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.
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?
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?
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
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
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.
What would be a form of right-messaging that would be less alienating to the public than left-messaging?
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.
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.
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.
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.