Actually, I came up with a much better definition that I think fits.
"I found a paradox, that in a lot of ways wokeness is deeply, deeply conservative. There's an orthodoxy, and all that matters is that you follow the orthodoxy. Everything outside the orthodoxy must be rejected and silenced, and anyone who isn't strictly following orthodoxy must be rejected and silenced regardless of their alignment otherwise.
If progressivism is truly about challenging norms and fostering dialogue, then an orthodoxy should not exist. Instead, the rigidity undermines progressiveness by creating a new form of conservatism: a defense of the orthodox beliefs and existing hierarchies within the movement itself.
The foolish justification for this behavior they came up with of Popper's paradox of tolerance relies on answering a paradox with one answer or another without realizing that the nature of a paradox is such that there is no cut and dry black and white answer.
My criticism here of paradox also applies to the paradox I recognized, by the way. You can't change anything to resolve it in a simple black and white manner because the components that make up the paradox are required to have the thing in the first place and thus the question is complicated. Without some form of orthodoxy, progressive ideology that questions societal norms would immediately have to start questioning the societal norms it successfully installed, potentially just resulting in paralysis.
I wonder though if this framework helps explain the difference between "progressive" and "woke". The former is a spectrum that most westerners are somewhere on, the latter is where you reach a highly dogmatic, highly self-assured spot on the spectrum.
Most people, even a supermajority of ideological conservatives, want social progress in some form. Anyone can see things aren't perfect and want things to be better. It's when you know exactly what needs to be done and it makes you a better person than everyone else and anyone standing in your way is the devil that it becomes (to use a bad term in context) problematic."
The dogmatic adherence to orthodoxy further fits with an analysis I did a few months ago about the movie Idiocracy. In that movie, the entire world is taken over by a form of populist, anti-intellectual idiocy. My criticism of the movie was that there are in fact multiple forms of idiocy. and today's predominant form of idiocy is in fact elitist and pseudo-intellectual. As an example, instead of watching "ow my balls", watching people watching "ow my balls" so you can point and laugh at the idiots watching the stupid show, as if that's any better. Under such a form of idiocy, the dull end up using the trappings of intellect to try to act as intelligent people, similar to the cargo cults of the pacific islands. From this point of view, the strict adherence to orthodoxy is a requirement because such idiots can't synthesize new ideas, they can only take ideas someone else created and pretend they came up with them, and any movement from that strict orthodoxy will not allow them to pretend they're smarter than they really are.
Ironically, the phrase "anyone that says anything I don’t like is woke" is part of the orthodoxy of wokeness. It suggests that the author of the parent post won't engage with my arguments in any real way, because they're just reciting pieces of an orthodoxy they've been given.
My post didn't call PC Gamer "Woke", I called it "Dreck". The problem with it isn't necessarily that it has even performative orthodox progressive values, it's that it has always been boring, lazy, and typically just an industry mouthpiece. I used to subscribe to PC gaming magazines, and there ere more entertaining magazines such as the legendary PC Accelerator, there were more engaging magazines that brought in industry experts like Ken Levine, there were more neutral magazines such as PC Games magazine, but virtually all of those magazines failed while PC Gamer continues on.
The fact that the article spends so much time in its introduction using orthodox buzzwords is evidence of what I'm talking about. The actual article appears to be "someone I disagree with politically is doing a thing. They are bad because I disagree with him politically."
Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
I don’t agree with you, but you are onto something.
Your use of “wokeness” is a good description for the way “Woke” is used to keep minorities in their place, c.f. Simpsons writing Apu out, despite dozens of subcontinent ethnicity comedians all openly saying they’d love the role, or streaming companies just stopping access to “problematic” content for an easy headline, c.f. Many streaming services and Community’s first D&D episode.
It is shown in people too, usually comorbid with a white saviour complex, where the being seen in the act of “helping” is more important than listening to the voices of whoever is being helped and the actual effectiveness, or desire, for the “help” given.
I wonder how neatly it maps onto a Liberal/Leftist divide… Probably not especially as everyone has blindspots and hangups over Race and Class that can be buried quite deep in the subconscious.
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 weeks ago
I don't always even know if I agree with myself when I'm trying to figure out stuff that's outside the edge of my own understanding, so regardless of whether you think you're right I appreciate the constructive engagement.
One employment lawyer I heard an interview with once suggested something similar to but subtly different than what you're talking about, that "woke" is actually a scheme by the ownership class to divide the working class by getting us to attack each other so we don't work together to get better wages or working conditions from them.
It's definitely a multi-faceted issue.
One of the keys is definitely that "woke" isn't all progressive thought, it's a very specific point, so to criticize the piece isn't to necessarily criticize the whole.
On the matter at hand though, the fact that the accusations against Musk are very specific and in a very specific order really speaks to the fact that it isn't really the author's personal thoughts. There's lots of things you can go after the guy for that aren't in order "racist sexist misogynistic homophobic transphobic". Much more relevant to the article would be that he often claims he'll be able to do things he can't, or he sets timelines he can't possibly meet, or his whole fortune is based on a ponzi scheme where the world's smallest car company has a market cap that dwarfs any other car company even when those other companies have entire product lines Tesla isn't even involved in. Most people who play video games don't play a game engine. Most people agree that once John Romero left id the company really wasn't the same, and while Quake 2 is a technical marvel it isn't nearly as fun to play or atmospheric as doom or quake. Doom 3 was also a technological marvel, but most people don't remember it as a classic the same way they remember doom or quake. Doom 2016 was the first time in decades that id really hit the nail on the head hard, and it was thanks to real creativity and bringing new ideas into the franchise and in many ways into the genre as a whole.
That's the actual problem with using AI to produce games, AI is an inherently conservative force -- not in a political sense, but in that it is fed data and does a great job of creating permutations of that data. AI is incredibly powerful for creating something like what has already come before it, but true creativity brings something new. Someone writing about a feeling nobody's ever written about that represents insight into the human mind, that's something a human can produce, but not an AI.
Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com 2 weeks ago
Woke is also an exonym, so it doesn’t really have a hashed out definition people who it’s used to describe would agree with.
On the more pertinent issue, yes - AI can’t create new things or really do anything that hasn’t been done before. And yes, no one really plays an engine, as much as the Occulus Rift fanbois wished about a decade ago.
I think the article flows reasonably well, though is more a hit piece/jokey opinion piece rather than an actual interrogation of anything Musk said. It’s the lowest kind of news, someone’s musings on someone saying something about someone saying something. The main push is his hypocrisy, with the whole “too many big corporations, so my big corporation should do it” lines.
But yes, it’s just brainless easy dunking on Musk without giving the whole thing anymore thought than Elon himself has.