Who goes 'ultra-woke' at work and why

I don't know what happened between Erin Overbey and The New Yorker but the dynamic this article picks out is definitely a thing.

The fracas has pitted the staff of a magazine against a lone voice of disruption who has been hailed by industry outsiders as a whistleblower for calling attention to the magazine’s hiring practices. But New Yorker staff — from all levels of the magazine, including writers and members of the magazine's union — paint a different picture of what happened behind the scenes. Specifically, seven sources close to the New Yorker told Gawker that Overbey’s version of events excluded critical context — namely, that each of her threads occurred after internal issues related to her conduct with colleagues, and that Overbey’s relationship with the union, on which her grievance now relies, has been fraught for the past year over some of the same subjects she claimed to have spoken up about. All seven sources also noted that Overbey’s threads had consistently taken magazine staff by surprise, because she has almost everyone in the newsroom — including high-ranking writers, young women, staffers of color, and the majority of the union membership — blocked on Twitter.

In my experience in the California nonprofit sector, there are three types of employees who go ultra-woke:

• junior employees who don't find their jobs that interesting or fulfilling and don't have enough on their plates (whether that work is interesting or not)

• employees with performance issues

• emotional vampires

Let’s start with the junior employees. Almost everybody starts out at the bottom: underappreciated and underutilized. Coping strategies vary.

If you care about your organization's mission and have confidence in your abilities, you will find opportunities to apply yourself (I think the kids call this ‘flexing’) and demonstrate that fetching coffee and answering phones is a waste of your talents. But to seize these openings, you have to be efficient enough to get your assigned work out of the way first. You have to be observant enough to see what needs to be done. And you have to be able to deliver. So this doesn't work for everybody.

Some junior employees take a different approach to workplace advancement, channeling their personal frustrations into institutional and systemic crusades, inventing dragons to slay where necessary. These crusades let junior employees lay claim to authority and expertise. Senior staff "don't get it." If they resist, they're stuck in their ways, won't shed their privileges, etc. The more resistance you meet, the more righteous your efforts, the more fulfilled you feel. Never mind if the organization’s mission gets lost in the fray.

Then we've got employees struggling with performance issues. They don't crave power so much as they need immunity. Wrapping yourself in the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion provides cover. Probably you think your conscience—not your self-interest—is driving you. That's how our brains work: justifying ourselves to ourselves. If you've been hearing a lot of criticism over your performance at work, going woke helps you both secure your job (firing the diversity champion is high-risk) and neutralize criticism (they just don't like me because I tell the hard truths nobody wants to hear!).

Finally, we come to the emotional vampires. If you're a normal person, you feel uncomfortable with the culture of public confession that's descended on so many progressive workplaces. But if you're an emotional vampire, it's feeding time. Nothing tastes better than whatever you can extract from your colleagues: the saddest chapters in their autobiographies, their shame and guilt over actual or perceived shortcomings, their discomfort.

Organizational cultures once frowned on this kind of emotional-extortion racket. Coworkers were supposed to respect each other’s boundaries and keep their private lives at home. But the ‘bring your whole self to work’ movement threatens to abolish any notion of privacy and the emotional vampires are on the prowl, their prying blessed as a necessary blow against whitesettlercolonialcisheteronormative oppression. Now if you make your colleagues squirm, you’re just doing god’s work.

The fulfilled, productive, and emotionally stable are noticeably absent from the ranks of the ultra-woke. What's the draw? But if you're unfulfilled, struggling to keep your head above water, and emotionally unstable, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain: meaning, purpose, direction, power, immunity, and blood.