So, whenever someone brings up the word "woke" lately the people who can be described as such immediately jump on it, claiming that it is a made-up insult by the lunatic Right to discredit those worthy progressive ideas.
This ignores the fact that this is merely a shorthand to describe those ideas, and not an insult as such, let alone the issue that the word had been used with pride as a self-identification not a few years ago... (Selective memory strikes again.)
But how about the original claim? Namely that the progressive ideas (which are called progressive, although there is nothing progressive about racism and sexism) permeated our whole culture?
If you look at entertainment -She Hulk, Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvels, Terminator, Netflix shows and so on and so on -it is quite plain to see. Gender and race swaps even in historical figures, girl bosses who would be described as toxic males had they been written as a man, (white) men can only be incompetent or evil, and the rest. Rewriting books to "reflext current sensibilities", banning and burning books, toppling statues, pushing for legislations that are based on identity politics, promoting people based on their sex and/or race to high positions -the list is long. But if you want further proof, look no further than Google's latest image generator.
Which caused quite a lot of stirr when it refused to depict white people in historical pictures of vikings, popes and even Nazis. (And this is not the only AI that does it.) I really love the fact that the Funding Fathers were depicted as black -makes the whole slavery thing a bit more confusing. When it finally does generate a white, blond, blue eyed Scandinavian, it is a picture of an Indian woman with blonde hair and light skin. It simply refused to generate white people's images, as it would be "harmful content".
Now google is claiming that it is merely a matter of inaccuracies in some historical photos.
Which is obviously not -see the issue about the refusal to generate current Scandinavians' images. (By the way, obviously while diversity is important for google, it is not that important. It does not insert random whites into non-white historical and other pictures. I have yet to see a white Malcom X generated. This is also interesting in the whole performative diversity exercise by the entertainment industry: not many random blacks and whites were placed in the Chinese army in Mulan, and reasonably few Asians and whites were shown as citizens of Wakanda.)
There is also a claim that it was merely rushed, and that they set up the filters incorrectly.
So what is it then?
Well, the obvious answer is that it is the evidence of a glaring anti-white bias programmed into the AI. (See here for an explanation how it is happening. In short, google is "wokifying" your promts.) There are signs that there are some activists working at google injecting in their own politics into their product.
Which is bad in itself, but it also shows how this sort of bias is wide-spread and normalized in "high society": you know, entertainment, tech and the rest. You know, in those circles which dominate our everyday lives.
And it will have serious consequences.
First, wokeness actively destroys meritocracy, as it is. This is not about a stupid image generator (or two). It is about the underlying ideology. All system has some built-in tolerance for less capable people, but when it becomes systemic, well... just think about the following question: would you prefer your neurosurgeon to be a diversity hire? Or the people desiging your airplane? Or the flight crew flying it? If you significantly increase the level of incompetence in the whole of a civilization, it will collapse under its own weight.
Second, it will promote serious blacklash. I mean you are actively telling a majority (in Western countries whites are still a majority, you know) that they are trash, and promote others over them based on their skin color. What do you think will happen? (Same with men, although they are not the majority, they are "just" half the population.)
Third, you are completely changing the past and present. This tool, now, is a novelty. You can joke about it, and claim people are racist for pointing out the obvious idiocy and bias, but but it will grow. It will be a large part of our lives, and it is actively lying. In twenty years these weird images of the Funding Fathers will be "real". It will completely confuse the issue of white settlers declaring independence, saying 'all men are created equal' while owning slaves. (Not that there are no lies and misinformation about the whole slavery thing currently, but this will put those to shame.) It will show you ethnic minorities and women in SS garbs, which probably would make Hitler spin in his grave -if he had one. (Maybe this is a way to find his remains.) If you cannot trust AI, if it seeds untruthful information into our collective body of knowledge, it will have disastorous consequences. Culture, history, entertainment, science -nothing is free from this threat of getting "relativized". There will be no factual reality left. Absolute loss of trust in anything. Again; this will destroy the fabric of a civilization.
So here you go. We will diversify ourselves into obscurity, while the Chinese -who are struggling with their own problem of impeding population collapse admittedly- are laughing at our self-inflicted wounds.
