I don't buy that. We hear about cultural appropriation more and more. There was a burrito business that was forced to close in Washington State because they were bombarded with accusations of cultural appropriation. There are probably other philosophies that were unpopular once upon a time that you could say are "movements" today because masses of impressionable people adopted those beliefs due to the publicity. Sometimes a spark becomes a flame.
I concede the point that the idea of cultural appropriation has become more mainstream, but our sense of what is mainstream is fundamentally distorted by social media, for the same reason that child abductions have been decreasing for years but parents are more terrified than ever of letting their children roam free; the internet gives us information overload on the potential dangers.
Our brains are not good at dealing with the scale of information that modern media makes available to it. Don't forget that people are optimized to live in a small, tribal society.
Let's consider some examples. Don't forget that if 1 out of 1000 people cares about cultural appropriation, that is still 325,000 people in America who will go berserk on someone for being white while cooking burritos wrong. If it's 1 out of 100, that's 3,250,000 people in America who will scream at an Armenian woman for putting her hair in braids! Remember also that SJW types trend towards being 1)younger 2)college-attending 3)female, all of which is indicative of an increased presence on social media, which makes them seem more common than they are.
A few hundred thousand to a few million people in America, if they are active on social media, can create a massive shitstorm which can obliterate anyone vulnerable to reputation damage, especially if the attack becomes coordinated, which it often will; social media is great at coordinating online harassment, and even at coordinating protests in person. This is despite the fact that such overwhelming numbers would only represent 0.1% to 1% of the population; an almost entirely fringe opinion!
I will repeat this till I am blue in the face; we are not mentally equipped to handle a social attack from thousands of people. It is mentally overwhelming and people go into survival mode and capitulate when they don't need to, because it feels like the world is against them.
Now, there is another interesting aspect to this identified by Nassim Taleb on how an intrasingent minority can actually shift the majority's position, simply by being intolerant dickheads. I recommend reviewing his article on this:
. So if there is a change, we need to understand that it is likely being driven not by a growing plurality who believe in cultural appropriation, but by an active minority who are seeking to impose their view of the world on a largely passive majority.
