This is one of the points that I have less solid evidence about.
However, my sense is that much of the power of wokeness came from exerting strong social pressure on the discussion that occurred on social media, backed up by fears of an account ban. This limited the ability of opposition to co-ordinate, previous attempts to create social media without censorship just created a cesspit of the most extreme right figures such that all moderates evaporated off. I still don’t think I’m quite articulating it right, but I’m pretty sure that losing control over a single social major media platform has been sufficient to dramatically limit the influence of wokeness, since the necessary communication can just occur on that platform.
Or, another way of putting it, Twitter acts as a magnet for the kinds of people who’d be open to learning about the perspectives shared there. But it doesn’t just reach these people, instead these ideas further proliferate out.
But still it seems that empirically, the tide turning on Twitter hasn’t yet resulted in the tide turning anywhere else, e.g. for the three intellectual groups I mentioned above. Non-intellectual niches like advertising and Hollywood also haven’t become less woke/”woke” as far as I can tell.
It is plausible that something like this will happen in the future, because the current state (Overton window on Twitter being very different than on other social networks) doesn’t seem to constitute an equilibrium. Another possibility would be for Twitter to “fall from grace” and become a website that is shunned by the mainstream and treated like e.g. 4chan.
Slight disagreement. I think the Overton window on twitter being very different from the window elsewhere can actually be a stable long-lasting equilibrium. The window is already different with different groups of people in real life, the sorts of things people say online have been quite different from what they would say in person for a long time. Its also very different in different online communities already. On a computer game discord server I am in new joiners often say things that break the sever rules (which they clearly did not read) and seem to be genuinely shocked by rules that seem (to me) very basic.
I think one difference is that on Twitter it is now possible to talk about highly taboo statistical data. When people hear about this, they don’t forget it for contexts where it is outside the Overton window to mention them.
It is maybe like in the 16th century, one country (like the Netherlands) allows discussing whether God exists (or, somewhat weaker, whether or not God is a person). As a consequence, people outside the Netherlands still can’t speak about this, but they may have read some of the debates published in the Netherlands, debates which previously didn’t exist at all, and that may well influence what they believe. Which in turn can over time erode the Overton window on discussing God’s ontological status.
What I see as important is how many content creators are on Twitter. This is how these ideas proliferate out. The most progressive groups of society will be the last places where we’ll see a shift, partly due to preference falsification.
This is one of the points that I have less solid evidence about.
However, my sense is that much of the power of wokeness came from exerting strong social pressure on the discussion that occurred on social media, backed up by fears of an account ban. This limited the ability of opposition to co-ordinate, previous attempts to create social media without censorship just created a cesspit of the most extreme right figures such that all moderates evaporated off. I still don’t think I’m quite articulating it right, but I’m pretty sure that losing control over a single social major media platform has been sufficient to dramatically limit the influence of wokeness, since the necessary communication can just occur on that platform.
Or, another way of putting it, Twitter acts as a magnet for the kinds of people who’d be open to learning about the perspectives shared there. But it doesn’t just reach these people, instead these ideas further proliferate out.
But still it seems that empirically, the tide turning on Twitter hasn’t yet resulted in the tide turning anywhere else, e.g. for the three intellectual groups I mentioned above. Non-intellectual niches like advertising and Hollywood also haven’t become less woke/”woke” as far as I can tell.
It is plausible that something like this will happen in the future, because the current state (Overton window on Twitter being very different than on other social networks) doesn’t seem to constitute an equilibrium. Another possibility would be for Twitter to “fall from grace” and become a website that is shunned by the mainstream and treated like e.g. 4chan.
Slight disagreement. I think the Overton window on twitter being very different from the window elsewhere can actually be a stable long-lasting equilibrium. The window is already different with different groups of people in real life, the sorts of things people say online have been quite different from what they would say in person for a long time. Its also very different in different online communities already. On a computer game discord server I am in new joiners often say things that break the sever rules (which they clearly did not read) and seem to be genuinely shocked by rules that seem (to me) very basic.
I think one difference is that on Twitter it is now possible to talk about highly taboo statistical data. When people hear about this, they don’t forget it for contexts where it is outside the Overton window to mention them.
It is maybe like in the 16th century, one country (like the Netherlands) allows discussing whether God exists (or, somewhat weaker, whether or not God is a person). As a consequence, people outside the Netherlands still can’t speak about this, but they may have read some of the debates published in the Netherlands, debates which previously didn’t exist at all, and that may well influence what they believe. Which in turn can over time erode the Overton window on discussing God’s ontological status.
What I see as important is how many content creators are on Twitter. This is how these ideas proliferate out. The most progressive groups of society will be the last places where we’ll see a shift, partly due to preference falsification.