Being and Dimes

Few if Any of You Will Survive

Dear Republic,

Say what you will about Dimes Square; as Dylan Smith writes, it gave us the term “vibe shift.” It also was our first example of the internet “explicitly direct[ing] the field of culture for the first time.” It’s hard to dismiss how impactful that’s been.

- ROL

BEING AND DIMES

Consistently popular throughout the history of the internet has been the dream of a global town square. In the early summer of 2021, this notion would manifest itself online as the “vibe shift,” a term originally coined by anonymous philosopher angelicism01 in a now-deleted tweet which came to signify the emergence of a distinctly new cultural paradigm and scene within the downtown Manhattan neighborhood dubbed Dimes Square. It was here that the internet would find a physical home, a nexus through which the culture of digital networks would travel and coalesce. 𝓗𝓸𝓷𝓸𝓻 𝓛𝓮𝓿𝔂, during an episode of the now-defunct Wet Brain podcast, referred to the vibe shift as an “eclipse” of the offline and online, a conjoining of the physical space of downtown New York with a scene that emerged and communicated primarily through the internet. Dimes Square, the neighborhood in which the vibe shift first appeared, had emerged at the tail end of the 2010s as an ultra-niche section of the Lower East Side popular with skaters and a small but highly notable circle of artists and socialites who championed transgression and active engagement with the internet as distinct features of their work. The early denizens of Dimes Square would lay the groundwork for the vibe shift by establishing the reputation of the area online as a “meme neighborhood,” one that eagerly embraced the anarchic culture and vernacular of a burgeoning current of the Web. A popular refrain during the earliest days of the vibe shift, “I have extremely fringe political beliefs and am an active dissident voice in an underground online community,” meta-ironically harkened back to this, signaling Dimes Square’s status as a space by and for the eclectic corners of the internet that had developed outside the mainstream throughout the previous decade.

It was the Covid-19 pandemic, however, that would fully fuse the development of downtown New York with this online ecosystem and establish Dimes Square as the real-world town square of the outsider internet. Remilia Corporation, a provocative digital art collective best known for their line of “Milady Maker” NFTs, would capitalize on this, directly positioning themselves as a gang of revolutionary cyberanarchists intent on the destruction of institutional culture. The desire for a reinvigoration of the experimental sensibilities that had dominated New York’s art world during the 20th century was a sentiment shared by many of the figures who rose to prominence early in the vibe shift, with the film collective New People’s Cinema Club (NPCC) hosting the week-long “NPCFest” in late 2021, a chaotic multimedia festival which served to exemplify this ethos and repudiate the cultural attitudes dominant throughout the 2010s. NPCC would distinguish itself with a curatorial vision that placed legacy figures of the pre-internet world on equal footing with distinctly post-internet celebrities, listing “incelcore” musicians Negative XP and Hard Christ alongside legendary underground director John Waters. NPCFest looked to the internet for a revitalization of the avant-garde and bohemia, submerging the calcified art world in the customs and mores of digital counterculture, a process that would come to define the essence of both Dimes Square and the vibe shift.

By virtue of being a neighborhood that had its most fundamental characteristics shaped first by activity online, Dimes Square’s most radical component, which merits more examination than that of other trendy neighborhoods (who may have a similar relationship to the internet), lies in the new paradigm of social relationality begotten through the vibe shift. The internet can no longer exist merely as an accessory or secondary source of cultural production: it is now cultural production in itself. Such a paradigm resists existing methodological frameworks and demands new modes of critique.

A central theme within the work of Martin Heidegger is the notion of gestell, usually translated as “enframing.” It describes the essence of technology and, by extension, the fundamental ways in which technology relates itself to the human. “What is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is in turn distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew,” writes Heidegger in “The Question Concerning Technology.” Our existence as human beings, and with it, our artistic production, is changed by technology, slowly molded by the logic of the tools we once controlled. What does it mean, then, when the internet and culture have become inseparable? angelicism01 sought to theorize this very notion, identifying gestell as now being equivalent with the internet itself:

The internet, which is impossible to think about, and is beautiful, is the danger itself. This is what Heidegger says and instead of repeating what he says word for word, like an academic, let’s simply breakthrough and says what he says: The Internet is the place where Being, the Vibe of Being-On in the fullest sense, including its universal sense as Vibe, flashes, beeps, quirks up, intensifies, and hereby, through all this, turns away from and towards complete forgetting and extinction and magnification at the same time. This is why a day on the internet is everything. Because actually, it is everything.

This essay, titled “WHAT IS THE INTERNET, ACCORDING TO HONOR LEVY, AND HOW LONG WILL IT LAST?” would be published by angelicism01 on June 8, 2021, just two days after his coinage of the term “vibe shift” on Twitter. The internet, having reached a critical point of usage sometime during Covid-19 (though one could easily identify an earlier moment), is now the primary channel through which human sociality is mediated. Culture, therefore, is no longer possible to speak of without also speaking of the internet, and it is not possible to speak of the internet without speaking of gestell. As such, culture-as-internet is functionally indistinguishable from culture-as-gestell. The vibe shift could be defined as the moment at which an understanding of this emerged among a small group of individuals who would thereafter consciously strategize new modes of creative expression better equipped for the dawning paradigm. The work produced during this era often positioned itself in opposition to more traditional avenues of culture such as galleries in favor of a decentralized network of collaboration and creation, with parallels in the mail art movement prominent during the 1980s. Charlotte Fang, the founder of Remilia Corporation, would be one of the most vocal advocates for an explicitly counter-institutional online avant-garde, calling for “forming a posting space against the algorithm until the new web rolls out, ok?” in a 2021 essay. Central to the practice of many of the early figures of the vibe shift was an interest in turning online activity into the constant production of an art object, one that simultaneously embraced the network dynamics of cyberspace while short-circuiting the existing infrastructure of the internet to engender an environment of perpetual creation. Many of the original figures present during the vibe shift, particularly Fang, would position their practice as part of a revolutionary, futurist avant-garde, one that would hijack the mechanisms of online control and destroy the technological system from within, recreating the virtual world as a cyberanarchist utopia free from state or corporate capture. In service of this, a popular motif embraced early in the vibe shift was illegibility, which acted to defy LinkedIn-style corporate speak, academic jargon, and algorithmically-oriented content in favor of a vernacular somewhere between dadaist cut-up poetry and leetspeak. Fang described this as “New Net Art,” a descriptor in which the term “net” stood not for “internet” but rather “network,” signifying a shift in cultural production from individual artists working in the gallery system to the actively evolving intercommunication of social webs and their relation to the internet. Fang writes in a tweet that “using the internet in [sic] as an information highway delirium, coordinating happenings on the timeline, call and response memetic/literary games, chaotic self-organized actions; this is

what the new net art means, ... not ‘net art’ as in art on the internet, art about the internet, but a network art, art in the internet, art of the internet. The precedents here are mail art, or maybe a reading of relational aesthetics by way of database culture.” Fang’s New Net Art would intertwine with angelicism01’s internet-as-Gestell to crystallize the essence of Dimes Square as the first neighborhood to be made inseparable from the internet, and in fact, nothing other than the of line manifestation of the internet itself and the cultural paradigm it endows. In other words, Dimes Square was the scene where the logic of the internet explicitly directed the field of culture for the first time, a process now occurring in cities such as London, San Francisco and Los Angeles, which have slowly integrated motifs first popularized within the vibe shift into their cultural infrastructure.

Dimes Square can be said to have “died” in that its most essential component simply became (or is becoming) the norm, both within the broader New York cultural sphere as well as across the globe. New cultural output will inherently exist in dialogue with the internet-driven logic that first appeared in Dimes, and to dismiss it as a simple flash in the pan moment rather than the arrival of a dramatically new paradigm for art and society would be folly. “What we really just now encountered was the Real of extinction qua extinction,” writes angelicism01 in an essay from 2022. “This is the vibe that’s coming now. And, freal, few if any of you will survive.”

Dylan Smith is constructing thought beyond the spectrum of visible light. He lives and works in New York City.