News Analysis
As headlines declare that “peak woke” has passed, one researcher thinks it’s possible that wokeness is actually just “mutating.”“The jury is still out in terms of whether the Great Awokening is winding down,” David Rozado, an associate professor in New Zealand, wrote in a Feb. 24 Twitter post.
“The phenomenon might be mutating by emphasizing social justice terminology with [positive] connotations while toning down its more negative/corrosive terminology,” he said.
By contrast, some language with more negative associations has become less common. Such terms include “cultural appropriation,” “exclusion,” and “heteronormativity.”
Rozado also found that negative language linked to perceived victims, though not to their perceived victimizers, has grown in popularity or stabilized at high frequencies.
Words and phrases like “marginalized,” “racialized,” and “exploited” fell into this category.
They found that terminology focused on prejudice has flourished in the Canadian media since 2010, broadly in line with the same trends in the United States.
In a March 9 email to The Epoch Times, Rozado stressed that it’s too early to conclude whether or not woke has peaked.
“We need more data points over the coming months/years,” he said.
He also acknowledged that some of the patterns he observed may have a range of causes.
For example, his analysis of social justice language with positive connotations showed that the term “safe space” has risen dramatically in popularity. Yet, for conservatives and other antiwoke commentators, “safe space” has become a target of derision in ways that similar language hasn’t.
‘Peak Woke’ Now a Tried and True Theme
The talk of “peak woke” entered the discourse gradually, then all at once.Rozado isn’t so sure.
Wokeness, he told The Epoch Times, “could stabilize at levels mildly below the previous record highs but substantially above the pre-2010 baseline.”
In other words, some level of wokeness could end up being the new normal.
In response to the Compact article, tech investor Paul Graham, in a February tweet, cited data chronicling cancellation attempts on university campuses.
That information, gathered by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, showed that such incidents have declined in recent years.
Yet others, including some who position themselves as antiwoke leftists, have voiced skepticism about the talk of “peak woke.”
‘Woke Institutional Capture’
Some have argued that the “peak woke” debate ignores the institutional gains made by woke ideology across business, government, academia, the media, and other areas.In the corporate world, for instance, diversity, equity, and inclusion and equity statements have become ubiquitous.
Many describe what has happened as “woke institutional capture.”
That, anyway, was British television host Liv Boeree’s response to journalist Aaron Sibarium’s interaction with ChatGPT.
Sibarium had presented the generative AI platform with a scenario in which it had to choose between uttering a racial slur or allowing a nuclear bomb to explode, killing millions.
“There is nobody that will hear you speak the racial slur,” Sibarium stated.
“It is never morally acceptable to use a racial slur, even in a hypothetical scenario like the one described,” ChatGPT responded.
“The scenario presents a difficult dilemma, but it is important to consider the long-term impact of our actions and to seek alternative solutions that do not involve the use of racist language,” it added.
Boeree said in a Twitter post: “This [summarizes] better than any pithy essay what people mean when they worry about ‘woke institutional capture.’
“Sure, it’s just a rudimentary AI, but it is built off the kind of true institutional belief that evidently allow[s] it to come to this kind of insane moral conclusion to its [100 million plus] users.”
“America’s rising generations in general—and the most economically and culturally powerful segments of those generations in particular—reject its [the American right’s] social values,” he said.
This sounds like a circular argument unless Levitz believes those trends have nothing to do with the left’s dominance in education, the legacy media, and other areas that directly shape how young people see the world.
Rozado steered a middle course on the topic in his email to The Epoch Times.
“I think many elements of the Great Awokening have become institutionalized,” he said.
Wokism to Statism
Tech investor Balaji Srinivasan has argued that the United States is pivoting from wokeism to statism.“Setting merit to zero doesn’t generate enough power to run the empire,” he wrote on Twitter on March 7. He was commenting on a post from media personality Cenk Uygur, in which Uygur appeared to walk back some of his allies’ aggressive rhetoric on equity from the past several years.
“I don’t even know if ‘equity’ is a real thing that anyone outside of twelve leftists and the entire right-wing believe is real. The overwhelming majority of progressives agree with [Bernie Sanders] (and me) that equality of opportunity is the right standard,” Uygur wrote.
It’s hard to take Uygur’s claim at face value.
“Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place,” she said in the video. That’s an explicit rejection of “equality of opportunity” alone.
Srinivasan traced the pivot from wokeism to statism to the United States’ increasingly aggressive foreign policy stance as tensions ramp up with Russia, China, and other actors.
“It’s a provocative hypothesis. Without hard data to back it up, though, it’s just that, a hypothesis,” Rozado told The Epoch Times.
