Is the general media-consuning public getting less awful? No, it must be the corporations who are wrong.
Also I feel like dropping the obligatory "for a group that prides itself on rationality they sure don't seem inclined to give 'woke' a solid definition for how much ink they spill on it."
It’s really funny how many contortions these guys will go to to avoid facing the tough reality that they’re an unpopular, radical fringe.
Your average person finds race “science” and gay bashing deeply off putting. Corporations realize this and have learned that making the most minor gestures towards inclusion wins them good will from the majority, and important rage from an unliked and economically insignificant rump. It’s really not complicated.
Addendum: it really is saying the quiet part out loud to say that “admitting that gay people exist” makes Disney woke, isn’t it?
It's pretty hilarious that the whole question is a blinking neon sign of the word 'bullshit' pointing directly at "get woke, go broke" refrain and the OP refuses to doubt it.
Like, clearly there's a lot of selection bias at play in "get woke, go broke" such that a failed movie is attributed to 'wokeness' *per se* and not, say, any entirely normal reason why a movie would under perform (or tv show, product, etc.). Perhaps we underestimate the capacity for audiences to identify and respond to 'wokeness' poorly done, i.e. clearly half-baked, token, or poorly communicated, etc. The feeling of being 'lectured about politics' doesn't necessarily mean one doesn't share those politics broadly or has some hard stance against the presence of politics in their entertainment! It could just be that people don't like politics done poorly!
Nope, must be some mysterious X factor. Some economic dark matter.
> "get woke, go broke"
This always is funny to me. Remember when the right tought they had enough cultural capital to take down patreon? Because patreon kicked out sargon of ack or somebody like that. That was funny. Even jordan peterson deleted his big account, and basically nothing changed for patreon itself. But the right did deplatform their own income.
> It's pretty hilarious that the whole question is a blinking neon sign of the word 'bullshit' pointing directly at "get woke, go broke" refrain and the OP refuses to doubt it.
I genuinely cannot think of a company that got woke and went broke. I can’t even think of any that suffered significant economic harm over one of the stereotypical brouhahas over some “woke” ad or twitter post.
Even scoped down to individual shows and movies, a lot of the common targets were actually successful. They’re still complaining about Rey in Rogue One, ignoring the fact that her gender wasn’t a plot point in the slightest, despite that film being a money printer. Not all of the “woke” female led movies were blockbusters, practically speaking they can’t all be, but all the ones they whine about seemed reasonably successful all things considered.
I can however think of a few companies and individuals that have suffered significant economic harm from going in the opposite direction though. Remember when they used to sell MyPillow in Bed Bath and Beyond? I do.
>It's pretty hilarious that the whole question is a blinking neon sign of the word 'bullshit' pointing directly at "get woke, go broke" refrain and the OP refuses to doubt it.
EXACTLY what I thought when I looked at the post. like it was so distressing how they can't understand what's happening, solely because they can't say this single idea might be incorrect.
I have no words to convey how Valentine's comments and behavior are to me, I feel like it's a caricature troll stereotype, but I know it is very, very, real.
Kirk and Uhura kissed, omg!! Why!?!? What's the profit incentive!?!?
The degree to which rationalists don't quite seem to understand art is a little baffling to me. Especially since my primary direct exposure to them is /r/rational, which is like 90% fiction recommendations. What is it about LessWrong that causes people to just turn off the part of their brain that recognizes "entertainment" as a thing that exists.
It is more that they have this twisted view of what constitutes progressive change in societies. They blame the media, governments, schools, etc, without looking outside for one fucking second and realizing peoples freedoms come from people doing the thing. It blows my mind this constitutes "rationality."
I thought LW was a damn furry community one point or did some shit change?
As a rationalist-adjacent, I honestly just spend most of my days working, occasionally hanging out on Reddit, hackernews, or getting high for a little entertainment. I see little use in enjoying the pleasantries of life (is that what you call entertainment?) when there’s lots of work (research, in my case and field) to be done. Idk, I love the rationalist community yet find this sub and its sneering of it just…fine. We’re fucking weirdos.
And outside of music, I definitely don’t understand what constitutes as art in most of its forms.
>Kirk and Uhura kissed, omg!! Why!?!? What's the profit incentive!?!?
Seriously, who the hell is out there paying for anything other than old recycled 50s gender and social norms?
> and holy shit, lesswrong lets the OP delete comments now! I wonder how many like this he killed
On the other hand, double downvoting bad posts feels extra good. I wish i could double downvote posts here!
The meltdown of the conservative movement over the last ten years,
and its embrace of increasingly extremist, authoritarian positions on
culture war issues, fundamentally comes down to the simple fact that the
free markets they cherish are like Kryptonite to the traditional values
they also cherish. Both Marxists like Eric Hobsbawm and fascists like
Richard Spencer have noted that, for all that Soviet Marxist-Leninism
called itself a radical ideology, it rigorously enforced the social
mores it inherited from the Old Bolsheviks in the name of stamping out
any movement that could threaten its authority, while Western market
liberalism brought cultural dynamism and (after a period of awkwardness
and adjustment) had no problem accommodating the new social movements
that emerged in the ’60s. Even with socialism itself, most of the
innovation in socialist thought after World War II came from either the
West or the Global South (most notably Maoism and Third Worldism), not
from an Eastern bloc where Marxist-Leninism was locked in as the state
ideology.
This is why we’re seeing the rise of movements like
paleoconservatism, integralism, national conservatism, common-good
constitutionalism, and other right-wing movements that explicitly
question free-market capitalism, seeing it as a force just as radical
and destructive as Marxism and arguing that conservatives sold their
souls to the Devil by embracing it in the name of fighting communism.
It’s the mirror image of the large-scale disillusionment that many
American progressives felt in the ’60s and ’70s when they saw the
proactive government they thought was on their side trample on civil
rights in Birmingham and Kent State, send 55,000 young men to die in
Vietnam, and spy on protesters and activists, causing them to embrace an
increasingly anti-government attitude.
The old-school Reaganites who still insist that “real
capitalism would never allow this, it’s all because leftists infiltrated
these corporations!” are the modern-day version of those who remained
dogged New Deal liberals in the ’70s. In both cases, they’re essentially
the last true believers insisting that the only reason their preferred
policy produced bad outcomes for them is because the Wrong People were
charge of it, instead of looking at the blind spots in their system that
not only allowed the Wrong People to take it over but practically
ensured that they would. For instance, how a powerful state bureaucracy
could be used by white reactionaries to direct wealth and opportunity to
other white reactionaries while muzzling dissidents and bulldozing
non-white communities to make way for highways, or how media and
consumer enterprises whose first loyalty is to the Almighty Dollar would
be more receptive to the concerns of urban and suburban liberals who
have money to spend than rural conservatives who don’t.
> right-wing movements that explicitly question free-market capitalism
I think this is kind of an interesting take. Do you have any examples?
>It's the mirror image of the large-scale disillusionment that many American progressives felt in the '60s and '70s when they saw the proactive government they thought was on their side trample on civil rights in Birmingham and Kent State
Aren't there even earlier examples from which progressives can draw that the government wasn't on their side based on the labor struggles starting at least 50 years earlier?
Yeah, for all the digital ink spilled over conservatives souring against capitalism, it looks remarkably like they're incapable of coming up with a framework that isn't just the same old conspiracy theories.
>I think this is kind of an interesting take. Do you have any examples?
Plenty. It goes way back to the moment capitalism really took off in the 19th century. Back then, the aristocrats saw it the same way we now view Marxism, because back then, it was the radical new mode of economic organization that threatened the power of entrenched interests. Capitalism was the force that empowered the liberals and the nationalists who opposed the interests of the landed gentry, state churches, and petty statelets of the era.
By the 20th century, capitalism had been leapfrogged by socialism as the new radical ideology *du jour*, but conservative critiques of it never really went away. For a particular type of reactionary, both capitalism and socialism were creatures of industrial civilization that had shredded the Proper Order of Things. They both valued material concerns above everything else and would throw out any higher ideals and virtues that didn't have immediate utility for the purpose of accumulating More Stuff.
Between the crimes of the fascists discrediting a lot of the anti-capitalist right, the New Deal becoming the face of mainstream left-wing politics, and the Cold War forcing conservatives to make their peace with capitalism as a lesser of two evils compared to Marxist-Leninism, these critiques fell by the wayside in the postwar era (barring a handful of cranky, unreconstructed fascists like Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, and Savitri Devi). However, they never disappeared entirely, and they made a comeback after the Cold War ended through people like Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis, leading to the rise in the last several years of the ideologies I listed earlier. Conservatism being explicitly *pro*\-capitalist, as opposed to just anti-communist, is a fairly recent phenomenon that goes back to the mid-20th century.
>Aren't there even earlier examples from which progressives can draw that the government wasn't on their side based on the labor struggles starting at least 50 years earlier?
By the '60s, progressives thought that things had changed. This was the era of the New Frontier and the Great Society. Government was now serving the many, not the few. Labor rights were now protected by the government through the NLRB, not suppressed by it through the National Guard. The government was now in their hands and couldn't possibly side with capital against labor like it did back in the old days.
The key word there was *now*. They'd forgotten what things used to be like, and their faith in progress meant that they never conceived that they could go back to that, or even that such malign forces were still lurking within the system they built. The '60s were a hard lesson in how state authority wasn't necessarily the benevolent force that New Deal liberals thought it was, how it could also be used for ill.
I appreciate the detailed reply. This is the kind of interesting comment that I stay on Reddit for, though it deserves a better read that I can give it while scarfing down my late lunch.
> I think this is kind of an interesting take. Do you have any examples?
The Thiel/Moldbug people are one example, and maybe what the GP was talking about, since monarchy is pretty far away from libertarianism. Trumpism is also right-wing but pro-tariff and anti-immigration.
Some maybe more interesting examples are:
* American Compass, a think tank run by Oren Cass which pushes industrial policy and pro-labor pro-family policies. Cass was an advisor to the Romney 2012 campaign and has the ear of several Republican senators, including Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio.
* Compact Magazine, which is hard to pin down but can semi-seriously be called "right-wing marxism". If you go to their site you'll see a recent article by Moldbug but he's not a frequent contributor and isn't a great illustration of the site. I believe Compact was a splinter from First Things, a US Catholic (not tradcath, actual catholicism) magazine.
What’s funny is that they’re confused about how “wokeism” survives in
the market when they can’t provide any clear reason why it
wouldn’t — they fail to explain why there would be a market
disincentive for being “woke” that makes the prevalence of “wokeism”
need explaining. Like, in one comment someone draws an analogy to the
clear market disincentive there is for segregation, but even in making
that analogy they don’t even bother to provide a similar incentive
against being “woke.” There’s just this axiomatic assumption that the
market MUST be against “wokeness.” So they’re spinning all these bizarre
attenuated theories without any need to in the first place.
In fact, I would even go so far as to say that the same market
incentive there is against segregation also holds less strongly for
bigotry. If being inclusive lets you overall expand your customer base
because more people will want to engage with your product, who cares if
you lose the few bigots who’ll actually bother to boycott you.
I think the reasoning there is pretty clear. They believe that the market is always right, and that wokeness is always wrong, so there *must* be some market incentive against wokeness. Otherwise they'd have to accept that the axioms they've built their worldview on aren't infallible.
> What's funny is that they're confused about how "wokeism" survives in the market when they can't provide any clear reason why it wouldn't
I'll try and take a stab at it, since I'm assuming this sub isn't going to try and kill the proverbial messenger. I think the logic is that there's a very vocal population of people (especially online) that react quite negatively to anything they perceive as "woke". Consider that even people who consider themselves rationalists are susceptible to a kind of experiential myopia (i.e. "the world is this way because it's always been this way *for me*"), the assumption is that a good portion of the market will reject goods and services associated with "wokeness" which might lead them to be out-competed.
> for wokism coming from? LessWrong asks the \*important\* questions, like why the market doesn't care what weird barely-crypto-fash think any more
https://www.rationality.org/about/staff#:\~:text=Michael%20%22Valentine%22%20Smith,Senior%20Instructor%20%26%20Cofounder
Not super familiar with the lw forums and now im wondering. Is this
lond of themotte style content common? Because as a post this is not
what I expect from lw pure rw biassed culture war style drivel. Wonder
how much of it is themotte posters breaking containment.
E: nevermind checked their profile and
ow god. https://www.lesswrong.com/users/valentine a cofounder of cfar.
He came at this without themotte. And his blog relentlessdawn is
really weird spiritual shit. (note I say weird as in, it is strange to
me, I’m not judging it otherwise, as I’m not spiritual enough myself to
do that, im not feeling any spiritual void and im fine spiritual wise
and im not in that scene at all. I just didn’t expect a cofounder of
cfar to start blogging about astrological
Saturn and how they have listened to Saturn in some way and have
some alternative view on Saturn (I have no idea if this is normal, or
that somebody is legit creating alt-astrology here). He also has a
youtube, which I will not link nor discuss because this is already
stalky enough).
Yeah I won't deny there are some really socially borked people who hang out at LW. There are some prominent rats who are "anti-woke" too.
The majority of the people who are in some way rats or rat adjacent aren't though.
Not sure why you would think that. There isn't universal agreement about anything in the rat community and Scott is a fucking wanker and I'm not the only person who thinks so.
Primarily the online rat community is a social club for autists and people who are happy to hang out with autists. Offline my experience is a bit less autism heavy but still very Neuro diverse and awkward socially on balance. The circles I travel in are very left leaning and mostly think Scott is a duckhead.
If you want to right off eveyone who reads ratfic or socialises with those who do then go ahead. But perhaps you could consider thst they're also just people. And not eveyone somewhat rat or rat adjacent believes in the coming AI apocalypse and all the other stupid shit Yud or Scott say.
> very left leaning
i'm sure
if you try to tell me the rationalist subculture isn't saturated with scientific racism and hasn't been for the past 20 years, that's simply a false statement.
Yeah it is of course impossible that my lived experience means anything. It is of course impossible that you don't know everything. It is of course impossible that you don't know better.
You fucking *are* Scott Alexander.
And me here for PR. Are you fucking kidding me.
1. I wouldn't advertise the rat community to anyone who wasn't autistic and even then with a very heavy warning. I mean it's good for one thing. People on the spectrum can hang out without being alienated and otherised and dehumanized by cunts like you.
2. What gives you the idea that I would make good PR for literally anything. If I wanted to be PR for something I advocated for I'd do it by not saying anything in public. I mean look at the fucking rat community. I think we can both agree that most of the people trying to be PR for it should just shut the hell up and have a better effect. I'm neither as stupid nor as arrogant nor as out of touch with reality as any of the figureheads as to think I would be good for PR.
3. PR for the rat community .... here. Lol. Actually I try get rats I know to come to this sub if the fools have been drinking the cool aid and believing in that death cult AI stuff or just taking Eliezer or Scott seriously.
You're so out of touch with the thing you know everything about and so confident you really reek the very same way Scott heads do.
> impossible that my lived experience means anything
you met a few nice people? congratulations!
you do understand that doesn't alter the rest of well documented reality, right?
your "no, u" is fabulous, do continue
So, the claim is that the foundation of rationalism is to reinvent race science for the umpteenth time, introduce reactionary views into the mainstream, and fear-monger about AI for profit, and that the vast majority of the community, from the top to the bottom support this, all documented extensively on sneerclub.
And your response is "I have a gut feeling that actually we're mostly good folks, and there's actually a lot to learn from this community despite its monstrous intent, and actually you're racist against rationalists"? You seem to think it's a nebulous de-centralized movement, but it's not, it's a highly hierarchical astroturfed campaign: you are being bought by money to enact right-wing policy.
You could just read philosophy and science without resorting to "rationalism". Nothing good there is original, and nothing original there is good.
Where’s the profit incentive to “wokeism”… what the everloving fuck.
Encanto is super woke and also disneys biggest hit in a hot minute. The
customers love that shit, and what’s not to love? The animation is so
beautiful, music is awesome, the cultural references are cool, and it’s
just a great story with real universal appeal.
Remember that woke was defined by the state of Florida in court as
“systematic injustice exists and we should fix that”. Why is there a big
market for that? Probably because most people are kind and nice and not
the ghoulish parody of humans that rationalists are.
Didn’t these guys used to at least pretend at having some
intellectual rigor? How about providing an actual definition of “woke”
and some evidence that actually shows that “wokeism” is actually
increasing before you write a bunch of nonsense about that?
This is grotesque. I read about 20 of those comments and had to stop,
making me too mad…I just can’t believe people sometimes. I shouldn’t be
surprised. Do any of these people have kids? Have any
of these people talked to a child at all, ever? On a more general level,
do they not get that “characters and storylines that are more reflective
of reality [on top of the existing Disney formulae]” or, shit,
“characters being nice” might, I dunno, be really popular? Or
that censoring for a market isn’t the same as creating a film in the
first place? Or any of the almost complete dislocations between what
they really want and what reality is, as enunciated in
other comments here? Etc etc ad infinitum. Dumb bastards, the lot of
them
Majority of Americans aren’t assholes to other demographics, media
follows suit for profit. Conservative media acts like natural
progression of ethics is great conspiracy and calls it a diabolical
“woke movement” to stay relevant instead of falling into the recesses of
obscurity. They’re the same people who would have shouted at black kids
entering a desegregated school.
lol, someone answered with the obvious: “The customers.” and got -20 karma
and holy shit, lesswrong lets the OP delete comments now! I wonder how many like this he killed
The meltdown of the conservative movement over the last ten years, and its embrace of increasingly extremist, authoritarian positions on culture war issues, fundamentally comes down to the simple fact that the free markets they cherish are like Kryptonite to the traditional values they also cherish. Both Marxists like Eric Hobsbawm and fascists like Richard Spencer have noted that, for all that Soviet Marxist-Leninism called itself a radical ideology, it rigorously enforced the social mores it inherited from the Old Bolsheviks in the name of stamping out any movement that could threaten its authority, while Western market liberalism brought cultural dynamism and (after a period of awkwardness and adjustment) had no problem accommodating the new social movements that emerged in the ’60s. Even with socialism itself, most of the innovation in socialist thought after World War II came from either the West or the Global South (most notably Maoism and Third Worldism), not from an Eastern bloc where Marxist-Leninism was locked in as the state ideology.
This is why we’re seeing the rise of movements like paleoconservatism, integralism, national conservatism, common-good constitutionalism, and other right-wing movements that explicitly question free-market capitalism, seeing it as a force just as radical and destructive as Marxism and arguing that conservatives sold their souls to the Devil by embracing it in the name of fighting communism. It’s the mirror image of the large-scale disillusionment that many American progressives felt in the ’60s and ’70s when they saw the proactive government they thought was on their side trample on civil rights in Birmingham and Kent State, send 55,000 young men to die in Vietnam, and spy on protesters and activists, causing them to embrace an increasingly anti-government attitude.
The old-school Reaganites who still insist that “real capitalism would never allow this, it’s all because leftists infiltrated these corporations!” are the modern-day version of those who remained dogged New Deal liberals in the ’70s. In both cases, they’re essentially the last true believers insisting that the only reason their preferred policy produced bad outcomes for them is because the Wrong People were charge of it, instead of looking at the blind spots in their system that not only allowed the Wrong People to take it over but practically ensured that they would. For instance, how a powerful state bureaucracy could be used by white reactionaries to direct wealth and opportunity to other white reactionaries while muzzling dissidents and bulldozing non-white communities to make way for highways, or how media and consumer enterprises whose first loyalty is to the Almighty Dollar would be more receptive to the concerns of urban and suburban liberals who have money to spend than rural conservatives who don’t.
What’s funny is that they’re confused about how “wokeism” survives in the market when they can’t provide any clear reason why it wouldn’t — they fail to explain why there would be a market disincentive for being “woke” that makes the prevalence of “wokeism” need explaining. Like, in one comment someone draws an analogy to the clear market disincentive there is for segregation, but even in making that analogy they don’t even bother to provide a similar incentive against being “woke.” There’s just this axiomatic assumption that the market MUST be against “wokeness.” So they’re spinning all these bizarre attenuated theories without any need to in the first place.
In fact, I would even go so far as to say that the same market incentive there is against segregation also holds less strongly for bigotry. If being inclusive lets you overall expand your customer base because more people will want to engage with your product, who cares if you lose the few bigots who’ll actually bother to boycott you.
[deleted]
this guy is the cofounder of CFAR, btw, just in case anyone tries to make out this isn’t a normative rationalist
Not super familiar with the lw forums and now im wondering. Is this lond of themotte style content common? Because as a post this is not what I expect from lw pure rw biassed culture war style drivel. Wonder how much of it is themotte posters breaking containment.
E: nevermind checked their profile and ow god. https://www.lesswrong.com/users/valentine a cofounder of cfar. He came at this without themotte. And his blog relentlessdawn is really weird spiritual shit. (note I say weird as in, it is strange to me, I’m not judging it otherwise, as I’m not spiritual enough myself to do that, im not feeling any spiritual void and im fine spiritual wise and im not in that scene at all. I just didn’t expect a cofounder of cfar to start blogging about astrological Saturn and how they have listened to Saturn in some way and have some alternative view on Saturn (I have no idea if this is normal, or that somebody is legit creating alt-astrology here). He also has a youtube, which I will not link nor discuss because this is already stalky enough).
Where’s the profit incentive to “wokeism”… what the everloving fuck. Encanto is super woke and also disneys biggest hit in a hot minute. The customers love that shit, and what’s not to love? The animation is so beautiful, music is awesome, the cultural references are cool, and it’s just a great story with real universal appeal.
Remember that woke was defined by the state of Florida in court as “systematic injustice exists and we should fix that”. Why is there a big market for that? Probably because most people are kind and nice and not the ghoulish parody of humans that rationalists are.
Didn’t these guys used to at least pretend at having some intellectual rigor? How about providing an actual definition of “woke” and some evidence that actually shows that “wokeism” is actually increasing before you write a bunch of nonsense about that?
That’s a bizarre question for a rationalist to ask, considering that “wokism” is not a thing that exists.
This is grotesque. I read about 20 of those comments and had to stop, making me too mad…I just can’t believe people sometimes. I shouldn’t be surprised. Do any of these people have kids? Have any of these people talked to a child at all, ever? On a more general level, do they not get that “characters and storylines that are more reflective of reality [on top of the existing Disney formulae]” or, shit, “characters being nice” might, I dunno, be really popular? Or that censoring for a market isn’t the same as creating a film in the first place? Or any of the almost complete dislocations between what they really want and what reality is, as enunciated in other comments here? Etc etc ad infinitum. Dumb bastards, the lot of them
Majority of Americans aren’t assholes to other demographics, media follows suit for profit. Conservative media acts like natural progression of ethics is great conspiracy and calls it a diabolical “woke movement” to stay relevant instead of falling into the recesses of obscurity. They’re the same people who would have shouted at black kids entering a desegregated school.