Anti-wokeness as entertainment
Thoughts on echo chambers and how much fun they are
TL;DR
Once useful - and arguably essential - critique of Wokeism is mostly now an entertainment business model.
Some of my favourite moments of the day are when I crack open a beer and fire up a podcast as the soundtrack to making dinner. There's a preference hierarchy here, which means that the moment there's a new episode of Blocked and Reported, that's what I choose.
For those who don't know it, Blocked and Reported is produced by journalists Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, mostly riffing on ideologically-based media and social media controversies. The title takes its cue from a common riposte people will post, generally on Twitter, in response to something they deem harmful or offensive.
I happened upon BarPod (as it's affectionately known) not long after retiring from Twitter and their themes chimed with me. Typically Jesse and Katie will discuss a controversy and tease out the most ludicrous strands among the 'hot takes' around it. It's fascinating, funny and disturbing all at once.
As a format it's reliably engaging, if you've witnessed or experienced the hysteria of hyper-online life sufficiently for the subjects they cover to make sense. I enjoyed it enough to become a supporter and benefit from subscriber-only 'premium' episodes. I still love it, but I noticed lately that my experience of listening to BarPod has changed.
In short, what began as a learning experience has now turned into entertainment.
This mirrors the way I'm experiencing a lot of 'culture war' critique at this point.
What seems to be happening is that mocking or demonising the citizens of Wokeistan has turned into a business model all over the internet. This is doubtless because a growing segment of people sense significant bad faith, poor behaviour and overreach on the part of many social justice proponents. It's always something of a relief to have one's intuitions validated by listening to, watching or reading generally smart people criticising something you felt a bit guilty about disliking.
But what I began to suspect recently was that I've inserted myself into a new echo chamber in which being anti-Woke is the new Woke and it's all becoming kind of onanistic and superior.
Perhaps this is inevitable when new strands of thinking emerge about anything. It starts out cool, fresh and radical before becoming mainstream. Anti-Woke certainly feels like a mainstream position at this point. It feels safe and predictable, thanks to the endless supply of real life caricatures out there who are willing to keep upping the ante on claims of harm and how to achieve ‘justice’, in questionable ways, for marginalised and minority groups.
Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog probably top the charts here, being thoughtful and funny, with impeccable credentials and painful experience, both having sustained alarming levels of abuse in their previous day jobs writing in the sociocultural and political space. They now make a good living from BarPod and recently appointed a researcher/producer. They've gone from doing a sometimes chaotic podcast to having staff and a fairly professional format. From punk to pop in little more than a year. Well done them. I remain a fan.
But I want more and I'm struggling to find it. One reason is that I don't want to be that guy who bores everyone with the argument that we all knew the right was bad but this Woke thing is just like China during the Cultural Revolution. Literally anyone who is paying attention knows that the leftish is like this now and there's only so many tales about people getting upset with other people for things that many of us think they shouldn't be upset about that you can hear before wondering ... so what's the answer?
Another writer/thinker I admire, Freddie deBoer, wrote what is for me the definitive piece attempting to move this epic confrontation on and I recommend you read it. He was responding to the inevitable moaning from the usual suspects that 'Woke' is really just a (sneakily racist) term of abuse and that as a word it's not tethered to anything outside the minds of people who use it.
Definitely, read it.
Meanwhile I also notice that the anti-Woke resistance is starting to get a bit weird itself. I unsubscribed from the podcast of a guy called James Lindsay when it started to feel like he was becoming psychologically unhinged. He rambled for about an hour on a point he'd just spent two minutes articulating perfectly well and I realised that there was no further cultural or political enlightenment to be gleaned from him. He just hates Wokeism and that, to me, is dull. And stressful, if you’re prone to emotional contagion. I want food for thought, not poison coursing through my Bluetooth speaker. Hate is why I quit Twitter. And not the hate of the 'actual fascists' - the hate of everyone for everyone else outside their groups.
As legacy media collapses under challenge from braver independent media (and the abject out-of-touchness of many legacy media writers) it's fashionable to celebrate the rise of Substackistan and quite-interesting, often right-leaning, fresher media like Unherd and Quillette. But I'm sceptical. My intuition is that most people in the 'heterodox space' are going over the same old ground every day because it gets eyeballs. And everyone's got to eat, right? And anti-Woke content is popular, so the dynamic of audience capture gets in the way of tackling difficult work, like coming up with new ideas.
There is an interesting thread in this episode of BarPod, in which academic Jeffrey Sachs is interviewed about cancel culture on the right, in relation to school curricula in America. Hearing about some of the ludicrous attacks on freedom of thought in American education coming from the right is a revelation.
If something seems like a revelation, that's a sure sign you've slipped into an echo chamber. Credit to BarPod for this, but I can't help noticing that listening to BarPod is a big part of why I sense that I'm now in one.
It would be lovely to suddenly produce, with flourish, a blindingly perspicacious observation of possible ways forward here. I have nothing, though.
Perhaps the best we can do is to maintain self-awareness and recognise that we like what we like, often more than we like what's genuinely useful.
A noticing about this newsletter
Rarely Certain is grinding toward the milestone of 1,000 readers for some articles and a reasonable (apparently greater than average) number of subscribers pay for the premium articles too. I've noticed that this feels like something of a responsibility, which is good. If someone supports your writing you definitely owe it to them not to be half-arsed about it. But I'm a bit self-conscious about people paying and I've noticed that part of my response is to over-write. The subtle illusion being that more words mean more value. But, looking back at some recent pieces, they're too long. I'm basing this on my own response, when even my favourite writers produce longer pieces than I really care to read (even though I've paid for the content). I'll often end up skim-reading the 2nd half of a 3,000 word tome because yes, you made your point already.
This is kind of why there's a TL;DR section up top now. But there's really no need for stuff to be TL in the first place, so I'm working on that.
You can stress-test my resolve here by becoming a paid subscriber too <imagine row of winking and smiling emojis>. Go on. You can do it monthly if you don't want to pay up front - and cancel any time.
The regular bits
Quote of the week
"Everybody's just full of fucking shit. I don't believe any fucking data until the shit happens and then you just have the stats. And even then, that only works in fucking sports. It does not work in other things because even after shit happens people put their own little spin on it and their little fucking numbers. Y'know, I gotta be honest with you. That human being instinct to want to win, over getting the right answer, is a fucking disease that everybody has - including myself."
Comedian Bill Burr on the ongoing furure over Spotify and the Joe Rogan podcast.
This week's bit of joy
WARNING: this starts out upsetting but the ending had me in tears of the good kind. The trope you'll always see on social media about how this terrible world is full of awful people. But if you drop back and observe a bit more dispassionately the fact is that this kind of content only flies because most people are compassionate and love lovely stuff. This kind of happy ending porn is popular because humans are generally great.