By Guardian-Jess Cartner-Morley - Sat 14 Dec 2024 12.29 GMT

Facts were cool for about 250 years. 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.

From voters picking up ‘bad vibes’ to the Brat girl summer, vague instincts now make the world go round. Does this represent a crisis of seriousness or has it always been feelings that make us human?

Vibes are everywhere. Disillusioned Labour voters are “picking up bad vibes”, reports this paper. The Bank of England gets “wrong-footed by a vibe shift in the economy”. In the US, a “vibe-cession” – a downturn in economic confidence at an impressionistic level – was a key electoral issue. Google Maps will not only give you directions, but “vibe check” a neighbourhood for you.

Of all this year’s hit albums, the one that had a vibe named after it – Brat – won the culture, catapulting Charli XCX to seven Grammy nominations. When a new production of Romeo & Juliet opened on Broadway recently, a US newspaper wrote that “the vibe is very ‘teens hanging out in the Target parking lot’, only with a lot more sonnets and glitter” – because even William Shakespeare is no one without a vibe these days.

Feelings have always made the world go round. The bone-deep part of being human is the stuff you feel: love, joy, grief, awe, fear, faith. Emotions start wars, drive revolutions, shape history. Marriage, a pillar of the established order at a societal level and a decision of life-shaping consequence at the individual one, is a choice for which there is really no rational basis. Still, for 250 years, in the public sphere, emotion was considered secondary to rational thinking. The accepted wisdom of the civilised world was that facts trumped feelings.

Now we have had a change of heart. Facts are dead, and the vibe is king. Vibes, for so long a fundamentally unserious shorthand for 60s nostalgia, are now taken very seriously indeed. Instead of being hedonism-coded, fuzzy through a cloud of smoke, the vibe is now item No 1 on boardroom agendas worldwide.

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

To some, this is a very bad vibe. We are in the grip of “a crisis of seriousness”, writes cultural critic Ted Gioia. We behave like fractious toddlers, judging the world on whether it makes us smile. We care less for good over evil than for feelgood over everything else. We expect entertainment not just from the entertainment industry, but from politicians too, and politicians have fallen in line, feeding us election campaigns sugared with TikTok memes and merch.

A full 28 years after Susan Sontag warned that seriousness was “losing credibility … with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries”, her warnings have, some believe, come to pass. Many columnists have pivoted to writing about Taylor Swift and the Hot Rabbi, but many of those who haven’t opine disapprovingly of this unseemly thirst for the transient and fluffy, unbecoming in a mature civilisation.

But the facts are not black and white. A church and state boundary between facts and feelings never existed, except in our imagination. The good old days when voters pored over policy documents and made a rational choice? A figment of the imagination. Those voters divided mainly along class lines, which was at least as much about an intangible feeling of belonging as it was about economic interest.

What is religion, after all, but values gift-wrapped in aesthetics and ritual? This is facetious, yes, but also sort of true, which is vibes in a nutshell. And what’s more, if our faith in knowledge and detail and statistics has tanked, this is not without good reason. Chatter about vibes tracks the same trajectory as that about fake news. Fake news has devalued facts, and vibes have stepped into the vacuum.

The story of vibes begins with the release of the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations in 1966. That was where the vibe chilled, for decades: West-Coast-specific, surf-adjacent, self-consciously laid-back. Quincy Jones launched Vibe magazine in 1993, when hip-hop was still a subculture, and the meaning of vibe began to expand. A graph of the word ‘vibes’ on Google Trends shows it begins to move from the alternative to the mainstream around 2016. Having hummed around the edges of culture for half a century, vibes began to gather steam.

Louise Yems, strategy director of creative agency The Digital Fairy, believes the rise of vibes “speaks to how our reduced attention spans have led to a shortening of language. We use fewer words to capture something bigger than the words themselves.” Sometime around the early 2010s, the media started talking about places, bands, hotels having “a cool vibe”, or “an uptown vibe”. Interesting timing, says Yems, “because Instagram was launched in 2010, and by 2013 smartphones were becoming much more common, so people were starting to interact with social media algorithms”.

The first modern vibe was “hygge”, which in 2016 was shortlisted for the Oxford word of the year. (It feels relevant to note that the overall winner, that year, was the word “post-truth”.) Hygge, a Danish concept defined as “a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or wellbeing” was the subject of endless articles that attempted to skewer its ineffable aura of wintry joy with reference to earthenware mugs of steaming drinks, log fires, artfully folded blankets and expensive socks. Before hygge, vibes were bacchanalian, or youth-culture specific. Hygge was an armchair vibe, to which all ages could tap in.

Then came the pandemic, which ratcheted up our lives to vibrate at a higher emotional frequency, while also moving them increasingly online. “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 collage of how we felt, because how we felt was really complicated.”

The world was shifting beneath our feet, and we were feeling the vibrations. By February 2022, vibes had seeped into our vernacular to the extent that New York magazine asked “A Vibe Shift is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It?” which explained: “A vibe shift is the catchy but sort of too-cool term … for a relatively simple idea: in the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated.” Vibes, once warm and fuzzy, were now seismic tectonic plates beneath the feet of culture.

From culture, vibes travelled downstream into politics – with a staging post in finance, according to Robin James, author of a forthcoming book, Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology, Algorithms and the Politics of Legitimation. “Cryptocurrency and NFTs [non-fungible tokens] are hype-based assets, where the value is in the vibe. They are worth what people think they are worth.” Vibes began to mean dollars. NFT companies started hiring vibes managers. “My guess is that vibe migrated from finance into politics,” says James. As vibes became a metric mapped on to making money, the language used about them started to change. The cultural corner-office job title, these days, is chief vibes officer, a role to which Smirnoff, the world’s biggest vodka brand, has recently appointed pop singer Troye Sivan.

In fashion, vibes have replaced trends rather than facts. Trends were the bread and butter of style for decades, demanding we buy a new look every six months. It was a system that worked brilliantly for a fast fashion industry which grew bloated on it; it worked significantly less well for the planet. Eventually, consumers grew tired of the game. Now, fashion is about a vibe, which is not just an aesthetic, but a whole mood.

The must-have of 2024 was a Brat girl summer, and this was not available to click and buy. You could buy denim shorts, or a Brat-green bra top, but for maximum impact you needed to accessorise them with a hangover and a Bic lighter in the pocket of your denim shorts. 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.

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. And where the zeitgeist was future-facing, a relentless drive toward modernity, vibes are more unpredictable, prone to bouts of nostalgia (cottagecore: vintage Laura Ashley dresses, dried flowers, having chickens) and whimsy (dark academia: polaroid photos of gothic architecture, writing a journal in a fountain pen).

“Fashion is what turns a vibe into something concrete,” says Tim Blanks, editor-at-large at The Business of Fashion website. “The feeling emerges, and then it gets merchandised. If the feeling is for boho, then fashion will give us a whole Laurel Canyon situation – a frilly blouse, a bit of a cowboy boot.” A vibe has a mystique that a trend does not, because it is more than just visual. As Blanks says, “You can’t take a picture of a vibe.”

The New Look with which Christian Dior dazzled the world in 1947 was brilliant in its visual comprehensibility: a wasp-waisted, full-skirted silhouette so simple that a child could draw it with a pencil. You can’t sketch “normcore”, or “quiet luxury”, or any other modern vibe. Baggy clothes are in, “but the difference between the trendy baggy look and just looking unkempt is in who’s wearing it, in what way, and where”, James points out. “Like, are they in Brooklyn, or in the middle of Iowa?”

Songs are shorter because that’s what streaming platforms reward. There isn’t time for a key change. But one thing you can do in a two-minute song is say, OK, here’s the vibe

Brands now believe that a vibe adds value, even if the audience is just pressing “like” on Instagram and not buying anything. “A vibe is invitational,” says Yems. “It’s a way to feel like you are part of a brand, regardless of product ownership. You can identify as a Ganni girl even if you can’t afford the brand.”

A vibe “is aesthetic, but can also be auditory, tactile, sensory”, says Ward. “If I said ‘autumn vibe’, you’d think: cold white sunlight over crunchy leaves, fluffy sweaters, steam rising from hot drinks. It’s a broader, stretchier way to describe a moment. This has been turbocharged by generation Z’s ease with fluid ideas of identity, and what Yems calls “their general inclination toward storyboarding and romanticising their lives, which has led to the mainstreaming of vibe”. Tablescaping – the vogue for curating “vibey” dinner tables with a combination of food, homewares, hedonism and conviviality – is a trend that feels confusing to older generations, but makes sense to generation Z, for whom cross-disciplinary identity comes naturally.

In music, genre is now less important than mood. Spotify, which dominates modern listening, has made a business decision to organise songs by emotional resonance, having calculated that playlists catering to every mood and moment – “indie folk playlist to give my brain a big warm hug”, “high-energy songs for winter runs” – keep our attention longer than old-school record rack cataloguing. Vibe-based playlists strip out signposting by tribe or taste, and organise songs to soundtrack your moods, as if your life was a movie. You can have music to get you in the mood to go out, or to calm you after a bad day.

The rise of the vibe has changed not just how we listen to music, but how it is made. “A genre is defined by things like instrumentation, time signature, whether there are vocals,” says James. “But a vibes-based playlist instead picks up on the orientation of those elements towards a mood.” James points to Spotify’s “chill vibes” playlist, which “has jazz, and R&B, and Japanese electronic music by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Totally different genres. But what they have in common is that these songs are the most toned-down versions of those particular styles.”

Listening to the Dare’s album What’s Wrong With New York recently, James felt it was “trying to sound like LCD Soundsystem, but these songs are so short. There isn’t time to develop those big builds and long releases of energy, but they can use elements – the attitude of the lyrics, say – to create an atmosphere, a feel.” In a short-attention-span world, vibe has become a kind of musical shorthand. “Songs are generally shorter now because that’s what streaming platforms reward. There isn’t time for a key change any more. But one thing you can do in a two-minute song is just kind of say, ‘OK, here’s the vibe.’”

Vibes predate the digital world, but technology is part of their story. It is tempting to frame vibes as the deep, mysterious business of being human resisting a technology financially incentivised to mine us for information, but vibes mirror the digital world as much as they resist it. It is no coincidence that vibes have expanded to take up space in our lives and in our culture during exactly the period in which smartphones, social media and algorithms have conspired to suck out the oxygen. James calls vibes “a vernacularisation of the algorithm.

A vibe is how we see ourselves the way that AI and algorithms see us. What they do is look for patterns, clusters of data points that fit together. On social media, people collect different images and put them together, in very much the same way that algorithms cluster data points.” Our modern hunger for vibes, says James, “takes ownership of these new powers that have been pushed into our lives. We are surrounded by systems designed to surveil and coerce behaviour from us. Vibes are our way of learning to game that system.”

After all, as author and 80s TV host Arthur C Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Vibes are both bone-deep and ephemeral nonsense. They are new and they are also ancient. They are precious fairy dust to keep the all-seeing algorithms from sinking their vampire teeth into our culture, and yet they are a modern marketing tool. When we put our faith in vibes, we feel for a moment as if we can put down our phones and navigate through life by the stars, like Renaissance sailors. Perhaps this isn’t quite true, but we all need a little magic in our realism. Why kill the vibe?