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Before we had vibes, we had the chillier, more Germanic zeitgeist. Both tap into our appetite for locating our lives within a bigger picture. But vibes are crowd-sourced and ground-up, where the zeitgeist was ordained by experts, a trickle-down form of cultural economics.

The thrill of a vibe is that it leads with emotion, not with spending power. It feels like playing hooky from a world where we are kettled by capitalism.

Vibes, once warm and fuzzy, were now seismic tectonic plates beneath the feet of culture.

“We started talking about vibes in September 2020,” says Dr Antonia Ward, chief futurist at trends intelligence company Stylus. “We were looking at how social media was reflecting a more chaotic mood. Before that, platforms such as Instagram had been quite buttoned down and filtered, but something shifted. We began sending a more impressionistic co... See more

Chatter about vibes tracks the same trajectory as that about fake news. Fake news has devalued facts, and vibes have stepped into the vacuum.

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.