Field note · unfree / woke
Woke Invasion
How a creed walks into an organization that never invited it — the pipeline, the line of demarcation, and the bargain — illustrated.
Proponents of woke have been proselytizing many unsuspecting organizations — most of which, with a few exceptions, yield to their demands — by adopting a number of covert tactics. The canonical account from education shows the shape of it: nobody votes the creed in, and by the time anyone objects, objecting is itself the offence.
Figure 1 — the mechanismHow the invasion runs
The tactics are covert not because they are secret, but because each single step is unobjectionable. The creed enters as curriculum, arrives as hiring, settles as policy, and ends as the thing that decides what may be said. Every yield becomes the floor for the next demand.
Figure 2 — the tellThe 2016 line of demarcation
Kara Frederick, a former Facebook employee, puts a date on the change in tech. Two cohorts share one building, hired for two different jobs — one to build the product, the other to govern what the product is allowed to carry.
There is a line of demarcation when it came to employees who were hired before 2016 and employees who were hired around 2017 [Trump election]. […] I think there is a lot of Sheldons who just want to be engineers; they just want to open source everything, … and now you have a different type of employees who are working there, and they are actively turning the organization to political change, to preventing “harm” and misinformation.
Kara Frederick, former Facebook employee — source
Figure 3 — the bargainWoke capitalism
Why would a profit-seeking corporation host the thing? One answer, conspiratorial in tone but tidy in structure: it was a trade. The managerial class is appointed steward of the movement and keeps — indeed gains — power; the activists get the transformation they demand. Neither side has to like the other.
This is overtly political and has nothing to do with being “nice” or “empathetic”. The corporations have inadvertently made an arrangement with critical theory leftists to transform society into a capitalist monopoly on top, and socialism on the bottom. That's the deal.
It's been dubbed “Woke Capitalism”, where the managerial class has reached a compromise in which they get to keep and — through being appointed as stewards of the political movement — gain power, while activists of the movement get the transformation they demand.
This particular warning in Google Docs is just that. It's Google managing the changes in society that certain activists want, in order to maintain corporate power. Changes like this will keep being added (as we should know by now) while our social structures change into something comparable to a social credit system. These changes are promoted by manufactured social pressures and financial incentives from large investment banks and so are implemented by any company that wishes to grow while under public scrutiny.
Discussions about this have been like groundhog day since 2015, no one seems to be able to get past the surface level of what is probably the greatest transformation of any society since the 1930's, and it's astonishing. It's a gradual escalation of demands from woke activists, backed by the behemoth corporations and banks, then adopted by governments.
For anyone who wants to help others, or to resolve injustices in our society, having true empathy for the plight of those oppressed and wanting to solve social problems: you know this is bullshit. Even for the activists this isn't about actually helping anyone, it's about pushing us into accepting a shuffling of hierarchies, of which they didn't bother to iron out the injustices.
The recordConquered ground
Organizations where the invasion is documented, with the date the record was made. This is a sample, not a census — and capture is not permanent: see the counter-examples of Coinbase, Basecamp, Kraken and Twitter, which extricated themselves.
Tech
- 2017Google's Ideological Echo Chamber — the Damore memo and its aftermath
- 2024DHH: Google's sad ideological capture was exactly what we were trying to avoid
- 2024Google's Woke AI Wasn't a Mistake. We Know. We Were There. — the Gemini fiasco traced to a culture that prioritized DEI over excellence
- 2021–25The Scala drama — an open letter, a cancellation, a libel suit settled with an apology and £5,000 damages, and a community's dereliction of due process
Academia
- 2024Claudine Gay — plagiarism, testimony, resignation