A Briefing on Contemporary Debates in Sociopolitical and Scientific Terminology
Executive Summary
This post synthesizes analysis on two distinct but parallel terminological debates: the evolution and contestation of the term “woke” in sociopolitical discourse, and the long-standing scientific controversy surrounding the use of “entropy” in information theory.
The term “woke,” originating in African-American English to signify an awareness of racial prejudice, has expanded to encompass a broad range of progressive social justice issues. In recent years, it has become a focal point of the culture wars, co-opted by right-wing and centrist critics globally as a pejorative to disparage movements they deem performative, superficial, or intolerant. Within leftist thought, “wokeism” and identity politics are subjects of intense internal critique. Key arguments center on the concept of “elite capture,” where a professional-managerial class co-opts social justice for its own ends, and the fundamental tension between a focus on class-based universalism and identity-based particularism.
A similar, though more technical, controversy has surrounded Claude Shannon’s concept of “entropy” in information theory since the 1940s. A substantial body of evidence and expert opinion from physicists and thermodynamicists argues that Shannon’s use of the term is a misnomer with no physical relationship to thermodynamic entropy as defined by Clausius and Boltzmann. The term was adopted on the advice of John von Neumann, based on a superficial mathematical similarity and a joke that “nobody knows what entropy really is.” This conflation has been called “science’s greatest Sokal affair,” leading to decades of scientific confusion and a “bandwagon” of misapplication across numerous fields, a trend Shannon himself warned against. Proposed terminology reform, such as replacing “Shannon entropy” with “bitropy,” aims to resolve this foundational confusion.
1. The Evolution and Contestation of “Woke”
The term “woke” has undergone a rapid and contentious evolution, moving from a specific cultural signifier to a global political battleground. Its trajectory reveals key dynamics in contemporary social and political discourse.
1.1. Origins and Initial Meaning
The term is derived from African-American English (AAVE), where “woke” is used as an adjective equivalent to “awake.” Its political connotations signify a deep awareness of racial prejudice and systemic discrimination.
• Early Usage: The concept can be traced to Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey’s 1923 call to “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” The specific phrase “stay woke” was used by Black American folk singer Lead Belly in a 1938 recording of “Scottsboro Boys,” advising Black Americans to remain vigilant of racial threats.
• Mid-20th Century: By the 1960s, “woke” meant well-informed in a political or cultural sense. A 1962 New York Times Magazine article by William Melvin Kelley, titled “If You’re Woke You Dig It,” documented its usage. The 1971 play Garvey Lives!includes the line, “I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon’ stay woke.”
1.2. Modern Popularization and Broadening Scope
The term entered mainstream consciousness in the 21st century, propelled by music, social media, and social justice movements.
• Music and Social Media: Singer Erykah Badu’s 2008 song “Master Teacher,” with its refrain “I stay woke,” is credited with popularizing the modern usage. The hashtag #Staywokesubsequently spread online, notably in a 2012 tweet by Badu in support of the Russian feminist group Pussy Riot.
• Black Lives Matter: The phrase was widely adopted by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson to urge awareness of police abuses.
• Expanded Definition: The term’s scope broadened beyond racial injustice to encompass a wider awareness of social inequalities, including sexism and the denial of LGBTQ rights. It became shorthand for a set of progressive and leftist ideas involving identity politics, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery.
1.3. Pejorative Co-optation and Global Spread
By 2019, “woke” was increasingly used sarcastically by political opponents to disparage progressive movements and ideas. This pejorative sense, defined by The Economist as “following an intolerant and moralising ideology,” has become a central tool in global culture wars.
• United States: “Woke” is used as an insult by conservatives and some centrists. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has built a political identity on making his state a place “where woke goes to die,” enacting policies like the “Stop WOKE Act.” Former President Donald Trump has referred to a “woke mind virus” and, in 2025, issued an executive order to prevent “Woke AI in the Federal Government” that favors diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
• France: The phenomenon of le wokisme is framed by critics as an unwelcome American import incompatible with French republican values. Former education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer established an “anti-woke think tank” and linked “wokism” to right-wing conspiracy theories of “Islamo-leftism.”
• United Kingdom: The term is used pejoratively by Conservative Party politicians and right-wing media outlets like GB News, which features a segment called “Wokewatch.”
• Other Nations: The term has been deployed in political discourse in Canada (to discredit progressive policies), Australia (by leaders of both major parties), New Zealand (by former deputy PM Winston Peters), India (by Hindu nationalists against critics), and Hungary.
1.4. The “Woke Right” and “Woke Capitalism”
Recent discourse has identified two significant offshoots of the “woke” phenomenon:
• The Woke Right: A term used to describe right-wing actors appropriating the tactics associated with left-wing activism—such as “cancel culture,” language policing, and claims of group oppression—to enforce conservative beliefs.
• Woke Capitalism / Woke-washing: Coined by Ross Douthat, this term criticizes businesses that use politically progressive messaging in advertising for financial gain, often as a substitute for genuine reform. This has been associated with the meme “get woke, go broke.” Examples cited include campaigns by Nike, Pepsi, and Gillette.
2. Leftist Critiques of Identity Politics and “Wokeism”
The rise of “woke” as a political descriptor has been accompanied by a robust and multifaceted critique from within leftist, progressive, and Marxist circles. This internal debate centers on the relationship between identity, class, and the strategic goals of emancipatory politics.
2.1. The Central Debate: Class vs. Identity
A primary tension exists between advocates for a class-first universalism and those who prioritize the specific, intersecting oppressions related to identity.
• The Class-First Perspective: Proponents, such as Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels (authors of “No Politics but Class Politics”), argue for a “politics of solidarity” over a “politics of identity.” This view holds that capital is the primary dynamic of oppression and that identity politics can distract from the universalist class struggle by dividing the working class. Some argue identity politics is rooted in idealism, which is incompatible with materialist Marxism.
• Critiques of Class Reductionism: This position is challenged by those who argue it overlooks forms of oppression that persist across class lines. One user pointed to the fact that “rich black women are still significantly more likely to die in childbirth than rich white women.” Another, identifying as trans, argued that the “extreme and toxic” vilification of certain minority groups requires a narrower focus, even if it is ultimately a tool of distraction used by the capitalist class.
2.2. Elite Capture and the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC)
A prominent critique argues that modern identity politics has been co-opted by a specific socioeconomic class.
• Key Texts: This critique is articulated in works like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s “Elite Capture” and Catherine Liu’s “Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class.”
• The Argument: These thinkers posit that the PMC co-opts the language and goals of social justice movements, not for material change for the masses, but to consolidate its own cultural and economic capital. Catherine Liu’s broader argument is that critical theory academics have disconnected from both empirical data and Marxist political economy.
• A Sharper Critique: Adolph Reed Jr. criticizes Táíwò’s work as the “quintessence of neoliberal leftism,” arguing that it naturalizes and accepts elite capture and celebrates “performative radicalism” (like the Combahee River Collective and Black Lives Matter) while accepting its failure to produce substantive change in social relations.
2.3. Original Intent vs. “Identity Reductionism”
Several commentators distinguish between the original formulation of “identity politics” and its contemporary usage.
• The Combahee River Collective: The term “identity politics” was coined in the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement. The original intent was materialist, viewing identity as a starting point for understanding one’s relationship to oppression and as a basis for coalition-building. It conceived of identity not as a static, essentialist category, but as a dynamic “process of becoming.”
• Contemporary Distortion: Critics argue that the current, “impossibly distorted version” of identity politics promotes “identity reductionism.” This modern form is seen as devolving into debates over who “has got the worst” and rejecting universalism in favor of an exclusive focus on particular subjectivities.
2.4. A Curated List of Critical Works
A Reddit discussion on this topic generated a comprehensive list of recommended literature, essays, and media from a leftist perspective critical of contemporary identity politics.
Author/Creator
Title
Notes / Mentioned In Context Of
Primary Critiques
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Elite Capture
Co-optation by the professional-managerial class.
Catherine Liu
Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class
Critique of the PMC’s role in identity politics.
Adolph Reed & Walter Benn Michaels
No Politics but Class Politics
A central text for the class-first political argument.
Musa al-Gharbi
We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
Nancy Fraser & Axel Honneth
Redistribution or recognition?: A political-philosophical exchange
Nuanced academic debate on the core tension.
Kenan Malik
Not So Black and White
Argues for politics of solidarity vs. politics of identity.
Susan Neiman
Left is not Woke
Vivek Chibber
Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital
Universalist Marxist critique of postcolonial theory’s culturalism.
Mark Fisher
“Exiting the Vampire Castle”
Critiques the “crabs in a barrel mentality” within leftist communities.
Christian Parenti
“The Cargo Cult of Woke” & “The First Privilege Walk”
Todd McGowan
Universality and Identity Politics
Wendy Brown
“Wounded Attachments”
Yascha Mounk
The Identity Trap
John McWhorter
Woke Racism
Controversial inclusion; McWhorter is considered right-wing by some.
Additional Works
Asad Haider
Mistaken Identity
Labeled “anti-idpol lite” by some commenters.
Eric Hobsbawm
“Identity Politics and the Left”
Norman Finkelstein
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It
Nancy Isenberg
White Trash
Discusses overlap of class and race. Critiqued as right-wing.
The Combahee River Collective
The Combahee River Collective Statement
The origin of the term “identity politics.”
Stuart Hall
“Who Needs Identity?”
A classic text on identity as a “process of becoming.”
Shulamith Firestone
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
Relates gender hierarchy to the material maintenance of capitalism.
J. Sakai
Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat
Controversial; heavily criticized as replacing class with race analysis.
3. A Case Study in Terminology Confusion: Shannon “Entropy”
A decades-long debate in physics, thermodynamics, and engineering provides a compelling parallel to the semantic drift and confusion seen in sociopolitical terms. The controversy centers on Claude Shannon’s use of the word “entropy” in his foundational 1948 work, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.”
3.1. The Central Argument: A Scientific Misnomer
The core thesis, articulated in the Journal of Human Thermodynamics and supported by numerous physicists and thermodynamicists since the 1950s, is that Shannon’s information “entropy” has “absolutely positively unequivocally NOTHING to do with” thermodynamic entropy. The conflation is described as a “farcical train of misconceptions” and “science’s greatest Sokal affair,” stemming from a coincidental similarity in the mathematical forms of the two concepts.
3.2. Dueling Origins and Definitions
The two concepts of “entropy” originate from entirely different scientific domains and describe fundamentally different phenomena.
Concept
Origin
Definition & Units
Thermodynamic Entropy
Formulated by Rudolf Clausius (1865) from the study of heat engines. Later developed by Ludwig Boltzmann and Willard Gibbs.
A physical state function related to heat transfer divided by temperature. Measured in joules per kelvin (J/K).
Shannon Entropy (H)
Developed by Claude Shannon (1948) from the study of telegraphy, signal transmission, and cryptography.
A mathematical function measuring choice, uncertainty, or information in a message. Measured in bits per symbol.
3.3. The 1940 Neumann Anecdote: Source of the Confusion
The historical record indicates that the terminological confusion was initiated by a conversation between Shannon and the mathematician John von Neumann around 1940.
• The Advice: When Shannon was deciding what to call his H function, von Neumann reportedly told him, “You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name. In the second place, and more importantly, no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”
• The True Origin: The actual mathematical predecessor to Shannon’s formula was not Boltzmann’s work on thermodynamics but Ralph Hartley’s 1928 paper, “Transmission of Information,” which used logarithms to quantify signal sequences.
3.4. The “Bandwagon Effect” and a History of Warnings
Following the publication of Shannon’s 1948 paper, the idea of information “entropy” was widely and inappropriately applied to a vast array of fields outside of communications engineering, including biology, psychology, economics, and sociology.
• Shannon’s Warning: Alarmed by this trend, Shannon himself published a 1956 editorial titled “The Bandwagon,” urging restraint and warning that applying his theory to fields like psychology and economics was “not a trivial matter of translating words to a new domain” and that such work was often “a waste of time to their readers.”
• Decades of Dissent: A long line of scientists have issued similar warnings:
◦ Dirk ter Haar (1954): “[The] entropy introduced in information theory is not a thermodynamical quantity and that the use of the same term is rather misleading.”
◦ Harold Grad (1961): “The lack of imagination in terminology is confusing.”
◦ Kenneth Denbigh (1981): “In my view von Neumann did science a disservice!”
◦ Frank L. Lambert (1999): “Information ‘entropy’ … has no relevance to the evaluation of thermodynamic entropy change.”
◦ Ingo Müller (2007): “[The joke] merely exposes Shannon and von Neumann as intellectual snobs.”
3.5. Proposed Terminology Reform: “Bitropy”
To end the seven-decade-long confusion, the author of the source paper proposes an official terminology reform: replacing the name Shannon entropy with bitropy.
• Etymology: “Bitropy” is a portmanteau of “bit-entropy” or “bi-tropy.” It translates as the transformation (-tropy) of a choice between two (bi-) alternatives (bits) into information.
• Goal: The name change aims to permanently sever the false link to thermodynamics and “release a large supply of manpower to work on the exciting and important problems which need investigation,” as editor Peter Elias argued in a 1958 parody of the bandwagon effect.
