Generation Woke

Outrage, Shame & the Decay of Discourse

Part One - Woke Metamorphosis

If you want to make your brain feel like it has been run through a meat grinder and thrown against a concrete wall on a hot summer's day, all you need to do is direct your attention to whatever it is that conservatives are calling “Woke” on any given day. Accusations of Wokeness and the people who make such accusations are never hard to find – this hydra has a multitude of heads, all slack jawed and screaming in Outrage. Casually perusing the comments under almost any news media post on social media will propel you right into the belly of the whale.

Woke, Wokeness, and related words are so broadly and vaguely defined that anyone hoping to accurately and seriously report on any of it has not just a mammoth task at hand, but a hell of a lot of head-scratching and jaw-clenching in their immediate future.

I have no Shame in being regarded as a pure maniac for even daring to take the job – the choice was to either firmly plant my feet on either side of a hubristic and unnecessary so-called “culture war”, or to write about it and hope to make sense of it all. Perhaps masochistically I have chosen the latter. Yet I see no end to the debate in sight, no mending of any great social and political divides that could come about from adding my Voice to the chorus; this is something I must do, a drive born out of a kind of paranoid fear that I would otherwise be consigning myself to feeding the Outrage Beast again and again and again, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

Above all, this will take time. Plenty of it, in fact. I doubt one article or even a half-dozen such articles could sufficiently plumb the sordid and polluted depths of this problem.

When, where, and how did this goddamned nightmare begin? How did we reach this point? More importantly, will it ever end?

It's a wholly necessary and common sense task to first deal with the facts of the matter.

The word “Woke” itself originates from African-American Vernacular English (or AAVE), being a metaphor for black political consciousness regarding racial discrimination, social injustice, and police brutality. The history of the word dates back to almost a century ago, but the concept of “Wokeness” became popularised in the 2010s - for brevity's sake (and to save you from a sore head) I will exclusively focus on the past decade of the word's usage, and its metamorphosis from a term of solidarity to a vile pejorative that defines the most depraved aspects of the so-called culture war.

In its earliest modern usage, to be Woke is to have an awareness of social and political inequalities and injustices along the lines of racial division. I will respectfully defer to the columnist David Brooks and his succinct paraphrasing in an opinion piece for the New York Times: “To be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures.” This is a far cry from the pejorative use of Woke we see in the culture today, its original meaning and intent corrupted and spread by the “rot pervading the power structures” itself.

I first encountered the word Woke in the early 2010s, during my time mocking conspiracy theorists online; to them, its meaning was along the lines of “being alert to conspiracies”, and at the time I had no idea of the etymological connection to AAVE or black political consciousness. According to their lingo, if you weren't Woke you were a Sheep (plural: “Sheeple”). In these conspiracist circles, Wokeness covered a long list of topics from 9/11 conspiracy theories, to wild claims about the CIA teleporting Barack Obama to Mars (a major proponent of these claims being Andrew Basiago, who also claimed to have been sent back in time to “check out” the American Civil War).

Little did I know that conspiracist usage of AAVE terminology amounted to cultural appropriation, a topic which would not enter the mainstream of political discourse for at least another half-decade, as well as a concept that is now considered Woke (even with evidence to support an accusation for cultural appropriation).

In the mid-2010s the meaning of the word came to include political issues relating to a multitude of identities – an awareness of systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and other forms of marginalisation and oppression. The definition of Woke never changed; only its scope was expanded to build on the foundations of political consciousness and solidarity.

As awareness of inequalities and injustices expanded, so did the unity among individuals who had long been crushed under the weight of corrupt power structures. 'Woke' evolved into a unifying tool, gathering the historically oppressed—a rallying cry against ignorance. Its purpose was to dismantle the vicious division within society, thwarting the fragmentation into smaller, isolated groups that nurtured toxic individualism, spreading disunity like an infectious plague.

I find it to be a terribly shameful thing that an idea which once served as a unifying force was transformed into a battleground, weaponised by embittered factions vying for ownership of its meaning. Wokeness fell victim to appropriation and the same polarisation it sought to mend.

I witnessed this metamorphosis in real-time. Adjacent concepts such as political correctness and social justice were turned on their heads by political movements which sought to undermine any attempts to foster social unity and empathy.

Arguing against this transition felt like beating my head against a brick wall, expecting it to give way. There are some valid arguments that can be made supporting the necessity of political incorrectness – it pushes for more productive debates, challenges us to re-evaluate our deeply entrenched beliefs, lends to a more authentic sense of artistic and creative freedom. The balance between political correctness and incorrectness allowed for actual progression to be made.

Social justice presents an altogether different matter. I frequently argued that the public Outrage over social justice implied a desire for further social injustice, and I am still waiting for anyone to provide a rational counterargument against it.

People like myself who yearn for genuine social justice became known as social justice warriors, conveniently shortened to “SJWs” by reactionaries and contrarians. Outrage against social injustice became political ammunition for the right-wing, and all it took was for that legitimate Outrage to be captured on video and shared across social media; those angered by the thought of social justice eroding their long-held social privileges kept feeding the Outrage Beast over and over again.

It would be shallow, ignorant, and plain Not Cool if I failed to level accusations of feeding the Beast against the so-called social justice warriors too. In all of my interactions with the Right, it became abundantly clear that I would reach a point where my attempts to argue for empathy and against social division were falling on deaf ears regardless of how well-articulated my arguments were, irrespective of the information I used to support those arguments. To continue arguing past that point only serves to bait the Beast; argue with an idiot for long enough can only lead to pitting your own Outrage against theirs. I am in no way innocent of this. I have fallen victim to the same manifestations of manipulative hysteria that my political opponents succumbed to long ago. I would confidently wager that every one of us has fallen victim to it, ever since social media became the dominant outlet for political discourse.

It all boils down to the shift in terminologies from the conceptual to the pejorative. Arguing against political correctness becomes challenging when doing so automatically places you in a position of incorrectness. The Right had to adjust their language to portray political correctness as having literally Gone Mad, as if to imply “I'm down with equality but these bastards are taking it too far!” Convenient, but not entirely effective.

The same can be said for social justice. Anyone with a half-working brain would assume that opponents of social justice must support social injustice, a bad look for a political movement built on appeals to authoritarianism and Rule of Law. There's no convenient way to convince the average person that you're still fighting for a just cause.

Woke is the Right's perfect bogeyman – a concise, one syllable catch-all word with an unlimited number of definitions which encompasses their collective prejudices, both convenient and catchy. Taking an anti-woke stance allows the Right to claim support for social equality and justice while portraying genuine support for such causes as having crossed the line into Excess.

Nuance has been sacrificed upon the altar of political discourse, nailed to its cross by the singular label of “Woke”. The False Dichotomy reigns supreme, reducing the diversity of perspectives within movements fighting for social equality into a single side of a binaristic framework, unfairly dismissed as excessively ambitious in its aspirations.

Is this not a mirror image of the other binaristic frameworks which the Right fervently clings to in the face of social progress? It yearns for a simplified world, a human species stripped of all complexity. It perfectly mirrors binary gender identities, the Good vs Evil mentality of American Christianity, the ever-widening chasm between Rich and Poor inherent in our late-stage capitalist world.

In its metamorphosis, Woke has morphed from a word with a singular, clearly-defined meaning into a tangled tapestry of vaguely-defined and divergent interpretations. It now encompasses a spectrum of negative associations. On one end of that spectrum, Woke is used dismissively to suggest that progressive movements and ideologies prioritise hollow virtue signalling over substantive action. Those labelled as Woke in this context are accused of being hypersensitive, out of touch with reality. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Woke is portrayed as a fundamental threat to the fabric of society and civilisation, framing all progressive movements and ideologies as perils to the Established Order.

Ironically, Woke in every context within this spectrum has become one of the Great Problems of our time, worthy of some level of justified Outrage - albeit not for the same reasons that the Right expresses Outrage over it.

Since its transition into an exclusively pejorative term, I have not encountered a single soul on the Left who self-identifies as being Woke. It has become a stigma that surpasses that of labels like 'communist', 'socialist', and 'Social Justice Warrior'. Engaging in discourse and activism as a Woke Person is automatically perceived by the Right to be an admission that you will be hypersensitive, acting and arguing in bad faith.

My experience with the language I write in, really my understanding of language in general, has illuminated the inherent power it possesses to shape perceptions, and thus reality. I frequently describe to anyone willing to listen how language serves as our most ancient wellspring of Magic, and how writing constitutes a sorcerous art which harnesses that wellspring's power to physically manifest its influence. The Pen, as they say, truly is mightier than the Sword.

Through the transmission and recording of ideas and narratives, language becomes a powerful tool in the hands of the Adept. I am constantly aware of the hefty responsibility that comes with being a writer - the ability for my writing to both unite and divide a great many people. It is a profound yet daunting responsibility that demands sincere conscientiousness from those who accept it. I am entirely incapable of writing absent-mindedly and blind to the dangers that can and will arise if my writing is misonstrued, if my spell is not properly and adeptly cast. I view this as being less of a burden, more of a guiding principle to evoke empathy and forge connections that would otherwise lie dormant or dead.

The degenerate, animalistic tendencies within the human mind have caused many to abandon this responsibility, forging language into weapons of death and destruction, surpassing even the capabilities of the most powerful nuclear bombs in existence. Few are blameless. None walk away unscathed.

I grew up in the times before social media became our dominant form of communication, before communication itself devolved into weaponised language . Now any bastard with an internet connection can harness a power which was once exclusively wielded by the skilled. Every idiot has not just one soapbox but a stack of the things, and it keeps growing taller and taller. Each of them is perched atop their soapbox stack, bleating and kvetching, a terrible cacophony which drowns out the voices of the sane pleading for them to listen to reason. Online communication has become a wasteland of destruction and desolation. The decay in our discourse has become catalysed. Damned rookies have perverted the written word itself.

This unregulated, amplified use of the written word has resulted in not only the corruption of the word Woke but also the weaponisation of the concept of Wokeness. In both online and real-world communication, Woke as a concept has been severed from its original integrity, twisted and polluted - a fucking abomination.

I take it personally. This is a perversion of my art and my deeply-held ideals. Deep, dark sorcery, man. Would it be too bold of me to claim that the weaponisation of language and the decay of all discourse poses a fundamental threat to the fabric of society and civilisation? Or am I just clawing at the bars like a hamster in a cage?

Because, in all honesty, I am not immune to my own Outrage. I can soothe the Beast, weaving words to lull it into a temporary dormancy, but even asleep it seethes and waits for its next meal.

Words alone are no longer enough. New Magic is needed. The hydra needs to lose some of its heads...

Part Two coming soon…