Ted Cruz Goes After ‘Woke’ Microsoft Over Xbox Power Saving Settings Update

If you haven't been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you will be familiar with the concept of the anti-woke" culture war the Republican Party grows and farms for its own purposes. This isn't to say there aren't real cultural conflicts we need to work out as a country, but that doesn't change the simple fact that much of what you hear about in the press is specifically cultivated by one party or another to generate headlines and outrage for the purposes of votes and campaign contributions.

And if you're looking for an avatar for this sort of un-principled outrage manufacturing, Ted Cruz would be one of the first names I would bring up. Cruz claims to be a strict constitutionalist, while also threatening companies for exercising their free speech rights. In most of the cases, Cruz is railing against the woke" in favor of shit-peddling lie-factories like OAN, claiming that a company choosing what to do within its own private purview is somehow censorship" in favor of wokeism."

And it gets really dumb at times. You may have heard recently that the GOP was out there claiming that the White House was going to be coming to collect not your guns (this time), but your gas-powered ovens/stoves. It wasn't really true. What actually happened was a consumer safety group within the government pointed out that there were a lot of health risks with these ovens and that the group might seek to lower future production of them in favor of safer electric ovens. No jackbooted thugs were going to go house to house and haul away your grandmother's gas stove.

But then came Cruz also going after Microsoft. Why Microsoft? Well, because Microsoft had embraced wokeism, according to Cruz, by updating its standard Xbox power settings to be more power efficient. Yes. Yes, really.

Here's what Microsoft's Xbox update actually does: It will cut down on power usage by up to a factor of 20 by changing the default setting of Xbox consoles from sleep" to shut down." Microsoft promises this update won't affect performance or gameplay, nor the ability to update the Xbox overnight. The main side effect is it will take a bit longer for the console to boot. The new firmware will also be carbon aware" and try to time its downloads and updates for periods when it will have the least impact on the electrical grid. And if for some reason you don't like these changes, everything can be switched back to how it was previously.

Innocuous. Good, even. But after Cruz's tweet picked up The Blaze's narrative it set off a wave of stories from Fox News and the like. According to them, not only was Xbox going woke" by making these environmentally friendly changes, but Fox and Friends hosts Ainsley Earhardt and Jimmy Failla suggested Microsoft was trying to recruit your kids into climate politics."

The open question appears to be: if this is wokeism, which it's not, then that doesn't explain what in the world is wrong with any of this. What, specifically, is Cruz objecting to here? The end customer is barely going to notice any difference other than a slightly longer boot time. The only other differences he or she might notice is a lower electricity bill, a longer-lasting Xbox console, and maybe the air outside is just a little bit less polluted. Where is there a problem to rail against here?

But the idea behind a manufactured culture war is to make good use of the echo chamber, which is exactly what happened next.

But again, what's the point of video games? It's for kids to be kids," Faila suggested in a Tuesday Fox and Friends segment about Microsoft's Xbox plans. Now you sit down and pick up a controller and they're like by the way, the world is on fire, AHH.' You know what I mean? You just want to play the game!"

And you can. That hasn't changed. The console doesn't tell you the world is on fire." The console doesn't open to a splash screen requiring you to donate to Black Lives Matter before you start your game. It just... you know... starts up and plays your game.

So please, whatever your political leanings, don't fall for this stuff. Cruz knows better, but he's trying to take advantage of you. Don't let him.