Happy limbo timeless time between Christmas and New Year’s! If you’re looking for some reading to fill the time, I’m happy to say I’ve finally finished one (1) heckin’ essay. At this point I’m averaging about one every 1.5 years… at least I don’t feel like I’m spamming you, so there’s that.
This essay is about vibes. You can read the full version with citations and margin notes (and nicer typography) on my website, or just keep reading here, sans extra notes.
This is also the first time I’m sending out a newsletter with buttondown since I quit Substack — let me know if it works ok for you.
I hope you’re having a lovely holiday season, whatever you may be doing. Without further ado, [clears throat dramatically]…
THE INDUSTRIAL AGE BEGAN around 1760, characterised by factory workers producing material goods with power-driven machines rather than hand tools. Then came the Information Age, beginning around the 1950s, characterised by knowledge workers producing analytics, designs, information — soft wares as opposed to hard wares. Now in 2024, we are in The Vibe Age, characterised by posters and content creators producing aesthetic feelings and... well, the vibes.
I can feel your skepticism, so bear with me here. The Industrial Age did not supplant the need for handmade goods, but it did reshape the economic and social structures of our world, permanently. Same for the Information Age: we still purchase factory-made goods, but entire classes of economic activities were born, and how we learn about and relate to society changed along with it.
I claim we're in The Vibe Age today because life now is one of information overload. Of the hyper-connected internet, paired with attention economies that grab and hold our disengaged engagement, with days that undulate back and forth between sitting at a medium-sized screen during the day, then ignoring a big screen while scrolling a little screen at night.
We've never had more information directly beamed to our brains, yet we've no time to process any of it. Information might be the oil of the 21st century, but it's crude oil, and must be processed to become anything useful. With context-building, information is processed into knowledge. With logical reasoning, knowlege is processed into understanding. With reflection, understanding is processed into wisdom, and with storytelling, wisdom is processed into meaning.
It's these second, third, fourth order derivatives that are valuable to us: knowledge and understanding allow us to make true judgements, wisdom allows us wise decisions, and meaning makes our lives purposeful and worth living.
But the firehose never ends. We've no time to think, so the only way to make sense of it all is via vibes — a loose interpretation, a gut check, a felt feeling — and we move on.
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A week after the results of the 2024 US presidential election, a friend and I were having a debrief in a crowded bar in LES. He shared his disappointment that people essentially voted against themselves. I say I don't think that's what people were thinking about at all. "People don't vote based off their beliefs or ideology," I project over the hubbub on a Friday night. "People vote based off vibes. 'Belief' and 'ideology' is just what we use to post-hoc rationalise that decision afterwards."
The effect of the Vibe Age on politics is one of chaotic accelerationism that dissolves into meaninglessness. For example, one of my favourite complaints from old-school activists is that subcultures these days have no style. There's no dress code, no stable set of aesthetics that map to specific political groups. No black ripped shirts and chains for the punks, no flowery sundresses and flared denim pants for the hippies. We're in the TikTok age now, which means fashion microtrends that cycle on the scale of weeks, not decades.
In the world of 2024, aesthetics come and go. What were subcultural staples are now costumes to be tried on and tossed away, rather than a stable signifier of community identity and group membership. This mirrors the general societal trend away from community memberships and towards hyper individualisation.
Observing the comment sections of the internet, I've noticed a similar phenomenon. Much like how subcultural fashion aesthetics are treated like disposable costumes to enhance the individual, political ideologies are also becoming character builds to don and discard at the drop of a hat. Commenters in their early 20s describe wild jumps between different political ideologies from ages as young as 10, jumping ship as soon as the vibes are off. Over time they build a seemingly incoherent amalgam of collected political nuggets.
You can see this hodge-podge approach to ideology in the public unearthing of Luigi Mangione's online footprint. His ideological tourism induced an curious response: people can read tea-leaves as they wish. Traditional media outlets report that he's some kind of "anti-capitalist" leftist; left-leaning social media circles are quick to clock his right-wing, manosphere clichés. Others average him out to be a centrist, but I think the reality is much more chaotic.
Like the hyper fast-cycling, microtrend-ification of fashion, political ideologies are becoming hyper-specific and increasingly atomised for you to pick and choose the bits you like. It's the ultimate form of liberalism, dividing people down so specifically such that no collective power can be found, no critical mass can be reached.
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A vibe is a a feeling, an atmosphere. A non-descript trope, a vague hint at a reference. It is simultaneously ultra specific while impossible to pin down. The vibes can be immaculate; the vibes can be in shambles. A place or a person can be "a whole vibe". It's intuition embodied in a noun.
When you live in a world of information overload, you lack the time to think all the way through to the end of a problem. So most times, we intuit a solution, then use our critical thinking skills to post-hoc rationalise our way out of there. In the Vibe Age, skills once used to process information — such as logical reasoning and deduction, narration and storytelling — have become corrupted. They're no longer used to arrive at some kind of truth, but are justification devices after a truth has been chosen.
You can see this pattern emerge in the popularity of "Random Internet Personality OWNS Unsuspecting University Student" videos, as well as the "rationalism" and "atheism" communities, where the appearance of rationality and logic is valued above true curiosity and open-mindedness. The skills of rational reasoning are now simply weapons to be used in the bloodsport of debate, to curate a vibe of domination and righteousness rather than arriving at any sort of newfound truth.
The skill of narration and storytelling has similarly been corrupted in the Vibe Age. What was once a way to make sense of history and the world, is now an emotion manipulation tool to convince you to buy life insurance, or whatever needs to fit in a 30 second ad break. Storytelling becomes storyselling.
Even film and literature, the primary longform storytelling media of our time, lean evermore towards unchallenging plots and cookie-cutter characters. A Marvel movie will, usually through a villain, raise provocations against the status quo just enough to give an illusion of depth, but then immediately take it to cartoonish levels of evil to quell any real discussion or change, even in a fantasy, alien universe. And don't even get me started about the modern litfic scene filled with sad white women wasting away, pontificating about the ills of modern society while doing nothing of substance to change it. But hey, at least it gives the reader the sense that they are indeed very smart and cultured, without the continuous work of being smart, or creating culture.
A vibe is a conclusion. It’s a destination that hints at the journey; an end that obfuscates the means. It’s a comforting shush, with no room for questions.
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In Aldous Huxley's 1932 sci-fi dystopian novel, Brave New World, "feelies" are a kind of heightened theatrical experience that overloads the senses with sights, sounds, touch, smells, and whatever else, to induce superficial emotions detached from plot and story. It's one of the main forms of entertainment in the fictional world and is usually pornographic in nature. Huxley meant for this to be a critique of introducing audio in films, but it could easily apply to the increasing focus on spectacle in entertainment over substantive storytelling. You need only glance at the near infinite well of live-action remakes and superhero universe re-re-retellings to get a sense for the modern version of this phenomenon.
Fifty-three years later, educator Neil Postman publishes Amusing Ourselves to Death, a critique of television as a medium that incentivised entertainment above all else. His argument is that the medium is the message, and television establishes a new norm that shows the viewer a string of disconnected, contextless information that creates the illusion of being informed, but actually leads people away from knowledge. Perhaps more importantly, it leads people away from action.
The strange thing about reading the works of Postman, or Huxley, is that throughout their works they give off a real old man yells at cloud vibe. Sorry but, you're mad at sound? In films? Sound design, dialogue performances and musical score made film a richer medium, with more avenues to express art and mastery of craft. Serialised television extended filmmaking to long, epic stories. (You can try but you will need to pry Battlestar Galactica from my cold, dead hands.)
It's obvious to say that sound in films and television didn't destroy humanity. But undoubtly it has changed our brains. And while this change may have been subtle enough to gloss over with film and TV, the effect of algorithmic feeds and short form video is undeniably noticeable. I've discussed this with friends at length — we can feel our brains changing. We can feel our attention spans diminish, our minds distracting ourselves even when we try and focus, our time pulled away from long form reading, despite our best efforts.
It's with this realisation that I approach Amusing Ourselves to Death with a more serious eye. Perhaps these ideas were simply too early for their time? Perhaps we were just too slow on the uptake. Or perhaps, the issue is economic and social, as it often is.
You see, the tricky thing about criticising entertainment value is that it makes you the fun police. It makes you a critic of regular people who just want to relax after a long day of work. The want to spend more time working and thinking is a luxury reserved for the upper classes — the working classes have been, uh, actually working. Don't they deserve a break?
When I warn of the lack of critical thinking and processing that happens in the Vibe Age, I am making an argument that the work of thinking matters (and, in many cases, is the whole point). Work for work's sake — or I should say, effort for effort's sake — is a critical part of life and a life well lived. But the concept of work itself has been perverted in today's economic and societal structures to become this soul-crushing, grinding activity where we prostitute our bodies and brains and time for the means to live (i.e., money). The modern common adage to never do what you love for a living shows just how work in the modern sense can suck the soul out of even the most enjoyable of human pastimes.
This creates a weird situation where engaging in the feelies, entertainment, and mindless hedonism becomes an act of defiant political protest. But it's "protest" in a suspiciously conformative way. "Self care" is the grand new hotness, nevermind that it's yet another individualistic band-aid solution that just means consuming more products, rather than any systemic change. To protest the system by becoming the ultimate consumer and upholder of the system is not as big of a protest as you think it is.
Maybe this is why revolutions are often started by well-to-do, mid- to upperclass bourgeoisie rather than working class proletariats, despite it seeming like an act of class betrayal. In some ways, you need a cushy, bullshit job to have enough time and headspace to see the bullshit in the economic and social systems around you, and enough means to do something about it without immediately perishing. So, for example, if you have the time to be reading this wanky essay... perhaps you are the perfect vehicle for change.
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The Vibe Age, with its algorithmic feeds and shortform videos, is not the siren of certain doom. Don't worry, I'm not going to old man yells at cloud at you. But notice how it has changed the way you think. Notice how your own skills in reasoning, in deduction, in storytelling, has been redirected in curious ways. Notice how much you are post-hoc rationalisting from already-selected conclusions, and be honest with yourself about it.
It's important to stress that I'm not trying to shame anyone for operating via vibes only. I most certainly do all the time. It's a reasonable defense response in our current environment of information overload. But none of us are destined nor doomed. We have agency, and massive collective power if we choose to use it. At least, I'm pretty sure. That's the vibe I'm getting.■
If you made it all the way to the end, thank you for reading. I know how scarce and special attention is, so know that I am truly grateful that you gave this piece of writing some time of yours. As always, if you have any thoughts, please feel free to reply! Hopefully the reply function works the same, still.
Wherever you are in the world, I hope you are well. I’m so happy to be finally sending one of these out again, please let me know what you think!
With much love,
—Serena