Paul Graham's Twitter Thread

Wokeness will seem such a joke in retrospect that many people won't believe it was ever a serious problem. Even many of the participants will forget. But it really was a big problem.

I remember well the feeling that there was an army of people waiting to pounce if you mentioned certain topics, even obliquely. And it wasn't in my imagination. You could tweet this and reporters would email you about it: https://x.com/paulg/status/895...

@paulg You were woke 200 years ago when you spoke out against slavery, you were woke when you said women should have the right to vote, you were woke if you thought blacks should be allowed to go to the same schools as whites, in retrospect history will not be kind to MAGA.

@DartsJey No, wokeness means something more specific than opposing injustice. It was one particular phenomenon that began on US college campuses in the late 1980s.

@paulg my kids will not believe me when I tell them the we weren't allowed to go outside because of a flu virus

@pete_raf Just tell them the early forms were much more virulent and killed 7 million people.

@paulg How can it simultaneously be a joke and a big problem?

@jpostman The same way medieval witch hunts were.

@paulg @paulg Why did it affect the US more than other countries? Why were woke-related “pronouns” more common, if not exclusively, used across English-speaking countries?

@AliJrl It originated within US universities.

@paulg What is wokeness?

@snboyle An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

@paulg Many will now speak out against wokeness now that it’s safe. Remember those engineers and support staff that sacrificed their careers in tech (such as myself) in order to bring this toxic cancer to everyone’s attention. I will never work in big tech again.

@paulg Still is a problem until I can get this guy out of my locker room.

@paulg Participants won’t forget. They will deny they ever believed any of it.

@paulg Wokeness has waned from its peak, but is still present.

@paulg Wokeness didn’t just annoy people...it wrecked careers, burned schools, and turned truth into hate speech. That’s not harmless. That’s hostile.

@paulg It was… and anti-wokeness is rapidly becoming just as big of a problem, because it’s ultimately the same malaise: an identity built around destruction as opposed to creation of something new and transcendent

@paulg Yes, the left pretending that you can chop off your dick and become a woman will seem quite ridiculous in retrospect.

@paulg What do you call an aggressively performative aversion to any progress along the social justice dimension? The problem with anti-wokeness isn't that extreme wokeness wasn't a problem (it was), but that social conservatives now get to dismiss *all* liberation thinking as "woke."

@paulg It’s not even remotely gone. The faculty on every college campus that support it, you think they’ve vanished? They’re lying in wait, like a primed viper. I wanted to use the word “latent” somewhere here, so imagine it’s in the tweet somewhere

@paulg It still is a huge problem. If you boil it down to the source; It's mental laziness. It's the same cause of bad parenting and theft. The easier life becomes, the lazier people become, the easier it is to implant these ideas in them.

@paulg You tried to get people to vote for Kamala.

@paulg Only if you are softer than baby shit

@paulg It's still a thing tho, it just flipped to being used to further right wing talking points

@paulg It STILL is a really big problem in academia.

@paulg Pronouns in bio is simply absurd

@paulg Picture says a thousand words