Virtually everyone in the echo chambers you frequent are anti woke. That doesn't apply at scale, where people aren't willing to accept your "woke" shorthand.
My understanding of "woke" is levelling the playing field & being aware of your biases so you can be a better human. It's hard for me to imagine someone being against "all humans are equal & deserve equal access to opportunity, if they have the skill & motivation." I know people are out there who don't believe everyone is equal, maybe that's the "anti woke" you speak of?
Either way, "woke" as a term is poorly defined to the point I immediately disengage when someone starts screeching about it, because it means nothing and now the rest of the conversation is pointless.
When I was a (white) youth in the just recently desegregated south, they had a word they called me when I stood up for my black friends and neighbors. They don't feel like they can say that one anymore so they got a new word. They mean what they have always meant by it.
> I have yet to hear a coherent description of what "woke" even fucking means that doesn't ultimately dissolve into a pot-pourri of personal grievances.
Exactly - that's the entire point of a dogwhistle.
I have yet to understand what a dog whistle is in this regard but in response to
quickslowdown's reply, I can only best describe 'woke' as using victimhood as the means to justify(?) their ephemeral power(?) in whatever context they deem fit? /shrug
A dog whistle is speech that's ambiguous enough for a speaker to claim "Well I wasn't talking about that" whenever they receive blowback for a thing they said, but mean it and communicate their meaning if there's no blowback.
To parent's point, the bullshit of the right's current definition of wokeness is that it's "things we don't like."
Which is about as useful as people calling something "problematic."
If there were firmer ideological underpining to the right's platform, I'd be willing to listen.
But currently, more words are spent complaining about and accusing others than talking about what they want to do.
> [woke is] using victimhood as the means to justify(?) their ephemeral power(?) in whatever context they deem fit?
Isn't that what the right is doing now?
I.e. we're victims, so we're justified in using our temporary political power to do whatever we want
> If there were firmer ideological underpining to the right's platform, I'd be willing to listen.
But there isn't and will never be imo, as human behavior cannot be hard-categorized into easy to understand boxes. Just as a light example, look at the former D's that were appointed and confirmed by the current administration. Would you say they have accepted a level of the Right's conformity over their original/core beliefs?
I think if it really was the case that Trump's 2nd term appointees had been all right-leaning, the narrative that he is a _fascist dictator_ would have held more weight. But it hasn't as a sort of compromise or willingness to meet closer to the center.
Whereas inversely, a true-to-life dictator XJP whom there is no perceived dissent within his congress or at minimum ever widely publicized or disseminated. Maybe this is the ideological stability you are looking for?
"Woke" just means "admitting actual history happened".
It is impossible to be an actual nerd and not be woke. Money-men "founders" have nothing but distain for the geeks that made them rich.
[Edit: I see people don't like this, but are simply down-voting rather than engaging. What is your definition of "woke" then, if not an awareness of America's history?]
> Complaining about wokeness doesn't make you right-wing, much less reactionary.
Honestly given the impact, I'd say complaining about "wokeness" pretty much defines "reactionary". Pronouns and flopsy straws never hurt nobody, and kids have been calling their elders racists and rapists and whatnot for generations.
Something happened to convince tech folks that "wokeness" was somehow a threat, when it clearly wasn't and never will be. And that something is interesting, and probably of a piece with whatever was going on in the echo chamber these folks found themselves in.
That's not all wokeness is. There's also the anti-merit stuff, which seeks to e.g. get rid of standardized tests or even remove algebra from school curricula. Then there's racial discrimination in hiring and admissions, which is often so cartoonishly stupid you can't make it up (e.g. https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...).
> Something happened to convince tech folks that "wokeness" was somehow a threat, when it clearly wasn't and never will be
People hated wokeness so much they became single-issue voters. That was short-sighted, but it doesn't mean they were wrong to oppose wokeness.
Characterizing those issues the way you do, instead of as considered and real efforts to do good stuff in the real world, is precisely the result of the echo chamber in question. It really doesn't occur to you to at least nod to the fact that some of us see things differently?
People can be wrong and not "woke" (which you're clearly using to connote "evil" or "enemy"). The slide from reasoned discussion into hyperbolic nonsense is precisely what the article is about. And specifically that the same thing happens to billionaire brains too.
I don't dispute that these are "efforts to do good stuff in the real world". It's just very obvious that they are having the opposite effect. I don't kow what that has to do with an "echo chamber".
> People can be wrong and not "woke" (which you're clearly using to connote "evil" or "enemy").
Of course they can. The Trump administration is wrong and unwoke. I did not use "woke" to connote "evil" or "enemy". Where are you getting that? I mentioned specific cases where "wokeness" has led to bad policy.
> It's just very obvious that they are having the opposite effect. I don't kow what that has to do with an "echo chamber".
Yikes. When something is "very obvious" to you, to the extent that you find yourself exasperated by everyone else's inability to see the obvious truth you're taking as a prior... You are almost certainly in an echo chamber.
The stuff you sneer about here has real argument around it. It's not as dumb as you clearly think it is. Does that mean you're wrong? No! But it means you're not thinking clearly. It's time to talk to some woke DEI hippie school board members or admissions officers or whatever, and maybe see if you can find out what they actually think about gender or racial justice or whatever.
You jump from bizarre accusation to bizarre accusation.
Here's my go at diagnosing you (and this goes for many people in this thread): the centerpeice of your worldview has been "liberals good, conservatives bad" for your entire life. Now, when faced with clear evidence of well-meaning liberals enacting harmful policies in the name of "racial justice," your brain short-circuits and you start sputtering gibberish (or arguing semantics, e.g."you can't define wokeness!").
The way out is to admit that liberals are human, they make mistakes, and "wokeness" and its associated policies are examples of this. Don't worry, after you start seeing reality more clearly, you can still vote for the Democrats! They're still better than Trump!
"Remove algebra from the school curricula" is a lie. The decision that made noise was about eliminating accelerated algebra classes where people take algebra ahead of the normal schedule. Whether you think that is dumb or not, it is not "removing algebra from the school curricula."
They (CA) are dumbing down what we teach children (delaying Algebra I, or replacing it with "data science or statistics") because there are racial disparities in test scores. That's the result of wokeness, and it's bad.
None of the very left people I know would describe themselves as anti-woke...but they all make it very clear that they find wokeness (or whatever you want to call it) ridiculous.
I wish when people use the term woke they would say what they actually mean. I suspect they don't because they don't want to be seen as racist, sexist, homophobic, or whatever. What do you mean by woke?
The "left" is huge and diverse (which people don't know because left-wing thinkers don't get the adoration and amplification right-wing thinkers do in this country.)
I am guessing you are referring to Marxist-Lennonists, or even Tankies. Folks who believe that only class oppression is worth fighting, and that the solution is centralized authoritarian regimes with left wing people in power. Those folks are generally anti-liberal, despite being on the left, and deny any history that would complicate their politics.
Alternatively, you might know neoliberals, who believe in the power of capitalism to address social problems and deny any history that might complicate their politics.
Or you might know Syndicalists, who believe unions are the path to worker's political power, and who deny any history that might complicate their politics.
Etc.
If you know one "very left" person, you know one very left person.
“Wokeness” is an elusive term that is the best attempt to describe a wildly variable but seemingly consistent pattern of beliefs and actions. My left-side friends disavow “wokeness” but still agree with many of the problems “woke folk” identify.
As an outsider, it seems like the moniker of woke best applies to the pattern of thinking that broad problems have a simple and heavy handed solutions. Furthermore, criticizing such solutions will put you in the same camp as those committing the offense, even though you may agree about the problem.
Wokeness isn't hard to define. If you don't know what it is at this point, there's really no helping you.
One of the lessons of the second Trump admin is that "smashing wokeness" may feel good (to people like me for example) but it isn't actually very important, and it doesn't make up for incompetence and lawlessness.
Your comment is actually an example of the echo chambers left and right wing people live and breathe in.
Out in, "what the F are you idiots doing with our economy"-land. There are exactly zero people who give a mosquito's dick about Woke DEI Trumpanzees or whatever.
These are issues important to elites. We tend to live in an echo chamber here on HN, so we think it's important to the guys working as hired hands during the day and the walmart stock shift at night.
Let me tell you, out here in flyover country, no one working at Taco bell cares about what you care about. Woke, anti-Woke, digital privacy, owning the libtards, stopping the right wing conspiracy, they don't care about any of it. There's a lot of pain out here, and they're way too busy to even worry about that useless crap.
We had an election in Wisconsin recently that the right wingers sailed in with millions on millions of dollars to try to win. Ended up losing handily. Why? Because they talked about a lot of things that, while they may have meaning outside of opioid country, don't mean a whole lot inside of it.
I just don't think elites get it. And that's dangerous.
