Vibes Cartel

Don’t be a cog in the mood machine.

Instead of your usual Reading, Watching post today, I have a little round-up and partial critique of the “vibe shift” discourse. It’s itself a bit discursive and rambly, but hope you enjoy!

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“While the jargon overflows with the pretense of deep human emotion, it is just as standardized as the world it officially negates: the reason for this lies partly in its mass success, partly in the fact that it posits its message automatically, through its mere nature … Those who have run out of holy spirit speak with mechanical tongues.”— Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity

There’s been quite a lot of discourse recently about the “vibe shift.” In the New York Times, Ezra Klein tries to answer the question of why it feels like Trump won a big landslide when he won narrowly. He attributes this to a wider Trumpian “cultural victory” and the overall change in the “vibes.” Becca Rothfeld writing on her Substack is annoyed about the vagueness of the discourse. She has both conceptual and empirical objections: it’s not a clear and distinct idea—it’s sort of the opposite, in fact—and people are not providing adequate evidence for its being anything outside of a trend among the trendsetters. James Duesterberg on The Point’s Substack, I think has the best intervention so far: He helpfully charts the genealogy of the “vibe shift” from its origins to its present incarnation:

In June of 2021, Sean Monahan, one of the founders of the trend forecasting group K-HOLE (of “normcore” fame) who now writes a newsletter called 8Ball, coined the term “vibe shift” to refer to an emerging cultural transformation, one whose contours were at the time hazy but that has since come into focus: a rejection of the background left-liberal consensus, a political shift to the right, and a new cultural decadence and nihilism. When he wrote at the tail end of the pandemic moment, the reference point for “the vibe shift” was the micro-neighborhood in downtown New York referred to as Dimes Square, known mostly to trust-fund skateboarders, artists, and the people (like Monahan) paid to market their tastes to large corporations. Three years later, the term “vibe shift” was being used by Very Serious People—people living inside the Beltway, people who write for the Times and the Post—to describe the historical significance of Donald Trump’s comeback, and the Canadian government was enacting tax holidays to stave off what the Deputy Prime Minister referred to as a “vibecession.” According to Niall Ferguson—author of Civilization: The West and Rest and a Harvard professor who describes himself as “a sixty-year-old Scotsman with a penchant for red suspenders”—after Trump’s election “the vibe shift…immediately [went] global.”

Duesterberg also makes a key critical point, I think, which is to show how the idea is rooted in the current conditions of commerce. “Vibe shifts” sound an awful lot shifts in market sentiment:

Sentiment, mood, “animal spirits” have always, of course, been central to politics and economics. Carter’s “malaise speech” from 1978, at the dawn of the neoliberal era, was an early indicator that sentiment was starting to come out of the shadows. What has changed is that emotions and affects are no longer seen as unconscious forces that need to be mediated by conscious reflection, regulated by collective debate, and transformed through political action. Trump dismissed Bitcoin in his first term but his recent, aggressive alignment with crypto is not just a matter of having been paid off. $TRUMP is as good of a bet, and just as legitimate, as the man himself. The logic of the memecoin is the logic of MAGA; sentiment is not the driver but the destination. To the moon, to Mars: out of this world, back to the future, to somewhere ‘great’—somewhere that is, precisely, nowhere in particular.

It is a funny sort of nihilism that believes in nothing except belief itself. But it would be a mistake to say that this pomo nihilism is confined to the hyperonline, to those whose minds have been destroyed by Twitter—whether they are incel crypto-trader white-nationalist shitposters or the Beltway quiet luxury commentators who obsess over them. As Reason was in the Age of Enlightenment which we are now definitively exiting, vibes are self-authorizing—viral. Whether you believe or not is precisely beside the point: vibes are belief, relieving you of the burden of believing in anything yourself. And we all depend on them now: not just the dentist in Vermont but the peasant in Burma. The world economy now runs on vibes: on the perpetual, exponential growth of US capital markets, and on the fantasy of artificial general intelligence which feeds it and which is itself the purest expression of the memetic logic of an intelligence freed from self-conscious reflection.

So, “vibe shift” is essentially a move in the capital markets. It’s the Trump trade. And a lot of people are trying to take a position: Long, short, hedged, etc. I remember someone Tweeting when the vibe shift discourse broke out in in 2022, “I’m hodling [sic] politics during the vibe shift.” It’s a change in fashion that demands concessions. “You don’t talk about fascism any more. Wokism is demodé. This is the new thing.” But this thing is not even terribly avant-garde anymore. While some of the proponents of the legitimacy of vibe shift discourse are trying to differentiate themselves from fussy, positivistic “midcult” liberal punditry, they should pay close attention to where the vibe shift discourse is now being reproduced: you’re aligned with Ezra Klein and Shadi Hamid here. I do not mean this in a derogatory way necessarily, but this is the New York Times and The Washington Post we’re talking about. They are at the center of elite consensus building. It’s already passed through the lower intestine of center-right opinion-making: Tyler Cowen’s blog. Ross Douthat writes that we are in a new age of myth and feeling, but the positivists and stat-mongers (and engineers, never trust ’em) seem to agree and are now the ones most invested in talking vibes. (A smart critic would notice this identity of pundit positivism and neo-romantic irrationalism and make something of it. Perhaps the uniting idea is the stock ticker and the financial chart?) And it’s already a bit of a slogan or a cliché. Another way of putting this is that it’s become commoditized: it was seeded as as a boutique property in the trend incubator of downtown Manhattan, and now it’s reached the outer boroughs and made its way to Washington D.C., not exactly a center of cutting-edge fashion. Unfortunately, the opinion journalism business works largely through the recycling of clichés: liberal elites, wokeness, national reckoning, the end of X, and so and so forth. One must be careful not to reify the clichés: just because everyone says it’s real doesn’t make it real. Or rather, it does, and that’s the problem.

The proponents of vibes discourse demand the sovereign right to make bold statements about the Zeitgeist. I sympathize; I believe synthetic, imaginative, and speculative thought is much needed in a fragmented and confusing era. However, the best pieces on this subject try to examine the material, institutional, and political conditions that are creating this new structure of feeling. For instance, Ezra Klein’s original piece in the Times and Jay Caspian Kang’s in the New Yorker offer explanations that go to the technological underpinnings of the current era. Sure, the explanations are provisional: We are not sociologists, we’re opinion writers, but they offer some real reflection. They don’t just stamp on the ground and yell “vibes, vibes, vibes!” Neither do they obsessively demand empirical evidence: they hazard a synthesis. But they try to answer “why” and “how,” to specify processes and mechanisms. You know, reasons. They try to perform the public exercise of reason, which is what we’re supposed to be doing as opinion writers: to think in public, even if imperfectly. They don’t just insist that irrationality is the order of the day. And they try to avoid the utmost sin and cliché of opinion writing: the empty declaration of endings and beginnings, which is just the creation of easy narratives. For instance, I wasn’t impressed with Ross Barkan’s New York Times essay about the end of the resistance and the beginning of our new era, because I don’t think it offered an interpretation of anything. It just said it was so. It says that we’ve exited the era of “hyperpolitics,” borrowing Anton Jäger’s coinage.

Now, longtime readers of this newsletter will know that I’m not the biggest fan of Mr. Jäger, nor is he of me, but I have to admit there is a good deal more to his notion of hyperpolitics than what Barkan says about it. Unlike “vibes,”
it’s an honest-to-goodness attempt to conceptualize the current moment. It tries to look seriously at material, institutional, and political conditions, although it remains a bit impressionistic. And I think Jäger might be a little taken aback to learn that the hyperpolitics era is over since he just wrote about for the September/October issue of New Left Review. The sudden appearance and disappearance of mass protests, the emotional volatility of the political sphere, and the difficulty of creating lasting institutions are what hyperpolitics is all about. So the puzzling change from 2017 to now is not the end of hyperpolitics, but an instance of hyperpolitics itself. “Vibe shift” is the hyperpolitical category par excellence, bringing the “animal spirits” of the market directly to bear on cultural and political phenomena. Hyperpolitics is an attempt at thought: it tries to explain underlying phenomena through a higher-order concept, while “vibe shift” seems to me like a (deliberate?) avoidance or abrogation of thought. It’s anti-intellectualism posing as superior, intuitive insight. (See, no hard feelings, Anton.¹)

Returning to Duesterberg’s piece, I think this notion that vibes are “self-authorizing” is very important to consider. What else is self-authorizing? Well, authoritarian politics, for one: “It is so because the leader says it so. He has declared a New Order, enough with your little intellectual games of reason, you outdated little intellectual pussies, bow down to MEN and HISTORY.” Uh-huh.

The other thing that Duesterberg’s analysis puts me in mind of is a Ponzi scheme: a process of self-perpetuating hype that turns out ultimately to be empty and then blows up. As the great economist Hyman Minsky pointed out, Ponzi behavior is not just the province of peripheral scams, it’s an integral part of the business cycle in financial capitalism: at some point, people stop paying attention to the underlying value of assets, they just try to hype the price on markets and then hope they can borrow against their overvalued assets to pay off their debtors. Eventually, the rubber hits the road, the bullshitting stops, the bubble bursts. Pick your cliché. Not coincidentally, Donald Trump got rich this way: in the 1980s, he rapidly expanded his “empire” to continue borrowing. But it was all gilded appearances—there were negative cash flows—and it all came crashing down. Around the same time, the vibe shifted, and the type of ’80s excess he represented went out of fashion. But he restructured his debt and changed his business model: he went from builder and owner to hypeman of the very idea of success. Capitalists hire Trump to slap his name on their big projects. Sound familiar? Look at all these crypto schemes proliferating. We’re clearly in some kind of especially Ponzified moment. I’m shorting the “vibe shift” because I think it’s based on air: I think sooner or later we’re headed for a big crash of the Trump bubble, but, also, God help us all when that happens.

As something of a Marxist, I believe that we should always look through relations of exchange to relations of production. Yes, I can see the number go up, but I want to know how are the vibes produced? “Self-authorizing” is a lot like “self-valorizing,” which is how Marx characterized capital: as a process of self-valorizing value. Hegel’s Geist, the spirit, the process of the self-actualization of human freedom and reason, has been replaced with the abstract, automatic, endless self-valorization of capital.² While it seems to authorize itself, it’s actually produced and reproduced by ongoing work. There’s a whole racket, an industry, with a division of labor: you’ve got podcasters, you’ve got opinion writers, you’ve got the owners of the websites and platforms, that is to say, a whole vibes-industrial complex. If you are part of that and don’t just want to be a drone or an LLM, it’s part of your duty to be critical and self-reflective about what you are doing when you write. Fortunately, the aesthetic and the political coincide here for once: if you are repeating clichés you might succeed in your career, but you will fail at your vocation. But hey, we all do it, after all: we’re just journalists, not James Joyce, but we have to try to catch ourselves doing it.

The word cliché is an onomatopoeia—the French word for click, incidentally—it originally comes from the sound of the printing press, and they are a constant byproduct in the industrial production of ideas. In small doses, bromides seem to be harmless and might even be good for you. In large doses, it’s toxic waste. Do not for a moment think you too are not dominated by the machinery of capital no matter which spirits or spooks you choose to invoke. The proximity of spooky language and hocus-pocus means that the reign of the commodity fetish is closer, not farther: it doesn’t help us grasp the whole, but to ignore it, to help us forget how things are actually being produced.

The richest people in the world with unprecedented control over the media and communications realign politically and then—coincidentally—there is a “big cultural shift.” Why? “Can’t say for sure, but probably has something to do with how annoying liberals are.” Come the fuck on. They are already putting pressure on the media to soften coverage. It’s not that things are just happening, they are doing things. And the media is already bending or being taken over by regime-friendly oligarchs. It’s not a mystery what’s going on—we can still read about it in the newspaper—so let’s not mystify ourselves.

One last thought. What this insistence on a new order—the vibes—remind me of a lot was the hysterical run-up to the war against Iraq. The sense was created of an unstoppable momentum and there was relentless, insidious sidelining and castigation of critics and dissent. Even if people did not think they were warmongering, they helped the regime’s cause by attacking those who objected as fuddy-duddies, hopelessly out-of-date, and unfashionable. Obviously, we were in a New Era™ after 9/11. Obviously, the administration had the winds of history at its back. It wasn’t conservatives and right-wingers who did a lot of this work, but liberals who rationalized and justified what was a series of absurd lies and ultimately a catastrophe. This is what I was trying to get at when we were moving into a Vichy era: a lot of people are just going to go along to get along. But not all.

I was lucky I was a very young man back then, a kid really, so nothing was obvious to me yet, and I wasn’t that impressed that big names in Opinion were pro-war or anti-anti-war. I didn’t feel that much pressure to conform because it was being made to seem sensible and wise. It was stupid and wrong. I knew they were lying and it made me angry. It was total bullshit. The things being done now are also both stupid and wrong. At the very least, let’s not play pretend and give it a profundity it doesn’t deserve, whatever the vibe-mongers tell us. It’s hard to practice reason when dominated by irrationality—in fact, it’s impossible—but it’s also a categorical imperative in this era. We must try.

1. Schmuck.

2. Moise Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory, 75