Astral Codex Ten

SJW

8 min read

SJW

Article

SJW is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 10, 2021 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “someone came up with the term ‘SJW’, and it took off”; “The term “SJW” changed that”; “generic anti-SJWism”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, Trump, woke.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: July 26, 2025

Appears In

None.

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
And most of the participants were into feminism in particular. The 2000s US was whiter than today, had worse Internet penetration of minority areas, and was in the early Obama era racial detente (did you know that in 2010, only 13% of Americans described themselves as very worried about race relations?). Even the most warlike of social justice warriors didn’t treat race as a big issue.
Inline links: only 13% of Americans
The term "SJW" changed that. The term "Men's rights advocates" implied a focus on the problems of men, but the people involved were never really able to get interested in this. "Anti-SJW" claimed no focus other than on how SJWs were shrill and annoying, which had been most of these people's real concern all along. "Men are more oppressed than women" was a hard debate to win, but "SJWs are shrill and annoying" was … less hard. It also played well with mainstream and corporate concerns who didn't want to look like they were actually being sexist or racist, but who were happy to profit off meta-level disputes over who was or wasn't annoying. The word "SJW" didn't immediately let the opposition shed its stigma, but it started it on a clear path towards that point which would reach fruition two or three years later.
Anyway, after a few years of that a lot of them were clearly genuinely racist, and they joined the ranks of the alt-right. So did some people from generic anti-SJWism who weren't too picky about who they hung out with as long as they were equally dedicated to owning the libs. Clinton's speech massively accelerated this process - having your extremely uncool enemy go on national television and say "This particular group of mysterious edgy Internet people is so dangerous and threatening, I think I speak for all right-thinking adults when I hope no teens dare to join them" was, in retrospect, not so smart a strategy. And so we got the alt-right.
Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep
March 24, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Links For March 2023
March 10, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
May 01, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
The real world intruded on the Commentariat’s hyperfixations In The Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars, Scott notes that online feminism was absolutely everywhere from around 2014-16 and then just sort of… disappeared one day. This has some parallels (down to the timing) for engagement with the SSC Comments section – from 2014-16 engagement with the comments section seems to be on an unstoppable upward trajectory and then in April 2016 it just sort of… reverses. I have already mentioned that April 2016 marked an extreme high-water mark for usage of the term ‘SJW’. From what I can see, there’s no particular reason for this specific to SSC – April 2016 has two threads with significant usage of the token, but they are completely random threads – OT47 and Links 4/16 (Links 4/16 does have a link about social justice warriors so that makes some sense, but OT47 doesn’t, so my conclusion is that there is just something that was in the water around that time). This theory says that the Commentariat really liked talking about SJWs, and when they were prevented from talking about SJWs they just stopped engaging with the blog altogether. The problem with this theory is that there is nobody really preventing the Commentariat from talking about SJWs to their heart’s content after April 2016. In February 2016, Scott requested that all Culture Wars topics be quarantined to a single Culture Wars thread on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit (link). This seems like the most common-sense explanation for the observation that the comment section changes dramatically around this time - of course engagement and usage of the term ‘SJW’ falls off when usage of the term ‘SJW’ is quarantined to a single thread in an offsite forum. However, the major problem with this explanation is that it doesn’t fit the data – comment section engagement increases throughout February – April 2016 and only starts dropping in May, when as far as I can see there is no specific events occurring in the r/slatestarcodex subreddit to explain it. Also, in February 2019 the Culture Wars Thread was euthanised (link) but there is no corresponding uptick in comment section engagement as people migrated back from the Culture Wars thread to the SSC comments section. I thought perhaps discussion of SJWs might have been drowned out by discussions of something else, such that it became passé to be discussing SJWs when there was some other Culture Wars issue at stake. This would mirror what happened to online feminism, where it became passé to discuss women specifically and more trendy to discuss intersectionality / race issues from about 2016 onwards. The obvious candidate for this switch is Trump and the rise of the MAGA movement. March 2016 was probably the last period where you could kind of convince yourself Trump wasn’t going to win the Republican Primary. In March 2016 it was just about possible Cruz could have won, but by April 2016 Trump was winning every Primary with decisive majorities. If you are slightly younger you may not have been online during that period, but I can attest that it was completely crazy commenting in political spaces around that time; I’d argue a strong candidate for the most toxic comments section ever is You Are Still Crying Wolf, where Scott offers some extremely guarded non-criticism of Trump, arguing that he was not unusually racist by American Presidential standards. This didn’t make my database because Scott nuked the comments for being too toxic, so we will never know mathematically how bad the comments were, but anecdotally they were pretty standout – closer to 4Chan than ACX in places. The evidence for this hypothesis is kind of mixed – if you abandon all sense of statistical appropriateness you can freehand draw a line which kind of looks like the decline in ‘SJW’ tokens is mirrored by a rise in ‘Trump’ tokens when you normalise the two terms, but you can also do that with any other word that was trending in April 2016, like ‘Snowden’ or ‘Wikileaks’ (or ‘Harambe’ as per the graph below). Looking just at the data it isn’t really a very impressive correlation to draw. I appreciate it is so boring to conclude that Trump is the Great Satan for the millionth time. However, I do think if you add in contextual factors there is reason to be cautiously supportive of a ‘Donald Trump killed the AXC Comments Section’ theory: The volume of ‘Trump’ comments is absolutely massive - around 11% of all comments were about Trump in January 2017, which is greater than comments about Russia during their invasion of Ukraine (10%) and comments about COVID during the first few months of the pandemic (7%). Even a topic like SJWs, which the Commentariat really liked talking about, could only manage a peak of around 1.2% (although eg ‘gender’ peaks at 5.5% and ‘feminis*’ peaks at 3.7%). Concepts like ‘Harambe’ and ‘Wikileaks’ barely register on this scale, at 0.3% and 0.5% peaks respectively. So even though the shape of the two curves looks similar when you normalise them, it is reasonable to believe Trump could have had a significant enough impact on the comments section to dislodge forum norms, in a way Harambe did not.
Inline links: The Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars, OT47, Links 4/16, link, link, You Are Still Crying Wolf, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6J8h!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faea86860-bafc-41c3-94f3-76f3b7424e18_863x331.png