Conversation

Replying to
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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But also that mode of perception is perhaps the most uniquely subjectively human. The least able to be automated away. Is fore-fronting this aspect of humanity nostalgic or prophylactic?
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Is it? Seems the most commonly shared with other animals. All mammals can vibe. Only humans can add symbols and semantics and get to thinking.
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