Being “Woke” in popular parlance may be defined as realising that one is being lied to by the forces of Evil (for want of a better word), and then deliberately refusing to accept their narrative anymore. Hence the “Woke” person is in a position to criticise those who persist in old-fashioned belief systems as being contrary to their own enlightened-perspective.
Except that it doesn’t work like that.
Recently, I looked at my news-feed and realised I was being lied to. The items which came up were meant to sedate me into not realising that I wasn’t seeing any stories which might actually inform, enlighten or challenge me. Filled with righteous anger, I went in search of whoever it was who had subjected me to mental slavery, and soon realised it was someone called “Alex Sumner.”
Yes! Far from the Google/Facebook/etc Algorithm being to solely to blame, I realised that by specifying my favourite news sources, my favourite topics, what I liked browsing, etc, I had turned the internet into a mirror – reflecting what I expected to see. And then I realised:
Because the Algorithm comes up with a result tailored to the individual, Everyone Is Seeing A Different Internet To Everyone Else.
Hence, the right wing people constantly receive a feed of right wing stories because they set their preferences to sites like Breitbart, altright.com and The Daily Mail. However, the Woke people constantly receive a feed from their own preferred i.e. “woke” outlets.
Everyone is being told what they want to hear – woke and unwoke.
There can be no dialogue on the internet between people of divergent points-of-view, because none of them are engaging with the same internet. Moreover, people argue assuming they are talking about the same thing whilst in reality each is speaking a different language to the other.
Becoming Woke is therefore not exchanging illusion for Truth, but one illusion for a different illusion.
It gets worse. In Philosophy, a debate between rival Philosophers could take centuries – literally, because the proponents lived in different time-zones. Likewise, in the Sciences, a scientific theory could hold sway for many years, e.g. it took over two hundred years to demonstrate Newton’s laws of motion are not true in every circumstance.
However: the Algorithm(s) are heavily biased in favour of novelty, to such an extent that to have an in-depth discussion on anything, even if it is not a great philosophical or scientific debate, requires an attention-span longer than that allowed for by the Algorithm. The internet may be a mirror, but we are only “seeing through a glass darkly” because it is not conducive to self-examination. It reflects, but does not allow self-reflection.
Personally I’ve started by deliberately altering my news preferences to read sources I would never read otherwise, although I think this might be the beginning of a plot for a dystopian science fiction series.
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner 
‘Cultural appropriation’: discussion builds over western yoga industry | Yoga | The Guardian
An op-ed piece in The Guardian states that what passes for Yoga in the west nowadays has become “divorced … from its 5000 year old roots.” Author of new book The Yoga Manifesto: How Yoga Helped Me and Why it Needs to Save Itself, Nadia Gilani, states:
I dislike using the vocabulary of political correctness, but I find myself agreeing with Ms Gilani’s sentiment entirely. The issues are, however, complex.
A quarter of a century ago, I attended the British Wheel of Yoga’s annual conference, and if I were to profile its attendees I would characterise them as predominantly white. I can only remember one teacher of Indian ethnicity and he had lived and worked in Britain for most of his life. I also noted that in a bid to host it somewhere that was peaceful and quiet, they had held it in the middle of the countryside, where it was a devil to get to via public transport (hence discriminating in favour of car owners, and against pedestrians).
Moreover, many of the teachers at the time appeared to have been ex-hippies who had hit the trail in the late sixties or early seventies, and found themselves – both geographically and spiritually – in India, where they trained under admittedly authentic native teachers such as BKS Iyengar, Satyananda Saraswati, and others. Iyengar, incidentally, himself a devout Vaishnavite Hindu, always struck me as a man at pains to emphasise how his modern system of Hatha Yoga fitted in with the classical tradition as exemplified by Patanjali, and his Indian heritage – despite the fact that he was perfectly willing to teach Westerners.
However, the most disturbing trend in Yoga at the time came not from the British Wheel, but from America, where feminists openly discussed in the pages of yoga magazines (this of course was in the days before the Internet) how they refused to acknowledge the importance of the Bhagavad Gita, because they believed its description of a battle was Patriarchal. In other words, no true woman would use such violent imagery, hence they did not accept it.
I believe that this is the real root of the modern decline in respect for meditation and spirituality in Yoga in the West. It may be politically incorrect to culturally appropriate the ancient heritage, but this has come about because there was a perception that the ancient heritage was itself politically incorrect!
Plus of course, stripping Yoga of its spiritual associations helps to commodify it. The fifth of the Yamas, according to Patanjali, is Aparigraha or lack of attachment to material goods, so it would be inevitable for Patanjali to be excluded from Yoga in order to make it more materialistic.
‘Cultural appropriation’: discussion builds over western yoga industry
‘Cultural appropriation’: discussion builds over western yoga industry | Yoga | The Guardian
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