Thread by @zpenoyre

#breadcrumbs Woke Disney via @YouTube

I've been thinking about this a lot recently - written half a dozen aborted essays about it, on paper, in conversation, internally

Scared to misstep and lose my grasp on the kernel of the question

But let's mind-dump it and see what sticks:

*Who has voice?*
A ramble through the valuation of ideas

@thelindsayellis's fantastic essay paints a very clear distinction between two schools of "wokeness"
- the"lean in" school, that we must conform to the systems around us in order to be accepted
- and another, unnamed, which I will call the "sonder" school

She makes the point that Disney can play the "lean in" game, because it does not challenge the system from which they are the beneficiaries

Let's make the system blind to identity and thus allow in diversity

But in many cases, that does not work. You cannot "lean in", no matter how hard you try, to abuse

It's not about *you* - it's about the abuser - whether that abuser is an individual, or, much more commonly, a system

An emergent culture, spawned through a mixture of curated laws, inherited epistemologies and random chance

There's no "leaning in" to a culture that discriminates blindly, as a waste product of its own construction

The church is open to everyone who can come to church

The "sonder" school instead is willing to accept the blind cruelty of systems, and seeks to change those systems - not the individuals

The church is whatever structure can hold all those who wish to be held

So how does this relate to the question at hand - who has voice?:

In an oversaturated system, such as this network, whilst we value turnover of ideas we are effectively powerless to control their source

There is so much volume of thought, much of it pupating, unclear, that rational value judgements of who we should be listening to do not exist

We can cut out the bad when we identify, but there's no way to search for the good

That's what happens when visibility is success, and success is visibility - adoption of new ideas is random wildfire

But randomness is not structureless - even if it is tangent to what we are saying identities and associations, even oddities of grammar, act as a prior on the adoption of an idea

When there is too much material to sift through content becomes secondary to context

The chance of being seen is just that, chance, but a chance that has its own systemic weighting

I am not a weatherman, I will not guess at which ways the winds blow

To be silenced - to be voiceless - to be unable to influence the works around us

This, to me, is the fear which motivates most of the abusive behaviour in our modern world

So, though it is a chaotic question, one with no single answer or absolute formulation - I invite you also to ask:
who has voice?

Unroll pls @threadreaderapp