Woke's Dead, Unless You Fear It

The people are asking: Is woke¹ finally dead? My initial answer is an evident yes. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was the first major blow, and Trump’s recent election victory felt like the knockout. The moment it first dawned on me that woke was on its way out was when I saw this video earlier in the year:

If then-UFC champion Sean Strickland had shared his opinion on transgenderism during the peak of the woke years (2019–2020), the internet would have seemed to erupt in an uproar. It could have led to an attempted boycott of the UFC, with efforts to force them to fire Strickland. Now, in 2024, there were a few mainstream articles weakly criticizing it, but that was all. The cultural power of the wokescolding reporters is gone, and they are now simply ridiculed.

Another sign was when corporations began moving away from “woke capitalism” during last year’s Pride, showing their reluctance to pander to one side of the culture war only to face the wrath of the other:

Source: “Putting the Woke Away”

More evidence: Culture war pundit Matt Walsh’s new film, Am I Racist?, an anti-antiracism documentary, was shown in local theaters here in Toronto this summer. During peak woke, theaters showing such a film would likely have faced boycotts. Lastly, and perhaps marking woke’s symbolic end, AOC removed her pronouns from her X bio, reportedly after Trump’s election. This claim was “fact-checked” by AOC herself, who revealed that the removal occurred earlier and was, according to her, a casualty of X's word limit constraints. Nonetheless, she did remove them.

I am biased in believing in woke’s demise, as my livelihood is independent of large institutions, where the woke infection tends to set in. I know people who work in universities, and they still fear it—woke is still very much alive for them. Hence, to modify my answer: woke is dead, unless you fear it.

My wife had a good analogy for this. She referenced the It movie, where the nightmarish “entity” clown grows in proportion to the fear it evokes, preying on people’s bespoke fears. Spoiler alert: the less they feared it, the more it shrank, revealing what it truly was. The big clown world monster was ultimately exposed as an incredibly fearful little being.

In my recent explorations of discarnate entities, including “egregores” (a kind of groupthink that seemingly becomes an autonomous entity), the practical advice across various perspectives is that if you do not fear them, they have no power over you. The more you fear them, the more attention you give them, and the more they grow. They thrive in proportion to your fear, feeding off it.

The Culture War Left is often synonymous with woke; however, many actual leftists (Democratic Socialists and Marxists) have been trying to extract the woke egregore from their ranks for years. This effort dates back to the late anti-capitalist philosopher Mark Fisher, who captured the vampiric quality of this egregore in his 2013 essay Exiting the Vampire Castle. Instead of focusing on collective solidarity, leftist circles are stalked by a parasitic moralism, which has neutered their organizational potential.