Core tenet of anti-wokism: one must acknowledge/ pay lip service to the notion of racism and other social issues, but one must not permit any further exploration of said issue.
One interesting subtext to where tech philosophy is landing in all this is that it will be the downfalll of America if woke ideas are promoted, and it will similarly be the downfall of America if racists/sexists/etc can’t practice free speech.
Do you really believe this? It seems inconsistent with free speech and Paul Graham’s own definition of wokeness.
What other ideologies fall in this category? Or another way, what ideologies don’t fall under the category of free speech? Should we stop advertisements with gay people? All religions or just non-Christian religions? What makes an ideology woke? That the mainstream is uncomfortable with it?
Some people compare wokeness to a religion, and I think this is somewhat of an apt description. There’s a meme going around about abortion or whatever that says that it’s fine if you’re religious and you want to limit yourself, but your religion shouldn’t limit me, and this is how I feel about most social justice stuff.
I read woke/social justice stuff to shape my own understanding of the world and then use that to act to help people in substantive ways, but I don’t really believe in proselytizing. This way of thinking is not for everyone, nor should it be.
I don’t disagree with his definition, not disagree that it’s a problem, but it’s still feels a bit to anti-Wokey in that he calls out things that he just disagrees with. #metoo brought down some terrible people who did terrible things, I don’t think you should call metoo in and of itself woke, not overly moralistic to be mad about sexual assault, there should be some nuance there.
He also calls Bud Light woke for… acknowledging the existence of a trans woman? Again not excessively moralistic to reach out to a constituency he happens to not like.
I wonder if another reason for tech’s move right is more boring and traditional:
They're old.
They’re approaching middle age, the insights that they uniquely held are no longer relevant and they want to preserve their wealth and power from a new generation of thinkers who will want to take it away.
The challenge is that the better AI gets at coding the lower the barrier to entry, so being an I indie dev will be like being on YouTube. Anyone with dedication could post 300 videos a year and get thousands or tens of thousands of views, but making money? That will get harder.
I think a big question is what outcomes do you want. Let’s say a vaccine is dangerous. How many people are you willing to sacrifice on the misinformation. What if it leads to social upheaval? You could ask similar questions about say, class consciousness, immigration etc. true or not, beliefs have consequences.
I watched this debate between Destiny and a centrist influencer and the centrist influencer was really confident in their perspectives, but also said they mostly used heuristics to learn things. There’s nothing wrong with heuristics, but they played this game where Destiny tried to guess the centrist influencers perspectives on things, and came pretty close to all the opinions. And the influencer admitted their heuristics were really shallow.
One of the weirdest things I’m reckoning with is that objectivity isn’t optimal. That you’ll be most successful based on a relative positioning of beliefs (either towards or against a given common perspective) rather than being “objective” in most areas.
I suspect actually if you want to shape public opinion you do what Twitter and Meta are probably doing by the scenes, put your thumb on the scales around what goes viral. Which is much more terrifying than “fact checking”
I’m really into the TV show Downton Abbey, and lately I’ve come to take one of the characters as a role model of mine, and it’s telling that that role model is the Butler. Still a position to aspire to but squarely in the lower classes. I think there’s a balance, but engaging with your own life, whatever that is probably leads to more happiness to continuous aspiration. So many of our billionaires seem miserable. Even more so if you pine for that life to the absence of caring for your own.
It’s interesting how society never really teaches you how to have enough. But, of course, having more doesn’t really change your position. For the most part, unless you’re a top billionaire, relatively speaking there are still so many people above you. If my career took off like a rocket, it actually probably wouldn’t change my position much.
And being wealthy or famous or successful is just a set of activities. Ones that in some way, aren’t that much different from the activities you can pursue as an upper middle class person.
There are so many activities that I can pursue that I enjoy, maybe more than I would enjoy the activities of a billionaire. In my heart I think I know there’s something great in a moderate life. Something filled with friends and family and personal challenges and triumphs. But I’m certainly not immune to the world of comparison we live in.
One perspective that I don’t know 100% agree with but I often observe.
There’s no such thing as a conpromise on free speech, and that’s not the goal. The objective is not to find a center but to pull as far to my side as I can. That’s why I might support censorship of the other side. _because_ I know when they get in power they’ll do the same on the opposite side. This theory is played out by the fact that Facebook does a 180 like days before Trump takes over.
Not censoring the other side isn’t functionally useful, in fact, if I don’t censor the other side the pendulum will swing even farther.
In general I feel like there’s this false premise that if the left had handled this better the right wouldn’t be so mad. I think that’s wrong the right was always going to pull right, no matter the starting point.
I’m really disturbed the extent to which companies are in lockstep with the government, and this should be a conservative value? I’m glad to see a reset on DEI in general, it’s not going away but we’ve needed new ideas in the space and I suspect we’ll see a resurgence sooner than you’d think.
I don’t know that I disagree with the premise, but nationalizing anything during an administration that is key in denationalizing stuff, I just don’t see the current federal government, not maybe any of them being inclined to act in California’s best interest.
Well, except in this case, don’t they actually want to cut a shot ton maybe even $2 trillion from the budget? This is the kind of lie where Musk doesn’t care and everyone else does but he just said it to get Trump elected. I think Musk wants this, no?
I don’t understand the like strategy/politics of lying. Sure I never thought they were going to cut 2 trillion dollars from the budget, but why tell the truth about it now?
This is an interesting change, since threads was supposed to be the nice place, but liberals in my feed(particularly journalists fwiw) were super upset about the lack of politics. I assume though underlying this will be an attempt to deprioritize movements like blm/metoo
One interesting subtext to where tech philosophy is landing in all this is that it will be the downfalll of America if woke ideas are promoted, and it will similarly be the downfall of America if racists/sexists/etc can’t practice free speech.