Stay woke

“…By 2016, these political expressions had migrated from the margins to center stage. At the Code Conference in San Francisco that summer, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appeared beside Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson wearing a T-shirt that read “# StayWoke.” (The shirts had been made by Black employees at the company after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014). Everyone in the crowd received their own. 15 “Woke” was a word with deep roots in Black culture: as early as 1938, the folk singer Lead Belly had urged his listeners to “stay woke” in a song about the Scottsboro Boys. Staying woke meant being alert to injustice, and to the likelihood of police and white vigilante violence. 16 Dorsey coopted the term for his own platform. Twitter offered a way to revise the narratives of mainstream journalists and deliver a more authentic perspective on current events. For him, scrolling and posting were the way to remain woke in the contemporary world. In the coming years, the term would become a catch-all for progressive politics, as amplified through the megaphone of social media. Yet the woke social network of #HandsUpDontShoot and #MeToo was always shadowed by its obscene doppelgänger: the internet of trolls. In 2003, a year before Facebook was founded, another tech-savvy teenager launched a website called 4chan. It was a simple message board modeled on a Japanese predecessor named 2chan, and its founder was a fifteen-year-old student from New York City named Christopher “moot” Poole. 4chan was a networked public of pubescent humor and smut, shot through with homophobic, racist, sexist, and ableist slurs. It also incubated many mainstays of internet culture, such as the meme. The term “meme” was first coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the final chapter of his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where he described it as a “unit of cultural transmission,” such as an idea, song, or style of clothing. By the 2000s, the term had evolved far from its original context to mean a combination of text and image shared online.” — Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff https://a.co/09sdsPgp