A Spiderweb of Interrogations Without End

or, Dissecting the Vibe Shift.

I wanted to write about the concept of “vibes,” now during the autumn of its capitalization.

I work in marketing. I was presented the query “what if advertising were made illegal?” by someone who wanted to jostle me off my axis. The question implied there would be a sweeping positive change throughout society. While I agreed in principle that there would be less annoying paid messaging cluttering the otherwise oppressive urban landscapes, I explained that the real problem wasn’t the defanged and heavily regulated advertising ecosystem but rather the decentralized cross-generational trend of individuals seeking influencer status by turning themselves into paid placements and monetizing every single relationship possible.

OnlyFans is for girls with catastrophe anuses, but social media is for nearly everybody else.

One of the most significant reasons advertising’s effectiveness has been muted is because people have adapted hacks to cancel them from their vision. From billboards to Spotify commercials, even unskippable ads are ignored with extreme prejudice. On a subconscious level we blur the edges of each perception, but on a conscious level we are aware more than ever before of the tactics used to persuade.

Most people fancy themselves in possession of media literacy certificates, and it turns out it’s easier than getting into Mexican MENSA.

The technic of media persuasion is inexorably linked to psychoanalysis and one trillion recorded years of trade. New techniques are tested on us yearly, and by the time we adapt to them more are being rolled out, each innovation layered in paranoid sediments training us to be critical of what we see, how we see it, and how we think we understand it.

The first example of this would be our deep awareness of propaganda, going so far as to misdiagnose it. Jacques Ellul elucidates my favorite perspective, explaining that propaganda isn’t just when the government makes posters that demand compliance. Rather, it is the pummeling of messages that make you adhere to rules outside of your own self-interest and rationality. Propaganda is when you don’t even believe in a value, but you know you must adhere to it even when punishment is unclear. Propaganda is the phrase “you’re not supposed to do that” repeated by the populace as it is transformed into the pitiless censor of itself.

It’s a subversive string of programming that sits outside of your conscious mind, meaning it is not subject to rationality. As we collectively achieved awareness of it, we are also aware of this space around our immediate senses and what we believed to be our self-interest, wondering what else can reside there. We have stepped backwards from our immediate experience and become cognizant of what other codes could orbit around our narrow purview, controlling our behaviors. Stories of man against nature were superseded by stories of man against himself, then man against the author, and once more man against the author who is against himself through his character.

We gain dominion over ourselves with distance, like gaining a deeper knowledge of an animal by standing above it snapshotted in death and dissecting it. We are then made dizzy by inhabiting a new cognitive dimension, no longer leveled with all life but the arbiter of its meaning.

"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." - Judge Holden, Blood Meridian

We feel comfortable flung into further dimensions, as Jim Hougan expressed during his travels abroad. Relishing the singular abandon of the Caribbean population in the mid-20^th century, over time this freedom from the Western fixation on contextual interpretation caused internal discord. How could these people not ceaselessly analyze what they were doing, and then analyze that very drive for analysis?

The defining characteristic of the meta-state is separation. Once the Rubicon between vacation and inhabitant was being traversed, he realized he was a stranger in a strange land.

We all feel this state of being is natural. With the publication of books like “Nudge” by Richard Thaler, jobbers throughout society are informed of how false dichotomies presented by authority permeate their everyday lives. Persuasion isn’t the handshake deal, it is a succession of small choices that slowly lead you to a destination, typically in the form of false dichotomies you are given the illusion of total control in choosing between. True control lies in who is prompting you to choose, but the goal of this is to legitimize the game itself by making you an active participant within it. The result is nobody trusts choices in closed systems, and everybody understands voting for change is impossible.

One of my favorite Marketing books early in my career was “Positioning” by Al Ries and Jack Trout, and I cite it as an example of how marketing experiments count as primary research that feed right back into our understanding of general psychology. In short, the book concerns how information-saturated minds can be breached with your brand proposition. The average person can only really be aware of two or three versions of a subject/object at any given time, which is why you often see competitive markets dominated by three main players (especially outside of cartel or oligopoly structures.)

Where there are exceptions is where niches have been constructed, and these niches are the strategy of creating a whole different category in someone’s mind that is easier to occupy.

An illustrative example would be vehicles. There are not of course 2-3 main contenders in the vehicle space, because sub-categories were forged. What are the two best luxury sedan brands, compared to truck brands, then budget sedans had to emerge, and you may be old enough to recall a time not long ago before SUVs even existed as a consumer class. Often you are taking a broad category in someone's mind and breaking it down to a lower level of hierarchy, and further down it fragments.

It became common knowledge that it is more expedient to carve out a space for yourself in someone’s mind than engage in a knife fight over contested territory. Seth Godin, a dog coffin of anti-joy, reworked this concept into The Purple Cow. The sky ever so slightly darkened, homosexualized.

Get a load of this giant dump of shit.

So, to position your product you need to open up a niche, which is a completely new space populated by you. This is a ferocious uphill battle that requires significant upfront investment, but it means you can find a place to utterly dominate and scale through your leadership.

I am likely explaining something you could intuit through experience, but at one time this was a revolutionary idea. Now Etsy skanks employ it. We are all advertisers, and like the crypto tycoon that moonlights as a derider of Baby Boomer Real Estate Holders, we have decided raping a lawless land is just different this time.

Hypernormalization was Hypernormalized, and we all become a little more aware of how easy we are to manipulate. Our awareness of all these tactics has fed into our schema to interact with the world; with each psychological innovation it is thereby commoditized, normalized, and deployed by regular people, forcing further innovations. This has caused paralysis through analysis on a civilizational scale, which may be the main culprit for why we are fat and our sperm is dead.

While everyone in our political milieu despises psychology and its ascended social form in the Therapeutic State, we still operate within the framework, accepting much of the concepts pioneered by Freud and Jung. We renounce the work of Alfred Kinsey and his mainstreaming of fetishization, but we constantly accuse each other of narcissism, delusion, and wanting to fuck the thing you want to destroy. Daily we psychoanalyze everyone around us, dealing in terms we forget were born by the very clinicians we routinely villainize.

The most important aspect of the Therapeutic State is the therapy itself, the endless interrogation between the clinical authority and the subject in lieu of measured punishment for social infractions. It is the alleged pursuit of root causes backed by the dual understandings of "you would not be here unless you were mentally ill," and "everyone is mentally ill to one degree or another, it is simply a matter of severity."

Awash in psychoanalytical terminology, we have been all too eager to enter into this frame of reference. We have been granted exciting instruments with which to dissect our culture and persecute each other.

“It is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.”- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Which brings us to the “vibe shift.” Usually, this term is deployed when discussing the danger in endorsing President Donald Trump in his first term vs. his second; it seemed the media was at war with him and friends turned into enemies, but no longer. People feel as if they can say things they could not previously. It can represent either Trump achieving the mandate of heaven as God Emperor around which society orbits, or the victory lap of seethin' smokin' CHUDCELS declaring a war on women.

It is very important for the reader to acutely understand why both of these narratives are farcical.

“Vibes” are indescribable; if they could be explained properly, they would, but the people who use this terminology lack both the vocabulary and insight to explain what is truly transpiring. Like an insect detecting a dramatic shift in air pressure, they are reacting to the mood of the zeitgeist, cowering when there is danger and emerging during the calm like a naked illiterate tribesman draped in viscera. It is reactive acrobatics to the confounding pressures of analyzation, triggering a feminine retreat into vibrations in the culture for survival.

This leads to the development of pop-esoterica like cyberpunk astrology, believing in everything from shitposting reality into form to noosphere entities driving global events, reaching their tendrils through revisionist history to give form to the formless. With Trump, you could more accurately explain that the journalist class that dedicated their lives to ginning up the Apocalyptic consequences of Trump during his first term were fired by their publications or migrated to Substack where most were subsequently fired by their audience. This conjoined with the infight-driven collapse of the Democratic opposition and the war of attrition waged by Far-Right Maniacs in every available online discursive space resulted in the temperature changing.

That is, at least in part, what really happened. You should care about what really happened. Nobody benefits by crafting kooky nu-spiritualities fueled by meme magic. This is an unnesessary fandom. This is a prey position.

People can be forgiven for falling into these traps; every aspect of our waking lives seems fake and insane, or at least that is the impression after periods of contemplation. There’s not a single source you can trust, nor media form that you can assume is legitimate. After staring into the void for a sufficient length of time, the void stares back. After you and the void stare at each other for a sufficient amount of time, something needs to happen. You take one gaping metaphysical step back from the situation, you stand outside of yourself, you take charge the only way you know how: commoditize the analysis and monetize the relationship.

One example of this mutated form is the Remilia Corporation – associated with Milady Maker and KaliAcc – a collective of terminally online degenerates drawn from all the main races, believing a successful subversive art movement manifests if approximately twelve people won’t stop talking about it on X. I’m going to make up a bunch of statements from them and in all likelihood they’re valid: a dark triad sorcery simulator, femcel influencer academy on the blockchain, interdimensional vitalism as nootropic.

None of that means anything, but it is being conjured by the wackest humans imaginable to make money off the mentally moebius-stripped.

It's not far off from the transgender transhumanist subversive orgs lurking in the e/acc movement or slithering through Discord, leveraging esoteric dissident schizo imagery to be palatable to the youth. Losing your mind in dark oblivion is fashionable, and the molesters of the world have heeded the call. It’s every dunce who wants to start a sarcastic cult, it’s every pinhead who penned a viral tweet thinking they can write a book, it’s every morphsuit filled with slop who ruined NFTs.

Reckless identity formation leads to commoditization of individuals and history – like how Hitler is commoditized in America, the recent release of Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” being a fitting case study – and we now can include states of being. We can glamorize being schizophrenically nihilistic, we play pretend as ourselves but with the tweak of a sexual fetish for fatal punishment. You have taken a decisive step outside of yourself, staring down at you losing your mind by witnessing the auctioning of your fragmented identity. You are making money off your own tulpa scamming people in a sex cult, and making the action a novelty turns it excusable. You have created so much distance between your present actions and any significant consequence. You have drawn such bold lines around the components of the dominion of individual experience so as to be ensconced in the vibe, utterly powerless as you gaze upon yourself enslaving yourself.

This is amplified by the Economy of Takes, an irreverent phrase we coined before we were informed tastemakers were making tens of thousands of dollars a month farming engagement with one of their several hundred posts per day. It is what it sounds like, referring generally to online status achieved through viral posts and reputation tracking.

The Economy of Takes pushes otherwise reasonable people with a thoughtful opinion to workshop that opinion into its most declaratively unhinged form (the hot take) because this is what generates the most energized response. Financial incentivization - most pronounced on X with their payouts - further pushes these people to become the most unreasonable versions of themselves, inciting controversy is reflected in more cash.

As I explained earlier, the ambitious influencer is replacing the rules-based network and there are more people willing than ever before to become preposterous monsters for a chance at impacting the status quo. None of this was instigated by governments or corporations, this is something that lurks inside of us.

This dynamic field of tumors is fertile ground for corrupting and antisocial personalities, but it is also manifests as a hack aesthetic and even worse amateur spirituality. As it happens you can produce a creative movement if the purpose is to make lazy images look more unhinged. It can never be art for the sake of art, though: it seeks to corporatize a generative vibe and collect cool madness into something pretentious. These corrupt intentions become a feature of the aesthetic. If you ever feel like you have responsibility for something simply step outside of it and interrogate then sell the narrative of interrogation.

There is a war being conducted for your mind, and all of your friends are enthusiastic participants. The social media creator landscape is just as controlled as the unending conveyor belt of cable TV wonks, and your friends want to make money upon the spectrum of prostitution whether it be broadcasting their feet or engineering an opinion with the express intent of enragement. It is trying to take a counterculture mainstream.

You can be an actor in this drama as long as you do not surrender influence to the Invisible Hand of Vibes, and you reject the unique Western propensity to lose oneself in the Oort cloud of meta-analyses that justify emergent wretched superstructures.