Woke me once, shame on you...
PLUS: Twitter neuters its grift economy, Anthropic's outing AI users, and no one wants to sit at the Cruel Kids Table.
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The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.
The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.
Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.
If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.
This week, we’re looking at why everyone is talking about “Woke 1,” the collapse of the conservative social media ecosystem, Twitter’s new payout scheme, and Anthropic watermarking Claude outputs.
We’re all trying to find the guy who did this
Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on ABC and got caught in a conversation about former Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s controversial old tweets. In an effort to downplay Hong’s past statements, AOC repeated a phrase that’s been gaining traction on social media: “Woke 1 was crazy.”
This made quite a few people angry.
Moderates and conservatives felt that the phrase was a stock dismissal of the very real excesses of “Woke 1.”
On the progressive side, many questioned what exactly they were supposed to be backing away from:
Cultural commentator Ryan Broderick insinuated those using the phrase were empowering sexism and bigotry: “Was #MeToo crazy? Was protesting police killing unarmed Black people live on camera crazy?”
The phrase was popularized by New York City Councilman Chi Ossé, who used it in May to downplay his own overbearing 2021 tweet that “a cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.”
It’s an implicit acknowledgment from Ossé, AOC, and other left-leaning personalities that during the “peak woke” years, certain things got a little out of hand. Progressive power brokers seem fully aware that they overextended their cultural and political program, and, hey, they’ve learned a valuable lesson, and they’re backing down from things they said back then.
At the risk of being a stick in the mud, I’m not sure that’s good enough. To use a wildly over-the-top analogy:
Woke 1 was not a natural disaster that just sort of unexplainably happened; it was a specific political and cultural project that specific people orchestrated. AOC was one of those people.
Woke 1 erupted out of reasonable concerns — sexual harassment and police brutality weren’t fake issues — but your head would have to be stuck in the sand to ignore that there were also harmful overreactions that did little to advance social justice:
Professors were investigated, suspended, and fired for saying a Mandarin word that sounded offensive in English and for showing artwork that depicted Muhammad. David Shor was fired1 for tweeting research that showed nonviolent protests were more effective than violent protests.
Two Black teenagers in Seattle were murdered because the city wanted to let anarchists cosplay at running an “autonomous zone” with no policing.
Perhaps most consequentially, we did actually defund the police in many cities, including in AOC’s backyard. Mayor Bill de Blasio cut anywhere from $420 million to $1 billion2 and more than 1,100 officers from the NYPD’s budget (as much as one-sixth of police spending) while murder rates were spiking to the highest level in almost a decade.
What makes “Woke 1 is craaaaazy” frustrating is in part what makes it effective: No one knows exactly what you mean. By Woke 1, do we mean prosecuting Harvey Weinstein? Pronoun buttons and land acknowledgments? Firing professors for wrongthink? Defunding the police? Body-positive models on the Victoria’s Secret runway?
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