Nothing but static
It would be easy to dismiss "vibes" as nothing more than a trend tied to a tired word appropriated from 1960s counterculture, sort of like "hipster" a decade ago. It doesn't really mean anything, one might say — it's just a marketing trope, a way to give commercial substance to transient moods, or to assign a mystical significance to certain popular social media posts without worrying about explaining that significance away. "Vibes" are just a vibe.
But it seems like the salience of "vibes" might also signal something like "the affective turn," only not for humanities professors but for ordinary people: Vibes indicate that collective states of feeling are registering as real and that these currents of feeling condition our thinking before we are aware of them (as when things "hit different"). The memes about vibes suggest that attention is being paid, however indirectly, to the means by which these collective feelings are conducted or made to cohere, even if only transiently. (In a sense, vibes are what fuel virality.)
"Vibes" also suggests that people want a way to assert the reality of things that can't otherwise be rationally explained (anti-vaxxing is a vibe) or which exceed the scale of particular, local descriptions (information overload and doomscrolling are also vibes). Vibes dignify intuition as a valid means of knowing and implicitly devalue less passive ways of knowing.
The word vibe itself stems from "vibration" obviously, but it also evokes vulgarized notions of how media transmission works, how we ourselves can function like a radio and tune into to the "wavelength" of certain people or situations, not by thinking them through or analyzing them but by simply turning the dial of our perceptive facilities and intuiting them automatically.
Even if the concept of vibes feels like a placeholder for something that has not yet come into focus, it seems important to pay attention to it, to what it is being used to figure (or obscure). A vibe is deliberately inarticulate, a word set against itself in that it denotes a lack of denotation, while its connotations tend to diffuse and evaporate. Vibes are about insisting something can't be put into words, that language is insufficient to representation, that there is way to "think" through video and images that doesn't require translation into verbal propositions.
At Real Life, we've already published essays about how vibes can be understood as a kind of post-neoliberal practice of extracting value from the effort to establish collective states of feeling, or as an alibi for the cultural dead end implicit in algorithmic recommendation. Another way to look at them is as a response to what sociologist Dave Beer describes here as the "recursive society": when data collection and intervening algorithms govern more and more of the terms of social existence. "The recursive society emerges when data gathering is so integrated that there is no point of origin — everything is already implicated by loop upon loop of data processing," he writes. I think "vibes" are correlated with the experience of algorithmic control, the uncanny mysteries of algorithmic recommendation and other predictive analytics, the sense of being constantly measured and scored and assigned dynamic identity markers in different contingent moments.
The vibe can suggest a passive indifference to analytical precision, but it also can insist that aspects of subjectivity can escape surveillance and recursivity and remain beyond prediction. That is to say, "vibes" seems like it can simultaneously refer to both: to the seemingly irrational correlations that machine-learning-style analysis turns up and algorithms impose on us and the shortcomings of such approaches, their gaps and failures, the frontiers they define but can't yet assimilate. It may even be that a vibe is always a conflation of those things, a way of seeing some specific experience as both the result of an algorithmic prediction and as an experience that fell through the machine's cracks. In other words, vibes are experiences that we know can't be disentangled from algorithms even as we feel their singularity.