Public ideas
Were you ever woke?
An American sociologist (unintentionally) gives Australians an insight into his country’s weird politics.
Musa al-Gabri is an American sociologist, who was recently in Australia promoting his book We have never been woke: the cultural contradictions of a new elite. A simple summary of his work is that he accuses the liberal left of hypocrisy. He is particularly critical of those he calls “symbolic capitalists” – mainly prosperous professionals, who espouse left values but who tend to live in the most socially segregated neighbourhoods, and have little sympathy for the poor and downtrodden. They assuage their consciences, however, by joining in left protest movements, such as Black Lives Matter and in their professional lives by being fully engaged with DEI programs.
You can hear al-Gabri on Late Night Live, in a 25-minute interview, as David Marr works hard to challenge his generalizations about the hypocrisies of a “woke” left.
His analysis seems to be very much about the USA, a country where many on the left are obsessed with “race”, and the notion of inescapable “white privilege”, rather than the inequities of social class. Marxist historians, such as Jerry Muller of the Catholic University of America, have a more disciplined way of seeing professionals in class terms: the capitalists of the 19 th century owned and monopolized physical capital, the capitalists of the 21st century own and monopolize human and social capital. The consequences differ only in scale.
Nevertheless al-Gabri’s work gives an insight into the way Trump managed to exploit working-class resentment of elites.
The Australia Institute hosted a public lecture in Canberra where al-Gabri described the reasons for the Democrats’ poor political performance in the USA: Are the Democrats in an unworkable coalition? The reference to a “coalition” is about the way Democrat governments tried to burnish their economic credentials by adopting neoliberal policies and by courting neo-conservatives, while neglecting cost-of-living issues. That strategy allowed the Republicans to accuse them of being obsessed with “woke” issues. From what we can see of Australia’s Labor Party, it is a little more politically savvy than the Democrats.
How Gen Z keeps itself informed
Young people get news and information from the Internet in ways that don’t match our assumptions about their behaviour.
Many people are rightly concerned that as people abandon traditional media and go online to hunt for news and information they will lose the quality assurance of content mediated through professional journalists.
Writing in Foreign Affairs – AI and the trust revolution – Yasmin Green and Gillian Tett report on studies of the way “Gen Z” (under 30) navigates the Internet in search of news and information. These studies find that while Gen Z tends to be mistrusting of traditional sources of authority, the young have their own methods of checking sources for trustworthiness, often relying on their peers’ comments and ratings.
Green and Tett also report on Gen Z’s reliance on and trust of artificial intelligence, noting that AI is developing strong persuasive capabilities. They find that in many situations young people prefer the anonymity and detachment of AI over interpersonal interactions. They also note that among the young, trust in AI is particularly strong in Japan, Korea and Indonesia, but is low in many other countries, including Australia.
To overcome the risk of young people’s choices leading them into echo chambers, and the risk that their choices contribute to polarized opinions, they suggest that AI could be harnessed to respond to queries to present different perspectives on issues – possibly becoming a source encouraging scepticism in a way that traditional commercial media isn’t.