Roblog

Matt Webb has written a few times about his sense that we’re in the middle of a “vibe shift”: that the last few years have been the end of something, and that we’re now at the beginning of something new.

“We’re post-woke, lfgggg screw the NIMBYs and your feelings too, there’s a spirit of joyful vengeance in the air, and the rage and greed is simultaneous with an ebullient brimming over of possibility and building.

“And I’m not saying I agree – far, far, far from it, let’s be clear – but I’m just trying to put my finger on a moment: the needle jumped. The closing bars of the multi-year vibe shift.”

Nate Silver’s recent book On The Edge identifies two tribes, “The Village” and “The River”, that he sees as being on opposite sides of a deep and consequential rift in American society.

Broadly: the Village is the liberal-leaning group that seeks to protect institutions, build consensus, and achieve social justice. They’re collaborative and narrative-driven. They’re at home in the modern Democratic party, and are well represented by east-coast, Ivy League universities like Harvard or Yale.

The River is the libertarian-leaning group that seeks to disrupt institutions, question consensus, and run society on a more unequal, risk-reward basis. They’re competitive and analysis-driven. This group is perhaps more sceptical of political parties, but undoubtedly skews Republican. Institutionally, they’re best represented by the move-fast-and-break-things tech companies of Silicon Valley.

Nate views the 2024 US Presidential election as (partly) a repudiation of the Village by the broader electorate. People, he thinks, took a look at what the Village were selling and didn’t buy it.

Nate’s lens is American, quite reasonably, but it’s easy to see the same dynamic in the UK, and I’m sure elsewhere too. I think this rejection of the old Village ways is the same as the vibe shift Matt can feel: a resurgent (and extremely online) River excited about a different future direction in which long-restrained progress will be unleashed.

I spend time with people from both the Village and the River, which makes this vibe shift feel ambiguous and uncomfortable. I too have sensed the “ebullient brimming over of possibility and building” that Matt talks about. I find that optimism easy to share in. Let’s build stuff! Let’s fix things! But I’ve also sensed and shared the fear and uncertainty of a new political order, and so have felt guilty for feeling anything but blanket pessimism.

That pessimism seems well-founded, to be fair. The world isn’t a binary, and the trap of the Village–River analogy is thinking that it is. The alternative to the sclerotic and now-somewhat-discredited institutions of the Village isn’t necessarily the gung-ho dynamism of the River. It seems perfectly plausible – likely even – that repudiation of the Village ushers in something much worse, and that’s surely a cause for the deepest pessimism.

At the moment, though, we just don’t know. Things are murky. There are infinite possible directions things might go in. It’s stressful and concerning. Do we have any control over it? Is there anything we can do, now, before things are set in stone, to make the future a little more positive? Are these the vibes of things that Will be, or are they the vibes of things that May be, only? Is it delusional to be optimistic in the face of such uncertainty, or is it essential?

I don’t know. We’re inarguably facing lots of problems in the UK. Matt reckons the only way out is through, which feels right to me. Perhaps the only approach is to build, to build better institutions, to build solutions to problems, to shape the media we produce and consume in ways that make the world marginally better, even at the expense of creating so-called echo chambers. More Bluesky and blogs, less X. More active vibe creation and less passive vibe-victimhood.

I post this as something scrawled on the wall to capture how things felt at a particular moment. We’ll never know less about the vibe shift than we do now, after all. I hope I look back at it in a couple of years’ time and think “you needn’t have worried”. I worry (of course) that I won’t.