There’s NO Difference…

There is no difference between woke one, woke two, or whatever anybody wants to call it. It’s the same thing it was ten years ago. But here are three reasons the conversation around wokeness isn’t slowing down, and I’m not absolved from any of them.

One. The people in the mainstream have no desire to change their approach. A lot of them deny it exists or reject the premise altogether, and you cannot have an honest conversation with someone acting like you’re seeing ghosts. For all the talk about nuance and media literacy, the argumentation that would actually get us to a solution never happens.

Two. It isn’t economically punished long term. A project fails, the debt gets shuffled, and everybody involved moves laterally into the next gig. Even when a studio collapses, the umbrella hires them again. And the audience side matters just as much, because this stuff gets attached to nostalgia. Tie it to an IP you grew up on and you’ll give it a fourth, fifth, sixth chance. Meanwhile these companies are making money in other places. Look at Disney, where the parks and experiences side pulls in more than double what the film and streaming side does. One bomb doesn’t register. For them to actually feel it, it would have to be sustained across several projects over several years, and that isn’t what they experience.

Three. A lot of the people who are aware don’t have the discipline to stop consuming, and they can’t walk away from the conversation either. I had to correct my own buying habits, and I was public about dropping my pull list from the major publishers. But an entire economy got built on pointing this out. I benefited from it. Most people aren’t willing to ditch it, because the community is real and it’s where a lot of us found each other.

The solution is the uncomfortable one. You have to reach the point where it’s “they’re going to do what they do, my focus goes here.” Not just withholding your money. Withholding your attention. That’s the part people struggle with, because it means dropping things you used to love.

And there’s an asymmetry nobody wants to name. One side will never consume anything made by someone they differ with ideologically. The other side doesn’t make that the deciding factor at all. Until that gets reeled in, there’s no woke two or woke three. It’s just the same thing we’ve been in for years.

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#Wokeness #Entertainment #Hollywood #MediaCriticism