Wokeness was once an awakening; today it serves as a backdrop. The line between moral gesture and aesthetic reflex, between attitude and staging, has almost vanished. What remains when awareness turns into surface?
Awakening as Ritual
The word “wokeness” once carried the impulse of being shaken awake. Today it sounds like a mantra repeated so often that it has lost its edge. What began as a movement has turned into choreography – precise, controlled, professional. In magazines, podcasts, and panels, conviction appears as style and morality as form. The impulse for change is maintained like a brand. Even resistance has a corporate identity. Wokeness is no longer radical but ritualized – a cultivated awareness that risks nothing and stages itself as proof of its own virtue.
From Pathos to Formula
In the early years of the digital public sphere, language was a tool of insight and a movement toward openness. Today it serves the management of agreement. Morality was once gray; now it glows blue – cool, digital, reassuring. The terms that once carried friction have become smooth. Political language sounds like advertising, and enlightenment like a campaign. Words such as diversity or empowerment are pleasant, interchangeable, and certified. The moral code has replaced the aesthetic one – or, more precisely, it has become an aesthetic itself. Between attitude and image there is no boundary anymore, only lighting. The language of virtue has long become the language of design. And somewhere among all the well-sounding phrases, the essential thing is lost: the risk of being misunderstood.
Morality as Lifestyle
Awareness today is a certificate, a seal of belonging and relevance. Companies, magazines, and influencers no longer sell products but a good conscience. A T-shirt can protest, a campaign can heal, a column can comfort. Virtue becomes merchandise, responsibility a brand. Even dissent works as style, adapted to the aesthetics of approval: reflective, empathetic, and always slightly ironic. The system has learned to integrate criticism. It doesn’t disturb – it refines. Yet by doing so, discourse turns into a consumable product, an endless loop of moral self-assurance.
The Economy of Tenderness
Feeling is the new currency. Intimacy is formatted, empathy monetized. The language of vulnerability has long served the expansion of reach. Podcasts and essays turn sensitivity into capital. Columns such as Fabian Hart’s “The New Blue” in Vogue exemplify this trend: the personal becomes pose, reflection becomes brand. Writers like Kübra Gümüşay, Margarete Stokowski, or internationally Roxane Gay, Jia Tolentino, and Laurie Penny move within this tension between sincerity and self-marketing. What began as honest self-search has become the soundtrack of a culture that treats emotion as design. Gentleness appears professional, openness calculated. Authenticity is no longer a risk but a backdrop – a perfectly lit frame for a feeling that has been staged a thousand times and long lost its meaning.
The End of Friction
The great paradox of wokeness is that it has abolished the conflict it once thrived on. A culture that once sought confrontation now manages consensus. Discourse no longer threatens power; it affirms it – in the name of mindfulness. Even criticism of the movement remains part of its aesthetic: mild, self-aware, controlled. In feuilletons and talk formats from Berlin to New York, morality now sounds the same everywhere – a well-tempered, brand-compatible murmur. It is the era of soft voices and regulated emotions. Everything can be said as long as it sounds kind. But language without risk loses its weight. It speaks much, but nothing that hurts. At times, the moral discourse feels like a room deprived of air – polite, friendly, and yet already suffocating. Between sensitivity and silence, only a banal harmony remains.
The Price of the Pose
The result is exhaustion. Words that once shone have turned dull. The constant performance of awareness wears down even those who have perfected it. Behind the façade of empathy grows a fatigue that must not be named – the quiet sense that everything has already been said and ticked off. Truth has been replaced by agreement, clarity by style. Morality is mistaken for meaning. Enlightenment has become a pose, a moral stretching exercise of self-confirmation. Attitude, like language, remains flawless – but empty. And somewhere in this emptiness, between all the right words, meaning dissolves – like an echo no one hears or answers anymore.
Return to Depth
It is long past time for another language – one that breathes, that allows uncertainty, that errs, stumbles, and doubts. A language that seeks encounter rather than approval, that wants to understand rather than please. Even at the cost of misunderstanding. Everything sustained only by agreeableness loses its necessity. We need a return to a blue that is more than decoration – one that listens to its counterpart, to a depth that does not reveal itself at once. The new blue, what remains, is no longer a signal but silence. It waits beneath the surface, where color still carries weight. Wokeness was once this blue – shimmering and impenetrable. But those who float too long on an extinguished wave drift too far from the shore of dialogue – out into the open sea of ideology. Yet isn’t this very distance from the familiar the condition for something new to begin?
