Astral Codex Ten

woke

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woke

Article

woke is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between May 10, 2021 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as ""if it fails, it will be because… younger and cooler people will just roll their eyes and say ‘Woke!’""; “the first few people to get on board the New Atheist, woke, alt-right, dirtbag left, and intellectual dark web movements”; “everyone is so obsessed with “woke” culture war stuff”. It most often appears alongside Trump, alt-right, Donald Trump.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: July 26, 2025

Appears In

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 also, New Socialism is looking less and less like an up-and-coming dragon-slayer. It’s hard to track the Google Trend because of the bumps from the Bernie campaign, but I feel like I hear less about it than I used to. Google Trend interest in Jacobin and Chapo Trap House have both been going down for over a year (although this is confounded by increasing distance from the Sanders campaign). The Twitter blow-ups between representatives of New Socialism and the woke establishment are less frequent and less fun to watch. Robby Soave’s prediction that 2018 was a “socialist moment” (a deliberate analogy to the “libertarian moment” that followed Ron Paul’s campaign in 2008) - and not the beginning of an inexorable trend towards more socialism - is starting to feel more prescient. I take no pleasure in reporting this; I disagree with socialism as a philosophy, but they had some good ideas, could have helped some people, and would have been a breath of fresh air after a decade of unremitting wokeness.
Inline links: Jacobin, Chapo Trap House, a “socialist moment”
Why did the hope that New Socialism would slay wokeness fail? If I had to guess, I’d say wokeness outgrew the Internet fashion cycle. Unlike its predecessors, it took over mainstream institutions. Mainstream institutions are sticky. You can take control of them by being cool. But once you have control of them, you don’t need to stay cool.
We can't review the history of the alt-right without mentioning the online message board 4chan, infamous for being racist and anti-Semitic and every other thing it is bad to be. 4chan's trajectory is a another great mystery. In 2010, geeky extremely-online young people were almost universally liberal democrats. Racism was associated with elderly white Southerners who would presumably die off in a few years anyway. 4chan had no connection to them or any other historical racist tradition. It was annoying and trolled people a lot, but that was it. Its conversion to full-on bigotry was unexpected, at least by me. It would be like if you woke up one day and everyone on Twitter was a Pol Pot supporter.
A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures
August 10, 2022 · Original source
Google’s first employee became their Director of Technology and made $900 million. Jesus’s first follower became the Bishop of Rome; one in every thousand people alive is named after him. The first few people to make websites in 1995, blogs in 2005, or YouTube channels in 2015 got outsized followings that they were able to leverage into higher status later on. The first few people to get on board the New Atheist, woke, alt-right, dirtbag left, and intellectual dark web movements all had easy opportunities to become famous; the next few thousand at least had the chance to be well-connected veterans.
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
May 01, 2024 · Original source
The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”. Or the banner ad:
Have fun! This satisfied the not-really-paying attention white electorate, because politicians could tell them that “quotas are illegal, we’re sure not doing anything like that”. And it satisfied civil rights activists, because inevitably businesses/departments came up with secret ways to favor minorities until representation reached the level where they wouldn’t get sued. A recent case illustrates the results of this double-bind. The FAA hires air traffic controllers. They used to judge applicants based on a test which measured their skills at air traffic control. This resulted in comparatively few black air traffic controllers. Various civil rights groups put pressure on them, and they replaced the test with a “biographical questionnaire”. The questionnaire asked weird unrelated questions about your life, and you got points if you gave the answer that the FAA thought black people might give (for example, if you said your worst subject was science). This still didn’t get them enough black employees, so they secretly told black communities exactly what answers to put on the questionnaire to go through. It’s easy to blame the FAA here, but (Hanania says) civil rights law almost forces you to do something like this. People tried simpler things, like keeping a test but giving minority applicants extra points. The courts and civil rights bureaucracy struck these down as illegal. The almost-explicit policy was that you had to get more minority employees, but you had to hide it carefully enough that the American people (who were still against racial preferences) wouldn’t catch on. Disparate Impact Not only can you not explicitly discriminate, you can’t use hiring criteria that “accidentally” discriminate by favoring one race over another. To give a stupid example, if someone refused to hire anyone from Detroit, this would have “disparate impact” since Detroit is a majority black city. If you allowed stuff like this, racists could covertly discriminate by using these sorts of rules. But Hanania challenges us to think of any criterion that isn’t potentially racially biased. For example, we know universities discriminate against Asians, so only hiring people with college degrees is a “disparate impact”. We know that more men than women have experience as miners, so a mining company only hiring employees with experience is a “disparate impact”. Since whites typically do better on IQ tests than blacks, and all cognitive skills are correlated with IQ, the Supreme Court decided in Duke vs. Griggs that all tests of any ability were potentially disparate impact, and you opened yourself to lawsuits if you used any of them. (in theory, companies are allowed to use tests and similar criteria if they prove them nondiscriminatory. But the standards for this - they have to prove it for each race and each job site individually - are so high that, in practice, few companies take this route.) Since this technically banned all possible criteria, companies couldn’t follow the letter of the law. Instead they hired fancy lawyers to tell them which way the winds were blowing. The lawyers told them that college degrees were okay, resumes with biographies and experience were maybe okay, and interviews were okay. Tests were out. Anything more creative was out. A disparate impact case made the news recently. The Biden EEOC sued convenience store chain Sheetz for running criminal background checks on their employees. They didn’t allege any intentional discrimination. They just said that more minorities fail criminal background checks than whites, therefore it’s disparate impact, therefore Sheetz has to drop the criminal background check. (the article links to another case where the Obama EEOC sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application) Is Sheetz the only company that does criminal background checks on its employees? Do they do the background checks differently than any other company? My understanding is that the technical answer is that to do background checks without being sued, you have to prove in some very formal way that the specific crimes you’re looking for would be bad for your specific industry, and maybe Sheetz didn’t prove that a general history of violence was bad for convenience stores. But if this sounds kind of fake to you, and you’re wondering whether the real rule is “the government has wide discretion to prosecute whoever it feels like”, Hanania’s answer is “definitely yes”. His position is that all of these rules are so broad that every company is always violating them in some sense. No company has exactly the same distribution of minorities as “the applicant pool”, whatever that is. No company has some magical hiring rule that has literally zero correlation with race, especially since black people are on average poorer, less educated, and less likely to have any given achievement (so any attempt to choose better employees over worse will necessarily disadvantage them). In real life, the bureaucracy’s rules are something like “don’t do anything different from other companies in your industry, and especially don’t be caught seeming less woke”. Hanania argues this creates an arms race / ratchet. Every company wants to be at least 50th percentile wokeness or above. But not every company can be above average. So everybody gets more and more woke, with no end in sight. Continuing with Sheetz: according to the article on the lawsuit, in 2020 they “introduced the IDEA initiative”, ie Inclusion Diversity Equality & Accessibility. Their website has a big picture of a black woman saying “We’re Building A Great Place To Work For All”, and boasts that they’ve created a special forum for black employees. They’ve made 60% of managers women, started a Woman’s Leadership Program, offered generous maternity leave, and written letters to the Chamber of Commerce on how the George Floyd murder made them realize “we quickly needed to learn, listen, be vulnerable and humbly approach . . . culture-shifting work”. Companies hope that if they do enough of this stuff, the EEOC will agree they’re an ally in the civil rights project and not sue them under their wide discretion to sue basically anyone. Too bad they’re getting sued anyway; some other convenience store must have done more of this stuff. Surely some executive is wishing they had just tried having one more mandatory diversity training… Harassment Law Harassment law might win the award for most complicated chain of reasoning from real legislation to enforcement: Legislation says you can’t discriminate against minorities
Inline links: A recent case illustrates the results of this double-bind, sued convenience store chain Sheetz, another case, Their website, letters
Therefore, every business owner needs to monitor their employees for jokes, political comments, flirtatiousness, and take action against any offenses. Hanania has several complaints here. First and most legibly, it (say it with me) gets taken too far. Volokh lists a large number of [examples of things that have been found to be] evidence of a hostile work environment: signs with the phrase “men working”; “draftsman” and “foreman” as job titles, pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and a burning American flag in a cubicle; an ad campaign using samurai, kabuki, and sumo wrestling to refer to Japanese competition; jokes of a sexual nature not targeted at any particular person; misogynistic rap music […] even terms like “great view” and “walk-up” have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs. And In a 2015 and 2016, a black father and son named Owen Diaz and Demetric Di-az2 [sic] worked at a Tesla plant. They sued the company for racial discrimination, with the father’s claims alone making it to trial….racial slurs were used in the presence of Diaz, and he saw racist graffiti on a bathroom wall. It appears that the workers allegedly responsible were mostly or all minorities themselves, and each time an allegation could be verified, the employee was punished. Tesla claimed that they had taken enough steps to address the concerns of Diaz […] a jury disagreed, and awarded the plaintiff $137 million, an amount that the judge reduced to $15 million. In response to the verdict, Tesla released a statement pointing out that witnesses confirmed that the slurs were used in a friendly manner, usually by African-American employees, and without hostile intent. (fact check: this article says the racism also included demands to “go back to Africa” people leaving drawings of caricatured black cavemen at the employee’s desk, threats, and claims that black employees were "given the most menial and physically demanding work" - and that these claims were backed up by testimony from two dozen former workers and a cellphone video showing people telling a black employee that they are going to “cut you up, n—-r”. This seems like a sufficiently different story that I’d like to know whether Hanania still stands by his version) Other parts of harassment law lead to more unfair double-binds. For example, you can’t be seen to “retaliate” against someone who accuses another worker of harassment. So suppose that a minority employee is bullying a white employee, the white employee resists, and the minority accuses them as “harassment”. Maybe there’s even a full trial, everyone agrees this is what happened, and the white employee is found totally innocent. Still, you can’t fire the bully, because that would be retaliation for a harassment complaint. And since you probably don’t want the bully and their victim in the same department, you need to move one of them. And you can’t move the bully, because that would be viewed as “retaliation” for the harassment complaint and they could sue you for millions of dollars. So you have to punish the victim. But Hanania doesn’t just say this kind of thing goes too far. He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting - basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed, and now this has been universally replaced with the bland soul-draining bureaucratic corporate aesthetic satirized in works like Office Space. Is this true? People talk about Mad Men (I’ve never seen it) as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassment law? Or because neoliberalism replaced the work-for-thirty-years-and-get-a-golden-watch corporation with the work-for-three-years-and-then-seek-a-better-job-elsewhere corporation? Still, Hanania really hammers in this point that we should apparently all be angry about the loss of corporate flirtation - he calls the current regime, “a sexless, androgynous, and sanitized workplace” which is “contrary to human nature [and] miserable”. Without civil rights law, we could have “organizations that combined the aspects of a church, a social club, a matchmaking service, and a traditional business.” In such a world: Some corporations start encouraging dating and forming close personal bonds among their employees. This can take many forms, from Christian matchmaking to promoting a party-like atmosphere. These pro-relationship corporations will come in conservative or liberal forms. Other firms explicitly market themselves as providing a more “professional” or “classic” work experience . . . we will see a period of wild experimentation, with some forms of corporate organization drawing a great deal of media coverage. People will criticize many of these experiments, and they will become the subject of public outrage. After civil rights law has been defanged, however, government no longer has the ability to easily shut such efforts down. Eventually, public anger subsides, and the idea of the media attacking a firm because it dislikes its internal culture will seem as intolerant as attacking a religious community for its doctrines, or homosexuals for what they do together as consenting adults. I appreciate my anti-civil-rights books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here. …And More Richard Hanania hates all this stuff. Partly he hates it because he thinks it’s unfair and anti-business and anti-merit. But also, Vaclav Havel talks about the indignity of life under communism. You weren’t allowed to just do your job and pay your taxes and follow the laws of the communist state. You had to be actively complicit. You had to act enthusiastic about the communism, force it upon others, inform on your colleagues and punish deviation - at least if anybody was going to check later. This kind of communism didn’t just hurt your pocketbook. It damaged your soul. It molded you into a worse and uglier type of person who would eventually abandon their better impulses in order to justify their actions to themselves. This is how Hanania thinks of civil rights law. Business owners can’t just give blacks ten extra points on the screening test and call it a day. They have to favor blacks while insisting to everyone that they don’t do this and it’s perfectly fair and they love civil rights law. They have to twist their employment criteria into some kind of illegible monstrosity so nobody can notice all the favoritism they’re doing, then tell everybody that they believe the monstrosity is “fairer”. They have to hire a bunch of diversity coordinators - not because they’re required to hire diversity coordinators, it’s not a requirement - but because they love equality so so much (and if they don’t do this, they’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons). Everyone faces a constant threat of lawsuits which can only be warded against by seeming maximally woke and maximally enthusiastic and maximally happy about all the idiotic fake laws you are being forced to comply with. Like in communism, you have to become your own mini-police state. You have to make employees snitch on each other if they tell the wrong joke. You have to turn your company into a tyranny of HR ladies. If you do any of this even a little less than other companies, you’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons, with penalties running potentially into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Because there’s no legible law except “be the same as everyone else so you don’t stand out as sue-able”, every corporation homogenizes into the same bland HR-ocracy. Everyone agrees on the same hiring process, which is to prioritize college degree, resume, and interview, and definitely not any test or measure of ability. This leads inevitably to our current society, where everyone has to waste their childhood doing meaningless extracurriculars so they can get into the best college so they can take the best internships so they get the best jobs. (unless they do something stupid like let themselves get the dreaded “resume gap”). But also: During the early 1800s, government positions were given out by the “spoils system”, basically “does the party in power like you personally?” In the 1880s, after President Garfield was assassinated by a guy who didn’t get a good enough position, they switched to a formal civil service, based on test performance and merit. The US civil service became the envy of the world, attracted some of the smartest people in the country, and obviously worked better than the old system wherever it was possible to compare. Still, this gradually (and somewhat deniably) ended in the 1970s, because the merit-based hiring system seemed like disparate impact. Hanania calls the current era “the racial spoils system”, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else (eg the FAA’s “biographical questionnaire”). He says every branch of government has become less effective as a result. Hanania doesn’t mention this, but I’ve heard an additional argument elsewhere. It’s legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit. Still, if you have great lawyers and are willing to pay a lot to settle lawsuits, you can get away with legally dangerous things. This is only worth it if you really really want high-merit employees, ie if the best employee is much more financially valuable to you than the second-best. This is mostly true in Wall Street (where you want your trader to outsmart the other guy’s trader by half a millisecond or whatever) and Silicon Valley (where ten employees can write a program used by millions of people). So the government, the civil service, the schools, etc, all abandoned merit-based hiring, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley lawyered up. But that means that if you’re a smart non-minority college graduate, you know that joining the civil service will be a mess - you’ll have a tough time even getting in, and you’ll always be passed over for promotions for less-qualified minorities. Meantime, Wall Street and Silicon Valley would love to have you. So all the smart people got concentrated in a few industries that might not have been their most economically productive use, and the old American tradition where elite families would send some of their kids into public service died out. What To Do? Hanania stresses that most Americans hate affirmative action (and probably by extension most other civil rights law, though they’ve probably never heard of disparate impact). Affirmative action has been on the ballot nine times, and failed eight of those. Most recently, it failed in California, a deep-blue, 66% minority state where the pro-AA side outspent opponents 17-to-1. Also, Republicans have controlled all the branches of government many times in the past fifty years, and now they control the Supreme Court. Most civil rights law is based on executive orders and judicial decisions, so you wouldn’t even need a Congressional vote to overturn it. Just an executive order, from any president who felt like it. Reagan could have overturned half of this with the stroke of a pen, if he’d wanted. So how has it survived this long? His answer: because until about 2010, Republicans were too scared of getting called racist. Reagan wanted to overturn affirmative action, but other Republicans (like Bob Dole) begged him not to, because racism, and eventually he caved. But since 2010, everyone has already been calling Republicans racist all the time, to the point where probably this threat has lost its power. And the sort of moderate Republicans who reined in Reagan are gone. So why haven’t Republicans (eg Trump) acted? Hanania thinks everyone is so obsessed with “woke” culture war stuff that the low-hanging fruit of actual woke laws that presidents can change has slipped under the radar. And so, this book. I would have summarized the case as “Hey, Republicans! Do you hate wokeness? Well, too bad, it’s a vast cultural movement with bastions in a bunch of places where we have no power. But some of this civil rights law stuff seems pretty related to wokeness, and we do potentially have power there. So instead of fighting the unwinnable cultural battle, how about we fight the very winnable policy one?” But maybe this didn’t seem optimistic enough for Hanania, so he framed it as “the legal wokeness is the source of the cultural wokeness” instead. More on this later. The Origins Of . . . Inequality A progressive, reading this book, might counter: “Sure, civil rights law - like all law - is poorly written and kludgy in parts. Like all law, it sometimes gets abused or taken too far. Those are the costs. But the benefits are that it fights discrimination and inequality. That’s very important! Don’t you think those benefits are worth the cost?” Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument. He briefly says that in a free market, companies couldn’t consistently maintain discrimination, because that would be leaving money on the ground. “Cool theoretical result,” objects the hypothetical opponent. “But white households earn an average of $80K and black households an average of $50K, and so on with other minority groups. So it sure seems like something inequality-related is going on.” My tongue-in-cheek reframing of Hanania’s summary of civil rights law went: We notice your workforce is less black than the applicant pool.
Inline links: 2, this article
Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
If you’re a follower of U.S. news outlets, you’ve seen some big stories unfolding over the past year: The unprecedented four criminal indictments lodged against former President Trump. The ongoing AI explosion. The backlash against “DEI,” “woke,” and “cancel culture” as exemplified by Elon Musk’s purchase and rebranding of Twitter to “X.”
On Priesthoods
January 08, 2025 · Original source
I don’t fully understand why wokeness succeeded at conquering the priesthoods so much more thoroughly than any previous political fad. Maybe it was just luck of memetic evolution - why did the 1918 flu kill so many more people than the 1917 one? Maybe the rise of the Internet let various bad ideas recombine into more virulent versions or just spread faster than they would have otherwise.
My theory is that this productive tension was the vector of attack for wokeness, and the reason it took over almost every priesthood within a five-year period.
Wokeness is a beautiful resolution between contempt for the public and wanting to stay in touch with the public. The public (as represented by the average straight male white guy) is, themselves, out of touch. Not just out of touch, but the enemy of in-touch-ness, the ones who must be conquered and transcended in order to be truly in touch. By learning what pronouns to use for trans people (etc, etc), you’re learning secret knowledge, feared and loathed by the masses, that makes you cool and in touch with the youth (considered as an abstract mass). You will gender your trans patients exactly correctly, and their eyes will go wide and they’ll think “Wow, doctors are so cool and in touch, not like all the other people I meet.”
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
Complexity of thought measures show clear directional reversals on every measure except average word length (which has been steadily declining) in both 2017 and 2021. This would be great confirmation for the theory that quality declined in 2016 except you’ll notice that 2017 is a bit too late to explain that! Overall, I’d say that all four of these measures point to a change which occurred when the Commentariat moved to Substack, and two-and-a-half point to a change which occurred in 2016. To me, the ACX change is somewhat understandable – Substack has a different userbase, different UI and Scott started blogging there after nearly a year hiatus so he lost some of the momentum and norms established from SSC. The start of ACX also coincided with another wave of COVID cases, which in some countries at least will have significantly altered the ‘online-ness’ of the general population. So, I don’t think we need to look especially hard for why ACX comments are a bit different to SSC comments. I also don’t think we need to look especially hard for why the ACX comments seem gradually moving more towards looking like peak-SSC; it took three years for SSC to reach peak quality, so we could tentatively propose that there is some sort of inherent ‘bedding in’ time for new comment sections to feel out and formalise the norms they want to establish. Speculatively, perhaps Substack has a different mechanism for attracting readers to WordPress so the beginning of ACX featured a mix of SSC old guard and Substack newcomers, and it is taking some time for the community norms of the SSC old guard to assert themselves onto ACX. The Commentariat seems capable of self-diagnosing the many ways in which the ACX change might have contributed to a decline in quality. For example, Moon Moth writes: I would posit that, for all of Substack's good qualities, the commenting experience is worse here. Which may be coloring commenters' overall impressions. [Expanding on this in another comment they write] Substack comments take too long to load, especially on mobile. And on mobile, they reload and lose my place whenever I switch tabs or apps … Which makes me reluctant to do anything but skim on mobile. And teddytruther writes: I also expect that this selection effect took a huge bump from the NYT controversy, which drew people primarily interested in Woke War Punditry and not a long series of guest posts on Georgist land taxes. The change which occurred in 2016 (and very specifically April 2016) is much less understandable to me. After some thought, I’ve come up with three possible hypotheses: Scott’s writing got worse in April 2016, causing mass disengagement, which changed the makeup of the comments section
Inline links: writes, writes
Looking at the data for related terms makes it clear that a massive shift in discourse occurred around the time of Trump’s election – terms which were somewhat common before (like SJW) died out basically overnight, whereas terms which arose in the alt-right ecosystem spring up basically at the same time. Also of importance, there is no clear term that replaces ‘SJW’ until early 2017 (with ‘antifa’), and no equivalent term that sticks until ‘woke’ enters common parlance.