[sotasota]

If you ever wondered what it was like to live during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, well, we are living in the Western version of that right now. You don't speak out during the revolution for fear of being ostracized, fired, and forced into a struggle session where your character and reputation is publicly destroyed to send a clear message to everyone else.

Shut Up Or Else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...

Historians might mark 2017 as the official date Google was captured.

[kurige]

I feel like the fact that you are able to say this, and the sentiment echoed in other comments, is a pretty decent sign that the "movement" has peaked. It was just a few years ago that anybody voicing this kind of opinion was immediately shot down and buried on this very forum.

It will take a while for DEI to cool down in corporate settings, as that will always be lagging behind social sentiment in broader society.

[duxup]

I think we're a ways from the severity of the Cultural Revolution.

[sotasota]

Yes, but it didn't get there overnight. At what point was it too late to stop? We've already deep into the self-censorship and stuggle session stage. With many large corporations and institutions supporting it.

[FirmwareBurner]

>With many large corporations and institutions supporting it.

Corporations don't give a shit, they'll just pander to whatever trend makes them money in each geographical region at a given time.

They'll gladly fly the LGBT flag on their social media mastheads for pride month ... except in Russia, Iran, China, Africa, Asia, the middle east, etc.

So they don't really support LGBT people, or anything for that matter, they just pretend they do so that you'll give them your money.

Google's Gemini is no different. It's programed with biases Google assumed the American NPC public will accept. Except they overdid it.

[suddenclarity]

> Corporations don't give a shit

Corporations consist of humans and humans do care. About all kinds of things. As evident from countless arguments within the open-source community, all it takes is one vocal person. Allow them to influence the hiring process and within shortly, any beliefs will be cemented within the company.

It wasn't profit that made Audi hire a vocal political extremist who publicly hates men and stated that police shouldn't complain after their colleagues were executed. Anyone could see that it would alienate the customers which isn't a recipe for profit.

[OOPMan]

You're both right and wrong.

Corporations and governments do consist of people and people do care...but it's also the case the being a cog in a large organization does have a tendency to induce stuff like "I was just following orders" or "It's not my problem, someone else needs to fix it" :-/

[FirmwareBurner]

>It wasn't profit that made Audi hire a vocal political extremist

Sure, the problem with these huge wealthy companies like Audi, Google, Apple, etc is that the people who run them are insanely detached from the trenches the Average Joe lives in (see the Silicon Valley satire), and end up hiring a buch of useless weirdos in positions they shouldn't be in, simply because they have the right background/connections and the people hiring them are equally clueless but have the imense resources of the corporations at their disposal to risk and spend on such frivolities, and at their executive levels there's no clear KPIs to keep them in check, like ICs have.

So inevitably a lot of these big wealthy companies end up hiring people who use the generous resources of their new employer for personal political activism knowing the company can't easily fire them now due to the desire of the company to not rock the boat and cause public backlash for firing someone public facing who might also be a minority or some other protected category.

BTW, got any source on the Audi story? Would love to know more?

[proxyon]

> So inevitably a lot of these big wealthy companies end up hiring people who use the generous resources of their new employer for personal political activism knowing the company can't easily fire them now due to the desire of the company to not rock the boat and cause public backlash for firing someone public facing who might also be a minority or some other protected category.

Exactly. This has been my experience. The political axe grinders get hired. They bring their personal politics to work. Slowly they hire people who agree with them. Then they're all bringing their politics to work. Finally, the entire company changes and becomes dysfunctional.

This is what Coinbase and Kraken FX stopped in their company saying it was destroying them.

[inemesitaffia]

Can't find a name

[Affric]

With all due respect your opinion was better when it was viewable as pure hyperbole.

Mao kicked off the cultural Revolution in May 1966. By August the Cultural Revolution was in full swing. That’s 4 months.

The cultural Revolution was sudden.

[leadingthenet]

> The cultural Revolution was sudden.

The Cultural Revolution could only have happened due to the very specific ideological backdrop that existed in China at the time. The heights of it were sudden, but it didn't come out of nowhere.

[janalsncm]

It kind of did. There was a civil war in China, Mao pushed out all competing factions, and had complete political power.

This is a bug in a chatbot that Google fixed within a week. The only institutional rot is the fact that Google fell so far behind OpenAI in the first place.

I think the ones shrieking are those overreacting to getting pictures of Asian founders of Google.

[lupusreal]

You have your history very confused. Nearly 20 years elapsed between the end of the Chinese Civil War which left the CCP in power and the commencement of the Cultural Revolution.

[dragonwriter]

> Nearly 20 years elapsed between the end of the Chinese Civil War which left the CCP in power and the commencement of the Cultural Revolution.

That’s not at all inconsistent with what the GP said. The point was that the impacts of thr Cultural Revolution depended on it being imposed top down by an authoritarian, unitary state with no constraints.

[lupusreal]

The cultural revolution was initiated by Mao because he was losing power and wanted to regain it. Even then it didn't happen overnight. It was preceded by a generation of buildup (in fact many of the violent perpetrators were young teenagers who were born after the Civil War had ended). And even if you start counting from when Mao initiated it, it still didn't kick into full swing overnight.

[the_doctah]

>I think the ones shrieking are those overreacting to getting pictures of Asian founders of Google.

Braindead take.

[duxup]

I suspect a lot of things that were similar, didn't get there ever.

[Ferret7446]

That's what everyone thought just before every single horrible thing that happened in history. The Cultural Revolution or, e.g., the Holocaust didn't happen overnight. Things change slightly every day and then afterward you realize that everything has gone wrong, right around when people come knocking on your door.

[cm2187]

Agree but we are pretty much spot on in woke mccarthyism territory, which used to be widely understood as a bad thing.

[randounho]

Who got executed/sent to prison for treason? I don’t keep up with current trends genuinely curious if they’re sending people to jail for not being woke

[lupusreal]

McCarthyism is generally understood to be the witch hunting that went on in Congress and Hollywood. Not the execution of the Rosenberg's, who really did give the Soviet Union nuclear secrets and earned their just executions. The causal link between McCarthyism and the Rosenberg's execution goes the other direction as what you're suggesting; their actual betrayal of the country inspired witch hunting. McCarthy was full of hot air and liked to accuse lots of people of treason, but he never managed to get anybody executed (or even convicted) for treason.

(More incidentally, the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage, not treason. Nobody in America has been convicted of treason for anything done after WW2, and none of even the WW2 treason convictions resulted in executions.)

[cm2187]

And the problem with McCarthyism wasn't so much what was happening in congress, it is that the accusation of being a communist made you unemployable in Hollywood or elsewhere. It's extraordinary that Hollywood re-established a black list after having produced so many movies complaining about those years. You are now required to show loyalty to the woke agenda in university admissions, research grants, hiring and promotion process in large companies.

[barfingclouds]

Lots of professors getting fired, or not promoted, guy who wrote the google memo fired, lots of censorship, canceling. You’d have to be intentionally lying to not notice this

[proxyon]

During McCarthyism people weren't executed or sent to prison for communism. They lost their jobs and were shamed. The exact same thing that has gone on during wokeism.

[PathOfEclipse]

Yes, they are absolutely sending people to jail to set an example in support of woke orthodoxy.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/anger-erupts-after-biden-doj-...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-supporter-douglass-mack...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/jailed-canadian-father-still-...

And of course there's the 100% corrupt weaponization of the courts when going after Trump:

https://www.dailywire.com/news/court-fines-trump-83-3-millio...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/not-a-single-dollar-lost-by-t...

[FooBarBizBazz]

At least they did something about the landlords.

[mrangle]

What exactly did they "do about the Landlords" other than murdering middle class landlords in favor of an inescapable Fedal Lord that is the Communist State?

Hiding much or all of the rent on the balance sheet of the State, while paying prison wages for mostly-compelled work and making people live on the edge of resource starvation, is simply barely hidden feudalism and even slavery.

Where is the people's Government, exactly? All communist governments are only extreme charicatures of Feudalist Lords, free to engage in the worst excesses over people who they demand not only be slaves but give into psychological enslavement. Communism is psychological feudalism, in addition to physical. At least medieval Serfs were free to openly dream of something better.

Communism is a Three-Card Monte psychological trick that creates Feudal Lords in the Upper Ranks of the State, and abuses the Serf into seeing Serfdom as the most virtuous lifestyle.

It's not a deep mystery as to why many upper class psychopaths like communism. It seeks to neutralize a lot of feudalist inconveniences, mostly with an origin in the otherwise free mind of the Serf.

[TimeBearingDown]

By “do something” are you referring to mob violence?

If not, then what?

If so, it proves the point that we could repeat the bloody collectivist purges of the past should we not learn from history.

[JyB]

Do not worry. They will soon enough do something about you too. That's the point.

[Viliam1234]

I have read the Wikipedia article again, and I am pleasantly surprised how more balanced it is now compared to the older versions.

For example, only half a year after the memo, some brave anonymous soul added the information that the version in Gizmodo (which most people have read, because almost everyone referred to it) was actually not the original one, and had sources removed (which probably contributed to the impression of many readers that there was no scientific support for the ideas mentioned).

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google%27s_Ideolo...

[numpad0]

I'd put blame on App Store policy and its highly effective enforcement through iOS. Apple did not even aimed to be a neutral third party but was always an opinionated censor. The world shouldn't have given it power, and these types of powers needs to be removed ASAP.

[proxyon]

This is a very good point and prescient. Apple, Visa/MC/Amex/Discover, Google Play Store, and even internet backbones are extreme monopolies and now that corporate America has been seeded with social justice crusaders they are abusing their power. Most recently the people who own the pipes of the internet as a utility have been waging war on websites like kiwifarms and straight up banning it off of the clearnet for being "transphobic." This is dark stuff.

[arp242]

People roamed the streets killing undesirables during the cultural revolution. In a quick check death estimates range from 500k to 2 million. Never mind the forced oppression of the "old ways" that really doesn't have any comparison in modern Western culture.

Or in other words: your comparison is more than a little hysterical. Indeed, I would say that comparing some changes in cultural attitudes and taboos to a violent campaign in which a great many people died to be huge offensive and quite frankly disgusting.

[PathOfEclipse]

Survivor's of the Soviet Union, North Korea, and Communist China are all echoing similar warnings about the direction America is heading towards.

https://www.amazon.com/Live-Not-Lies-Christian-Dissidents/dp...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/exactly-like-history-repeatin...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-survivor-of-maos-china-...

"This is, indeed, the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”

Given all the evidence available, I find your dismissive and gaslighting attitude highly offensive and disgusting. What's happening to America is deadly serious, and the consequences could be, without any hyperbole, the loss of freedom, peace, and prosperity for the entire world, and the brutal death of millions.

[magnoliakobus]

Are you aware that millions of people were murdered during the actual cultural revolution? Honestly, are you aware of literally anything about the cultural revolution besides that it happened?

The Wall Street Journal, Washington Enquirer, Fox News, etc. are all just as allowed to freely publish whatever they wish as they ever were, there is not mass brutalization or violence being done against you, most people I live and work around are openly conservative/libertarian and suffer no consequences because of it, there are no struggle sessions. There is no 'Cleansing of the Class Ranks.' There are no show trials, forced suicides, etc. etc. etc.

Engaging in dishonest and ahistorical histrionics is unhelpful for everyone.

[logicchains]

>Are you aware that millions of people were murdered during the actual cultural revolution

Are you aware that the cultural revolution didn't start with this? No successful movement starts with "let's go murder a bunch of our fellow countrymen"; it gradually builds up to it.

[magnoliakobus]

Are you aware that we don't live under a Maoist dictatorship or any system of government even slightly reminiscent of what the cultural revolution developed within?

[EchoReflection]

https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/coddling-of-the-american-m...

Historically, students had consistently opposed administrative calls for campus censorship, yet recently Lukianoff was encountering more demands for campus censorship, from the students.

[marcusverus]

The same authoritarian spirit is alive and well in the American left. Remember when 45% of Democrats supported putting the unvaxed in camps, and 29% supported taking their kids away?[0]

How many more supported such measures, but had the sense to lie about it?

[0] Here's the poll. Search for 'designated facilities' and 'remove parents’ custody': https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/par...

[FooBarBizBazz]

Nah, America is past "peak woke".

If it gets Trump 2.0 there might be a hyper-woke backlash though (or double backlash?).

But if there's another Biden term, things will be chill, culturally.

Also, Twitter is dead, and that's where the spirals got out of hand.

[barfingclouds]

I agree with this. I don’t like new twitter but old twitter had a chokehold on society that did a lot of damage.

And yeah this is a lot of why I really hope trump isn’t elected. It’s going to bolster a far left movement like it did last time, to a really scary degree. That and undoing environmental policy, I feel like it will unravel this country

[Ferret7446]

In all seriousness, I don't think Biden can make it to another term. Even if we assume he gets voted in, he'll likely keel over walking up to the podium for the inauguration. Let the poor old man rest.

[wakawaka28]

Biden is letting a whole ass army of military-age young men into the country and burning all our money in expensive wars that might turn nuclear. He has to be voted out. Besides that, he's so obviously incompetent and senile, it would be a sick joke to keep him in. I figure either way, we're getting trouble. At least if we get someone else, we might have a chance to get our affairs in order, even if there are a few people freaking out about "far right" candidates (aka anyone the uniparty hates).

[throwawa14223]

My perception is Biden is pushing the woke pretty hard. I'm not sure why it would chill under him.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/house-gop-fails-to-ove...

[seanmcdirmid]

Trump 1.0 triggered the initial woke wave in the first place (he was a catalyst, not a proponent). Trump 2.0 would rather trigger double woke, which will trigger its backlash like woke 1.0 triggered its own backlash.

Biden as president is boring, which is how I like it. But if you want to rile liberals up, nominate or elect Trump president again, it will definitely drive voter turnout if anything else.

[wakawaka28]

No, what triggered Woke 1.0 was a psyop around Occupy Wall Street, years before Trump was even a candidate. It was a diversion used to break up the protest. Since then, corporations have embraced it as a shield against future protests. They engineered this strife and they are likely to lose control eventually as all the hatred they planted boils over.

[mostlysimilar]

Any links for additional reading?

I think it's very likely the "culture war" is a distraction tactic so corporations and the ultra-wealthy can hide behind the real issues that divide us: they own the world and the levers of control while the rest of us work ourselves into the grave.

[wakawaka28]

This will keep you busy: https://newdiscourses.com/ He is really a great speaker. Jimmy Dore and Glenn Greenwald also cover a lot of stuff on their channels.

[Perceval]

The "Great Awokening" began circa 2012:

* https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-wh...

* https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2304/2304.01596.pdf

* https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white...

* https://unherd.com/newsroom/where-did-the-great-awokening-co...

[seanmcdirmid]

You do know that the same time China was having its Cultural Revolution, America and the west were having one as well? With all those baby boomer kids coming of age, 1969 wasn't a calm year anywhere in the world. In China, it meant communism and down with the old culture/elites. In the USA, it meant free love, drugs, and protesting against the Vietnam war.

But this, I don't see any comparison to Google suppressing what images could be generated with AI to any of what happened 55+ years ago.

[wakawaka28]

It's evidence of a systematic suppression of white people, with roots in racism and cultural Marxism. Of course you're right that it hasn't escalated out of control yet. Except that whole BLM thing where people burnt down businesses and terrorized cities for months. That's just a taste of what's coming if we don't promote actual tolerance instead of Division Exclusion and Indoctrination.