If You Think There's A Vibe Shift Going On, Then You're Probably A Tool

Vibe Shift Week at The Republic of Letters Commences With Matthew Specktor's Contrarian Take

Dear Republic,

We won’t always be this, like, heterodox, but this is Substack after all! — and it seemed important somehow to tackle the issue of the vibe shift. What is it? Are we in one? Is there — as has been speculated on — a “reverse vibe shift”? Or are you a tool for even thinking about vibe shifts, let alone commissioning a series of essays on them, as Matthew Specktor suggests in this sharp piece?

-ROL

IF YOU THINK THERE’S A VIBE SHIFT GOING ON, THEN YOU’RE PROBABLY A TOOL

Philip Roth, that phallocratic golem of the late 20^th Century, once wrote that “getting people right is not what living is all about . . . it’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.” What Roth said about other people has always seemed to me to apply, no less, to our efforts to apprehend our own given cultural moment. The folks who pretend they know what’s going on, who say they’re tuned in to the zeitgeist— something I suspect we can only ever grasp accidentally — are full of shit, careerists and dupes I’d trust no further than I can throw them. Of course, I would say that, being a member of a generation — Generation X — more notoriously cynical than any other. From where I sit, anyone who tells you they know what’s going on is selling something.

Consider, then, the “vibe shift,” that slippery term deformed by internet use into something even vaguer than the term itself (what could be vaguer than a “vibe,” after all) implies. The original vibe shift was pronounced upon in 2021 by the consultant Sean Monahan, a member of the now disbanded art collective K-HOLE. According to Monahan, this vibe shift involved “a return to fragmentation,” a pivot away from the suffocating uniformity of 2010s internet in favor of “a return to scene culture.” These phrases are anodyne enough and seem to gesture broadly towards a break with the tiresome lockstep of the social internet, but the right has since demagogued the vibe shift to mean a pivot to post-woke culture, a pendular shift away from the social justice-y concerns of the late 2010s. As some jamoke writing in the Free Press put it (OK, the “jamoke” was Niall Ferguson, but given that he portrays himself as a tea-slurping, suspenders-wearing, Walter Scott-reading sexagenarian Scotsman, find me a better definition of jamoke than that), the vibe shift involved Trump’s triumph over DEI, etc. This seems pretty far from what Monahan (who invoked “a return to indie sleaze” instead) had in mind, but in any case —

Bullshit. Yes, it’s no longer 2017, yes, the era of pink pussyhats and #resist and Lin-Manuel Miranda and firmware updates in the form of “coffee” (ah, Chuck Wendig, where are you now? Not that I really want to know) is well behind us, and yes, there are people whose entire politics seem to have been forged around the question of whether they can still say the words “pussy” or “retard” out loud in public and those people are now apparently in charge. But those people, the ones who insist that cringe liberalism has had its day and things are going to be different now — “different,” meaning, in this case, “the way things used to be” — are mistaken. Politics may be downstream of culture, but culture is a flickering, unstable, many-headed thing — it is created in millions of ways, from moment to moment — and the past, as Faulkner said (a phrase that has survived dozens of vibe shifts), is never really past besides. This means the utopian aspirations of the social justice folk will surely never be realized —there will always be some asshole who wants to throw the R-word around with impunity somewhere — but also that the revanchist drive of people who claim the vibe shift represents “a return to reality” (good grief, Ferguson, I’d like to snap your suspenders) will also remain forever thwarted. The vibe it shifts and then shifts again. There are people (we’ve all seen them) who seem to get stuck in a particular era. Their perspective fossilizes, and they somehow seem to think that “reality” — or “common sense,” or whatever other nominally-neutral term they tend to use — involves a kind of stasis and that the nature of certain things (our understanding of gender identity, for example) should remain forever fixed. There’s a bar down the street from my house that used to be — you can still see it if you really squint — a true dive, instead of what it is now, a place where the bartenders spend eight minutes meticulously mixing a twenty-three-dollar martini. But sometimes when I pass that place in the late afternoon, I see a man who’s clearly been coming there since it was a dive bar — a place where anyone ordering a ‘martini’ at all would get glared out of the room — and who probably doesn’t notice it’s changed until the check arrives. He looks like Dennis Wilson in the period immediately preceding his death, bearded, burly, and dissolute, and he's usually wearing a Hawaiian shirt, alone among the sharply-dressed hipsters, but it's his bar as much as it is anyone else’s. Which is why a “vibe shift” feels goofy to pronounce upon, because whose ‘vibe’ is it anyway? A person like Monahan (whom I don’t mean to insult: K-HOLE the collective did fascinating work, and one of Monahan’s partners in that endeavor, the writer Emily Segal, is one of my favorite contemporary novelists) is wishcasting, or doomcasting, when they talk about a vibe shift. They want it so badly to be true! And, of course, others who also want it to be true, who are feeling bored or impatient or annoyed with the current culture, pick up on it. And when enough people do it becomes true, or true-ish, but it’s never entirely true. The moment you name it you’re kind of forcing the issue anyway. You’re catching an inkling, or a partial truth, and trying to make it the whole thing.

A Walter Scott-reading jamoke

Which brings me back to Roth, a writer of whom I rarely tire, even if he was a casualty of the previous vibe shift, in which the Great (white) American Novelists of the late 20^th Century were at the very least placed on probation while the assumptions that underwrote their ascendency were thoroughly (and, to my mind, fairly) interrogated. Roth was a writer who understood the American mindset of his era better than anyone save, perhaps, Don DeLillo, and who articulated its shifting, um, vibes across the decades, from the febrile blossoming of the sexual revolution on through the satire-resistant perversities of the Nixon era, the grotesque hypocrisies of the Reagan— and, later, the Clinton — era and so on, but in the end was reduced to remarking “I don’t know anything anymore about America today. I see it on TV, but I am not living it anymore.” Of course, even that remark (in 2012) feels weirdly semi-prescient — these days, almost all of us are left to gain our experience of “America” through a different kind of screen, and through the relentless predations of its tech barons and oligarchs, but might not otherwise be able to say we’re “living it” in the sense he means either — but ultimately he’s admitting his cluelessness in the face of an inscrutable reality. Which seems precisely the kind of posture the vibe-thermometer of the contemporary internet is designed to thwart, or at least to shame (who among us wants to admit to being clueless about anything these days), but still seems surpassingly accurate. “No one knows anything,” goes another oft-cited bit of wisdom from my neck of the woods, to which I would add: least of all the vibe forecasters.

Matthew Specktor

's books include The Golden Hour, out now from Ecco Press, Always Crashing in the Same Car, and American Dream Machine. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. A founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, he lives in West Hollywood.