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?

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.

If this is the case it's interesting to see how each different tech figure expresses this fealty.

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 :(

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)

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.

Ftfg.

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.

Strong Weimar vibes from our billionaires.

You mean how twitter is censoring users who use "cracker" but not those who use the N-word.

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".

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?

- a dick

Additionally, what's with the amount of US politics discussion increasing lately

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

> 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.

> 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...

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.

https://nitter.poast.org/paulg/status/1878761763799519595

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.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2xpsg9

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

There’s nothing here but fuel for the comments section.

Type the word "cisgender" on twitter and say that again, Paul.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268

    Great idea; shame about the name.
    
    Here's the problem with using words like "bro" (however jokingly) [...]

But instead Graham focuses on people who are overly concerned with specific language because those people are easier to criticize.

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.

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.

"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....

Otherwise a great piece.

I wonder what would happen

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

They're just as self righteous as the "woke" just much less self aware.

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.

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.

But this time around, we're looking at a full term by an admin that is staffed for the most part by die-hard Trumpists who make it very loud and clear that this particular topic is of utmost concern to them. Republicans in Congress are also much more in line with that.

Perhaps even more importantly, this change of sentiment didn't start with tech - it started with prominent figures among the establishment liberals publicly calling out "excesses", and while this narrative received some pushback already, it has received way more support among the rank and file. This is a signal that the next Dem administration, should there be one, is likely to be much more hands-off in these regards. So, then, why would big tech stick to their guns on DEI if it disadvantages them immediately with no clear advantage to hope for in the future?

I agree that velocity is surprising, though. Mostly because it makes it very clear that any talk of "values" has always been bullshit, so why would this new take be an exception? MAGA folk don't seem particularly convinced that e.g. Zuck is sincere, and I can't blame them.

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.

Woke went from being a slang word to top of the Klan's most wanted list.

"What is a woman", etc.

If you say there are more than 2 genders, they will shun you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The issue is this: 2010s SJWs were annoying. Gamergate, anti DEI, anti Woke people of today are even more annoying.

Why take a perfectly good, specific, and useful word like woke and wrap it up in all this?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Making such an absurd claim brings into question everything written on a subject he clearly knows nothing about.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

"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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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")

The ideals of the Enlightment, the epistemological foundations of rationality and objectivity are not perfect, and liberals don't claim it to be such, but it exists because after Fascism & Communism, there wasn't better alternatives.

Regardless, we've had 10 years of trying such post-Enlightment policies, and predictably it's just resulted in just a flood of populism, crime and tribalism. I guess we'll have to go through a crash course again in understanding the reason why hierarchical thinking emerges in the first place, just like in Old Antiquity 2000 years ago. You never really had a solution to the Paradox of Tolerance, or the Friend-Enemy distinction...

But look around you, the rest of the world is moving past you. Even if you succeed in the West, China, India, Southeast Asia, the developing world have all picked up the spirit of modernity anyways. Theirs is a homogenized vision of "soulless" luxury malls, modern skyscrapers and totalizing impression of capitalism, meritocracty, rationality and objectivity that you oppose so much. But they are rising, and I daresay their living standards already exceeeds yours in many areas. In the future, if they seek to impose their domains to your borders, do you think you can seriously think your "woke" frameworks can compete?

Anyway, as you say, Mr. Summers will be fine.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

To raise just one example: for most people, terms like "whitelist" and "blacklist" held no racist connotations. When they uttered those words, they felt no animus towards another person or race. If they were asked to speculate why those words exist or how they originated, there's a good chance they'd point out that "light" and "dark" have longstanding associations often evoking religious imagery of good vs evil. And indeed, if you investigate the history of these words, they don't seem to have a problematic racial history (which can't be said for all words).

But due to the potential for racial connotations, replacing these words was part of a widespread campaign. Resisting the removal of these words would result in someone being labeled a racist/bigot etc.

Personally, I've chosen to remove those words from my vocabulary because they offend some people in neutral settings and it's not a big deal to say "allowlist/denylist". But I'm not taking it upon myself to scold other people for not doing the same thing. On the other hand, if someone started using the n word, I wouldn't be quiet about it.

My general point was that acting as if all "woke" issues rise to the level of murder, property rights or racial discrimination is exactly the problem. People stop taking the "you must live this particular way" people seriously when the issues up for discussion are complex and not obvious.

There's a very credible argument that the DA overcharged the case so people who dislike him can try to ostracize him as a felon and make his supporters look unhinged. If your shorthand for "the less woke candidate won" is "the felon won," you don't get to credibly claim "I'm impartial" in a conversation about wokeness.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

But it has nothing to do with "cutting checks". PG hasn't been doing that, nor influencing HN, nor even reading HN as far as I know, for many years.

"Visibility limited: this Post may violate X's rules against hateful conduct"

You then have to click "View" where you're taken to another view where the message is shown, but with the warning still present. You can't share, like, or reply to the message

Not sure if the account also receives a suspension or shadow banning.

It's policy from Elon himself: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841

You can see it play out in replies to my tweet here, where someone didn't believe it: https://twitter.com/WickyNilliams/status/1855754162102816937

Sure, but Graham isn't suggesting there is some radical progressive movement with any real power. The question is whether wokeness, however defined, is mere performance or carries some real substance. The only people who believe there is any sort of ascendant left are on the far right, and Graham certainly isn't there (he's a middle-of-the-road neoliberal centrist).

In fact, the lack of an ascendant left was the argument used in the debate among historians and other scholars of authoritarianism on whether or not MAGA is a fascist movement. Some (those who typically associate themselves with the more radical left) claimed that MAGA cannot be fascist because fascism must be a reaction against an ascendant left and there isn't one. The response to that arguments by those who say MAGA is fascist is that even though it doesn't exist in reality, such an ascendant left does exist in the MAGA imagination.

> That's why also the point of "conscious bias against defining new forms of heresy" is just reiteration of the etablishment view of slow, iterative change vs highly disruptive change, of which the former can more effectively keep authoritarians in check.

Maybe, but Graham isn't claiming there's some radical left with some significant power. He's clearly not a radical, but his point is that wokeness isn't radical, either. If anything, he thinks it's mere radical chic and believes that to be different from the "real" protest movement of the sixties, and I pointed out that radical chic was levelled at the time against that movement, too.

> The point is that for PG, and for the majority that voted Trump, Wokeism isn't working

I seriously doubt Graham ever entertained voting for Trump, and those who did would find it hard to define what wokeism is (only that it's one of the many things they're against, including Graham's neoliberalism). They would find it hard to consistently define anything.

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.

> 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!

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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"

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.

https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-hist...

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.

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.

Everyone more empathetic than me is just virtue signaling.

I see how upvotes were detected. But outrage?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

"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.

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

Thank you rich white man for letting us know racism isn't that big a problem. We did it!

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-...

> 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.

At the dawn of Project 2025 let us think how to stop the woke the next time?

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!

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?

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.

- Nit picking/pedantic thinking.

- Snitching.

- Keeping score/counting favors.

- Blaming.

- Attacking ad-hominem.

- Latching onto words instead of principles.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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...

But a group prayer led by a school coach is, of course, totally fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Bremerton_School_Di...

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

- 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.

Many of the people most “taking it seriously” do the least to reduce its prevalence. Some are actually harassers.

"Heresy" (https://www.paulgraham.com/heresy.html) was during Biden's tenure.

"Orthodox Privilege" (https://www.paulgraham.com/orth.html) was during the height of lockdown-era BLM.

"Keep your Identity Small" (https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html) is from the beginning of Obama's tenure.

Criticizing "wokeness" today is not at all inconsistent with PG's historically stated opinions and beliefs.

Btw pg is as anti-Trump as he is anti-woke. I wonder how many heads in this thread would not explode if they really took that in.

The claim is simple: using words to mock a group, hurts that group.

This is still true when the group is one that you consider to "hold almost all the power".

Holding power is irrelevant to the harm caused by actions like insulting people or discriminating against them.

Is it? To hear wokeness advocates talk, things have gotten worse.

The problem is that you provide other examples and then extrapolate from there that the original comment could be true. However, whether or not you believe it could be true is not serious evidence that it is.

Yes, offering alternative wording to offensive language is a real thing. But notice that the OP is asserting that a facially silly example is real without any support beyond a claim of personal experience. What should matter to you is whether it is real or not as opposed to whether it is surprising or not.

Fake silly examples like this are meant to sit on the line between believable and absurd specifically to make certain ideas seem ridiculous. Making up silly examples of real things is a specific technique to undermine them. It is a propaganda tool not a good faith attempt at dialogue.

C.f., people making up stories about litter boxes in schools to try and undermine efforts to protect the rights of gender non-conforming children (https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/30/how-furries-got-swept...)

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.

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, 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.

Why did he magically started calling out wokeness issue only after Trump's win?

Weak

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.

    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.

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.

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.

- 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.

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!

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.

> [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.

---

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."

I find it hard to take seriously the notion that anybody serious is arguing for "let's go back to all white dudes" as a response to DEI. Sure...it's going to happen because nepotism and cliques aren't going away. But on the whole, it seems people want to move towards competence/merit being the only factors in play.

Will it get there? Time will tell, but there will invariably be issues. Your execution can be wrong, even if your philosophy is right. But if your philosophy is wrong (we need x% minority engineers, x% trans engineers, x% female engineers), you'd be hard pressed to avoid bad implementation.

"We are having a hard time hiring all the people we want. It doesn't matter what they look like" John Carmack

While I agree that this is true, I think the point pg makes in his article could be extended to a general rule that, if you find your earnest desire to do good things is leading you to embrace something like wokeness, you need to take a step back. The best way to do good things is to do good things--in other words, to find specific things that you can do that are good, based on your specific knowledge of particular people and particular cases, and do them. Participating in general efforts to micromanage people to make them do good things, or to stop them from doing bad things, which is what wokeness is, is a very poor way to make use of your earnest desire to good things.

The new right tech bros are doing their own cancellations. Silicon Valley traffics in old tweets critical of Musk or Trump like the Victorian courtesans Graham ironically criticises.

If that was his intention, wouldn't he make an article calling for the end of wokeness and everything related to it? Instead of saying something that can be summed up as "There are bad parts of wokeness, and there are some good parts"

Trump and Elon Musk literally just make any shit up and get away with it.

What I mean by "easy" is "quick and superficial." Hiring the most competent doctors delays achieving the statistic of "more black doctors," so it's not the "easy way" I'm talking about. It takes time for education to come up to par in black communities, because they're poorer for historical reasons. The right (and harder, because it's not doable via a means that the DEI people directly control---hiring) way is to put money where it's needed for education, and "more black doctors" will be a ripple effect achieved without discrimination.

If you are giving scholarships or subsidies to black teenagers so they can eventually get into a university, that’s also DEI, so better subsidise their families so they can get a better primary education and upbringing… but that’s also DEI.

So you keep going back and the “solution” is basically to do nothing and keep the status quo.

Because (a) that's not the topic at hand, and (b) in American discourse, it's rather obvious what the correct (or at least default) position is with regard to racial discrimination and injustice: Don't discriminate on the basis of skin color, national origin, or any number of other things that have nothing to do with a person's character. Love your neighbor as yourself. It's even been written into law, including an amendment to our constitution.

> sounds very dishonest

I can assure you, I am sincere and not drying to deceive. What do you think my real intent is?

Politicians claiming to take murder and robbery more seriously don’t necessarily do anything to actually reduce their prevalence.

A lot of problems can only addressed systemically.

Murder? Yes, an excellent start to solving this problem is to not murder anybody. That's really the single most important thing you do.

And yet, history shows, other people are going to do murders and simply not murdering people yourself is not sufficient to deal with this problem. You need to intervene or call for help if you see somebody getting murdered, and we need some sort of system to deal with murderers and protect other people from them, etc.

If murder is too extreme a metaphor for the anti-woke crowd, how about pissing on the bathroom floor? It's great if you are not pissing on the floor, but somebody is and we all have to walk on that floor, so we need to have some kind of community standards around it, and also somebody needs to clean up that piss.

How many innocent people get convicted of murder because of our desire to "take murder seriously"? (The Innocence Project has found that the answer is "quite a lot".) Note that every time an innocent person gets convicted, it means a guilty person (the actual murderer) goes free.

How many murderers get released back into society to murder again because our desire to take something else "seriously" has somehow overridden proper enforcement of our laws against murder? (I don't know if any specific study has looked at this, but my personal sense is, again, "quite a lot".)

So no, the lesson of experience appears to be that "taking it more seriously" is not a good way to reduce how often some bad thing happens, with murder just as with sexual harassment.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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).

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.

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 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...

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.

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.

…

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?

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.

The oppressor/oppressed axis is not the most correct or best lens through which to view society, because in truth, everyone is both. We all at times sin against others and are sinned against ourselves. We all fail to love at least some of our neighbors as fervently and generously as we ought to. In a sense, we're all in this mess together, and although helping and defending the oppressed and downtrodden is a noble and very good thing, it doesn't follow that entire demographics of people ought to be labeled as "oppressors" and opposed (in the same way that entire demographics shouldn't be intentionally discriminated against on the basis of the demographic variable itself--either directly or indirectly). Sin is individual, and should be addressed on an individual basis, since we each bear individual accountability for our behavior. From the government's perspective, individuals who have discriminated against people on the basis of race or otherwise oppressed people ought to be individually tried and sentenced through the court system. If that's not happening, hire better DAs and write better laws. If that isn't happening, engage in political campaigning and activism (with the right message), or at least support those who do.

What makes an ideology wrong isn't first whether its outcomes are bad, but whether its propositions are false. (Note the notions of good and bad themselves need to also be subjected to the truth test, which is why pure utilitarianism is fundamentally ungrounded to reality.)

I have seen it countless times being thrown as a vague, shapeless accusatory things that can go from people being overboard in their language policing to opposing real, actual fascism.

    In other words, people believe that "taking it seriously" 
    will automatically reduce the frequency of a bad thing. 
    But in fact it doesn't--it might well do the opposite

I agree, though, that America proves that taking it seriously certainly isn't enough to prevent it.

(It's also worth noting that per capita violent crime in America has plummeted since the 90s, with no major changes in the way we handle such things...)

    But "taking seriously" particular manifestations of 
    this general issue, like murder or sexual harassment

For example: focusing on overly rigid standards of speech to the point where nobody wants to say anything at all, a focus on overly harsh punishment instead of education/remediation, etc.

I will also share that I, personally, have seen the devastation that a provably false #metoo accusation can wreak.

Still, I strongly object to the idea that the efforts of organizations to address the "social justice" causes lumped into the category of "wokeness" are automatically bad. I don't think that's a useful discussion. It is a thing to discuss one policy at a time.

What gave you that feeling from the Harris campaign?

But even if you look at police murders on civilians, they are killing more whites than blacks. You might argue that whites are 5x more than blacks, but police has more interaction with blacks than with whites. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

That does sound quite oxymoronic. (I’m not American.)

Inclusive language can prevent homicide? I'm so lost, what does that have to do with cold-blood murder?

Well, for years those advocates did so with censorship, gaslighting, destruction of property, threats and calls for violence, etc. They had a hysterical fervor and lack of rationality that did often seem quasi religious. I dont think Paul's understanding is perfect but the parallels to religious puritanism are quite obviously there.

That idea gets very close to

https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2009/march.htm

> “I am a middle-aged white person and even I know that blacks and other racial minorities cannot be racist, just like women can not be sexists. Racism equals power. Whites are not hurt by the everyday flow of society.”

I’m Black and I can go into a long rant about how I disagree with every word of that sentence.

But the Christian Right has had most of the power in the US for most of its existence until the rise of tech during the last 20 years. The entire crusade against “woke” is that demographic shifts are going to make the US a “minority majority” country within our lifetimes and that people who were usually in the shadows are now able to speak out.

Of course the exception I can think of for imitating southern accents would be acting

A perfect example is when gay marriage was illegal and some straight people loudly announced that they wouldn't get married until gay people could.

OK. Your motives are good but how exactly is this going to help legalize gay marriage? And why did the world need to know about it?

Beginning by changing the language is so fundamentally flawed that I have a hard time believing you seriously think it could ever be effective.

And it happened, to a degree. Then it got overplayed, in part because the prigs Graham criticises were less concerned with police violence than they were with arguing online about it.

That in turn not only animated a pro-police backlash on the right, it also sapped the police/sentencing reform movement of the legitimacy it would need to survive mistakes, e.g. Chesa.

Also, you're projecting. You don't (and can't) know what a person's true goals are. Framing these actions as them communicating they are morally superior to someone (you?) is a thought in that other person's head, not the protestors. Maybe these straight people truly believe this form of protest (not getting married) will bring attention to a cause and maybe change some people's minds. Did it? Who knows. But good on them for at least trying.

That's largely all anyone can do (and I have a lot more ability to do something about it as a business owner than the average progressive), which I'm sure feels inadequate and leads to roving bands of thought police members looking for perceived transgressions to attack.

Sticking with the hiring situation, if you notice that a recruiter only ever recommends hiring people with say the last name Pandit then ask them about it. A lot of times people are not ashamed of their views and will just straight up tell you that they could tell the other candidates were inferior because of their name.

But as somebody else mentioned, there is no silver bullet here. Racism varies from instance to instance. A solution to fix racism in hiring isn't going to fix red-lining. You need to be keeping an eye of things and looking for patterns that don't make sense for the given sample size.

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.

(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.

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.

Eh, if x and y are correlated, you can optimize for x to a point and still get y gains.

They aren't good people.

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...

One of the main points in the essay: "The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so"

And your comment is a classic example of that behavior.

I think it’s more of “I can do it because I can afford it. But other folks can’t because they need their job (or something similar).”

> other folks can't because they don't get it like I do

His point of view undoubtedly resonates with 'some folks'.

Are you saying that thinking about "wokeness" is a distraction, regardless of the person? Or that specifically PG thinking about "wokeness" is a distraction? Or maybe even "thinking about wokeness in that way" is the distraction?

It seems like if "wokeness" is important, then having more people thinking about it is better, regardless of their outcome from thinking about it. If "wokeness" isn't important at all, I'd totally understand you, but seems there are way more people out there thinking about it more than PG, since it's the first time I see him say anything about it at all.

(Just to be clear, despite the above comment, I do not align with "wokeness".)

This is not a concise essay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Brigade

That is, people have clever _moments_ - some more than others perhaps - but can equally have stupid ones. We convenientally flatten the statistics into a boolean.

For example, recently someone considered to have made a lot of smart decisions in his life has been found to have payed others to rank his character up in a video game so he can brag about it. Everyone has stupid moments.