Metadata
- Author: Jess Cartner-Morley
- Full Title:: ‘It’s Game Over for Facts’: How Vibes Came to Rule Everything From Pop to Politics
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Data culture,
- URL:: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/dec/14/how-vibes-came-to-rule-everything-from-pop-to-politics
- Finished date:: 2024-12-14
Highlights
Facts were cool for about 250 years. From the Enlightenment until this century, facts were where it was at. They had a good innings. But it is game over for facts, the end of the line for statistics. These days, what counts is what you feel. In other words, it’s all about the vibe. (View Highlight)
Feelings have always made the world go round. (View Highlight)
Still, for 250 years, in the public sphere, emotion was considered secondary to rational thinking. The accepted wisdom of the civilised world was that facts trumped feelings. (View Highlight)
Fake news has devalued facts, and vibes have stepped into the vacuum (View Highlight)
A full 28 years after Susan Sontag warned that seriousness was “losing credibility … with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries” (View Highlight)
The story of vibes begins with the release of the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations in 1966. (View Highlight)
A graph of the word ‘vibes’ on Google Trends shows it begins to move from the alternative to the mainstream around 2016. (View Highlight)
Hygge, a Danish concept defined as “a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or wellbeing” was the subject of endless articles that attempted to skewer its ineffable aura of wintry joy with reference to earthenware mugs of steaming drinks, log fires, artfully folded blankets and expensive socks. (View Highlight)
From culture, vibes travelled downstream into politics – with a staging post in finance, according to Robin James, author of a forthcoming book, Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology, Algorithms and the Politics of Legitimation. “Cryptocurrency and NFTs [non-fungible tokens] are hype-based assets, where the value is in the vibe. They are worth what people think they are worth.” (View Highlight)
vibes mirror the digital world as much as they resist it. It is no coincidence that vibes have expanded to take up space in our lives and in our culture during exactly the period in which smartphones, social media and algorithms have conspired to suck out the oxygen. James calls vibes “a vernacularisation of the algorithm. A vibe is how we see ourselves the way that AI and algorithms see us. What they do is look for patterns, clusters of data points that fit together. (View Highlight)