In a recent essay in The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka makes the case that the rise of vibes-talk signals a shift in online culture: where once the internet’s most exciting promise was its endless series of stories, now more and more users go online not for narrative, but for “moments of audiovisual eloquence” - for vibes.
They are also questions too big to approach solely from the perspective of the individual internet user. Still, some difficult questions remain: why this sensibility why these words that conjure up visions of both acid cool and New Age kitsch, and why now? These are bigger and unwieldier questions than the cooptation dance can contain. A vibe-forward, witch-positive, healing-crystal-hawking consumerism is perhaps today’s dominant form of what Frank, writing in 1997, called “hip consumerism.” Maybe it is true that, as philosopher Robin James has it, “sometime in the last five years, ‘vibes’ got co-opted by capitalism, ” though such a hard cutoff feels unconvincing. Is this all just part of the endless dance between counterculture and business culture, to use historian Thomas Frank’s terms? Youth cultures develop a sensibility brands capture it and sell it back to them and others. It is a kind of spell: an attempt to conjure the essence of a dim elsewhere in the here and now. For them - for us - it has become received common sense that some days “the vibes” are simply off that everything from a weird-looking cat to a cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal is a potential object of identification, an occasion for remarking, “Same energy,” or more tersely, “Mood” - which is to say, “ That’s me!” Tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram users assemble collections of images and clips intended to produce a distinct impression, an overall mood or vibe: forest clearing, tweed jacket, roaring fire, marble bust. Perhaps the most dedicated speakers of the langua ge of the occult today are millennial and Gen Z denizens of social media platforms. Still, it is possible to identify a sort of vanguard.
The occult is for everyone, and so for no one in particular. Yuppies profess to feeling certain energies New York Times writers divine vibes venture capitalists do a booming business in moods, pouring money into astrology apps. Today, this vocabulary has diffused beyond any niche group. Among hippies, dropouts, and other assorted voyagers in psychedelia, they were part of a private shorthand for sensations strongly felt but not so easily explained.
But who are they speaking to? Once, vibe, mood, and energy were watchwords of the counterculture.
#Arc z vibe full#
It’s hard, a marketing email laments, to build an organization filled with people whose “energies align.” An AI-generated horoscope ascribes to today’s events a total “Taurus full moon during Scorpio season mood.” From every corner you are buffeted by vibrations and waves, moods and intensities. Come in, an app pleads, and listen to an algorithmically curated playlist of songs that “fit the vibe.” “ We caught a vibe! ” yelps a voice in one of those songs it isn’t immediately clear whether this means caught as in brass ring or caught as in disease. T he products of mass culture have learned to speak a new language: the language of the occult.
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