On the Woke-ification of M&Ms and Xboxes
On the Woke-ification of M&Ms and Xboxes
Miss Green M&M, if you're reading this my DMs are open.
The inciting incident to the article you’re reading occurred about a month ago. I was getting my daily dose of brain rot while scrolling on Twitter when I saw a screenshot of Tucker Carlson Tonight with the headline, “MISERABLE, NON-BINARY CANDY IS ALL WE DESERVE.” Aside from thinking such a headline was downright hilarious in an absurdist sort of way, this tweet quickly vanished from my memory.
A few days later, I received a text from my little sister. Naturally, I assumed it would be an update on her college experience. She just went back for a new semester, and I know school can be stressful for her. Instead, I received a TikTok of another clip from Tucker Carlson Tonight, where he complained about a new purple M&M that I was unaware existed. Tucker’s M&M takes had infected the TikTok algorithm.
It was at this point that I first considered writing this article. I ultimately could talk myself out of it for the time being. While I am a culture war veteran, I was not ready to deploy myself for another tour or to reckon with my past relationship with M&Ms. Undoubtly, by the time I finished writing the article “Sexy M&M discourse” (I can’t believe that’s a phrase I had to type out) will have run its course. My take would have had nothing of value to add. I put the idea away and hoped to forget about it. Unfortunately, eventually, our demons catch up with us.
I went to the gym the following Sunday afternoon to get some running and weights in before the work week started again. The gym I work out at has a large set of TVs in the center where they play cable news and sports. As I waited for the chest press machine to free up, I looked up and saw another absurd headline, this time reading, “I WANT CANDY! MARS BLASTED FOR WOKE ALTERING OF M&M’S CHARACTERS.”
Surely they can’t STILL be talking about this, right? It had been over a week since I saw the original headline, and Fox News was still discussing “Woke M&Ms.” I know by publishing this, I will inevitably be feeding into the algorithmic discourse machine that creates these conservative non-issue talking points to begin with. However, there is something from my past that is persuading FORCING me to write this article.
As a child, I LOVED M&Ms, specifically the green ones. As the first grandchild of my maternal side of the family, this obsession quickly created a parasitic relationship between my grandparents and me. They had disposable income, and I was their only grandchild for about three years. At this time, I was given multitudes of M&M merchandise. The ones with the Green M&M were always my favorite. I remember dressing up as the Green M&M for Halloween one year. It did not matter to me that she was a woman and I was a little boy. She was green, my favorite color, so she HAD to be my favorite.
Mars played up Green’s sexiness back then. I, of course, was oblivious to this considering I had no idea what sex appeal or sex itself even was. It wasn’t until I was a teenager looking back on some of the merchandise I had owned that I realized this fact.
Really, I slept with this sexy Green M&M pillow that says “The rumors are true” on it for multiple years? Sure did! And it never even occurred to me that the pillowcase’s existence was weird until college when some of my friends and I made it into a bit of an ongoing joke. Considering my past and borderline obsession with Miss Green, I have the credentials to speak on this polarizing issue. Here’s my take on the disfiguration of her sex appeal: I don’t care. It’s CANDY! Making her sexy in the first place was always a little weird, but it was mostly harmless. Trying to create “inclusive M&Ms” is just another drop in the endless sea of corporate activism. But this is only occurring because the “invisible hand of the free market” that conservatives love so much decided that “going woke” is where the profit is. At the end of the day, It’s candy. As long as M&Ms still taste good, I couldn’t care less. The fact that anyone would get worked up over this, especially enough to be airing on cable news for over a week, is laughable.
So why did I waste your time and mine by writing this merely to say I don’t care? Because I think the outrage over “Woke M&Ms” indicates a broader and more dangerous trend in the American Right.
In the post-Trump era, much of conservative discourse is no longer informed by any cohesive conservative ideology. Gone are the days of free markets and moral majorities. Today, American conservatism is only defined by what it stands against rather than what it stands for. The American right must position itself against anything perceived as “woke.”
“Wokeness” is a nothing word that lacks any proper definition. Still, to the American conservative, it is a stand-in for anything they don’t like: green energy, LGBTQ rights, socioeconomic equity, non-rigid gender roles, the teaching of American history for what it is, and of course, M&Ms that elicit no arousal.
In the America of 2023, being Conservative isn’t about being “pro-freedom.” It’s about “anti-woke.” This incoherence of ideology inevitably leads to some contradictory places. The same group of people banning library books for perceived “sexual deviancy” is trying to convince the population that M&Ms aren’t sexual enough! The same group of people that believes the free market can do no wrong is advocating for the government to step in and hold corporations accountable for being “too woke.” Eventually, so much is considered “woke” that being “anti-woke” stretches itself too thin. Everything is part of a larger plan to deliver America right into the hands of the “postmodern woke neo-Marxists.”
While regarding M&Ms, the societal impact of this line of thought is mostly negligible and honestly just funny. It begins to pose a more severe problem when other less chocolate products get involved—products with negative externalities. To effectively explain the argument I’m attempting to make here, I need to give a tiny crash course on the economic concept of externalities. An externality is an external cost of a good or service that isn’t paid for by the parties making the transaction but rather by other people or society as a whole. The simplest example I could use to explain this phenomenon is a cigarette. In a more simplified view of economics, one would consider that there are only two costs in the transaction of a cigarette: The cost of the raw materials and labor the supplier pays when manufacturing the cigarette and the cost of buying the cigarette, which the consumer pays. However, there is a hidden third cost of the cigarette. This cost isn’t always a financial one.
Regarding the cigarette, this third cost is society's cost of putting up with secondhand smoke. While this might not seem like a severe cost, eventually, someone has to pay it. The cost will be paid for, whether it’s the lung damage a child living with a smoker might have to live with or restaurants spending extra money to create a smoker section. This outside effect of the transaction is called an externality. When it’s something harmful or bothersome to other people (like secondhand smoke), it’s called a negative externality.
Traditionally, it has been the role of the government to step in and regulate corporations from creating too many negative externalities. This can be done by making them incur fees or just outlawing the manufacturing of some goods altogether. Government organizations like the FDA or the EPA are examples of this.
Enter the newest corporation to go woke: Microsoft. Earlier in the year, Microsoft announced a new power-saving mode for the Xbox Series line of systems. A negative externality of owning an Xbox is that it uses a significant amount of power to keep on even when no game or application is running. This imposes two significant costs—the pollution caused by the power plant generating electricity for the Xbox, a cost on society. And the cost of the owner of the Xbox’s power electricity bill, a cost on the individual. This is, by all means, a great feature. It lessens the environmental impact of playing video games and makes one of the long-term costs of owning an Xbox (the power bill) more affordable. All that remains is why. Why would Microsoft invest resources into creating a feature like this when it provides no financial benefits to them? I believe it’s another attempt to rehabilitate their image and make them the most “consumer-friendly” of the big three video game console manufacturers. This strategy is necessary after the Xbox One lost the 8th generation console race to the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.
American conservatives have another idea. According to them, this is Microsoft caving to the woke left. Xbox did not introduce this feature to be consumer friendly but rather to brainwash your innocent gamer children into becoming full-on tree-hugging, good-for-nothing liberals. This isn’t a sentiment only coming from a few rogue right-wing Twitter accounts. Ted Cruz has echoed it, and Xbox’s power-saving mode got Fox News coverage.
This is where the real problem is. In the past, Americans relied on the government to protect them from corporations cutting corners and forcing the consumers to pay the prices of negative externalities. Today, even when corporations decide to absorb the cost of an externality themselves (which rarely happens to begin with), conservatives want the government to step in and put the cost back on the consumer. They’re arguing to raise their own electricity bills, all in the name of being anti-woke.
Ted Cruz is not that stupid. The people who work at Fox are not that stupid. These people are Ivy League-educated coastal elites. They’re encouraging this line of thought because it puts citizens right where their corporate donors want them. If corporate accountability is “woke,” then “Patriots” will willingly accept their own exploitation.