The corporate retreat from wokeness?
I’ve seen a number of articles indicating that some companies are trying to leave extreme wokeness behind. For example, there’s this one about recent developments at Warner’s in that direction.
That doesn’t surprise me much – after all, cutting off so much of your potential audience wouldn’t seem like a good business move, and so a return to a more representative message would seem to make sense. What surprised me was the tremendous swing to wokeness in the first place. One would think it glaringly obvious that this would affect the bottom line negatively, and yet it was commonplace. My question is: why did they do it? It might have been an okay or even a good idea for some sort of niche company, but not for those whose business model was built on broad appeal.
My questions, in no particular order:
(1) Was it a case of competitive virtue signaling gone mad?
(2) Were the people making the decisions untethered from the reality of the need to make money?
(3) Did they think they were so creative and so clever that people would flock to their products anyway?
(4) Did they figure it was worth a little dropoff in business to demonstrate such virtue, but the dropoff was a lot more than they had bargained for?
(5) Was it merely a reflection of the fact that the personnel at such companies had become a woke echo chamber themselves and couldn’t even judge the extremity of what they were doing?
(6) Is this return to the center going to catch on and be real, or is it just a weak and sporadic thing?
Mostly your #5 but slightly different. The young low level staff are a crazy woke cult and the older management types are scared to death of them.
As for why they may (and I say may because I’m not sure I believe it) shift away from this is that when times get hard or look like they are going to get hard financially it tends to focus the mind.
This may sound promising, but to ascribe too much significance to it may well be an example of wishful thinking, as tyrannical wokesters still possess a frightening amount of power and cultural influence. Far more disturbing, in any event, than the “woke-ification” of entertainment or sports, is that which is taking place in medical schools, in medical societies, and in medical journals, on which Heather Mac Donald’s recently-posted essay (“The Corruption of Medicine” in CityJournal) is essential (and dispiriting) reading. On the general topic, the two best books are by Joanna Williams (How Woke Won) and by Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.), the former from a left-of-center perspective and the latter from right-of-center.
I’m thinking younger members of management pushed for it and older ones didn’t want to be accused of the usual thought crimes. In a way it’s similar to police response to the grooming gangs that we’ve seen in the UK.
“What surprised me was the tremendous swing to wokeness in the first place.”
May not be the whole story but I’ve read that if you buy a stock, you vote in corporate elections, etc. However, if you buy an ETF (and mutual fund?) you don’t own the underlying shares. The fund management does. So they vote the shares. And some of the biggest (BlackRock, Vanguard) are activist owners and use investors’ collective financial power to bully CEOs.
They turn away from profits, good products, motivated employees. They instead prioritize ESG principles.
And perhaps many of these management teams didn’t need much bullying? They could be poisoned by the same untruths that MSM uses to turn our neighbors into Good Germans.
I continue to maintain that the older CEOs and other executives do not believe any of this garbage but they are terrified of their own employees and have a warped view of reality that thinks social media is the real world. But in the end there are some who actually care about the bottom line enough to push back.
The same goes for politicians like Schumer and Pelosi only with them it is a new, convenient way to get more power.
j e– Have you seen the new City Journal article on the return of racial segregation to health care?
https://www.city-journal.org/disastrous-push-to-resegregate-health-care
I continue to maintain that the older CEOs and other executives do not believe any of this garbage but they are terrified of their own employees and have a warped view of reality that thinks social media is the real world.
1. Why would they be terrified of their employees?
2. Why would someone who lived the first 40 years of their life without any such thing as ‘social media’ think it ‘the real world’?
I sometimes correspond with a recently retired fellow who was an attorney in the G-C’s office of a corporation he does not name. He maintained that the ‘C-Suite’ people weren’t listening to the legal department and that the wokery was being pushed by HR and corporate communications. In his opinion, the wokery was more a result of negligence than design on the part of the CEO and his palace guard.
Art,
Are you serious or being ironic? I’ll pretend you are being serious.
Because they have seen numerous examples of CEOs and others lose their jobs for all kinds of things from legit to totally made up ‘microaggressions’ by these wokesters inside the company which are amplified by social media which these same people live on and have convinced virtually every institution is where their real customers are.
Is anyone aware of a professional organization for those who lean conservative or libertarian? I’d love to find and connect with others, specifically working in IT or other knowledge industries who think more like me. Most of the organizations I’ve been exposed to are great for making connections, but everyone tends to lean far left.
Just look at all the weak ass apologies that corporations issue virtually every day about some stupid social media driven outrage that are often amplified by the employees of the company.
Look at Disney in Florida for a perfect example. Do we really think that these 50-60 year old execs think it is wise to teach K-3 kids about all kinds of sex topics or are they afraid of the mob and the mob is outside their office either in reality or just metaphorically.
The Brendan Eich episode was one of the first episodes of this.
“And perhaps many of these management teams didn’t need much bullying? “
“…the older CEOs and other executives do not believe any of this garbage but they are terrified of their own employees and have a warped view of reality…”
There’s probably a certain amount of truth within each of those, as to how much, it’s anyone’s guess.
But….having gone “Full Woke” once, can any of them be trusted to not jump on the next brainless social media sensation and ride it until the balance sheet cries “uncle”?
Were the people making the decisions untethered from the reality of the need to make money?
I think this is at the root of it plus the theory of young staff having been indoctrinated. I think that is what happened at Disney as they have many gays among their “cast” members at Disneyworld. The gay-transgender thing is coming apart as lesbians realize the tranny thing is a war on women. Even Netflix seems to be edging toward sanity.
Neo says, What surprised me was the tremendous swing to wokeness in the first place. One would think it glaringly obvious that this would affect the bottom line negatively, and yet it was commonplace. My question is: why did they do it?
VDH’s new long article in the NY Post covers both short- and long-term reasons: https://nypost.com/2022/08/26/how-middle-class-now-view-their-rulers-with-rightly-earned-disdain/
Sample: “Nationally, the failure of the elite that transcends politics is even more manifest. The country is $30 trillion in debt. No one has the courage to simply stop printing money. The border is nonexistent, downtown America is a No Man’s Land, and our air travel is a circus — and not an “expert” can be found willing or able to fix things. Is Pete Buttigieg the answer to thousands of canceled flights or backed-up ports? Is Alejandro Mayorkas to be believed when he assures the border is ‘closed; and ‘secure’ as millions flood across?
The universities are turning out mediocre graduates without the skills or knowledge of a generation ago, but certainly with both greater debt and arrogance. Our bureaucratic fixers can only regulate, stop, retard, slow-down, or destroy freeways, dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, ports, and refineries — and yet never seem to give up their own driving, enjoyment of stored water, or buying of imported goods.”
The noise of the Woke may disguise their numbers.
A woke employee is already purchasing as much corporate out put as he needs and can afford. He’s not going to increase the bottom line. But his noise obscures how many aren’t interested in woke and have choices.
Net profit margins aren’t really high and it doesn’t take much to cut them to the point somebody notices.
Took the extended family to the Disney enterprise in Orlando before all this blew up. Even with discounts it was expensive. I was impressed by the organization. It was so well organized you didn’t notice how well organized it was. IIRC, their train from parking was broken that day–somebody tell me they had one, please–and they had gotten the smoothest ad hoc bussing arrangement up and running.
That takes a lot of people who are well trained and carefully chosen and vetted and that means high employee expenses plus you need a fleet of buses sitting around just in case. And you have to know who’s legally qualified to drive the bus, and know where the keys are.
It would save them exactly zero money for the Aubrey clan to not show up.
Doesn’t take much for the bottom line to reflect…something. Meantime, customer relations is deep-sixing customer complaints so the execs have no idea….
And then there are the heroes/winners. See Goya Foods.
As with ESG, there may some fiduciary duties ignored and subject to legal action, although it would be vague.
I’d simply caution against too early a victory celebration.
The Louise Perrys of the world and the firing of Tater from CNN are small successes against a wider cultural decline. Let’s thank God for a show cancelled here or a corporate retreat there…but that’s small potatoes.
We are daily saturated with both woke BS and stock standard BS such that what’s left of the cultural edifice of Western Civilization may have to be burned to the dust and rebuilt before normality is restored.
A lot of executives are afraid that if they don’t project the right attitudes, they won’t get Millennials and younger people either as employees or as customers. To some extent, this may be excessive generalization from the attitudes of their own kids. (I also strongly suspect that the influence of spouses is sometimes a factor)
There are also geographical factors. A lot of tech companies are located in Silicon Valley, right in the heart of Wokeness, and a lot of financial companies are located in New York City, heart of old-line Leftism.
Because they have seen numerous examples of CEOs and others lose their jobs for all kinds of things from legit to totally made up ‘microaggressions’ by these wokesters inside the company which are amplified by social media which these same people live on and have convinced virtually every institution is where their real customers are.
Someone loses their job, it’s because his supervisor or someone up the chain of command fired him. So, why are people up the chain of command afraid? And is it your contention that the board of directors is afraid as well?
Look at Disney in Florida for a perfect example. Do we really think that these 50-60 year old execs think it is wise to teach K-3 kids about all kinds of sex topics or are they afraid of the mob and the mob is outside their office either in reality or just metaphorically.
How many of those executives made their bones through (1) office politics or (2) marketing?
Art,
Yes, at some level they are afraid and the whole point is the chain of command has been compromised by social media mobs that can destroy or at least greatly harm careers for any number of ‘sins’. The customers are nameless faceless folks where as the enemy is inside the house, so to speak.
I have no idea I don’t work at Disney nor have any insider knowledge of their office inner workings.
A couple of years ago, it came to light that Boeing’s new head of communications (ie, chief PR person)…a former Navy pilot…had in 1987 written an article opposing women in combat. He apologized for his former Wrongthink and resigned.
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2020/07/03/boeing-executive-resigns-over-1987-op-ed-opposing-women-in-combat/
Pretty sure that if CEO David Calhoun had asked him to stay, he would have stayed. Calhoun said:
“Niel and I discussed at length the article and its implications for his role as the Company’s lead spokesman,” said David Calhoun, President and CEO. “I want to emphasize our Company’s unrelenting commitment to diversity and inclusion in all its dimensions, and to ensuring that all of our employees have an equal opportunity to contribute and excel.”
I don’t think Boeing is conducting any combat operations for which its female employees could be eligible, and if they were, the corporate communications department wouldn’t be selecting people for that role anyhow.
As the 737 Max debacle made clear, there are some corporate culture problems at Boeing, and this kind of thing is not the way to fix them.
Art Deco…”How many of those executives made their bones through (1) office politics or (2) marketing?”
Nothing wrong with marketing. There is no point in creating products unless you can sell them.
Office politics? It should never be the *dominant* factor, but it is always going to be an *important* factor, in organizations of any kind.
I think Griffin is correct. I’ll cite Disney as an example. Initially, Chapek said the company would not make any political statements. Then the woke in the company raised such a huge stink that he caved then made a complete reversal and more. I wish I knew why a CEO of yhe largest entertainment company in the world is so afraid of lower level woke noise makers.
There a plausibility to all of the above rationales.
However, IMO JimNorCal gets closest to the primary factor.
Context: can we all agree that Justin Trudeau qualifies as ‘woke’? Can we also agree that, as a graduate of W.E.F.’s “Young Leaders Program” that WEF supports ‘woke’?
“The list of corporate speakers Davos probably doesn’t want you to see (forgive the lengthiness but it serves to bring home the extent of the cancer)
“Corporate speakers include:
Notable corporate speakers at Davos 2022 include:
The boss of PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC).
CEO of Infosys, UK chancellor Rishi Sunak’s wife’s company.
Proctor and Gamble.
The boss of Deloitte.
The boss of Standard Chartered Bank.
Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
The boss of Marriot Hotels.
Moderna.
The Wellcome Trust.
The Atlantic Council.
The Carlyle Group.
Nike.
Henry Kissinger.
The IMF.
The boss of Citi.
The boss of Credit Suisse.
The boss of PayPal.
The boss of Nasdaq.
OECD.
The boss of the Bank of America.
The boss of Unilever.
Shell.
The boss of Nokia.
The boss of IBM.
The boss of Hewlett Packard.
The boss of Accenture.
Senior VP of Google.
The boss of L’Oreal.
McKinsey.
WTO.
Goldman Sachs.
The boss of BlackRock.
The boss of YouTube.
The boss of Microsoft.
Deutsche Bank.
Bill Gates.
The boss of KPMG.
The boss of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.
The boss of Fidelity.
Mark Carney.
HSBC.
The boss of Coca-Cola.
The boss of Siemens.
The boss of Pfizer.
The boss of Bayer AG.
The boss of the Rockefeller Foundation.
The boss of Cisco Systems.
The boss of Bloomberg LP.
The boss of Brightstar Capital.
The boss of Intel.
The boss of Qualcomm.
The boss of Honeywell.
Nestle.
Then, Davos’s main “partner” organisations (presumably funnelling money into it) include some of the most notorious companies on the planet:
Johnson & Johnson.
JPMorgan Chase.
Chevron.
Morgan Stanley.
Uber.
Amazon.
Barclays.
HSBC.
Goldman Sachs.
Press poodles and useful idiots
Media lapdog speakers joining (and promoting) this shitshow include:
BBC.
Sky News.
Financial Times.
.
Associated Press.
Wall Street Journal.
Business Insider.
CNBC.
Economist.
Bloomberg.
CNN.
NBC.
Politico.
Deutsche Welle.
New York Times.
Washington Post.
Tortoise.
France 24.
And, like corporatism’s useful idiots, the charities and NGOs propping all this up to include:
The boss of the Red Cross.
INTERPOL.
The executive director of Oxfam.
The boss of WWF (wildlife, not wrestling).
The founder of the Rise Up Movement.
The boss of Human Rights Watch.
Amnesty International.
But – there’s one stand-out issue. And that’s a couple of notable absences.
Amazon is a “partner” at Davos, but there’s no one from the company speaking. Meanwhile, Apple, the world’s biggest company, is nowhere to be seen on the main partners’ list – being tucked away on a general one. Elon Musk wasn’t invited, either. And Meta/Facebook and Twitter’s absence from proceedings is also telling.
But still, four of the world’s top five biggest companies by revenue are all represented in some way. Meanwhile, many of the top 25 banks and investment management firms who own those and all the other huge companies (and therefore really “run the world”) are also at Davos – either as speakers or main partners.
https://bywire.news/articles/the-list-of-corporate-speakers-davos-probably-doesnt-want-you-to-see
Of course we shouldn’t forget the influence of political pressure upon the corporate world… here’s a link to a pdf of the 309 political / government figures who attended the last meeting in Davos. This is of course a separate list from the corporate leaders in attendence.
https://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/data/general-file-upload/2022-05/WEF_AM22_List_of_confirmed_PFs.pdf
it doesn’t work, the first battle is language, it’s not ‘woke’ its a mirage, its mind arson, no institution works like this,
I think Griffin is correct. I’ll cite Disney as an example. Initially, Chapek said the company would not make any political statements. Then the woke in the company raised such a huge stink that he caved then made a complete reversal and more. I wish I knew why a CEO of yhe largest entertainment company in the world is so afraid of lower level woke noise makers.
It’s either the board or it’s that Chapek is a very other-directed man. Take your pick.
Yes, at some level they are afraid
Thanks for the assertion.
‘Thanks for the assertion’
You’re Welcome!!!!
The Salem Witch Trials were fueled by young girl hysterics who were infected by the current panic of the day.
But all the actual death sentences were carried out by adults.
This seems like the same sort of thing.
SusanM.
Good point. But I would almost be certain that the adults thought that witchcraft was possible. So there was already an underlying fertile field there. The older adults today know that there has been real racism, so they are a potential fertile ground for the woke religious fanatics to guilt trip. Not to mention, that middle aged men may be susceptible to manipulation by young women both thru fatherly feelings and the desire to once again feel approval from young, attractive women, even if they have no intention of acting on that approval.
It has been several years since I read “ The Light and the Glory”, which covered a lot of early American history, including King Phillip’s Indian War, which was a huge, partly self inflicted shock to the early colonist. Before reading that book I had not realized how massive of a blow the Indians delivered in that war. That war was a defining moment in pre revolutionary America and was likely the defining event in many people’s lives, both Indian and white. Entire towns were destroyed in that war.
One of the other events that the book covered was the Salem Witch Trials. The book examines these events from a religious perspective that would see many of these events differently than the secular histories would.
https://www.amazon.com/Light-Glory-Peter-Marshall/dp/0800750543/ref=asc_df_0800750543?tag=bingshoppinga-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=80333120160116&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=e&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=&hvtargid=pla-4583932712969015&psc=1
Jon Baker. That war killed ten percent of the men of military age in the colony. At least that many were wounded. Military medicine being what it was, getting shot was a pretty bad deal. So I don’t multiply the KIA by anything but one.
So twenty percent of the colony’s young guys were shot which means at least half were shot at.
Managed that without any help from Britain, too.
At least the beginning of the militarization of the American society.
Thanks for the book tip.
Reading through these comments, I’m not sure that people still recall the viscerally racial toxicity of two years ago, in the wake of St. George’s martyrdom. It was everywhere. Mostly it was not funny at all, though I did have a couple of good laughs when the Dixie Chicks became the Chicks (nothing offensive about that term, said no Second Wave feminist ever) and when even Eskimo Pie announced a name change. But otherwise just about anyone anywhere could be branded a racist for any reason or no reason at all, and if you ran afoul of the antiwhite Woke, no one had your back. There was nothing left but the groveling.
My question is: why did they do it? It might have been an okay or even a good idea for some sort of niche company, but not for those whose business model was built on broad appeal.
First let’s set aside the last year or so, since that’s when things began to change concerning wokedom.
You might think that some people like the woke stuff and some people dislike it, so there is some symmetry there. Win some, lose some. But it wasn’t symmetric.
Roughly 15 years ago, my adolescent niece’s in-law would come to visit and we’d do things out in the community. At first I just thought that they had very specific places they wanted to go. Then, I thought they were being a little too picky. But I finally realized that there were many places they absolutely would not go because they were politically incorrect. “Corporate coffee” and that sort of thing.
I read Nassim Taleb’s “Skin in the Game” recently. Unfortunately, I subsequently read The Black Swan and forgot much of the first one. But he goes into this in SITG. The titles in the table of contents give a flavor.
Book 3: That Greatest Asymmetry
Chapter 2: The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dominance of the Stubborn Minority
Most people are relatively tolerant in their day-to-day lives and activities because their preferences are generally not all important and a little shifting of choices smooths out many of the hassles. But some people are completely intolerant of some things. Non-Kosher foods or non-Hallal foods for example. A whole group of people engaging in some activity together will generally shift the group activity to satisfy a couple intolerant folks.
I think corporations adopted these woke things because it actually made good business sense and maximized their revenues, right up to the point where conservative or sensible people became mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. Fight intolerance with intolerance.
Jon Baker and Richard Aubrey: the legacy of King Philip’s War was still very much alive in the part of New England where I grew up. Field trips to battle sites at Bloody Brook, Old Deerfield, and Northfield were a standard feature of the elementary school curriculum in the 1960s. Springfield, Massachusetts was one of the towns destroyed in the war. “King Philip” and “Metacomet” are still popular names for businesses in middle and southern New England.
The poet Robert Lowell came from an old New England family. Lowell began his 1944 poem “Children of Light” thusly:
“Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones
And fenced their gardens with the Redmen’s bones…”
Another poem from the same collection is entitled “At the Indian Killer’s Grave”.
Jill Lepore’s “The Name of War” is a good secular history of the conflict and its influence on American culture.
Good comments.
I suggest that reasons (1)-(5) operate in a mix with different weights for each company, or even each officer in a company, and the total of all the factors determines the “flavor” of wokeness displayed — and its strength.
If the highest weights are on 1, 3, & 4, then we could see the turn-about displayed by some corporations as they get mugged by reality.
If the highest weights are on 2 & 5, then there will continue to be stubbornly entrenched wokeness.
Not sure if testing this thesis is possible, given we don’t have direct insider information, but public news stories might contain enough to make a guess.
For example, the old CEO of CNN probably internalized a heavy mix of 1,2,3, & 5, but the new one is weighting 4 to the max and (hopefully) zeroing out the rest.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/08/cnn-cancels-reliable-sources-host-brian-stelter-leaving-network/
https://freebeacon.com/media/chris-lichts-republican-apology-tour/
As for the robustness of (6) — I think that will depend on the economic and/or social sector involved, and how many of the wokerati eventually have to live with the consequences of their ideology (referencing the discussion on V. D. Hanson’s post).
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/08/27/vdh-on-why-the-masses-detest-the-elites/#comment-2639810
This also may have had an impact on why the decision makers (walking the edge of 1, 2, & 4) reduced the weight they had previously assigned to the demands of the younger staff (heavily invested in 3 & 5):
https://notthebee.com/article/warner-bros-and-discovery-employees-are-freaking-out-because-their-boss-is-going-to-go-make-them-go-back-to-the-office-after-more-than-two-years
Another possible factor:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/02/gops-refusal-to-play-along-with-corporate-medias-rigged-game-is-working/
@ physicsguy > “I wish I knew why a CEO of yhe largest entertainment company in the world is so afraid of lower level woke noise makers.”
I think a useful analogy would be visualizing the noise makers as bratty kids, and the CEOs as neighbors who put up with them because their Daddy (see Geoffrey’s list for some possible names) is a hulking brute who doesn’t mind smashing faces if he thinks someone’s dissing his kids.
Start fighting back against Daddy, and you neutralize the kids.
Hubert. I was born in Springfield, lived a few years in Norwich where my grandfather ran the Mohican grocery store.Swum at beaches only reluctantly reduced to the written word.
It’s not the same as in the UK: “old military families” don’t have land. But some go back to the never quite put out, smoldering of that old frontier.
Thanks for the book tip.
Richard Aubrey: “But some go back to the never quite put out, smoldering of that old frontier.” Well put. Go up into the hills above the Connecticut, it’s still Indian country.
Re: Indian names reluctantly reduced to the written word, here’s one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Chaubunagungamaug
Also known as Webster Lake. Not a beach, but still a body of water.
I was born about twenty miles north of you and I’m guessing more than a decade later. Was your dad at the Armory? Or perhaps Westover AFB in Chicopee?
As for Neo’s questions, I vote 1 predominantly, plus what TommyJay and Geoffrey Britain said. Status signaling. That, plus they figured it would be less grief (and possibly even more profitable) to just get on the bandwagon than to pull a Goya. And a general lack of backbone. I don’t know any CEOs, but I have known some university presidents, who are brand managers and therefore CEOs of a sort. They give jellyfish a bad name. Mitch Daniels (Purdue) is very much an exception.
A couple of quick comments.
1) Most of Corporate America and some mid-sized companies are de facto run by HR. HR is feared because they can destroy a career by accusing someone of not being a team player. It’s the same thing that happened to academia a decade ago.
2) I think a lot of execs are hoping for a quick but painful recession so they can clean house. The Feds Powell has basically promised this in speeches “ to correct the imbalance in the labor market.” If that’s what it takes to cleanse business of its HR dominance I think if it as an inoculation of common sense back into the institution.
1. Insult and piss off half your potential audience.
2. ????????
3. Get rich
Hubert. My Mom was with her folks in Longmeadow while the sons and sons in law were overseas.
My Dad went from UConn to Ft. Devens off to various places ending up more or less seeing Russians on VE Day.
How about Misquamicutt or Quanancantaug?
As to woke corps: How they got there is one thing. What is happening now is another and not closely related. As in, why should we do a Gillette and alienate all the people who buy our stuff. Looked cool when we started but now we don’t have any money. Got to be something we can do….
And CNN trying to climb out of the Port a Potty?
Richard Aubrey: thanks. I remember you mentioning that your dad played football at UConn before the war. The Huskies were always a tough team in the old Yankee Conference.
I understand that it was common for Army wives to move in with their parents or in-laws while their husbands were in training or overseas.
My Boston-born dad played football at Northeastern–also the Huskies, but not in UConn’s league–his freshman year (1941-1942), then enlisted in the USAAF. At Fort Devens, where he was discharged in 1946 after returning from the Pacific. Moved with my future mother to western Mass. in the early 1950s after he got his PhD and became a lifelong UMass Redmen (there’s that Indian connection again) fan. Many happy memories of watching games with him at Alumni Stadium.
BTW: Gen. Creighton Abrams was from Agawam. He nearly pulled it off in Vietnam (Lewis Sorley, “A Better War”).
Misquamicutt or Quanancantaug are definitely contenders, but they’re halfway pronounceable. I’ve got a cherished family photo that was taken at Misquamicut.
Woke corporations: yes, watching them reel back the nonsense is fun, but Neo’s question remains: is it for real? I expect we’ll see them return to their vomit eventually, especially if the government makes it worth their while. Which it probably will.
NS Lyons has a pessimistic Substack post on the subject, from a bit back:
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over
Art Deco,
I don’t think this is an ‘either/or’ situation. The C-suite didn’t care enough about what the HR departments were up to until it was too late. The camel has its nose under the tent and now the upper management and boards are afraid as they have been self-selecting for more other-directed people who excel at office politics. It was merely a decade ago when the problem any one could see coming was still being dismissed with, “they’ll grow out of it.”
It’s the same thing that happened to academia a decade ago.
I was employed in higher education for 21 years. No, the place wasn’t run by HR.
It is more of a rear-guard action than a retreat; I think it is still being undersold how bad it has become.
David Zaslav, CEO of Discover who recently purchased Warners, is an outsider who is wealthy enough to even consider pivoting to a different tactic. But there is already a target on his back just for being an outsider (or merely a tv-man) to Hollywood.
About #4: It isn’t just a drop-off at the retail level, which there is, but how much more expensive ‘wokeness’ is for Hollywood. The business requires a lot of young, cheap talent to mitigate its financial risks, especially as streaming damaged the secondary physical media market. The industry-wide quota systems– Amazon caps white people at about 25 to 30% of every production– made young white actors, directors and writers unhirable. Only white guys and gals with proven track records are considered for positions.
Initially, places like Warners and Disney and Netflix thought they could substitute non-white people into the cheaper roles. There has been three problems with this though. One, this non-white talent pool which has always been small, was already filled with people who work consistently. The demand outweighs the supply, making this talent not as cheap as some white 20-something just off the bus. Two, it made the white talent more expensive as they now had a new-found leverage of their own. This leads to three: now that the white talent remaining were asking for (and receiving) better deals, it led to a lot of accusations of “isms” and collective demands that these companies match all offers in full based on skin color, regardless of experience or draw. So, for example, if Martin Scorsese could get a sweetheart deal from Netflix, then the demand became that Netflix match that deal with every creator, regardless of their experience and track record. It is easy to see how they set up a system where suddenly every production has the chance to bleed money.
So the short of it is that it has made all these productions too expensive. At Warners itself, they are in such bad financial shape that they only have money to distribute two or three more theatrical releases for the rest of the year– a major studio that for years was 2nd only to Disney.
We are seeing changes at Warners, and a while back at Netflix, to try at the very least to restrain some of this. But not all of the quotas are going away, and they may have already reached a point of becoming institutionalized where no one is going to rock the boat because “this is how it’s done.”
Hubert:
A woke CEO from the briny deeps.
https://centerforsurfresearch.org/blobfish/
Numb. You may be right that Warners is going away. But the market, in whatever form will remain. And somebody will go after it, likely having watched Warners not learning its lesson. And, possibly, Warners May see it happening in time to pull out.
What it takes is allowing the noisy woke no moral authority whatsoever.
We are seeing changes at Warners, and a while back at Netflix, to try at the very least to restrain some of this. But not all of the quotas are going away, and they may have already reached a point of becoming institutionalized where no one is going to rock the boat because “this is how it’s done.”
You mean their production costs are inflated, but they cannot get rid of hiring quotas which are generating the inflation because reasons.
Art. Somebody starting from scratch doesn’t have the because-reasons thing.
I don’t think there’s any lessening of Wokeness. I work for a CA tech co and we are all in on DEI. I don’t see anything changing. Happily, they had no comment on Roe. They give us weekly, anonymous surveys, and I can’t be the only one complaining.
Art. Somebody starting from scratch doesn’t have the because-reasons thing.
I’m sure you thought that was coherent.
Wokeness is not a force in media and similar corporations only. It’s just more immediately obvious there because of the visual element (and for the moment, I define ‘visual’ broadly to take in all sensory inputs that receive obvious information about “identity”). In other words, just because a given corporation is not “public-facing” in the rather narrow sense represented by an entertainment or print/electronic media enterprise does not mean that there is not a ‘woke’ undercurrent pushing on at least some aspects of the business. I would suggest that precisely because of this aspect of Wokism being less publicly detectable, less overtly critical to the business’ modern “social justice” mission in such cases, it can persist longer and at a more endemic level in the ranks there. Depending on circumstances, it may or may not be more restrained as a result, but I provisionally view that as independent of the nature of the business. This was why that N. S. Lyons article which Nancy B. mentioned seemed very right to me.
What would happen if we actually had a monoculture instead of the, it seems to me, increasingly balkanized excuse for a culture we have now? I am convinced that the woke brigade is small but loud, and, corporations by their nature are conflict adverse, whereas, the woke brigade seeks conflict. It seems to me that the wokesters, actually the result of a process begun in the 60’s, are using a subverted system to achieve their ends. I claim not expertise. Just spit balling.
Om: thanks for the link. I can’t speak to CEOs but one notices a family resemblance to your typical university administrator–e.g. George Bridges, the former president of The Evergreen State College:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/new-video-madness-reigns-evergreen-college-students-take/
Unfortunately, I think the N.S. Lyons article referenced by Nancy B. is correct. Wokeness is the culmination of decades of patient institutional work by the Left. It is buttressed by federal civil rights legislation and related penalties and the current generation is completely on board with it because jobs. Which means that it is not going away anytime soon. The solution? My $.02, FWIW: build attractive alternatives at the state level. DeSantis is showing how this can be done. We need at least 10-15 more states to follow suit, preferably states with economic and financial heft.
Art. It was, considering the context.
However… a new business–say, going into the entertainment market–has the opportunity not to hire woke people for Human Relations. Or woke anybody else. And so, when an issue arises, there is no woke influence internally nor sympathy for its external manifestations.
There will be little internal call for such a firm in sporting goods to stop selling guns and thereby telling a substantial portion of its customer base, buying guns or not, that they’re stupid, evil people. There is nobody already on board pushing what is known as “because reasons”.
There is speculation that at least one public relation firm advised clients not to make a cause out of abortion after the Dobbs decision. It was going to backfire on the companies if they went full-on pro-abortion.
Why the woke wave? Colleges have been moving in that direction for decades and leading the way. I think the big change in the corporate world started in the Nineties. We were moving towards a borderless world and Shanghai mattered more to corporate executives than Sheboygan. We were also foreseeing a “majority minority” future, and this began to transform marketing strategies. HR departments and management consultants were already trending that way. Then come George Floyd and BLM at the same time as gay marriage and the Caitlyn Jenner and a corporate panic about not being progressive enough. Don’t underestimate the influence of shakedown artists threatening boycotts either.
Businesses probably figured people would buy their products whatever they did. They were also concentrating on the 25-49 year-old demographic and thinking that if they could win over the young and woke, they would have formed brand loyalties for the future. Corporations have been trying to “diversify” their boards of directors for quite some time. I don’t think the top officers in many corporations are that “diverse” but they are Michael Scott types who are trying to be politically correct and up to date and adapted to the new order.
Will the wave break? Some crisis may force people to work together. For a long time, there was a hope that a tough Black president would tell the country to get over all the racism talk and move on, but obviously that didn’t happen. All a large part of the population learns in school and college is wokeness, so wokeness is probably here for some years to come.
This essayist believes that the Professional-Managerial Class is the new ruling class, so maybe they’re just making cultural policy decisions and feeling their oats.
https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/inherit-the-earth?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
It’s a Med-Long Read, but I thought it was good.
…”Aside from a few radical chic gestures toward defunding the police and allying with trans “lives,” the professional managerial class has, over the last few years, stood in consistent and open opposition to the interests of the working class: the zealous support for Covid lockdowns and the indifference to the economic pain they caused, the insistence on vaccine mandates on threat of unemployment and the angry, authoritarian retaliation against anyone who dared to oppose them, the reflexive censorship of anyone who defied the authority of the expert class. Even when the PMC has acted in a spirit of ostensible generosity, it has been largely self-serving.”