That’s right. I’m saying (writing) it here. Big Tech, who, I believe, has taken over our entire Global Village, after having created it with their technological innovations, will move on from their current position of advocating that malignant package of ideological nostrums which we now call “wokeness.”
In order to be able to make this point, I’ll need to ask and answer a few questions. Here are some of those questions:
1. What, in fact, is Big Tech?
2. Why does Big Tech, at the present time, push wokeness?
3. After wokeness, what?
I intend to answer those questions, or suggest answers, not necessarily in the order that I asked them, because this is a complex subject with many rabbit holes and blind alleys. Nevertheless, I’m going to give it my best shot.
So: what in fact is Big Tech?
Big Tech is a name given world-wide in our Global Village, for an industry which affects the lives of all the villagers. It is the industry which created the electronic device on which you can read this, or the printer which printed the paper on which you are reading this.
There is nothing new about industries which have a major role in running the world, or influencing the world, but which are separate and distinct from governments and from nations. A few examples of such industries, which pre-existed Big Tech and are still powerful:
1. Banking
2. Fossil Fuel
3. Transportation
4. Journalism
5. Entertainment
Zooming in on that list one can find historic examples that played a major role in the history of the USA, and therefore the world: the “robber barons” and “yellow journalism.” The first was essentially a category of the the transportation industry, the railroads, which opened up the “Wild” western part of the nation, ultimately creating a whole genre of stories which still inspire the entertainment industry. But the railroads and the “robber barons” who ran them also resulted in the creation of some of the (now 50) states of the United States of America.
So, Big Tech, a present-day incarnation of the historic “robber barons,” is an industry which shapes, affects, and runs the whole world, not just the western USA.
But Big Tech does, in fact, share the running of our Global Village with other powerful entities. In my opinion, the top two of these entities are the so-called Military-Industrial Complex and the People’s Republic of China.
What, then, is the relationship between Big Tech and the ideology (“religion” if you like) of wokeness?
Wokeness is an amalgamation of the “diversity” movement and the “climate change” movement. In the case of the former, certain population groups are singled out and elevated to a higher status, the excuse being historical “oppression” of those groups: “people of color,” women, and the “queer.” In the case of the latter (“climate change”) it’s not just human collectivities which are oppressed, but the whole planet.
“Climate change” is a renaming of an ideology formerly called “global warming,” and whose critics aptly call it “climate alarmism.”
So, what’s in it for Big Tech to back wokeness?
In my opinion, Big Tech is the product of smart people who never really did fit in with the “conventional wisdom” of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Such people proudly called themselves geeks and nerds, and were celebrated in the 1984 hit movie, Revenge of the Nerds.
Given that the brilliant geeks and nerds who established Big Tech, as well as creating the Global Village itself, consider that they came together in incubators and campuses from all over the planet and were themselves refugees from all of the conventional wisdoms of their place of origin, which despised them for their ideas, romantic preferences, and, to quote one of them, Steve Jobs (adopted biological son of a Syrian immigrant) thinking outside the box.
I myself don’t believe that the woke diversity movement was actually created by the nerds and geeks of Big Tech. It was created by far-“left” intellectuals in academia, including the law schools. But it was, and is, appealing to the actual people who are the creators in and of the Big Tech industry.
Ultimately, I believe, those creators, those former geeks and nerds who now run the Global Village, will create their own ideological framework and move on from the severe limitations of wokeness.
More about that later.
Aha! It’s out there now! They’re calling it a VIBE SHIFT. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/federalist-radio-hour/id983782306?i=1000593597423