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I'm not well versed in woke culture, CRT, and the other fashionable mumbo-jumbo that has come to dominate the minds of our out-of-touch, self-loathing elites. I have been inoculated against it, in a sense, by my own idiosyncratic neurology. I spent decades trying to learn to get along with the normies; I'm not going to throw all of that out in order to learn a whole new collection of arbitrary customs and tribal signs intended to demonstrate my class and political affiliation. My social class is survivor, and my political affiliation is piss off.
As one who has found a certain comfort and enjoyment living at the fringes of polite society, I found some like minded people in geek culture. The geek culture of the 80's and 90's, to be exact, not the sanitized and prepackaged "geek culture" that has come to prominence today. (As an aside, I wonder if the OG geeks of the 60's and 70's feel a certain sense of superiority over the geeks of my generation in the same way; post Star Wars, sci-fi and fantasy were already getting mainstreamed). The enjoyments of my youth, havens for nerds and misfits and outcasts, have become hot commodities, properties to be exploited and homogenized.
Andrew Breitbart famously commented that politics is downstream from culture. I have been wrestling with that idea a fair amount. If that's true, and you want to create political change, you first have to change culture to reinforce your political goals. The rich fields of dork culture, which have become mainstream pop culture, are upstream of politics. Therefore, architects of social change have to go to the sources of the river and divert them for their own purposes (in my opinion it's more like poisoning the river, but anyway...).
Woke leftists have been working overtime in order to insert "wokeness" and push their political agendas into pop culture. If you're following the culture wars at all, this isn't exactly breaking news. Most recently Tolkien fans are upset about a new Amazon show based on the Lord of the Rings, which looks like it won't follow the traditional LOTR lore and has inserted various different modernized, "woke" characters and ideas.
I should make it clear that except in principle, at least, I don't really care. As far as JRR's books, I read and liked the Hobbit and stalled out after the Fellowship of the Ring. There were too many asides and too much backstory for my adolescent brain; I preferred Zelazny and Robert Howard, who got to the point. I keep thinking I ought to go back and read them, but I'm coming to the painful realization that there's only so much time and I have a lot of interests to pursue. I feel fairly satisfied with having watched the Peter Jackson movies, which I found long and intermittently tedious with bursts of really cool and interesting sequences. Anyway, I seldom watch films or TV shows nowadays, and when I do it's usually films I liked when I was younger. The modern habit of making every movie three hours long and every TV show a six season, 120 episode extravaganza rules them out for me; I really just don't have the time.
I personally like playing with woke ideas and concepts from time to time, just to sort of call out the bullshit of the cultural elites. I don't think that contradicts my opening to this post, because I don't use it as a social-class signifier; I just enjoy studying my adversaries and poking their weak spots. When rich white liberals talk about how racist all white people are, for example, and talk about "structural racism and white supremacy," they are really talking about themselves and their wealthy elite liberal cohorts. Even in their own view, skin color is both the most important thing and somehow not important at all (see the way they label any black conservatives as somehow being white supremacists).
While they bemoan colonization, they themselves are actually "colonizing" culture in order to create the political changes they want to see. It's another form of magic, in essence (creating changes in consciousness in accordance with will). If they had valuable ideas that are worth being embedded in culture, they'd create new and exciting cultural properties of their own that people would adopt and build upon; because their ideologies are weak, they can only attach themselves in a parasitic way to other people's ideas and cultures and subvert them to their own ends.
As happens often, the elites have called themselves out on their own bullshit. By co-opting symbols, myths, narratives, language, and culture to serve their own goals, they are yet again destroying, taking over, demonizing, and colonizing things important to other cultures to serve their own political and economic ends. Geek culture was just another ripe virgin territory to be exploited, monetized, and discarded when all of the value has been extracted.
It's not about skin color, it's about the powerful exploiting the weak, poor, and defenseless. Meet the new "woke" boss, same as the old boss but with new jargon and weak justifications.
As one who has found a certain comfort and enjoyment living at the fringes of polite society, I found some like minded people in geek culture. The geek culture of the 80's and 90's, to be exact, not the sanitized and prepackaged "geek culture" that has come to prominence today. (As an aside, I wonder if the OG geeks of the 60's and 70's feel a certain sense of superiority over the geeks of my generation in the same way; post Star Wars, sci-fi and fantasy were already getting mainstreamed). The enjoyments of my youth, havens for nerds and misfits and outcasts, have become hot commodities, properties to be exploited and homogenized.
Andrew Breitbart famously commented that politics is downstream from culture. I have been wrestling with that idea a fair amount. If that's true, and you want to create political change, you first have to change culture to reinforce your political goals. The rich fields of dork culture, which have become mainstream pop culture, are upstream of politics. Therefore, architects of social change have to go to the sources of the river and divert them for their own purposes (in my opinion it's more like poisoning the river, but anyway...).
Woke leftists have been working overtime in order to insert "wokeness" and push their political agendas into pop culture. If you're following the culture wars at all, this isn't exactly breaking news. Most recently Tolkien fans are upset about a new Amazon show based on the Lord of the Rings, which looks like it won't follow the traditional LOTR lore and has inserted various different modernized, "woke" characters and ideas.
I should make it clear that except in principle, at least, I don't really care. As far as JRR's books, I read and liked the Hobbit and stalled out after the Fellowship of the Ring. There were too many asides and too much backstory for my adolescent brain; I preferred Zelazny and Robert Howard, who got to the point. I keep thinking I ought to go back and read them, but I'm coming to the painful realization that there's only so much time and I have a lot of interests to pursue. I feel fairly satisfied with having watched the Peter Jackson movies, which I found long and intermittently tedious with bursts of really cool and interesting sequences. Anyway, I seldom watch films or TV shows nowadays, and when I do it's usually films I liked when I was younger. The modern habit of making every movie three hours long and every TV show a six season, 120 episode extravaganza rules them out for me; I really just don't have the time.
I personally like playing with woke ideas and concepts from time to time, just to sort of call out the bullshit of the cultural elites. I don't think that contradicts my opening to this post, because I don't use it as a social-class signifier; I just enjoy studying my adversaries and poking their weak spots. When rich white liberals talk about how racist all white people are, for example, and talk about "structural racism and white supremacy," they are really talking about themselves and their wealthy elite liberal cohorts. Even in their own view, skin color is both the most important thing and somehow not important at all (see the way they label any black conservatives as somehow being white supremacists).
While they bemoan colonization, they themselves are actually "colonizing" culture in order to create the political changes they want to see. It's another form of magic, in essence (creating changes in consciousness in accordance with will). If they had valuable ideas that are worth being embedded in culture, they'd create new and exciting cultural properties of their own that people would adopt and build upon; because their ideologies are weak, they can only attach themselves in a parasitic way to other people's ideas and cultures and subvert them to their own ends.
As happens often, the elites have called themselves out on their own bullshit. By co-opting symbols, myths, narratives, language, and culture to serve their own goals, they are yet again destroying, taking over, demonizing, and colonizing things important to other cultures to serve their own political and economic ends. Geek culture was just another ripe virgin territory to be exploited, monetized, and discarded when all of the value has been extracted.
It's not about skin color, it's about the powerful exploiting the weak, poor, and defenseless. Meet the new "woke" boss, same as the old boss but with new jargon and weak justifications.