Where's the economic incentive for wokism coming from?

That you think they're going super hard woke (especially Disney) is perhaps telling of your own biases. 

…and then you go on to describe how Disney is in fact selling movies with woke components to the West, which is exactly what I was talking about.

Just… don't do this. I'm not available for this kind of psychoanalysis. I find it extremely difficult to engage in good faith when people make moves like this one. My biases are my business. If you think I'm missing something, just point it out. Don't try to diagnose my failures of rationality.

You are making the mistake of assuming that because the median Chinese citizen is ideologically opposed to the American left in a technical sense, Disney's localizing movies for China means that Disney isn't a captured institution. But in fact the American left cares very little about the beliefs and attitudes of the average Chinese person, as they compete in an almost entirely distinct political arena. So major movie companies being willing to sell movies there is not much evidence of anything.

More telling than Disney's localizing for China at all is the fact that they refuse to make high budget, well marketed movies catering to (for example) the Christian right, even though such a niche has proven to be very profitable for independent filmmakers, and in fact ought to be easier for Disney to cater to as an American company.

A concrete example of this inversion of the burden of proof arose just today, with regards to the Twitter layoffs:

Their complaint cites calculations provided by Mark Killingsworth, an economics professor at Rutgers University, to allege that, overall, “57 percent of female employees were laid off on November 4, 2022, while 47 percent of male employees were laid off.”

This lawsuit is not alleging that any specific discriminatory behavior took place, or that discriminatory reasoning was used by managers in choosing who got the pink-slips and who got to stay on. Rather, the brute fact that more women than men were laid off is used as evidence to assert that Twitter was targeting women. Now, it's up to Twitter to show that it was not behaving in a discriminatory manner in conducting its layoffs.

Thank you, this was helpful.

Lots of people also threatened to move to Canada if Trump was elected President. How many of them actually chose to do so?

I don't think this is the right analogy. Listening to more moderate and right-leaning folk, one gets the impression that viewership of shows and movie franchises that are going woke has been dropping like a rock. Like apparently there was an analysis of when people turned off the Captain America streaming show on Disney+ (I forget its name — the one where Falcon becomes the new Captain), and the moment it plunged was the scene where police were harassing Falcon due to racial profiling.

Maybe the most befuddling part of the culture wars is the way, on every front, soldiers on both sides muddle the facts. It's hard for me to tell what's even true. Daniel Schmachtenberger describes this as "polluting the information commons". There's a Molochian dynamic where the facts of the matter are part of what's being fought over.

That's why I've been looking at places that have a profit incentive that are also catering specifically to wokism, noticing I don't see a corresponding shift in the other direction at the same scale, and kind of scratching my head. Wokism doesn't look as obviously profitable a thing to align with as their behavior seems. Even if it is, that seems like it'd be hard to determine.

The possibility that it's actually more like legally imposed internal friction makes some good sense. I doubt that's the full picture but it's a plausible major component.

Ah, so being woke increases your job safety, if you are a member of one of the protected groups. It makes your membership in that group more salient; if you ever get fired, it makes it easier to argue that you were fired because you belonged to that group.

And there is no obvious counter-strategy, because telling them "stop talking about your membership in a protected group all the time" can itself be interpreted as attacking the group.

It sounds to me like the core thing to take away from this is that Union works. can anyone explain to me a reason to see this as bad? It seems to me that Valentine could only reasonably want to ask this if he wants to intervene on it in some way. So I'd like to hear more about what intervention he'd like to attempt and what his intended target of agency is. he says he is "not available for that social move", which I take to be him attempting to avoid being pressured to be reasonable; I'd like to hear more about that.

edit: after a surprisingly direct "okay, but I'm not out to get you" from him, which unlike most internet interlocutors I actually trust from having known him a few years ago, I now expect that I will not object to his attempted interventions. I do still think that this post is strong evidence he intends to intervene, but I now expect he's likely to intervene in ways that attempt to bridge conflicted agency between interhuman agentic networking patterns. Which is the essence of what solving safety problems is about, so, thumbs up.

Aren't CEOs mostly Republicans? And what's stopping the shareholders from insisting on prioritizing profit?

What tendencies specifically would you classify as "woke"? Having an intentionally diverse cast? Progressive messaging? Other things? And which of these tendencies do you think would alienate a significant portion of the consumer base, and why?

By "woke" I'm referring to a pretty specific memeplex. I don't know how to name memeplexes with precision, but I can gesture at some of its key features:

• Intersectionalist social justice theory. There's systemic oppression, and there are beneficiaries of systemic oppression. This is folded in a basic way into the functioning of society. It can be changed, and there's a moral obligation to change it, but only the beneficiaries (people with "privilege") can actually do it. Therefore having privilege is a moral responsibility — which the privileged are systemically encouraged not to notice. There's lots of disagreement about who's where in the privilege hierarchy (e.g., do cis women or trans women have more privilege?), but there's a pretty general agreement that cis hetero white men have the most privilege.
• Shame tactics. It's necessary and appropriate and good to pressure privileged people to accept their responsibility. Any privileged person who hasn't done so is part of the problem and is therefore a bad person. It's forgivable if they simply do not know the evil they're perpetuating, but if they've been exposed to this truth and they resist then they are willful beneficiaries at the expense of others and deserve condemnation.
• Cancel culture. People who voice disagreement with this message are encouraging systemic oppression and need to be deplatformed. We deplatform them by refusing to listen to them and by shaming and deplatforming people who continue to listen to them. (A common extension: People who object to this canceling tactic are also supporting systemic oppression and must, in turn, be shamed and/or canceled.)
• Western culture must repent. The West took over the world through colonialism, which is the origin for a lot of / most of / all of the systemic oppression. In order to purge ourselves of this systemic oppression, we need to uproot all the elements that descend from Western colonization and replace them with something better. It's also necessary for Western cultures and people to apologize and make material amends for this past so as to heal the damage done. Education of history should focus on the West's atrocities and avoid mentioning its virtues, since those virtues are usually just ways of justifying privilege and the atrocities aren't emphasized enough for us to collectively notice the need to repent.
• [No clear vision.] This is a meaning-making framework, not a vision for the future. It's about what to destroy, not what to create. It's a memetic mutation blending postmodernism, Calvinism, and a watered-down version of Marxism. It's not clear what a world free of systemic oppression looks like, but it's counted as victory if those who aren't on board with the fight get alienated or destroyed, or if more people start loudly using these tear-down tactics and repeating the message. It also comes with a total disregard for the potential downsides of tearing down culture this way (since concern for the downsides is just an argument for perpetuating systemic oppression).

The main problem with this memeplex is that it's a war machine, not an idea. One is not allowed to debate with it. You either agree and align, or get attacked. There's no room for "Hey, I think you might really have a good point about systemic oppression being a thing, but these approaches for creating change seem like they'll create more problems than they solve. Maybe we could think of what else to do instead?" The usual refrain is some version of "Get with the program!" or "You're just trying to protect your privilege" (or "You've internalized white supremacy" when speaking to someone from an obviously oppressed category).

It even comes with a ban on being named, which is curiously demonic. The term "woke" actually came from its early origins. It was a reference to waking up to the reality of systemic oppression, instead of continuing to sleepwalk as a kind of accomplice. In recent years it seems to have evolved a demand that it be viewed as totally normal, that disagreement is a sign of moral corruption, that trying to name this thing means you're resisting and thereby choosing to align with evil. I hadn't realized how strong that particular mutation had become when I first posted this question.

You're right, I could have been clearer about what structure was confusing me.

I keep encountering these detailed claims & explanations about how the movement toward "woke" (for lack of a better word — apparently the left has tagged what was once their word as now strongly right-coded) is having negative effects on viewership and profit. Not overwhelmingly like a lot of the right insists ("Get woke, go broke"), but still pretty significantly.

Like apparently in the Disney+ show where the Falcon became the new Captain America, there was a pretty dramatic drop-off in viewership right at the scene depicting police profiling the main character for being black. As far as I know, there was never a corresponding upswing from people who were excited about this material being depicted in the MCU.

A lot of these companies seem to have decided to send strongly left-coded messages like this and then tag audiences who object "toxic fandom". Electoral evidence gives me the sense that left vs. right is pretty evenly split in the population. The usual move in the past has been to be as unoffensive as possible so as to appeal to a wide audience base. So this swing seems like a pretty wide-spanning decision that profit lies so overwhelmingly with left-leaning audiences that alienating right-leaning folk is absolutely worth it, even if it doesn't create a correspondingly large number of strong left-leaning folk to start watching.

But since profit in media companies tends to be attached to raw viewership numbers, I get confused. Something doesn't add up.

Even saying it's ideological (like right-leaning folk often assert) doesn't stack up. Why would all of them suddenly become ideological in the same direction? Wouldn't those who are just profit-focused benefit from not going ideological?

So it really does seem like a profit motive, but the profit mechanism isn't at all clear to me.

Whenever I talk to people clearly aligned with the left in this front of the culture wars, I get the clear sense that they think they've simply won. That the right is a fringe thing or something, that these leftist ideas are just normal, that the few people who object to the messaging are just a few leftover bigots who need to get with the times or be deservedly alienated, etc. But that's not the impression I get at all when interacting with folk outside left info bubbles. (Strangely, I often get the opposite impression: lots of right-leaning folk think "wokism" is a fringe movement of just a few screaming people who have the ears and brains of Hollywood, that the reality of viewership will come home to roost eventually, etc. The info bubbling goes both ways on this.)

So I'm looking around and wondering: Gosh, did these companies solve the problem of the polluted information commons and actually determined that profit lies so, so much with the left that alienating the right is worth it? How did they do that? What do they know?

…and those people tend to also be supporters of social justice politics.

I guess this is the part that's not so clear to me. I see lots of people like this. I also see lots of people who are groaning about being repeatedly lectured and about their characters and franchises getting deconstructed. It's hard for me to find a vantage point that doesn't bubble me in one sphere or the other in a way that makes one side look overwhelmingly larger than the other. So I just can't tell what the actual demographics are here. But the revealed behavior of these companies gives me the impression that they do find it crystal clear. That's what I find a bit bewildering.

Heavily downvoted for (a) not answering the question and (b) instead using this space as an opportunity to repeater signal boost the left's narrative in this particular corner of the culture wars.

[Edited to correct an inappropriate blindness on my part.]

The system wouldn't let me delete your reply here. The button simply wouldn't respond.

The problem in short is that you're actively summoning the mind-killing aspects of politics by forcefully asserting one side of a culture war debate as fact, in content and in frame.

This is epistemically toxic and absolutely does not belong in the context of a discussion space for rationality.

Since the tech won't let me delete your comment, I've heavily downvoted it, and I'll leave this comment here.

coined by the anti-equality/human-rights/anti-LGBT/racist crowd

This is false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke 

What is called "woke" is actually normal...

In the future, when not wanting to signal the allegiance to the Bad Guys crowd...

If you find yourself uttering statements like this, consider that you may have been mind-killed by politics. (EDIT: To clarify, I'm from Europe, not the US, and am thus pretty far removed from US politics.)

Though to add a bit of substance to this comment, consider this: How would you expect a poll on the question "To the extent that you understand the term, do you consider yourself to be 'woke'?" to break down by party? For instance, what numbers of "yes" vs. "no" would you expect for Republicans? Anyway, here's such a poll from mid-2021.