Yeah, this was a meaningful update for me in this area. The importance of concrete examples in areas where the info commons have become a memetic battleground. It seems kind of obvious once said but I’d never thought about it this way before. I just wanted to point and ask “Why does that thing move the way it’s moving?”
…especially since you’ve used the word “woke” which is in fact generally a pejorative in current usage as far as I’m aware.
I think I said this somewhere else, but you might find it a helpful aside anyway:
I originally learned the term “woke” from skater kids who would probably have identified with the left. I watched as the term morphed from a “awaken from the Matrix” kind of thing to “seeing the racial inequality that’s baked into culture” and then into a more general intersectionalist framing — all from people who stood out clearly to me as being on the political left.
I’d known the right sometimes used “woke” mockingly, but they also use “pro-choice” mockingly at times too.
So the main surprise for me here was in discovering that the left has apparently started interpreting anyone using “woke” as being on the right and meaning it mockingly.
It’s an odd level of memetic forgetfulness, resulting in an actual change in what the term means and signals, that I hadn’t expected. It’s weird to me on the level of if “Black lives matter!” were to evolve to be a KKK slogan. Not impossible but definitely not what I’d expect by default.
What I’m saying here doesn’t detract at all from what you’re saying. I just thought you’d find that snapshot into why I’d used “woke” interesting and possibly helpful to know.
Huh! I had heard it in passing before the past 6 years, but over the past 6 years is when I started hearing it enough to get a binding for “wokism”, which I think is a keyword that had a strong binding for me. My intuition wants to round it off to “I hadn’t heard it until the recent definition”, which I think is technically wrong, but still matches my perceptual data fairly well. Shrug, it’s not actually that important; one could add some connecting words that would make it clearly a description of something bad, even as someone who strongly approves of large swaths of what the right would label “woke” I do think that there’s a kind of performative wokeness that fails to be actually awake in the ways I care about and thereby fails to implement the coprotection of beings that I’d want people to wake up to in the first place.
Yeah, this was a meaningful update for me in this area. The importance of concrete examples in areas where the info commons have become a memetic battleground. It seems kind of obvious once said but I’d never thought about it this way before. I just wanted to point and ask “Why does that thing move the way it’s moving?”
I think I said this somewhere else, but you might find it a helpful aside anyway:
I originally learned the term “woke” from skater kids who would probably have identified with the left. I watched as the term morphed from a “awaken from the Matrix” kind of thing to “seeing the racial inequality that’s baked into culture” and then into a more general intersectionalist framing — all from people who stood out clearly to me as being on the political left.
I’d known the right sometimes used “woke” mockingly, but they also use “pro-choice” mockingly at times too.
So the main surprise for me here was in discovering that the left has apparently started interpreting anyone using “woke” as being on the right and meaning it mockingly.
It’s an odd level of memetic forgetfulness, resulting in an actual change in what the term means and signals, that I hadn’t expected. It’s weird to me on the level of if “Black lives matter!” were to evolve to be a KKK slogan. Not impossible but definitely not what I’d expect by default.
What I’m saying here doesn’t detract at all from what you’re saying. I just thought you’d find that snapshot into why I’d used “woke” interesting and possibly helpful to know.
Huh! I had heard it in passing before the past 6 years, but over the past 6 years is when I started hearing it enough to get a binding for “wokism”, which I think is a keyword that had a strong binding for me. My intuition wants to round it off to “I hadn’t heard it until the recent definition”, which I think is technically wrong, but still matches my perceptual data fairly well. Shrug, it’s not actually that important; one could add some connecting words that would make it clearly a description of something bad, even as someone who strongly approves of large swaths of what the right would label “woke” I do think that there’s a kind of performative wokeness that fails to be actually awake in the ways I care about and thereby fails to implement the coprotection of beings that I’d want people to wake up to in the first place.