Societal support for rainbow colors is no longer as prominent as it used to be. This is most obvious when you look around on LinkedIn or disable the adblocker in your browser. Whereas a couple of years ago, even fifty-people outfits were falling over themselves to proclaim their allegiance to the anal flag, nowadays support is much more muted. Even some of the largest corporations who were once the biggest promoters of wokeism try to remain neutral. We are in the middle of “pride month”, and at the very beginning of “pride summer”, yet neither Google, nor Microsoft, nor Meta, to pick some of the worst offenders in the past, have swapped their company logos on LinkedIn.

Even better than anecdotal evidence is hard, cold data. Thus, I was quite delighted when I came across an article on Business Insider that goes in-depth on the topic of de-wokefication. They used AI, or cheap Indian labor, to count how often earnings reports of the largest companies in the US mention “diversity, inclusion, and equity”, looking at the last few years. The numbers are quite telling. Here is what they found:

DIE was kicked off in 2020, concomitantly with the fiery-but-peaceful protests in honor of St. George Floyd, the noblest of criminals. As you can see from the chart above, we are now back to the very beginning of that reeducation campaign in terms of numbers. This is not a victory yet because we are far from zero, but it is quite obvious that the numbers for the DIE crowd are bad. If I were running an NGO that makes money by DIE grifting, I would be very concerned. Maybe ask Anita Sarkeesian how her grift has worked out.

The tide in the culture war is turning. Larry Fink has deep pockets, but they are not deep enough to fool everybody all the time. Currently, the Western world is experiencing high inflation, and partly this is due to DIE nonsense, both directly and indirectly. Many, if not all, Western governments support “minority-run businesses”. Of course, you can expect that you pay more for lower quality, and all of this adds up. Governments also flooded the economy with money during the scamdemic, and a lot of it was used to prop up nonviable businesses.

The tech industry used to be seen as an engine of growth. Instead, the last few years have shown quite clearly that tech is a bubble in which people got a lot of money to work on products for which there is not even a market. There are a lot of tech companies with evaluations in the billions that have never made a profit. Yet, they were busy making a stand against bigotry and were overeager to hire people with questionable qualifications. Money was free back then so it did not really matter that much if they spent some of it on hiring a bunch of activists.

Most famously, Elon Musk fired about 80% of the staff of Twitter after he bought that company. It seemed that only a minority of people did any work there. Just from using Twitter, it is not really clear why they needed 8,000 engineers and now we know that they really did not need that many people. I do not use Twitter/X much, besides from clicking on a link to a post every once in a while, but it seems that this site is faster and more stable than it has been in years. In the end, money talks and if companies need to watch their purse strings, they get rid of the fat they accumulated. This includes activists who spend their days on telling engineers that they cannot use terms like “blacklist”, coders who cannot code, and project managers who have absolutely no idea about anything. DIE is on life support.