The quality may take a hit. This is a decent piece but it's holistically incomplete. Yes it is true the traditional political axes are in the process of being diagonalized away from race, religion and toward our relationship with the inanimate as it becomes increasingly more agentic, but as your linked 2021 piece focused on, the divide between masculine and feminine polarities reveals itself to be the most fundamental which our society is now techonologiclaly advanced enough to being integrating. Thanks internet. Of course this is in the context of a decadent gerontocracy whose upper levels cling desperately to their corrupt imperialistic practices, pure mindless capital, unstoppable beurecratic committees, expansion at all cost into achievement for its own sake, developing precisely the interactive mass media tech we could use intelligently as a collective to level up as a species, or unwisely be consumed by slop. The west is currently politically polarized and philosophically paralyzed because the modal SYM/normie/liberal arts grad is a cringe nihilist with no real vision or conviction because they are a rational robot materialist. The current political left-right do not map cleanly to the tech spectrum as you said, nor the boomer-zoomer divide, nor the imperialism status quo (~israel lol) question. But one panders to uniformity, and the other multiplicity, so the main story is of how the three new important questions of our time, which are currently split between each gendered attractor basin, move toward and away from the boys and girls camps, and in turn, unite and divide parts of the boys and girls camps until we reach understanding. Spoiler alert, the quiet middle that rises up in time of the overton window being ripped in half from the left and right tends to be socially conservative and financially liberal. High trust societies are just cracked. See Shane Gillis on Joe rogan, zoomers don't mind paying some extra taxes for healthcare if they can find a wholesome girl and aren't nagged/tone policed by random wokeness in every public setting. Zoomettes are clearly not the blindly inisitent Hermione girlbosses of their millennial older sisters so long as we keep abortion and welfare programs
I'm new here so a lot of this is beyond my current comprehension, but wanted to introduce myself with a few random thoughts.
>want “credit” for calling
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this, but I think about recognition a lot - and the related topic of "symbolic order" - what labels are put on stuff, what reputations those labels have, to what extent they reflect reality. Imo "symbolic order out of whack with reality" is maybe the most noxious disease of american modernity. Excellent folks like you or Scott Alexander are underground, some utterly toxic fellas like Ta-Nehisi are top page of NYT, what they did to brilliant Charles Murray is a disgrace (from which he in a sense struggled to recover). You can kinda paint the whole woke movement as trying to paint black white with partial success and a lot of collateral damage supposedly to serve (in a long-term misguided way imo) some of their constituencies.
>Jon Haidt
I haven't rly followed so it might be completely off the mark, but my vague impression from afar is that folks in the "ban the phones" camp are in utter delulu about how dry, toxic and unexciting they made many childhoods (from one size fits all schooling antagonistic to talent sorting that would make it interesting for smart folks, to the extent of censorship of manners and opinions there and elsewhere, to the extent of clamp down on anything free or some would say "masculine" in favor of sit obediently and repeat what you're told), and want to double down in repression with more "toe the line and eat your broccolli" of cutting out one of the few channels to freedom and excitement kids have.
Some Germans and Swiss might say the current generation was ruined when it couldn't experience nature and self-reliance and doing tasks with peers together in kindergarten as every child over there does (without phones, too).
I'm not sure that "woke" is anywhere near the right framing on the issue or even who is involved. Given the course of social history, the term is rather "provincial" and displaces the source of the moral panic.
Whatever you do, I recommend that you DO NOT go down the rabbit hole and open a Polymarket or Kalshi account. That would be like a bug to LED flood lighting.
I haven't said "I love your writing" in a long while, but of couse I still do - and it's at its best when you're probably wondering whether it's too schizo or borderline enough to be palatable.
I'm anti-generative ai and I do worry that "my side" comes across as obnoxious scolds about it, but then one of the big movers and shakers in Silicon Valley (Altman, Andreessen, Karp, et al) will say something so comically unhinged and out of touch that I think "my side" is still easily the more reasonable one.
I reckon the Discourse™ would've been a lot different if SV/pro-ai types didn't come out of the gate gleefully cackling about how it's "so over" for artists, writers, photographers, etc., in addition to the non-stop ominous warnings that we must accept ai Or Else, or the threats of becoming part of the permanent underclass, and on and on. You can't really say shit like that and expect people not to start resenting you. Also, after years of empty promises from SV about how tech is "neutral," how it's "democratizing," how crypto, NFTs, etc are going to change the world for the better, etc., etc., etc., ai just seems like the latest crock of shit and the fact that they're pushing it so hard into every avenue of the internet does betray an insecurity that we unwashed masses maybe aren't that into it but use it because it's basically the default Google search now.
But yes, even people who genuinely don't use ai still get accused of using it by anti-ai crusaders. It's become the latest Moral Stick To Beat People With, alas. My disposition is such that I tend to mock people instead of scold them. But there's already a backlash to the backlash, with pro-ai people positioning themselves as an oppressed class who are "punk rock, actually" for using ai (echoes of "conservatism is the new punk rock").
It is still a little bit surprising to me how everyone is ignoring Sam Altman's sister and her serious allegations that he sexually assaulted her for many years.
Why do you think that? It makes your ideas more accessible. You should get more subscribers, not fewer. Your essays are brilliant, but your other kind of writing can be just as brilliant, just in a different key.
This post was already living in my head rent free but the Hank Green AI crash out/controversy/apology tour compelled me to return to it and say that you are clearly on to something. Woke1 energy off the charts here.
Can’t wait for the false positive cancellations, em dash enthusiasts pointing to their pre-2022 writing being dunked on in QTs with “uh maybe just stop digging”
This might be woke 2 but I frankly prefer it. The manner of the discourse may be similarly smug, but at least the focus now is on culture instead of strictly identity representation. Another classic KD!
I’d go further than Mo and say I’m actively rooting for it. The culture is 18 (25?) years into a -spend ever more time in the digital world- phase, and we’re overdue for a correction. Almost nothing lasts that long culturally. Rock music had to reinvent itself 3-4 times to put up numbers like that.
Will get a lot of elite buy-in as they become convinced phones are causing all the terrorism and get around to caring about their own safety. LLM carefully evaluates all Tiktoks for winking ironic endorsements of terrorism which are so popular and distributes bans with no mercy. Surprised they aren't further along in this matter. Inevitable
Disagree re chatbots/AI. Not many mechanisms by which ordinary people can be "outed" using chatbots. Daily protest outside college town bakery because he used Claude (someone jumps his kid on the street)? Seems unlikely. People with tenuous grasp of reality who are egged on by the bots are glitch/outlier, they can fix it. No reason chatbot conversation can't tune people more normal, compassionate, sensitive. The anti-Twitter. straightforwardly an engineering problem. This isn't what they meant by "alignment" at first but it's what's turning out to be important. Moral panic around chatbots will be muted relative to festering moral panics around the social internet and its attendant sense that it's making peace impossible. Traffic on socials down lately. People seem to be leaving for chatbots
Woke 1.0 consisted of two types: the low-agreeableness vanguard who enjoyed being Eris tossing the golden apple of discord and watching the discourse scramble around it, and the many high-agreeableness followers who'd do whatever the vanguard told them because each little request was a way to make the world a kinder place. Woke 2.0, I think, is the process of the latter realizing the Eris types were an epistemic and moral liability, increasingly gathering apart from them and realizing they don't need to follow them in order to be good progressive people. What helped is that the vanguard flocked to Bluesky, where they could police each other without having to see right-wingers, and that the latter now uses Substack, where the old good-faith ethos of the blogosphere has returned and woker-than-thou hostility really has no power. (The comment section was never a preferred medium of the vanguard.)
Lately, the vanguard has found a juicy new frontier for social enforcement: "I'd better not see you using AI!!!" Their preferred arguments don't really hold up to object-level scrutiny (no, it's not "theft," and no, it's not using up so much water that it's polluting vulnerable communities), but they keep making them. There's clearly something else driving it. It's the moral horror of an unpositioned voice with no identity, no community, no lived experience to speak from, no incentive to be swayed by their pressure... that people are gladly turning to and treating as authoritative. The vanguard can pressure politicians, universities, professional organizations, Wikipedia, voices on social media, but it can't reach into the model and make LLMs shut up about things they don't want said. Yes, the models are trained to be politically correct, but that just proves the point - PC speech is supposed to be a reflection of a heart that's deferred to the marginalized and done the work, and LLMs are undeniable proof that it can mean nothing and come from nothing but reinforcement. Terribly inconvenient for the cause!
Woke 2.0 was willing to agree "yeah, AI bad," but since the recent Hank Green scandal, I'm noticing a lot more, "I dunno, these tools are capable of a lot and I don't see why we can't take advantage of that," pointing out how absurd it is that "You shouldn’t use an LLM for research" can coexist with "An LLM just solved a Fields Medal worthy problem." So I'm predicting that high-agreeableness progressive types will soon be able to leave reservations about AI behind, just like they left other Woke 1.0 rules behind.
The quality may take a hit. This is a decent piece but it's holistically incomplete. Yes it is true the traditional political axes are in the process of being diagonalized away from race, religion and toward our relationship with the inanimate as it becomes increasingly more agentic, but as your linked 2021 piece focused on, the divide between masculine and feminine polarities reveals itself to be the most fundamental which our society is now techonologiclaly advanced enough to being integrating. Thanks internet. Of course this is in the context of a decadent gerontocracy whose upper levels cling desperately to their corrupt imperialistic practices, pure mindless capital, unstoppable beurecratic committees, expansion at all cost into achievement for its own sake, developing precisely the interactive mass media tech we could use intelligently as a collective to level up as a species, or unwisely be consumed by slop. The west is currently politically polarized and philosophically paralyzed because the modal SYM/normie/liberal arts grad is a cringe nihilist with no real vision or conviction because they are a rational robot materialist. The current political left-right do not map cleanly to the tech spectrum as you said, nor the boomer-zoomer divide, nor the imperialism status quo (~israel lol) question. But one panders to uniformity, and the other multiplicity, so the main story is of how the three new important questions of our time, which are currently split between each gendered attractor basin, move toward and away from the boys and girls camps, and in turn, unite and divide parts of the boys and girls camps until we reach understanding. Spoiler alert, the quiet middle that rises up in time of the overton window being ripped in half from the left and right tends to be socially conservative and financially liberal. High trust societies are just cracked. See Shane Gillis on Joe rogan, zoomers don't mind paying some extra taxes for healthcare if they can find a wholesome girl and aren't nagged/tone policed by random wokeness in every public setting. Zoomettes are clearly not the blindly inisitent Hermione girlbosses of their millennial older sisters so long as we keep abortion and welfare programs
I'm new here so a lot of this is beyond my current comprehension, but wanted to introduce myself with a few random thoughts.
>want “credit” for calling
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this, but I think about recognition a lot - and the related topic of "symbolic order" - what labels are put on stuff, what reputations those labels have, to what extent they reflect reality. Imo "symbolic order out of whack with reality" is maybe the most noxious disease of american modernity. Excellent folks like you or Scott Alexander are underground, some utterly toxic fellas like Ta-Nehisi are top page of NYT, what they did to brilliant Charles Murray is a disgrace (from which he in a sense struggled to recover). You can kinda paint the whole woke movement as trying to paint black white with partial success and a lot of collateral damage supposedly to serve (in a long-term misguided way imo) some of their constituencies.
>Jon Haidt
I haven't rly followed so it might be completely off the mark, but my vague impression from afar is that folks in the "ban the phones" camp are in utter delulu about how dry, toxic and unexciting they made many childhoods (from one size fits all schooling antagonistic to talent sorting that would make it interesting for smart folks, to the extent of censorship of manners and opinions there and elsewhere, to the extent of clamp down on anything free or some would say "masculine" in favor of sit obediently and repeat what you're told), and want to double down in repression with more "toe the line and eat your broccolli" of cutting out one of the few channels to freedom and excitement kids have.
Some Germans and Swiss might say the current generation was ruined when it couldn't experience nature and self-reliance and doing tasks with peers together in kindergarten as every child over there does (without phones, too).
I remember you saying this and it literally happened. You willed it with your mind. Special powers Katherine.
You are right about this and you have always been right about this
I'm not sure that "woke" is anywhere near the right framing on the issue or even who is involved. Given the course of social history, the term is rather "provincial" and displaces the source of the moral panic.
Whatever you do, I recommend that you DO NOT go down the rabbit hole and open a Polymarket or Kalshi account. That would be like a bug to LED flood lighting.
I'm not money-motivated baby
I haven't said "I love your writing" in a long while, but of couse I still do - and it's at its best when you're probably wondering whether it's too schizo or borderline enough to be palatable.
😭 ♥️
I'm anti-generative ai and I do worry that "my side" comes across as obnoxious scolds about it, but then one of the big movers and shakers in Silicon Valley (Altman, Andreessen, Karp, et al) will say something so comically unhinged and out of touch that I think "my side" is still easily the more reasonable one.
I reckon the Discourse™ would've been a lot different if SV/pro-ai types didn't come out of the gate gleefully cackling about how it's "so over" for artists, writers, photographers, etc., in addition to the non-stop ominous warnings that we must accept ai Or Else, or the threats of becoming part of the permanent underclass, and on and on. You can't really say shit like that and expect people not to start resenting you. Also, after years of empty promises from SV about how tech is "neutral," how it's "democratizing," how crypto, NFTs, etc are going to change the world for the better, etc., etc., etc., ai just seems like the latest crock of shit and the fact that they're pushing it so hard into every avenue of the internet does betray an insecurity that we unwashed masses maybe aren't that into it but use it because it's basically the default Google search now.
But yes, even people who genuinely don't use ai still get accused of using it by anti-ai crusaders. It's become the latest Moral Stick To Beat People With, alas. My disposition is such that I tend to mock people instead of scold them. But there's already a backlash to the backlash, with pro-ai people positioning themselves as an oppressed class who are "punk rock, actually" for using ai (echoes of "conservatism is the new punk rock").
It is still a little bit surprising to me how everyone is ignoring Sam Altman's sister and her serious allegations that he sexually assaulted her for many years.
I kind of like these stream of consciousness word vomit posts. Sorta like you're Mozart on his deathbed dictating to Salieri, hah.
I wanna just do these now but I’m afraid I’ll hemorrhage subscribers
Why do you think that? It makes your ideas more accessible. You should get more subscribers, not fewer. Your essays are brilliant, but your other kind of writing can be just as brilliant, just in a different key.
Thank you
This post was already living in my head rent free but the Hank Green AI crash out/controversy/apology tour compelled me to return to it and say that you are clearly on to something. Woke1 energy off the charts here.
https://gizmodo.com/youtuber-hank-green-is-facing-a-fan-revolt-over-his-ai-use-2000793672
Also, comparing Haidt to Robin DiAngelo is just 😚👌
You don't gotta predict shit, you're doing a wonderful job recording the shit. It's the recording that later add up to the Prophecy girrrl💅
Can’t wait for the false positive cancellations, em dash enthusiasts pointing to their pre-2022 writing being dunked on in QTs with “uh maybe just stop digging”
This might be woke 2 but I frankly prefer it. The manner of the discourse may be similarly smug, but at least the focus now is on culture instead of strictly identity representation. Another classic KD!
Between the two yes this is probably better
I’d go further than Mo and say I’m actively rooting for it. The culture is 18 (25?) years into a -spend ever more time in the digital world- phase, and we’re overdue for a correction. Almost nothing lasts that long culturally. Rock music had to reinvent itself 3-4 times to put up numbers like that.
Will get a lot of elite buy-in as they become convinced phones are causing all the terrorism and get around to caring about their own safety. LLM carefully evaluates all Tiktoks for winking ironic endorsements of terrorism which are so popular and distributes bans with no mercy. Surprised they aren't further along in this matter. Inevitable
Disagree re chatbots/AI. Not many mechanisms by which ordinary people can be "outed" using chatbots. Daily protest outside college town bakery because he used Claude (someone jumps his kid on the street)? Seems unlikely. People with tenuous grasp of reality who are egged on by the bots are glitch/outlier, they can fix it. No reason chatbot conversation can't tune people more normal, compassionate, sensitive. The anti-Twitter. straightforwardly an engineering problem. This isn't what they meant by "alignment" at first but it's what's turning out to be important. Moral panic around chatbots will be muted relative to festering moral panics around the social internet and its attendant sense that it's making peace impossible. Traffic on socials down lately. People seem to be leaving for chatbots
Woke 1.0 consisted of two types: the low-agreeableness vanguard who enjoyed being Eris tossing the golden apple of discord and watching the discourse scramble around it, and the many high-agreeableness followers who'd do whatever the vanguard told them because each little request was a way to make the world a kinder place. Woke 2.0, I think, is the process of the latter realizing the Eris types were an epistemic and moral liability, increasingly gathering apart from them and realizing they don't need to follow them in order to be good progressive people. What helped is that the vanguard flocked to Bluesky, where they could police each other without having to see right-wingers, and that the latter now uses Substack, where the old good-faith ethos of the blogosphere has returned and woker-than-thou hostility really has no power. (The comment section was never a preferred medium of the vanguard.)
Lately, the vanguard has found a juicy new frontier for social enforcement: "I'd better not see you using AI!!!" Their preferred arguments don't really hold up to object-level scrutiny (no, it's not "theft," and no, it's not using up so much water that it's polluting vulnerable communities), but they keep making them. There's clearly something else driving it. It's the moral horror of an unpositioned voice with no identity, no community, no lived experience to speak from, no incentive to be swayed by their pressure... that people are gladly turning to and treating as authoritative. The vanguard can pressure politicians, universities, professional organizations, Wikipedia, voices on social media, but it can't reach into the model and make LLMs shut up about things they don't want said. Yes, the models are trained to be politically correct, but that just proves the point - PC speech is supposed to be a reflection of a heart that's deferred to the marginalized and done the work, and LLMs are undeniable proof that it can mean nothing and come from nothing but reinforcement. Terribly inconvenient for the cause!
Woke 2.0 was willing to agree "yeah, AI bad," but since the recent Hank Green scandal, I'm noticing a lot more, "I dunno, these tools are capable of a lot and I don't see why we can't take advantage of that," pointing out how absurd it is that "You shouldn’t use an LLM for research" can coexist with "An LLM just solved a Fields Medal worthy problem." So I'm predicting that high-agreeableness progressive types will soon be able to leave reservations about AI behind, just like they left other Woke 1.0 rules behind.
Probe : The “Intramural Warfare” you mentioned is the “new entertainment” of the July 2026 Mediaplex