I've been reading lately that we might have passed Peak Woke. For example:
AOC removed the pronouns from her bio on 𝕏.
This is a clear sign of the cultural pendulum swinging back to the centre.
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 14, 2024
Fine, but Science™ requires data, not anecdotes. We need evidence that wokeness is on the decline.
Well, have I got something for you! It might seem that if we can't even define wokeness we can't measure it either, but that's not so. Behold the WI, the Woke Index:
The WI is an index composed of woke-adjacent words on Google Trends. The exact words remain a trade secret, but the result, measuring wokeness on a scale of 0-100, is above.
And believe it or not, it's interesting. Even though none of the words are race related, the raw index correctly places peak wokeness in June 2020, the month George Floyd was killed and progressive wokesters went crazy.
However, wokeness, like any cultural phenomenon, has inertia. For this reason the official index is the smoothed trendline. It places peak wokeness in January 2022 and suggests it's declined by about a quarter since then.
You might think this is moronic, but I say it's no worse than a hundred other indexes concocted by think tanks around the world (freedom, happiness, sustainability, etc. etc.). Maybe a little better, even. After all, even though the inputs were chosen with no knowledge of the outcome, curiosity about woke terms really does seem to correspond with widespread perceptions. I shall update it periodically.
Another periodic chart... yippee! You do love your charts!
Wouldn't wokeness decline when the need to be aware of inequality and bigotry also declined?
Who's going to protest for wokeness when wokeness won?
"Wokeness" is not a thing itself, it is euphemism for all types of efforts to end inequality based on race, sex, religion, sexual orientation and some other things. The MSM try to avoid imputing racism to anyone, even when it gets very blatant, and of course people on the right are not going to say they are "anti-anti-racism", let alone racist, so "woke" is the current codeword.
I do not say that "wokeness" is never excessive, but the objection of the right and MAGAs specifically is probably not to those excesses, but to the whole idea of loss of dominance of white, Christian, male, straight people.
Euphemisms tend to be replaced by new ones, so tracking the terms "woke" or "wokeness" will not necessarily track the social movement. But maybe some other combination of things, not necessarily words, could be used to track the intensity of anti-inequality activity, and the intensity of the reaction to it.
+1
it is not just the objection from MAGA
it is the obsession with it by reactionary centrists like Drum and Chait I find most problematic
It is the obsession with puerile, inflexible ideology of reactionary elitists like yourself that I find not just problematic, but destructive to any real progress, which requires the power to instantiate said progress. Baseless character assassination of those who don't meet your puritanical standards is exactly how we got Trump II. Good job, buckwheat.
Nope a-hole, we got Trump because a fire hose of disinformation from traditional and social media, convincing folks of all sorts of crazy notions.
This fire hose was the source of baseless character assassinations of those who would not fall in line to the MAGA talking points of the day.
I'm supposed to celebrate the world becoming less welcoming and more dangerous for my daughter, and other friends like her? Not to mention people of color?
Am I a moral scold? And nobody likes to be scolded morally, right?
Everything everybody does is just perfect and fine for me, and that harassment at the hands of TSA agents never happened.
Thank God we're getting over "wokeness". Whatever that is.
This poll, on support for Black Lives Matter, may do a good job of tracking the anti-racism part of "wokeness"
https://civiqs.com/results/black_lives_matter?uncertainty=true&annotations=true&zoomIn=true
And it agrees that the peak was reached just as or before the protests began. Of course the induced idleness of covid had something to do with the protests.
The Age of Woke may be coming to an end, and I know many will not miss it. But we'd be a better world if the Age of Anti-Woke were coming to an end, and that seems to be something that never happens.
+1
What's depressing is that the original concept and intent of "woke" was hijacked by entitled white folks and turned into a navel gazing joke. The 1619 Project should be required reading for every American high school student; instead we got pronouns and rabid virtue signaling. The left is as much or more an unexamined prisoner of its privilege as any billionaire, as evidence by the last four years of meaningless bullshit posturing.
Could that data be weighted incorrectly with the rabid reactionaries losing their shit over the progressive wokesters going crazy? Or is that baked in all through the data?
Maybe it's just scanning news feed headline for "woke" and since those have gone down, "showing" us that BIG WOKE is less of a thing.
Really, without more details, this is just silliness wasting our collective time.
That's what I mean. Woke as a search term probably shows up WAY more in the fetid corners of the conservative Internet, so is this chart a measure of right wing nuttery levels? Or is it just a measure of corporatease finally cooling? Because given enough time and shiny objects, they'll find other things to bitch about.
hard to say when we don't know the search terms KD used.
Sony and Disney both lost significant sums of money this year putting out some awful products that were more interested in agenda than they were in product quality.
Maybe we are past peak "wokeness," but it needs to fall about 75% not 25%.
I have bad news for you about how interested major corporations are in "product quality" especially in Hollywood - they absolutely do not care about it.
That said, whatever you're talking about is something else.
what is the "agenda" for Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine?
this ought to be good
I was talking about "The Acolyte" and whatever the latest MCU show was.
Sony bought a gaming studio, put a couple hundred million into it, came out with a game that they then shut down and refunded all sales after 2 weeks. Studio is now closed.
Ahh, yes, you disliked a show, and hence, it was woke.
Citation never offered.
So the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. And not wokeness.
This is semantic nonsense.
+1
I bet that sounded very smart in your head.
Wokeness and justice are closely related, though not quite synonymous, terms. You can't have one without the other.
Cool idea.
Your bizarrely right-wing crusade against "wokeness" is disturbing. I mean, you're a smart guy. I learn a lot from this blog. But seeing you buy into the Fox News narrative of "wokeness gone mad" is simply sad.
How do you not see that "wokeness", like "cancel culture" before it, is nothing but a conservative talking point that warps and misrepresents the very topic it's supposedly upset about.
Because he's a middle-aged retiree who lives in Orange County and doesn't do anything all day.
Kevin is over 65. He's not middle-aged, he's elderly. I speak from the viewpoint of a couple of years older than Kevin.
He was middle-aged when he started blogging. That was twenty years ago.
I don't see him participating in a crusade?
He's written several posts complaining about "wokeness", either as the main topic or just as a tangent from a related subject.
Sure, "crusade" may be a bit of hyperbole but he has been consistent in his opinion that "wokeness" is a serious problem on the left rather than overblown nonsense from the right
Some hooks get set, some never even get a bite.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No, not "...a serious problem on the left rather than overblown nonsense from the right." Why do you phrase it as either/or? It's both, as anyone who tries to see can see. What's extremely problematic is that a neo-puritanical, ideologically fixed and fixated 'left' is using the real and serious racism of anti-'wokeness' as a shield to avoid necessary and critical self examination. I'll put it simply - if you put your energies into essentially meaningless bullshit like pronouns and other signals of how good, right, and righteous a person you are, if you present yourself as morally superior, if you position yourself and your beliefs as self-evidentially right regardless of context, if your actions and behaviors are structurally indistinguishable from evangelical Christianity, a "moral minority" if you will, then we have left the station of any meaningful definition of 'wokeness' and fully entered the world of unexamined privilege and entitlement.
If there's one project for the left in the wake of Trump II and how disastrous this will be for exactly the causes and peoples that 'woke' folks claim to support, it's this - that any inflexible ideology, never mind one unrelentingly focused on privileged championing of fundamentally meaningless horseshit, is not a recipe for success. Without power, no matter how 'good' your ideas are, they mean nothing, and relentless morality policing of effectively trivial ideals does not, and will not, gain power in a democracy.
You seem to mention pronouns a lot. no one on the left is forcing anyone to describe themselves any particular way. the position on the left is that some people prefer certain pronouns so you should be respectful of the individual and use the pronouns they prefer. it is no burden on anyone and affects no one except the person who prefers those pronouns.
apparently being respectful is "too left" for you and other folks. every argument against using a person's preferred pronouns, or the idea that it's being "forced upon people" is coming from the right. don't fall for it
Trumpism is an inflexible ideology that seems to have gained power in a democracy.
If only.
For decades I've seen polls asking people if they thought political correctness or wokeness had gone too far. And even a majority of self described democrats said it was too much. Even on college campuses the majority always answered yes.
Everything's always gone too far.
The fact that you can say "for decades" should show you that it's an attitude that persists regardless of the actual situation. "Somebody" is always going too far, and it's never the Right.
Gee, what a surprise. Right wingers spend years complaining about "woke" and the MSM reports it as both sides so folks say it's gone too far.
What's interesting is that this Visegrad account started out as a pro-Ukrainian, anti-Russian account with little interest in anything outside of that war, and then slowly revealed itself as being a hardcore right-wing reactionary account, to the point of being useless and ignorable.
My point being, Kevin Drum should know better than to get information from a hardcore reactionary right-wing account, but because of his longstanding belief that he's smarter than everyone else, he's wound up in an information bubble.
this.
@visegrad24?
seriously?
Oh boy…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/15/the-boys-in-our-liberal-school-are-different-now-that-trump-has-won
What we saw now was that all this was the result of an obsession – perhaps somewhat subconscious – with preserving an idea of traditional masculinity that both Biden and Harris threatened, in different ways. As an older, frail individual, Biden was an easy target for Trump’s aggression. While Trump’s comments seemed like an attack on Biden’s age and mental competence, they also incorporated indirect attacks on his masculinity that influenced this impressionable demographic of young men. And when contrasted with Trump’s pumping fist after the assassination attempt in July, Biden was appearing weaker and weaker while Trump was solidifying his representation of traditional male heroism.
What's with the gibberish? You couldn't manage bigotry today?
Anonymous. An anonymous high school aged writer in the opinion section of the Guardian.
ಠ_ಠ
adding to this comment: I just saw a clone at NYT...
Boogeyman charts that nobody understands how it was created or how it could possibly be interepteted.....but its line with numbers, SO ITS SCIENCE!
Maybe next we get the Jewish Influence chart? Or the Blood Purity chart?
Good work!
The chart appears to display mild periodicity
First half of year a rises to a peak around April that returns to where it started from by the end of June..
Second half of year is random with a trend up or down that largely corresponds to the smoothed trendline (that I'm guessing is a moving average)
So... what might account for the net-zero change for six months that peaks half way in? I wonder if Easter / Passover is involved somehow. Remember, the index is based on *words* and religion has a lot of woke-ish words.
What is it about the second six months that make it prone to matching the "spirit of the age"? Could be as simple as (crudely) exhibiting the natural underlying trajectory of a passing fad.
Maybe it's the chocolate?
C'mon Kevin. The exact words are a trade secret? Cough them up up.
"the raw index correctly places peak wokeness in June 2020, the month George Floyd was killed"--he was killed in May 2020.