We are supposed to have moved on from the worst excesses of what is now being referred to as “Woke 1.0”: that period of time around 2020 and 2021 when society, as a collective, appeared to have lost its mind.
This was when, around the time of the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. and beyond, a data scientist named David Shor was fired from his job for tweeting out research showing that violent protest can lead to political backlash for the Democrats. It was when a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art faced public censure, and eventually resigned, because he told staff that ceasing to collect work from white artists would amount to “reverse discrimination.” It was when ESPN fired an analyst before she even started working over homophobic tweets she posted nearly a decade earlier.
