Comment by djur
6 days ago
I don't think he would have written this 10, even 5 years ago. It only really started becoming a trendy viewpoint in his social circles recently.
6 days ago
I don't think he would have written this 10, even 5 years ago. It only really started becoming a trendy viewpoint in his social circles recently.
That's not true. PG has been ranting about wokeness for quite a long time already. I don't think you quite understand the nuance of a lot of these definitions. PG isn't a conservative MAGA guy nor a bigot. He just does not like how the woke crowd goes about trying to affect social change and how unsavory types use the woke crowd to achieve their political goals.
I've read his earlier writings on the topic and they are substantially less conspiratorial and influenced by neoreactionary thought. He even previously used the term "prig" in this 2004 article:
https://paulgraham.com/say.html
This is top to bottom a more thoughtful, nuanced take on essentially the same topic. The main difference is that saying stuff like "class of bureaucrats pursu[ing] a woke agenda" and "woke mind-virus" is fashionable among SV elites today, and it was not in 2004.
I think the big shift was in cancel culture, doxing, swatting, and all that stuff starting to rise, which is all relatively recent.
A moralistic ideology acting holier than thou is nothing new. In the 80s (and for sure time after) evangelicals had their "Moral Majority."
But nobody really cares until an ideology starts regularly driving harmful actions, at which point there starts to be a lot more push back.
Swatting and doxing aren't ideologically-aligned actions, though. They certainly don't have anything in particular to do with "woke".