Comment by danenania
5 days ago
Being proud of something doesn’t mean you talk about it unprompted all the time.
I have several friends who are vegan. My point is that they don’t deny it–if you ask them, they’re happy to say “yeah, I’m vegan.”
But people who believe in things that are widely considered woke, like changing ‘master’ branches to ‘main’, usually will deny that they are woke or that they want to change the name for that reason. They’ll tell you it’s about common decency or not offending others and that it has nothing to do with wokeness.
I am one of those who changed master to main. It is exactly two letters less to type the name is IMO more self explainatory than master. So even if we excluded any historic background why the verbiage of master/slave might be considered problematic id still prefer main.
Now is this a (main) hill I have to die on? Totally not. Do I have very strong opinions on this? Nope. Does it cost me a lot? Nope. As I said, I have to type less, and as a teacher explaining that the main branch is the main branch is easier than explaining that master means it is the main branch and explaining where master comes from electronics etc.
"Woke" people for the most part are like me: not adamant social justice worriors whose ardent opinions have to be defended till the last drop of blood, but people who are like "meh, why not, doesn't cost me a thing and maybe it is only right". And that is the polar opposite of what the political right wing and their whole billionaire-funded propaganda machine likes to paint people whoe make choices like that as.
Now I don't say people with strong opinions on these issues don't exist, because there do. But they are the minority. But taking vocal minorities and declaring them the representatives of the majority seems to be a trend these days.
The motivation was not to be more self-explanatory or type less though. Let's be real.
I hear you... you go along with it because the zealots who do feel strongly are aggressive and it's easier to concede the point than face backlash, even if you object to (or are indifferent to) the language-policing. I've switched to 'main' as well, so I get it. pg's essay discusses this:
> Most people are afraid of impropriety; they're never exactly sure what the social rules are or which ones they might be breaking. Especially if the rules change rapidly. And since most people already worry that they might be breaking rules they don't know about, if you tell them they're breaking a rule, their default reaction is to believe you. Especially if multiple people tell them. Which in turn is a recipe for exponential growth. Zealots invent some new impropriety to avoid. The first people to adopt it are fellow zealots, eager for new ways to signal their virtue. If there are enough of these, the initial group of zealots is followed by a much larger group, motivated by fear. They're not trying to signal virtue; they're just trying to avoid getting in trouble.
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All I'm saying I guess is let's not pretend that the subject of the essay isn't a real thing. Just because no one self-identifies as 'woke' doesn't mean the ideology doesn't exist—call it whatever you want, but the phenomenon is real and it's had tangible influence on our culture, including in tech.