From my experiences at a very woke company, I tend to agree with the top comments here that it’s mostly a bottom-up phenomenon. There is a segment of the employees who are fanatically woke, and they have a few advantages that make it hard for anyone to oppose them. Basically:
They care more about promoting wokeness than their opponents do about combating it, and
It is safer from a reputational standpoint to be too woke than not woke enough.
Then we get a feedback loop where victories for wokism strengthen these advantages, leading to more victories.
The deeper question is whether there is also a system of organized top-down pressure running in parallel to this. Elon’s purchase of Twitter presents an interesting case study. It seemed to trigger an immune response from several external sources. Nonprofit organizations emerged from the woodwork to pressure advertisers to leave the platform, and revenue fell sharply. Apparently this happened before Elon even adjusted any policies, on the mere suspicion that he would fail to meet woke standards.
At the same time, there was a barrage of negative media coverage of Elon, uncovering sexual assault scandals and bad business practices from throughout his life. Perhaps a similar fate awaits any top-level executive who does not steer his company in a woke direction?
I’ll end with an excerpt from an old podcast that has stuck with me:
It is impossible to defend the idea that the invisible hand of the market would guide them [corporations] to this course of action. I’ve been inside a large company when it was adjacent to this kind of voluntary action — where corporations all act in lock step — you’ll just have to trust me here — and I’ve seen the way it’s coordinated.
What will happen is a prominent journalist or several will reach out to the company’s leadership team and ask them for a comment on the current thing. Especially they do this if that company has any history of dealings with the object of the cancellation or the scandal.
The influence of these kinds of journalists, from publications such as the New York Times or the Atlantic, is such that even their most innocuous question is a threat; no threat is ever stated, but all parties involved understand the discussion. Once a few highly visible players perform the designated action, all the smaller players get in line.
They have the nerve to call this a preference cascade, when in reality it’s an obedience cascade.
From my experiences at a very woke company, I tend to agree with the top comments here that it’s mostly a bottom-up phenomenon. There is a segment of the employees who are fanatically woke, and they have a few advantages that make it hard for anyone to oppose them. Basically:
They care more about promoting wokeness than their opponents do about combating it, and
It is safer from a reputational standpoint to be too woke than not woke enough.
Then we get a feedback loop where victories for wokism strengthen these advantages, leading to more victories.
The deeper question is whether there is also a system of organized top-down pressure running in parallel to this. Elon’s purchase of Twitter presents an interesting case study. It seemed to trigger an immune response from several external sources. Nonprofit organizations emerged from the woodwork to pressure advertisers to leave the platform, and revenue fell sharply. Apparently this happened before Elon even adjusted any policies, on the mere suspicion that he would fail to meet woke standards.
At the same time, there was a barrage of negative media coverage of Elon, uncovering sexual assault scandals and bad business practices from throughout his life. Perhaps a similar fate awaits any top-level executive who does not steer his company in a woke direction?
I’ll end with an excerpt from an old podcast that has stuck with me: