I’m trying to understand why several systems (Hollywood, Disney, universities, probably others) that are normally quite profit-focused are leaning so hard woke.
I get the thing about how, if you don’t go woke hard enough, you could get canceled, which is bad for business. That’s some push.
But there’s a counter-push of “Lots of people don’t like being lectured about politics when they’re seeking entertainment” (for instance).
It’s not at all clear to me that the first effect is so utterly hugely enormously larger than the second that the profit incentive would cause so many companies to swing hard woke.
Likewise, I could understand some ideological capture. But unless this had profit appeal I would expect the market to just… eat pure but incomplete ideological capture after a while (as per the right’s chant of “get woke, go broke”).
So… what gives? What am I missing here?
That you think they’re going super hard woke (especially Disney) is perhaps telling of your own biases.
Lets look at Disney and Hollywood (universities are their own weird thing). The reality is that in the Anglosphere there are lots of progressive people with money to spend on media. You can sell “woke” media to those people, and lots of it. Even more so when there’s controversy and you can get naive lefties to believe paying money to the megacorp to watch a mainstream show is a way to somehow strike back against the mean right-wingers. And to progressive people it doesn’t feel like “being lectured to about politics”, because that’s not what media with a political/values message you agree with feels like. So going woke is 100% a profit-motivated decision. The leadership at big media companies didn’t change much over the last decade or two, nor likely did their opinions (whatever those actually are). But after gay marriage gained significantly above 50% approval rate in the US and the Obergefell decision happened it became clear to them that it was safe to be at least somewhat socially progressive on issues like that, and would be profitable.
But equally, almost every single “woke” Disney movie has the “woke” components carefully contained such that they can easily be excised for markets where they are a problem. You see a gay kiss in the background of a scene in Star Wars, it gets cut for the Chinese and Middle East markets. Disney has many very progressive employees who are responsible for making the actual art they produce; artists lean pretty strongly progressive in my experience, so of course the employees’ values come out in the art they make. But the management puts very strict limits on what they can do precisely because anything less milquetoast is believed to be less profitable.
…and then you go on to describe how Disney is in fact selling movies with woke components to the West, which is exactly what I was talking about.
Just… don’t do this. I’m not available for this kind of psychoanalysis. I find it extremely difficult to engage in good faith when people make moves like this one. My biases are my business. If you think I’m missing something, just point it out. Don’t try to diagnose my failures of rationality.
Karma downvote for lack of introspection into failures of rationality in a rationality forum.
Agreement upvote for “don’t do this” because “that is telling of your own biases” without naming any is just not engaging. It was sadly a throwaway starting line to an otherwise excellent comment.
I’m cool with your assessment. Just to be clear, I’m not refusing to introspect. I’m not available for the kind of social move issued. That’s a separate question from willingness to introspect. My introspection is based on my judgment, not directly from social pressure. In fact I try to make whether I introspect and make adjustments immune to direct social pressure. To do otherwise strikes me as opening a port that’s really epistemically hazardous to open.
they were in fact just pointing it out.
You are making the mistake of assuming that because the median Chinese citizen is ideologically opposed to the American left in a technical sense, Disney’s localizing movies for China means that Disney isn’t a captured institution. But in fact the American left cares very little about the beliefs and attitudes of the average Chinese person, as they compete in an almost entirely distinct political arena. So major movie companies being willing to sell movies there is not much evidence of anything.
More telling than Disney’s localizing for China at all is the fact that they refuse to make high budget, well marketed movies catering to (for example) the Christian right, even though such a niche has proven to be very profitable for independent filmmakers, and in fact ought to be easier for Disney to cater to as an American company.
What’s profitable for an independent filmmaker isn’t necessarily a market opportunity worth pursuing for Disney. Disney, Paramount, and the other major studios operate on an entirely different scale than independent filmmakers. Given the amount of corporate overhead that they have, a film that returns less than several hundred million dollars in profit, mostly due to merchandising and theme park tie-ins, in some ways, just isn’t worth it.
It’s not just the Christian right who are being neglected by this reality. Pretty much every film genre other than action/adventure and superhero has suffered. When was the last time we saw a major studio fund a small-to-medium budget comedy? Or romance? Drama still gets funding because those films win awards, but it’s unclear even how long that will last.
Okay, fine, maybe not Disney specifically, but Hollywood is perfectly capable of making explicitly political movies like Knives Out iff they are explicitly politically leftist. Chris Evans and Ana de Armas are not getting paid to act in analogous movies for other political factions in American politics, and right wing themes, undertones, or acknowledgements are not getting inserted into mainstream high budget action/adventure movies even to a token degree like left-wing ones do.
You’re thinking at the wrong level of abstraction. There is no economic incentive for wokism at the corporate level. But look one level below. The question isn’t what causes “corporations” to act in woke ways. The question is, what persuades employees of corporations to act in woke ways?
My hypothesis is that anti-discrimination legislation has, due to court precedents, developed an inverted burden of proof. If a corporation fires or disciplines someone who is non-white, female, disabled, or belongs to a number of other protected categories, it is now up to the corporation to prove that the firing or discipline was done for non-discriminatory reasons. This, combined with the ideological leanings of most people in HR departments, is sufficient to ensure that every corporation has, within it, the equivalent of an ideological cell, whose job it is solely to push the corporation to act in a more woke manner. This ideological cell has both public opinion and federal law on its side; well meaning individuals who push back end up like James Damore.
The market is part of society. There was a similar argument made against anti-segregation legislation in the 1960s. After all, given that it’s more profitable to sell to both black people and white people than it is to sell to white people only, wouldn’t it be in business owners’ rational self-interest to desegregate their properties?
The answer, in both instances, is the same: if there is a sufficiently high cultural barrier, then it will be more profitable to go with the culture than against it. Most reasonable people can at least nod along to the woke slogans. After all, it is quite reasonable to suggest that women ought to be treated equally to men, that blacks should be treated equally to whites, and people shouldn’t be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. It’s only when those reasonable propositions are taken to extremes that they result in wokism.
Because of this motte-and-bailey aspect to wokism, it’s easy for wokism to permeate the culture, and for advocates of wokism to tar those who oppose them as racists and bigots.
Lots of people also threatened to move to Canada if Trump was elected President. How many of them actually chose to do so? A Republican in the United States will shout vociferously about Coca Cola or Nike engaging in woke behavior, but will he or she choose Pepsi when he or she next shops for groceries? Will he or she buy some other brand of shoes? And if he or she does, will it make a difference? After all, Pepsi and Reebok are hardly less woke than Coca Cola and Nike.
A concrete example of this inversion of the burden of proof arose just today, with regards to the Twitter layoffs:
This lawsuit is not alleging that any specific discriminatory behavior took place, or that discriminatory reasoning was used by managers in choosing who got the pink-slips and who got to stay on. Rather, the brute fact that more women than men were laid off is used as evidence to assert that Twitter was targeting women. Now, it’s up to Twitter to show that it was not behaving in a discriminatory manner in conducting its layoffs.
That IS evidence.
Thank you, this was helpful.
I don’t think this is the right analogy. Listening to more moderate and right-leaning folk, one gets the impression that viewership of shows and movie franchises that are going woke has been dropping like a rock. Like apparently there was an analysis of when people turned off the Captain America streaming show on Disney+ (I forget its name — the one where Falcon becomes the new Captain), and the moment it plunged was the scene where police were harassing Falcon due to racial profiling.
Maybe the most befuddling part of the culture wars is the way, on every front, soldiers on both sides muddle the facts. It’s hard for me to tell what’s even true. Daniel Schmachtenberger describes this as “polluting the information commons”. There’s a Molochian dynamic where the facts of the matter are part of what’s being fought over.
That’s why I’ve been looking at places that have a profit incentive that are also catering specifically to wokism, noticing I don’t see a corresponding shift in the other direction at the same scale, and kind of scratching my head. Wokism doesn’t look as obviously profitable a thing to align with as their behavior seems. Even if it is, that seems like it’d be hard to determine.
The possibility that it’s actually more like legally imposed internal friction makes some good sense. I doubt that’s the full picture but it’s a plausible major component.
In what way do you intend to intervene on this knowledge?
I don’t have such an intention. I’m just trying to understand how the world works in this spot.
I believe you where I did not before, since I trust explicit statement from you in particular quite a bit. Thank you for the clarification; I can participate on that level. In response, I’ve removed all my heavy downvotes that had been motivated by detected agency.
Ah, so being woke increases your job safety, if you are a member of one of the protected groups. It makes your membership in that group more salient; if you ever get fired, it makes it easier to argue that you were fired because you belonged to that group.
And there is no obvious counter-strategy, because telling them “stop talking about your membership in a protected group all the time” can itself be interpreted as attacking the group.
It sounds to me like the core thing to take away from this is that Union works. can anyone explain to me a reason to see this as bad? It seems to me that Valentine could only reasonably want to ask this if he wants to intervene on it in some way. So I’d like to hear more about what intervention he’d like to attempt and what his intended target of agency is. he says he is “not available for that social move”, which I take to be him attempting to avoid being pressured to be reasonable; I’d like to hear more about that.
edit: after a surprisingly direct “okay, but I’m not out to get you” from him, which unlike most internet interlocutors I actually trust from having known him a few years ago, I now expect that I will not object to his attempted interventions. I do still think that this post is strong evidence he intends to intervene, but I now expect he’s likely to intervene in ways that attempt to bridge conflicted agency between interhuman agentic networking patterns. Which is the essence of what solving safety problems is about, so, thumbs up.
Nope. I wanted to ask this question because it’s about a part of the world that didn’t move like I would have expected, which meant I wasn’t perceiving the world clearly. I care about clear sight. I didn’t have a conclusion in mind about what should happen instead, let alone a scheme to intervene somehow.
Nope. But this line of yours right here is an example. I’m not okay with being strawmanned like this. If you insist on doing so or cannot summon the capacity to stop, I won’t engage, regardless of how valid or valuable your content might otherwise be.
I believe you now when you say you don’t have the intention I’d assumed; I trust you plenty well enough to believe such a sentence. I had detected significant intentionality towards attempting to destroy, and your resistance to clarifying what metanetwork you’d be participating in set off my alarm bells. I now recognize that what you appear to me to have read as my intentionality, and what I read as yours, was probably both of us recognizing each others’ behavior as executing network code (egregore fragments, if you like the woo phrasing rather than the distributed systems phrasing) that would attempt to demand each other participate in the same network.
I’m cool with it if you’re not in the network that has been repeatedly insulted as “woke” lately. I don’t need you to agree. I don’t intend to make any demand of you besides to recognize that I’m not actually intending to make demands or attack when I misread your intention—please understand that the reason my mental netcode detected your behavior as agentic still seems to have been justified at the time. My read that you were guarding against pressure from my netcode still seems right, but since I already have a model of your base-level trustworthiness, and your now having directly asserted no agency towards destruction, I’m more willing to believe you’re not intending to destroy the good part of what you label “woke”.
So with that in mind—I do think that the network behavior seen as woke in disney (for example) is very unhealthy and worthy of analysis to repair. I might term it, to make up a name on the fly, “getting high on the woke”, to contrast with actually trying to improve the world in the direction that subtlety-awareness that got labeled “woke” can provide.
If we’re going to get anywhere, I expect we need to apply a “no command validity” filter to each other’s posts. I won’t accept your commands and you won’t accept mine, and then we can get somewhere. But I’m not able to remove everything you see as a command, apparently, because statements about how I read your interactions appear to me to be reading as commands to you. That’s not my intention; my intention was to express annoyance, not to assert my annoyance is necessarily and unavoidably valid, and your comments asserting that you’re not being agentic to attack sneakily reassure me a lot because I trust you to be honest about an explicit statement like that.
I expect my comment will take several hours or maybe a day+ to process into a form that can generate a response that you trust to not be attacked. No worries if so. Or if you feel you can respond with only fast inference mode, that’s fine too, I don’t need you to take forever to respond, I only offer it in case it clarifies friendliness that you need not rush for me.
I still do feel that the core intention of this post was rather a disaster and that we can’t reasonably establish which answers are accurate without a lot more on-the-ground data collection.
I like the spirit with which you’re meeting me here.
In all honesty I’m probably not going to respond in detail. That’s just a matter of respecting my time & energy.
But thank you for this. This feels quite good to me. And I’m grateful for you meeting me this way.
RE “no command validity”: Basically just… yes? I totally agree with where I think you’re pointing there as a guideline. I’m gonna post something soon that’ll add the detail that I’d otherwise add here. (Not in response to you. It just so happens to be related and relevant.)
Understandable! No worries at all. I’ll take your message as a fin, and this message as a fin-ack; before, I thought we were headed towards connection timeout, so it’s very pleasing to have a mutually acknowledged friendly interaction ending. Glad we had this talk, sorry to have amplified the fight.
FWIW, for your thinking, if it’s useful—I think the very problem we ran into here is inherently the biggest issue in distributed systems safety for humans itself: how do you explain yourself to a group that is severely divided, to the point that the fight has started leading to beings choosing to disconnect their meanings.
Would love to talk through distributed systems safety with you at some point, though probably not now in this thread, for various reasons; but I’m hopeful that my ideas are shortly obvious enough that I simply won’t even have to, it seems like deepmind may yet again scoop me, and if deepmind can scoop me on how ai can help solve social issues, I don’t think there’s any way I’d be happier to be disappointed; I claim you may be surprised by being scooped on your human friendliness work by ai friendliness researchers shortly too. The general gist of my hunch is, agentic coprotection is reachable, and consent-to-have-shared-meaning may itself be a fundamental component of ai safety—that is, something along the lines of consent to establish mutual information. Or something. it’s a research project because I’m pretty sure that’s not enough to specify it.
Anyway, have a good one!
What is this “Union” you’re referring to?
People working together in synchronized groups; the generalization away from formalized Unions. See, eg, wildcat strikes.
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:
If you think of “wokeism” as a luxury belief—something that many people like to use to show themselves as virtuous, but don’t really do a cost/benefit of any component of behavior or signalling, this makes more sense. Also, don’t confuse yourself into thinking systems or corporations have beliefs or intents. They are merely aggregates of diverse actors who happen to be near each other and have intertwined behaviors.
Signaling of wokeism is pretty rampant in today’s youth, who are the biggest customers and large part of the workforce for the things you mention. It’s probably not ideologically attractive to the elites or leaders, but it’s not obviously harmful, so they’re better off supporting (or at least accepting) it than dealing with massive conflict within their orgs and among their customers.
Random theory I heard: When Disney releases a new black princess, the fact that toxoplasma of rage forms around it provides them a lot of free advertising. Most people are like ‘shrug’ and don’t care that much, but the fact that everyone’s complaining and/or hyping it gets it onto most people’s radar.
One possible incentive for corporations to promote wokism is that it’s a distraction from other forms of activism which might their hurt bottom lines more.
Also as Bryan Caplan and other comments pointed out, regulations may also drive this shift: the regulations leave companies vulnerable to lawsuits with vague criteria and a defense strategy is to 1. not be the slowest target (this results in a race/escalation) and 2. prepare a vague signaling defense (look at all these employee training programs we do, surely that proves your vague and non-falsifiable accusations of discrimination must be wrong).
A large part of it is the US legal system and anti-discrimination law playing out in counterintuitive ways. The key thing is that where corporations are concerned, US law runs on counterfactual court cases; the actual text of legislation matters only insofar as it affects those court cases. Combine this with management having imperfect control over employees within a corporation, imperfect resolution of facts, and a system for assigning damages that’s highly subjective, and executives are left in an odd position.
Every company which does a significant amount of hiring and firing, ie every company above a certain size, will fire and reject some number of people in protected groups. Some of those people will claim that it was because of their group membership, and sue. As a distant corporate executive, you can’t prevent this, and can’t tell whether the accusation is true.
But you can put everyone through some corporate training. And it seems that the empirical result, discovered by legal departments that have been through this many times, is that you get the best outcomes in the court cases if you go over the top and do reverse-discrimination that the letter of the law says should be illegal.
Off the top of my head (and slightly worried that this will become a major culture war thing, but I will answer the question that was asked):
There is a principal-agent problem. If pursuing wokeness comes at the expense of profits, the latter doesn’t necessarily affect the people who make those decisions very much.
My impression is that many of the executives are in fact woke, and others are at least unwilling to say otherwise.
Wokeness seems pretty optimized for shouting down and intimidating opposition. (I think much of the specifics of the ideology were and are determined by some people successfully shouting down others within the woke movement.)
At least in the entertainment industries, when a distinctly woke thing is made, there tends to be a narrative that evil people hate the thing, and therefore anyone who hates the thing is evil, and therefore lost profits should be treated with an attitude of “good riddance” rather than “maybe this thing was made badly”. I think this tends to be the woke narrative, and generally promoted by media—and, as per the previous item, any opposing narrative would tend to get shouted down.
Aren’t CEOs mostly Republicans? And what’s stopping the shareholders from insisting on prioritizing profit?
I’m thinking of tech companies that tend to be based in the SF Bay Area, and the most prominent entertainment companies are Hollywood—both of which are known for being more lefty. Also, CEOs are one thing, but other executives matter too; and writers and directors especially in entertainment.
Regarding shareholders, I don’t really know how that works. I do think it’s a general fact that getting a zillion people to coordinate on expressing their wishes is difficult. There’s a board of directors, who I guess nominally represent shareholders? Looks like every company can have their own rules, though I assume they’re mostly similar; looking at Disney’s bylaws, it says:
Although “Each Director shall at all times represent the interests of the shareholders of the
Company”, I suspect this is difficult to enforce. If the board ends up dominated by a woke narrative (with at least a vocal minority of woke people and a majority of people who shut up and go along with it), leading to unprofitable decisions, what can the shareholders do about it, other than sell their stock? “Shareholder revolts” are a thing, which implies that the divergence between shareholders’ desires and what the board is doing can indeed get pretty wide (though also implies that they can eventually get their way).
I do suspect that the profit motive will ultimately reassert itself, but it seems to have taken a long time and doesn’t show major signs of happening yet. It may take an “everyone knows that everyone knows that the woke decisions have gotten really bad” moment, which the woke narrative promoted by most media is probably delaying.
Typically board members are elected by shareholders, and an attacker can win a proxy fight with a relatively small portion of the shares if he can convince other shareholders.
Money is an inventive, not the only one. People also want to be seen as socially acceptable. not reviled Pariahs.
The simplest explanation to me is that most of the things one would call “woke” in media are actually pretty popular and accepted in the culture. I suspect most people don’t care, and of the few who do more like it than dislike it.
It seems strange to me to be confused by a company’s behavior since you’d normally expect them to follow the profit motive, without even mentioning the possibility that the profit motive is, indeed, exactly what is motivating the behavior.
What tendencies specifically would you classify as “woke”? Having an intentionally diverse cast? Progressive messaging? Other things? And which of these tendencies do you think would alienate a significant portion of the consumer base, and why?
Edit: I’ve changed my mind a bit on this on reflection. I don’t think the purpose is appealing to the few people who care, I think it’s about stirring up controversy.
By “woke” I’m referring to a pretty specific memeplex. I don’t know how to name memeplexes with precision, but I can gesture at some of its key features:
Intersectionalist social justice theory. There’s systemic oppression, and there are beneficiaries of systemic oppression. This is folded in a basic way into the functioning of society. It can be changed, and there’s a moral obligation to change it, but only the beneficiaries (people with “privilege”) can actually do it. Therefore having privilege is a moral responsibility — which the privileged are systemically encouraged not to notice. There’s lots of disagreement about who’s where in the privilege hierarchy (e.g., do cis women or trans women have more privilege?), but there’s a pretty general agreement that cis hetero white men have the most privilege.
Shame tactics. It’s necessary and appropriate and good to pressure privileged people to accept their responsibility. Any privileged person who hasn’t done so is part of the problem and is therefore a bad person. It’s forgivable if they simply do not know the evil they’re perpetuating, but if they’ve been exposed to this truth and they resist then they are willful beneficiaries at the expense of others and deserve condemnation.
Cancel culture. People who voice disagreement with this message are encouraging systemic oppression and need to be deplatformed. We deplatform them by refusing to listen to them and by shaming and deplatforming people who continue to listen to them. (A common extension: People who object to this canceling tactic are also supporting systemic oppression and must, in turn, be shamed and/or canceled.)
Western culture must repent. The West took over the world through colonialism, which is the origin for a lot of / most of / all of the systemic oppression. In order to purge ourselves of this systemic oppression, we need to uproot all the elements that descend from Western colonization and replace them with something better. It’s also necessary for Western cultures and people to apologize and make material amends for this past so as to heal the damage done. Education of history should focus on the West’s atrocities and avoid mentioning its virtues, since those virtues are usually just ways of justifying privilege and the atrocities aren’t emphasized enough for us to collectively notice the need to repent.
[No clear vision.] This is a meaning-making framework, not a vision for the future. It’s about what to destroy, not what to create. It’s a memetic mutation blending postmodernism, Calvinism, and a watered-down version of Marxism. It’s not clear what a world free of systemic oppression looks like, but it’s counted as victory if those who aren’t on board with the fight get alienated or destroyed, or if more people start loudly using these tear-down tactics and repeating the message. It also comes with a total disregard for the potential downsides of tearing down culture this way (since concern for the downsides is just an argument for perpetuating systemic oppression).
The main problem with this memeplex is that it’s a war machine, not an idea. One is not allowed to debate with it. You either agree and align, or get attacked. There’s no room for “Hey, I think you might really have a good point about systemic oppression being a thing, but these approaches for creating change seem like they’ll create more problems than they solve. Maybe we could think of what else to do instead?” The usual refrain is some version of “Get with the program!” or “You’re just trying to protect your privilege” (or “You’ve internalized white supremacy” when speaking to someone from an obviously oppressed category).
It even comes with a ban on being named, which is curiously demonic. The term “woke” actually came from its early origins. It was a reference to waking up to the reality of systemic oppression, instead of continuing to sleepwalk as a kind of accomplice. In recent years it seems to have evolved a demand that it be viewed as totally normal, that disagreement is a sign of moral corruption, that trying to name this thing means you’re resisting and thereby choosing to align with evil. I hadn’t realized how strong that particular mutation had become when I first posted this question.
You’re right, I could have been clearer about what structure was confusing me.
I keep encountering these detailed claims & explanations about how the movement toward “woke” (for lack of a better word — apparently the left has tagged what was once their word as now strongly right-coded) is having negative effects on viewership and profit. Not overwhelmingly like a lot of the right insists (“Get woke, go broke”), but still pretty significantly.
Like apparently in the Disney+ show where the Falcon became the new Captain America, there was a pretty dramatic drop-off in viewership right at the scene depicting police profiling the main character for being black. As far as I know, there was never a corresponding upswing from people who were excited about this material being depicted in the MCU.
A lot of these companies seem to have decided to send strongly left-coded messages like this and then tag audiences who object “toxic fandom”. Electoral evidence gives me the sense that left vs. right is pretty evenly split in the population. The usual move in the past has been to be as unoffensive as possible so as to appeal to a wide audience base. So this swing seems like a pretty wide-spanning decision that profit lies so overwhelmingly with left-leaning audiences that alienating right-leaning folk is absolutely worth it, even if it doesn’t create a correspondingly large number of strong left-leaning folk to start watching.
But since profit in media companies tends to be attached to raw viewership numbers, I get confused. Something doesn’t add up.
Even saying it’s ideological (like right-leaning folk often assert) doesn’t stack up. Why would all of them suddenly become ideological in the same direction? Wouldn’t those who are just profit-focused benefit from not going ideological?
So it really does seem like a profit motive, but the profit mechanism isn’t at all clear to me.
Whenever I talk to people clearly aligned with the left in this front of the culture wars, I get the clear sense that they think they’ve simply won. That the right is a fringe thing or something, that these leftist ideas are just normal, that the few people who object to the messaging are just a few leftover bigots who need to get with the times or be deservedly alienated, etc. But that’s not the impression I get at all when interacting with folk outside left info bubbles. (Strangely, I often get the opposite impression: lots of right-leaning folk think “wokism” is a fringe movement of just a few screaming people who have the ears and brains of Hollywood, that the reality of viewership will come home to roost eventually, etc. The info bubbling goes both ways on this.)
So I’m looking around and wondering: Gosh, did these companies solve the problem of the polluted information commons and actually determined that profit lies so, so much with the left that alienating the right is worth it? How did they do that? What do they know?
Perhaps both of these groups are broadly right about the size of their direct opposition? I don’t think most people are super invested in the culture war, whatever their leanings at the ballot box. Few people decline to consume media they consider broadly interesting because of whatever minor differences from media of the past are being called “woke” these days.
I think what’s going on profit-wise is, most people don’t care about the politics, there are a few who love it and a few who hate it. So the companies want to primarily sell to the majority who don’t care. They do this by drumming up attention.
Whenever one of these “woke” properties comes out, there is inevitably a huge culture war battle over it on Twitter, and everywhere else on the Internet where most of it is written by insane people. It’s free advertising. Normies see that crap, and they don’t care much about what people are arguing about, but the property they’re arguing over sticks in their minds.
So if it’s all about being controversial, why is it always left-messaging? This I’m less sure of. But I suspect as you say any political messaging will alienate some people, including normies. It’s just that left-politics tends to alienate normies less since the culture has been mandating anti-racism for decades, and anti-wokism is a new thing that mainly only online culture warriors care about.
What would be a form of right-messaging that would be less alienating to the public than left-messaging? Suppose your example of the racial profiling scene were reversed to be a right-leaning message about racial profiling, what would it look like? A policeman stops a black man, who complains about racial profiling, and then the policeman finds evidence of a crime, and says something like “police go where the crime is”? Maybe I’m biased, but I think the general culture would be far more alienated by that than it was by the actual scene.
That… makes a lot of sense actually. A lot. PT Barnum style advertising. I had not considered that. Thank you.
How about pride in America? An expression of the nobility of the country we built, our resilience, the Pax Americana, the fact that we ended WWII, etc.
It doesn’t strike me as too strange or difficult to do this.
But that’s after about 20 seconds of thought. I’m sure I’m missing something important here.
A good old “America fuck yeah” movie would certainly be cool now that I think about it. The most recent movie that pops into my mind is “Top Gun: Maverick”. Though I haven’t seen it, I imagine it’s largely about American airmen being tough, brave and heroic and taking down the bad guys. I haven’t seen anybody getting into culture-war arguments over that movie though. I’m sure there are some people on Twitter saying it’s too “American exceptionalist” or whatever but it certainly is nowhere near the same level of conflict prompted by, say, She-Hulk or Rings of Power or anything like that.
My guess is that for both the left and the right, there are values they prioritize which are pretty uncontroversial (among normal people) and having pride in America and, say, our role in WW2 is one of those for the right (and being proud of MLK and the civil rights movement would be one for the left)
Then there’s the more controversial stuff each side believes, the kinds of things said by weird and crazy people on the Internet. I don’t have quantitative data on this and I’m just going off vibes, but when it’s between someone talking about “the intersectional oppression of bipoclgbtqiaxy+ folx” and someone talking about “the decline of Western Civilization spurred on by the (((anti-white Hollywood)))”, to a lot of people the first one just seems strange and disconnected from real issues, while the second one throws up serious red flags reminiscent of a certain destructive ideology which America helped defeat in WW2.
You want something that’s not too alienating overall, but which will reliably stir up the same old debate on the Internet.
In summary it seems to me that it’s much easier to signal left-wing politics in a way which starts a big argument which most normies will see as meaningless and will not take a side on. If you try to do the same with right-wing politics, you run more risk of the normies siding with the “wokists” in the ensuing argument because the controversial right-wing culture war positions tend to have worse optics.
As far as running a media company goes, fandom is extremely profitable, increasingly so in an age where enormous sci-fi/fantasy franchises drive everything. And there’s been huge overlap between fandom communities and social justice politics for a long time.
It’s definitely in Disney’s interest to appeal to Marvel superfans who write fanfiction and cosplay and buy tons of merchandise, and those people tend to also be supporters of social justice politics.
Like, nothing is being forced on this audience—there are large numbers of people who get sincerely excited when a new character is introduced that gives representation for the first time to a new minority group, or something like that.
As with so many businesses, the superfans are worth quite a few normies who might be put off by this. I think this is the main explanation.
I guess this is the part that’s not so clear to me. I see lots of people like this. I also see lots of people who are groaning about being repeatedly lectured and about their characters and franchises getting deconstructed. It’s hard for me to find a vantage point that doesn’t bubble me in one sphere or the other in a way that makes one side look overwhelmingly larger than the other. So I just can’t tell what the actual demographics are here. But the revealed behavior of these companies gives me the impression that they do find it crystal clear. That’s what I find a bit bewildering.
Your mistake is thinking that demographics matter, without considering intensity of support.
Let’s ignore wokism for minute, and look farther afield, at Japan. Japan’s demographics are well known to be kind of disaster. Their population has been declining for some years now. And yet, we find very little willingness among Japanese media franchises to market their wares abroad. Instead, what we find is intense specialization. Japanese media companies have understood for years that getting a lot of money from a few fans is just as profitable as, and in some ways more sustainable than, getting a small or moderate amount of money from a lot of people. As a result, Japanese media is intensely fandom oriented, with many franchises being nigh-incomprehensible unless you’ve bought in to the toys, the video games, the anime and the various manga spin-offs. .hack is a notable example of this, as is Pretty Cure.
I see American media going down the same road. Star Wars, for example, has been a notable example of this, with every movie after the original trilogy increasingly pandering to the fandom, and focusing on maximizing the amount of profit extracted from people who base their entire identity around Star Wars. Marvel is the same way, featuring deeply interlocking plots requiring the viewer to have watched a dozen preceding movies, a 7 season television series, and god knows what else, in order to really understand what’s going, who these people are, and why any of this matters.
In the US, for whatever reason, the people who get really invested in these sorts of things tend to be woke. The people who complain tend not to be as invested, and go do other things with their lives. So what ends up occurring is a process of evaporative cooling, where the people who complain about increasing wokism wander away from the franchise, and those who remain (and spend money) are woke.
I… don’t think that’s true. There have been a lot of complaints from the woke-supporting media about “toxic fans”, not to mention “gatekeeping” by uber-dedicated fans who have memorized lots of stuff and demand that others prove their knowledge or else they’re not real fans.
It is true that, eventually, the wokeness drives away those who don’t like it. Certainly you’ll get there after long enough. Not sure how far that has progressed. And not sure how much of the fanbase will be left.
I think The Last Jedi is one of the clearer counterexamples here. Among the list of complaints by some dedicated fans:
The beloved character of Luke Skywalker, who believed that even Darth Vader could be redeemed, shown as deciding (even briefly) to kill his own nephew for starting down a dark path, and then to waste the rest of his own life. There are interviews with Mark Hamill himself saying he didn’t like what was done with Luke.
Various other things that can be described as screwing with the audience, like having several paths of interest from the first movie (the big new villain Snoke, the mystery of Rey’s parentage) be cut off as “Nope, that’s not a thing, that’s not happening”. “Subverting the audience’s expectations” became a meme.
Dialogue literally saying “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” (Of the three heroes Han, Luke, and Leia from the original trilogy, the second one is killed in this movie.) One wonders whether it was meant for fans.
An entire subplot where the heroes go on some “crazy adventure with a desperate plan to save everyone”—classic Star Wars—and then are chastised because actually some vice-admiral, who looked like her plan was to just wait for everyone to die, turns out to have had a real escape plan, and you heroes were making things worse all along. (Why she didn’t explain this, even privately to the ringleader of the heroes—even when they mutinied and started off on their crazy plan that endangered her plan, she watched and kept her mouth shut—is unclear, but might be chalked up to bad writing, which is unfortunately common.)
Incidentally, the whole pattern of interaction between Poe and Holdo and Leia seems like a feminist wish-fulfillment thing: toxic-masculinity male, disrespecting female superiors, mansplaining (telling Holdo about the situation—which she already knows), disregarding their orders; the female superiors reacting with sarcasm, then being vindicated in the end and chastising him repeatedly (and stun-gunning him). It’s hard to imagine this as being meant to appeal to anyone except the woke; the only incomplete thing is that Poe’s actor is Latino rather than “white”.
There is a kind of attitude that comes across as actively hostile to a preexisting fanbase:
We’re changing things you loved.
If you complain about this, then (a) the thing you’re complaining about isn’t happening, your biases are showing; (b) of course that thing is happening and that’s normal and good; (c) either way you’re a bigot for complaining.
Good riddance to you. Also you’re in a tiny minority, so no one should support you or care that you’re leaving. Though we will complain about all the toxicity we get from people like you.
And this attitude seems to have taken hold in a bunch of places. Seems like a recipe for driving away existing customers. The question in this thread is, is it rational? Do they actually end up selling more product this way?
At least judging by box office numbers, The Force Awakens (which was a fan-pandering mostly-copy of the original Star Wars) made $2B, while The Last Jedi made $1.3B. Now, people can claim alternate explanations like sequel fatigue, so are there better ways to see whether the fans liked it? Audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes are 85% and 42% respectively. Well, a woke talking point is that negative Rotten Tomatoes audience scores on woke movies come from organized trolls, so what else? IMDB gives 7.8 and 6.9 respectively, and it also shows a histogram of those who rated it anything from 1 to 10, where even if we ignore the lowest ratings, we can see that, normalizing against the number of 8-votes, on The Last Jedi there are fewer 9- and 10-votes and more 7- and 6-votes; I doubt the trolls are coordinated and restrained enough to arrange that.
Of course, that’s just one data point. Another franchise to look at would be Ghostbusters, though this post is long enough already.
Generally speaking, the demographic that, as an adult, spends lots of money on toys, games, and other paraphernalia for your franchise is probably the exact “basement-dwelling male nerd” demographic that the woke tend to pick fights with. Maybe lots of them are so spineless that they’ll keep buying your product even after you insult them and tell them to go away, but even if that turns out to be true, I don’t think sane businessmen would have predicted that in advance and consciously bet their profits on it. I do believe it’s in large part a principal-agent problem: writers, directors, and some executives push for wokeness, and others generally don’t push back (among other reasons, it’s a principal-agent problem for them too: why risk your career for company profits?).
Fandom people on Tumblr, AO3, etc. really responded to The Last Jedi (because it was targeted to them). Huge phenomenon. There are now bestselling romance novels that started life as TLJ fanfiction. Everything worked just like it does for the Marvel movies, very profitably.
However there was an additional group of Star Wars superfans outside of fandom, who wanted something very different, hence the backlash. This group is somewhat more male and conservative, and then everything polarized on social media so this somehow became a real culture war issue. Of course, Disney did not like the backlash, and tried to make the 3rd movie more palatable to this group.
That kind of fan doesn’t organically exist for most things outside of Star Wars though. For most things, you only get superfans in this network of fan communities which skew towards social justice. And for any new genre story without a pre-existing fanbase, there’s an opportunity to get fandom people excited about it, which is very valuable.
Wow, Rian Johnson actually has a Tumblr account. That statement is plausible. And explains a decent amount.
Does that mean revenue for Disney? I googled and it looks like you mean “The Love Hypothesis”, which is being adapted by Netflix. Though I doubt Disney anticipated that particular result in any case.
Remember that the ultimate question here is whether what Disney did made business sense, knowing what they knew at the time.
“An additional group of Star Wars superfans”, as in, the group of people that were fans of Star Wars, buying Star Wars toys and games and attending Star Wars Celebration, since before Tumblr was created (2007)? Their preexisting repeat customer group, in other words? (I haven’t been able to find e.g. statistics on what percentage of Star Wars Celebration attendees were male, but I’d be surprised if, as of 2016, it were less than 80%, and 90% would not surprise me. I expect similar numbers for “people who’ve seen more than one Star Wars movie”, “people who have bought a Star Wars video game”, etc.)
You seem to be saying that Disney treated that preexisting customer group as an afterthought, instead targeting the Tumblr/AO3/etc. fandom group. (In fact, as I say, TLJ looks to be somewhat actively hostile to the first group—having characters criticize them by proxy for liking classic Star Wars stuff.) I’m not saying that’s an incorrect description of what they did, but, given what I expect the revenue numbers from the two groups were at the time TLJ was being created… I think this can be accurately described as “the decisionmakers for TLJ [most importantly Rian Johnson, but also any higher-ups who didn’t countermand him] were acting in a way that any profit-maximizer in their position should have recognized as expected-to-lose-profit”. Which was to be demonstrated.
So, for franchises with pre-existing fanbases… is the recommendation to go full woke, cater to the Tumblr fandom, and alienate some portion of the pre-existing fanbase? Does the recommendation depend on the relative sizes of the two?
deleted due to excessive downvotes.
Heavily downvoted for
(a) not answering the question and (b) insteadusing this space as an opportunity to repeater signal boost the left’s narrative in this particular corner of the culture wars.[Edited to correct an inappropriate blindness on my part.]
There are ways to say true things that are partly, mostly, or entirely for reasons having nothing to do with conveying the truth.
Notice the contrasting terms “anti-progress” vs. “inclusion”. And the framing about some folk not wanting categories of people to exist, rather than any kind of framing that such folk are caring for something that matters to them and might matter to civilization. And the injection of a slogan in the last line.
The tone of this isn’t about explaining something. It’s implicitly asserting that wokism is just overwhelmingly popular, which is the closest to an answer to the original question as is given. But it’s mostly about frame assertion.
I don’t care how true someone’s utterances are, or what side of the culture wars they’re fighting for, if they’re bringing in tactics like these. It heavily pollutes the information commons.
Egads. Well, I’m glad we could calibrate your trust then!
Oh. Actually I didn’t know that “woke” was a problematic word in this corner of memespace. I was just trying to point at the memetic structure and found this term lying around. I’ve seen it on media from far left to far right, so I’d guessed it was just the word everyone had converged on for referring to this thing.
Is there a word you prefer?
Ah, I think I missed this part of your comment here. Not sure how that happened.
On this I apologize. I missed that you were honestly trying to answer the question. Mea culpa.
The info commons point still stands though.
Cool. Thank you for explaining.
I also am sure that a more skillful version of me could have named and navigated all this with a lot more grace. You seem to be sensitive on this spot, but I also kind of hit it with a hammer. Sadly I don’t yet see a more graceful way to do the thing I’m caring for without fawning. But I’ll get there. I regret you got hit in the process.
Wanting to flag this as another example of frame control.
I’m not trying to align with the right. I think they’re nuts in almost exactly the same way.
My position is more like anti culture war escalation.
Sadly, this means that when someone is heavily aligned with one side of a front of the war, I can come across as aligning with their enemies.
Alas.
Mmm. As I just mentioned here, I actually didn’t know use of “woke” got interpreted as a “very strong right-side signal”. Lots of left-leaning folk around me use the term too. What does your corner of the left call it?
“Woke” is a pejorative neologism for “rights-and-equality-respecting”
coined by the anti-equality/human-rights/anti-LGBT/racist crowd. (Edit: Sorry, actually not coined by them.) What is called “woke” is actually normal, and what they’d call “normal” would have to be sanitized to avoid offending their sensibilities (white main characters, non-LGBT couples, etc.).My guess as to why “woke” (actually normal) culture is marketable is that the anti-rights-crowd is both getting smaller and losing its marketing power.
(In the future, when not wanting to signal the allegiance to the Bad Guys crowd (to both them and normal people), avoid using the word “woke” and find some other way of expressing the same sentiment. Example: “I can’t understand why is there a gay couple in a new movie. Any idea why they put such a bizarre, not-related-to-reality and not-appealing-to-viewers thing there?”)
The system wouldn’t let me delete your reply here. The button simply wouldn’t respond.
The problem in short is that you’re actively summoning the mind-killing aspects of politics by forcefully asserting one side of a culture war debate as fact, in content and in frame.
This is epistemically toxic and absolutely does not belong in the context of a discussion space for rationality.
Since the tech won’t let me delete your comment, I’ve heavily downvoted it, and I’ll leave this comment here.
I still think you’re seriously underestimating the value of green_leaf’s comment, though. it certainly does read as annoyed, but if I could, I’d have it hovering around −2, not −20.
As for the “culture war,” there I’m making a normative statement (they are morally wrong, we are morally right), not a factual one. If you want to dispute that, you can, but it goes beyond your original question and changes the topic.
Do you have anything to say about the factual part of my answer (the suggested reason why movies are increasingly normal rather than anti-rights/equality), or are you satisfied with getting offended at my answer not employing moral relativism?
I am not available to engage with someone who’s trying to attack me with moves like this one.
If you want me to engage with any content of what you have to say, I’ll need you to clean up the inclination to attack.
If you cannot or don’t want to do that, we’ll simply be done.
Ok.
This is false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
Thanks. I didn’t know that. So what I had in mind is the neologism (the third meaning), but the original word has actually normal roots.
The phrase “politically correct” seems to have undergone a similar trajectory in the US if my personal experience is any indication: the first time I heard it was in the late 1980s on KUSF, a radio station mostly run by students at the University of San Francisco, by a speaker who was obviously an adherent. (Specifically, she said, without irony or sarcasm, “Don’t you mean you want a Pepsi? Coke is not politically correct.”) Then after the phrase started to be used frequently by critics, some of the adherents started objecting to the term as pejorative (perhaps without realizing that the term was used by adherents before widespread use among critics).
If you find yourself uttering statements like this, consider that you may have been mind-killed by politics. (EDIT: To clarify, I’m from Europe, not the US, and am thus pretty far removed from US politics.)
Though to add a bit of substance to this comment, consider this: How would you expect a poll on the question “To the extent that you understand the term, do you consider yourself to be ‘woke’?” to break down by party? For instance, what numbers of “yes” vs. “no” would you expect for Republicans? Anyway, here’s such a poll from mid-2021.
Politics is a very encompassing term, and unfortunately, many people like folding into it even questions of human rights, dignity, etc. (and technically speaking, it’s true). The danger of avoiding having a well-defined, strong opinion on normality and morality on the grounds that it would be politics, and having a strong opinion on politics means being mind-killed, is that I could accidentally ignore the true/false and right/wrong distinction.
Unless you mean the form of those phrases and not the content (in which case—I picked the form deliberately).
A third possible interpretation I can see that you’re saying political discourse caused me not to think clearly about this topic, in which case I think you’re overrelativizing the issue by overcompensating to avoid being mind-killed yourself.
I’d expect most of them to identify as not-woke, let’s say 85-15.
After looking at the poll (of which I’m not sure to what extent it’s trustworthy), the real numbers are 36-17, which is 68-32 after renormalizing, which is different from what I expected. I’m not sure to what extent I should update on that.