If you knew wokeness was eating the world in, say, 2009, what would you have predicted? e.g
- same-sex marriage
- more democracies
- # metoo
- diversity & inclusion
- universal healthcare
- increased power of the state
- attempt to equalize opp across the board
- fertility
Conversation
Just "markets eating the world" predicts
- cryptocurrency
- charter cities
- ISAs
- prediction markets, etc
Conclusion: Society is becoming more egalitarian (AND more meritocratic), & has been for a while
At the same time software is eating the world, wokeness is eating it too
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I'm interested in feedback on this thesis, both on historical and on investment grounds.
If this thesis is true, what else does it enable or predict?
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Replying to
I don't think this is true. It's something more like an entanglement of woke-and-anti-woke is eating the world... I was just doing a thread about that cf the "supremacy" dustup
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So tldr on "supremacy" thing: yarvin backchannel-baited aaronson into overreacting to some aspirational overreach by a band of the awokened ones, thereby turning it into actual overreach. These people all deserve each other
If you don't know what this is about, be glad.
Show this thread
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Replying to
interesting. what is my thread wrong about or missing?
is wokeness eating the world and meritocracy eating the world the same thing as "woke-and-anti-woke eating the world"?
...perhaps one point missing is that there is no center?
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the point is that neither woke nor antiwoke is actually capable of eating the world, unlike software or markets (I think is right long-term about his markets thesis), so the analogy falls apart on feasibility.
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In practice what happens is that an institution that's entirely taken over by wokies tends to fail functionally before it can do serious damage these days (so that's different from communism in the 20s) while an institution that's pwned by the alt-right/alt-light/NRx is stillborn
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Though both can do serious damage in the process of failing fast in today's environment, that's not the same thing as "eating" where a functional substitution process accompanies the destruction
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Also, "meritocracy" is not the logical opposite of "woke", though it sometimes marches under that banner. The logical opposite is ethnonationalism, which is why it is very hard for those who take quillette-type positions at face value to avoid that slippery slope
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And so, whether they like it or not, and no matter how much they whine about being smeared, the co-option of "classical liberalism" and "meritocracy" arguments into ethnonationalist apologia is hard to resist. The middle is not a tenable position while hedgehogs eat the world
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The overall slight drift to the left (which you call new shapiro more left than old shapiro, yarvin calls cthulhu tending left, and MLK calls arc of history bending towards justice) is not the same thing as "more woke". Woke is a label for a specifically extremist new thing.
So what’s the best label for the phenomenon—Egalitarianism eats the world? Leftism?
And is that contra markets/meritocracy?
Re your point about wokeness collapsing, I’m not sure you can have a fully market driven society either before that leads to some sort of revolution.
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my point with the entanglement thesis is that there isn't a there there with what you're trying to tag. It's bothsides or nothing. My best take on a bothsides version is hedgehogs are eating the world. It's a beef-only mindset that can only think in conflict mode
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Yeah, it's confusing at this point bc "woke" has become a weasel word for bad-faith argumentation at the same time as a rallying cry, and Twitter makes it hard to tell in which sense it's being used.


