🔗 Episodes: The Vibes Aren't Shifting

From Emily St. James at Episodes:

"Yet the more I think about this, the more I think "everything is content" is almost the right frame but also a slightly too limiting one. It suggests a world mediated by screens, to be sure, where the news can be carefully pacified and turned into just another stream of viral moments. But its undercurrent is always "Well, if we could just turn off the social media spigot/everybody's smartphones/the internet, then everything would just get back to normal," a statement that ignores the role of 24-hour cable news networks and talk radio in the buildup to this moment, among other things.

What that statement most ignores is how many of the stories in this moment are less about "good content" and more about forcing a narrative onto the world, then expecting the world to conform to it. We saw a great deal of this in the aftermath of Trump's 2024 election win, when a narrow victory in the popular vote and an admittedly strong victory in the electoral college somehow became equated with a semi-permanent vibe shift and the end of woke or what have you. I'm going to link to this piece, which actually felt like it was grappling with the reality of what it might mean for the vibe shift to be real.

But the bet in politics that will win you the easiest money is always, always, always that the second the new guy takes over, he'll start being blamed for everything people don't like. And Trump's victory was narrow enough that he had plenty of people who voted for him for assorted reasons who were likely to turn on him the second things got even a little bit inconvenient for them, much less once one of the core policy initiatives of the administration became terrorizing random American cities. This is simple human nature. Backlash is one of our core reflexes on some level, and the reflexive reaction the majority of people in this country have to agents of the state terrorizing random people – regardless of those people's identities – is almost always some form of, "Well, don't do that!" Americans are awful in many ways, but integral to our national identity is the very idea of hating being told what to do, a core skill that typically serves us poorly but occasionally gets us out of a real jam."

The vibes aren’t shifting

Why the right-wing effort to change the narrative is already flailing.

EpisodesEmily St. James