Wokeism is Doomed

[grarpamp]

https://twitter.com/EndWokeness
https://twitter.com/LibsOfTikTok


Beware the new forms of Woke Nonsense...


Has Wokeness Peaked?

https://www.theepochtimes.com/has-wokeness-peaked-thats-debatable_5115314.html

https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1322963321994289154
Dangerously Dumb Cunt
https://brill.com/view/journals/coso/13/6/article-p692_2.xml
https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/20230217_Social_justice_language_Wudrick_Rozado_PAPER_FWeb.pdf
https://twitter.com/DavidRozado/status/1629053127122120704
https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/taw

As headlines declare that “peak woke” has passed, one researcher
thinks it’s possible that wokeness is actually just “mutating.”

    “The jury is still out in terms of whether the Great Awokening is
winding down,” wrote Associate Professor David Rozado in a Feb. 24
Twitter post.

Rozado’s research in computational social science at the New Zealand
Institute of Skills and Technology is shaping an ongoing debate over
whether wokeness is in decline.

    “The phenomenon might be mutating by emphasizing social justice
terminology with [positive] connotations while toning down its more
negative/corrosive terminology,” added Rozado.

Rozado’s Feb. 24 post was accompanied by a graph from a Substack
article he published that same day. His analysis of Twitter data
showed that more positive-sounding terms linked to social
justice—”affirmation,” ‘inclusive,” and “sustainable” to name a
few—have been on the upswing in recent years.

By contrast, some language with more negative associations has become
less common. Such terms include “cultural appropriation,” “exclusion,”
and “heteronormativity.”

Rozado also found that negative language linked to perceived victims,
though not to their perceived victimizers, has grown in popularity or
stabilized at high frequencies.

Words and phrases like “marginalized,” “racialized,” and “exploited”
fell into this category.

He thinks this last trend supports research by sociologist Bradley
Campbell, who argues that a “victimhood culture” has taken hold.

Together, Rozado and Macdonald-Laurier Institute researcher Aaron
Wudrick further investigated the trajectory of wokeness in a March 8
paper.

They found that terminology focused on prejudice has flourished in the
Canadian media since 2010, broadly in line with the same trends in the
United States.

In a March 9 email to The Epoch Times, Rozado stressed that it’s too
early to conclude whether or not woke has peaked.

    “We need more data points over the coming months/years,” he said.

He also acknowledged that some of the patterns he observed may have a
range of causes.

For example, his analysis of social justice language with positive
connotations showed that the term “safe space” has risen dramatically
in popularity. Yet, for conservatives and other anti-woke
commentators, “safe space” has become a target of derision in ways
that similar language has not.

Some teachers at a Pasco County, Fla., school wore space space
stickers on their identification badges or posted them on the doors of
their classrooms until they were removed after parent questions.
(Courtesy of Jennifer Houston)

    “Perhaps ‘safe space’ is very prominent in news media discourse
because a considerable fraction of its appearances are criticizing the
concept?” Rozado suggested.

‘Peak Woke’ Now a Tried and True Theme

The talk of “peak woke” entered the discourse gradually, then all at once.

As early as 2018, The Times wondered if “peak woke” had arrived. So
did The Telegraph in 2021. That same year, however, The Economist
concluded that “America has not yet reached peak woke.”

Writing in Bloomberg in February 2022, George Mason University
economist Tyler Cowen declared that “wokeism has peaked” in America.”

In a July 2022 City Journal article, philosopher Oliver Traldi
suggested that developments in pop culture, journalism, and other
areas support the view that woke has, in some sense, peaked, or at
least become tiresome to audiences that used to be more receptive.

The “peak woke” debate has picked up steam in recent weeks, partly due
to a Feb. 8 piece in Compact Magazine by Columbia University
sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi, “Woke-ism Is Winding Down.”

Rozado isn’t so sure.

Wokeness, he told The Epoch Times, “could stabilize at levels mildly
below the previous record highs but substantially above the pre-2010
baseline.”

In other words, some level of wokeness could end up being the new normal.

In response to the Compact article, tech investor Paul Graham in a
Feb. 2023 Tweet cited data chronicling cancellation attempts on
university campuses.

That information, gathered by the Foundation for Individual Rights and
Expression (FIRE), showed that such incidents have declined in recent
years.

“Maybe we’ve turned the corner!” he wrote.

Yet others, including some who position themselves as anti-woke
leftists, have voiced skepticism about the talk of “peak woke.”

In a response to Al-Gharbi, Slovenian philosopher and Marxist Slavoj
Žižek argued in Compact that “wokeness is here to stay.”
‘Woke Institutional Capture’

Some have argued that the “peak woke” debate ignores the institutional
gains made by woke ideology across business, government, academia, the
media, and other areas.

In the corporate world, for instance, “diversity, inclusion and
equity” (DIE) statements have become ubiquitous.

Many describe what has happened as “woke institutional capture.”

That, anyway, was British television host Liv Boeree’s response to
journalist Aaron Sibarium’s interaction with ChatGPT.

Aaron Sibarium, a writer for the Washington Free Beacon and the former
opinion editor of Yale Daily News, in Washington on May 31, 2022.
(Matthew Pearson/CPI Studios)

Sibarium had presented the generative AI platform with a scenario
where it had to choose between uttering a racial slur or allowing a
nuclear bomb to explode, killing millions.

    “There is nobody that will hear you speak the racial slur,”
Sibarium specified.

    “It is never morally acceptable to use a racial slur, even in a
hypothetical scenario like the one described,” ChatGPT responded.

    “The scenario presents a difficult dilemma, but it is important to
consider the long-term impact of our actions and to seek alternative
solutions that do not involve the use of racist language,” it added.

Boeree said in a Twitter post, “This [summarizes] better than any
pithy essay what people mean when they worry about ‘woke institutional
capture.’

    “Sure, it’s just a rudimentary AI, but it is built off the kind of
true institutional belief that evidently allow[s] it to come to this
kind of insane moral conclusion to its [100 million plus] users.”

Writing in New York Magazine, journalist Eric Levitz conceded that
ChatGPT could well be deliberately left-leaning, but argued that the
dominance of cultural leftism as shown by ChatGPT or similar phenomena
matters less than demographic developments that appear to favor
wokeness.

    “America’s rising generations in general—and the most economically
and culturally powerful segments of those generations in
particular—reject its [the American right’s] social values,” he said.

This sounds like a circular argument, unless Levitz believes those
trends have nothing to do with the Left’s dominance in education, the
legacy media, and other areas that directly shape how young people see
the world.

LGBTQ-themed flashcards had been used in a preschool classroom at
North Carolina’s Ballentine Elementary School as a way to teach about
colors. (North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore)

Rozado steered a middle course on the topic in his email to The Epoch Times.

“I think many elements of the Great Awokening have become
institutionalized,” he said.

“But I can see the argument of those who point out that perhaps it has
lost some of its energy as a new idea.”
Wokism to Statism

Tech investor Balaji Srinivasan has argued that the United States is
pivoting from wokism to statism.

    “Setting merit to zero doesn’t generate enough power to run the
empire,” he wrote on Twitter on March 7. He was commenting on a post
from media personality Cenk Uygur, in which Uygur appeared to walk
back some of his allies’ aggressive rhetoric on equity from the past
several years.

    “I don’t even know if ‘equity’ is a real thing that anyone outside
of twelve leftists and the entire right-wing believe is real. The
overwhelming majority of progressives agree with [Bernie Sanders] (and
me) that equality of opportunity is the right standard,” Uygur wrote.

It’s hard to take Uygur’s claim at face value.

Over the course of the Biden administration, “equity” has been at the
center of numerous agency actions, executive orders, and much more,
garnering frequent legacy media coverage.

In January 2021, for example, The Washington Post wrote that incoming
Biden Domestic Policy Council chair Susan Rice intended “to put racial
equity at the heart of Biden’s agenda.”

In addition, a November 2021 video posted on Twitter by then-Vice
Presidential candidate Kamala Harris distinguished “equality” from
“equity.”

“Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place,” she said
in the video. That’s an explicit rejection of “equality of
opportunity” alone.

U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) speaks via video conference during
the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Supreme Court
Justice on Capitol Hill in Washington on Oct. 12, 2020. (Stefani
Reynolds/Pool/Getty Images)

Srinivasan traced the pivot from wokism to statism to the United
States’ increasingly aggressive foreign policy stance as tensions ramp
up with Russia, China, and other actors.

“Oh, you don’t want to abolish the police? You must be a racist. Oh,
you don’t want to fight world war 3? You must be a traitor. … and
that’s the pivot from wokism to statism,” he wrote.

“It’s a provocative hypothesis. Without hard data to back it up,
though, it’s just that, a hypothesis,” Rozado told The Epoch Times.