg: they're bad).
Marx was a conflict theorist whose main point was that economic structures and social structures are inexorably linked. The point of Capital Vol 1 was that through a series of implications, the difference between exchange value and use value ultimately results in conflict between owners and workers.
This is where wokeism falls apart as an ideology: It is outcome driven instead of opportunity driven. Equality becomes the goal regardless of motivation, ambition or merit. Why would the best, or more broadly anyone better than average, participate in such a society? What's their incentive?
When you define woke this way, you ultimately admit that wokeism is just a veneer of identity politics layered over good old-fashioned communism. The problem with communism is that it sounds great, but doesn't work. How many times must it fail before people realize that?
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Woke-ism is a cult.
There is no generally accepted definition of woke, and that is largely by design to mislead others through well known psychological blindspots (Cialdini), towards inducing others to join collectivism while also inspiring disunity and hate, albeit indirectly.
The movement often couches its perspectives in power dynamics which follows elements common to Maoism and Communism, along with many other similar marxist movements. It also has elements from critical pedagogy (the critical turn), which has origins in Marxist movements.
The mind virus part of it is the same with any belief system that lends itself towards irrational delusion, inducing bitter resentment in individuals and falsely criticizing without any rational framework or basis, often ignoring objective reality for a false narrative.
Woke-ism is a cult of the semi-lucid insane brainwashed children they manage to mislead, who desperately try to poorly grapple with reality, miserably, and bitterly, while dragging everyone else down.
Its rather sad for the individuals who become both victim and perpetrator. There is no cure for insanity, nor the blindness induced.
If you want a rational discussion on this subject matter, I'd suggest checking over James Lindsay's work outing these type of movements. Your description is fairly misinformed.
https://newdiscourses.com/2023/03/workings-of-the-woke-cult/
“ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
This is accurate. A manifestation of the woke belief system. I see this bigotry all the time online whenever team blue joke about the right.
What Paul Graham misses is the "aggressively performative moralism" that appeared in response to wokeism. For those hungry for attention, it was a very useful enemy. In many ways, the narrative of what it even meant to be "woke" was quickly hijacked and controlled by those opposed to it. Deriding anyone of color in a leadership position as a DEI hire is a good example. None of this was a call for reason or to return to balance. It was an equally performative stunt to cast anything that event hinted at inclusiveness as evil intent.
I think it's much simpler than that. Woke is power, it's a moral position that can be used like a club to force others into a specific line of thinking. While it's basic mission of recognizing discrimination, etc. around us, it morphed into a political and societal weapon to force people and institutions to do certain things, like establishing DEI offices.
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I don't think I agree. I think the counterpoint of "woke" is "fascist" or "racist". People on the right call things woke and people on the left call things fascist. But I think the difference in the meaning of these words reveals a lot about who is saying them. For example, woke people are merely self-righteously moralistic but fascists are such a severe threat that we have to end things like free speech, etc. in order to prevent a constant threat to society. That might explain some of this divide.
> i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
> people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think those are just two perspectives on the same situation. “wokeness” is realizing we should be treating people better and “anti-wokness” is people feeling called out by that.
People tend not to like it being pointed out that they are assholes, especially when they know it’s true. That’s pretty much the whole “anti-woke” thing in a nut.
>I think those are just two perspectives on the same situation. “wokeness” is realizing we should be treating people better and “anti-wokness” is people feeling called out by that.
>People tend not to like it being pointed out that they are assholes, especially when they know it’s true. That’s pretty much the whole “anti-woke” thing in a nut.
I think this is an example that accurately sums up with most normal, non-partisan people mean when say say "woke". The smug self-righteousness exhibited by those who believe themselves morally superior to others is "woke". The suggestion that somehow you are an asshole if you don't sign on completely and without question to the bizarre social and political agenda of self-appointed word and thought police. The people that you avoid like the plague because they are constantly searching for something to be offended about or some way to chide you about having transgressed against some ever-changing lexicon of acceptable terms and phrases. The people that think the world is neatly divided between "oppressors and the oppressed" and that where you fall on this insurmountable divide is based almost entirely on who your ancestors were or what your skin-tone is rather than anything you've actually done in your life. The people that think they have a monopoly on deciding what is right and wrong, and that they have been appointed the moral arbiters to decide what everyone is allowed to say.
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You missed the point of the article completely. Wokeness (as PG defined it, which I would agree is the most commonly used definition today) isn't merely realizing we should be treating people better, it's realizing that people should be treated better and focusing on being a "prig" about completely inconsequential and tangentially relevant concerns as a result of that rather than taking meaningful action.
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completely agree. The Right uses "woke" as sort of an anti-virtue-signal.
> Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase "people of color" is considered particularly enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. [...] There are no underlying principles.
To understand much of our language, Gnorts would have to already be aware that our words and symbols gain meaning from how they're used, and you couldn't, for instance, determine that a swastika is offensive (in the west) by its shape alone.
In this case, the term "colored people" gained racist connotations from its history of being used for discrimination and segregation - and avoiding it for that reason is the primary principle at play. There's also the secondary/less universal principle of preferring "person-first language".
> gained racist connotations
This passive phrasing implies a kind of universal consensus or collective decision-making process that the word has officially changed connotation. If this were the case, it would not be such a problem.
What happens in practice is that a small minority of people decide that a certain word has bad connotations. These people decide that it no longer matters what the previous connotation was, nor the speaker's intention in uttering it, it is now off-limits and subject to correction when used. People pressure others to conform, in varying degrees of politeness -- anything from a well-intentioned and friendly FYI to a public and aggressive dressing down -- and therefore the stigma surrounding the word spreads.
It's hard to believe that this terminology treadmill genuinely helps anyone, as people are perfectly capable of divining intent when they really want to (nobody is accusing the NAACP of favoring discrimination and segregation).
Add to this that the favored terms of the treadmill creators don't necessarily even reflect what the groups in question actually want. Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American (CGP Grey made a whole video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ).
So that momentary pause you feel when you almost say "Indian" and then correct it to "Native American", who is that actually serving? It's not the people in question. It's a different set of people, a set of people who have gained the cultural power to stigmatize words based on their own personal beliefs.
>Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American
Enforcing this false dilemma is what leads us to this situation. Even this CCP Grey guy is arguing for the false dilemma. Actually referring to Native Americans or Indians as a monolithic group is the problem. The many peoples forced to live in the Indian Territories(Oklahoma) have different needs than the peoples forced to live along the US-Canadian border(like Ojibway, Blackfoot, and Mohawk) and different needs than the Apache... another overloaded name[1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache#Difficulties_in_naming
This is one of the things that most fascinates me about the anti-woke.
You're advocating for people to be described in whatever term they prefer and not have a term imposed upon them from outside.
That alien visiting for mars would think "Oh, this is this wokeness I have heard of, respecting groups desires to be addressed in their preferred way".
But no, you're only bringing this up because you believe the people you think are "woke" are imposing a name on these groups from the outside.
Is it a principle or is it a pointless gotcha? I would argue this is aggressively performative anti-wokeness!
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The battle over the term "tranny" in the 2010s was very eye opening. Some celebrities were being skewered for using the term, though they and a huge % of LGBT folks saw it in a positive light.
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2014/05/rupaul_s-_tran...
>So that momentary pause you feel when you almost say "Indian" and then correct it to "Native American"
Here in Canada it's "Indigenous peoples", sorry, I mean "First Nations", unless they've come up with something else now. Never mind that the people in question don't necessarily feel any kind of solidarity with other indigenous groups beyond their own.
(Also, "missing and murdered indigenous women (and children)" is a set phrase, and people will yell at you if you point out the statistics showing that something like 70% of missing and murdered indigenous people in Canada are men.)
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In fact the Gnorts would not have "a long list of rules to memorize" with "no underlying principles".
They would instead have a history and culture (or many histories and many cultures) to learn in order to contextualize words and symbols and find their actual meaning, because meaning doesn't really exist without context.
From the perspective of someone who was not raised in the culture in question, this is a distinction without a difference.
Imagine that the 2028 Democratic presidential candidate for some reason consistently uses the term "colored people".
We all know what's going to happen. The underlying history and culture would change within the span of 24 hours, and suddenly "colored people" would loose it's racist connotations.
Awareness of history and culture won't help you understand language rules. Instead, to avoid saying something racist, one must be keenly aware of political expediency.
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I read Future Shock for the first time a few years ago, on about the 50th anniversary of its publication.
One of the strongest impressions I had were that there were TK-count principle topics in the story:
- The psychological impacts of an ever-increasing rate of change and information flow. Largely a dark view of the future, and one that's borne out pretty well.
- Specific technological inventions or trends. Most of these have massively under-performed, with the obvious exception of information technologies, though how that's ultimately manifested is also strongly different from what was foreseen / predicted.
- Social changes. Many of these read as laughably trite ... until I realised how absolutely profound those changes had been. The world of 1970 and of 2020 are remarkably different in gender roles, acceptance of nontraditional sexual orientations, race relations, even relationships of the young and old. I'm not saying "perfect" or "better" or "worse", or even that FS is an especially good treatment of the topic, only that the situation is different. Moreso than the other categories, the book marks a boundary of sorts between and old and new world. We live in the new world, and the old one is all but unrecognisable.
(Those in their 70s or older may well have a more visceral feel of this as they'd lived through that change as adults, though they're rapidly dying out.)
"TK-count" should of course be "three". Gah!
Owners of social networks are terrified that they're accountable to society in any way. That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades. Basically they've taken over and are making all the rules.
What is accountability? A platform picking what the truth is?
Presumably you liked the fact checkers before because they were of the same political persuasion as you. Now that Trump is in power would you prefer if Musk/Zuckerberg placed right wing fact checkers in place and punished any opinion which is outside of the platform's Overton window?
Musk removed picking fact checkers and replaced them with community notes. Zuckerberg says he'll do the same. Isn't that the societal accountability that you want?
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> That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades.
This is only a tiny part of the reason.
The main reason is that fact-checking works so well against the right, and has almost no benefit for the right.
Why?
Because almost everything the right says is a lie of one kind or another, but almost everything the left says is either mostly or wholly grounded in fact.
So “fact checking” is an almost useless tool for the right, since it rarely ever contradicts what the left says. And yet, the right can get very severely corrected by fact-checkers with almost everything they say.
Musk and Zuckerberg are killing fact checking because they NEED misinformation to carry the day. Because if we truly understood how badly the Parasite Class were bleeding the Working Class dry just for a few extra thousandths of a percentage point of wealth accumulation, we would all rise up and bring out the guillotines to dispose of them once and for all.
Misinformation is the way they control the working class.
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I can't for the life of me comprehend how PG manages to write in a style that sounds so lucid, so readable and compelling, and so authoritative, but on a substance that's so factually incorrect that it won't stand to any bit of critique.
Like the paragraph quoted above: it's just so blatantly obvious what's wrong with turns like "considered particularly enlightened", or "there are no underlying principles" that I find it hard to believe that the text as a whole sounds so friendly and convincing, unless you stop and think for a second.
I wish I could write like this about whatever mush is in my head.
From a (potentially made up [1]) letter from Freud:
> So yesterday I gave my lecture. Despite a lack of preparation, I spoke quite well and without any hesitation, which I ascribe to the cocaine I had taken beforehand. I told about my discoveries in brain anatomy, all very difficult things that the audience certainly didn’t understand, but all that matters is that they get the impression that I understand it.
Maybe pg has the same strategy. Certainly reads that way.
[1] https://www.truthorfiction.com/sigmund-freud-i-ascribe-to-th...
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I find it's super-easy to communicate this way if I pick a position I think is bad and dumb.
It frees me from giving a shit if I'm using e.g. rhetorical tricks in place of good-faith argument. Of course the argument's obviously bad, if you're any good at spotting bad arguments! So are all the others I've seen or heard supporting it. That's why I picked it—it's bad.
I can usually argue positions I disagree with far more persuasively and fluently than ones I agree with, because I'm not concerned with being correct or making it look bad to smart people, nor making myself look dumb for making a bad argument (the entire thing is an exercise in making bad arguments, there's no chance of a good one coming out). Might try that. It's kinda a fun, and/or horrifying, exercise. Drag out those slanted and context-free stats, those you-know-to-be-disproven-or-commonly-misrepesented anecdotes and studies, (mis-)define terms as something obviously bad and proceed to tear them apart in a "surely we can all agree..." way (ahem), overgeneralize the results of that already-shaky maneuver (ahem), misrepresent history in silly ways (ahem), and so on. Just cut loose. No worries about looking foolish because you already think the position's foolish.
Someone could say something similar about the large number of people who apparently reviewed this essay, who were supposed to critique it in order for him to make it stronger. It's possible he just ignored their criticism, but it's also possible they already agree with Graham and didn't think about the flawed premises, so their feedback didn't address what might be "blatantly obvious" to you or I.
Similarly, Graham almost certainly already has strong opinions on the basic premises of this essay. Thus, the process of revising and polishing his essay to make it readable and compelling doesn't help him spot any of these obvious critiques. As you quoted, he believes the people advocating "people of color" over other terms have no principles. Thus he can't apply their principles to his own essay and anticipate their criticisms. Based on how he describes "wokeness," he seems to think are generally unprincipled.
Neither he nor his reviewers are equipped to analyze the substance, which is why it can be stylistically strong but substantially weak.
Turns out that technical education doesn’t equip you for dealing with every discipline of inquiry, especially not when it involves social phenomena.
Of course the humanities are all usurped by the woke elites and you should look only to PG and his friends for guidance.
I think it's called "from first principles", which is the laundered term for "disregarding context and previous work, because I don't feel other people's work is worth anything".
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Having the principle of "words become bad because bad people use them" is stupid because you cede power to bad people. But really, its not a principle at all, its just a dumb cultural signaling, ie. "I'm not like those uneducated hicks".
Is that how you justify a swastika tattoo? You can also rob the bad people of the power to hide behind the words and symbols: if only bad people use them, we know the users are bad. It's definitely signaling, I don't see why it has to be "cultural".
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When the meaning of a word gets distorted by use in bad faith, it's no longer useful for its original purpose.
Switching to another word isn't ceding power to the bad people. It's taking away their power to redefine things. It's letting them have the now-useless word exclusively, which will become associated with their speech, and not the original meaning. The original meaning is reclaimed by using a new not-yet-soiled word for it, and the cycle continues.
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No one ever said the average person is smart.
It only works because we're in a society of judging people the moment we see them. Mimicking the language of "bad people" will get that association. I don't think we'll ever truly "fix" that.
He's a smart enough person that even asking that question makes me think the whole piece is written in bad faith. Yes, language evolves and has specific context and nuance.
its not that complicated, he just doesn't think that hard about things when they support his conclusion. He's silently edited blog posts in the past to fix glaring holes that a 7th grader could catch after commenters on HN pointed them out.
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Indeed all I can think of now is Stewart Lee's bit about "political correctness gone mad"
(some strong language and racist words used so maybe not safe for work or around kids)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_JCBmY9NGM
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The point he is making is that it's ultimately absurd to make moral judgements based on word usage.
A person who actively discriminates in hiring against black people but doesn't call anyone a slur is seen as more virtuous as someone who doesn't discriminate, yet uses the slur in jest. The first behavior is seen as more excusable than the second, although an actual reasonable moral judgement makes it evident it's not.
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Being "smart" isn't a binary, and can't describe someone in any all-encompassing ways. Someone can be smart about investing in startups but stupid about understanding social discourse around marginalized groups.
I am not surprised at all that Graham is both of those things.
The stigmatization is imagined at best. Its similar to how words to describe individuals with learning disabilities also gain a negative connotation. Its not the word its the fact that the word refers to a subset of people that a comparison to is an insult. Hence, Mongoloid -> Retard -> Special -> <whatever the new one is>
In terms of racism, its different but the same mechanism. Being compared to a minority race is not an insult (to most people). Its the fact, that racist people will use the word with vitriol. Racists and those they argue with will use the term in their arguments and gradually the use of the term will gain the conotation of a racist person. Hence, Negro -> Colored -> Person of Color -> <the next thing when PoC becomes racist>
I think _Mongoloid_ doesn't fit with the rest of your examples, as it was never originally an impartial term. There's never a time when _Mongoloid_ wasn't an offensive term to some group, whereas _retard_ & _special_ were originally impartial.
With terms for learning disabilities (and some racist terms) factual inaccuracy is also a factor.
Mongoloid, Retard, Special, individuals with learning disabilities are not entirely interchangeable (except as insults).
I think I once read on reddit that the first few votes a comment gets pretty much determines whether it will score sky-high, or get downvoted into oblivion.
In the same way "colored people" can gain these connotations, just from other few people (falsely or not) inferring that it has those connotations. There need not be a history. I've seen too many blowups over the years about the word niggardly to think otherwise (more than one of these has made national news in the last few decades).
It's not that there is a history of discrimination, it's that we've all made a public sport out of demonstrating how not-racist we are, and people are constantly trying to invent new strategies to qualify for the world championships.
> In the same way "colored people" can gain these connotations, just from other few people (falsely or not) inferring that it has those connotations. [...]
> It's not that there is a history of discrimination
In abstract theory, that would be possible.
In concrete reality, with "colored people", there is, in fact, a history of discrimination, and when the context of use is not such that there is a clear separation from that history (a separation that exists in, e.g., the NAACP continuing to use "colored people" in its name) it has become problematic because of that history.
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Yeah, I generally really liked this blog post, and I was very much steeped in "woke" culture at one point. But this part struck me as an analogy that could be improved. Lots of things about human culture and language are strange if you try to understand exactly why they came to be what they are. Think of various ways of saying Christmas: Xmas, Noel. Or Santa Claus, he is also Saint Nicholas, but Christmas is not Saint Nicholas's Day, like Saint Patrick's Day or Saint Valentine's Day, etc.
Yeah pretty sure the aliens are going to struggle more with there, they’re, and their.
It's the same with the performative moral posturing. Woke used to mean being cognizant of systemic injustice - stuff like police brutality. It came from 1970s harlem.
Then the dominant culture that was responsible for a lot of that injustice latched on to it and twisted its meaning, watering it down.
This is known as political recuperation - when radical ideas and terminology gets sanitized and deradicalized. It isnt some conspiracy either. It happens naturally, especially in America.
Just today I merged to the main branch instead of a master branch. This happened because Microsoft employees wanted to pressure Microsoft to prevent sales to ICE-the-concentration-camp-people and Microsoft wanted to throw them a bone by "avoiding the term master" while still making that sweet sale.
Rename that branch and everybody is happy, in theory right? Everybody except the people in those concentration camps, I guess.
The people in Silly valley with masters degrees and scrum master certificates can laugh and pat themselves on the back about all of this silliness, imagining that "wokeness" became stupid because of Marxism or something, rather than because of societal pressures (like the ever present profit motive) which they actually deeply approve of.
In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.
Phil Ochs
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Please make your substantive points without personal attacks.
Btw your assessment could not be further from the truth. I've never met anyone who was more interested in learning or more intellectually curious than pg is.
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Books are special cases, because they can be considered discussions. And, often, they're nonthreatening discussions. Pick up the book if you'd like, read it, think about it, respond by talking to others or writing letters. Great way to advance knowledge.
But here's a different context: I see somebody spray painting a wall in an alley. If they're painting a flower or a portrait, I might hang around or come back later to see the result. If they're painting a swastika, I'm more likely to avoid that alley from then on.
Symbols mean something. If they didn't, nobody would bother using them.
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Read about semantics and social constructionism.
A symbol or word carries no inherent meaning. We give it subjective meaning. That meaning is constructed socially through a shared understanding of what that symbol means through context and intention.
The same symbol or word can have multiple, and sometimes opposite, meanings, in different contexts.
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Swastika use in Germany is heavily regulated. It is certainly not free to use symbol.
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they’re not negroes, they’re colored
they’re not colored, they’re African-American
they’re not African-American, they’re black
they’re not black, they’re Black
they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC
I wonder what the next twist of the pretzel will look like
If you're truly mystified, and believe this is nothing more than PC linguistic gymnastics, I wonder why you started with "negroes"?
90% of this list is less the slur treadmill and more the MLA/AP Stylebook version treadmill. Nobody's going to get mad at you for writing African American, unless you work for a newspaper, it's largely motivated by MLA and AP wanting to sell new books every year or two, same as how titles were underlined when I was in grade school and now they're italicized.
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Why'd you leave the most notable one out of your list?
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Most of those are terms for different things.
Not all people who are black are African American.
Not all people of color are black.
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I think this just demonstrates that changes to language are not sufficient to erase racism.
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As long as assholes finds ways to ruin words for the rest of us, there will always be a new more sensitive / caring way to refer to traditionally oppressed people.
I know it sucks to keep up with things, but what sucks even works is not keeping up, and finding you and the neo nazis using the same language to mean different things. If you care, then you put the work in. That’s all anyone can do.
bipoc means a different thing than black. you should use the word that has the meaning you want.
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Yes exactly. The whole debate doesn't change the fact that certain people form the lower class, and those people tend to also have certain physical characteristics, and people don't like lower social class, which makes them dislike those characteristics.
I imagine they look similar to the gymnastics you did to come up with this comment.
I think we should respect someone's preferred language for their identity. It's not that hard.
Seems like you're pointing to a singular imaginary boogeyman out to annoy you?
You should try the better thing of actually considering the history of each of these.
I won't deny that it can be annoying, but considering the specific why of each one is important. Necessary even.
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What, IYO, is being twisted here? What should people be called?
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Absolutely insane equivocation. "Negro" has always been associated with slavery and that's why it was used up until even recently by people like Malcom X. "Colored" is associated with apartheid America in the same way.
African American was a term used around return-to-africa movements and was always heavily associated with non-americanness.
> they’re not black, they’re Black
Somebody has never heard of proper nouns
> they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
Yes... nobody ever called indigenous people negroes. It's not the same thing as black. People use the phrase to talk about more than just black people.
> they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC
The I stands for indigenous.
Haven't read the article yet, skimming the comments.
Wild quote though. Does PG self censor when using the N word? Or does he say it, with the hard r?
If that word isn't part of his vocabulary, why not? Seems like it should be.
> If that word isn't part of his vocabulary, why not? Seems like it should be.
I don't get the comparison. Hard "R" or not makes little difference. You're eligible to be canceled for using either form. So not like PoC/CP.
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From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]"
Then follow to the footnote: "[14] Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying users."
This is puzzling to me because: if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.
Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
No matter what kind of media policies there are, the fact that there is limited bandwidth means that some views are going to be emphasized, and other views are going to be suppressed.
The antiwoke crusaders are just as intent on moralizing and language policing as the worst of their opponents, and in places like Florida they're actively implementing limitations on speech and academic inquiry. To the extent that Graham and his fellow travelers in tech believe in freedom of expression, they've picked dangerous allies.
The past few years has shown us who the tech titans really are. We only had an inkling before, but now they don't have any reason to maintain a facade.
They believe in oligarchy so long as they are the oligarchs. They believe in authoritarianism so long as they are the authorities. They believe in censorship so long as they are the censors.
And now that they've amassed power that will be unopposed for the foreseeable future, there's no reason to pretend their goals are elsewhere. A single party system will cause them issues like Chin has, America has 30-50 years to get to that point and presumably they all plan on emerging as the Supreme Leader when that day comes - or at least landing in the inner circle.
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> in places like Florida they're actively implementing limitations on speech...
Is this a reference to the law preventing teachers from speaking to young children about sexuality?
> ...and academic inquiry
I assume this is in reference to Florida's rejection of the College Board's AP Black History curriculum, which was rejected for containing "critical race theory" in violation of Florida Law. Surely our democratically elected state governments are better suited to have the final say in what goes into our kids heads than some NGO's Board of Trustees? Anyone who thinks educators make for less political judges than politicians is invited to review the donation history of teachers unions[0].
[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?ind=L1300
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According to DHH, the massive tech layoffs were motivated by a desire to rid companies of wokeness: "most major corporations have wound down the woke excesses while pretending it's all just a correction for "over hiring"." He goes so far as to say that's what Basecamp did and (in his opinion) it's a necessity to clean out those with the wrong political views in every tech company. Sure sounds like a politically-motivated purge to me.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/google-s-sad-ideological-capture-w...
Much like "woke" isn't really a single coherent entity, neither is "antiwoke". E.g. Bill Maher is notoriously anti-woke, but I haven't heard him demanding language policing. The part of it that does is the same people who have always done it, i.e. social conservatives - for whom it is literally a part of their platform and has always been that.
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Elon censored me for mentioning my Mastodon handle on Twitter. Me and anyone else who did the same.
i guess pg knows one thing about it ;) https://fortune.com/2022/12/18/twitter-suspends-paul-graham-...
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You're using a definition of "censorship" which is so broad as to be meaningless. By your definition, when I upvote a comment on Hacker News, that's "censorship" because it makes other comments in the thread a bit less prominent.
>Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
Censorship isn't the only way to prevent the rise of bad ideas. For example: "the solution to bad speech is more speech"
I don't think that's true. When you and I up- or down-vote a comment, we are a part of expressing what will end up being the community's consensus. That's not censorship.
When Twitter's algorithm promotes certain topics and demotes others, that is a unilateral act made by a single, unaccountable entity that has full control over the platform. That is (or at least can be) censorship.
> "the solution to bad speech is more speech"
Yes, but when enough people who otherwise have little actual power get together to drown out "bad speech" with "more speech" it gets called 'cancel culture' and 'witch hunts' and is used as the primary example of 'censorship' on social media.
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> but without censoring either
PG should try using the term "cis" in a post.
(not arguing with you, but arguing with the statement that neither are being censored)
There is definitely censorship on Twitter these days. A local strip club has its account suspended for "hate speech"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/the-penthous...
> Twitter took action after a photo of the club's latest marquee reading, "Forever neighbours, never neighbors" went viral.
> The wording references president-elect Donald Trump's recent trolling of Canada by calling it America's 51st state, and uses the juxtaposition of the Canadian spelling of "neighbour" against the U.S. "neighbor" for political satire.
> ... the free speech social media platform shut down the club's account saying "it violates the X Hateful Profile Policy."
They simply realized reach is what you need to control, it doesn’t matter if you can write the most brilliant political content if no one will see it due to the distribution algorithm penalizing it while each single one of Musks mostly idiotic tweets reaches hundreds of millions of users. Free speech is meaningless if it can’t be heard by anyone.
Yes! I like to use the term "fair speech" for this concept. Free speech is that you are free from government retribution. But fair speech means that you also have equal opportunity to speak as others. As you said, if person A can say one million things while you are only able to say one thing, you are effectively denied speech.
Weren't a number of the accounts that Elon reinstated just overt white supremacists? Like, yes, by "not censoring" white supremacy, there are some causally correlated effects for what the far right considers "wokeness" on that platform.
You raise good points. I’m optimistic because i think the quieting of some voices (while bad) is much better than their complete silencing, as has happened through deplatforming, shadow banning, and even White House requests in the past.
I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
> I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
The problem with this logic is that for the most part, new media isn't replacing legacy media; it's simply placing new layer of filtering in front of it. The vast majority of people sharing information on these platforms aren't journalists doing their own research. Instead, they're getting their information from journalists and just applying their own filtering and spin. "Rebuting" usually just involves linking to different news sources. You were always better just reading the legacy media in the first place.
This is BS, Elon absolutely censored people.
The guy who drove over people in the Christmas market in Germany recently openly backed the far right and was a racist. Elon removed all tweets that didn't match with the made up story that he was an islamist.
> From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]"
As has been demonstrated time and time again, especially on the Internet, unmoderated discussion boards do not scale. Trolls can naturally push out the reasonable people by increasing the noise level. Once the number of users exceeds some small threshold it is basically a guarantee that trolls will move in. Shitposting is cheap, easy, and the people who do it have all the time in the world. If you don't moderate the board will become useless for substantive discussion.
I mean this was amply demonstrated back in the Usenet era. Nothing has fundamentally change with human psyche since then, so the rule still holds true. Twitter/X is just the lastest example.
You've hit the nail on the head here. If you let the trolls in they will suck all of the air out of the room.
Twitter is not unmoderated.
I don't know how many people I muted, banned, or how many times I clicked that I don't want to see something. Over time, Twitter gets better.
This being said, I prefer doing my moderation myself instead of having somebody I extremely disagree with (former Twitter employees) to do this for me.
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I think the more glaring thing is that Musk has indeed directly censored twitter. Saying cis results in an auto-ban for example. But he's also just blatantly censored people for disagreeing with him.
Also, in a time when the next president of the united states is quoting hitler and also saying that Hitler "had a lot of good ideas" I hardly think a very poor multi-page screed on the word woke is the best use of time and thought.
So there was a platform called Twitter - apparently people who were 'woke' liked it and became the most loyal clients. This made the platform grow and become popular. Then came the "hero" and saved the platform from "wokeness". This is the real story. Elon came and bought something that was grown by the despised "woke" people and made it his own.
If I go into for you instead of following it's extremely heavily skewed into conspiracy theory right. So to me it looks like they are boosting the reach of that content.
if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.
Not at all - the difference here is choice. You can choose to pay or not to pay. And if you don't pay you are still seen.
There was no choice wrt visibility under the old regime, WrongSpeak was censored - you couldn't pay to be heard.
Now that doesn't mean the current situation is optimal, but it at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
> at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
This has multiple issues.
The older set up was not there to promote visibility but to provide a layer of authentification, most blue ticks were brands and recognisable people. Now its mostly scams, allowing anyone, especially potentially malicious actors, to don the mask of credibility is not "allowing the possibility of diversity of opinion" is allowing the fox in the hen house.
Secondly, if you imagine the goals of right wing people to maintain current power structures, and the left to disrupt them, then the ability to pay is already corrupted due to the current power structure being supremely lobsided. Aka those with all the money are effectively the only ones who can pay. (In law this is called 'right without a remedy', its when you technically have a right on paper but could never actually exercise it)
This whole situation also enables a problem we already know exists which are state actors. Russia was part of a disinfo campaign through FB tools in 2016 through cambridge analytica, and used bots in twitter in 2016 and 2020 through multiple state sponsored bot farms. Allowing that kind of state warfare to be amplified by spending money is really really poor choice from a platform prespective. Without those tools, organic growth is harder to achieve and getting around bot detection tools means a part of the infra would be caught before it caused damage (even under those circumstances, there was plenty of damage done). Removing all guardrails is a frankly indefensible choice in terms of public safety
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I guess you could call turning your social media site into a toilet, causing anyone with any sense of pride or morality to leave, neutralizing “wokeness”.
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Society, in its grand equality, gives rich and poor alike the ability to spend their money on billboards and full page ads.
This is ignoring all of the actual algorithm changes and Elon-induced censorship of specific topics on Twitter that make Paul's point just flat-out wrong, of course.
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Perhaps the more accurate term is "suppressing" - you can do this directly or by crowding out or deprioritizing specific content based on many attributes. Content is both literal and second-order (like paid vs. unpaid)
It's much more than that. If the government says, "only land owners can publish", regardless of content, that's still obviously censorship. In what world would "only Christians may publish" not be censorship?
I wish twitter would use LLMs to automatically censor people who abuse apostrophes. As long as they're promoting and appealing to Nazis, throw the Grammar Nazis a bone!
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.
Any real history of "political correctness," if we're going to use that term to mean the pursuit of social justice, will be incomplete without an accounting of the internal struggles of various activist causes when confronted with their own wrongdoing/ignorance/blindness/lack of "political correctness".
One of the best examples is the women's movement in the 70s being confronted internally by minority women blaming middle class white women for winning the right to work in an office building, when minority women had long been holding down jobs and needed other forms of championing, such as against police abuse, or the effects of poverty, or discrimination against their sexaul orientation.
It's insane to reduce the drive for political correctness to a bunch of radical students becoming tenured professors and unleashing their inner prigs against everyone else.
Thinking about progress, I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate was a lesbian. That would be unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s. Even the right is progressing and they don’t know it.
> I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate
Not only lesbian. Living with a Sri Lankan woman and raising two boys. And living not in Germany, but Switzerland.
Seems to bend herself quite a lot to gain power ...
I had a similar double-take moment reading about Breitbart editor "Milo Yiannopoulos" a few years ago.
Different racist cultures develop different ideas on what makes someone white. "Yiannopoulos" might be called a 'wog':
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
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Peter Thiel is gay and still advocates against gay marriage (He's married to a man himself).
Those people know the restrictions they push for won't apply to them, they are too powerful, quite literally above the law.
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Doesn't mean they aren't fascists, gay fascists are by definition, fascists.
They literally started sending fake "remigration" tickets to anybody with a foreign sounding family name, exactly what the nazis did to jews in the 1930s.
https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/parteien/id_...
I don't think its accurate to describe the AfD as right wing. Far right or possibly fascist
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> unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s
Ernst Röhm, leader of the Nazi's SA forces, was gay. People did not join the Nazi movement because of the impeccable life style of their leaders, but their political program. Same with AfD or Trumpists.
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They actually do know it, and they’re mad that so many think they don’t. It’s why they think wokeness is a problem, it is (to them) mainly performative and insulting because progress has happened and continues to.
They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress.
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Yup, Graham utterly fails to get over the bare minimum bar of American social justice critique, which is "What side of the civil rights movement would your proposed ideology have landed on?"
Graham is fairly explicit that the civil rights movement wasn't priggish in the way he criticizes. He basically develops the thesis that such priggishness arises as a side effect of any ideology when it becomes sufficiently dominant, and it's worth opposing the priggishness, independent of the merits of the dominant ideology in question.
There's a big difference between these two things
* Berkeley's Free Speech Movement: https://qr.ae/pYCVXO
* "Free speech is a disease and we are the cure", from the sidebar of /r/ShitRedditSays: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/
Are you sure? He says 'And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.'
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He's presenting his own musings as some kind of historical record. Utterly unburdened by the need for data to back up his narrative.
The Internet has finally allowed the wealthy and powerful to converse at the same level and in the same space as your big brother's friend who smokes a lot of weed and knows that the government is suppressing a car that runs on water
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I have to admit it's pretty funny that all of the citations in the piece are just more of his own opinions.
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You can tell who a person does and doesn't talk with when reading something like this. To write an essay of this length, on this topic, and not bring up (at a minimum) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority suggests you shouldn't be writing about it.
I was a college student in the 1990s. Not only that, I was a member and even leader of evangelical Christian groups in college. Outrage, us versus them, claims of being persecuted, and imposing standards of morality on others was the reason those groups existed. The bigger the fight you started, the better.
This is like writing an essay criticizing WalMart for paying low wages when every competing business pays the same or lower wages. Not false, but definitely not the whole truth, and obviously misleading.
I have the impression that Paul Graham does not read. His essays are such a product of echo-chamber diatribes and accolades that I cannot fathom him sitting down and reckoning with public information that contradicts his personal philosophy.
(He very well might reread his own essays and read other people's work at a 1:1 ratio. He might also simply have poor reading comprehension.)
ironically paul graham has an essay about reading journalism as a subject expert and immediately knowing that the writer is writing about subjects that they don't know much about.
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Graham doesn't mention Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority by name, but he does explicitly compare wokeness to religion:
> Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex.
> Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes.
I think it's abundantly clear that he does not condone priggishness whether it's coming from the right or the left.
> and not bring up (at a minimum) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority suggests you shouldn't be writing about it.
I think it's fine to point out that there are parallels on the right. But I don't think it is constructive to say that he is not entitled to write about a topic just because he doesn't explicitly mention something that you think is important.
> it's abundantly clear that he does not condone priggishness whether it's coming from the right or the left
He tacitly condones Musk, whose priggishness currently consists of smugly rehashing alt-right talking points.
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You’re right that he doesn’t condone it from any side, but the article would be much stronger if it spent more time on right wing forms of this problem too.
For example, any of the “go woke go broke” forms of right wing cancel culture, the ways that Christian colleges require professors to sign statements of faith, the way that sexual repression is still very much the norm in many conservative circles…
I mean, look at the paragraph surrounding this line:
> Of course [we shouldn’t require signing DEI statements]; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs.
It’s seemingly ignorant of the fact that this still happens a lot on the right! A family member had to sign something to the effect that they wouldn’t drink alcohol even off the job because the employer was religious.
A more timely example is that a core part of project 2025 is replacing bureaucratic federal workers with specifically conservative, Christian individuals.
Now, I don’t believe PG supports that. But if you spend an article mostly only attack one “side,” without acknowledging it’s somewhat of a two way street, you’re not going to convince that many people, and you can see that in this thread.
If PG’s goal, as he says, is to fight back against the prigs, he needs to better appeal to those who want to continue being respectful & progressive. And to do that, he needs to avoid being so reductive with what “woke” means.
The title is "The Origins of Wokeness". He's writing about things that many groups were doing at the time, making his explanation at best incomplete. As for Jerry Falwell, you cannot write about the origins of modern cancel culture and not mention him, since he's the one that popularized it.
I genuinely enjoy that many people think PC culture started with BLM and woke language and what not in the 00's-10's.
There's literally a movie called PCU from 1994.
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If you want some critique of the thing PG thinks he's critiquing (which, to parallel what he says about social oppression, is a problem but not of the nature or relative magnitude he thinks it is), but from people who have agendas to oppose social oppression instead of to protect it along with their own wealth and power, you could start with:
How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth?: Movement building requires a culture of listening—not mastery of the right language. by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-much-discomfort-is...
we will not cancel us. by adrienne maree brown https://adriennemareebrown.net/2018/05/10/we-will-not-cancel...
Another point, he is very invested in keeping the economy and the widening gap between the rich and everyone else out of it.
One of the big catalysts of wokeness was of course, Occupy Wall St, borne out of the 2008 financial crisis. When the bankers get bailed out and you just go underwater on your mortgage, people start to get upset and want to change things. And organizing yourselves and drilling with lots of rules and getting on the same page with people you don't otherwise have any connection to is paramount when it comes to becoming a large enough, hivemind type group that can bring about collective action. But if he brought that up in this article, people who don't care about 8 genders and fringe social issues might start backing away from the "woke = bad" message
to my mind, Occupy Wall Street and "wokeness", as it is generally depicted, are generally opposing movements. although it may have started there, "wokeness" was not primarily driven by universities and people on twitter, the overwhelming majority of it was driven by corporations and the corporate media. for businesses, it was a new way to buy credibility through moral posturing, and for the media it was a new cheap form of outrage to use to try and hold onto their dwindling readerships. further, "wokeness" is generally divisive to the working classes and far less threatening to the generally mono-cultural capital-holders. even further, it's a very nice way to distract young activists away from fighting against class structures.
to me, it's almost like the corporate classes saw Occupy Wall Street, a very very rare occurrence of genuine class consciousness and protest in the streets of America, and they realised that they needed to neutralise it somehow, and "wokeness" was how they achieved that.
thank you for the sane comment. adrienne maree brown is wonderful
edit: I realize I didn't post the adrienne marie brown piece I meant to, I was thinking of this one: https://adriennemareebrown.net/2020/07/17/unthinkable-though...
I think there’s a fascinating throughline from older Christian moral enforcement to what the essay calls “wokeness.” Historically, a lot of Christian movements had the same impulse to legislate language and behaviors—just grounded in sin rather than privilege. For instance, the 19th-century American Puritans famously policed each other’s speech and actions because the stakes were framed as eternal salvation versus damnation. That social dynamic—where the “righteous” person gains status by exposing the lapses of others—feels remarkably similar to what we see now with “cancellations” on social media.
The parallels between the "original sin" in Christian theology and "... privilege" in social justice discourse are pretty obvious.
I also find it rather amusing that the social justice movement tends to be so US-centric - i.e. focusing on the issues that are specific to or manifest most strongly in US, and then projecting that focus outwards, sometimes to the point of cultural intrusiveness (like that whole "Latinx" thing which seems to be nearly universally reviled outside of US).
At the same time many people sincerely believe that US is not just a bad country - I'm fine with this as a matter of subjective judgment, and share some of it even - but that it's particularly bad in a way that no other country is. It's almost as if someone took American exceptionalism and flipped the sign. Which kinda makes me wonder if that is really what's happening here.
> that whole "Latinx" thing which seems to be nearly universally reviled outside of US
Well, there are a few things to clear up:
1. Latino is an American word that's only useful in the US to summarize people south of the US in Latam. People in Latam don't use the word since that grouping isn't otherwise useful to them.
2. There definitely are Spanish speakers who do use the -x or -@ suffix like "tod@s" and "todxs".
The mass confusion between these two facts is responsible for most of the discourse you'll read about latinx.
Americans don't understand that #2 exists. "Woke" Mexicans, for example, do use the -x suffix.
"Non-woke" Spanish speakers think the -x suffix is dumb in their own language. But they don't represent all Spanish speakers.
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The book "American Nations", whose basic idea is that the US + Canada is composed of 12 cultural "nations", also observes that the Puritans were rather intolerant. The Puritan culture influenced what he calls "Yankeedom" (New England west to Minnesota) and the "Left Coast", which was settled by Yankee shipping. My impression is that these two areas are the most "woke"; it seems that Puritan intolerance casts a long shadow, even though those areas rejected orthodox Christianity a long time ago.
My 2 cents is that this book was one of the worst excuses for historical analysis I've ever read (not that the author is even a historian; he's a journalist). It felt closer to astrology or a Buzzfeed quiz about what Harry Potter house you belong to than anything of actual value. It reminded me of a litany of corporate workshops I've experienced, where the author comes up with an interesting hook and then works backwards to support their conclusions. Great for selling a story to those looking for intellectually empty calories. Pretty much garbage otherwise.
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Right: it's worth noting the Puritans departed England in part because they were, basically, zealous pains in the butt who didn't get along well with contemporary English society.
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To quote mark fisher “…It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.”
Christians are so new. I wonder why Pharisees aren't mentioned more often when bringing in this topic.
Actually, "pharisaical" is the dictionary definition for this kind of hypocrisy.
An optimistic explanation is that they don't want to be antisemitic. The present-day term for "Pharisee" is "Jew." The early rabbis who created Judaism as we know it were Pharisees, and theirs was the only first-century Jewish sect which survived until today. You can even see the alternation between "Pharisee" and "Jew" in The New Testament. For instance, in some verses it criticizes the Pharisees for washing their hands before eating, whereas in others it levies the same complaint against Jews generally: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2011%3A38%...
My guess would be because most of the audience it's said to are much more familiar with Christianity than with 0000s Judaism. If the person hearing the comparison don't know anything about the operand then for them it becomes a meaningless comparison.
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Probably because this topic is American and it's the history of American Christianity that's being referenced.
The difference here is people are trying to address people’s actual life experiences instead of something they believe based on faith.
All peoples' life experiences equally matter. Just some areas more equal than others.
/s
Or so they believe
an interesting article on this topic: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/more-christian-th...
I grew up in the 80's - I felt exactly the same about evangelicals then as I feel about the woke today.
fr Nathaniel Hawthorne is immensely relevant in the present day
Everyone does moral enforcement though. Even this blog post we are commenting about (which I really agree with) is an attempt at moral enforcement. He even prescribes that wholeness be treated like a religion and gives a whole list of scenarios where one should deny the request of a woke person (same as one would a religious person). To constantly keep up this equality among all ideologies requires rules and enforcement of those rules, aka moralizing
The frequency and severity of enforcement are the distinguishing factors here.
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"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not exactly. The article doesn't try to draw a causative link between Christianity in particular to "wokeness".
i definitely believe in the relationship between modern wokeness and some older religious traditions of moral policing
there seems to be a territorial overlap between the two
The difference is religion’s justification is the words of a fictitious being whereas “wokeness” stems from principles of equality and tolerance.
Surely some adherents of each use it to feel righeous/superior, but in only one case is it actually justified.
I know what you're trying to say--But also, the (unintentional?) irony makes me chuckle:
"Sure, my group sounds self-righteous, but our view is justifiably superior."
Nobody wins a shouting match.
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Where do these principles of equality and tolerance come from? Are they descriptions of a stochastic processes produced by one of an infinite series of marble machines, or do they have a deeper root in something that is true for all places and times (I'll even accept roots in something that is true (not just acceptable) for this time, for all people within this time)?
Black person here.
Like most discussions of "woke" and "wokeness," this one too fails HARD by not fully and directly addressing the origins of the term -- and by "fails hard" I do mean will almost certainly do more obscuring than clarifying by starting from an information-deficient premise.
Including, e.g. "The term 'woke' has its origins in the Black American community as a signifier of awareness about ones political and social situation..." is a bare minimum.
You're right, but I don't think he's interested in the term. He's interested in the social phenomenon that (briefly) appropriated the term before the other side started using it as a negative.
There is so very little citation or substantiation in the entire essay. Even the footnotes are largely just more speculation. He presents it as some kind of historical record but it's literally just his thoughts.
It’s almost like that is the entirety of the rhetorical and argument station expectations when people comment on too much wokeness.
Vibes.
“I invented a meaning for this word that bears no resemblance to its actual meaning and then am critical of others because I think my invented definition is bad”
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It is actually insane how far I had to scroll to see the first comment mentioning this. He has merits in his comparison to religion but this essay is a huge miss.
Edit: in this thread, the actual origin of “woke” is only mentioned 3 times, the thread has 1942 comments as I type
https://x.com/seunosewa/status/1878835480424513903
"Usage is usage. I don't make the rules."
He also clarifies he's referring to the contemporary meaning in the linked essay:
> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now?
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This is maybe not unknown but often intentionally avoided by people like Graham who discuss this topic with an anti-woke bias. The exercise is to create a false origin and attack that rather than address the actual history of the term and its origin.
I'm also black and growing up I had the impression that "woke" referred to left-leaning conspiracy theorists and activists. 9/11 truthers and gay rights activists were the main woke groups of the Bush era
Going to guess you're pretty young? Seems odd to have not heard it differently elsewhere first.
jrm4, yours should be the top comment.
I denounce Paul Graham's essay. At a time when our leaders - especially our thought leaders - reliably do the wrong thing, it's especially appalling that he has the wrong take on wokeness, transparently and self-evidently to appease Donald Trump and his followers in order to protect his financial ties to Y Combinator startups. That's low, bordering on unforgivable, and until he retracts his statements, I'm afraid that I've lost respect for him and his opinion in all other matters.
It's obvious that pg isn't schooled in the basic civic virtues that I assumed he was. Such as: in journalism one always punches up. That's perhaps the simplest litmus test to know if one is siding with the oppressor.
I identify as woke and progressive. I speak out against all forms of oppression. I call out othering such as sexism, racism, ableism and ageism. I watched political correctness rise and fall under the boot of capitalist authoritarianism. I witnessed the wrong people win the internet lottery and deliberately undermine everything the civil rights movement achieved since the 1960s, as well as the shared prosperity that the New Deal brought since FDR. I watched them monopolize our media, take over and corrupt symbols of what's possible like Twitter and Wikipedia, attack beloved institutions like the US Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency, divide us on wedge issues in order to enrich themselves, and capture our regulatory bodies through lobbying and packing courts with judges and justices who toe the party line. I watched the winners sell out like pg just did. I watched my heroes fall.
I thought the readership of Hacker News was with me on this stuff. But I guess I was wrong. It's apparent that too many people here just don't get it. They don't work on their unhealed traumas, they don't seek equitable solutions. They just side with concentrated wealth and power, whether out of fear over their own job security, greed by hoping to be at the top of the pyramid someday, or through simple projection by not nurturing their own dignity and the power that their voice could have to shed grace and light onto the world.
If everything I just said is performative, so be it. I'd rather be on the side of peace, love and righteousness than whatever all this is.
Because you said that this author has the "wrong take on wokeness", what do you believe to be "the right take on wokeness"?
And by the way, I do think you are being more than a little bit performative here, because it seems you're just displaying how morally superior you believe yourself to be over Paul Graham, your heroes, and the readership of HN. But I would still like to hear your answer to my question.
Sure but that has almost nothing to do with how it’s used today.
Language and the meanings of words change over time, and it’s all but impossible to make people go back to using tre old definition.
The second definition is a gentrification of the first definition. It has everything to do with how it's used today.
It's what it meant until white people started lecturing each other on what it means, then conservatives started using it as a derisive catch-all for anything conceivably liberal or simply empathetic.
but don't you think an essay titled "the origins of wokeness" should consider that definition?
"Prig" is in the eye of the beholder. What about when the "prigs" were right? I'm sure the Quakers were seen as "prigs" by the southern slaveholders/traders. The Quakers were early to the abolition party and their opposition to slavery was based on religious zeal which made them seem like "prigs" to the people in the South who's whole society and economy was built on slavery. But we now consider the Quakers were right and the slaveholders wrong. MLK was viewed as a "prig" by many southern whites for interfering in their racism. But MLK was right.
> What about when the "prigs" were right?
I think the big take away is that being right via a lecture doesn't do anything.
If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
Instead, go out and do something. For example, defer typing up that long comment about how [x] is right and [y] is wrong, volunteer for some community service. Build shelters for people who need it. Offer pro bono services to marginalized groups.
If nothing else, simply live your way of life and out compete the people who were wrong.
But that 1000th internet comment you posted, even if it was "right", it didn't make a single lick of difference. So ask yourself why you really put it up.
> If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
Actually it's through Internet conversations and mostly online education that my mind was changed, my whole worldview in fact.
Quietly doing good is admirable. So is speaking up where people are talking. Both is even better still.
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Quietly being your best self doesn't give us substantial change, though. Consider that all of the big gains in civil rights for various groups came from people being loud about their belief in equality, and insisting that people who felt otherwise were wrong.
> If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
i'm basically a professional social justice warrior in tech and nobody is lecturing each other. everybody just does the work.
"stop lecturing... instead, go out and do something" is a dangerous train of thought. I agree that building houses for the homeless is a good idea (imagine if you could actually just do that, though...) but most of the issues people are talking about can't be directly confronted in cozy ways like going to the soup kitchen or building a house. A lot of the issues people are "woke" over are societal ills and the "action" available to them is stuff we don't want people doing. We should be advocating for reasoned discourse instead of - to paraphrase a popular tweet I didn't like enough to screenshot - telling people to shut up and go firebomb a Wal-mart.
Or take the abortion debate. We don't want anti-abortionists "taking action" against clinics and doctors any more than we want pro-choice advocates doing back-alley abortions if we can avoid it. It's all very dangerous!
I think the basis of his arguement is a prig is incentivized by calling out the moral failures of others to make themselves feel more virtuous.
Where perhaps the quakers or MLK were doing it out of moral outrage.
> by calling out the moral failures of others to make themselves feel more virtuous.
Isn't it impossible to determine the internal motivations of others? And even if they were doing it to make themselves feel more virtuous they can still be turn out to be right on the issue, can't they? Or it's possible that there's a combination of both moral outrage and ending up feeling virtuous.
As pointed out by Uncle oxidant, this is hard to determine.
I would suggest instead that a prig deems a person to be bad/evil based on them having a different view/behavior that society is generally divided on.
Conservatives will readily confound moral outrage with virtue signaling in order to neutralize it.
Doesn’t matter ultimately. If you’re at the point of requiring loyalty oaths to get hired, you’ve already lost the plot. Way past counterproductive.
There’s a great sttng episode, the drumhead, which explores witchhunts.
I would say a lot of what drives wokeism is not priggery but ignorance and just going along with the crowd, sometimes in forms that are well meaning.
e.g. sometimes white people have some experience where they realize how much crap black people get; they might actually meet some black people or learn about history (e.g. black people have been complaining about the police in America as long as there is America, why are we supposed to remember one person's name but forget Rodney King or the Watts Riots, that people like Booker T. Washington had trouble w/ the police) but instead they chant thought-stopping slogans like "defund the police" (tell that to the black people who have gunshots in their neighborhood every night) and instead of saying something like "Black people are beautiful" they have to say "Black lives are beautiful".
The trouble is that people today are looking back 15 minutes and looking ahead 15 minutes and are up against the likes of Xi, Putin and Netanyahu who are thinking in terms of hundreds of years if not thousands. They're like children in the hands of gods.
---
There is an undercurrent of priggery in attitudes about sexuality that's a different and much more complex theme that starts w/ Baudrillard's essay at the beginning of
https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction....
and continues with experiences such as discovering that when squicky rumours are flying around it is is the former BDSM professional several steps removed from the event who goes the the police with a garbled, confused and hysterical story or that the transgenderist gatekeepers of Tildes don't know that there are 549 paraphilias (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia) and that pedophilia is just one of them in their mad rush to cancel anyone they can. In contrast the people who pray a few times a day, homeschool their kids, and volunteer on deadly cold nights at the homeless shelter, while people who hate them are sharing hateful memes online, who "seek first to understand" the way Steven Covey says you should)
For me, Urban Dictionary[0] defines this issue much more clearly:
> When this term became popularized, initially the meaning of this term was when an individual become more aware of the social injustice. Or basically, any current affairs related like biased, discrimination, or double-standards.
> However, as time passed by, people started using this term recklessly, assigning this term to themselves or someone they know to boost their confidence and reassure them that they have the moral high grounds and are fighting for the better world. And sometimes even using it as a way to protect themselves from other people's opinion, by considering the 'outsider' as non-woke. While people that are in line with their belief as woke. Meaning that those 'outsiders' have been brainwash by the society and couldn't see the truth. Thus, filtering everything that the 'outsider' gives regardless whether it is rationale or not.
> And as of now, the original meaning is slowly fading and instead, is used more often to term someone as hypocritical and think they are the 'enlightened' despite the fact that they are extremely close-minded and are unable to accept other people's criticism or different perspective. Especially considering the existence of echo chamber(media) that helped them to find other like-minded individuals, thus, further solidifying their 'progressive' opinion.
> 1st paragraph >"Damn bro, I didn't realize racism is such a major issue in our country! I'm a woke now!"
> 2nd paragraph > "I can't believe this. How are they so close-minded? Can't they see just how toxic our society is? The solution is so simple, yet they refused to change! I just don't understand!"
> 3rd paragraph > "Fatphobic?! Misogyny?! What's wrong with preferring a thin woman?! And she is morbidly obese for god sake! Why should I be attracted to her?! Why should I lower myself while she refuse to better herself?! These woke people are a bunch of ridiculous hypocrite!"
[0]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Woke
Also:
Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683826
This is a significantly better article than the wandering drivel of the original post
I came in here to see if this had been posted already. deBoer does a much better job at talking about it in a comparatively neutral way. He only adds his two cents at the very end.
Another good one that gets it even closer is from Sam Kriss. His prose is a bit less to the point than deBoer, but he outlines his idea that "wokeness" is not a political ideology but rather an etiquette. I think it's paywalled now but the archived version can be read:https://web.archive.org/web/20230324050437/https://samkriss....
It's a good writeup that doesn't require the reader to have taken a stance or agree with the author's (arguably reactionary in the case of PG's post, depending on one's perspective) politics.
I love when urban dictionary nails something well like this, it's very amusing. Like a gold nugget surrounded by trash. The only other thing that tickles me so is the occasional pseudo-profound 4chan green text.
I thought this was an interesting read. For me, it sparked the insight that wokeness parallels the rise and fall of the attention economics, with the premise that attention is the real bottleneck in social justice. It places an emphasis on awareness, and the solution is often left as an exercise to the observer.
Political correctness and language codes are not new. I think what was new is the idea that people could rally around the banner of awareness, and thereby avoid disputes about solutions. This is why many of these topics lose momentum once their followers get the attention and have to deal with the hard and less popular questions of how to fix something.
The Unabomber manifesto talks about this a surprising amount too -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
I have read it before but which part?
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There was a variety of causes that gained prominence ~2015 when Bernie Sanders came much closer to challenging Hillary Clinton than anyone expected. The Democrat party establishment picked the wishy washy meaningless bits out and focused on them while keeping away from the more challenging economic issues that would actually require their ideologies to adapt
I think what most people call "woke" is probably just a reaction to the obvious emptiness of many of the things politicians like Kamala Harris chose to focus on whilst ignoring more concrete issues. A lot of it was stuff there never was a solution for.
It goes back even further than that.
There seemed to be a surge in 2011 too, when it became apparent that the Obama administration was going to let the big banks off the hook for the financial crisis.
I mean, that's part of it. The culture war is useful to both US political parties, because they both have a bourgeois class interest and need something to keep people invested in politics for the sake of their political legitimacy, but at the same time need to prevent them from gaining class consciousness or becoming involved in class politics.
Put another way: the culture war (as woke vs. anti-woke) divides the electorate, but in a way that lets them be parceled out between two factions of the ruling class, rather than aligning any of them against the ruling class.
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> For me, it sparked the insight that wokeness parallels the rise and fall of the attention economics, with the premise that attention is the real bottleneck in social justice.
This was mostly my reading too. Maybe more cynical, but I walked away thinking that wokeness itself isn't good for business unless you are in the business of selling rides.
It's a well written piece. Early on, though, this caught my attention:
> As for where political correctness began, if you think about it, you probably already know the answer. Did it begin outside universities and spread to them from this external source? Obviously not; it has always been most extreme in universities. So where in universities did it begin? Did it begin in math, or the hard sciences, or engineering, and spread from there to the humanities and social sciences? Those are amusing images, but no, obviously it began in the humanities and social sciences.
He's setting up the assertion "political correctness began in university social science departments." He tries to make it look like the conclusion is an inevitable result of reason, but really it's just an assertion. I dislike this rhetorical technique.
His assertion is probably correct.
This feels like one of the weakest PG articles
The writing quality feels like that of a university student
Just lots of assertions thrown out without any real backing
Yes, that paragraph is patronising and cocky.
Spending too much time in the richest, most tolerant counties in the country can make you forget that we still have colleges that won't admit gay students, or that many people still don't believe in interracial marriage.
Yes it's a teeny tiny little bit of a shame that a college president had to step down for raising a fair academic question. It is not half as important as when a cop shoots a black person dead for dating with a white girl.
Don’t criticize obviously bad things because there are things that are even worse.
We're all here because the author is criticizing opinionated people for loudly disliking obviously bad things.
Rock meet glass house.
I'm sure you did that on purpose. I'm sure I'm the silly one here.
> we still have colleges that won't admit gay students, or that many people still don't believe in interracial marriage
1. Who cares? Those colleges are private entities and presumably this admissions discrimination means they cannot receive Federalor state funds. If admitting gay students goes against their religious beliefs, then the rest of us benefit from having the people they reject.
2. It is not up to us to tell other families who they can and can't marry, or what they can or can't think. Let the bigots be bigots in their bigoted bubble, as long as they don't hurt anyone outside it. (If their children wish to leave the bubble, we should protect and support them privately.)
3. A cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl is homicide, independent of anyone's beliefs.
>Who cares?
I believe it’s in everybody’s best interest to stand up against discrimination.
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Right, but the problem is that consequences for a cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl don't seem to be the same as the consequences for homicide.
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I don’t disagree with his definition, not disagree that it’s a problem, but it’s still feels a bit to anti-Wokey in that he calls out things that he just disagrees with. #metoo brought down some terrible people who did terrible things, I don’t think you should call metoo in and of itself woke, not overly moralistic to be mad about sexual assault, there should be some nuance there.
He also calls Bud Light woke for… acknowledging the existence of a trans woman? Again not excessively moralistic to reach out to a constituency he happens to not like.
There are degrees of good and bad in all of it.
Harvey Weinstein preyed on people. Louis CK consensually engaged in his kink with people who later said they didn't mean to consent but were embarrassed because they wanted to curry his favor. Aziz Ansari went on a bad date, and she gossiped to someone who wanted to write a hit piece.
PG says wokeness peaked with George Floyd. Surely there was priggish stupidity that came from Black Lives Matter (like banning "blacklist" as if it had racial connotations), but what happened to George Floyd was legitimately fucked up.
I'm looking forward to a day when these ideas can be openly discussed. It's not that everything done in the name of woke was bad, it's that wokeness is a dogma that silences discussion. People whisper in cafeterias "hey, can I tell you what I really think," but nobody wants to say "the emperor has no clothes" when your wellbeing depends on it. In the last decade in tech, part of your job was paying lip service to inclusivity. If you date in SF or NY, you'll notice a bonkers number of people still signal a trendy virtue in their profiles, usually BLM/ACAB or Free Palestine/watermelon.
If people worry that they can't keep a job or be invited to a social gathering or find a mate if they question the dogma, you'll end up with a bunch of people performing for the dogma, because they need access to those essentials.
> If people worry that they can't keep a job or be invited to a social gathering or find a mate if they question the dogma
And who, exactly, do you think will have to worry about being stigmatized for their beliefs in the next four years? Who will be threatening them, making laws that violate their rights, pointing guns at them? Anyone who spends their time complaining about the targets of such suppression, as though they don't have rights of free speech or association, is doing a bit of dogma enforcement themselves.
I'm not a fan of Floyd at all. Garner was the far better martyr for that cause.
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The events that PG chooses to paint as woke say a lot about what he really thinks. By the end, I was convinced he was truly against consequences. Cries for justice should be ignored. If a lynch mob isn't being a formed, then everyone should just shut up.
Yeah, that's just nuts. Let's be very specific: the issue was that Bud Light hired Dylan Mulvaney to do a social media promotion. It's not as if Dylan's face was on beer cans available in stores or anything. And this simple act caused a massive backlash. I would think that this might raise some questions about who exactly the prigs were in this instance.
The backlash arose for many reasons, but this article explains the most principled one:
https://thecritic.co.uk/dylan-mulvaney-did-not-share-our-gir...
It's not priggish to take a stand against misogyny, is it?
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This seems like extraordinarily weak writing with very little backings or substantial evidence to the claims. That in itself would be fine - if presented as opinion - but this has an air of a historical biography of the actual lineage of the term. This is anything but.
It feels like an accounting of a person who is very deeply wearing tinted glasses about the world.
This is a politically charged discussion but I think it demonstrates some of the problem. Left arguments, just like the right, devolve into a theme of you are with us or a racist. There is no middle ground. I am no longer in the Bay Area but I still remember one of the depressing defining moments of this during the BLM protests. Shop owners would throw up signs that literally would say “We are minority owned, please don’t destroy our shop”. In my mind it’s the wrong way to think about it, does that mean we are giving the ok to destroy non-minority businesses? If you were to ask that question at that time, you would get labeled quite quickly as a racist.
The shame about everything these days is you cannot have a discussion anymore, maybe it never existed. I am not a republican but I also cannot stand the outspoken left shouting over everyone else in CA. Does that mean I am antiwoke?
Let me share the perspective I have as a member of a class of people that have been subject to racism for thousands of years, including enslavement, arbitrary murder, and systematic mass murder. Please forgive me, but being quiet didn't seem to work so far.
At least hundreds of thousands of polite, quiet, reasonable, assimilated urban Jews were murdered in the holocaust. It is deeply wrong that African Americans and other minorities or mentally ill people live in a world where the police can be every bit as dangerous as the gestapo. I feel like it's wrong that millions of women have been murdered simply for not doing something a man wanted. Millions or billions of women aren't treated as if they have the same value as men.
Please look at the bully pulpit standing against us. Most of the power in American society is concentrated in the hands of a very few white men. How loud do you think someone has to be when they have to stand against the megaphone of society? When someone needs to stand up against trillions of dollars in wealth?
Pretty loud as it turns out!
I am not sure what your reply has to do with my comment. Be as loud as you yourself want to be. The issue with the left is the same that as the right in America. The handful of extra vocal folks set the tone. You are unable to have any real discussion as it’s too easy to quickly get labeled a racist or some other classification. If you don’t agree with a position, well you must be a nazi of some sort. That is/was the typical vocal left in CA.
The comparison of police being gestapo is just silly. In the general case police are underpaid for what they are tasked with. I am no fan of the police but it’s naive to think they are the gestapo. Severely under paid and undertrained to then have to take care of the same neighborhoods all the time. I also think your narrative of finger pointing does not really attack any of the issues. Instead of pointing fingers nobody wants to sit down and ask why certain communities have poorer outcomes than others. Poor police outcomes are a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
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Hear, hear.
The article missed the biggest opportunity to be curious by avoiding the question: What if they're right?
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe... It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
To be fair, he does say the above, which is close enough. The problem with asking "what if they're right" is that there's no single formulation of beliefs shared universally by such large and diverse group, so you can't consider whether they are right or not, only whether each individual expression is.
But there’s this statement as well:
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be…
The whole idea of woke (in the non pejorative sense) is that you’ve done the work to perceive the actual problem.
That statement shows that he hasn’t, which I think undermines the good parts of the essay.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mmskXXetcg
This is a fantastic response. Wokeism is a pseudo-religion, and Dawkins's response to the in vouge religion is timeless.
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> with far left views that in the recent decade have become the loudest voice basically every online platform. > the same toxic far left hub that Reddit has become > shifting away from the far left messaging that has been the default
That entire post has left reality a long time ago. Honestly, this level of resentment can't be healthy.
> angry, myopic, us-vs-them extreme thinking.
You've clearly become what you're (allegedly) so vehemently against.
I think it's best to understand it in terms of entirely different separate realities that define political ideologies nowadays, like it's not just that I disagree with you, we don't even share the same plane of existence anymore. Like for example conservatives love to call Biden a marxist/far-leftist — it's incomprehensible gibberish to me, it goes against everything I believe to know about reality, but it probably makes a lot of sense to you, you might even agree with the statement. It's not a disagreement in the traditional sense, it's not something we could talk about and reach some sort of mutual understanding.
The same is true with people using the term "woke", to describe something they believe exists and is a great danger somehow, the most important political struggle of our times even perhaps. And you're right, in your perception of reality it really is scary and worth fighting against. It's just that I believe you are living in a dangerous, delusional fantasy that has nothing to do with reality. That's why finding common ground is pretty much impossible unfortunately.
Like one time I saw a conservative calling the world economic forum a far-left institution, I really don't think a productive conversation between leftists, liberals and conservatives is even possible at this point.
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There is an entire cottage industry on Substack of people writing about Wokeness. It has been covered extensively and I do not feel like PG is adding anything new here.
IMO Freddie deBoer wrote the best definition of "Woke", something that many people fail to grasp.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...
The beautiful thing about essays like this is that they show you that the author has truly never known what he was talking about. Just a guy who stumbled through life at the right time. It’s a shame these people have so much power and influence. It could be wielded by people much more thoughtful and benevolent.
Graham was brilliant in the 90s. I would say this article is more like evidence that he's washed up. When you no longer have to work hard because your name alone means money, your mind turns soft.
On par with YouTubers making the newest Roblox challenge videos to stay relevant in the algorithm.
He has nothing to add except his name.
I first heard the term from my ex-wife when she was involved with black politics in Chicago in 2014. At that time their definition was firmly in the "awareness of racial and social injustice". It was seemingly later twisted to mean hypocrisy or hyper political correctness. Redefining it seems to have nerfed any effect it once had.
That is not incompatible with pg's definition, if "raising awarenesss" dominates "doing something about it".
He said the word woke *described* the "awareness of racial and social injustice". He didn't say it was a mechanism for "raising awareness".
Let me ask you this: How does one, in your mind, do "something about it?"
PG's article focuses on "woke" as a kind of performative morality and you've gone out of your way to try an unify this original definition of "woke" with Paul's performative definition.
Was "woke" being used performatively in the 1930's when black folk advised other black folk to "stay woke" when traveling in certain parts of the country that were hostile to their existence?
When does the original definition start becoming incompatible with Paul's half-assed definition in your mind?
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> The danger of these rules was not just that they created land mines for the unwary
In real life, these "land mines" don't usually explode unless people think you're stepping on it intentionally.
For instance, every time I've accidentally used the wrong pronoun for someone, I've gotten a polite correction, I make a mental note, and everyone moves on. It's just not a big deal.
With a large enough audience, there will always be someone who assumes you've acted with ill intent. But if you know you've done it innocently, then you can just ignore them and move on.
Intent matters. Those performative things communicate your intent to make others feel welcome and included. So if you fly off the handle at a reasonable request that would make a group of people feel more included, you've communicated your intent accordingly.
Occasionally, there are some purely performative things that don't actually make anyone feel more included. Personally, I think it's reasonable to ask that question if you're genuinely interested in finding the answer. However, purely performative things tend to disappear in time; so sometimes the most pragmatic response is to just go with the flow and see where things land.
I think what PGs article misses, pretty much completely, is a more accurate definition of the work woke, which is:
>A word used to label another's political beliefs and activism as incorrect and foolish, particularly if that person is seen as "left leaning" or "progressive."
In other words, it's common usage has devolved to mean "you're an idiot."
This is a travesty, really, because its use erases any chance to have an honest dialogue about the topics and behaviors being labelled as "woke."
For example, people could instead say: "I disagree with X behavior, and here's why." Instead, people say: "look at that woke idiot." (And really, this is not an exaggeration.)
The normal behavior you describe, of people pointing things out, with others' responding in kind, has little to do with the common usage of the word "woke," which has simply become a form of name-calling.
And it is unfortunate, because there is much to criticize about activists on the left, but name calling is in no way helpful, and instead, drives further reductive discourse.
This is it.
Well organised and destructive conservatives across much of the western world, have conspired successfully to nullify the positive effect of a word once used to elide wide ranging ideas and discussions on the subject of social justice.
This is social media at it's most galling.
Though alongside that, we now have a wider appreciation of a long list historical crimes, and the longstanding effect of those transgressions.
In that sense, we have all become 'woke'.
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> In other words, it's common usage has devolved to mean "you're an idiot."
So liberals call conservative idiots "woke"? I think people have lost the plot here in trying to define this word.
> But if you know you've done it innocently, then you can just ignore them and move on.
For sensitive people that isn't really an option, it just causes endless stress.
The land mines do explode. Edinson Cavani got three match suspension after saying “Gracias Negrito” on social media to a teammate who just had a good game. And Spanish was his mother language.
The teammate was not offended in any way, but some authorities higher up apparently were.
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The weirdest thing that I've run into wrt pronouns is when people object to the use of gender-neutral pronouns as "misgendering" - e.g. a person insists that you must not use "they" to refer to them but rather their preferred gendered pronoun, and if you don't, then that is "erasing their identity".
The argument that's usually made for this is that if someone's referred to as "they" while other people around them are "he" or "she", this makes them feel excluded etc. But if so, then using "they" uniformly would have been acceptable, and yet the same people insist that it is not.
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In cases of ambiguous gender presentation, they is common and accepted.
The idea is that yeah typically your pronouns should line up with your appearance or presentation, but sometimes it's a bit ambiguous. I've had people call me "ma'am" on the phone or in drive throughs because my voice tends higher. Or because I have long hair and from behind it tends to look feminine. It bugged me when I was younger and less used to it, at this point I don't really care. But I do appreciate it when people ask.
When it comes to common terms, they're usually pretty whatever. I've been doing a lot of work in a protocol where original terms were "master" and "slave", and while I don't really care reading it in docs I personally feel uncomfortable speaking in those terms because my brain always brings up the connotations. Especially when the pattern is just as effectively described with Client/Server.
My goal, ultimately, is just to keep the vibes positive and help people feel welcome and included and seen. Some reasonable changes to patterns of speech to support that isn't that crazy to me. It's no different than code switching when in a different country, or just talking to different groups in general.
> This type of policing is another iteration of doublespeak that we were warned about in 1984. Policing the language polices thoughts. It harms communication effectiveness. It makes it harder.
Jesus, it's really not that hard. I work full remote and I just ask people what they prefer. I'm not in office and a lot of people aren't on camera and it's a bad idea to generally assume shit based on their name anyways. If I forget I apologize and we move on.
I have literally never encountered any issues in my long career of working with people because I don't feel a need to fill my head with hot air and make a big deal about it.
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https://x.com/dril/status/473265809079693312
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> Isn't that the issue though? I healthy society should be able to challenge, object and argue (within reason), without losing jobs or being exiled?
When you're in parliamentary/house sessions (or whatever your democracy/society/state has), sure, argue and object to everything. There you have what Americans are so crazy about, "Freedom of Speech" and all that.
But outside of that, in private life, most people would find you very cumbersome to deal with if you challenge, object or argue with things that people state about themselves. If I say I'm 32 years old and you try to argue against me, I'll eventually just ignore and shun you, because who has the time to deal with such inconsequential stuff?
If someone is named Jimmy and you keep referring to him as Jimbo despite them politely asking you not to, what do you think will happen?
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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.
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I think people may disagree on what "within reason" means. There are some red lines established by Title VII that cause "just asking questions" to cross into "hostile work environment." Is it reasonable to keep asking those questions?
Reasonable people can disagree on that question, but the law will protect a company that fires an individual for crossing that line while the rest of society is arguing over where the line should be. That's just how law works in general.
Easier said than done. Intent does not matter. The vocal minority will instantly peg you a racist and those whispers will continue to persist. I have personally been through it. Unfortunately we exist in a world now where the vocal left and right pollute the airwaves.
Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten. I don't think what pg is saying is anything new, he's always had the same sentiment around anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian/mob and pro-breaking-the-rules attitude.
It's called "hacker" news for a reason.
shrug Well I've been on HN for about 20 years, and I'm not anti-pg (he's about 50/50 by my accounting). I'm also anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian, anti-mob.
But he missed the mark here. It feels like he published a first-draft without getting any dissenting takes on one of the biggest hot-button topics on the web. I (or a million other people) would have been happy to read a draft of this and explain that he'd create offense and confusion with his... attempt to explain the history of priggishness around social justice based on his lived experience... if that's really what this is supposed to be.
NINE other millionaires read this weird, angry screed. Not a single one felt the need to gently guide Paul Graham towards the truth.
These people are willfully ignorant, but they're so arrogant that they think that they're right about everything.
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> he'd create offense
That's sort of the point of the essay, he compares woke to a religion and explores how companies deal with various religious beliefs at work, ie: no one religion is ever allowed to suppress others no matter how righteous its believers feel or offended they may become.
I'm not sure why that's a bad thing or would create "confusion" in your mind.
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Exactly, this “hacker” news. Where does this screed from PG fit into that? If this was published by literally anyone else it wouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.
Hacking isn't just about computer programming, you could call it a philosophy.
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I think tracking vibe shifts is interesting and noteworthy.
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I enjoy his technical and tech culture essays, ones like this are a waste of time and mental energy. I won’t read it because I know it provides zero value.
You won't read it based off of its title I presume? On Twitter he says how so many people jumped into conclusion without even reading the essay.
Btw this falls squarely into "tech culture" category.
It's hard to take him seriously when he claims X doesn't censor, despite their very blatant and open censorship. Hacker news has not gotten anti-pg, it's more that pg has become more vocally political and is now facing the consequences of that.
Case in point, anyone else posting a screed like this would instantly be flagged and removed.
This is a significantly less good piece of writing than many of his older essays. It can be as simple as that.
I take it as more of an indicator of how much liberal sentiment has shifted over the last 15 or so years.
That plus the community having grown.
> Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten.
Frankly, I find it more concerning that anyone thinks HN should be pro Paul Graham by default. He should be judged by his ideas, not who he is.
He claims to be anti-censorship, yet he can't see Twitter is just as censored as it used to be because it aligns with his world view now. The same as the Left used to be blind to Right censorship. Maybe he should try tweeting "cis".
"pro-breaking-the-rules attitude" come on. He's aligning himself with the most conservative and powerful people in the world right now. How is that a rule breaking attitude?
You can be aligned on 99% of things and still be a rule breaker. Additionally it matters a lot how big and societally ingrained the rules that you're breaking are.
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Tech billionaire Paul Graham is the establishment.
Miss when his essays were actually about hacking!
Being anti-censorship is one thing that should, taken in isolation, have nothing to do with your object-level views. But in practice, those claims tend to correlate with very specific views, and they're applied hypocritically. Elon is the most high-profile recent example - I think it's hard to argue at this point that he had any principled anti-censorship views, given his behavior since taking over Twitter - but he's far from the only one.
You won't see PG writing an article on how homeless people in SF should be more pro-breaking-the-rules. Because it's OK to steal from your users, to inflate your growth numbers, to make false promises to build your initial userbase, but it's not OK not to shoplift from the Safeway or do drugs on the BART. That's the kind of breaking the rules that isn't cool, edgy, smart, and most importantly high status and beneficial to Paul Graham. Don't you think that double standard is a bit suspect, that he's "pro-breaking-the-rules" exactly when the rules restrain him and not others, when it's the rules he thinks are stupid and not the rules someone else thinks are stupid?
You won't see PG writing an article about how it's bad to deny a 15 year old medical information on puberty blockers. That is, undeniably, censorship in its very simplest form: it's the suppression of information out of a belief that it is in some way dangerous to let people know about it. But most of the people who claim to be so concerned with censorship won't say a word against it, and a lot actively support it, because it stops being "censorship" when it's something they like.
And, of course, the idea that the anti-woke crowd is "anti-authoritarian" is kind of laughable right now, given their response to the incoming administration.
The change isn't that his (or other tech elites') ostensible values have changed. It's that their ostensible values have become increasingly transparently hypocritical. PG hasn't become less of a hacker: it's "hacker culture" itself, especially as represented and hijacked by venture capital, that is not what we (or at least what I) hoped it was.
Rule breaking for me, and not for thee sums up my objection, I suppose.
> it's called "hacker" news for a reason.
exactly, so why is a long political opinion piece from PG on wokeness here in the first place?
ah yes an ill-informed whiny screed about wokeness is exactly the kind of content pg is good for. that's hacker content right there!
Yeah man, he's really breaking out of the mold by doing the exact same thing all the other SF billionaires are doing by sucking up to the right wing. Even braver and more punk of him, like Zuck, to only do it after the right wing won the election.
I'll give my opinion, as someone who used to hold pg in extremely high regard, but who is often surprised at just how thoroughly uninsightful pg's essays seem to me now.
The biggest problem I see with pg, and basically with all of the SV elite, is that I rarely see them question any of their assumptions or conclusions that don't lead them to "everything I've done is right, or at least the original goals of the 'SV ethos' is the best thing for society."
For example, take the concept of meritocracy. I completely agree that I think the "wokeness" of many on the left went way overboard in demonizing meritocratic processes, e.g. getting rid of advanced classes and opportunities for some students in the name of "fairness". At the same time, I rarely if ever see these SV kingpins suggest viable solutions to the fact that in the relatively new "winner take all" tech-led economy, very bad things happen if only a teeny meritocratic elite hoards all the wealth and leaves everyone else in an extremely precarious state. For a counterpoint as to someone who I do find insightful, consider Scott Galloway. He is definitely not someone who I would call woke, but he also understands some of the real problems so often ignored by the "tech utopianists".
In this particular pg essay, there is not much I disagree with, but I didn't really learn anything from it either. I'm also extremely suspect at all these SV leaders suddenly highlighting their views that are conveniently in lock step with the new administration. Like you say, pg has talked about this before, so I'm not saying his thoughts aren't genuine, I just think what Tim Sweeney said recently is pretty spot on "All these SV leaders pretended to be Democrats, and now they're pretending to be Republicans." It's similar to how I feel about Zuckerberg's recent pronouncements. When I first heard them, most of them I agreed with and they made sense to me. Then I read the actual new "hateful conduct" guidelines and I almost threw up. I'm actually fine with being able to call gay people like me mentally ill - I'm willing to debate that 9 ways to Sunday. But kindly STFU about "free speech" when only gay and transgender people had a specific carve out to allow for their denigration. Like I have to listen to all this crazy religious bullshit that in a sane world we'd recognize as symptoms of schizophrenia, yet if I said that on FB that would go against their new hateful conduct guidelines.
Frankly, I see pg largely as another uninteresting SV elite: someone very, very smart and who obviously worked very hard, but who was also obviously extremely lucky and now thinks that his thoughts are worth so much more than anyone else.
> I'm also extremely suspect at all these SV leaders suddenly highlighting their views that are conveniently in lock step with the new administration. Like you say, pg has talked about this before, so I'm not saying his thoughts aren't genuine, I just think what Tim Sweeney said recently is pretty spot on "All these SV leaders pretended to be Democrats, and now they're pretending to be Republicans."
Yep. IMO you struck right at the heart of it. My cynical POV is that pg, like many others, tries to be on the good side of who's now in power.
Everything else discussed in the article or here, as valid or interesting as it might be, looks to be a distraction from this central motivation.
This is simply bad writing. And it's also quite offensive given the origin (and ultimate conservative perversion) of the term "woke."
I thought it was more pro woke than anti pg, still I was surprised.
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HN has many of those who have gone through the indoctrination process in college that he describes in the essay.
It is extremely silly and in bad faith to accuse anyone to disagree with of indoctrination, but it's even sillier when every single tech bro is basically the same person, reads the same books, repeats the same topics, on the same day using the same phraseology.
You could have literally taken this essay from PG posted it on the timeline of any single one of his colleagues and you couldn't even tell who wrote it. The "anti woke" economy, if you look at the numbers accounts of that flavor do on Youtube, Twitter et al. is a magnitude if not larger than what, according to them, cannot be criticized.
The phrase "woke mind virus" also featured in this essay, is more of a literal meme or mind virus in the Dawkins sense of that term than anything it attempts to address. The lack of awareness to accuse others of indoctrination when you write an essay so generic that you can autocomplete the last 90% after reading the first 10% chatgpt style is quite something.
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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.
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And there I was, reading a comment earlier today about how HN is better than the other places because it prefers technical articles over "politics".
If you want technical articles with less politics, try the invite-only red site.
How do you get an invite?
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The one thing I'll never understand are people using self-aggrandizing titles on things that are otherwise vacuous shitposts. It happens more with blogs than it does with actual, hardcover published books. Maybe "Ferromagnetism" by Bozorth but at least he discovered/invented a particular combination that works well so he gets a free pass by the virtue of it.
(to be clear i'm not calling Bozorth's work a shitpost, but you have to got to have balls to slam that kind of title on a textbook)
> The number of true things we can't say should not increase. If it does, something is wrong.
Word.
Everyone agrees with this. Obviously, the problem is determining what is true. There is significant disagreement. This is the root of the problem, not that people are preventing other people from saying things that they themselves believe are true.
The problem comes from deciding what's true. It's factually true to say that a higher percentage of black people than white people are convicted felons. It's also grossly negligent to describe that as a cause ("black people have higher tendencies to become criminals") than as an effect ("centuries of systemic racism held higher numbers of black people in poverty, and poverty highly correlates to the kind of criminal behavior that gets you arrested, and also lower quality legal representation, which makes it more likely that the next generation will also be poor; lather, rise, repeat").
Is it a lie to say "black people are more likely to be felons"? No, but if that's all you have to say on the subject, then you're probably a jerk and shouldn't be talking about it at all.
TL;DR I'm weary of people saying things that are factually true on the face of them, but that utterly distort the conversation. See also: "scientists don't know how old the universe is" (but have a broad consensus of a narrow band of values), "vaccines can harm you" (so can water), "it's getting cooler in some places" (global climate change doesn't add X degrees to every location uniformly), etc. etc. etc.
To expound, "black people are more likely to be felons" is only true (in the truest sense of the word "true") given a clear definition of what "likely" means, and the conditions under which the statement is true.
The statement could easily be interpreted as either:
- when selecting a random black person and a random white person out of the current American population, there is a statistically higher chance that the black person is a felon than the white person
- black people are more inclined towards committing felonies than white people, and will continue to do so at a higher rate
These have very different meanings, but are both fair and natural interpretations of the information-deficient statement "black people are more likely to be felons". Given that, the statement will likely cause more confusion and argument than clarity, and so is a bad statement.
There's a term for lying with carefully selected truths: Paltering.
> Paltering is when a communicator says truthful things and in the process knowingly leads the listener to a false conclusion. It has the same effect as lying, but it allows the communicator to say truthful things and, some of our studies suggest, feel like they're not being as deceptive as liars.
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True things which make you a jerk (to some) shouldn't be censored to avoid "distorting the conversation". Respondents can explain the context.
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This presumes a high, perhaps delusional, level of faith in the public speaking space to determine what is "true."
I like to follow a statement like that up with: What exactly did you want to say that you can't anymore? Please give some specific examples.
While the sentiment sounds good on paper, in practice it far too often is someone complaining that you can't demand a black men to be lynched if they have a white girlfriend anymore because society has gone all woke.
There are lots of things that aren't 'PC' to say anymore and that doesn't mean society is failing. In fact I would argue that it is just plain old progress, especially when it is accompanied by a number of things that we can now say that used to be taboo.
Out with: "Gay people should be burned at the stake."
In with: "Contraception allows families to decide when to have children."
> I like to follow a statement like that up with: What exactly did you want to say that you can't anymore? Please give some specific examples.
At one company, we instituted "opportunistic hiring" policies. A certain portion of our engineering headcount was reserved for women. Men explicitly could not be hired using the headcount put under the "opportunistic hiring" pool. However, it was absolutelyy forbidden to mention that gender was used as a factor in hiring.
Yes, we straight up banned one gender from a portion of our head count. But nobody could say that one gender had greater headcount than the other. That was considered offensive harassment. The same managers that would hire women under their "opportunistic hiring" pool one day would admonish other people for suggesting that women were beneficiaries of discrimination the next.
Another example: 9 out of 10 people shot and killed by police are men. Is this evidence of sexism against men in police? If I say that I don't believe that the police are sexist, but rather this disparity is due to the fact that men commit proportionally more acts of violence than women, is such an opinion sexist against men?
In many circles, pointing to the fact that the racial breakdown in policy shootings matches the racial breakdown in violent crime, with the same strength of correlation as the gender breakdown in shootings, is considered racist. In fact, even acknowledging a disparity in the rates of violent crime is considered racist by many (even if one states that poverty and historic injustice are the causes of the racial disparity in crime).
I'm very curious how you came to the conclusion that Paul was thinking of statements like "gay people should be burned at the stake" when he writes, "the number of true things we can't say should not increase".
I have a specific example in mind, but I fear that if I mention it, I'll be doxxed, cancelled, fired, and burned at the stake.
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What are some true things you cannot say? Enumerate some, please.
> saying "colored people" gets you fired
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Over the past couple of weeks there have been two heavy virtue signalers in my social circle that have turned out to be complete assholes to people around them, and I had that thought exactly. Maybe the very reason they feel the need to get approval from "virtuous" people is because they themselves are so awful.
Why are the tech elite and right so obsessed with this term? It’s such a bizarre phenomenon - I can’t wrap my head around it.
Tech elite currently enjoy disproportionately large benefits from rampantly un-balanced systems that allow them to exploit people for their work and therefore they stand to lose quite a bit from any rebalancing of said systems.
Basically, workers get nothing and CEOs get everything.
It represents something they can't control and which could ultimately be used to take them down a peg or two, if not more, by ostracizing them in the public's eyes.
tl;dr - They are afraid.
How much money do you have to have before your beliefs stop changing like a flag in the political wind?
To be fair to pg, he has hinted at anti-radical-left beliefs before (see the essay about moral fashions). He is probably able to voice anti-radical-left views now because the Overton Window has shifted.
pg has been pretty consistent in this position for a long time. His worldview is closest to what one could call "classical liberalism":
Free speech, economic liberalism, civil liberties, individual autonomy.
That's a worldview that is pretty idiosyncratic today (sadly).
On some topics he's "left wing" (pro palestine), on others he's "right wing" (anti affirmative action in university admissions).
PG has always been annoyingly consistent about his views on this.
His accounting for what attracts people to wokeness is incomplete. Certainly there are prigs in the mix, but for most, I think it's that wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously. The challenge, then, is how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously without also folding that effort into an ideology with vague expansive definitions that lend themselves to actual prigs.
What attracted me to it is the idea that sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. are forms of bullying that are definitively antisocial. At its core, it should be about stopping bullying at the level of individuals, society, and institutions.
And, despite being "pro woke" or whatever it should be called, I had my own lessons to learn: I had to learn to stop interrupting women. I had to learn that interrupting them was wrong and that it was a form of sexism that I needed to address.
That’s just how the prigs justify to themselves being prigs.
> wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously.
I'm not sure that's true. Wokeness doesn't focus on actual harassment; it focuses on accusations of harassment, with a definition of "harassment" that is highly subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate very well with actual harassment.
> how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously
The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
> The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Taking it seriously is a prerequisite for any effective mechanism for reducing sexual harassment.
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I feel like when this all started out the problem was really taking it more seriously. People would talk and complain about it and no one would take them seriously. So the group managed to scrounge together enough power to force it to happen.. And then some of that power got misused. It's still better than it was before it started, though.
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> The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Try replacing "sexual harassment" with "murder" or "robbery" and see if it still makes sense.
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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.
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Why do you perceive some sort of conflict or paradox between "taking it more seriously" and coming up with an effective way to prevent it?
I mean, that is "taking it more seriously."
I swear, this whole topic is just an ouroboros of people talking over each other about vaguely defined terms.
You complain that "wokeness" has a "highly subjective" definition of harassment that "doesn't necessarily correlate well" with reality.
"Wokeness" itself is an incredibly vague and amorphous term, primarily wielded by those who oppose it. It barely exists except in the minds of its opponents, and certainly does not have some kind of governing body or like, official position on harassment or anything else.
If you feel that some specific person or institution is doing a shitty job of addressing harassment, or if you have some specific ideas of your own, those would be great things to bring to the table.
But accusing a vague and amorophous thing about being too vague and amorphous about another thing is... man, please, stop.
For over 20 years I've been clicking on pg's essays, knowing that I can look forward to an interesting and insightful read. I can no longer assume that.
Would this have gotten front page if it wasn't pg? Because I think I know the answer to that.
It's not surprising that people come to PG's commenting site to comment on PG's writings.
Front page dynamics are complicated. I won't say you're wrong, but you might be wrong. Time of day (for instance) can have a huge effect.
I attended a corporate training on harassment where it said you can’t say “all hands” because it’s disrespectful toward people without hands. Use “town hall” instead.
On one hand, sure it’s an easy substitution to make. On the other hand, who decides these things? How does this affect our company? Do people without hands actually care? It all adds up and it’s wearisome like PG says, all these rules and you just try to avoid stepping on one.
I find this highly highly suspect as an anecdote without some supporting evidence
A quick search suggests this is a bit of a running meme used to discredit and poke fun at such trainings rather than something you’ve honestly experienced.
Here's an article that was posted here a long time ago:
https://it.wisc.edu/learn/inclusive-language-for-it/
It attempts to replace, or offer alternatives to, offensive language in IT. For example "dummy variable" is under the category of "Ableist language" in the website and should be replaced with the term "placeholder value". "master" and "slave" are other examples of language that, apparently, need to get phased out.
I don't see the problem with the comment that you responded to. It's not surprising to me.
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I giggled at what you did here! High five!
Everyone less empathetic than me is a bigot.
Everyone more empathetic than me is just virtue signaling.
Paul was on the board of, and advisor to, many of these companies that exported their culture to the world through their products and services. He wasn't the black sheep of the group whom others simply ignored and promoted their own independent political convictions.
I don't understand what this comment is trying to say, but the image of pg being on the board of companies (other than one that he founded) is pretty funny. I can't imagine him wanting to do that.
There is reason why he is writing this now. He did not get rich by having an opinion.
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.
> I happened to be running a forum from 2007 to 2014 > our users were about three times more likely to upvote something if it outraged them.
I see how upvotes were detected. But outrage?
> a mob of angry people uniting on social media to get someone ostracized or fired
Worth noting that this arose by the specific design of the social media ownership. The "correct" side was artificially boosted and the incorrect side was censored. The outraged would have just cancelled each other out otherwise.
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it?
Yes. It requires the willpower to disengage from the performative point scoring of internet discourse. Most good conversation must now happen in private for many reasons, much of that has to do with the technology PG himself has previously supported.
Presently, you are seeing social media forking into red and blue (x and bsky and fb and truth social). This is bonkers. A superior format for discussion is a place like HN which is tightly (and opaquely) moderated. Another great development is the use of 'community notes' which, for all its imperfections, is superior to straight censorship.
Ultimately I'd like to see people like PG invest in high quality journalism where the mission is a dispassionate reporting of the best-available facts, supported where possible with data, and presented in such a way as to demonstrate transparency.
The journalism point he made hits home, hard. I'm a sunday times subscriber, and just added WSJ and Financial Times paper edition. I don't really want to add 10 substacks and parse through them all. I'd pay a lot, a lot a lot, for a quality daily briefer, known in some circles as a newspaper of record.
One that I love, deeply, is the Martha's Vineyard Gazette -- still printed on broadsheet, and with fantastic journalism -- it's what regional and local papers used to be. I wish we could have something like this in the national format.
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.
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.
Given that Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for murder, it feels quite shameful for the author to be unable to name his victim as anything other than "the suspect" - the sentence feels like one of endless examples of the 'past exonerative tense.' Similarly, given that up to 26 million people participated in protests over the _murder_ (not "asphyxiation"), minimizing what seem to be by any count the largest mass protest movement in US history as "riots" is nothing but a thought-terminating cliche.
Similarly, the article claims that the New York Times has become far left, but offers no evidence for this. When I think of the NYT in 2020, however, while there certainly were articles using the priggish language that Graham denounce, I immediately think of the Times's decision to feature an op-ed by Tom Cotton (right to far-right politican) suggesting that the nearly two-century long norm that the US government should not use its military to police its citizens (formalized in the post-Civil War Posse Comitatus Act) be broken in favor of an "overwhelming show of force" against "protest marches." In general, the New York Times has firmly remained a centrist (small-l liberal) newspaper, and I think claiming it has experienced massive ideological drift without providing examples says more about the writer than the paper.
In general, I feel like the essay shows a base disregard towards the concept of accurate history (suggesting that "homophobia" was a neologism invented "for the purpose [of political correctness]" during "the early 2010s" and fails to convince me of any of its points because of this.
+1
See my comment as well. The evidence PG uses to support his claim the New York Times has done this massive ideological shift is completely undone in his ninth footnote, that says the throw-away line in the article might not have even been reviewed by a senior editor. Yet PG still has gall to state it as fact.
> Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.
It seems that the defining factor is that there was no actual authority attached to the morality of the situation. He is essentially saying that life was better when one could get away with doing whatever they wanted with no repercussions.
This is such a well-travelled path that I am surprised his intellect, nor that of the people that he claims proof-read this document, didn't protest before hitting 'publish'.
Here's a question: how can social justice actually be justice without enforcement. The US constitution coded this as the 13th amendment - is that now a woke document? Is that an example of "radicals getting tenure", or is it example of progress?
Articles like this really don't age well. Neither, it seems, does the author.
I found it extremely odd that he specifically pointed out professors being sexist as a thing that's perfectly fine to let them get away with.
I live in Europe (Germany) and we have no wokeness here. Saying something sexist or racist isn't a big deal. Some people will think you are an asshole and that's it. Our leftists go to the US and come back ranting about how oppressive wokeness is. I'm a minority myself and have experienced my fair share of racism. But I have no desire to push for somebody to get fired for making a racist joke or some such thing. I will just lower my opinion of them and move on with my life. I don't want to live in a country where a wrong word at the wrong time might mean you're fired.
Germany has laws against hate speech! There are opinions you can be jailed for in Germany that you couldn't be in the US.
I think it depends on the word and the context. If the person speaking is your boss, there might be situations where 'moving on' isn't an option and the words might have wider implication in your life.
Germany actually has several laws in place that explicitly protect people in the workplace, such as the General Equal Treatment Act (2006, with revisions to 2022) which contains an explicit treatment of Harrassment, specifically mentioning that of a sexual nature.
Going further, in a judgment dated from 06.12.2021, LAG Cologne, sexual harrassment was explicitly stated as acceptable grounds for extraordinary dismissal. So actually you already live in exactly that kind of country.
https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/de...
What I think you're trying to say, though, is that you don't experience the kind of angry fanatical discourse that seems to a big feature of social media and US discourse, where laws are being weaponised and used as blunt political instruments, with which to do as much damage to society as possible.
In this case, I agree with you and am super grateful I don't live there.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bans_on_Nazi_symbols
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.
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.
This one was staying in the Drafts folder if Kamala won.
I have no respect for the people like Graham who are only voicing their objections now that the election results provide cover.
Graham has always strongly opposed censorship, group think, purity spirals etc.
But he wasn’t willing to write an article like this until Trump’s election provides him cover. It’s funny how many moderate liberals have suddenly found their voices.
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I sadly suspect we’re going to see some risk adverse hiring of boring white dudes in all positions of leadership. Regardless of competence.
We’re already seeing DEI weaponized. Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not. Organizations will be risk adverse and only hire the most boring white dude they can find from central casting. Whatever you want to say about diversity initiatives this will be a pretty terrible outcome.
> Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not.
That sentiment ("any mistake is because they're a DEI hire") is obviously wrong. But didn't DEI open itself up for that accusation by lending it some truth? It's a fact that black doctors have lower GPAs than Asian doctors on average.
I think a lot of people would argue against DEI because it takes the easy way out of a real problem. The result we want is more black doctors, but the way you should get to that is not changing standards that are not inherently racist.
I think a lot of people would argue against DEI because it takes the easy way out of a real problem. The result we want is more black doctors, but the way you should get to that is not changing standards that are not inherently racist.
The easy (and right) way out was to hire the most competent doctors, not the blackest doctors. I don't want more black doctors, I want the best doctors, regardless of their skin color. If you want more black doctors, you should train better black doctors. However, if you're going to do that, don't be surprised when white trainees band together to work harder too. If it's fair for your side, it's fair for every side.
I have no idea why we went backwards from "discrimination based on skin color is never okay" to "it's okay if they're black" but there's no reason not to simply recognize the mistake, fix it, and move on.
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> Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not.
This isn't restricted to tech.
"I'm French when I score, Arab when I don't" - Karim Benzema.
LinkedIn has a DEI jobs category in their Jobs section. How is that a qualification to do a job?
Why exactly is that a terrible outcome? What's wrong with boring white dudes?
Nothing. But if people are afraid of NOT hiring boring white dudes it becomes not about competence but about avoiding the optics of not wanting to look like you’re doing a DEI thing
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The whole "pale, male and stale" narrative is antiwhite racism. I don't think people should perpetuate it.
White men hold almost all the power in America. I can't reconcile this fact with the idea that there is some conspiracy against white men. Can you provide some more context on what you mean?
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Summary: Old successful man thinks the social justice movement is unnecessary and stupid. Also, twitter is better since Elon.
Abbot and Costello - Who's on First - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYOUFGfK4bU
SNL - Republican or Not - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h_N80qKYOM
If one desires understanding and learning about the world, one must remain curious and humble. Unfortunately curious and humble people are generally not as emotionally and more importantly, politically activated.
So a politician may go looking for a subject that will be emotionally activating to as many people as possible. It barely matters whether more people will be on their side or the other side. As long as the fight is going, they will get engagement.
It is very difficult to motivate a person towards a complex world where the other side is made of humans (sinners, but still human).
It is much easier to motivate a person towards a simple world where their own side is righteous and the other side is composed of demons.
---
So, is the other side made of sinners or demons?
"When your market was determined by geography, you had to be neutral. But publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography" is interesting! I'd never thought of that being the cause of news polarization, but as a story it makes sense.
In 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.
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Do you really believe this? It seems inconsistent with free speech and Paul Graham’s own definition of wokeness.
What other ideologies fall in this category? Or another way, what ideologies don’t fall under the category of free speech? Should we stop advertisements with gay people? All religions or just non-Christian religions? What makes an ideology woke? That the mainstream is uncomfortable with it?
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Yes, that's what people actually mean when they say "woke", but would Graham openly admit that?
Did they promote "trans ideology"? Did the ad say anything about trans principles?
Or did it just have a trans person in it?
Because if you are saying employing trans people is woke, that's pretty messed up.
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> In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white police officer ~~asphyxiated~~ a black suspect on video.
This is quite some impressive editorializing, especially when the black "suspect's" killer is currently in prison for murder. I only highlight this because it indicates a very particular viewpoint held by the author - particularly stuff like this -
> And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
So, he states very early the performativeness is the issue. But, inevitably, when you ask these same people what then should be done about inequality, whether it be racial or otherwise, the answer is often "nothing" or denying that a problem even exists. I don't pretend to know this author's view here, but I'm just pointing out that the sentence quoted here is kind of dishonest - the implication being that if performativeness regarding social justice is a problem, that you should then focus on real efforts around social justice. This isn't mentioned a single time in this nonsensical screed, getting close in parts like this answering the "what now?":
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because there will be a next thing. Prigs are prigs by nature. They need rules to obey and enforce, and now that Darwin has cut off their traditional supply of rules, they're constantly hungry for new ones. All they need is someone to meet them halfway by defining a new way to be morally pure, and we'll see the same phenomenon again.
So, this author undermines his entire "point" (if a real one existed) with stuff like this, because the obvious conclusion is that any real effort at correcting social injustice and inequality will be met by cries of "aggressive performative moralism" by people exactly like this. From my view, that's probably the point, just please don't pretend you're doing anything intellectual here.
I'll leave this, this certainly does sound very "conventionally minded" (as he uses in a derogatory manner throughout this):
> Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong
> But, inevitably, when you ask these same people what then should be done about inequality, whether it be racial or otherwise, the answer is often "nothing" or denying that a problem even exists.
That's an assumption you're making - I don't see any evidence of that viewpoint in pg's essay. Any specifics you can point to?
I can point to a specific that seems to contradict you:
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
Inevitably, someone will chime in and say that it wasn't what he said, it's what he didn't say -- arguing from someone's purported silence. But that's exactly the kind of performative nonsense he's arguing against. It ought to be possible to speak against something without being castigated for failing to pay lip service in some way to a related topic.
This line of questioning is extremely annoying, and if I can be frank, also sounds very dishonest. You already answered your own question, knowing what it is, but I'll walk you through it -
His core "thesis" or "problem" here is the performative nature of social justice initiatives. He's correct, they often are performative. This does imply, on its face, that some efforts should be done to enact real initiatives that are not performative. I'm sure we can agree there this is what is implied by his statement.
Why then, would a serious author with this problem statement, then proceed to write thousands of words bemoaning the underlying nature of the initiatives themselves (without addressing what about them makes them performative, not even a single time in this essay) or about not being able to say "negro", rather than coming up with even a single conclusion on what must be done instead? I mean, you can just take a random sampling of the comments in this thread, which honestly shocks me it's not been flagged, to see precisely how people with his same viewpoint interpreted it. Lets please not pretend here. I can't exactly get on the phone and ask him what he thinks the answer to this question is - I can only go on a huge volume of discourse that has gone on for many, many years and make some conclusions on my own based on what he spent a very large amount of words complaining about, and shocker, none of them had to do with the ineffectiveness of social justice initiatives or "wokeness" (how he defines it), but rather how it oppresses him.
Does that help?
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Having too much money is brain poison.
Clad in shining armor, I’ve sworn to protect all that is holy and honorable. My vow drives me forward, blade at the ready. My task today clear: to beat a dead horse, and, if that fails to satisfy the call, to lay my blows upon a dead snake, a snake that is dead.
I 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.
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.
I remember having a conversation with someone around a decade ago about whether "social justice warrior" pointed at anything real. My contention was that every popular moral system has its prigs and its fanatics - social justice no less than Christianity, environmentalism, socialism, etc, etc, etc.
Every decade has its new leftest boogeyman for the right to complain about, same as always. Critical Race Theory, Political Correctness, Hippies, Civil Rights Crusaders, etc... Doesn't really matter, just so long as it is an "other" that can be ostracized as a group.
The left is lucky in this regard because they get to complain about the same two boogeymen all the time: white males and Israel.
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I remember how a particular AI ethics reasearcher got Yann Lecun to leave Twitter. That's perfect definition of wokeness for me.
Articles like this on either side are a waste of time to write and read. Commenting on them is even worse (and here I am too...)
Zero people are receiving value from any of this energy, because it is impossible to - these are intellectual empty calories. Nobody here will be changing their mind, and these comments won't bring anybody closer to changing their mind. Literally nothing of substance is being created, and nothing will change because of any of it.
It proves that you and I are foolish that we participate in such useless activities while our short lives slip away. I'm here hypocritically yelling into the wind like an idiot right now. All of this is a sad waste of human potential.
Imagine if the time spent writing this article and all these 1400+ comments went into something simple like picking up litter where we live. What a real appreciable difference that would make. I'm going to go do that to offset the time I spent writing this stupid comment.
Thanks for this.
Thank you for the reply.
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.
> 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!
> optimizing for proportional representation has to come at the expense of quality
That's like saying a baseball team should try to sign a catcher if that's the best available player right now, even if they already have plenty of catchers and desperately need a shortstop. You need balance on a baseball team, just like you get a better party with a good mix of people, just like you get a more interesting university community if you bias against a monoculture.
Is there a pejorative term for performative intellectualism?
People have been writing the same article since 2016. It’s unbearable
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.
> This is also why the Democrats are so fractious internally, relative to the Republicans. Republicans default to trusting each other (not saying whether that's merited or not) while Democrats only make temporary uneasy alliances
The number of votes it took for Republicans to select a Speaker of the House and the effort that Speaker has had to subsequently undertake to keep that position says otherwise.
> The number of votes it took for Republicans to select a Speaker of the House and the effort that Speaker has had to subsequently undertake to keep that position says otherwise.
It's natural that the politicians selected by this group are going to be self-serving, unable to cooperate, etc. The fractiousness I'm describing is at the level of the voter, not the politician. See the 2024 presidential election for an example.
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
Following this logic, the Emancipation Proclamation was "problematic" because the "correct" thing to do is free slaves quietly via the underground railroad, as we wouldn't want to get slave owners in trouble.
This is fundamentally an argument against systemic change, as "getting people in trouble" is both core to the genesis and the enforcement of things like the Civil Rights act.
Attacking "wokeness" with this argument is deeply problematic, and extremely tone deaf in the wake of the Meta moderation leaks, wherein their internal documents highlight that the new moderation changes allow statements like "Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”
>Following this logic, the Emancipation Proclamation was "problematic" because the "correct" thing to do is free slaves quietly via the underground railroad, as we wouldn't want to get slave owners in trouble.
Present-day racism and slavery are in completely different neighborhoods of magnitude; to the extent that the comparison borders on false equivalency.
>...the new moderation changes allow statements like "Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit."
If a platform is attempting to operate within the ethos/spirit of free speech, you 'should' be allowed to make such statements on the platform. The root of the argument is the disagreement on whether and where one should be "allowed" to say those things.
Saying it's problematic is not a trump card (no pun intended). If you can demonstrate how allowing people to say offensive/harmful things (excluding established limits on free speech regarding safety) is inconsistent with free speech, then you're adding something to the discussion. Anything else is likely a disagreement on utility of free speech vs. civility; a place where folks can agree to disagree.
> If a platform is attempting to operate within the ethos/spirit of free speech, you 'should' be allowed to make such statements on the platform.
Ah, but you aren't allowed to say "Christian men are totally useless" or "Lesbians are so stupid", so it sounds like you should take up the ethos/spirit of free speech with Meta as well.
I don't follow that logic and that is the kind of absolutism many of us disagree with. It seems like an appeal to emotion to me. I'm not sure you can characterize the EP as shallow; aggressive yes, if one considers bold to be synonymous with aggressive in this context.
I don't find any issue with people making statements like that. I also don't need to agree with it to think that you should be allowed to say it. Do you find that to be problematic?
I'm reminded of a lyric from "Mississippi Goddamn."
> Don't tell me, I tell you
> Me and my people just about due
> I've been there so I know
> They keep on saying "Go slow"
Since YC startups (culture) is the exact opposite of what PG is saying, this is just a political stance in words, nothing more.
Ohhhh, he’s genuinely stupid. Got it.
Is this a subject Paul has expressed an interest in before, or is this another instance of tech founders cozying up to the incoming president before he's installed? There seems to be a lot of that going around in Silicon Valley lately, is something threatening their billions of dollars if they don't toe the line?
He’s been interested in how taboos influence our thought and speech for a long time: https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html .
Yet this article is the only mention of the term "woke" on his site. What a strange coincidence that it happens now even though he's been interested in the topic since at least 2004.
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He's been pretty consistent about this.
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"
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.
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
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.
Hmm, this is a completely generic and unreflective rant about ‘wokeness’ that could have been cobbled together from YouTube comments and Jeremy Clarkson columns. What is PG thinking?
The most striking thing about it is that it makes absolutely no attempt to consider how there might be a link between the undeniable social progress that’s been made on race and gender over the past decades and the aspects of ‘wokeness’ that PG finds distasteful. He simply assumes that you can automatically get all of the progress without any of the stuff he doesn’t like.
In "The Age of the Essay"[0], Paul writes:
"An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
"Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
"If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them."
So there's your answer. PG is thinking "This is something I don't know; I should write an essay to figure out an answer."
It also makes sense to me that when he writes an essay connected to an area he knows well (like startups), the result is maybe full of unique perspectives and is broadly insightful/useful. Whereas an essay on wokeness isn't likely to bring much to the table to anyone who has been paying attention to diversity for several years.
Maybe it's still useful to engineers who've been living under a rock and haven't paid any attention at all; I don't know.
[0] https://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
That's a good reason to write an essay. I think the present case illustrates that it's not a sufficient reason to publish it.
> What is PG thinking?
My assumption would be that he's doing a performative hard right turn like pretty much every other tech billionaire this week in order to make nice with the incoming lunatic administration.
he made a hard right turn a decade or more ago. Its not just now.
source: his other blog posts.
More:
https://nitter.poast.org/paulg/status/1878761763799519595
“An aggressively performative focus on social justice.”
Paul is giving the strawman definition (or, ironically, the PC definition) of “woke”. It’s a code word that can be anything the user doesn’t like, and isn’t anything they do like. It’s used as a weapon along with its alias, DEI.
But people aren’t using it with that “performative” definition in practice. People are using it to label social justice topics that they don’t agree with. So it’s disingenuous to try and define it in a way that is much more narrow than its practical usage.
Even Paul himself uses the word in a way that sure seems inconsistent with his definition:
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
Bud Light sent Dylan Mulvaney promotional cans of beer to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of her web series about her transition. Mulvaney had been a target of right-wing activists for some time, and those activists drove the boycott. This was just a particularly effective example of a long line of right-wing campaigns against companies that associate with trans celebrities. How does "woke" fit into this except from the perspective that "woke" just means being on one side of the culture war?
why is a beer a platform for pushing some individual's personal choices?
why should it be used to push any sort of political messaging?
why shouldn't bud light owners reject a brand that pushes those political messages?
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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.
> 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?
If anything, this is a useful looking glass into the minds of people who love to complain about language policing and think "censorship" is our biggest social problem.
If you're very rich, not left leaning, and have a big platform, I imagine it's very easy for censorship/woke mobs to seem like the biggest problem. Most of your needs/wants (in terms of food, shelter, safety) are met, you can mostly do what you want, but people online call you names and some of your posts might get taken down. It's one of the only problems you can feel, and it's obviously because the culture is wrong, because you feel it's empirically established that you are smart and good.
It's a little like people whose exclusive concern in the realm of sexual assault is false accusations; if you can't imagine being a victim or a perpetrator, false accusation is the only part you think can affect you, so naturally your priority is minimizing that risk. Skews your perspective a bit.
Censorship is and always has been a central threat to a free, pluralistic and democratic society.
It is always a key tool of authoritarian governments. And always starts with people thinking certain ideas are too dangerous to express.
I love that complaining about language policing is language policing
It isn’t, though.
In the same way that the police upholding the law is vigilantism?
Well, with the recent news that Facebook censored vaccine side effects by order of the government, I think we shouldn't underestimate censorship.
FB was not ordered to do this. In their words:
it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement... we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today
- Mark Zuckerberg, 26 August 2024
"News"
I'm not saying this didn't happen but I wouldn't trust Mark Zuckerberg if he said the sky was blue. He is trying to curry favor with the new administration and he is not above lying or embellishing what really happened.
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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.
Interesting to compare this narrative to "A history of 'wokeness'". (Specifically, it's interesting that the "origins" seem to have very little to do with the history.)
https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-hist...
Came to share the same link, much better piece than PG's
It's political correctness gone mad!
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2xpsg9
I thought it was going to be like the origins of corn syrup where we actually learn some history but no it's just this guy's ramblings.
And I hate the term "Politcal Correctness", what does it mean? I think it means the opposite, your politics we're previously correct and now they aren't, it's an excellent rebranding. They can always joke that we can't say things anymore but actually, you really couldn't say things or act in certain ways or even exist or you would suffer violence.
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.
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.
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?
I am in particular happy that we at least try to banish s-word from tech vocabulary. I never thought it bothered me, but someone out there cares for me before me even knowing, and I am grateful.
Is it policing speech? Yes, kind of. Can it be considered under PC umbrella? I guess so.
Priggish? Hell no. This is not priggish, this is just respect for human beings.
It's rather ironic that this is the exact priggishness he's talking about.
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?
The essay was posted about 60 minutes ago but must have been removed as that post is no longer discoverable through yc search. Weird.
(This comment was originally posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683660 but we've merged that thread hither)
It got flagged to death. 50+ upvotes, 6 comments, but flag killed.
I mean, I kind of understand: The discussion is going to turn into the kind of thing that HN tries to avoid. And yet, "moralities" driving things we can't talk about is the point of the essay, so it's really ironic to have it flag killed here.
Off topic: We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more. That means that flag killing is uncorrectable - if users decide that it's inappropriate, their only recourse is to email dang. That seems to me to be a step backward - let the user base correct the overreach of others in the user base.
> We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more.
That hasn't changed. Neither has any of the other logic around voting, flagging, or vouching.
Vouching unkills [dead] posts. The current thread was dead, for example, and vouches rescued it. But a post can be [flagged] without being [dead]. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918548 for a past explanation.
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Your second paragraph is very well said. Made me chuckle but also lament.
There’s a globally shared movement opposing anything the left considers progress—for minorities, the environment, a shift away from fossil fuels, animal rights, fairness, and other ethical causes. This opposition dismissively labels such efforts as “wokeness.” From the US to Germany, from Orbán to Erdoğan, you see this trend everywhere.
It’s largely driven by men who feel their way of life is under threat. They want to continue as they always have: eating giant tomahawk steaks, driving oversized SUVs, denying climate change, and being offended by the existence of gay people. These are the same individuals who empower fascists—whether in the US, Germany, Argentina, or Italy.
The world seems to have forgotten the lessons and the misery of the Second World War.
In other words, it is impossible for there to be excesses or incorrect opinions on the left.
My friend, I am a leftist. I guarantee you no one hates leftists more than leftists.
We fight each other to death over everything.
"Progress for the tick is not progress for the dog."
> These are the same individuals who empower fascists—whether in the US, Germany, Argentina, or Italy
Correct, madame.
Imagine that, there are also men who care about environment, who are not offended by seeing homosexual human beings, and who don’t want to have fascism.
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.
> 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.
Can we all agree that this is an exemplar of the sort of priggishness that defines "wokeness"?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268
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.
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.
>and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
Type the word "cisgender" on twitter and say that again, Paul.
https://x.com/search?q=Cisgender&src=typed_query&f=live
There are many typing that word?
Try posting it yourself. See what happens.
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This guy thesauruses!
It’s interesting to me that a certain type of person is so susceptible to buying into this fable of wokeness, especially when it pertains to universities. Almost like there is a woke mind virus, but it’s not infecting the people they think it is.
I attended university in the mid 2010s, so close to peak “wokeness”, and I never witnessed or heard of anything like what pg is describing. In my experience it was totally fine to hold just about any political/ethical view as long as you were a decent human being to your fellow classmates. There certainly was no political correctness police forcing us to assimilate.
The popular perception, especially in certain circles, is that there's been a rash of "cancellations" and extensive banning of, especially, outside speakers on college campuses, and also to some extent professors, accompanied by large and successful movements there to accomplish those outcomes.
In fact, there are so comically few cases of any of that that the couple real-ish ones are always cited by those advancing that position, plus a handful that really, really aren't that sort of thing at all (always look up the full story, 100% of the time they omit context that totally reframes what was happening, this phenomenon is more reliable than most things in life).
Real data exist on things like speakers' appearances at schools being cancelled, and it's most fair to say that the trend there is it's gone from "damn near never happens" to "still damn near never happens". And it's not because controversial right-wing sorts, which we may presume would be the most likely to be banned, aren't even trying to speak on campuses when e.g. invited by friendly organizations—they are, and frequently do.
The entire phenomenon is extremely close to being imaginary. That's why you, actually being there and not just going by social media and pop-political-book and talk radio and podcast "vibes", didn't see it.
On YouTube, watch the Evergreen State College 3-part documentary by Bret Weinstein. This is much more common than you think, through your anecdote, unfortunately. Granted, this happened in 2017, so a few years after your time in college, but I would argue "peak wokeness" sits between 2016 to today, in large part due to Trump's first election win.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH2WeWgcSMk
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0W9QbkX8Cs
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vyBLCqyUes
This should make anyone's skin crawl with the way this college's faculty and staff were treated, and the childish behavior of the students to allow this to happen. This gives a reason why "college kids" are no longer considered adults.
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> "genital mutilation of children (gender affirming surgery)"
In the past 4 years in the USA there have been:
- roughly 14.4 million children born, half of them are boys (7.2 million) and 57% of those circumcised. 4.1 million non-consenting genital mutilation surgeries on people who didn't ask for them, mostly infants.
- 4160 breast removal surgeries in minors under 17.5 years old on people who did ask for them, mostly teens.
- 660 phalloplasties in the same group.
We should definitely wonder why Republicans are fine with four million non-consensual genital mutilation surgeries every year mostly on infants, but against a thousand times smaller number of surgeries mostly teens willingly asking for them. We should wonder this in the context of Republicans pushing back against legislation raising the minimum marriage age:
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/louisiana-... - "If they’re both 16 or 15 and having a baby why wouldn’t we want them to get married?" - said representative Nancy Landry, a Republican from Lafayette
- "The West Virginia bill is an outright ban on all marriages under 18. When the House advanced it to the Senate with a resounding 84 votes in support, just over 12 Republicans voted against it" ; ""The only thing it's going to do is cause harm and trouble in young people's lives," Harrison County Delegate Keith Marple, a Republican and the lone person to speak against the state bill" - https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-make-case-child-marriag...
i.e. Republicans being fine with 15 year olds "making their own choices" when it comes to marriage.
> "stating pronouns as a performative act" ; "Continue to deny that this worldview exists, and you will continue losing elections."
This is the United States where you stand up every day in school and performatively pledge allegiance to a flag, yes? Where you stop strangers in the street to "thank them for their service"? How are you so annoyed about someone putting "he/him" next to their name (but not about them putting captain/corporal/major/doctor/reverend next to their name), and as a response you vote for a man who admits sexual assault, has been convicted of federal crimes, lies about his experience, knowledge and credentials, spent $141,000,000 of your money playing golf - mostly at his own golf clubs, used the presidency to (illegally!) promote Goya products, nepotistically sent his own children as official US representatives to meetings? A president who performatively attends church for photo shoots but doesn't regularly attend church for prayer?
It's this kind of behaviour which gives rise to the jokes "the Right will eat a shit sandwich if it means the left will catch a whiff of their breath" and which makes a mockery of the claims that it's all the left's fault; the Right is fixated on trivial bullshit, arguing for the right to be able to lie and be jerks without being fact checked or facing any consequences, without a sense of proportion of different events, obsessed with being angry about the left's feelings and calling them snowflakes, while choosing who to vote for because a film character gets black skin instead of white skin.
He is attacking a straw man, by defining "woke" in a far narrower sense than it is actually used. Any objection to any form of prejudice, or any indication that the speaker is aware that members of some groups are better off than others, will be labelled "woke" by many commenters. It's to the point where some bigots say "woke" in the exact same places that their grandparents would say "n***-lover".
But instead Graham focuses on people who are overly concerned with specific language because those people are easier to criticize.
No that’s the most common usage now. It’s almost exclusively used pejoratively. Very few people use it in a positive sense anymore.
It’s hard to define “woke” as anything other than “something someone politically to the left of me does that I don’t like” as that’s how broadly it’s used.
It’s utterly meaningless.
I’m sure elites love that we’re spending more time arguing about tokenism in mediocre corporate franchise media and other nonsense than we are talking about economic and material concerns
This is a good write up that is sure to trigger a lot of people. The main two things I see coming out of this aggressive militant moralism is the death of public and to some degree private dialog. This is especially apparent in left-wing medias who seem to have completely cleaned up their writings to the point that now in order to get informed about what's actually going on you literally need a separate news source. Interesting discussions have also died out because there is one right way that everyone must adhere to, one correct language, one correct behavior. They died out because any voiced opinion that is slightly off is going to get canceled by the moralists so we're left with silence and private echo chambers. At this point its a religion where the tenets are more important than actual reality. As a fellow atheist I can't wait for it to dissipate.
I presume the essay went through many revisions earlier, but right now, talking about embers bursting into flame and burning hotter than ever feels a bit - awkward?
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.
It's a political distraction to keep the working class fighting themselves while the wealth class continues to pilfer.
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.
"Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one."
Thank you rich white man for letting us know racism isn't that big a problem. We did it!
Thank you for saying this.
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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Those who complain about Wokeness most often can't see their own thorn in their eye. Peter Beinart wrote about this years ago:
> The theme of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was “uncancel America.” But when news broke that one of the speakers, a hip hop artist named Young Pharoah, had called Judaism “a complete lie,” CPAC cancelled him. Which led Young Pharoah to denounce CPAC for practicing “cancel culture,” which just goes to show: Denouncing “cancel culture” is a lot easier than defining what it actually is.
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/want-to-fight-cancel-cul...
In my country an artist made songs titled "Fuck children" and "Women are whores". He was cancelled (and then cried about it). Cause it's so unfair to not book artists who jokes about raping children? Who gets to cancel who? In the real world, pro-Israel "wokeists" have gotten way more people in trouble, both on and off campuses, by calling people "anti-Semites" than left-wing "wokeists" have for complaining about usage of wrong words for "non-white" people.
Like certain washed up comedians, these people are all hypocrites. They reserve the right to offend others, but when others offend them they cry.
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.
Would this essay be on the HN frontpage if it was written by anyone else?
There was an essay by Ken Shirriff on the front page earlier, discussing political stuff but leaning in the opposite direction. It, at time of writing has 271pts vs this with 218pts.
No. And man, I feel like the quality of PG's essays have declined. Even if I agreed with a few points, it was so rambling, and just made so many leaps. The sheer length of it is a pretty good signal he didn't really work that hard on this.
No. Stuff like this benefits those behind HN and many who frequent this site. The political-neutral face HN puts on is a farce.
I'd like to think "no", but we've debated a lot of dumb shit written by famous-in-some-circles people over the years.
I'd also push back on HN ever having been politically neutral. I think 20 years ago it was "politically naive" or "politically ignorant", but that's not the same thing.
Did pg really think through the timing of this essay?
Whether his intention or not, releasing this right now feels like it's part of a concerted effort by the SV ultra-rich to convince their fans that Trump Is Good Actually.
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>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is a rare case where the author and their position makes the content more important than the content itself.
It was already flagged like 8h ago
It would but not for long . politics stuff tends to get flagged fast .
Not if they're from PG apparently
No.
Sometimes it's good to know where people stand when they're shooting themselves in the foot.
...especially because this class of society is often standing on the backs of others!
We just had a day-long front page about why we need to feel shameful about using the term "Cargo Cult" because some tribe that positively no one is thinking about when they use the phrase believed a God would deliver cargo if they setup fake radio towers and used bamboo headsets. Some sort of hand wavy "why I am better than all of these fools who don't understand the real details" bit of noise. Colonialism or something. White guilt.
When I saw this PG article I wondered if that article inspired it. It is the perfect example of someone walking into something where zero people have ill intentions, and everyone understands exactly what that very useful term means, and telling us all we should stop using it because of their moral eye opening. Aren't we all better people now?
Here are some takes on woke from the left:
The Origins of Contemporary Woke Culture ft Christian Parenti
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxdBOxl_eik
which is an excerpt from the full This is Revolution podcast episode:
The Cargo Cult of Woke ft. Christian Parenti
https://www.youtube.com/live/6TJbv45DJyk
Chris Hedges interviewed Parenti also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTpeQ4V-YeY
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/how-wokeness-kills-class-...
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?
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.
> 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!
> 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.
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I would turn this entire discourse about "wokeness" on its head, especially the discourse from the pg's and Musk's of the world, and assert that they don't actually care about the way the ideological wind is blowing; They're afraid of the collectivist nature of it.
That many less-powerful people can band together in pursuit of social justice against them, entrenched titans of capital, those capable of steering mainstream discourse, can provide a counter-argument to their power structures, is what _really_ troubles them.
> If a trans colleague identifies a way that you disagree with, does this give you free pass to misgender them and deny their identity?
Yes, of course. If you believe that false claims of an opposite-sex identity constitute a harmful lie, why should you be compelled to endorse it?
> Yes, of course. If you believe that false claims of an opposite-sex identity constitute a harmful lie, why should you be compelled to endorse it?
Because such behavior is a direct and targeted attack on an individual or individuals, not the concept of gender identity, transness, etc.
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Summary: Rich white guy complains that it's too much effort to figure out what we're supposed to call 'coloured people' these days. It reads like the lament of a sore winner who has been forced to think of other's feelings against his will.
And all of this is couched in a pseudo-histororical style that perhaps the author hopes will shield it from being read as an 'emotional' argument.
And you know what's the worst thing? We live in a conservative world. They set the rules of the game, the draw the chalk outlines of the playing field, they own the ball the stadium and the referees.
And now they tell us we have to be silent when they rough us up too?
Yeah I guess wokeness and cancel culture are what you complain about now when your life is so free from challenges that you have nothing else to complain about.
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.
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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This kind of "upspeaking" will probably get more accepted and popular now. Dark times ahead.
yeah, I have underestimated the lust for authoritarianism in silicon valley tbh
You all understand that this is to appease MAGA/trump right?
So what? well, are you not terrified? if they preemptively are going to such lengths to appease the racist MAGA crowd, are you not afraid of what they will do with all the data they collect and with the amount of dependency we have on tech?
Please be afraid. IDK, maybe watch star wars or something, the piece about how fear leads to anger, then hatred then violence should make you afraid. Have you ever seen CEOs an tech leaders line up to brown-nose a president before? what happens when he asks them to do even worse?
I don't find that to be true and I find your own rationale to be its own sort of performative moralism. Many normal people feel this way and it isn't to appease MAGA or Trump or whatever, including myself and many people I know who have been and/or are lifelong leftists. It is not impossible or even unlikely that people in higher positions developed these feelings on their own accord. I'm not saying your statement is always untrue, but it denies the people you're writing about much agency.
I think that what's happening is that people on all levels are now more comfortable in saying what they actually think or believe rather than saying things to avoid busting arbitrary social rules.
this has nothing to do with leftism or rightism. MAGA is not right-wing,they're fascist and authoritarian.
paulg has a reliable pattern of history, where he echoes the current trends in the tech company leadership circle. him, altman, musk, bezos,etc.. they run in the same circles. I am not even disagreeing with his sentiment of being against performative morality or equality, people on all sides of politics have been saying that for decades! the framing of anti-racist and anti-fascist people as "woke" and hijacking that conversation as a culture war item where any attempt to criticize racist and fascist systems and sentiment is classified as "woke" (they tried the term "SJW" a few years prior to "woke") is what is happening here, and it is very obvious.
You cannot plead ignorance on this!
This isn't about arbitrary social rules or saying "colored people" vs "people of color" or b.s. like that. that sort of mis-framing is mis-direction, straw-man reasoning. Someone tells you "hey, pay minorities a fair wage" and responding with "I can't call them _____, that's woke and political correctness", how sickening it is when the tech world shows its hypocrisy. Better to have performative morality many times over than willfully ignorant tolerance of hatred and prejudice. Use the terms "DEI" and "woke" in any context other than their original intended context and you're either a damn racist or an enabler.
I hope these people read this, I for one would be very vocal for calling them out and shaming them after they've drunk from the poisoned chalice of trump.
There's prigs on both sides
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.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now.
Graham is really skipping over some pretty significant whys and wherefores on how a term that dates back to, at least, 1923 becomes a pejorative starting around the '80s. Perhaps it is worth considering in what publications and media it became a pejorative, and who would benefit from others thinking it should be one.
While some folks who lived through the Sixties went into academia, others went on to own media empires. Those groups didn't have particularly aligned goals.
is this just me or this post also seems to be indicating some form of "moral superiority" and bias in the author's thinking?
To me it seems like Musk's twitter takoever has done more than just "neutralize" the wokeness of twitter. It has amplified factless-ness and fake claims beyond proportion.
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2024/how-elon-musk-twi...
In general an essay writer believes his opinion is the correct one. Otherwise he wouldn’t write the essay.
In the US, both the Left and the Right have been taken over by their more fringe elements. For now, the Right has won.
Left strategy has been terrible for years. That's one of the consequences of the Woke movement. Far too much political capital was expended on niche issues. Gays are 3% of the US population. Trans are 0.3% of the US population. Can't win an election catering to those groups. Too few votes. (See Sex in America, the Definitive Study,[1] which selected their survey group randomly across the whole US and followed up with mailed, in person, and paid interviews, until they got >90% participation. Most other surveys have some degree of self-selection of the participants.)
Occupy Wall Street never came up with a political agenda. Black Lives Matter had a huge agenda, and one of the groups claiming to be in charge had a document over a hundred pages full of demands. Nobody was pushing hard on worker protections or labor law enforcement - not cool enough, but affects a big fraction of the population. Nobody was pushing to break up monopolies that raised prices, even in apartment rentals and health care where collusion has been proven.
This lack of focus lost elections.
The Right agenda is basically tax cuts for the rich, plus God, Family, and Guns. That's enough to form a majority.
So here we are.
[1] https://archive.org/details/sexinamericadefi00mich/mode/2up
> Nobody was pushing hard on worker protections or labor law enforcement - not cool enough, but affects a big fraction of the population.
I don't think this statement is fair. There has been unionization effort across the country throughout the years.
The difference is that corporate media is often very comfortable boosting ideas such as racial justice, but not class consciousness.
Left strategy appears to be terrible is imo because neither party is left wing. There is simply no place in the current political landscape for a labor party/wing to address the issue for the big fraction of the population you mentioned. The republicans pretends to address it, the (majority) democrats dance around it.
> I don't think this statement is fair. There has been unionization effort across the country throughout the years.
Not very successfully. Only 6.9% of private-sector US workers have a union. That peaked at 35% in 1954.
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/union-membership-data/#full-...
It seems to me that there's no place for it precisely because of what PG calls "woke". Class consciousness doesn't work if it's not reciprocal. Obama put up great working class numbers, but the modern Democratic coalition isn't willing to pander to socially conservative views, so it doesn't work so well anymore.
A pithy but I really feel important example: a party with no room for Joe Rogan in it is definitionally not a party of the working class.
> Left strategy has been terrible for years. That's one of the consequences of the Woke movement. Far too much political capital was expended on niche issues. Gays are 3% of the US population. Trans are 0.3% of the US population. Can't win an election catering to those groups.
This isn't the left's strategy. It's the right's. The right targets these small groups because they know we won't let them be attacked. We will push back. It makes it very easy to paint the left as trying to cater to LGBT folk, but that's nonsense that only sells to those completely out of the loop. Which is unfortunately most of the US electorate. And it's not about it being a strategy. It's about being an ally against bigotry. It takes a really fucked up person to abandon millions of people to increased discrimination because you think it'll help your polling with middle America.
What about bigotry against women? That is the actual effect of pro-trans policy.
The right capitalized on that because the left was too blinded by ideology to see the harm caused to women.
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> 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?
> Should students and employees have to participate in woke indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No, because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way about their religion.
But a group prayer led by a school coach is, of course, totally fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Bremerton_School_Di...
Pretty sure pg would say they’re the same thing. I don’t remember him carrying water for religion.
I'm sure we are going to see his treatise on the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court any day now, right?
Were the students forced to participate though, or was it voluntary?
You don't think high schoolers would succumb to authority and peer pressure even if they didn't really want to participate?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
This is one of Paul Graham's best essays. The historical timeline is accurate, the phrasing is much more careful than the comments here claim.
If you are 20 and in university, it will be hard to understand the historic perspective. You cannot just rip out single sentences and attack them without context.
If you disagree with everything, at least read the paragraph about Mao's cultural revolution, where he riled up young people against his political opponents. It may sound appealing if you are 20 and in university, but keep in mind that it can happen to you, too, just 8 years from now when the purity spiral has evolved.
Software organizations like Python have been taken over by shrewd manipulators who used exactly that tactic: Have a small "elite" that dictates ever changing morals, does not contribute much or anything at all and weaponizes new contributors against their opponents. The result is a dysfunctional organization where most interesting people have left, some companies still force contributions but there is virtually no organic open source activity. And a couple of "elites" have been fired by Google. That is the standard path of performative wokeness.
Anyway, a great essay and I hope that Paul Graham will treat us to more historic perspectives this year.
I didn't know that happened to Python. It happened to NixOS.
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An Internet rails against political correctness, forgetting that it's not 1996 anymore. Some Hackernews decry the woke mob. No technology is discussed.
N-gate will be missed!
RIP to a legend
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.
If it takes a felon winning an election for you to come out and write this then you are a coward. Where were these deep thoughts when BLM was blocking public roads and emergency services. I'm impartial to both sides simply making an observation.
PG has been tweeting about woke for years.
Most people were cowards then, and now too. It's nice to finally get these leaders sharing what they actually think again. After biting their tongue for what a decade?
If you insist on casually calling the guy you voted against a felon, I don't think you're as impartial as you claim.
He is in fact a convicted felon. That is objectively, impartially true.
It not be impartial to mention it, though. PG almost certainly didn't write this essay out of cowardice because a felon got elected.
He may have written it out of cowardice because a bully got elected, though...
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It is a fact that he is a convicted felon.
For the record, there are some conservatives on YC that agree with PG.
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.
In any serious discipline, ranging from philosophy to mathematics, precision is a requirement. Here, "woke" is everything but precise. It's an umbrella term that the right uses with bad faith to discard any form of social struggle or claim for a more egalitarian society, then part of the left took ownership of the term (reverse stigma).
Then a quoted aberrations IMO,
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that.
These statements are typically what fuels some people's outrage. Who is PG to decide what is the right scale? In the US for example, too many black people lost their lives because of a systemic racism, at the scale of society (police, job, housing, ...). Is this not scaled enough? To me, it shows an incredible level of disconnection between the social class PG belongs to and the actual problems in society.
I read a tweet around 2014 that was very short and simple and stayed with me for a while and now seems prescient. It was something like "man, anti-SJW is getting worse than SJW" (using sjw as the precursor for woke). Makes me think that reactions are sometimes stronger than the actions they go against and can often be swinging too far the other way.
I think part of this is correct regarding the professors who started off as "radicals" or hippies in the 1960s but there is no mention of why the cultural revolution of the 1960s happened in here. Couldn't that be examined more closely?
In my opinion, we have been undergoing a cultural clash for power at the top of society for decades between various groups. At one point in time this country was firmly in the hands of WASPs. Waves of immigrants arrived in cities who clashed with them. There were fights about who could get into the most powerful universities which was directly related to the struggle for power between the groups. Wokeness in the US, is in my opinion, a consequence of identity politics which we have had for some time. I think identity politics is probably more natural than not having it because we see it all over the planet. I think a lot of people have created a narrative that they are fighting against identity politics but in fact have just recreated it in different terms.
I can't be the only one that sees "wokeness" and general political radicalization (on either side) as being explainable by the collapse of religion and nationality as the key sources of identity and group-inclusion.
Political identities are modern-day religions, basically.
I'm not saying it's better to be actually religious - this isn't some sob-story about how the decline of religiosity is some great evil. I'm just pointing out the parallel: that something that's consumed A LOT of human energy and attention has disappeared in 1 generation leaving a huge vacuum of meaning for most people, and people are filling that vacuum with political identities.
Doesn't this list work for both political movements and religions: shared moral frameworks, common enemies, a metaphysical value system, sense of belonging, set of virtues and sins, rigid orthodoxy, regular rituals (protests, boycotts, etc), transcendent societal goals, conflict-as-sacred-struggle, etc.
Overly simplistic, maybe; but I think I'm not too far off.
As defined in a Florida lawsuit, woke is, "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." I think that is generally true. I also agree with parts of what PG stated. More than anything, I think the term 'woke' as defined above has been twisted by both sides, and action is more important that talking.
I've lived long enough to see pg turn into a boomer-ass uncle lmao.
It's also very funny that he decided to publish this _now_ of all times.
It's no coincidence that PG published this days before Trump's inauguration.
This is yet another Silicon Valley elite kowtowing to their new GOP overlords.
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Focusing on the term “wokeness” is a bit silly. I’ve always liked to think of it (“it” being the wave of political thought that came into influence around 2013 or so) as the latest wave of the civil rights movement. I call it “social justice” since they often use that term, but of course that term has been around for decades as well. It doesn’t matter what name you use, as long as we agree on the phenomenon we’re describing.
But really, you can trace it back further than the 60’s, as far back as in the 1920’s with C Wright Mills. He was a sociologist who essentially argued that science shouldn’t pursue explanatory knowledge, but rather emancipatory knowledge. The idea was that science can’t be some external objective thing apart from human political systems.
As for why it didn’t enter the national awareness until the last decade, I have no idea. But I think it has to do with the internet, that’s my intuition.
I would have to refute the notion that wokeness is a mind virus. "Stay Woke" has a much deeper origin in African American culture, and it refers to the fact that one needs to stay vigilant about another's intentions.
The implicit message is that the "us" cannot trust the "they", and writers like Paul Graham show the reason why: Any attempt at social change can easily be labeled a virus by capitalists if it does not produce greater prosperity. It's the same prosperity that has poisoned the earth, so I hope they have answers there too.
>"Stay Woke" has a much deeper origin in African American culture, and it refers to the fact that one needs to stay vigilant about another's intentions.
Yes, this origin is correct as I remember it. I first heard the term publicly from Larry on his show a decade or so ago, mainly referring to police interactions. He presented it well using comedy, unlike the rabid versions of today. He presented it too well as today, it seems this movement has since taken over by (mostly) white college people to service their own selfish ends; that's the mind virus part.
This clip pretty much encapsulates this idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAbTOcVJgM8
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.
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> I would have to refute the notion that wokeness is a mind virus.
So would anyone with even 4th grade critical thinking skills. Sadly the text is riddled with the kind of naive, unearned confidance that dominated Sillicon Valley in the early 2000s.
I grew up then, every kid on a computer was smarter than the entire world put together. If only things were run by engineers all the problems would be fixed. We werent racist, or sexist, as long as you used Latex for your work, and Vim for your coding and looked down on humanities you belonged.
Only problem is, engineers did end up running everything. FB replaced traditional media, and what it achieved rather than the mass of uninformed working class, the mildly educated propagandised working class and perpetrating owner class. Well you ended up with heaps of misinformation, 2 genocides (one in africa and another in asia), 2 stable countries brought to the brink of civil war with brexit and trumpism, an arab spring that led to a decade of unstable countries from Lybia to Afghanistan. And the same safeguards that have been built for traditional media are now being built for FB, just 2 decades late and with way less regulatory teeth than the goverment fines imposed to early yellow newspapers.
Uber and wework were another engineer led proyects. Transport and Offices all gonna be cheap, available and with that magic Sillicon valley sauce, where people at google use a slide to go to work. But now wework is a documentary of failure and hubris and Uber is on a long term bet for self driving cars to try and abate its unionising workers who are recreating the old taxi system without the medallions or insurance.
Tesla and Airbnb were gonna change our lives. But one is a plastic badly built car with no lidar because its owner made a bad bet a decade ago, and the other is being demonised in every city for aggravating the housing crisis while remaining less safe and more expensive than most hotels.
Engineers like PG run the show and we are recreting 100 years of guardrails, while they become billionaires over our inability to stop them and punish them. They then buy newspapers, social media platforms and think tanks and destroy words made up by marginalised communities to use as insults. Then useful idiots like PG read the insult, and not the original word and write lengthy essays with nothing interesting to say because they are attacking a strawman created by a republican think tank because some billionaire cant say the n word anymore.
Where I live, while I was at school, the proper way to say that a person was of colour, was the word "negro" (in Portuguese, and I think also in Spanish).
At the time, using the word that directly translates to "black" in English "preto", was considered extremely offensive and was never to be used applied to a person.
Now, fast-forward a few years and the influence of American woke culture, the word "negro" is now connected with the N-word slur in English and is considered offensive. You now have people of colour demanding to be called "preto".
This is one of the many insanities that the woke movement brought us. I'm glad the world is changing away from it.
It might be helpful and interesting to expand on the history. Was this an active effort to reclaim the word? That makes all the difference. People might not choose the word you would prefer when they form their own identities.
The comparison between religious fanaticism and wokeness is incomplete. One big difference is that religion can be deeply meaningful to an individual without them needing to express their beliefs publicly - religion can often be an entirely private affair. Many a loud preacher of religion has retired to a private life of quiet worship. Wokeness would have no meaning at all as a private affair, it's entirely based around shaming others in the public discourse. That's why PG's proposed solution of "allowing expression of beliefs without enforcement" might work for creating religious tolerance, but will not work for combatting priggish wokeism. If you don't allow their policing of words, there's nothing left to wokeism.
I agree with Sam Kriss, "wokeness" is an etiquette: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics
> They’ll tell you that actually, there’s no such thing as wokeness. It’s not an ideology. It’s not a belief system. It’s just basic decency. It’s just being a good person.
> They’re right. Wokeness is an etiquette. There are no sects within wokeness for the same reason that there are no sects on whether you should hold a wine glass by the bowl or by the stem. It’s not really about dogmas or beliefs, in the same way that table manners are not the belief that you should only hold a fork with your left hand.
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")
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.
This just reads like the usual anti-intellectualism.
That’s really all Silicon Valley has to offer at this point.
They are our betters and we should follow them without question.
> They are our betters and we should follow them without question.
Wasn't this basically the messaging of the Harris/Walz campaign? Perhaps if not directly then through the commentary around it.
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>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.
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.
> 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.
> The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it
What did they do that was "An aggressively performative focus on social justice."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Light_boycott
Seems like they did a branded tie in with a celebrity who was trans?
Would it be woke to have an advert with a black, Jewish, female, immigrant, albino, gay, Chinese or Hispanic celebrity?
I kind of feel like it would have been at some point in the past.
Is there a list somewhere of what kinds of celebrity is "politically correct" these days so that corporations trying to advertise beer can avoid these accusations?
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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).
Wokeness is what happens when you have socially liberal and fiscally conservative investors / executives try to please their democratic leaning employees without having to pay more taxes. It costs them nothing, so you get corporations and the media to embrace race and gender progressivism with a full clamp down on any true progressive causes like universal health care, free education and etc.
The same VCs crying about wokeness are also crying about a collapse of the manufacturing base in the US, when they're the ones responsible for offshoring all of it and not investing in any business that deal with physical goods because software are so much larger.
As an example, yes Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions.
"Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions". I think you hit the nail on the head. There is a whole chapter to be written about pro/anti "wokeness" stances used by companies / politicians to divert attention from the deeper class vs class issues.
Wokeness is also a way the media can smack down candidates like Corbin and Sanders, labeling them sexist or an antisemite for focusing on class instead of identity politics.
It is no coincidence that wokeness arose during Occupy Wall Street, and the insistence on the use of the "progressive stack" was part of what destroyed that protest movement.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you pg for writing this!
Why does woke like set people off like this?
Someone should study the anti woke they way these people focus on woke so much. I don't get it? If it's truly just words why are so bothered by them, let them go for the worthless words they are.
I think it's related to the perceived centrality of identity in the world. I see this as a natural consequence of individualism, which itself is championed by both modern capitalist and libertarian thinking, to pick two.
As the focus on the individual's happiness, wealth, values (etc.) have become more and more ubiquitous, the need to define oneself becomes more and more important. As this has matured, many systems have build that reinforce it. Representative democracy - one person, one vote, and welfare systems that address indivudual needs, are positive examples.
With this comes also a much stronger need for protecting these identities, and more weight is given to perceived categories, whether they are superficial, like skin colour, or structural, like religion or class.
So, when people talk about wokeness, they are not only trying to define the social contract, but they also aligning with it their identity, which gives a kind of existential urgency. The idea that we might be wrong about our position carries with it a sense of loss of self, which triggers most people.
Just my two cents.
This article never takes up the cause of the minorities who are being harassed and killed on a daily basis, but spends a lot of time whining about having to show even a modicum of empathy by using more inclusive language. For this reason it reeks of self-centered willful ignorance.
That's the point.
Spending time teaching people to use people of color instead of black is just performant. Actually firing a recruiter that immediately throws any black resume into the trash is real change.
This seems illustrative of the "boogeyman" points that many commenters are making. I think it is a very small number of people who don't want people to call black people "black", and that the majority of liberal people would find the notion "you can't call them black people" to be ridiculous.
Are there people who believe this? I'm sure there are, but I think they are a vocal minority.
How exactly would you go about implementing the "real change" here?
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What term would you use to encompass non-white folk?
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"People of color" is a broader term than "black people", and is meant to replace the (pretty widely accepted as) offensive "colored people", not "black people". I feel like it's useful to have a non-offensive phrase that means "nonwhites" without being defined in terms of white people, but maybe I'm just too woke to reason effectively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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From the article:
>>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
pg, and many anti-woke crusaders, employ examples of performative anti-racism to undermine the necessity of genuine anti-racism altogether.
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I think that inclusive language became a symbol of a step too far. If you expect me to adjust some governmental policies to make a better society that's fine, but if you expect me to change the way I express myself because you personally don't like it and you have a bunch of bullies behind you, that's just not okay and should be fought against.
Who's being killed on a daily basis? Could you provide sources?
People in Chicago?
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/01/03/chicago-homicides-...
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Currently, Ukrainans are.
But I suppose the color of their skin means they don't count towards the particular argument that dude is trying to make. Not calling him racist of course. I'm not even suggesting it.
[update] Hey! Look! I was down-voted for mentioning that white people are being killed on a daily basis, what an absolute surprise :D
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Institutionalized racism, sexism, and the general idea that some lives matter less than others kills people every day through healthcare claim denials, red-lined neighborhood districts with lack of infra for safe access to food/water/health/civil services, etc. If you want explicit violence, police in the USA literally kill people at alarmingly high rates usually reserved mostly for countries with notoriously violent regimes or gangs, beating out Mexico, Sudan, Rwanda [1].
"Wokeness" is a fake bear the right has built up to distract from class issues and sow dissent amongst workers and stave off class solidarity. Progressive policy is largely embraced by the majority of Americans [2], but because the right (and its newfound grifter-billionare tech exec class like PG, Musk, Zuck, etc.) have convinced an overwhelmingly large amount of Americans that their woes are because we have gender neutral bathrooms (instead of wage theft by the C suite), it is peddled and use as a smokescreen to continually push through policy and regime changes that will only every serve the .1%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_annual_...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/majority-of-americans-suppor...
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> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
It seems like pg sees good parts with "wokeness", and also bad parts. He want to continue with the good parts, while getting rid of the bad parts. The essay mostly seems to speak about the historical context, and how to work with "wokeness" so the good parts can persist, rather than "whining about having to show empathy".
Lots of comments here would do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay they deem worse, as currently there seems to be a lot of handwavey-arguments based solely on the title alone.
> do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay
I mean its a pretty big train wreck from the start to the end but I will try to point some of the dumbest lines, and pg is a smart guy so this is a particularly weird miss by him.
>> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness
This is simply not true. Stay Woke is a phrase that has a long history and it mostly related to paying attention to political issues not correctness. The hashtag where it became mainstream was around the shooting of an african american man by the police. It wasn't cancelling someone for saying something dumb, it was because police brutality has a never ending history in the states.
One of the first issues it was used on was freeing P*ssy Riot an anti goverment band from Russia, again not a political correctness instance but one of censorship and violence.
>> Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.
He admits he uses the word pejoritively but does not examine why a word that begins in a marginalised community is now mostly an insult. Like that is beyond irresponsible. if you and your gf have a petname and I start using it as an insult, and I control the media and the word becomes a common word to mean dumbass and I analyse it as that, then I am 1) siding with the bully 2) being a shit reporter.
>> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
This is just stupid because "the woke" is not a real group of people, he even admits he uses it as an insult, and secondly because he has no reason to know at what scale it is a problem. Handwaving a problem that doesn't affect you is bonkers, like I'd walk in an oncology ward and say "the scale that cancer is killing you is exagerated, but its a real problem". Paul Graham is a 60 year old white dude who went to Harvard, a uni that invented Essays to admit more white kids instead of jews, sport scholarships to put more white kids than asians thorugh and that was caught admitting white kids with worse grades than asians and was sued for it. He benefits from racism in the instituion he went to, spends his life in a subject that has 0 to do with policy, politics or race and then starts a paragraph with "racism isnt so bad yall".
>> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that
They led to the crumbling of the vietnam war, the desmitification of the american military and the end of racial segregation. I know he was a kid when it all happened but the 60s movements can hardly be called failed political projects.
I could go on because its all equally unbased and plainfully dumb. But I think just pointing out the kind of basic mistakes he has in terms of how he treats the subject means you can easily spot other equally dumb conclusions or assertions.
Another dumb conclusion, specially coming from someone with a background in computer science is
>> Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect people to seek it out. But they do.
We KNOW that anger is the most potent emotion in the brain, therefore social media algorithms favour it. AI feeds based on "engagement" feed people anger, people dont seek it out. Shareholders and people like Paul Graham who think humanities are stupid do by creating machines that interact with humans in ways that are completely unethical.
In the US statistically speaking a minority is much more likely to be killed by another minority than a "white" American.
Most people are killed by someone they know. Due to redlining many minorities live in communities that are, to this day, essentially segregated. Add the disproportionate correlation of violence and poverty, adn you get a volatile cocktail.
You will find it that cities with less redlining have less srong correlation between races of victims and perpetrators than cities that are more strongly, or more recently, redlined.
Sure, for the same reasons 84% of white people are killed by white perpetrators, and most child abusers are family members of the victim. Closeness brings both opportunity and conflict, and things like redlining and white flight have ensured the white and black population are quite well segregated.
Great fact!
I wonder... why is that? Is it simply because they are non-white? What do you think is making your fact a fact?
Except the state is doing its killing as normative behavior in all of our names, whereas disorganized gang violence is already generally seen as wrong.
And yes, police unaccountability most certainly affects more than just minorities. The lawlessness of law enforcement is actually the most pressing second amendment issue of our time, but you wouldn't know it by listening to the fully-pwnt political hacks at the NRA, pushing their chosen "side" of the group-herding thought-terminating "woke" strawman like pg here (sigh). How can you claim to have a second amendment right to self defense when the police can summarily execute you for exercising that natural right, in your own home, at night? (The answer is that you can't)
Statistically true. What's your point?
Their problem with "political correctness" is that someone corrected them who them deem lesser than them.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now? I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
It bothers me so much that Paul Graham people thinks it's performative. He can't imagine anyone actually, sincerely holding those beliefs, because he doesn't hold them himself. If someone is trying to modify their beliefs and then their behaviour, say, by mild self-censorship, he's got a list of insults ready for that person trying to better themselves: prig, politically correct, woke.
It's not performative. We really do believe that there are injustices and that if we can begin by changing the language, we can change the behaviour.
Just because Paul Graham can't imagine himself sincerely believing in self improvement followed by social improvement doesn't mean we don't believe it in ourselves.
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> minorities
Ahem! I think you mean People of the global majority? Please consider using more inclusive language in the future.
Actually I think that's exactly the problem with "wokeness" today. People care so much about minorities that we've come to a point where people will be extremely quick to cancel someone online who says something wrong but the same people turn a blind eye to the actual injustices that happen in the world like homelessness and hunger. It's easier to ban someone who says something ignorant than it is to go out and advocate for building new homes or deciding to stop buying on Amazon and Temu to curb the capitalism that people seem to hate so much.
Change needs to happen and I think the "woke" are at least working in the right direction compared to a lot of the right (who seem to be moving back a lot of progress that's been made in the last 50 years) even if their actions are woefully inadequate.
I feel like it's important to enter this part of the cycle where the absolute worst people feel comfortable entering their most heinous takes into the permanent internet record under the delusion that the social pressure to be a good person has been defeated forever.
This is effectively putting the popcorn into the popper, but it won't be served until about ten years from now.
Trump won the popular vote; it's very hard, over the long term, to have strong social pressure from a minority over the majority.
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But it's not just minorities who are being harassed and killed on a daily basis, so why should they get special consideration? That's the problem I have with it. It puts people into buckets, and then claims one bucket is more important than the others, even when that bucket is statistically insignificant compared to the others. Wokism is simply racism rebranded.
You did notice the trend of 2025 is Billionaires complaining?
I think they don't care at all, this is just signalling, different camp has the power to rule the country now and suddenly all of them are changing their minds
If you look how many white people are killed by blacks versus blacks killed by white people, you will have a shock. Even when you account for whites being a few times more than blacks in the general population.
I really don't buy this "minorities" are being killed story.
This is how to lie with statistics. Two things can be true without contradiction. Does a black gang member randomly killing an innocent white person cancel a white cop randomly killing an innocent black man?
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"Inclusive language" won't stop anyone from being killed or harassed, especially with Trump in power in the US again.
Can you point to an increase in minority vs majority deaths while Trump was in office last time?
There will never be anything funnier than a massive article which talks about the "origin of wokeness" that fails to, at any point, talk about the actual origin of "wokeness" – Black communities online.
This is the greatest weakness of an already weak essay.
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
> Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.
Wow, PG downplaying racism and sexism was not on my 2025 bingo card.
I hear some good points and I can understand the fatigue with cancel culture; still, discussing recent movements like blm and #metoo in negative light only seems very narrow.
I guess especially for rich celebrities movements like these and the power they represent can feel limiting, threatening, to the point of feeling targeted.
Reaction, reaction everywhere
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).
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"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> 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.)
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.
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Using his definition, it was peak performance.
I think a key tenant to wokeness in this framework is the emphasis on awareness/alertness relative to solutions.
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that.
Au contraire, the idea that racism is a problem is now labeled "critical race theory" and it's a crime to spread this knowledge to students in multiple states.
Teachers in Oklahoma can't teach students the fact that the Tulsa Massacre was race-driven.
So Paul himself, it appears, has given himself over to the wokeness by acknowledging that racism is a genuine problem.
This is a dishonest argument. Paul can oppose an ideology without agreeing with everyone and especially extremists who also oppose that same ideology.
I dont think wokeness or paul graham are communist or fascist respectively so forgive the hysterical sound of the analogy im going to make here, but i think your argument is similar in reasoning to this one:
You oppose fascism? Well, fascism opposed gulags. If you oppose gulags I guess you were a fascist after all."
> 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.
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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.
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.
The defining work on this subject is “Industrial Society and its Future” by Ted Kaczynski. Where he says “leftism” say “woke” and you have it.
This always needs to be followed by a condemnation of his violent methods, but that has been used as a way to avoid dealing with his horribly on point diagnosis of the problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_F...
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
“Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless, can't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same thing to political correctness.
…
My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a hostile work environment could constitute sex discrimination, which in turn affected universities via Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person, but since for a professor merely being the subject of a sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of things that might not be said ‘with ladies present.‘“
I’m linking two thoughts the essay doesn’t explicitly connect, but which I think is important to the thesis of why 2010-era cancel culture didn’t get cancelled itself, and that’s its almost autoimmune capacity to cancel comedians.
That said, Graham elides over how cancel culture was renamed “woke.” Was it the left or the right who did this? I suspect the latter, at which point we have to contend with the existence of two mind viruses, the cancel-culture/woke one and the anti-woke totem of the left.
Also, this requires more thought: “publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained in business fell in the direction they'd already been leaning: left.”
Why? And why have right-wing publications failed to gain comparable traction?
> My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not
See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice or start saying the only thing they care about is “Gods and Guns”.
FWIW: I was born and raised in southern GA and have only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL.
They are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian.
Fundamentalist Christians were the original prigs. It is amusing to see pg try and shoehorn the word on to the social justice movement.
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I don't disagree, but I do think it's important to note whether the person is mocking the southern accent or just imitating it as a form of flattery. Often it's the former rather than the latter. The (vast) majority of the time I hear someone doing a southern accent it's for purposes of making fun of them, especially for being stupid/redneck. I don't think it's unreasonable to be offended when somebody is mocking you.
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> See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice
Graham’s point, generously, is you’ll always have pearl-clutching prigs. What matters is if they’re empowered.
> are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian
But they haven’t—until recently—had the power to e.g. end someone’s career or ability to perform in New York or San Francisco over it.
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This is pretty much a canonical example of what does not belong on HN. A dumb topic, and then on top of that a dumb take on that dumb topic.
Reminder to flag the submission if you think it’s inappropriate for HN.
IMO, it doesn’t belong here.
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.
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>A dumb topic, and then on top of that a dumb take on that dumb topic.
Agreed. A dumb topic, with dumb people discussing at length.
It's like calling the word of Jesus heresy ... if pg essays don't belong on HN then the word "hacker" has lost all meaning. He's describing a system and how to change it. What else are we doing all day on these computers?
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.
Pauly G. such a fortunate one. Just a defensive old white man. Not a good look, son.
Tedious moral panic.
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.
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.
It's interesting that none of these anti-woke oracles can tell that they're at the center of an even greater cancel culture mob than the one they purported to be against. Wasn't PG just getting canceled a few months ago by the right for speaking up about Palestine? Give it a few years, this manifesto will look hilarious.
Of course they can tell they're at the centre of an even greater cancel culture mob, the writing of these articles is entirely with fear of avoiding cancellation in mind...
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
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.
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.
if you're going to talk about history, it really helps to ground your narrative in real people, events, or statements. This all comes off as a history of vibes, and I don't remember the same vibes at all (maybe because I wasn't on twitter).
When pg does make contact with reality, it mostly doesn't even support his narrative. He mentions the George Floyd protests and the MeToo movement/Weinstein - by any measure real social justice issues where the perpetrators deserved condemnation!
He also mentions the Bud Light boycotts as a case of going "too woke", but Bud Light's actions were not an "aggressive performative focus on social justice." Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever. It was the boycott by anti-trans bigots that politicized that incident.
Also not on twitter, other than to camp my name. I disagree with your reading of the essay - he says that both of those were sort of "peaks" for their respective movements, and I would say that feels accurate to me. I'm in a mixed-race family, and George Floyd was the first and so-far only period where our family needed additional support, talk, help, considering how to respond.
I agree that Anheuser-Busch seemed to have been stunlocked by Dylan Mulvaney v. Kid Rock on the internet.
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.
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> Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever
Isn't it one of the tenets of wokeness that "nothing is apolitical"?
There are no "tenets of wokeness", because "wokeness" isn't an ideology, a movement, an organization, etc. but rather a pejorative.
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> He also mentions the Bud Light boycotts as a case of going "too woke", but Bud Light's actions were not an "aggressive performative focus on social justice." Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever. It was the boycott by anti-trans bigots that politicized that incident.
This is a double standard. For example, Contrapoints was cancelled for using Buck Angel to do a 10 second voice over in one video[1]. A far less politically charged association with someone than what Bud Light did. In this regard, I think the left has been the ones who primarily set the rules of engagement for the last few years. Can't complain when those same rules are used against you.
[1] https://medium.com/@rachel.orourke_88152/the-10-second-voice...
Contrapoints, her defenders, and her critics (mostly) were all on the left. I don't know the person you linked to, but she seems to be defending Contrapoints from a left theoretical perspective. It's deeply disingenuous to argue that bigoted right-wing campaigns are justified by some subset of people on the left being cruel to other people on the left.
Certainly this essay is, mostly, “not wrong”. But I was hoping PG might use his powerful brain and hundreds of words to explain how one should combat structural racism and sexism without the unfortunate side effect of “wokeness”. As far as I can see, he just recommended you do it “quietly”. Disappointing.
Here’s how:
Don’t discriminate on the basis of sex and race.
For sake of argument, what if the answer truly is "do it quietly"?
What if it's most effective to live your life to the best of your ability without prejudice, and instead of preaching about what people should do, you just do what it is that you believe to be right?
I grew up in (and left behind) conservative evangelical christian circles, and the thing that always made me most uncomfortable with "wokeness" is how much it often resembles those holier-than-though people I grew up around.
It's not that I disagree with the underlying ideas behind "woke" positions as much as it is the behavior of the people who want to move those ideas forward.
Whether it's overly pious evangelical christians or "very woke" people, I think there's an underlying belief that transcends particular points of view that there's a particular way people must conduct themselves and that using various tactics ranging from moralizing to public shaming are tactics that are effective.
Except I don't think these tactics are effective at all, and while it may be unsatisfying, "try to be the best example you can be" seems far more helpful than what often emerges when people feel they're morally justified.
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.
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> For sake of argument, what if the answer truly is "do it quietly"?
Then why is the richest man in the world buying a social media platform? Why is Bezos buying newspapers?
Why are christian preachers shouting at everyone all the time?
Why are republican think tanks and lobbysits spending their entire career fighting tooth and nail against public education and healthcare?
Why are those preachings not demonised, or considered a problem and why is no one asking them to do it quietly?
> Except I don't think these tactics are effective at all
The loudest president of all time just won re election despite being a convicted felon, he will walk next week into the white house with his wife the ex playboy model voted by Evangelicals who say gay people are the devil.
Idk it seems like empirically the attempts to demonise wokeness as a loud abbrasive movement that "doesnt work" is an attempt to disuade the fact that it DOES work the only issue is one side is much much much louder due to owning the means of communication and can create consent around their behaviour.
Or is Zuck coming out and saying " we need more masculine energy" and removing all DEI iniatives at FB a week before trump takes office not the same kind of pandering behaviour just "anti woke"? Or Elon talking about how we need "Christian values", when he has 11 children from 7 women, 3 of whom worked for him, he has more money than god and wont share it with any good causes, while he buys a social media platform to force everyone to hear each one of his brain farts not the same kind of pandering?
That aint quiet, subtle or living anyones best life. Yet PG is not writting an essay about their behaviour, or calling that pandering and katowing to anti intellectualism which is a much worse cause than social justice btw
> "What if it's most effective to .. instead of preaching about what people should do, you just do what it is that you believe to be right?"
It isn't. See these LessWrong articles[1,2,3] about charitable giving for more reasoning. People take ideas, understanding of the world, behavioural cues, from what we see around us. From the first link, a charitable fund raise over a mailing list involved quiet private donations without fanfare, and public mailing list posts about why (other) people were not going to donate, why it was a bad idea. None of the donators posted publicly in support of donating.
I could make up any number of examples, but here[4] is a recent news article about two young lesbian women living together who "had been spat at in the street and received anonymous messages - including abuse scrawled across their front door on Christmas Day". What good does it do them if everyone who supports them does it quietly, and everyone who hates them does it loudly and publicly? What world does it lead to when spitting on someone in the street is fine, but speaking out against it is "woke leftist moralizing"? What world does it lead to when people who are not involved looking around to see how others are behaving (bystander effect) see LGBT hate enacted, written, spoken, and don't see or hear anyone around them speaking against it?
Would the young women care if someone vocally complaining about it at the pub is genuinely annoyed or just performatively status grabbing?
Seems pretty clear from history that just quietly living your life while horrors whirl around you is a personally comfortable way to live your life, but is not an effective way to change any of the horrors. Whereas taking arms against the horrors can be an effective way to change the horrors regardless of whether you're doing it because you really want to, or because you were peer pressured into it, or because you are just going along with what everyone else is doing.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-ki...
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N6FNkxMJpraMLTPwq/to-inspire...
[3] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KoTCTwmPbEAZTyPbz/why-you-sh...
[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgnwqdp7gno?at_bbc_team...
It's very telling that he gives Marxist-Leninism as an example of moral orthodoxy instead of the much more relevant Capitalist orthodoxy that exists in the U.S. which he viciously upholds. It's pretty clear that it's much more acceptable to rail against DEI, "wokeism", etc., than it is to suggest that a different economic system is possible in American society. There's very few people in power that can get away with suggesting that there can be something better than Capitalism, or even admitting that there's some problems that Capitalism just can't fix. Most of the progressives or "wokes" in power only go so far as suggesting refinements and guardrails for the current system. Meanwhile, roughly half our elected officials rabidly speak out against the "woke" with no consequences, and the media clearly props up the current system against all else.
It's just so frustrating to see guys like Paul Graham pretend like they're somehow outside of or above "orthodoxy" and "ideology", to use their own terms. "Wokeism" is a religion, but somehow "anti-wokeism" isn't? My point isn't that all of what they label "wokeism" is good or that Capitalism is all bad, it's that there is a hypocrisy in their beliefs that belies their whole argument.
Above all it's just embarrassing to see, and it kills me that they paint their obvious orthodoxy as heresy, when it's anything but.
“Anti wokeism” is to atheism what wokeism is to Christianity. It can turn into a religion in its own right sure but it’s origin is disbelief in another ideology.
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?
Not even wrong
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.
As an outsider, the rambling against wokeness is insufferable, even though I personally agree with some points usually brought up.
I only found out what wokeness is from people ranting against it, and never really see anyone arguing in favor of it. It has become a mania of the right.
This is a silly straw man argument with lots of claims and little evidence supporting them.
Oh god why is pg even writing about this? Why does every aging, decrepit Silicon Valley oligarch think the world needs to hear their opinion on political correctness? It's all becoming too much. Please buy a diary and write your important thoughts there.
I admire PG's essays, but this one seems to give an origin theory about a complex societal issue without any evidence.
My pet theory is is that liberalism won the battle with conservatism and achieved everything useful that it could with it's existing instruments. But then it kept looking for something more and went into wokeness with good intentions. With women's equality and gay marriage the movement was able to convince people and also create legislation. When going into equity and inclusiveness there isn't a legislative solution (or there are, but they don't do much to fix the root of the problem). And people are already convinced that it's good in theory. The only solution is to make an incredible effort to actually help the communities that are raising the disadvantaged- an incredibly challenging task. Instead they maintained the existing approach of convincing and cancellations and DEI policies (in place of legislation).
I think the approach for liberalism to get back on track and achieve their goals is to do the hard work of helping disadvantaged children. If you want to make a difference, the Big Brothers Big Sisters program is a program that helps things at their root- improving the support structure of children in need.
This 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.
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.
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)
This seems a very long way to say: "I believe that 'woke' has become dogmatic."
Merely saying that without explaining your reasoning is worthless.
I did not read till the end yet, but "woke" is also a very successfully weaponised word for anyone to help push their ideology to further extremes, both left, right, not center. Woke is also a very good detractor from rich and poor discussions.
Few things are as performative as venture capitalists aligning their politics with the upcoming government.
I read it more as finally being safe to share his views without gross retaliation leading to a complete excommunication from every professional venture he's involved in. The powers have tilted in such a way that people no longer have to hide their true feelings. Refreshing, really.
PG would have done well to read this rather good Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
> The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case.
This seems like a good argument. It's very clear that 'wokeness'/political correctness is more about fixating on syntax (the literal words used) over semantics (the intention of the speaker). But in my book, it's the intention that matters — in fact I'd argue it's the only thing that matters. If you're choosing to wilfully misinterpret and be offended by something someone innocently said, that's completely on you. We shouldn't celebrate the act of taking offence, but at the same time we should all make an effort not to accidentally create it. Why are people who can do both seemingly so rare?
This 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....
> Thanks to Sam Altman [...] for reading drafts of this.
Ftfg.
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 :(
> 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.
So now the ones who want to preserve the constitution and the democratic processes (aka by demanding peaceful handover of power instead of hanging the Vice President), are woke.
Strong Weimar vibes from our billionaires.
> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
You mean how twitter is censoring users who use "cracker" but not those who use the N-word.
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
All of "wokeness", "social justice", etc, when you look at the "forest not the trees" ends up pretty simple:
One group of people is saying: "This hurts, please stop", to which the other group says: "No".
So the first goes back to the drawing board to come up with reasons, theories, explanations, convincing arguments... and you get things like critical race theory, systemic *isms, etc.
That's pretty much it. Sure, there's other bits in there - about accomplishing the "stop", or about handling emotions around blame, or about handling your own hurt, etc - but, at the end of the day?
It's really just people saying "this hurts, please stop", and what forms around the response when the response is "No".
> One group of people is saying: "This hurts, please stop"
But the entire article you're criticizing can be summed up as "wokeness hurts, please stop". To which you say, "No".
As an extreme outsider (and mostly emotionally uninvested) to this whole scene, and having read a few of the most popular articles, I've always taken Paul Graham to be an intelligent and articulate person. This article is has made me really reevaluate my judgement.
I'm open to thinking about and discussing the points he is raising, but his arguments and the presentation feel weird and flimsy. Lots of anecdata, cherry-picked history, bad arguments propped up by debatable ideas presented as facts. And weird, almost sociopathic lack of empathy (eg: the 2020 "a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video" event)?
I mean, sure aggressive policing of speech and performance in social media is somewhat dumb, but any normal mind should be able to look behind the overreaction and realise that the underlying issues raised are valid and pressing.
Is article is just a performance piece in preparation for the incoming regime?
The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk does a really good job of tracing the history of "woke". In particular he does a good job of not lumping woke in with all left ideas.
Oh boy.
Sorry, but at this point I don't think this article is appropriate for this website
Additionally, what's with the amount of US politics discussion increasing lately
It's not increasing - whatever you're seeing is most likely random fluctuation. HN's approach to political stories was established a long time ago and we aren't changing it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
are you the Daniel Gackle mentioned at the bottom of the article or a different one?
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.
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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.
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"?
There's a guy on X named Gad Saad writing a book called "suicidal empathy". I think this term captures it better than "wokeness".
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.
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.
Do I want to read an essay about PG yapping about wokeness? Is this a realistic conversation engendering 1500 comments and 500 points? Why?
> 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.
No surprise that Paul is on the Elon, Mark, Trump side of things — like 99% of the American rich.
Whole article on the word "woke" and no references to Erykah Badu. I don't think he knows what the word means.
"Social justice" is a perversion of justice. Eastern Europe and other countries that tried communism used social justice as an excuse to eradicate middle and upper classes through mass murders, incarceration, confiscation of property, denial of access to education or higher-paying jobs, and promotion of lower classes to the levels of their incompetence.
I feel like this is the most neutral, correct take on "wokeness" I've ever read on the internet. Good job!
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.
even though I agree with much of his commentary, the piece that's missing is in the questions: were you principled and brave? how were you an example?
I know what I did, and some of it is in my comment history on this site. but I think the whole episode was a failure of moral courage. sure, it was the woke, but really, it was us. I think anyone feeling more free to speak now needs to reflect on that. Watching Zuck on Rogan was refreshing and hopeful, but that (very Harvard) oblivious affect that blows with the wind is not a foundation on which to rebuild the culture.
there's a very compelling take from the woke, which summarizes as, "you don't get to say mean and dumb shit without a cost anymore, and we're not bearing the costs of your culture that is set up to exclude us." This must be heard, and most criticisms of the totalitarian moment that seized our culture overlook that this argument was the kernel of truth that anchored the system of chaos and lies that followed.
to most of them I would respond, "you othered yourselves and when adults wouldn't listen to you, you organized to terrorize kids about their 'privilege.'" however, for our civilization to survive, there is a social re-integration of a lot of people that needs to be done so that there is an us again, and a sense of our shared protagonism.
I'm glad PG, Andreesen, Zuck, Musk, and others are addressing this stuff. Elon's massive gambit and persistent leadership, and Zuck hiring Dana White for the Meta board are very good starts.
If you want to be a part of rebuilding after this dark period, ask yourself if you had courage when it was hard, and reflect on when you didn't so that you don't fail like that again.
I did, and do, and each day I pay the price and then some.
Free speech and research is critical in order for our society to thrive. That said, it is not mutually exclusive with helping folks that need a little help to integrate and contribute when they really want to? It’s sad to see changes that helped, getting thrown out for its association with a social craze.
I find it hilarious that the prophet of modern Startup Culture and its subsequent proliferation of Y Combinator/FAANG cult practices (e.g. growth at all costs or practising agile as a copy-cat set of misunderstood tech rituals) is blind to fact that the only ones proselytising about "wokeness" these days are the same ones trying to outrage you about it (i.e. Fox News and Elon Musk) in order to distract you from the fact that wealth and resources are being hoarded by the very same companies/individuals.
With this coordinated oligarchic turn to the right I finally feel very progressive again.
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."
Just call it "The International Woke" already. It's what this is getting at, isn't it?
> 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...
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.
A well-considered essay from PG. I thought this part, discussing a practical approach to dealing with disagreement of beliefs, was particularly insightful:
> Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.
> If we're not sure what to do about any particular manifestation of wokeness, imagine we were dealing with some other religion, like Christianity. Should we have people within organizations whose jobs are to enforce woke orthodoxy? No, because we wouldn't have people whose jobs were to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Should we censor writers or scientists whose work contradicts woke doctrines? No, because we wouldn't do this to people whose work contradicted Christian teachings. Should job candidates be required to write DEI statements? Of course not; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs. Should students and employees have to participate in woke indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No, because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way about their religion.
For better or worse, I don't think much practical possibility stems from this insight, and I wish PG had considered the possibility that the enforcement of some orthodoxy is unavoidable, and that the liberal environment he's describing is a vacuum into which some orthodoxy will inevitably insert itself.
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.
I guess pg might have power to implement this by dictating to his companies' HR leadership through the CEOs/boards. As for the rest of us...
It's interesting that pg doesn't connect the type of thinking and indoctrination he sees in wokeness with similar types of thinking and indoctrination we currently see in followers of Trump. Crowds of people holding up "mass deportation now" signs, the governor of Texas ordering flags at full mast for the inauguration in the middle of a period of mourning [1], Republican politicians refusing to say whether or not Trump lost the 2020 election [2], Republican state legislatures trying to minimize mentions of LGBTQ topics in the classroom. Not only is much of it performative, as he complains about in the essay, but it has the feel of religion more than just a political movement. It almost seems like one could rewrite this essay with the focus on Trump instead of wokeness.
This part in particular seems misguided if only because pg fails to recognize that "the next thing" is already here and wearing a red MAGA hat.
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because there will be a next thing.
[1] https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-orders-flags...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-still-t-trump-lost-17...
Interesting. But that shouldn't surprise us. "Performative" means you're doing something to be seen, not because it's really "you". Well, when the power shifts, then who it's worth being performative for also shifts. I wonder if that's what we've been seeing in the shifts since November.
If woke people are performative... then what is this incoherent nonsense meant to be?
woke wasn't bad in the beginning, but it became more powerful than needed and that power was abused. When you get people to rename universities and streets you grew up intimately with, it's very annoying.
Incredible article, thank you for sharing. The parallels to unwelcome and unsolicited religious proselytizing is something I've been calling out for years, and ironically have often been met with extreme hatred and condemnation in response.
Never in my life did I think that nearly every institution, company, corporation, (you name it), would compel and coerce people into following a narrow set of societal rules that appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and grated firmly against a functional, albeit imperfect, status quo -- most of which was accepted and even celebrated by most people in Western nations.
What's terrifying to me is how acceptable it became to write and defend academic literature around these manufactured problems, specifically for "prigs" to justify their abhorrent behavior towards other people.
I'm glad more people are finally willing to have an honest discussion about this, without immediately labeling it a "right-wing talking piece", as too many so lazily love to do.
It's magnificently Paul Graham that he wrote some incredibly long essay called "The Origins Of Wokeness" without ever discussing, the origins of wokeness. Whatever you think about the current situation of "wokeness", the fact that pg manages to never once mention the origin of the term, going back to Marcus Garvey and Leadbelly, speaks to pg's monumental intellectual incuriosity.
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I want to see a reddit clone, except users can only downvote
I wonder what would happen
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.
the origin of wokeness was childish gambino's 2016 single "redbone" from the album "awaken my love", in this essay i will. . .
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.
“Can you believe it? That colored boy wants me to call him ‘mister!’”
Paul Graham is a billionaire frantically trying to fingerpoint and blame other people when his ilk have had an outsized influence on politics and business for years and we're no better off.
oh no
Actually, the origin of “wokeness”, the term, is right-leaning bigots who need to discount any grievance by any group of people who claim they might just possibly be suffering some systemic disadvantages in this country.
Nope. It was a term of respect and affirmation in the African American community first, and seems to have been successfully expropriated and rebranded.
I understand your point, but I don’t think anyone used the word “wokeness” before the Right started it as insult.
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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.
People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon. Perhaps the author is just more aware of it now, or modern technology has pushed it deeper into our lives, but it's not new.
And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue. If they care about it.
Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe? Now you're just being performative about performative people.
Perhaps the best way to lower the number of performative individuals is to... you know... resolve their issues?
> Annoyed people are whining about civil rights?
Nobody is annoyed people are whining about civil rights. We are annoyed that people a) are whining about non-issues that they have gone out of their way to be offended by, and b) are demanding that the rest of us change the world based on their blown out of proportion views.
>People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon
People have always done lots of things. The degree, intensity, and manner with which they do them varies and matters.
>And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue
They could be already focusing on the issue. Or they could be ignoring it. That's their decision. Perhaps they have problems of their own to tackle first. Nobody has to be an activist about some cause just because another wants them to.
The problem with performative justice is that (when the performative types get enough power) its bizarre demands and rituals are imposed onto and everybody else, with little recourse.
Another problem is that the performative justice diverts resources to tackle the performative insignificant or detrimental aspects instead of the real issue.
>Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe?
Wouldn't solve the issues described in the article caused by performative justice, from stiffling academic discussion, to creating an outrage factory that diverts the press from its mission and polarises society to a detrimental effect.
> People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue.
You can do both: focus on fixing performative "justice" in order to fix the issue. Particularly the part that is spinning your arguments and using them for injustice, making them appear weaker.
There's a strategy: support flawed people on your team, because they'll help your team overall. And sometimes this is good, even necessary, e.g. voting for the less-bad candidate in an election. But sometimes there are teammates who are counter-productive even for their own goals. You don't even have to eject these people, but you have to correct them, or they'll make your team worse than if they didn't exist.
When I hear conservative arguments, they rarely if ever target the points I think are reasonable and obvious. They target points that I think aren't worth defending (e.g. "illegal immigrant who commit armed robbery not deported"), and points that I think are worth defending but require nuance (which can be defended with some form of "you're correct, although..." to reveal and protect the reasonable part). Conservatives win voters by targeting the weakest points, which just about anyone previously uninformed would side against; "performative justice" creates most of these points, and attacks against attacks against performative justice protect them.
It's like a bottleneck or unstable pillar in a building. You don't want to divert everyone to fixing it, because the overall pipeline or building is the ultimate priority, but it has to be addressed. Likewise, fixing the issue is still the ultimate priority, and I don't expect everyone to address performative justice, but somebody has to do it.
// Now you're just being performative about performative people. //
Nice ricochet.
I'm grateful to Paul Graham for actually giving a definition of "woke". Really, this is the first anti-woke essay I've seen which actually tells us exactly what the author is complaining about.
And it makes it rather abundantly clear why nobody else has given a definition of exactly what the author is complaining about.
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.
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.
There's left-wing orthodoxy.
There's also right-wing orthodoxy.
On the internet right-wing orthodoxy is the prevailing one, and it's also better funded (and more politically connected).
You are not a rebel if you support the oligarchs.
I did not expect CEOs / industry titans to fall in line with the new regime so quickly, in the few weeks since Trumps election most tech leaders have completely changed their public stance on these topics. Why are they so afraid? Or are they simply happy to drop the charade as it seems clear the wind blows the other way now?
I wasn’t feeling very positive about all the talk about making the world a better place but recently I’ve become quite cynical, it’s really just about the money it seems. I even find this whole hacker ethic quite stupid now, basically all that ethos about free software was just instrumented by corporations to extract wealth, and now that AI is seemingly around the corner they can finally drop most people building the software for them, as that was always the biggest cost center anyway.
IMO most of these CEOs are not motivated by wokeness or anti wokeness. They are motivated by money, and the freedom to take whatever action they deem appropriate both inside and outside their companies.
Biden was anti-monopoly and Trump is pro-corporate, so these CEOs are just naturally aligning according to their own motivations. And like all people, sometimes they take on the other priorities of the group, to feel that they fit in.
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?
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I don't disagree with a lot of what he says here, but I feel like too many people in Silicon Valley are hyper-fixated on the conformity and enforcement coming from the left, while ignoring and even stoking the flames of anger and conformity on the right. Particularly his points on news, because much of the news is now heavily skewed to the right.
PG would do well to reflect similarly on the rise of the right wing equivalents and recognize that they're the ones actively stymying progress on many of the critical issues of our time.
it's not about the "meaning" of the word but more the way people use it and its connotations.
it is often code for a racist or homophobic sentiment the speaker doesn't want to own up to.
when people say "things are getting too woke" - let's be honest, they are often saying that people who were once unfairly marginalized (black people, gay people, women) are getting less marginalized.
People on the left don't like to admit it, but a lot of the left wing activism we see today growing out from the 1960s was directly influenced by the Soviet Union and it's "active measures" programs
According to the KGB defector Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, the Soviets actively encouraged colleges to focus on studies away from science and engineering, and also encouraged the "break down" of things like "religion" and "family" to make for more fertile soil for the inevitable communist takeover. At best such measures were focused on encouraging anti-nuclear activism to reduce the US capacity for nuclear retaliation in the event of a total war. At worst it led to Cultural Revolution style critiques of college faculty. Despite the Soviet Union being gone, the cultural aspects of these efforts live on (mostly in Sociology departments)
People on the right don't like to admit it, but a ton of the right wing "activism" we see TODAY is from modern Russian efforts to try the same sort of interference on the right (and still to a lesser extent on the left). There was no one from the 80s more disallusioned by the old Soviet tactics using left wing actors than Putin (who was in contact with left wing Red Army Faction terrorist groups in Germany). He's sought to try the same tactics out on the right which has been incredibly receptive to conspiracy theories of all kinds.
There's an active campaign to erode the public's faith in science (anti-vaccine movements, ivermectin being a cure-all for everything) and journalism. Spread through channels like Rogan's podcast, and perhaps even Mr. Musk himself who spreads propaganda about big lies like "Ukraine having some sort bioweapons program" unquestioningly. Gradually the goal is not to get people to believe in something, but rather to get them to not know what to believe.
The American left is too distracted by culture wars bullshit to counter blatant propaganda, and people like Paul Graham are too enamored by the success of Musk et al to see what is directly in front of them.
Good lord I cannot stand the tech-bro echo chamber.
They're just as self righteous as the "woke" just much less self aware.
Oh man … stay in your lane. Capitalism. The human condition can seem very hopeless, for sure.
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.
Read this and understand one thing, you being anti-woke is not fighting the elite, fighting a cabal of anti-freedom leftists.
You are sided with the billionaires, politicians and justices of the Supreme Court that hold virtually all the power in this country. You are on the side of Putin and the Iranian regime, both calling out "western degeneracy".
"Wokeness" is nothing but a scarecrow used to discredit any and all progressive ideas. In the name of "anti-wokeness" women are dying of complications, giving birth to the child of their rapists. LGBT people have to hide in the closet, from fear of repercussions to being who they are, enduring massive psychological pain.
As a remedy, I would like you to hold one conversation with a trans guy/girl, hear them complain about the harassment they receive almost daily, about how difficult it was to have anyone recognize their illness and receive treatment, and realize that they are simply trying to live a life in this messed up world, like you and me.
"Wokeness" is what results in horrifying outcomes of policy like this:
https://4w.pub/male-inmate-charged-with-raping-woman-inside-...
This is a direct result of "progressive" beliefs being translated into policy.
It should be no surprise that people start to question and reject these beliefs when they begin to understand the harm they cause.
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...
The rich are choosing sides for Trump era, and this is just a white flag raised.
wokeness will be discussed until morale improves... (or better said easier to rule and win elections while the masses are fighting the non-existent "culture war" and have no time to look at real problems (which whoever is ruling has no interest in solving..)
A big swing and a miss by Paul Graham for a season-losing strikeout. Above all, he begs the question in the original sense of "beg the question" - he defines the terms "woke" and "wokeness" by themselves. He uses the secondary and willful redefinitions of those who would permanently corrupt the terms. Further, he excludes the original and true meanings of "woke" and "wokeness" by denying that they are still in play or still in use merely on his say-so, perhaps because that conveniently fits his narrative. Excluding contradicting data is how you corrupt an analysis to match the thesis statement. Additionally, matching the terms to anything to do with "political correctness" is the same: borrowing the right's redefinitions in a circular question-begging fashion. It's also all rather unoriginal and tired. We've had many decades of this anti-political correctness sophistry if not so well-written. It's cud pre-chewed by a thousand dull-eyed ruminants. What is accomplished here? I think we've only learned about Paul Graham and it isn't flattering.
Eh, it’s par for the course for a blog post—some good, some inchoate, a little wrong.
I appreciate having the word “prig” to replace criticism of both wokeness and the new right Silicon Valley’s Musk-Trump worship.
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.)
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So now we have pg virtue-signalling his fealty to the other old rich white guys. Great. Just great.
The only people who use the term "woke" are social conservatives, and those to their right. Everyone else talks about "justice" and "equality" and "awareness". The woke problem is a conservative problem.
Bingo! This accusation is a confession.
And what are people supposed to do about injustice? Resolve it without talking about it?
woke is over, now. Also Zuckerberg changed music
To me this seems to be the most rambling, disorganized essay I've seen him write. I normally appreciate how he structures his arguments and in this one, I struggled to get past the first few sentences.
Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way.
Wouldn't calling some a prig or woke, saying that the people are "self-righteously moralistic people who behave as if superior to others," in a way, be demonstrating the same behavior?
Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?
In that vein, I don't know what Paul's motivations were to write this post and I don't know why he lacked the normal structure with headings and such, I just hope that he's doing OK. I'm trying to understand the feelings he's experiencing, and maybe if I'm able to get through his writing I'll have a better sense. He seems a bit distraught, frustrated, ranting, not sure.
> Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way.
Just mentioned this in another comment, but historically the only people who've actually identified as "woke" are black civil rights activists, who used it to mean that someone was aware and informed. I've never seen it used in any other context (or really by other people) until the latest culture war generals co-opted it as an insult for progressives and minorities.
> Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?
You would hope so, but I'm guessing the people who use civil rights-era slang to belittle activists probably don't care about the humanity those activists are trying to highlight and fight for.
The biggest flaw imo was the deafening silence around how "wokeness" is used as a tool by corporate Dems/Repubs and state agents of capital interests to distract from material issues and keep people divided over "culture war" / identity politics issues instead of uniting their focus on the former.
No mention of how the recent resurgence coincided with the Occupy Wall St protests.
No mention of how it was used to dismantle the Bernie Sanders campaigns.
Etc.
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.
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Can someone steelman (or just represent) the argument of why Bud Light supporting Dylan Mulvaney is wokeness and not classical liberalism/free speech?
https://thecritic.co.uk/dylan-mulvaney-did-not-share-our-gir...
This article explains why.
That ad campaign was enabled by the 1st amendment but not motivated by it. You’re conflating why they wanted to do it with why they could do it
This is a weird hill to die on for a billionaire. Is wokeness a problem? If I recast it as an assault on free speech, sure. But exactly how bad is this assault? I sure hear a lot of really rich people talk about wokeness, despite the proclaimed suppression of their speech. And is it as much of a problem as racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of bigotry endemic in our society?
I just picked this one at random today; took about a minute to find something: https://www.startribune.com/mom-ids-son-as-teen-left-with-br...
I’m relieved to read that racism isn’t as bad as I think it is.
> 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.
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.
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"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.
So he’s an anti-woke California Democrat. That would make him a republican in most other states.
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
we’re flagging pg now?
Hopefully flagging is based on the content and not the writer.
This sort of thing makes me nervous. When the owner of a forum finds the masses don't unflaggingly support his take on something, what's the reaction?
Elon has recently shown us what happens on Twitter when you don't tow the line. I don't know that Zuck is meddling behind the scenes, but it could just be that he doesn't telegraph it as boldly as Musk.
Yes, why not? Why should he get a free pass for his bad takes?
> we're flagging pg now?
I assume it's because the term "woke" will almost always derail a thread.
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.
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"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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It's my impression that geeks are prigs at a higher rate than society as a whole, but their priggishness is generally directed in random directions which makes it harmless and even quaint or endearing.
Surely you've experienced the one person on the team who will lecture endlessly on why robertson screw drive are so much better than torx, yadda yadda... or something similar. it's not a question of having a point or not-- they might or might not-- it's the haughty air of superiority, the perspective that countering perspectives don't exist or at least couldn't have any merit, that their pet issue couldn't ever be too irrelevant to worry about.
"System of rules that you can use to bludgeon people with instead of considering and empathizing? Sign me up!"
Maybe before you didn't notice it because more of them agreed with you or because enough of their priggishness was uncorrelated. Like a ferromagnetic material, if the domains are pointed in random directions you get no net field.
It's probably even just an effect of online forums in general. If you are of the view that many ideas are valid and that your preferences aren't so important, you tend to not comment at all.
In any case, if you're bothered by the net-prig-field there is a remark in PG's essay which might provide some advice: The priggishness is amplified when membership can be self selected by ideology rather than geography. If you just mix a diverse collection of people together their prig field will tends to cancel out, views will be normalized, extreme positions suppressed. So seek out venues where the structure of participation doesn't lend itself to polarization, or at least polarization incompatible with yours.
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Forgive me — what’s a prig?
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a lot of people here don't realize they are woke prigs
Wow! This is basically a master class in performative mediocrity.
Rewriting history was never more fun!
It’s simple, if you can do a special rain dance that makes you not have to draw back your bottom line, you will do it every day of the week whether you’re a billion dollar corporation or a 500 year old university
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:
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.
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:
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.
There are also some real zingers in his unexplored trains of thought here. He notes that "wokeness" in academia originated in the social sciences and not, say, mathematics or engineering. He then goes on to concoct some explanation based on folks from the Sixties getting into academia and not a far more obvious explanation: our modern understanding of the ills and boons of society originated from the sciences focused on studying society.
(Sure, Paul, the physics department didn't come up with woke. They were too busy overlooking Richard Feynman hitting on every undergrad woman that came through his department).
FWIW, I also saw political correctness "rise." In my experience, it rose in the computer science department discovering that when they adjusted their approach to incoming undergrad students based on observations from the social sciences that systemic sexism was bending the nature of their pre-undergrad education, the women performed better in the computer science undergrad curriculum. There's Paul's missing evidence from the "hard sciences."
Yeah, what's up with that? Is this supposed to be evidence for why (what he defines as) "wokeness" is bad? Ideas worth considering... can't come from the social sciences? Can they only come from STEM fields? That is uh, certainly a viewpoint for him to have.
This article was written due to recent events.
- IMO it should've acknowledged that there is genuine "intolerance" of foreigners/gays/trans, not the speech/writing you hear about in the news, but specifically the physical attacks and legal discrimination in third-world countries and rarely by extremists in first-world countries. And that seemingly-mild speech can lead to blatant hate speech, then physical attacks and legal discrimination; but it's not inevitable, and analogously when society swings to the center, it can swing too far to the other side, but maybe there's friction that makes it swing less and pulls it closer to an ideal equilibrium.
- It also states that Twitter doesn't censor left-wingers, which is factually wrong, unless every case of journalists being suspended and links being auto-removed is made-up or overblown. 4chan is an example of true free speech (sans calls to violence etc.), but it doesn't help the argument for multiple reasons. I think it's too early to say that "wokeness" is being rolled back; the truth is, woke intolerance isn't as pervasive as people think it is, so you will always find examples of people who directly contradict it and prosper.
However,
I strongly agree with the core message: there will always be people who use "morals" to control others. Taken straight from the article: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce." The article applies this and the remaining parts to left-wing "social-justice warriors" but you can apply it to right-wing religious zealots.*
The reality of "free speech", "live-and-let-live", and other compromises, are that people use them for their own agenda, to get more control. But that's OK. One of the reasons we have as much free speech as we do today, is that there are groups from all sides pushing it for their own reasons, and within these groups there's an opening to express your opinion. The vast majority of people are more focused on helping themselves than they are hurting you, even when hurting you is on their agenda, which means you can benefit from compromising with even smart people who hate you.
* Also, Paul Graham isn't really saying anything that he hasn't before. See: https://paulgraham.com/heresy.html, https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html, and https://paulgraham.com/say.html, written in 2022, 2020, and 2004. For a different left-biased take, see https://paulgraham.com/pow.html, written in 2017. But even if he was, this response stands. You can pick decent messages even out of articles people far, far more "right-wing" say, although it's a lot harder, and unlike this one the message you pick out probably won't be what the writer intended.
I think it's interesting that pg references James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian in footnote 15.
These two (professional) philosophers are arguably the vanguard of philosophical opposition to identity politics; they have written extensively on it, tracing its ideological roots to Karl Marx and comparing it to the Maoist cultural revolution in China. (And it bears being said: they're certainly not prejudiced against any majority or minority group.)
Cant imagine a better person than Paul Graham to give us the history of the origins of the struggles various underprivileged groups have had over the recent decades.
Anyway the conservative reaction to “wokeness” (or “wokism” if youre an annoying european conservative) is way more annoying than “wokeness” ever was. And as far as I can tell its just them going “I am annoyed by these people so I am going to be a huge baby”
Like theres no material impact to them here. How much can a DEI team possibly cost? It’s just babies being babies.
Actually I’m going to take that back. There is a material impact to them but it is that they risk losing out by not being in Trump & friends good books. In that case Paul’s rant is not only wrong but it is hypocritical because this is just as performative! If not more! The billionaires are already the most privileged group!
> How much can a DEI team possibly cost?
I don't think opposition to "a DEI team" is about cost at all, it's about the fact that it's harmful to your company to hire and fire based on skin color or gender expression, or to harass and lecture people for not participating in the DEI religion enough. If I had a nickel for every hiring discussion I've been in where I felt pressured to thumbs-up someone with serious flaws just because we were below an unspoken but widely-understood quota, I'd have a lot of nickels.
The idea that we should pass over the best candidate if he's a certain color and pronoun, thinking that will right the wrong of centuries-old sins, that's the mind virus that some of us don't approve of.
If you want an example of why it's bad and dumb even if you're a progressive, our VP, a very unpopular candidate who ran a laughably failed campaign for president was undeniably chosen as VP for DEI reasons, then she couldn't be "passed over" when Biden changed his mind about running, due to optics, so she, a candidate who peaked at 17% in the 2019 primary, was installed as the nominee.* The DNC killed itself on the altar of DEI in this case, and then lashed out at everyone else saying things like "Latinx people are white supremacists!"
*Stipulated: Democrats have a massive shortage of popular national-level politicians, so obviously while Harris was a bad choice, I can't point to any guaranteed 'better' ones.
Not much I can say other than that was a disappointing piece of trash from Paul.
The whole tirade against wokeness by the far right is nothing more than a bizarre attempt to stigmatize those who want to improve things for segments of society.
A more legitimate article might have focused on tactics such as shaming and cancelling those who disagree which is problematic in many instances, but Graham paints with too broad of a brush and comes across as another conservative whose only interest is to discredit those who think differently.
> comes across as another conservative
Graham endorsed Harris.
The left needs to stop accusing other members of the left of being "far-right" everytime they dare to have a different opinion on a topic.
That tendency of the left to ostracise its own rather than engage in debate, is exactly what pushed people like Elon and Rogan away, along with much of the centre, and is exactly why Trump won.
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.
on the other hand, throwing people under the bus is cheaper than spending $1M for the inauguration, you see the savvy investor!
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.
I want to share a personal story.
I’m from Argentina. When I met my current wife, she volunteered at an orphanage. Her task was to take one of the children out for fun on weekends. It seemed simple, but it wasn’t. There, she met “A,” a 10-year-old girl. Some weekends with “A” were easy, but she was generally problematic. So, as we tried to understand what was happening to her, we learned a bit about her past.
Her mother was a drug addict and a criminal. Her father was likely her grandfather and was also in jail for various reasons, including abusing her.
We were heartbroken and tried to help, but we didn’t plan to adopt her. There are many other details, but I don’t want to bore you with the horrors. To summarize, this story shattered my naivety.
However, the story takes a positive turn. When Argentina legalized same-sex marriage, two women adopted “A.” It was the first adoption case involving a same-sex marriage in our country.
Things weren’t easy for them. We’re friends now and see each other occasionally. They transformed “A’s” life for good. But it’s not like the movies. Once a child has endured such trauma, recovery can take years, and sometimes, it’s not even possible.
Nowadays, we have a president in Argentina who constantly claims to be engaged in a “cultural battle.” He’s a fan of Elon Musk and Trump. The “cultural battle” primarily involves removing sexual education from schools, removing organizations dedicated to protecting women from abuse, and portraying government spending on helping the poor as communism. He frequently uses the term “woke” to denigrate people who don’t share his views.
However, this “cultural battle” is all about hate.
The entire concept of “canceling culture,” “anti-woke,” and Mark Zuckerberg removing tampons from bathrooms are distractions. The world is full of children like “A,” and the cost of proofreading this with AI is probably enough to feed one person for a day. I’m not trying to sit on a moral high ground while I write this from my iPad Pro. But, at least, we should have more empathy.
Sorry for my long comment, but I feel that this article from PG misses the point (ja! It’s my second time writing in disagreement with a PG article). I’m concerned about the direction that all this hate is taking here in Argentina, echoing the things that happen in the US.
I appreciate your story and feel for "A" and the women who adopted her. But I think we need to get beyond this idea that there are only two sides and you have to pick one or the other. I don't see why I can't agree with you and also agree with PG. I didn't feel any hate in his article and I imagine he would support the people who have been helping "A", i.e. you and your wife and her adoptive mothers.
> There are many other details, but I don’t want to bore you with the horrors. To summarize, this story shattered my naivety
I have had similar experiences and understand you.
Here's a ChatGPT rewrite, focusing on a different end of the political spectrum:
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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."
Unfortunately he's going along with right-wing orthodoxy instead of seriously confronting modern internet cults. Graham proves himself to be a groupthinker, not an independent thinker.
(The real tragedy of "woke" is how it undermines the left; how could you ever win an election if people who seem to travel with you tell 70% (white) or 50% (men) of people that they're intrinsically bad? Worse yet those "fellow travelers" will sit out the election because they think any real politicians is a "fascist" for one reason or another.)
My son has two friends who I'll call B and C -- "wokeness" could be evoked in the case of B but you'll see it is a wrong mental model.
I knew B from elementary school and I know he's a bit out of sync with other people, like myself and my son. Call him "neurodivergent" and leave it at that. I introduced B to TTRPGs which he enjoyed greatly at the time and is an ongoing interest for him. (Unlike my transsexual friend from college, neither I nor his mother ever heard him express anything noncongruent about his gender identity as a child.)
My son met C in high school. He probably has a developmental problem too but I wont't DX it. B seemed a little depressed and withdrawn, C has always expressed hostility against people and institutions. C certainly has pathological narcissism and says that hard work is for suckers, his dad is a provost at an elite school. If he was seriously seeking a royal road he'd continue in the family business (where nepotism rules) but he hasn't talked to his dad in years, though, like B, he still lives at home. C jumped off the roof of his house one day to impress his little brother and broke his leg. His mom, who grew up in rural China and later got an MD valid in China but not here, thinks he is possessed by demons.
B works part time. C doesn't work. Neither are in school.
During the pandemic B was worked on by an "egg-hatcher" who helped B develop body dysmorphia. Last thanksgiving family plans fell through but we went to the community center in B's hamlet because we knew we'd get to meet up with B and his mom. (B uses a different pronoun and different name at work but doesn't mind if we use his old pronouns and name.) B told us all about the horrible side effects of the meds he is taking, and then got jumped on by a (seemingly mental ill) Trump supporter when I was coming out of the bathroom. B expresses a lot of hostility to the likes of J K Rowling because he's been told to.
C encountered "blackpill" incels who also talked him into body dysmorphia. (Like the transgenderists they have a language of transformation through ideology, in this case based on a scene from The Matrix.) His height is average, but that's not good enough. He stretches every day and wants to have surgery where they break his legs to extend them. He hasn't talked my with my son or myself since the time my son said what his real height was in an online chat. I had a 'Black Card' membership at Planet Fitness and made the offer to teach him how to lift weights, but he refused. Rumor has it, however. that he bought anabolic steroids online and injected them.
People who see things through an ideological lens would see B as good and C as evil or maybe C as good and B as evil. I look at them and see similar signs and symptoms and if I had to DX it would be "lack of social connection and lack of meaning"; both acquired body dysmorphia through ideology, I've got no doubt about it and I see both as victims of internet cults.
In Terry Prachett's Hogfather professors at the Unseen University discover a principle of "conservation of belief" so that when the Hogfather (like Santa but comes on Dec 32, drives a sleigh pulled by pigs, ...) is assassinated the world becomes plagued by the Hair Loss Fairy and the God of Hangovers (the "Oh God!") I see transgenderism, inceldom, evangelicals who don't go to church, BLM enthusiasts who don't personally know any black people, people senselessly adding stripes to the rainbow flag (hmmm... people in those classes have always had trouble with being confused with others... In Iran they think gay people need trans surgery, Intersex people frequently express that they've been violated when they get the same surgery that helps transexual people feel whole, etc.) , anti-vax activists and people who are obsessively pro-vax just to oppose anti-vax people as being our own Hair Loss Fairy that comes out of traditional religions failing.
Crazy and rather ironic that an essay from pg himself gets flagged no HN.
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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.
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Appeal to authority needs to be used with prudence. I wouldn't trust pg on a medical topic, but I have no issue hearing what he has to say on this particular topic because as far as I am concerned academic credentials do not give you a better understanding of the contemporary social climate.
For that matter Trump and MAGA have no degrees in psychology and sociology. Despite this, they were much more in tune with the American public than the Democrats with their fake intellectualism.
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Wow, I really hated this article. Thanks for the bad opinion, Paul.
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Ok, but please don't break the site guidelines when posting to HN. Name-calling and personal attacks aren't allowed here, and your comment consists of nothing but.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The sheer amount of content-less booing of political outgroups throughout the thread (overwhelmingly in one direction, unsurprisingly given the article content) has really disappointed me.
I can't help but wonder if this is intentionally ironic.
(From TFA: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules.")
I think it’s intentional and ironic. But I don’t think PG realizes what he did. I throughly believe he’s in the space of “I can do it because i am morally superior. But other folks can’t because they don’t get it like I do.” I get this feeling from reading not just this, but his other essays too.
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My respect for PG and the rest of the leadership of the tech world unfortunately seem to be headed off the same cliff.
The arrogance and lack of empathy is so disappointing and so unnecessary. Please try harder. A lot is at stake here.
Your comment, while eloquent, is totally unsubstantiated. At least PG tries to justify his perspective.
You didn't.
This comment is kinda harsh isn't it? Do you have anything specific from his words to support:
> ... mind become filled with mush
> desperate pledge of allegiance ...
I think it's just the fact he spends this much time thinking about wokeness. His whole argument is it's unimportant and performative, so then why did he spend all this time writing an article about it?
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Do you have any points of substance you can elaborate with? I would genuinely like to hear your argument.
Not OP, but personally it's just sad to see someone that you view as a historically great mind getting distracted by nonsense, like if a great mathematician suddenly stopped their research to focus on flat earth and contrails
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I do agree with you that it seems like that and I generally agree with you, but I'm also not a fan of your comment that only addresses the mind of PG, while the words he written are right there.
Point out the parts of the blog post that shows his lack of rational thinking and research, rather than just giving some overall personal attack, as currently the comment is relatively off-topic considering the submission.
I'm sure there are good and bad parts of the blog post, while you failed to address any sides of it.
Did we read the same article? It seems like a pretty coherent and plausible explanation for the current state of political correctness.
You read a reply from a person that doesn't like the implications of PG's statements and conclusions. Which I think is further evidence of PG's claims.
Could you expand on why this article makes you believe his mind has "become filled with mush."
What points is he making (if you consider him to be making clear points), how do you think those points are flawed, etc..
He's just kissing the ring.
As a liberal/left/progressive person who agrees with many of the ideas "woke" people are pushing, I find "wokeism" extremely problematic.
We need to put to bed the notion that criticizing some aspect of a social phenomenon somehow means someone is wholly endorsing the worst elements of the opposition.
Personally, I believe "wokeism" (I hesitate to even use this word because it's poorly defined) is actually one of the largest impediments to moving society towards the ideas generally associated with the word. It's a tactics issue.
The difference between "We want the world to look more like X" and "Let's do these specific things to make the world look more like X" is critical. How you go about the latter can have a huge impact on the former.
That's just not true. He did not like wokeism, but on the other hand he's aligned with the democrats, including voting for Kamala. Like his politics or not, he is independent thinker.
Paul Graham was never smart. He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Young people in need of guidance would do well to read the classics and disregard everyone with a pulse.
Paul Graham is one of the smartest people I've ever met, hands down, not a close call.
If I know propositional logic, one of two things follows: either (1) I've never met any smart people, or (2) you've jumped to a false conclusion.
Either way, you shouldn't be posting personal attacks to HN.
I'm assuming you're exaggerating for effect at least a little but with that caveat I couldn't agree more. CS Lewis has a great argument for this in his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation. Paraphrasing his argument: Time naturally filters out the nonsense and what we're left with are the books that are worth reading by virtue of the fact that they have stood the test of time. Truth or at least the closest we can get to it naturally bubbles up to the surface over time.
https://thecslewis-studygroup.org/the-c-s-lewis-study-group/...
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"He then received a Master of Science in 1988, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1990, both in computer science from Harvard University."
Anyone with a PhD Comp Sci from Harvard is automatically very smart in my mind, unless by "smart" you mean something else...
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> He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Agreed. People seem to think that success is deterministic, so following the advice of successful people will lead them to success, rather than there being any number of other factors that might make someone who might make choices with the highest chance of success end up not succeeding, or someone who might make choices that aren't actually that smart end up becoming successful in spite of that. The worst part of this is that it's not just the students who naively believe this, but the successful people themselves. When someone mistakenly thinks that their own success is solely attributable to your own superior intellect or work ethic, it's not surprising that they end up advocating for policies that treat people in unfortunate circumstances as being not worth trying to help.
Graham's early essays on, say, the ambitions of cities or hackers and painters, were interesting, original, were grounded in his personal experiences, and were focused in scope.
This latest mush makes extravagant claims about the evolution of society over the course over a 70 year period, seems shocked that news rooms might have style guides, and suggests that recent campus life can somehow be meaningfully be compared to the Cultural Revolution.
It observes many trends, perhaps some accurately, but observes everything superficially.
Pragmatically, what Graham suggests at the end is reasonable--pluralism combined with openness to the ideas of others about morality. I don't know that we needed 6000 words of vague dyspeptic musings to get there.
He has demonstrated the ability to write and think more clearly than this. It is reasonable for someone to observe this and be disappointed.
Both of you are attacking pg's character, yet he's done no wrong here.
> 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."
As an LGBT Latino, I feel gross when people step up to "include" me. The "LatinX" thing is just sick, and the fake "pride" bullshit makes me feel unbelievably cheapened. Not all gays or bis are the same. I don't go around screaming "yass qween", listen to Beyonce, or watch Ru Paul. But we're token represented like that. I hate everything about it.
Superficial facets of my "identity" have been commoditized and weaponized. (I'd say "appropriated", but that'd only be the case if this wasn't a complete cartoon representation.)
I've been called a "fag" once in public for kissing a guy. Whatever.
My wife has been called cis-scum (despite the fact she's trans!), I've been made to write software to deny grants to whites and men [1], I've been told I can't recommend people for hire because they weren't "diverse", I've been taught by my company my important "LatinX heritage" and even got some swag for it, I've had a ton of completely irrelevant people make my "identity" into a battle ground, etc. etc etc. I can't count the number of times this surfaces in my life in an abrasive and intrusive way.
I felt more at home in the world before 2010 than in the world today that supposedly "embraces my diversity".
[1] Restaurant Revitalization Fund, look it up.
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He's smart about startups and tech but as soon as he starts to talk about politics or philosophy he gets very 2 dimensional very quickly.
In much the same way people who build useless startups never talk to any actual customers, Paul Graham wouldnt be seen dead with the types of 1970s black activists from Harlem who actually originated the term "woke" (to refer to e.g. police brutality).
Im sure he knows plenty of the rich, white moral posturers who run large corporations and pride themselves on making a rainbow version of their company's logo for use outside of middle eastern markets, though.
(regardless of the merit of your criticism, this comment was at least very funny to me, so thank you for that)
In a way, this kind of ad hominem attack supports his point.
I found the essay cogent and accessible. He's very active online and engages in good faith even with his detractors.
Whatever else you think of him, he's an incredibly concise and persuasive writer. Even on topic I disagree with him on, I can't fault his reasoning or presentation.
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What I find funny is that PG thinks he is a thinker who breaks the rules. No PG, you and your friends write the rules. Wokeness is about acknowledging the game is rigged against black people and others. But go ahead PG, redefine it as political correctness, then write an essay about how the current system is actually good.
The reason wokeness scares the elite like PG is because it targets the system they themselves helped create.
It doesn’t even have any kind of real power to unseat these dorks. They have enough capital and connections to hold on to power for life. It attempts to delegitimize them, question their worldview and expose them to other viewpoints and their reaction is to lash out against it. Very fragile identities.
It just amazing to see how the new Trump administration prepares to take over, all the Tech Bros suddenly are coming out of their shell.
Musk on DEI. Zuckerberg just got back to his Misogynistic persona of the first days of Facebook. Peter Thiel published an editorial in the FT last week talking about conspiracy theories on JFK, and now...The attack on Wokeness... Cherry-picking historical examples, misrepresenting real power dynamics, and dismissing genuine social concerns as mere “performative” gestures. All while coming from a privileged VC perspective that notoriously funnels opportunities to the same elite circles...
I don't disagree, but Thiel has been "out of his shell" for decades.
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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.
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You're clearly passionate about social justice. But pretending it's just 'being nice' and everyone who disagrees is evil? That's exactly the kind of oversimplified thinking that stops real progress and actually causes evil.
Movements for social change are messy. They involve hard trade-offs, heated debates about methods, and yeah, sometimes people on 'your side' screw up or take things too far. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
And the history is just wrong - 'stay woke' wasn't forced on anyone. People chose it proudly before it became contentious. You're rewriting history to avoid engaging with actual criticism.
You can fight for what you believe in without pretending you're in a morality play where the good guys are pure and the bad guys twirl their mustaches. Real life is more complicated than that.
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There's much more ideology attached to "wokeness" than just "be nice" and "be respectful", such as the concepts around gender and neurodiversity spectrums.
Just using the word itself evokes immediate reactions from those aligned with particular political "sides". I've formed this opinion after my many, mandatory DEI trainings at work.
I think all good people can agree that being nice and being respectful of people who aren't hurting others is a no-brainer.
Edit: Note that this comment is being downvoted to oblivion and illustrates my point.
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I don’t know about “be nice” - Personally the expression I equate it with is “live and let live” (or maybe “quit being an asshole”)
It’s a reaction to discrimination. If there wasn’t racism and sexism and discrimination there would be no “wokeness”
So congrats righties, you got what you asked for
I don't understand this wokery-as-politeness argument. Politeness obviously has a place, but if you're trying to solve real social problems while also being unable to discuss the actual problem, because speaking frankly about it is impolite, then clearly is counter-productive if your goal is to solve actual social problems. As far as I can tell, wokery functions as a straight jacket on language that is designed to make only one solution to a given problem (generally the solution that blames white people) even sayable.
I don't think it is politeness, I think its a political power play to control language that sounds nice to first-order-thinking left wing types.
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Western urban monoculture.
This is a ridiculous comment. I don't know if you've noticed but a lot of what's happening in the entire western world politically is a result of the backlash against wokeness and leftist economics.
Without wokeness there is no Trump, and the far right in Europe would still be marginal.
Edit - it's funny, just yesterday I was listening to a podcast where Peter Thiel was lamenting the lack of introspection on the left. Lots of comments proving it correct.
This comment is historically and intellectually uninformed, i.e., devoid of understanding about the antecedents and relationships between what is driving todays rise of the right, which is a populist counterrevolution to the 60s and beyond’s postmodernism-fueled culture wars, which elevated the marginalized and women, and served as a strategic distraction while the elite locked in wealth extract ion from below and minority rule by manufacturing a pervasive epistemic crisis.
Same for yours, You can hardly call the free market and privatization policies that the western europe has been going through these last three decades "Leftish economics"
What big leftist economics policies have been enacted in the West recently?
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Are you accusing the people who fight against Trump's politics and who vote against him to have put him in power? Also, what "leftist economics" are you talking about?
Now this is a ridiculous comment.
It reads just like "antifascists are the new fascists" discourses. It's absurd.
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I think this is a bit reductive.
Trump came to power on the back of a populist anger at the wealthy elite and the consequences of neo-liberal economics (which is pretty fucking far from e.g. Marx. Regardless of the entirety of his meaning, certainly some of Alex Jones' hatred of "globalists" springs from the fact that they outsource jobs to where the labor is cheaper). Insofar as "wokeness" factors into Trump's power, it was to harness that anger and direct it at some wealthy elites, but not others. That is, he claimed that these wealthy elites are being performatively sanctimonious and are trying to rob you of your freedom, money, power, etc, but those wealthy elites have your best interests at heart. Even though the two wealthy elites are kissing cousins (to whit, Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump Jr. both engaged in a committed long-term relationships with the same woman, albeit at different times) and don't actually care either way.
"Woke" in the traditional sense is realizing that no matter what they say, both groups are wealthy elites, and that neither actually has the interests of anyone but the elites at heart.
There are definitely moments of "are we really prioritizing this right now?" with modern social justice movements. But even on the subject of trans kids, the question for me is not "are we encouraging the wrong ideas around gender?" but rather "are we doing everything that's necessary to keep kids from committing suicide?"
The other day there was a post about fascists vs. rakes, and I really do feel like the the discussion around wokeness comes down to a similar misunderstanding about the intentions and moral principles of the two sides of the discussion.
Without wokeness, Trump et al would've already steamrolled us.
Being woke is to be aware of inequalities between ethnicities, religions, and classes. Being woke is to be aware of the fact that the planet is overheating due to our unfettered capitalism.
You calling something ridiculous is what is ridiculous, friend.
Yeah, what the rich need is more tax breaks {sarcasm}.
The world is full of people too stupid to know how stupid they are. They need to wake the fuck up.
The scientific method is to look at data and form models of reality from that. Not to have a model in mind and then look for evidence to support it or evidence to ignore.
Graham has a Hegelian, Panglossian view of things. In "woke" terms he is a very, very wealthy white cishet male born to an upper middle class physicist. As the relations of production and social order were created for and are controlled by his class he defends it.
To use an example - due to government mandates, the number of blacks attending Harvard Law School this year is less than half what it was last year. It does not fit into the narrative of a progressive, forward moving country which is meritocratic (although absurdly the legacies etc. taking their place is called a move to meritocracy). You can't say there is a national oppression of Africans in the US by the US, or that things are not meritocracy, so thinking starts getting very skewed. You can read this skewed thinking in Graham and others.
YC was started by a convicted felon, and it's due to his privileged birth that Graham was not convicted along with his co-founder. Meanwhile black men are killed by police for selling loose cigarettes or handing a clerk a counterfeit bill (something I unknowingly did once) to cheers from corporate media commentators and demagogues. What kind of country you live in even here in the imperial center is very much a question of what class you are in, as well as other things.
The working people and wretched of the earth are tired of being lectured to by the scions of diamond mines, Phillips Exeter graduates and the like. Even if they do know the worst case big O time for quicksort. History goes through twists and turns, and I welcome the challenges to their power we will be seeing this century.
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Still can't believe we all changed our branch names from master to main.
Decades ago, when I was a teenager, and saw that “master/slave” was a technical term, it made me uncomfortable- like, it has so much baggage for a technical term.
I’m guessing that the master branch is not a master/slave reference, but “master copy”. But I think main is just as good, so I really don’t care that it got caught up in the movement. This is just language naturally evolving, which I know many people are fundamentally against on an ideological basis.
To me, fighting the changes of language over time is like yelling at the wind. Just let it go and focus on what’s truly important (almost everything else). People will advocate for changes and they will stick or they won’t. If you are an effective communicator, you really shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping up.
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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
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.
Are there viable alternatives to HN? I'm pretty sick of PG and Altman's influence.
They aren't good people.
Lobsters probably comes closest. But still invite-only (AFAIK) and you also don't bump into random programming superstars (who programmed that one childhood game you absolutely loved) there every now and then.
Besides, I feel like HN is dang's kingdom, and compared to how it used to be, pg is barely mentioned nowadays. Based on feelings only, it doesn't feel like HN skews pg/altman friendly, I'd probably say it's the opposite if I had to say anything.
PG and Altman don't have editorial influence on Hacker News, and current moderation policy is to not kill topics partaining to YC. (which is why I suspect this blogpost got rescued from being flagkilled)
100% agree. They've become a symbol of how money corrupts people.
> 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.
>how money corrupts people
Money just exposes what was latent. Similar goes for power.
Ycombinator is of course, involved to some extent with the creation of HN. So I get it. Tech leaders cultism sort of infests the space.
But I do tend to find HN pretty broad in topics. I do think they end up on here because they’re good at making news for themselves (not a compliment) and the sort of people posting on here, are posting tech news. I don’t see ending up on HN’s front page as any indicator of goodness, but more so, it’s at least something people are talking about and sparks some discussion, goodness-neutral on the specific topic at hand.
dang is really good at his job!
That said, I really like mastodon! Obviously it’s a different sort of platform, but you can get a similar but less-tech-thought-leader-centric experience with some light curation. (And participation by yourself!)
What influence of theirs are you seeing on HN?
With Meta, X and Hackernews right wing American now I am also struggling where to go. Sure it won't be much here or the aforementioned networks anymore.
Lobste.rs
People suggesting lobster.rs as an alternative are the Marie Antoinettes of 21st century.
Reddit? Not sure why you decided today is the day to move
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.
Probably because of the blog post that it is a comment to
Really? In a thread discussing PG's most recent brain fart you can't understand why today would be the day?
lots of things reach a breaking point: dams, pollution assimilation, BS jobs, social media sites...
Same but also with Dang.
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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.
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wokeness is more or less southern Baptist fire and brimstone Christianity for posh urban white people. For western minorities it functions as a kind of nationalism
I think you describe it really well. There is certainly a large pocket of black communities on social media sharing dreams of a Western takeover, ranging anywhere from outright (fraudulently) claiming inventions they never invented, brazenly replacing characters in every form of entertainment, all the way to openly proposing a white purge, let's call it. Very concerning.
What's even weirder is that this content was rarely ever flagged in the Twitter days, and still prevails on X today. Demonizing anyone of white European descent on Reddit is also completely acceptable, and doesn't result in moderation.
"what did you think decolonization meant? Vibes, essays, papers? Losers."
> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness
This is a fake news. Research shows that Twitter algorithmic amplification favored right-wing politics even before Musk made it even worse. See: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
> On the other hand, the people on the far left have only themselves to blame; they could tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted to.
Being this much clueless in pg's position is not possible. I can only assume he's consciously lying. He can see front row what Musk does with Twitter and how the "free speech" he's supposedly defending is actually "what Musk likes to hear speech", and he perfectly knows Musk is strongly aligned with the far right that he supports however he can all over the world. See for example: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2025/01/10/musk-dou...
I wish, but to be Black in America is to witness this sort of cluelessness (despite prowess in other areas) ALL THE TIME.
Domain specific knowledge is SO REAL.
(Incidentally, this is roughly why I don't believe we will ever have so called "AGI")
Calling this "cluelessness" is being more charitable that parent, and on the balance of evidence, mayn not be the correct explanation.
If one were sceptical of this synchronized "political awakening" in the tech industry, that incidentally is aligned to an incoming presidential administration, one might call it some sort of gratuitous signaling of virtues. Which is hilariously ironic, and shows either a lack of self-awareness, or profound levels of shamelessness.
This feels like another VC/executive "taking a knee" towards the new administration, a vivid trend in the last few weeks. I feel like pg was particularly more left/right neutral just up until this month of inauguration.
Sorry, can you back this up with some data and specificity?
I understand that you feel Musk is aligned with the far right; my question is what exactly is Musk doing with twitter, and (other than when people take the piss against him personally) how is he removing free speech that is not "far right"?
I'm genuinely interested in the details -- and they are hard to come by.
Elon suspended PG's account just for lightly alluding that another social media platform exists. I'm not sure why you're even bringing up the idea of free speech on Twitter. Can you imagine Discord suspending your account for lightly alluding that Slack exists?
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This is by Twitter itself, before Musk: "Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend: In six out of seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left." https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
This is more recent: "We observe a right-leaning bias in exposure for new accounts within their default timelines." https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01852
You can also find a lot a testimony from users like: https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/1es2lfd/...
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Now from personal experience (I've been on Twitter since 2007 and used it virtually everyday since then):
I've heard and read a lot of such testimony in particular from user who don't post much or at all and only follow a few accounts. In the last two years they've been exposed to a lot of far right content.
I've seen how the moderation team at twitter took action before musk when reporting (often illegal) hate speech and now just respond by saying that it doesn't violates the platform rules.
I've seen on the contrary people (even journalists) and political or news organization getting locked out of their account following a far right online mob against them, and then having a hard time (sometimes to the point of giving up) getting it back because the moderation team did not act.
I can. Before he owned twitter, if someone called me the n-word or other racial slurs, action was taken. Now when that happens and I report it, they reply to tell me no rules were broken
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I use Twitter for machine learning research only, but somehow that account gets inundated with Maga crap. That's proof enough for me.
Sure, that's an anecdote of one instance, but it's so clear. And how would you do a proper study? I'm guessing you would need Elon's permission.
Its interesting how doing something is immediately equated with 'removing not far right' free speech.
The idea is he promotes the talking points that benefit the right and the Republicans. Both personally and in changing the platforms algorithms [1].
There have been reports of people disagreeing with that general 'platform' loosing their blue check marks [2], accounts being disabled, followers dropped [3] and so on to reduce the reach of left/liberal people.
He doesn't need to remove speech he disagrees with, he can drown it and amplify the messages he wants to be heard and significantly control the narrative and discussion that way.
[1]https://eprints.qut.edu.au/253211/1/A_computational_analysis...
[2]https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-accused-...
[3]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-twitter-accounts-left-los...
If your position is that awareness of Musk’s alignment with the far right is a matter of feeling rather than well-documented fact [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] then no amount of easily-accessible and readily-available detail will convince you to adjust that position.
As for an example of Elon making Twitter rules around speech he doesn’t like, here[8] is one that is very public and not hard to come by.
1 https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/02/elon-musk-nazis-kanye-twit...
2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/12/20/elo...
3 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/elon-musk-far-...
4 https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...
5 https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/23/business/elon-musk-nazi-jokes...
6 https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/05/02/elon-musk-reinstates-...
7 https://www.vice.com/en/article/elon-musk-twitter-nazis-whit...
8 https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-cis-cisgender-slur-twitter-185...
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Elevating tweets of folks that pay the troll under the bridge, where folks on the left are going to avoid that fee (why would someone on the left materially support a right wing pundit?) is one very obvious way.
Just go check out that man's X (twitter?) feed. Elon constantly says the quiet part out loud. I'm from genx and if you're younger I'm going to give you all some solid life advice. When someone tells you who they are, listen.
> how is he removing free speech that is not "far right"
In Dec 2022 he suspended the accounts of several left-leaning journalists without providing a cohesive justification: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/technology/twitter-suspen...
Posting about Ukraine is categorised as misinformation and downranked: https://x.com/aakashg0/status/1641976925064245249
Suppression of tweets in India and Turkey: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/twitter-takes-down-po... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/05/twitter-musk-censors...
> you feel Musk is aligned with the far right
It's not a feel, it's real (unless you're so far to the right yourself, you don't consider the AfD, neo-nazis, TERFs, etc etc such)
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Create a new account and find out. If you create a new account, without any other information, twitter will recommend you follow Musk, Don Jr (President's right wing son), and Babylong Bee, a right wing fake news joke site.
Go ahead, do the experiment and come back and tell me what you see.
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He tweeted 150x a day in support of Trump leading up to the election. Just go look at his timeline.
Edit: lol at this getting downvoted. Some of you free speech purists really don't want to hear basic facts. Seriously. Just go look at the timeline. 150x a day is not an exaggeration. All of it in direct support of Trump, or attacking DEI and anything else associated with Democrats.
People who lean left are choosing to leave.
Greg Lukianoff of FIRE, a free speech defender said Musk made twitter better for free speech (on balance): https://youtu.be/Er1glEAQhAo?si=2aWdSIsbKzjz0nGA&t=2853
It’s interesting to see how polarizing views about Musk have become. People often overlook the fact that Musk was, and in many ways still is, aligned with traditional liberal values. He’s been a long-time supporter of initiatives like universal basic income, environmental sustainability through the green movement ect... Yet, the moment he expresses support for ideas that deviate from the more extreme edges of left-wing ideology, he’s vilified and treated as a pariah by those who once championed him.
Regarding X, I still see plenty of left-leaning content, but the dynamic has undoubtedly shifted. What’s changed is that the platform no longer artificially amplifies one ideological perspective at the expense of others. Previously, algorithms seemed to prioritize content aligned with extreme left narratives while outright blocking opposing views. That system gave the impression of a dominant left-leaning consensus, that was entirely artificial.
At the end of the day, it's impossible to remove all bias so whatever system maximizes free speech is the best one.
What are you saying? Musk is literally and openly supporting the far right neo-nazi party in Germany these days. See: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2025/01/10/musk-dou...
Also, it's just not true that "Previously, algorithms seemed to prioritize content aligned with extreme left narratives while outright blocking opposing views". It's a lie. Twitter's research itself revealed their algorithm favored right wing politics even before Musk. And it became a lot more true since he took power. See: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
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Musk recently de-verified or banned a bunch of far-right accounts that were posting anti-H1B content. Musk isn't far right, he's just looking after his business interests.
Well like any political descriptor, "far right" is a generalization that applies to several groups. In this case, Elon is part of the corporate-techno-authoritarian far right that supported trump, while figures like Loomer who were posting the anti-H1B content are part of the white-nationalist/christian-nationalist far right (that also supported trump).
Musk literally supports the far right in elections all over the world. In the past few days he intervened in Germany in favor of the far right candidate. See https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2025/01/10/musk-dou...
I was banned from Twitter within hours of Elon having control for changing my displayed name (not my handle) to "Elon's Musk" in a reply to something unhinged that he had tweeted.
So much free speech.
Were you banned for your speech or for being a troll intent on being disruptive to the community? Because there's a difference.
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The easiest thing for a truly evil person to do is lie. They lie about being good, first and foremost. That most people are just a bunch of willfully ignorant rubes works very well for them, unfortunately.
So you were banned for the new rules on imitation as opposed to free speech
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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?
Are you aware you are asking parent to “prove it” to the claims you don’t agree with, and then make similar claims in the opposite direction without “proving it”?
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Bullshit. Try using the term cisgender on Twitter, regardless of context
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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.
"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?
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It's amazing to see the masks come off even before trump's coronation.
I stopped reading his essays some time ago, but it feels like they keep getting dumber and dumber.
> it feels like they keep getting dumber and dumber.
Considering how dumb "Hackers and Painters" was, that's a pretty hard fall.
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It's also with nothing that this article's title was either directly ripped from or just so happens to be identical to a YouTube video about the "party ball" in the video game super smash Bros[1].
There's lots of good criticism of the actual article to expand on here, calling someone a white supremacist because they used an incredibly common title format does not add to that.
[1]https://youtu.be/lSaNV-83mAQ?si=xAE75fWHcqG17Lfm
It is also similiar to "On The Origin of Species" a far more famous book that I'm sure everyone has heard of.
"either directly ripped or just happens to be near identical" is a pretty wide disjunction—it includes every possible case!
These fringe conspiracies on the left are just as troubling as the same ones on the right. Sure it’s possible but highly unlikely that this was an intentional use of that book. I would guess for more likely he has no idea about this book like myself.
Hanania mellowed (matured? Sold out?) immensely in the last 10 years. If you are a white supremacist wanting to read him because of coltonv recommendation, be prepared to be disappointed:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1878829377338966310
> One way to understand conservative/liberal differences is to think of conservatives as the people who are intellectually limited and lazy.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/08/richard-hanania-raci...
> “I truly sucked back then,” Hanania admits, confirming that, between 2008 and 2012, he posted pseudonymously on several white-supremacist and misogynistic websites […] He confesses he “had few friends or romantic successes and no real career prospects” at the time and was projecting his “personal unhappiness onto the rest of the world.”
He has denounced his past beliefs.
He still cites people who contribute to these websites that he describes as "white-supremacist and misogynistic", though. That seems awfully odd for somebody who claims that these beliefs are odious. I also really don't know how else to interpret a call to overturn Griggs v Duke.
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.
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.
You are not trying hard enough. Sure, you managed to allude to Paul Graham being a white supremacist just for using a similar title. How many ways are there to phrase a title for an essay about this topic? But really my disappointment comes from you not being able to leap to calling him Hitler. Surely someone else in the comments will manage it anyway. 7/10
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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.
The title.
>It's worth noting that the title of this article
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Please don't do this here.
Prime example of why woke got associated with negative connotations.
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They are Marxists and will tell you so, where do you think this oppressor/oppressed dichotomy comes from?
Who's "they"? Peterson couldn't name a single person when pushed.
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He's the co-founder of this website
Then I wish we had a higher bar for content.
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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.
That’s because it is not a quote from the article or a sentiment pg upheld.
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Notwithstanding your incredible lack of charity, and notwithstanding the use-mention distinction, it is in fact completely legal to refer to groups by slurs in the US, and always has been (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...).
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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.
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On what basis do you make that claim? They might not have time to write more.
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What? Paul Graham has been making statements that people found "too right wing" for at least 20 years. I have never seen him express pro-censorship or radical DEI views like the big U.S. corporations did.
We see now that all these corporations are A-grade hypocrites, which was already clear in 2020 but forbidden to say.
You cannot accuse Paul Graham for suddenly changing his views.
Can you provide a few examples? I honestly don't remember anything this bad
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Timing is everything. There's been a procession of tech leaders prostrating themselves before Trump, and Trump hasn't even had his coronation. Now Paul Graham has joined the fray.
So excuse me if I see it as a pathetic capitulation. A "me too" moment following all the other so-called tech leaders.
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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.
https://x.com/search?q=trump+(from:paulg)
Some people are scared of what trump et al might do.
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.
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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.
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.
I believe we are at last seeing the person for who they really are.
Not very many profiles in courage awards going around in silicon valley these days.
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Eh. The relevant parties are largely incapable of feeling embarrassment.
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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
> "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
Yeah it's pretty telling how much of a sacred cow this is for so many people
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Substanceless empty comment that has likely been copy-posted by Mildred under a pro-vaccination video on YouTube, written into the newspaper letters page about climate change by Capt. Black, and in the tabloid news article comments section about immigration.
Do I really have to waste my life pointing out that you are making solely an ad-hom comment, while whining about ad-hom comments?
"they lack substance"
"they lack the ability"
"educated under woke teachers"
"unable to see"
"unable to argue logically"
ad-hom, ad-hom, fantasy, ad-hom, ad-hom.
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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.
You're saying that the heretics will be suppressed?
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Can you please make your substantive points without resorting to the flamewar style? Your comments are standing out as more flamey than anyone else's that I've seen, so far, in the thread.
In particular, it would be good if you would note and follow the following site guidelines:
"Don't be snarky."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Your views are welcome, but we need you to express them in the intended spirit of the forum. The same, of course, is true for anyone with opposing views.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
In Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement, he notes that articulate forms of name-calling are still name-calling.
When Graham opens his essay by providing a definition of 'prig' but then using that pejorative over and over again to refer to his conceptual opposition in this essay, how are those who are responding to the essay to respond? It seems we put ourselves on a field disadvantage if we are to argue a point with an author who is immediately resorting to name-calling with one arm tied behind our backs.
I respect this site tries to be something else than other online fora. But it is a site still inextricably tied to Graham and his legacy, so when he drops an essay like this it's reasonable to either expect people responding to it will take the same tone as the founder of this site, or that we should be very, very clear that this site has become something not at all associated with its founding.
Has it?
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I’ve been on the site since the beginning under various usernames. I agree with your point overall but sometimes something said truly is “bad” (idiotic, foolish, whatever) and is deserving of being called so.
I believe writing “after the riots of 2020” and framing what happened as “wokeness” qualifies as idiotic.
I made my points and haven’t responded further. I don’t believe I’ve said anything else that can be considered flamewar style commentary. I’ll keep in mind what you’ve said.
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> 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.
I have absolutely no need to get anywhere near the line of what anyone would think of being lewd.
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> Fortunately when the aggressively conventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one thing that gives them away: they define new heresies to punish people for
If the "conventional-minded" define new heresies, against a new creed, how are they conventional? What gives Paul Graham away is what he doesn't mention and may be what bothers him more: the old heresies that the surprisingly innovative and even rebellious "conventional-minded" abolish. (Actually, they do neither, but those who believe the former also believe the latter)
As with the myth of the "cancel culture" that Graham mentions (or the similar myth of "the war on Christmas"), the problem isn't the truth of certain events that do occur. It is the exaggeration of magnitude and ignorance of context. Clearly, at no stage in human history were more people not only free but also able to widely disseminate a wider range of views as they are today. Specifically, far fewer people are "silenced" at universities today than were, say, in the 1950s (except, maybe, in super-woke Florida).
> College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous combination.
Yeah, larping in a world of Jewish cabals and weather/mind control has turned out to be far more poisonous.
Anyway, for a more interesting and astute perspective on wokeness, see https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics Kriss shows why comparing wokeness to socialism or Christianity -- as Graham does -- is a category error:
> [I]t’s not a politics, or an ideology, or a religion. If you’ve ever spent any time in a political movement, or a religious one—even a philosophical one—you’ll have noticed that these things always have sects. Small differences in doctrine turn into antagonistic little groups. There are dozens of denominations that all claim to be the universal catholic church. Put two Marxists in a room and you’ll get three different ideological schisms. ... But it’s hard to see any such thing happening in any of the movements that get described as woke. Black Lives Matter did not have a ‘left’ or a ‘right’ wing; the different rainbow flags did not belong to rival queer militia ... The spaces these movements produce might be the sites of constant churning mutual animosity and backstabbing, but the faultlines are always interpersonal and never substantive. This is very, very unusual. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the woke mind virus is so perfectly bioengineered that it’s left all its victims without any capacity for dissent whatsoever, permanently trapped in a zombielike groupthink daze. This is the kind of possibility that a lot of antiwoke types like to entertain. Let me sketch out an alternative view.
> ... Wokeness is an etiquette. There are no sects within wokeness for the same reason that there are no sects on whether you should hold a wine glass by the bowl or by the stem. It’s not really about dogmas or beliefs, in the same way that table manners are not the belief that you should only hold a fork with your left hand.
> ... What makes something woke is a very simple operation: the transmutation of political demands into basically arbitrary standards of interpersonal conduct. The goal is never to actually overcome any existing injustices; political issues are just a way to conspicuously present yourself as the right kind of person.
> ... Unlike wokeness, the word antiwokeness is still used as a self-descriptor. The antiwoke will announce themselves to you. They won’t deny that antiwokeness exists. But since there’s no fixed and generally agreed-upon account of what the object of this apophatic doctrine actually is, you could be forgiven for wondering whether it is, in fact, particularly real. Wokeness is not a politics. And antiwokeness is not a politics either. It’s a shew-stone
> Every day, the antiwoke are busy producing wokeness, catching visions of incorporeal powers, desperately willing this thing into colder and denser form. What does this look like? Hysteria over uncouth material in entertainment media. Pseudo-sociological dogshit jargon. Endless smug performances of wholesome trad virtue. To be antiwoke is to be just another type of person who mistakes etiquette for politics, putting all your energies into the terrain of gesture and appearance, obsessed with images, frothing at every new indecency, horrified, appalled. We must protect the children from harm! I’m sure that some day very soon, the antiwoke will have their own miserable cultural hegemony. Big companies organising compulsory free-speech training for their workers. An informal network of censors scrubbing the mass media of anything that smacks too much of progressive tyranny.
> What gives Paul Graham away is what he doesn't mention and may be what bothers him more: the old heresies that the surprisingly innovative and even rebellious "conventional-minded" abolish.
Can you give an example of what you mean here?
I'll try, but it's a little tricky because, again, I don't think wokeness (whatever it is, although I agree with Graham that the term is usually applied to some superficial performance) actually does much of anything. Graham and other centrists latch on to cases where "heretics" are banished, but the sparsity of these cases only demonstrates how few of them are punished. Furthermore, centrists often emphasise how productive and useful past movements were in contrast to excessive and ineffectual current ones (I would say that the use of such a claim is the defining characteristic of the centrist). Of course, they say this at any point in time, and because the effect of current and recent movements is often yet to be seen, the centrists are always vindicated in the present. If a movement does happen to be effective relatively quickly -- say, support of gay marriage -- the centrist retroactively excludes it from the PC category (note that the most significant successes in the gay rights movement coincided with Graham's wokeness, but he doesn't even mention that).
Anyway, to answer your question: the same people who make up new heresies also challenge old creeds. In the case of wokeness, what's being challenged is the centre's (neoliberal or neocon) belief in its rationality, meritocracy, and objectivity. For example, Graham mentions "woke agendas", highlighting DEI (never mind that DEI is a new version -- and an aspirationally less excessive one -- of the 60s' affirmative action), but while he focuses on the ineffective performative aspects, he ignores the underlying claim which remains a heresy to him: That the old meritocracy is not what it claims to be, and that it, too, is missing out on "Einsteins" (to use his terminology) due to its ingrained biases.
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Also, when comparing the empty wokeness to the substantive protest movement of the sixties, Graham not only neglects to mention the real achievements of the former (LGBT rights, some MeToo successes) but also the performative aspects of the latter, as if radical chic never happened or a whole fashion and lifestyle (with a name that lasts to this day) -- also co-opted by corporations -- didn't emerge. I think there was even a pretty famous musical about it.
Do religious and political movements always develop such sects within a decade or so of their founding? If not then I'm not sure wokeness has existed for sufficient time (since the mid 2010s in the form it's discussed in the article I think) that the analysis you present here applies.
But I still find the analysis interesting. I think one difference between wokeness and political and religious movements is that wokeness doesn't seem to have a doctrine.
It's questionable in what way wokeness exists at all without a clear definition. Graham's definition is more personal judgment than definition, but according to him, whatever he thinks it is seems to be about 30 years old. Bolshevik-Mensheviks and Trotskyists-Stalinists sects appeared faster than that (the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks split a mere 5 years after the creation of the party).
Also, I think Sam Kriss's point about sects and splits was meant to be taken in humour. Funnily enough, both Kriss and Graham seem obsessed with convincing the reader they're not boring. But whereas Graham's writing is predictable though he repeatedly insists on telling the reader that his old-school conventionalism is the true rebelliousness, Kriss writes provocatively in a way that's supposed to make you unsure of whether he's serious or not. In any event, Kriss's writing is at least always entertaining even when it isn't interesting.
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This is the wokest essay I've ever read.
I like the idea that you could think of the essay as part of the newly performative "not-hard-left" messaging. I guess maybe it is a product of its very recent times. It seems to me like there's a bit of social and cultural space for people to "speak up" that haven't felt like they can for some time. To my mind, that's all to the good, it leaves room for discussion and debate which is healthy.
Very interesting piece. Thanks for sharing!
"And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice."
"Social justice" is inherently problematic, as explained in "Hayek: Social Justice Demands the Unequal Treatment of Individuals" https://fee.org/articles/hayek-social-justice-demands-the-un....
Telling that you believe this as Boston has to fix its deep seated racism.
Amen! Thanks for the link.
The one thing Paul missed is Russia's role in the rise of wokeness. The Internet Research Agency controlled over 50 percent of the largest ethnic Facebook groups in 2019 and organized multiple BLM protests, including one attended by Michael Moore.
Wokeness was a state sponsored attack.
But as with most things, it isn't mono causal. The largest blame should lie with the social media platforms themselves. They created something that rewards the narcissistic, anti-intellectual and authoritarian tendencies that drive both wokeness and the alt right.
I think focusing too much on wokeness itself would be an error. We should focus on the conditions that lead to these kind of unhealthy authoritarian-leaning social movements in the first place, which is social media, inequality, inflation, etc.
wow, somehow you jumped to some next level conspiracy garbage more extravagant than the rest of the comments. 20 million people participating in protests was not a “state sponsored attack”
> 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
Also: 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.
If pg wants to hang out with dt at mar a lago he's gotta have some easily googleable bona fides afterall.
I have no idea why this was shared on Hacker News (might simply be the Paul Graham connection), but it was one of the best, well-written, and researched articles I've read in years!
I can't tell if this comment is serious