I told you all the wokepocalypse was coming

(But now where will I go for lazy clickbait ideas?)

“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.” —Sir William Ralph Inge

Back in January of 2023, I was driving home from Dane County Jail, dodging piles of jagged snow and listening to the audiobook of Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World. The book was one I’d chosen half-randomly out of the hundreds on my to-read list, but as I listened I kept thinking back to the prisoners I’d just been interacting with.

You can probably infer the subject matter of the book from the title—or even the author, if you’re familiar with him—but in short, the book is a polemic against the totalizing worldview commonly referred to as “social justice,” “woke,” “identity politics,” “successor ideology,” or any number of other things. It’s a worldview that’s difficult to pin down, since it’s been so dominant in elite thought since the mid-2010s (and because those most committed to it tend to deny it even exists), but as I wrote a year ago, the best way to define it is that it’s a curious mix of systemic diagnoses and individualist remedies: All the problems in the world, say the woke, exist because the male, cis, het, and white conspire to oppress the non-male, trans, queer, and “of color”—but for some reason, the solution consists of things like group therapy and “cancelation” campaigns. It’s an ideology, Doyle says in his book, that’s created an atmosphere eerily similar to that of seventeenth-century Salem in society’s upper echelons, where the only way to secure your own future is to denounce others. Which—more on that in a bit.

In any case, I was thinking about the prisoners I’d just been working with mainly because I was struck by how alien all of woke ideology would have been to them. Here were these guys who by any measure were trapped at the bottom of a questionably just system—most of them black, Latino, Muslim, etc.—but all they wanted to talk about were family and personal responsibility. If you closed your eyes, you could have sworn it was a Bible study happening at a Republican convention.

Granted, it had been a Bible study (and a voluntary one at that, meaning there was probably a bit of self-selection happening there), but my experience is in line with statistical reality: The median black American is more conservative than the median white American, at least on social issues. And in surveys that ask whether the world has gotten too “politically correct,” nearly every demographic answers yes—except one: wealthy, educated whites.

All this points to a fact that’s pretty inescapable: Namely that “woke” culture, whatever its pretensions of ending oppression, was (and is) very obviously just a game for the wealthy and powerful—a new, ever-changing etiquette of platitudes (“Trans women are women!”) and euphemisms (They’re not homeless, they’re unhoused!) to be carefully learned and repeated in order to prove you’re “one of the good ones.” No different, really, from Victorians scolding each other over which fork was the salad fork—and, appropriately, it also comes down mainly to throwing extravagant dinner parties.

Vaguely rightwing-coded author Rob Henderson¹ calls this sort of thing “luxury beliefs,” but he’s hardly the first to put a finger on the phenomenon. Marxist thinkers (such as Walter Benjamin) have been writing since the nineteenth century about the phenomenon of petite-bourgeoisie morality, which is usually at least as performative as it is genuine. After all, being in the petite-bourgeoisie—the modern equivalent of which is the “professional-managerial class”—means having a considerable amount of privilege, but not so much privilege that you’re untouchable. Remaining ahead of the back-stabbing culture that such precarious classes tend to fall into means constantly learning new etiquette to prove you “deserve” to be there—and at this moment in history, for whatever reason, we’ve defined the “deserving” privileged to be the ones who most performatively hate their own privilege. Ironic? I mean, sure—but when has irony ever prevented weird social milieus from emerging?

(Article continues after the break:)

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I was thinking about all this stuff about a month ago when a seemingly definitive “wokepocalypse” occurred in the world of gaming: three video games that had widely been decried as “woke” by those in the anti-woke online spheres—Concord, Star Wars: Outlaws, and Dustborn—all crashed and burned within a week or two of one another. Concord was such a disaster that its publisher, Sony, made the extraordinary decision to un-publish it and give refunds to the handful of people who had bought it. Outlaws was enough of a flop to send its publisher Ubisoft’s stock price into a free fall. And Dustborn—a punk rock–themed graphic adventure that received not-insignificant funding from the governments of Norway, the European Union, and possibly even the United States (note: if multiple powerful governments are rushing to fund your game, it’s probably not as punk-rock as you think it is)—has sold so poorly that it peaked at 83 concurrent players on Steam.²

Obviously, there are plenty of rightwing trolls rushing to take credit for these games’ flops on the various anti-woke corners of the internet, but to give them any real credit is to misunderstand how economic forces actually work. Aside from the considerable evidence that boycotts themselves rarely impact sales, there just aren’t that many rightwing trolls in the universe. While spending too much time online might give you the opposite impression, the overwhelming majority of people are just normies who have very little interest in your culture war and will buy any game that looks fun (and skip any game that doesn’t), which suggests there’s a bigger problem here: Namely that “woke” has lost its cultural cachet with the average person. It’s become alienating—and maybe even kinda boring.

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While I haven’t played Dustborn, I’ve heard it said that it plays more like a rightwing parody of wokeism than a sincere embodiment of it, and, looking at the official promotional artwork for the game, I absolutely believe it. My immediate thought upon seeing the images and reading a bit about the plot was less, “Wow, what a Diverse™️ and Inclusive™️ cast” and more “Why do these Diverse™️ and Inclusive™️ casts always look exactly the same? Why are these things always about black lesbians with asymmetrical haircuts and fat Muslim women with vitiligo?” There are, after all, thousands of “identity categories”—everything from “fundamentalist Mormon” to “native Alaskan”—that you will almost definitely never see featured in a game like this. The cast here looks less like a random sampling of America’s broad diversity and more like the wet dream of an Ivy League gender studies major. So what’s going on?

The uncomfortable answer would seem to be that “diversity” and “inclusion” have paradoxically become nothing more than one more class signifier, signaling to an elite few that you’re “one of the good ones” and alienating the rest. And as much as that might sound like a white-guy whine to you, consider how few of my person-of-color friends at the county jail would feel comfortable or “included” in an elite, woke space like a gender studies class, or the board room at Microsoft. The complex dance of euphemism, orthodoxy, and obligatory denouncements (“I love Harry Potter, but I hate J. K. Rowling” is the “Mohammed, peace be upon him” of the woke set)³ would be impossible to keep up with. Nor would any of them be particularly excited about all the performative deference they’d likely receive. “Inclusivity”—by design or by accident—has become just another way to exclude a majority of people.

And of course, walking away from alienating spaces has gotten easier than ever.

***

I’m going to take a brave stand here: I don’t like racism. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say racism is very bad (I await my Nobel Peace Prize). But despite all that, there are an awful lot of podcasts I’ve fallen off of in the last five or ten years because I was tired of getting lectured about racism. I’d be listening to (for instance) a retrogaming podcast, and they’d interrupt their conversation about Yoshi’s Island or whatever to announce that by the way, racism sucks and so does Donald Trump, and I’d just sigh and wish I was listening to anything else. I’m not a Trump supporter, and in fact I’ve been quite vocal in my criticism of the guy, but when I loaded up a gaming podcast, I was doing so to escape the garbage of the real world, not to be reminded of it.⁴ It wasn’t even a conscious decision of “I’m never listening to this again”; I’d just find myself naturally losing interest and giving my time to things that bummed me out less. I know someone’s going to show up in the comments and be like, “Well, that’s your privilege—” but, like, no. It’s not my privilege to stop listening to a podcast. Literally everyone can stop listening to a podcast.

I don’t doubt that, for the average person, something very similar is happening with games like Dustborn. Very few people see the promotional art or the game trailer and seethe with rage at the “wokeness” of it all; they just take note that it’s clearly aimed at someone else (i.e., the tiny, privileged slice of humanity that can still use words like “diverse” and “inclusive” unironically)—then shrug, say, “Not for me,” and move onto other things. In the age of the internet, there are literally infinite entertainment options at your fingertips, making the act of passing over things that aren’t up your alley the easiest thing in the world.

Fundamentally, the problem with “woke” as an aesthetic was never that it was wrong, or dumb, or offensive (though certainly many have found it to be all three); it was just that it was boring. If everything can be explained in terms of oppression, well…what is there left to talk about? Most people don’t fancy themselves intellectuals, but most of us are looking to be stimulated by new and interesting ideas in the media we consume, whether we’re conscious of that desire or not; moments like “Luke, I am your father” or “Bruce Willis was DEAD THE WHOLE TIME” have gone down in cinematic history not only because people “didn’t see them coming,” but because they re-contextualized and deepened everything that came before them. Past a certain point, the one-dimensional moralizing of “woke” has little potential to do that.

No doubt we’re standing at the threshold of a new era in which some other aesthetic replaces the old-and-busted “woke” vibe. And while history suggests it’ll be something equally cringey,⁵ here’s hoping it’s at least a marginal improvement. 🕹🌙🧸

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⬅️ In case you missed it: Wanna take the creation narrative as a metaphor? Sure, go for it

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1. I’m pretty sure Rob Henderson self-identifies as a moderate, but he seems to know which side his proverbial bread is buttered on, consistently using the preferred phraseologies of the right to explain his ideas. In fact, his language is so rightwing-coded that Marxist writer Freddie deBoer wrote this scathing takedown of him, apparently without really taking the time to engage with his ideas at all (from what I could tell, he only ever watched a short video Henderson made for the New York Times). It’s too bad, because Henderson and deBoer have been saying a lot of the same things—just with very different choices in vocabulary.

2. If my YouTube feed is any indication, at least 70 of these players were angry rightwing streamers looking to turn it into “content”

3. Every day, the list of things and people you’re required to denounce gets longer. Being a Kind™️ person sure requires you to hate a lot of people.

4. A really dark moment for me was when a podcast I once called my absolute favorite ended with the announcement, “If you support Donald Trump, stop listening to this show. We don’t want you here.” On the one hand I get it—Trump has been terrible for democracy, America, etc. (and the episode aired shortly after Jan. 6). On the other hand, how was being an asshole to his supporters supposed to fix that? Again, I’m not a Trump supporter, but I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the show anymore. I wasn’t even taking a conscious, principled stand…it just gave me, as they say, “the ick.” And I had plenty of other things to listen to.

5. Remember how 1990s “politically correct” culture gave way to the “offensive” humor of South Park? Can we…do something less dumb than that this time around?