That’s it then. Woke is dead.
No one could agree on what the term “woke” meant in this country anyway, since it was bred in the US in a radically different cultural and historical context.
It was subsequently ready-baked into opposing groups that had no equivalent in Ireland beyond spittle-flecked far-right posters and their mainstream dog-whistlers taking their cue from Donald Trump.
Still it remains astonishing that prominent figures in Irish politics wielded the word as a weapon without reflecting on its origins or its fit into the communities that make up Irish life.
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Last week as Los Angeles was blazing, far from reflecting humbly on its climate denial, Make America Great Again’s (MAGA) response was to rage about the sexual orientation of Los Angeles’ first woman fire chief, Kristin Crowley, and her diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hires.
In online discourse, “DEI hire” now translates as “not a straight white male”. Recall the many “DEI hire” references to the highly qualified Kamala Harris and ponder why there were no such similar references at all to her opponent, Trump, the felon who tried to overturn the 2020 election and was found liable for sexual assault but who happened to be male and white.
This was always the fabulously ironic feature of “woke” and misogynistic white identity culture: it was a two-way street.
If one side over-reached, even briefly in a damburst of frustration, the “anti-woke” response was to collapse into victim mode, spearheaded by anti-woke outrage merchants constantly hunting down fresh “libtard” outrage while echoing the same issues, illiberalism and intolerance they were raging against.
The current US corporate panic – Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and Amazon, Toyota and Boeing included – to suck up to Trump and MAGA by ditching DEI tells us everything about big business.
Having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits
— Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg dismantled Meta’s DEI programme in six weeks. Programmes designed to boost the share of women and minority leaders and to diversify the workforce and suppliers are over.
Woke is dead. We know this for sure because Zuckerberg, speaking to podcaster Joe Rogan (of course) last week, called for more “masculine energy” in the office and thinks “having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive”. The environment has become too culturally “neutered”.
This mighty discovery dawned on him when – wait for it – he started interacting with more men in the mixed martial arts (MMA) community. Having something to do with his male friends where they can “beat each other” has been a “positive experience” for him.
Remember it’s just eight years since the #MeToo movement flooded the world in office horror stories that ended in mass male resignations and arrests.
Remember that women are still struggling with the gender pay gap and forced to drop out of the workforce due to lack of access to childcare, and that new research suggests that more British women are driven to suicide by their domestic abuse perpetrators than are murdered by them, and that buildings in Afghanistan are not allowed to have windows overlooking places where women might be passing.
To scratch his billionaire itch, Zuckerberg’s response is to turn to the great thinkers and role models of MMA, such as Conor McGregor who sent him a “Happy Birthday bro” on his 40th birthday last May and got a “Thanks! Excited for your return” in reply.
Who needs trained, paid fact-checkers when untrained customers can do it for them?
That influence is reflected in Zuckerberg’s sweeping changes to Meta’s hate-speech rules which amount to open season on LGBTQ+ people. It seems incredible, but you have the birthday boy’s permission to call them abnormal and mentally ill now.
It’s over half a century since the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental illness but you won’t see that on Meta platforms, since he has also announced the end of fact-checking.
Who needs trained, paid, dedicated fact-checkers when untrained quasi-sentient wallets – as big tech clearly regards its customers – can do it for them?
Context: Facebook did not introduce content moderation or limit political content because a few woke folk complained.
It did so as part of an effort to clean up its public image and reassure advertisers, amid a raft of scandals in the 2010s, including that it had allowed Russian interference, far-right militias and rampant misinformation on its platform, and had exposed and sold users’ data (the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which broke in 2018).
This all happened for years before Zuckerberg admitted to “a lot of mistakes” in Congress in 2018.
‘Christian men are totally useless’ is banned but ‘Mexican immigrants are trash!’ is deemed acceptable
Now, according to Meta training materials obtained by The Intercept, it’s fine to say things like “immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of s**t”, “gays are freaks” or “look at that tranny” (beneath a photo of a 17-year-old girl). You can say that “migrants are no better than vomit”, but not that “Muslims make me want to throw up” because it claims a group “causes sickness”.
“Christian men are totally useless” is banned but “Mexican immigrants are trash!” is deemed acceptable as is boasting that “I’m a proud racist”.
Asked to comment by The Intercept, Meta said that the example of the 17-year-old girl should have been in the banned category.
Men aged 25 to 34 make up Facebook’s largest audience, accounting for 18.4 per cent of global users, according to Statista. Its second largest audience comprises men aged 18 to 24.
In Ireland, the 25-34 age group also comprises the biggest share of its four million users, accounting for a quarter. People aged 65 years and older make up only 7.7 per cent of Facebook’s Irish audience.
The EU remains outside the scope of Meta’s changes for now. Should the EU choose to come out fighting, the Digital Services Act may well be the last bastion of human decency.