The Vibe Shift's Been Over: We're in an Entirely New Era

Before we focus on the new era that recently dawned (or the vibe shift that ended), let’s look at three different timelines for context.

Eras

The Post-War Era (1946-1951) 5 years

The Eisenhower Era (1952-1959) 7 years

The Camelot Era (1960-1963) 3 years

1964 VIBE SHIFT (between Kennedy-era optimism and Vietnam-era dissidence)

The Vietnam Era (1965-1973) 8 years

The Sleaze Era (1974-1979) 5 years

The Reagan Era (1980-1988) 8 years

Pax Americana (1989-1994) 5 years

1995 and 1996 VIBE SHIFT (the Internet was slowly becoming mainstream, setting the stage for the Y2K era)

Y2K (1997-2001) 4 years/the last era of empire; the rest are post-empire

2002 VIBE SHIFT (between 9/11 patriotism and Iraq War-era skepticism)

The Iraq War Era (2003-2008) 5 years ¹

The Obama Era (2009-2015) 6 years

The #resistance Era (2016-2020) 4 years

2021 and 2022 VIBE SHIFT

The Big Gap (2023-?)

The Boomers grew up during the Camelot era, the Vietnam era and the sleaze era. Gen X became more vocal in the Reagan era, Pax Americana and Y2K. Y2K was also when Millennials first became relevant: the overlap of decades in Y2K matches the overlapping of the generational influence. The Iraq War era, the Obama Era and the #resistance era fully belonged to the Millennials. One of the first major characteristics of this decade’s vibe shift was how Gen Z’s influence became dominant, going of course into what I call the big gap (I will explain the term later).

Youth Countercultures

Beatniks: began in postwar era but became prominent during the Eisenhower era; compared to what followed, they were a minor youth counterculture, their influence peaking in 1956 and quickly dwindling by the Camelot era.

Hippies: major youth counterculture that began during the Vietnam era and had continued, if fading, relevance, all the way to 1976 (when Jimmy Carter got elected for quoting Bob Dylan) and 1977 (when Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours was a blockbuster album); in the sleaze era, there was a diminished punk presence in America compared to the UK; disco did not have the identification/worship that rock had; the Reagan era was a weak time for youth countercultures, many of them fragmented into subcultures like goth, punk, metal and hip-hop; dance pop had cross-generational appeal; Boomers loved the pop music of the Reagan ‘80s, influencing many aging hippies like Crosby, Stills and Nash to adopt the sound and even use the same songwriters (Cher using Diane Warren for example).

Slackers: like the beatniks that expressed dissatisfaction with postwar America and especially with Eisenhower-era culture, the slackers were largely skeptical and apathetic re: Pax Americana, and America’s Cold War victory; the working class was getting gutted and consumerism was more suspect than ever; unlike any other counterculture on here, one man — Kurt Cobain — clearly signaled the beginning of the movement (“Smells Like Teen Spirit”) and the end (his suicide); the slackers were the minor youth culture that preceded and influenced the hipsters, much like the beatniks did with the hippies.

Hipsters: first major youth counterculture since the hippies; while their musical icons, by design, did not have widespread appeal, the hipster aesthetic was everywhere; the hipster revolution, in keeping with the alternative rock philosophy in general, was primarily aesthetic, less about politics or even values; primarily relevant during the Iraq War era and the first half of the Obama era, with the second half’s emphasis on poptimism ensuring that the hipster influence would diminish in movies, music, etc. and would primarily be felt in the design world for the remainder of the 2010s.

NOTE: The tweetniks (“tweetnik” is a neologism I coined to describe the hashtag activist youth that I also called “hashtag hippies” in older posts on this Substack) were a major force in the #resistance era. I do not consider them a counterculture simply because most of what they demanded through Twitter (more LGBTQ representation in movies, etc.) was accomplished pretty quickly and smoothly by institutional media. What’s more, they were more interested in changing mainstream pop culture demographically than in either offering an alternative to the mainstream or even a different aesthetic altogether. Or, as

Sean Monahan

recently said:

The identitarian left certainly thought it was an avant-garde, but that was a movement which dared not speak its own name. Can you imagine the outrage if a museum did a retrospective on ‘woke art’? What no one wants to admit is that you cannot produce an avant-garde in a climate of fear.

I believe the #resistance era, for this reason, will have less nostalgia than the very similar early ‘70s portion of the Vietnam era, which also was idpol heavy with a Republican president in power. The difference of course being that every recorded art form in the early ‘70s reached quantum leaps in development and sophistication.

I will get into what I think this decade’s counterculture will be later.

Scenesters: what I call the Dimes Square people, thanks to

Nick Dove

‘s comment on a recent Note of mine; a minor youth counterculture, primarily consisting of the dissident right as well as dirtbag leftists (much of their sensibility informed by the post-internet art and alt-lit of the early 2010s) whose years of relevance were from 2019 to 2024; they peaked during this decade’s vibe shift, expressing skepticism with Biden that almost no other creative figures expressed; already had fading relevance during 2023 and became redundant after Trump’s victory.

For much of this piece, I was influenced by

Matthew Gasda

’s recent article for Wisdom of Crowds. Particularly, how he updates Bret Easton Ellis’s paradigm of Empire-era culture (postwar to 9/11) and Post-Empire (after 9/11). Gasda, unlike Ellis, sees potential in Post-Empire culture (I agree) because of Trump (this is where we part; I have more faith in a counterculture than a counter-elite). I was particularly fascinated with the graphic he included below:

Let’s use this graph for the third timeline.

The Vibe Shift vs. The Big Gap

The Vibe Shift

Joe Rogan

GameStop

Thiel Fellowship

Britney emancipated

Andruil, Palantir

Elon's Memes

Travis Scott's Astroworld

X

The Big Gap

Trump's Rallies

Citizen Journalism

Substack

Tucker Carlson

Jon Stewart returning to The Daily Show

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Now let’s zoom in on this decade. 2020 was the last year of the #resistance era. In that year, the “resistance” resembled the establishment too closely. Tweetniks, wagging their fingers at anyone who questioned the World Health Organization narrative, or even Big Pharma, during COVID, from the comfort of their work-from-home laptop jobs, lost what little countercultural credibility they could have had. The height of absurdity and hypocrisy of course was when going to a party was considered a clear infraction against the “stop the spread” movement, but rioting for George Floyd was democracy in action.

The term “vibe shift” has been a widely-contested term, especially during the vibe shift itself. I am not interested in who coined the term: Angelicism or

Sean Monahan

. Also I do not wish to use the term “vibe shift” for every single cultural/aesthetic change that trends through the news cycle. The vibe shift of 2021-2022 was a time of transition between the #resistance era and our current one, which I will get into shortly. We already touched on how the vibe shift was marked by fading Millennial relevance. While some may have been relieved that Trump was banned on Twitter and Facebook in 2021, after January 6th, the #resistance crowd’s Trump Derangement Syndrome was more pronounced than ever. Here he was, out of office and with no social media outlet, but the tweetniks and the mainstream center-left press kept highlighting Trump’s court cases and alleged collusion with Russia — all while ignoring newly-elected Joe Biden's many gaffes. The kind of mistakes that were widely publicized and mocked when George W. Bush was in office. COVID restrictions were increasingly flouted and idpol cashgrab reboots kept bombing at the box office. This being, of course, the worst decade for Hollywood in history. It wasn’t only Gen Z that had more power during the Vibe Shift; online networked media, first through Twitter, then through TikTok, became more trusted and engaged with than official news sources. Mainstream media of course insisted that this was a prime cause of misinformation. The same mainstream media that insisted that Biden’s senescence was a conspiracy theory.

The term “vibe shift” has been used to describe the aesthetic change in posting around 2021, and I agree that this is relevant. Virtue signalling became less common already as shitposting and absurdist irony, with some shock humor here and there, became more common. This environment of course becoming the perfect tinderbox for Trump and Musk’s ascent the past few months.

As you may have seen in my first timeline above, I marked several vibe shifts before the one in this decade. I define a “vibe shift” as a transitional time between eras, after a major cataclysmic event. 1964 was the vibe shift after Kennedy was assassinated; 1995 and 1996 the vibe shift period after the World Wide Web was introduced into households; 2002 the vibe shift after 9/11; the 2021-2022 vibe shift of course being between COVID and our current era.

I am typically proud of the terms I have coined here (“mesoculture”; “tweetnik”: etc.). My label for the new era from 2023 to now, “The Big Gap” is an ugly placeholder that is meant to be replaced by a way better term by myself or a smarter commenter. Having said that, it is functional, having many different meanings and applications. The most obvious one is the big generation gap between Gen Z and older generations. October 2023 saw the schism between the online youth and legacy media thanks to the youth’s support of Gaza and the legacy media’s unwavering support, in both left and right leaning outlets, of Israel.

From the linked article:

Were it not for legacy media slavishly trying to synchronize itself with the moves of Twitter teens, today’s rift between cultural progressives online and behind a news desk would have never happened.

One side-effect: a devaluation of social justice morality. Celebrities pink washing the Gaza conflict, saying that Palestinians would kill gays and transgender people, did not change minds. Now the social justice celebrities had enemies with the youth and the right.

It was at this time that black square, #resistance era morality resembled nothing more than Victorian morality, especially in its punishing strictness and hypocrisy. There were clear parallels between the fainting couch prudishness of Victorian scolds and the pronoun-policing of the #resistance SJWs.

What’s worthy of note is that the morality of the #resistance era had its roots in the ‘60s New Left, but became bowdlerized, defanged of any serious critique of capitalism or imperialism, by the ‘70s. Like Victorian morality, this progressive morality began as an expression of empire. Just like the Victorians wished to educate the masses and the recently-colonized natives about proper morality, sitcoms like Diff’rent Strokes were meant to educate the youth about how racism was wrong and, more importantly, how America is not a racist country.

This morality became more prevalent in the Obama era. Despite the fact that it gained momentum after the empire, it was meant to be a rebranding exercise for America, increasing its soft power globally.

The big gap will be an era, then, that can potentially be not only similar to the ‘60s, with a major youth counterculture, but like the 1920s as well, with its widespread impatience with staid Victorian attitudes. ² Two concrete examples of this: pro-Gaza youths do not fear being labelled anti-Semites; Luigi Mangione sympathizers did not take the bait when they were accused of liking him for being white, as if he would have been less popular if he were black. If the anti-Semitic card has declined in value, why wouldn’t the race card?

This is the biggest generation gap since the ‘60s. Not to say there was no generation gap between the Millennials and the Boomers. Yes, Boomers said Millennials were spoiled. Pretty generic, standard generational criticism. It would take a decrease in technological progress for any elder generation to say otherwise. Millennials might have had tension with the increasingly right-leaning Boomers in their families that were ranting on Facebook about how their pronouns were “Blow/Me.” But the Boomer Liberal Elite ³ took their cues from Millennials and their social media etiquette guidelines as dutifully as possible.