Every chart shows a trend down from peak but still way up from 2019. Seems like what I’ll call a tee-up article - very fact-light with a provocative title so people can vent their preexisting frustrations after skimming it.
A bunch of people are mad that their “white guilt” was weaponized and provided mansions for nonprofits, while doing absolutely nothing to attempt to fix the issue.
I hate the term “woke”… and pretty much any other term that takes a heavily nuanced subject and condenses into one word for lazy minds to use and misuse. I hated the term when the left introduced it 10+ years ago, and I hate it now that the right has taken it over.
See also "The rise and fall of the DEI movement" on NPR.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/09/06/1198913319/consider-this-from-npr-draft-09-06-2024" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2024/09/06/1198913319/consider-this-from...</a>
Counterpoint; we are in a downwards-facing economy with war on our doorstep at eastern and western fronts. Companies have less money to spend on virtue signalling, governments are less discriminate about the results they want, and individuals have higher priorities than expressing uniqueness online. "Woke" is a byproduct of the entire political spectrum being steeped in it's own head-up-ass echo chambers, leading to QAnon and queer marketing strategy respectively.<p>America is pretty much guaranteed to return to a woke status-quo if we're sold enough luxury goods and convince ourselves that everything is fine again. Wokeness is the masturbatory pattern of self-assurance that both the left and right rely on to convince themselves they have absolute control over an irreconcilably apolitical reality.
1. America contains many countries other than the USA.<p>2. Regardless, one might rather say that the "America is going woke!" fashion among media pundits is being replaced by "America is rejecting wokeness!" fashion.
The Economist has a style guide rule of always explaining who someone is no matter how famous. The description they chose for Elon Musk in this article is "billionaire conspiracy theorist". And their thesis is that corporate wokeness is in decline - how ironic.<p>Also interesting how much more biased their headlines are in the print edition than online:<p><i>> This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “Back to sleep”</i><p>I wonder why they do that. Presumably they know online articles will be seen by a more diverse audience?
Also posted a few days ago at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41625358">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41625358</a>
The movement is still coalescing but I noticed this too in my church--people were leaving churches that were more strict about lockdowns towards churches that were more right wing. A steady trickle of people leaving and people arriving.
"Woke" is a code word for a political movement that hates being labeled. Regularly rebranding because they are a dead political movement. If they were somehow forced to go by their appropriate label, they'd disappear in a week.<p>This article is simply denoting the most recent label of 'woke' has been burnt and they'll be rebranding again.<p>In the long term this political movement will become a religion. Might be next year, might take another 25 years.