Oh Dear Lordy Lorde 2.0

Unfun fact, the first World War was referred to as "The Great War" it was not pessimistically titled "World War 1" presuming a sequel was already in the works. It is a sad day when someone first said "World War 1" and it was sad when AOC said "Woke 1..." and I believe she was quoting some friend of hers. 

Woke 1, or Woke 1.0 is literally tragicomic, because it implies a 2 which thankfully, mercifully I do not believe to be an intelligible concept. If it is to be anything, it is likely to be whatever young left-leaning people care about now, whom I suspect care about economic inequality, job automation, educational inflation, generational property apartheid etc. which I would suggest is more accurately labelled "Occupy Wall Street 2" albeit lacking the specificity of establishing protest camps.

And let us just zoom out a bit and think about it for a second, here are people, predominantly but not exclusively young, actually pretty much everyone in the bottom 80% of net worth households minus some racists, and most people under retirement age in the top 20% of net worth households. They are unified around a big structural issue like "the wealthiest 0.001% should not be able to hoard wealth and accrue more of it until society collapses"

At which point, I am going to assert, the woke thing to do between 2014-2024, like literally what 8% of the population very loudly proclaimed to be a good idea when confronted with a large body of people united in a demand for change in the face of an existential crisis was to say something like "this issue disproportionately affects [insert marginalized group]" and the problem was not that the statement was untrue, they were often factually true, even expectedly true, the problem was that these statements were the functional equivalent of saying "let's fight among ourselves!"

A Brief Autopsy

Caution, the amount of time I want to spend on exposition here means that what I will describe will be done so in a way that is certainly reductive.

To borrow a term from Commies, many reactionaries have expelled enormous amounts of time and energy trying to formally analyse, render intelligible and communicate what "Woke" is, and if you ignore all the high-end theory, and even most of the jargon, what it was was out there on the streets was a grab-bag of memes, often rhetorical tactics that really functioned more like an intellectual fashion very similar to skinny or baggy jeans, lo-rise or hi-rise jeans etc. Even to the point of sticking around for about a decade while having seasonal trends.

Very few of its adherents had a coherent ideology, nor did they need one. As such conspiracy theorist James Lindsay, likely waisted his breath and drove himself insane doing his analysis of Paolo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" and cohering it to a super schema of everyone from Marx to Lenin to Gramsci to Kimberly Crenshaw etc. etc. Because even though there no doubt was an intellectual origin to woke memes, some kind of organising principle, in practice woke people only needed to know enough to name drop, if that.

If you will, it is an effort akin to unpacking the mind of Phil Knight, founder of Nike Athletic Wear company to understand why people wear Nike products.

In practice you can quickly discover that on the ground, on the front line, it was just a set of rhetorical products that allowed people to avoid arguments and obtain very short term outcomes. Viewing it as a youth fashion, rather than an ideology, would also likely have helped you predict its accomplishments, and its association with performativity.

It was embraced by political parties that have their origins in worker movements, or were historically transformed into worker's parties, as a shelf-like extender for the "third way" which was the Blair-Clinton program in the 90s where left wing parties like the Democrats and UK Labour party came to power by maintaining the economic policies of 1980s Reagan-Thatcher, or "Neoliberalism" a misnomer that rather than literally meaning "new freedom-ism" it was "the new focus on the freedom of property owners to do whatever the fuck they like with their property, unrestricted" 

Basically, view it as someone who simply wants to get into power, but needs to consider first and foremost the concerns of those who fund their campaigns being the wealthy asset owning class, what a GIFT it is, if someone tells you "I am more concerned about how many indigenous physicists there are than whether the minimum wage is a living wage."

This is almost like having a plant in an audience to lob you a softball question at a town-hall meating. Imagine how you might be sweating if someone asks you if you are committed to dismantling an economic system that transfers wealth not only from the poor to the rich at an accellerated pace, but suicidally from the young to the old, and somebody stands up and asks you "do you think racism is bad?"

The red flag for somebody with a healthy amount of cynicism, was that the left-wing of two-party systems embraced woke talking points. Woke was incredibly cheap politically because it was mostly concerned with regulating the behaviour of citizens, woke was about individuals paying a personal tax in effort just to go about their daily lives. 

Woke demanded no investment on the part of our governments, it demanded regulation that people raise in many ways, their own cost of living.

Popular in cultural cul de sacs, it was never broadly popular. We can consider it like velcro, it has uses, at one point it was new, it is still around, it was never and never will be the most popular clothing fastener, it is not a broad and popular revolution.

Some memes I am sure will stay like "acknowledgement of country" in the context of Australia, and there are particular historical conditions that make it both viable and original to Australia, whereas I am not sure they will ever take off on the continental USA because indigenous peoples often contested eachother's lands, for example Comancheria displacing Apacheria whereas in Australia, semi-nomadic indigenous groups might have been occupants and custodians of fairly stable geography for 40,000+ years. I strongly suspect that there will be a residual of they/them pronouns, but they may function almost as a regional dialect much like "y'all" is a "Southern Thing" of course this may have been broadly adopted with more success than gender-neutral or non-binary pronouns, just as many US citizens have taken to saying the Australian "no worries" (rather than coming from The Lion King where obviously you would co-opt "hakuna matata" not "no worries")

It Wasn't Just Crazy It Was Bad

I am keeping in mind that many people adopted the memes and rhetoric with the best of intentions. They earnestly oppose sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia and hold as values inclusion and justice. If one was to pull them aside one would discover that they likely could cite Scandanavian countries as positive examples of democratic socialism, but they likely would not be quoting from Gramsci's prison diaries nor be referring to arguments made in Judith Butler's gender troubles. 

They likely consumed a bunch of op-ed's that cited as the origin of intersectionality Isabella Baumfree's "Ain't I A Woman" speech and then made some point about some well meaning organisation having some degree of hypocrisy. But many people's pipeline to woke memes and ideas came from watching Nanette, and youtube videos, and twitter, hearsay upon hearsay. I know this because I was there, and it was not a phenomena restricted to those doing Gender Studies or Social Anthropology at University/College at the time, but was taken up by people right up into the boomer demographic who were simply absorbing it through a demography of popular culture.

The thing being, that what critics called the "awokening" being the infodemic of woke memes, identified it early and predicted its doom to fail. It was first labelled as "identity politics" but probably the earliest to really capture the broad phenomena were colleagues Greg Lukianoff and Johnathan Haidt had published an article in the Atlantic by 2015 titled "The Coddling of The American Mind" which would go on to be the basis of their book of the same name published in 2018, by witch point much of this was old-hat but no less valid.

Haidt would present 3 "untruths" to stop telling kids, but these are I believe also a synthesis of the woke character:

1. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
2. Always trust your feelings.
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. 

And I should also point out, my understanding of Lukianoff and Haidt's collaboration was born out of Lukianoff having successfully used cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to recover from depression and then noticing that his student body were adopting effectively the antithesis of CBT which another way of putting it, would be adopting such poor mental hygiene so as to make themselves mentally ill. In 2014.

This may be the sense in which it is fair for AOCs friend to have arrived at the conclusion that "Woke 1 was crazy" in terms of much of it was literally both irrational and incoherent and based on cognitive distortions like mind reading, black-and-white-thinking etc.

I am tempted to keep harping on this point, but I've made the rod for my back that is justifying woke was beyond crazy, it was bad. 

That is I feel the reckoning that actors like AOC are likely keen to avoid, as per the line in "Get Shorty" 1995:

Harry, look at me. You're trying to tell me you fucked up without sounding stupid, and that's hard to do.

My favourite  definition of stupid comes from Italian Economist Carlo M. Cipolla "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses." and that I think applies certainly in net effect, to the woke. 

The first sense in which woke was not just crazy but bad, was in being a popular movement, ie mostly consisting of enthusiastic amateurs and activists, and they adopted what Lukianoff would codify along with co-author Rikki Schlott in "The Cancelling of the American Mind" as the perfect rhetorical fortress. A schema of how attempting to argue with woke people would go, thanks to the adoption of memes.

The perfect rhetorical fortress is basically a means by which any dissenting opinion can be dismissed without engagement, and it was basically a checklist of ad-hominems to be appealled to. I myself, when confronted with this social phenomena of early wokeness being trigger warnings as facebook posting etiquette and the emergence of 'mansplaining' wrote in February of 2015 a post about Ad Hominems, as a complete amatueur lay person that probably learned 'ad hominem' because of this emergent rhetorical-fallacy.

There was also the motte-and-bailey, perhaps best exemplified by the discource around the gender pay gap. If at any point between 2014-202X one sought clarity on what was meant by 'patriarchy' the most common response from a fellow lay person who had invoked it, was not a definition but an appeal to the existence of the gender pay gap.

The short motte and bailey was that the motte (boring but easy to defend) definition of patriarchy was simply a catch-all for the disparate outcomes of gender like pay gaps, lack of political representation and representation on C-suites, wealth gaps, orgasm gaps etc. such that patriarchy was simply descriptive of a status quo, which while serious is fairly uninteresting, the bailey though (exciting but impossible to defend) was a conspiracy of men overtly holding women back from equality, very hard to substantiate in terms of recognition under the law through to any actual meeting minutes where men motioned, seconded and passed the oppression of women since like 1979 or something.

This was not crazy, it was bad, because this is a society wide news story equivalent in function to the recent revelations that Meta's own experts knew that adding beauty filters to instagram would harm teenage girls, and they went ahead and did it anyway. Woke was bad, in short, because we knew it was bad, and we knew it was bad immediately, it was promoting ideas and techniques known to be bad not from recent history, but going back to antiquity.

The significance of Lukianoff and Schlott's perfect rhetorical fortress is that it was the experts formally coming to terms with the fact that while it was a matter of record that woke consisted of a whole grab bag of terrible ideas, stupid ideas that would harm others while resulting in no gain and even losses for the woke, all that could be done was to record the criticisms and the warnings because built into being woke was cutting the break lines and going after anyone who did not also cut their break lines and join the charge directly into a dead end.

Then let me just take as an example of woke culpability, the slogan "No climate justice on stolen land" I have made the point before, and we have an exemplar in the People's Republic of China, that this statement is likely profoundly false. While I'm fairly confident, China continues to oppress and marginalise non-Han ethnic minorities in its pursuit of the 'One China Policy' this totalitarian regime has also leapt far ahead of liberal democracies in terms of electrifying the domestic car fleet, building out high-speed rail and other mass-transit solutions, and likely leads the world in investment in renewables and green tech.

Now, literally the slogan refers to 'justice' in which case it is trivially true, basically, justice cannot be achieved until their is justice for people who have been dispossessed. 

My question, where it is hard to summon the credulity to extend a benefit of doubt, is the function of the slogan. How is an amateur activist going to apply it? Because what it sounds like and reads like to me is that someone is attaching a rider to climate action, suggesting that colonial land theft needs to be addressed as step 1 of responding to the climate catastrophe upon us.

This was but one, albeit a prominent one, way in which woke "1" was not crazy, but bad. A friend of mine was a long time organiser of Australia's premier sustainability festival, and looking at the program one year I saw a talk that was along the very lines of 'before we talk about climate change we need to talk about racism' and I opined that these people, though understandable, would one day need to answer for taking up oxygen in a very very serious debate to effectively sabotage it.

To be clear, I'm not saying racism is to be neglected, I am saying that addressing climate catastrophe should not be made contingent on first achieving social justice. The false contingencies foisted onto any and all attempts to make progress by intersectionality, meant very little progress was made, and plenty of regress.

If Woke 2 is anything it is that the right-wing is Woke, Crazy and Bad

My grounds for objecting to this line of arguing, is that the right wing's "wokeness" is simply not new enough to be called woke 2. However it persists where left wing wokeness I think palpably chilled after the 2024 US election. Now if you are an ideologue, you have double standards, you believe there is right and wrong. 

By this I mean for example using a paralegal process of hounding someone out of a job via activism getting their employers or financial backers to commit an act of cowardice to avoid bad press rather than say determine an outcome through a due-process, its impossible to say if this is bad if you are an idealogue unless you find out who is involved and what they believe.

Or holding an adult to account for something they tweeted a decade ago, back when, figuratively speaking, everyone was tweeting like that is impossible to describe as in bad faith unless you know the specifics of the politics.

The right wing of (in particular) US politics have been, for quite some time, an extremely radical party pushing an ahistorical poorly founded agenda who want books and professors and public officials cancelled for the dangerous ideas they possess that might jeopardize progress toward their utopian agenda. They cleave to debunked economic theories appealing infinitely to a simple lack of commitment and demonize and monster their opponents while remaining objectively niche and unpopular.

Andrew Doyle at least a year ago, was already speaking about the "Woke Right" and in discussing this concept Doyle provides his definition of "Wokeness" in a manner more concrete than my own preferred 'grab-bag of rhetorical memes': 

"the cultural revolution that seeks inequity, according to identity, through authoritarian means."

James Lindsay also may have coined the term "woke right" again around a year ago and for me these analyses are surprisingly recent I must admit I haven't been interested in Lindsay's output for years and Doyle I guess, having never really objected to anything he says, but by largely not having his own platform and instead appearing on other platforms I long since learned to triage my attention away from like Triggernometry, Coleman Hughes and Quillette, in that recency I don't want to give too much credit given that from the earliest analyses of Haidt and Lukianoff, pioneers in the sense making of the "Awokening" they've always included both positive and negative identity politics on both the left and the right. 

Indeed, most who possess the capacity to criticise wokeness at all, have always been able to identify hypocritical behaviours coming from the right. 

In which case, if I wasn't so damn aesthetically sensitive, I would literally go and make the "if" in this sections subtitle a much larger font, because in my opinion it is a really big IF.

Worth Recalling Being Sane in a Crazy World

Tim Heidecker or however it is spelt, creative director of Info Wars which satirical newspaper The Onion acquired from its founder Alan Jones recently was doing a press junket to promote the upcoming relaunch of Infowars as a show, including an interview on Wired.com for which the thumbnail pull quote was "acknowledging the insanity makes people feel sane" captured how I was feeling in 2016, where I was getting an education on how ineffective education was.

Triggernometry and the Dave Rubin show have aged like milk, probably because of audience capture. But in 2016 they were what I could find that could make me feel sane about left wing people being anti-free speech.

I had been awoken to wokeness a few months earlier perhaps and was starting to get perturbed like Homer Simpson in a lesbian bar as I noticed more and more of this "thing" around me. I remember the precise moment because it left me dumbfounded, a friend said to me "I don't like evolutionary psychology because I find it condescending to women." with the dumbfounding thing not being so much the stance, as the argument.

Please understand, by this I mean it is like saying "I don't like Aerospace Engineering because I find it condescending to lead balloons." or saying "I don't like the scientific method because I find it condescending to creationism."

I didn't know how to respond, and I didn't at the time. So I couldn't interrogate the many better and worse interpretations of the sentiment expressed. It was just this exceedingly strange thing to say.

A while later, I had noticed something else strange, I can't remember or date the specifics, but on both sides of the wokeness debate, there were all these memes, wokeness had a back breaking amount, such that its kind of a good test of recall capacities to try and recall as many as you can without looking them up - call out culture, cancel culture, platforming, mansplaining, manspreading, emotional labour, gaslighting, safe spaces, lived experience, people of colour, BIPOC, intersectionality, visibility, pronouns, non-binary, gender non conforming, performativity, pay gap, patriarchy, antifascist, antifa, acab, woke (itself), shaming, DEI, accountability, privilege, privilege preserving epistemic pushback, folks, bodies, defund the police, black lives matter, no x without y, decolonization, silence is violence etc.

And on the flipside, critics and skeptics of woke had their memes - virtue signalling, grievance, cancelling, identity politics, postmodernism, cultural marxism etc. What I was noticing though, was that identifying where 'reactionaries' where getting their talking points from was trivially simple, most were uncritically regurgitating wholesale the arguments presented by a circuit of podcast guests who would come to be clustered by conspiracy theorist and self-proclaimed 'entertainer' Eric Weinstein as 'the intellectual dark web' Jordan Peterson being 80% of the pareto distribution, followed by Sam Harris, the Weinstein brothers, Douglas Murray being likely 80% of the remaining 20% and then a longer list that made up the last 4% of the total idea pie that were nevertheless much easier to identify as the sources of counter-woke memes than everything on the woke side.

By 2016 I was already aware of what came to be known as silos and echo chambers, so extending the benefit of the doubt I simply asked people who the left-wing public intellectuals were so I could check them out. Like where did my friend who builds modular synths hear trigger-warnings were a good idea? And how had someone been convinced that it was progress to start obsessing over race again?

The project was surprisingly hard, and in August of 2016 I wrote and shared a post where I speculated as to how an anti-scientific idea like trigger warnings had gone if not mainstream, certainly mainstream in youth culture.

I recall it, because I can recall speculating that use of trigger warnings had proliferated in the same way that eating desserts with cutlery had proliferated in a Seinfeld episode (the technical term, my favorite marketing term, being 'prole drift')

This was the journey that eventually lead me to James Lindsay, the answer being that woke memes do not come from nowhere, they do indeed have their origins and in many cases were nothing new, and very old. They were just having their moment in youth culture.

Wokeness then, I assert is more akin to a fashion than any serious political movement. It became such a thing, because it was a fashion that actively engaged politics and society, but in terms of its intellectual roots interrogating these would be misleading, like trying to figure out who came up with turning up their jeans, or distressing their jeans, or sagging, or jeggings, and specifically by asking someone 16-25 why they turn their jeans up.

Dollars to donuts, they won't actually know. This is the value of the reflection for me, because while I was experiencing this strangeness in 2016, I think for most people nothing strange was happening at all. It was not crazy, it was increadibly normal. For most people what began happening in 2014 was nothing, nothing they were inclined to notice, because what happened in 2014 was what happened in 2013 and 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007...1944ish (the emergence of the "Teen-ager" thanks to bans on child labour, the transistor radio etc.)

What was happening was what for many was always happening - you were trying to stay "with it" simply emotionally invested in their being an easily discernable formula for navigating life. The extend to which you thought about the adoption of trigger warnings as an early meme, and pronouns profiles as a late-stage meme was the necessity for having arguments to reassure yourself that you were with it and others were not.

Such that my experience, was that people would present arguments for say 'intersectionality' without being aware of Kimberly Crenshaw.

The woke and anti-woke were not two sides of a debate, one was a reaction to the other. It was the equivalent of a fashion commentariat (anti-woke) writing articles about why turned up jeans is a bad look and will go out of fashion in a few seasons.

AOC and System of a Down

AOC suggesting that 'woke 1' was just a prior model, I think makes her appear to me as the guy who still had a goatee in 2003, the 90s were over man and goatees never really came back. But then, there was System of A Down, a bizarre quintessentially 90s band that didn't break until 2001.

SOAD belong firmly among the greats of the 90s rap-metal alternative rock bands like Faith No More, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Rage Against the Machine and Primus, and not the dog-leg of 'Nu-Metal' that came after them but before System of A Down (at least in terms of commercial success). Right, like what I'm saying is that there's a good chance if you love FNM or RATM then you'll love SOAD too (infact FNM and SOAD are touring Australia together early next year, so yeah, of course) but there's also a good chance that you'll think (even if you kind of like them) that comparatively Korn and Limp Bizkit are a joke.

SOAD are kind of an exception that proves a rule though, by 2001 it was fair to say that alt-rock was dead, the demos that had been hit by the Bay Area musicians that got played on college radio and signed with interscope now listened to pop-punk acts like Blink 182 and Sum41 were all the rage. People in their 20s were being made to feel old wearing Doc Martins and Converse All-stars by the teenagers wearing Globes and DC shoes and Sketchers.

Yet strangely, SOAD were also there, and they were big.

Maybe AOC who was sighted as an example of a prominent woke lightening rod that had quietly removed her pronouns from her online profiles, is you know, an Eddie Vedder. She is going to make bank touring and playing the hits to the woke die-hards, she is going to be fine, but maybe she is just looking for her System of A Down when she alludes to a 'woke 1'

Here's the thing, I can be rightly accused of having 90s nostalgia. Being a 90s tragic. That shorthand can gloss over the detail though, I think due to socio-economic circumstances conditions were ripe for a bunch of really interesting shit to happen in the 90s, and having thought about it a lot, I now consider the 90s to span from 1988-1996, just as the indigenous people's of the continental United States didn't neatly recognize modern boarders prior to colonization, such that what white people call 'Native Americans' are also native to Canada and Mexico, people with a shared culture and way of life that don't fit neatly into modern naming conventions.

Just so, decades don't actually neatly fit into decades, and as such, I feel no desire to see a renaissance of many shitty aspects of the 90s, like MSN messenger, Nu-Metal, Ska, Punk Pop, Y2K, Gangsta rap...yes much of what made the 2000s the worst cultural decade had begun in the 90s. 

Being nostalgic for woke though, even though I've made SOAD my analogy, the analogy is kind of bad as a concluding note, because SOAD were like the very 90s secret bonus track that was actually good (like NIN cover of "Physical" as track 98 of their 1992 'Burn' LP) but Woke is more like being nostalgic for the 2000s, just a terrible terrible time to be nostalgic for MTV Punked, Guitar Hero and American Idol. 

The civil rights movement of the 1960s is to the 90s as Woke is to the 00s. Okay one was progress that got arrested, the other is regress that we should be glad to see the back of.