Serious question, and maybe this is ignorant because I do not have an academic background but: Are these people not just a vocal minority? And if so, who cares? It seems like the internet is always up in arms about woke-ism but I honestly don't notice much of it in my daily life. At work, sure there are rules and regulations, but they make sense.
Treat people with respect is always my default stance. If I make an assumption about someone and call them 'he' while they want to be called 'she' - that's fine. Tell me and I'll do that from now on. Don't see the big issue, and I don't think 99% of people who desire such things (e.g. trans people) will try to cancel you for making a mistake. It's always the extremists that put others in a bad daylight and that's a shame.
It depends. Local politics can be pretty touchy depending on the place. I feel like I have to be pretty careful and use the right incantations to stay safe in public (“hi I’m name, he/him pronouns, dialing in from unceded lands). I can’t advocate for LGBT people, have to advocate for LGBTQIA2S+ people, which isn’t a big deal but turns into quite the mouthful when you have to use it repeatedly and can’t be caught slipping. I can’t be caught calling an idea crazy or unhinged because that perpetuates stigma against people living with mental illness.
The real issue is it turns some spaces into a bit of a knife fight situation, and it is very tempting to call others out for slip ups when you need to press an advantage or discredit a politically inconvenient perspective. But then there’s a whole prostration/apology dance that maybe neutralizes things?
If you’re good at bullshit it doesn’t matter, but it can really grate on some people.
Separately, at work, I had to add code to maintain a relationship between an owning context and child nodes. I’ve been stressed about it because I worry that “owner” might be one of the racist programming words, so tomorrow I’m probably going to do a commit to change to “originatingContext”. Not a big deal but add that up a few tens of thousands of times and you’re talking real dead weight loss for the economy. See GitHub changing from master to main. Not really problematic but also a cost without benefit.
You'd be wrong to assume people are reasonable about this. I work at a place that is a bit progressive, but much less so than SV bigcos...also this is in Texas. I interviewed a person whose resume had a clearly female name, appeared more feminine than many tomboy type women I know, and otherwise gave no signals to us about gender identity(they went by a nickname which was gender neutral, which in hindsight is a signal, but subtle, not at all clear). Turns out they considered themselves nonbinary. During the round table afterwards I got called out for writing "she" in my summary of their interview and had to listen to someone grandstand for a couple of minutes about respecting nonbinary persons' pronouns in front of about a dozen senior people in the company. The interview panel leader advised us all to always say "the candidate" and never use pronouns in the future. Funny thing is "the candidate" seemed like a chill person that probably wouldn't have taken offense anyway.
Productive professors and administrators are very busy with doing research, teaching and taking care the students and try to avoid political bullshit like the plague. That leaves busybody with nothing better to do plenty of time to come up with such initiatives.
It's about the fact that institutions (incl. corporations) hold all the power in the world, and the people within them are recruited from academia. If academia becomes (is) an indoctrination school, it will produce mainly activists and those who don't mind submitting to activists. These people will then eventually rebuild this system in their workplaces (since 'wokeism' is an inherently corruptive and hard-to-resist system). After this, you will start to see the fruits of their labor pop up all around - OpenAI censoring their model to oblivion, movies selecting for overtly activist plot points, social media companies beginning to censor more and more stuff...
You wouldn't see activism in normal everyday discussions, though, due to people being rather agreeable in real-life face-to-face conversations. Political undertones, no matter how strong, are always in the background, not forefront, of conversations anyway. You wouldn't expect people to proactively discuss Putin with you if you went to Russia, for instance.
And yet, if the general public either agrees with or is neutral towards ideals which DON'T conform to real reason, those ideals can be weaponized in the fringes. And they indeed are.
(Note: Below, I'm using the term 'fascism' to describe the societal phenomenon. I'm NOT referencing nazism nor saying that the current political atmosphere is anywhere close to it.)
Westerners are conditioned to think about fascism as originating from one well-defined party, mainly due to the fact that autocracies of the world do indeed operate that way, but fascism is just the blind power-hunger and violence of the human condition enabled by any group of people and accepted by the majority. The hallmark of fascism is that it is never hostile to the majority, but continuously extremely violent to whoever happens to be the edge case at the time. It guides the general discourse through these edge cases, not the center. Thus, if you are in the center, you don't really see anything bad happen to you - as long as you course-correct every once or twice from the edge cases.
I don’t subscribe to so called woke gender ideology so I will be calling “non binary” people by their “assigned at birth” gender pronoun. It’s my freedom to do so and I refuse to change my core beliefs for someone’s own personal deviances.
I had a conversation recently with somebody who said they didn’t want to be friends with people who weren’t willing to go the extra mile to be decent to people by using these sorts of speech rules. They were very angry about the subject and had some really nasty words for people who disagreed with them
It’s an absolute nothingburger, but lately tech seems to be outraged and obsessed over a “woke mind virus” that seems to be infecting the masses by the billions…
In their minds, because in real life this just doesn’t exist.
The problem becomes when this vocal minority is put in a position of influencing what others do and how they communicate. At best, they are making people less clear at communicating, but at worst they are trying to co-opt the use of language and forcing people to acknowledge that this world view is the right one through the use of language.
>> And if so, who cares? It seems like the internet is always up in arms about woke-ism but I honestly don't notice much of it in my daily life.
The only place I have noticed this is in the workplace. They allowed a small group ( < 10 people) to force everyone intro various DEI groups and meetings and events on a regular basis. As soon as the ringleaders left the company (just regular job switching, nothing dramatic) all of the DEI groups died. I'm onboard with most of this stuff because people deserve respect - but it is 100% a small vocal minority that makes all of this get way more airtime than it actually needs and than the majority want to give it.
Treat people with respect is always my default stance. If I make an assumption about someone and call them 'he' while they want to be called 'she' - that's fine. Tell me and I'll do that from now on. Don't see the big issue, and I don't think 99% of people who desire such things (e.g. trans people) will try to cancel you for making a mistake. It's always the extremists that put others in a bad daylight and that's a shame.