Conversation

Exhibit C: The vibecamp event that just happened in Austin involving a lot of people adjacent to my twitter (I seem to be connected to about a third of them but I definitely don’t feel like I’m part of the scene at all)
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The common feature is that they seem to be about sensory/somatic responses to felt provocations that are not themselves sensory/somatic or even the right scale for sensory/somatic responses to be meaningful. That does not mean they’re “wrong” (nothing wrong with good vibes)
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What do I mean… Most sensory/somatic responses are to sensory provocations… Like… you see a cookie, feel tempted, you eat it. You hear music, feel the rhythm, start dancing. You notice a fashion trend (fedoras say) catching on and feel it and adopt it or complain about it…
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But say the provocation is a sense from Covid that the world is broken in institutional ways. Or a sense from the stock market vs reality that the economy is messed up. Or a sense from Russia-Ukraine war that geopolitics is out of whack. Or the bald fact of C02 > 400ppm…
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A personal sensory/somatic “vibe” is patently a not-even-wrong response to these felt provocations. You can’t eat, dance, or dress your way out of any entanglement you feel in these larger-scale human matters. But it might still make you feel better to do so.
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The prototype of this sort of thing is a funeral. You dress a certain way and eat certain wake foods. But what you’re marking is mainly the passing of the *idea* of a person, via rituals and ceremonies around the flesh that remains. There’s a funeral quality to “vibe processing”
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I’ve been idly making fun of the vibes discourse for a while now. Sort of taking drive-by shots at it mainly to resist getting sucked in. I think it’s because of this sense of glitchy misconfiguration. Trying to make a thing out of a Sensate response to Ideational provocation.
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While you can never *avoid* a somatic-sensate response to an ideational provocation (the body and senses will react to thoughts whether you want it to or not), it seems vaguely degenerate to center that epiphenomenal response as a thing, or mode of processing.
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It’s like Waldenponding with extra steps. Or a transposed tempo ritual (the way for eg religions tend to transpose natural rhythms into rituals). I’m reminded of how after the Black Death (according to Distant Mirror) death cults grew popular. Vibe cults are similar perhaps?
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Sorokin himself thought that the Sensate and Ideational cultures could be synthesized into Idealistic cultures. He proposed a historical cycle where Sensate cultures (the West is one by his model) collapse and give birth to new Ideational cultures.
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So maybe the vibes discourse is really an internal sense of crisis in a Sensate culture that can’t see past it’s own demise to the Ideational reboots that must follow? So you get a mix of somatic responses plus doomed reactionary tendencies. Then the new thing is actually born.
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Degenerate in a mathematical sense. Or Plato’s cave projection sense. A 1d response to a 2d provocation. You can’t respond to an Ideational crisis with a Sensate response. You can’t dance at Covid. You have to come up with vaccine ideas. t.co/xEHVCxPEVF
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I feel bad about raining on the vibe parade a bit since there’s a lot of good positive energy around it that I hope goes somewhere good. And people who like dancing and music and drugs should dance and sing and do drugs. But the misconfiguration… bothers me. False note in vibe.
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If the vibes thing is just a moment in art history, I’m not interested in it tbh. I like art and art history enough but it’s not enough by itself to be interesting. I do think there’s more to it than that though. Just not as much as vibers think, or rather, feel. t.co/lg2Og4FRjC
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