Atmospheric pressure
The word vibe, as Kyle Chayka details in this New Yorker piece, has returned to prominence in the social media era to capture the feeling of making and consuming content that isn't really about anything other than itself. Chayka defines vibe, with respect to social media, as "a moment of audiovisual eloquence," and cites Robin James's definition: "a sympathetic resonance between a multiply situated (geographically, temporally, politically, epistemically, materially, etc.) subject and their social and material milieu." That is to say, content that conveys a vibe presents a consumable moment that "feels right" on terms it simultaneously establishes, its genre or aesthetic or the -core it evokes. It feels complete without its having to provide much of a narrative or usable concrete information. It offers a moment of vicarious identification not with a particular person so much as with an entire situation, a mise-en-scène — as when a clip or a post is hashtagged #mood.
James argues that a vibe is a "phenomenological horizon," an orientation that conditions what can be perceived. I tend to think of vibes as more like affects. Affect (from the point of view of affect theory anyway) precedes an individual's experience of it as an emotion; it is "the circuit of bodily responses to stimuli that take place before conscious apprehension," in Anahid Kassabian's definition from Ubiquitous Listening. That means affects are in tension with any idea of an autonomous subject whose feelings are wholly self-directed and under their control. It calls into question the possibility of self-expression from a position of full understanding and certitude, since the existence of affects suggests that we don't always know what we feel or who we are until after the fact.
When we experience a vibe, it comes with an awareness that we are part of a feeling that is larger than us, that is circulating around us rather than coming from inside us, taking us outside ourselves while simultaneously reminding us that we are nonetheless a discrete self. So to try to capture vibes or produce them for a post is to catch oneself up in that contradiction: If affects shape our experience and we come to terms with them only as a belated reaction, our consciousness catching up to them, then we can't unilaterally dictate what sort of feelings we want to have or express. Instead, we try to assert agency over affects by naming them in a certain way, packaging them. A vibe makes us part of a collective subject that conducts the affect; naming the vibe extricates us from that and repositions us as a pseudo-sovereign consumer.
Hence on social media, a vibe is basically a commodified piece of affect situated within a person's profile. It is an attempt to isolate something that exists beyond and before and through (and probably any other preposition you want to include — if you've read anything on affect theory, you know that one can't write about it without playing the multiple-preposition game) individuals and turn it to account as personal property. Vibes try to master circulating affects and turn them into a kind of capital. (Is "capitalizing on vibes" a vibe in itself? That is often the mood I take away from this kind of content.)
But there is another side to vibes that Chayka suggests here:
Exhausted by the Internet of personalities and expressed individuality, constantly measured and sorted by likes, we perhaps find comfort in turning our gaze outward. There is a self-effacement that takes place in embracing this new language, a sense that you are not “the main character” of a situation, as another TikTok meme might describe it, but a replaceable observer. “No thoughts, just vibes,” one online mantra goes, and after a year of constant anxiety it has a certain appeal.
One can respond to "vibes" not by trying to master them but by surrendering to them. One can indulge the hope that the circulating affects, the collective subjectivities, will efface the self with a mood and dissipate it throughout an environment.
In Ubiquitous Listening, Kassabian calls this nebulous condition "distributed subjectivity," the potentially liberating feeling of being a node in a network that conducts a feeling. But it also resembles what psychologist Roy Baumeister describes in this 1988 paper as a masochistic desire. "Why would anyone in today's self-seeking society want to escape from self?" he asks, and then answers:
It is plausible that high-level self-awareness can lead to anxiety and discomfort under some circumstances. The requirement of making decisions under pressure or uncertainty, of taking responsibility for actions that may disappoint or harm others, of maintaining a favorable public and private image of self despite all threats and challenges, and of asserting control over a recalcitrant social environment can become oppressive and stressful and can foster desires to escape. This burden of selfhood can be used to explain and predict the selective appeal of masochism. Additionally, masochism can serve as an effective deterrent to unwanted thoughts and feelings, perhaps especially feelings of guilt, anxiety, or insecurity.
As I've argued elsewhere, the conditions described above map pretty well onto the experience of using social media, with its opaque distribution of surveillance and opportunity. There is always an awareness that simply being on social media will "disappoint or harm others," not least because, as Simon DeDeo argues here, platform algorithms are optimizing for how to use your presence to manipulate everyone else. The agency we seem to have over our self-presentation generates at the same time an intense anxiety about it, which can spark the need Baumeister describes of wanting to repudiate agency, to reject "adulting," to experience oneself as a thing without capability that is carried along passively within emotions that overwhelm the self and at the same time secure it. Baumeister argues that masochism — defined as a "systematic attempt to eradicate (temporarily) ... the self as an active agent who makes choices and takes initiative" — can serve as pressure-release valve; this would allow us to remain present on social media while intermittently absenting ourselves psychically.
Vibes can be understood as one of the means for this, dissolving subjectivity into a miasma of affect. They would then tend toward increasingly self-annihilating or objectifying expressions of themselves — cringe, humiliation, obedience, compulsive repetition, going blank, and so on, experiences that actively and explicitly nullify the space of personal autonomy. That is, "No thoughts, just vibes" could be construed as a definition of and rallying cry for masochism. Vibes can be felt as the rejection of individual personality, an expulsion of the self, a self-objectification, a paradoxical willing away of the will, at least for the ephemeral moment that the vibe coheres.