"When the term emerged a little over ten years ago, it was associated with the best of intentions. But now it's being torn apart between left and right."
On the eve of the 2024 US presidential election, I'm reviewing the eternal shadow battles. Elon Musk is once again invoking the "woke mind virus." He should know, as the operator of the original brain virus breeding facility. What's unfolding resembles an AI-animated zombie war—replication equals decay, improbable limbs, sagging shreds of flesh. I'm afraid of being infected just by watching. I'm bored, half-asleep. Don't fall asleep with images like these. Don't fall asleep, this is important. Right? Is this show a tragedy or a farce? If I can wake up, it will have been a farce. If not... still A farce. But even the most absurd dream cries out for interpretation. The AI drama, in particular, raises the question: Based on which prompts did it arise? What original images were mashed up in it?
What Musk meant by "brain virus," for example, was "woke AI." What this meant: After the initial AI hype subsided, the language and image models came under criticism for blatantly reproducing the most primitive stereotypes. For example, the prompt "Show me a picture of a Black doctor treating white children" repeatedly generated the same scene: a kind white doctor, adored by a crowd of Black children. The developers must have frantically turned the diversity dial, because the flood of images online suddenly changed. A search for popes yielded nothing but female popes; anyone looking for Nazis encountered SS squadrons with quota-black members. The glitch suited the right-wing, as it distracted from the main problem: the AI. internalizes prejudices even more thoroughly, reproduces them even more diligently than we ourselves. At the same time, it revealed a weakness in the fight against stereotypes – a kind of programming error that had already compromised the predecessor version of wokeness, political correctness (PC).
Political correctness – an idea that has long since become automatized. Yet this automatism has always been inherent in it, ensuring a dynamic symbiosis with automated communication systems, but at the same time also making it susceptible to disruption. For the term itself, originally an expression of left-wing self-irony, deliberately demonstrates a logical error: The complexity of politics cannot be reduced to any "correct" formula. What algorithm of inclusion, for example, could do justice to all parameters: diversity and historical truth and the imperative not to stoop to those below?
As early as the 1990s, the dogged struggle for formulations, the transformation of the political struggle into a "war of words," was lamented – especially among leftists. The "language metaphor" of structuralism was thus being overturned. Taken too literally, the cultural scientist Stuart Hall warned: Social phenomena are understood "as language," "as text," "as code." This suggests the belief that they can be recoded on the same level. The old left-wing dream – to renew the world through new language. But understood in such a mechanistic way, language becomes self-perpetuating, disconnected from the world it was supposed to renew. The linguistic paradigm, according to Hall, "goes too far by erecting the machine of a 'structure' with a propensity for self-generation." In other words: with the characteristics of a virus. But in the robust debate that Hall and many other leftists were conducting, this seemed well on the way to being absorbed. After fierce defensive struggles, demands for things like "fair language" were partly assimilated by society, and a productive sensitization took place. At the same time, the liberal culture of debate, as Hall represented it, proved its worth—the discursive immune system capable of regulating itself. The "PC debate," had become endemic, it could have ended as a mild cold.
If only it hadn't been bred again. Or—leaving aside the question of who was to blame—if only it hadn't entered into symbiosis with a development that can be understood as an even more aggressive variant of the same linguistic paradigm. Coding—which Hall conceived merely as a productive metaphor, but others, less cautiously, as a factual mechanism—had created its own world, albeit a virtual one. On digital platforms, the "PC" protocol ran as if tailor-made for this. Especially online, political activism could be completely reprogrammed into verbal battles. Even when the fight was declared against "structural injustice," the adjusting screws of words took center stage, displacing the macrostructures of the economy and society, as well as the new structures that drove the discourses forward: the algorithms. These far more powerful levers remained untouched, while symbolic victories were achieved in grueling conflicts – such as the capitalization of the adjective "black." Or, as the crowning Pyrrhic victory, the image of the Black Nazi.
It's so easy to miscalculate the formula for justice. Every mistake is gleefully held up to the righteous – thus ensuring its defiant repetition ("now more than ever!"). For the system lacks tolerance, whether for leniency in the face of others' mistakes or for the admission of one's own. There's no time, no space to sweep away the dross that toxically enriches one's self-image and the image of others. One can't get rid of the (self-)caricatures, and no one is really to blame for that. It's just that one has knowingly accepted their reproduction mechanisms.
So wokeness got caught up in this viral generator, running at full speed, and in just a few revolutions, went through the same development that PC had been churning through for decades. I seem to vaguely remember how the word "woke" first emerged, for a moment completely free of malice. It must have been in 2014, in the collective pause following the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson. Indeed, it was a wake-up call, a moment of still unnamed potential – and an old word named it and recharged itself within it. In the old dialect, woke means nothing other than "woke," but in Black dialect it also means "politically awake," at least since the blues singer Lead Belly warned of racial hatred in 1938 – anyone traveling in Alabama should "stay woke, keep their eyes open." Just as the blues has always been appropriated, well-meaning white people turned the bittersweet woke riff into a schmaltzy song. Soon, it resounded from all sides, stolen from its originators, becoming a diatribe for those who thus gained a fresh identity. Yet these anti-woke people had nothing in common except the bone of contention: Leftists resented wokeness because it threatened to discredit the left-wing cause; rightists did it specifically for the pleasure of screaming. They were once again free riders on the bandwagon of left-wing self-criticism.
To be honest, I too use the word, not willingly, but it just seems obvious. It's being forced upon me, I almost said—but who is "one"? Surely not the anti-woke screamers, the smitten dogs who want to distract from their own narrow-mindedness? Certainly not the woke themselves, who now reject the term far and wide – but, in a counter-reflex, profess even more passionately to everything it seems to imply by tacit agreement. For what they see denounced is the very trait of themselves that they absolutely refuse to surrender.
A dilemma, even more pronounced than with political correctness. Yet wokeness may have initially been a rebellion against the leaden legacy of PC. It burst into the idleness of its formulas with the sap and embers of a living tradition, namely the Protestant revival. This zeal, however, was immediately targeted again. For example, in "The Chosen" (2022), the Black linguist John McWhorter polemicized against "woke racism," which, as a "new religion," had betrayed the Black community.
None of the disputing parties is alien to the enlightenment affect. Everyone—in their own opinion—has just seen the scales fall from their eyes. This is especially true for the right-wing anti-woke, whose zeal twice (the nightmare has since come true) swept their savior figure into the White House. The supposedly typically left-wing concept of wokeness was even preceded by the right-wing symbol of the red pill, coined by Curtis Yarvin, the neo-reactionary representative of a "Dark Enlightenment": In the science fiction film "The Matrix" (1999), the protagonist takes the risk of taking a red pill that awakens him in the gruesome reality beyond the simulation. In 2007, Yarvin recommended "red pills" against democracy—an awakening from the Matrix (the "cathedral") of the left-wing establishment. (A dream he now believes he can realize in 2025: the "reboot" of the USA as a monarchy, with a CEO as the "new Augustus.")
Thus, a New Right, allied with religious conservatism, seized on a motif from the postmodern dystopia of two trans directors, while the secular Left gained a reputation for piety. This phase of culture war, a particularly abstruse schism within American Protestantism, so fond of division, revolves around the question: Who possesses true revival?
The mysticism of revival isn't foreign to me either, not at all, if I'm honest—it's just the constant repetition of the word "woke" that makes it seem so foreign. Or: I can't deny what is being dragged into the public eye, torn out of context, and exposed to ridicule. Namely, nothing less than the utopian impulse, which is simultaneously weakness and strength, nakedness and armor. I, too, have developed a sense of mission that I believe I need to remain upright. But nothing is easier than remaining in a state of alarm. Woke up, jumped up, frozen. Out of sheer shock.
Behind this defensive posture lies a now desperate longing: to finally be able to truly wake up. Simply wake up together from the eternal nightmare struggle. No more having to do any convincing. To experience how the senseless argument dissolves into the light of day. To say at breakfast: "I dreamed we had an argument, it was about the capitalization of a word." To laugh about it together.
That's how powerful the magic of the word "wake" is. It is much older than Protestantism, older than Christianity. The belief in natural rhythms, effective precisely because they are uncontrollable. Sleeping, dreaming, waking—what else could one rely on? What else but the simple passage of time? On the fact that darkness turns into light, war into peace—only at the height of the nightmare do I open my eyes and come to, gasping. That's why the thought paths along the knife's edge tempt me, that's why I conjure up the nightmare on the right, as if it would then plunge me into the dazzling dream daylight on the left.
Contradictions, as if deliberately exacerbated by the belief in that necessary change. Thus, in American left-wing discourse, the assertion of eternal white stubbornness went hand in hand with maximum demands that presupposed an unconditional white will for atonement, such as reparations for slavery. The longing for justice crystallized into a powerful image – one that thus eluded realization. As in Germany in 2015, when the horrific image of a right-wing shift, a Fortress Europe, was countered in the next breath with the pious wish "No borders." Irreconcilable differences were invoked, as if they would then resolve themselves. As if it were unnecessary to seek dialogue, to negotiate, to compromise. Not necessary because not possible. Not possible because not necessary. As if awakening to injustice inevitably coincided with awakening to a just world.
Who is "one"? Everyone and no one. We have fed our dreams into the machine. It entangles us in threads that we no longer spin alone. It weaves recurring patterns in which we simultaneously recognize and no longer recognize our thoughts. Even waking up has become part of the alien web of dreams. For it is not we who wake up, it wakes. But the machine that never sleeps, the "woke AI," for example, also doesn't know waking up, as humans need it. Not as a refreshed re-entry into a newly moldable daily reality. Rather, it has cultivated that aspect of wakefulness that derails it again. After all, even everyday wakefulness is unbearable as a permanent state. You need nothing more than sleep. Sleep as hours of forgetting – in which memory can first form. Sleep as dream – to organize what you have experienced and remembered deep within. As a space in which it works within you because you stop working. As powerlessness that forces you to let go – so you can start again. No less than waking up, you long for falling asleep, trusting in a natural rhythm in which both states are perfected. But this rhythm has long been out of balance.
In 2013, media theorist Jonathan Crary diagnosed a distortion of the sense of time in the almost seamless interconnectedness of the world: The all-pervasive flow of information dissolves the natural human day and night rhythms into the endless loop of "24/7." "24/7 (...) conjures the artificial, monotonous image of a 7-day week operating on a 24-hour cycle, which prevents the unfolding of diverse or cumulative experience," as well as the "notion of a longer period of time (...) in which something could change, in which unforeseen events occur." Thus, global insomnia also impairs political consciousness. It resembles "a state of emergency, as if, due to extraordinary circumstances, a battery of spotlights suddenly flashes in the middle of the night and cannot be turned off." One is jolted awake, certainly also in a political sense. But citing the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Crary warns: "Insomnia corresponds to the need for wakefulness, a refusal to look beyond the horror and injustice of the world. It is the restlessness of the effort not to participate to be impervious to the torments of others. But their restlessness also reveals the frustrating ineffectiveness of an ethic of vigilance. The act of witnessing and its constant repetition can become a mere endurance of the night or of disaster; it is neither public nor entirely private."
Vigilance, which takes on a life of its own as a grueling, permanent state, undermines, precisely, the notion of "political awakening": "This entire category of images and metaphors is now incompatible with a global system that never sleeps—as if to ensure that no disturbing awakening ever becomes necessary or meaningful." Ultimately, "24/7" represents the narrowest, most monotonous time horizon imaginable, "the radical abandonment of any claim to connect time with long-term undertakings or even with notions of 'progress' or development." A radiant 24/7 world that casts no shadow is the capitalist end-time vision of a post-history, an expulsion of alterity as the engine of historical change."
A familiar dilemma: Your pulse races while simultaneously paralyzed; your thoughts race; you know you urgently need to let go so that the blockage can be resolved; you can't let go because of the sheer urgency. . . Even after a single sleepless night, concentration, memory, the ability to plan, or even to imagine a different state suffers. Especially for the politically alert, insomnia is a real problem—and no longer a taboo subject. The stresses of activism, or even of staying informed, are being discussed much more openly than in earlier times. Politically active people are encouraged to take care of themselves: eat well, drink, sleep, spend time with friends and family. The fashionable term "self-care" testifies to the effort to achieve more humane social interactions. But in practice, the Self-care fits all too well into the paradigm of expediency and efficiency. You briefly enter rest mode, recharge your batteries, and recharge your batteries to continue functioning. The rhythm of functioning, in turn, seamlessly transitions into consumption—self-care as a scented candle or bubble bath—leaving barely any gaps in which fundamental change could take root.
Not only the system, but also the political resistance ultimately begrudges us such retreats. The system recognizes their simultaneously subversive and constructive power—the resistance to it misjudges it. Ultimately, self-care is tainted by the stigma of selfishness. How can I justify taking care of myself when my commitment always falls short anyway? Especially when I doubt my effectiveness, the temptation is great to at least point to my sleepless nights, in which, in my powerlessness, I express solidarity with the powerless. This, but far more radically, is how the philosopher Simone Weil went to the factory despite her physical weakness to share the lives of the workers, choosing In 1943, she starved to death in solidarity with the tormented.
Jonathan Crary, on the other hand, draws on Weil's contemporary Hannah Arendt, who, in her major work, "Vita Activa oder Vom tätigen Leben" (1958), emphasizes the importance of a restorative retreat into the "darkness of the hidden and the sheltered" for political life. In doing so, she develops ideas already expressed in her first work, "Rahel Varnhagen: The Life Story of a German Jewess from the Romantic Era" (1933) – for example, in Rahel's slow "recovery" after the failure of her first great love, which at the same time painfully demonstrated her social marginalization.
"Day after day, one wakes up, acts like the others, and goes to sleep. In this 'silly regularity,' greater misfortunes have faded away than the fact that one has ever left one behind. No life is imaginable without the steady alternation of day and night, of waking and sleeping; without the day's hope for the night, which allows us to sleep and, in its eternal equilibrium, suspends the history of the day. 'Tiredness protects us from frenzy,' 'we must know that we can sleep; that protects us.' (...) Regularity is not as 'silly' as youth is inclined to believe. (...) It soothes the pure and expressionless lament—everything is over—and precisely for that reason prevents us from continually experiencing the past anew as the present, from blurring the features of reality and perpetuating the transient.
Twenty-five years later, after the truly "greater misfortunes" of war, the Shoah, and expulsion, Arendt sees in the "safe alternation of day and night" political equilibrium, political recovery, also guaranteed. The retreat symbolized by sleep is precisely necessary for political activity. Crary summarizes: "Without this space or time of privacy, away from the 'glare' of the relentless light radiating from the public sphere,' there would be no possibility of a special identity, a special self capable of making a substantial contribution to discussions about the common good."
The loss of such private, dark, indeterminate spaces is by no means the fault of "the woke." But the kind of wakefulness cultivated in the political networks assumes their irrelevance. Indeed, to the extent that such spaces still exist, the woke feel alienated from them. The basic trust needed to even let go and sleep has been lost. No wonder, especially since insomnia increases feelings of insecurity—even to the point of paranoia. A vicious circle. Surrendering to vital sleep requires a leap of faith, which, in the face of escalating dangers, seems increasingly risky: enduring dark spaces, silence, privacy. Giving yourself space to let go and allow the "possibility of renewal and thus of freedom." To the other Leave room to dream out their dreams. To sleep off the intoxication. If we'd been able to sleep in, we might have woken up in a different November by now.
For now, my overwrought nerves give me a dream vision: Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," the last act. As with Rahel Varnhagen, it's about the pain of failed love, of not being suited to one another—but here, the recovery unfolds as a miracle. Puck, the troll, the droll, who chased the protagonists against each other and through the forest all night long, drips the magic potion into the eyes of those who have collapsed from exhaustion. Reality shifts again: the estranged lovers wake up in mutual love. Senseless enmity turns into friendship. Everything is set right. The original, unsustainable state, when they tormented, harassed, and rejected each other in a vicious cycle, has unraveled in the confusion of the night. "When they awake, what they deceived is, / Like dreams and Vain night-images have flown away / (...) / I banish from her beguiled eyelid / The image of the fiend, and all shall be peace."
Isabel Fargo Cole, born in the USA in 1973, has lived in Berlin since 1995. This text is an advance print from her essay collection "The Zenoncene - Paradoxes of Progress," which will be published on September 1st by Edition Nautilus. [1]
1. Warum "woke" am Ende ist. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Frankfurt. 23 Aug 2025: Z1. Von Isabel Fargo Cole
