Forget brat summer, the vibe shift is here and it's terrifying
SOURCE:ABC Australia|BY:Lindsay Dunbar
From the rise of misinformation and AI to escalating political tensions, vast economic disparity, and the erosion of social bonds, the vibe shift is now understood as a deep, unsettling change in our collective reality.
This moment is both paralysing and invigorating, full of risk and possibility. And it has me asking the question, what comes next?
There is a line in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises that reminds me of what we are experiencing now.
A character, Mike, is asked "How did you go bankrupt?"
"Two ways," Mike says. "Gradually and then suddenly."
The vibe shift, predicted post-pandemic, has arrived. But not in the form many expected. Just like Mike's bankruptcy, it's happened both gradually and suddenly.
The vibe shift came to mean a hard reset after the malaise of the COVID years. There were several false starts. 2021's Hot Vax Summer. The return of the Indie Sleaze aesthetic the same year. And 2024's Brat Summer. All fizzled out.
It was like waiting for the drop, a build-up of tension that demanded a release. Was this it? Could you feel it? Nah — I can't feel it. Not yet.
But when the vibe shift arrived almost a year ago, at the start of Donald Trump's second term, it was palpable.
The shift, originally predicated by Sean Monahan in the trend newsletter 8ball and later picked up in an article in The Cut in 2022 ("A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It?") was not just about aesthetics or fleeting cultural trends. It was a profound transformation of the fabric of society itself.
From the rise of misinformation and AI to escalating political tensions, vast economic disparity, and the erosion of social bonds, the vibe shift is now understood as a deep, unsettling change in our collective reality.
The pandemic changed us, but it wasn't the only thing making us less social.(AAP/Scott Barbour)
The pandemic marked a pivot point and what followed was a coalescing of crises: Climate catastrophes. Political unrest. A cost-of-living crisis. The decline of institutions, literacy rates and in-person socialising. The mental health crisis, particularly among young people, who spent increasing amounts of time online, live-streaming wars in Ukraine and Gaza. And this month, closer to home, Jewish Australians were targeted in a mass shooting at Bondi Beach while celebrating the festival of Hanukkah. Fifteen people died.
The Atlantic has called it the "anti-social century". More of us were more physically alone, for longer periods of time, than ever before.
The vibe shift ushered in a different set of material conditions, a shift in the economy and the ascendance of new cultural values.
But it didn't end there. The values we thought were the anchors of our society turned out to be hollow or unstable. The emergence of startlingly capable AI arrived as distrust in institutions and the rise of misinformation and disinformation grew, alongside creeping authoritarianism in America.
It was difficult to know what was real anymore.
As we navigate this new era, it's clear things will never return to the way they were.
We're caught in a moment of intense, conflicting energies. Reality feels bent and broken. This moment is both paralysing and invigorating, full of risk and possibility. And it has me asking the question, how are we going to meet this moment?
Enter AI
Kyle Chayka writes a weekly column for The New Yorker about technology and culture and he agrees the first rumblings of the vibe shift began with the pandemic.
"[COVID lockdowns coincided with] the height of the internet existence," says Chayka, whose column is called Infinite Scroll. "It was when the most people were the most online. That drove people insane. That triggered the start of the shift."
If the pandemic softened the ground for a much more online existence, the rollout of ChatGPT was the real disruptor.
"The big change is AI and that came in 2022," Chayka says. "It felt like a change in the air that suddenly destabilised a million different things at once."
In 2022, ChatGPT went from a secret only a few people knew about, to "all of us being Pandoras that opened the box," he says.
"ChatGPT is critical in how our perceptions of reality have changed," he says. "Now we are asking 'is this person I am talking to at the call centre real?'"
AI also didn't just change the vibe, it changed our material world.
"We have to compete with machines more than ever before," Chayka says. "It's also flattening reality and uniqueness, making everything look and sound the same."
But where AI will go is also so unknowable that for the first time in a long time, it is hard to imagine what the future will be like.
I date the vibe shift to a moment in time. It was late 2024, when being an offline person and undertaking digital detoxes seemed like a hangover from the 2010s, a quainter time.
In December, I had drifted back to Twitter, renamed X. I had not visited X for a while, but I missed what it used to be.
Despite all the problems of old Twitter, it was a place that was more enjoyable than not. As theorist Richard Seymour wrote in 2019: "It rewards quickness, wit, cleverness, play and certain types of creativity — even if it also rewards darker pleasures such as sadism and spite."
Elon Musk's X quickly became a mirror of Trump's America.(Reuters: Brandon Bell/Pool)
Re-engaging with the platform after Elon Musk took over was disorientating. Every post I made seemed to vanish without likes or engagement. All my friends were hidden by the algorithm or in exile on other platforms or logged off completely.
Norms around how you speak about diversity — migrants, different shaped bodies, religion and women — had been completely thrown out the window. You could say the worst things and be rewarded with attention, rather than deplatformed and cancelled.
My feed also offered very little Australian content. I had stumbled into a digital approximation of Trump's America: long threads about lifting and protein, claims about a link between autism and junk food, the dangers of vaccines and the "long con" of renewable energy. Users wrote threads about the virtue of stay-at-home wives and how many of modernity's ills could be placed at the feet of ambitious women.
With its pornography, carnival barkers and supplement salesmen, being on X felt like being in a dystopia.
And I wasn't imagining it. Time and time again, Musk used the platform to amplify right-wing views, whether that was attacking Australia's eSafety commissioner, British prime minister Keir Starmer over immigration, the EU over tech regulation or promoting far-right anti-immigration figures like Tommy Robinson.
Back in December 2024, I wondered is this how the world actually is? Were those appearing in my timeline human or were they bots?
And what was a more accurate reflection of the world? Old Twitter which was filled with people who I had relationships with in real life as well as online? Or this place called X, filled with people I didn't know, who may not even have been people at all?
I logged off, a little dazed, and headed straight for a party.
What the f*** is real?
Arriving, a friend asked me how I was. I was OK, I replied, but still disorientated from my time on X.
"I don't know what's real anymore," I said.
It was dawning on me that this feeling of not knowing reality was — for me — the vibe shift.
AI had polluted my clarity, in part because it was so uncanny and real that it was very easy to be tricked.
Hey, did you see Pope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer jacket? Did you see the emotional support kangaroo trying to board a Qantas flight?
My friend at the party understood. This mild form of derealisation was becoming a common experience that was at the same time completely isolating.
Someone poured me wine. We talked about Luigi Mangione who at that time had just been arrested for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Was that even him caught on CCTV or someone else?
We talked about Trump and Musk and ketamine — and how DOGE just seemed to emerge from thin air. We talked about the war in Gaza and the strikes on the hospital. There were reports that it wasn't a hospital. There were many reports that it was.
I tried to ground myself by looking into the faces of old friends and hearing their familiar voices.
This was the start — for me — of a feeling of temporal instability. Not unstable in myself, but that I couldn't get a purchase on anything. What the f*** was real?
Kyle Chayka from the New Yorker told me he observed the sensation as: "Is the person I'm texting right now using ChatGPT? Is my Hinge match being charming or are they using ChatGPT? Is this a real conversation I am having?"
I had over many years as a columnist, written end-of-year round-ups that tried to make sense of the world over the past 12 months.
2014 was the year of Malaysian Airlines and ISIS.
2017 was American Carnage and #MeToo.
2019 was the year of catastrophic fires, Greta Thunberg and Fleabag.
2020 global pandemic.
2021 everyone was exhausted from the pandemic and watching Squid Games.
Yet by 2025, reality was no longer a shared experience and the world can no longer be captured so neatly by a few key phrases.
Now, what is real for me, may not be real for you.
Silos are blooming
First there is the issue as to whether the content is real or fake. Is it misinformation, AI, a troll spreading mischief?
Then there is the splintering of content and people into silos.
The kind of monoculture that existed in the 20th century and made it easy to categorise epochs, eras and trends, has been fragmented by streaming services, social media, and personalised algorithms.
Yet at the same time, confusingly, these fragments share a similar aesthetic and reflect the monopoly of just a few big tech platforms. BlueSky looks like X. Reels look like TikTok. Threads look like X. (No-one wants to look like Facebook.)
Yet we long for a time when things were unique. There are Instagram accounts that are shrines of nostalgia for the quirky and unusual design aesthetic of the past: a font on a movie ticket stub, the curved handle on a beautiful park bench, the elegant slant of your grandfather's cursive handwriting, the care that went into distinct signage and details in a hand-sewn dress.
Now, Chayka says, everything is a bit samey: "Every podcast broadcast on YouTube looks the same, it's the same format. Zohran Mamdani's videos looked like TikToks and Subway Takes, and soon every campaign will look like Zohran's."
Even cafes, restaurants and shops across the world share much the same aesthetic: signage in sans-serif font, subway tiles, beige long benches and plenty of pot plants.
"We crave physical environments that are conducive to digital experiences, so they must be comfortable, not too demanding, allowing for a seamless digital experience," Chayka argues. "While our digital reality is more individualised through algorithms, our physical spaces are less so. We crave homogenised physical spaces, to be comfortable looking at our phones."
He wrote about this phenomenon in his book Filterworld.
While our physical reality binds into a sort of globalised beige, our online reality is a shrine to the subjective.
With the decline of traditional media and journalism, we are experiencing the disappearance of a singular and unassailable vision of what is what, what is designated as true, and sanctioned guidance on how we should think critically about things.
Newspaper editorials — a relic of the 20th century — are disappearing not just from newspapers, but from relevance. People like to do their own research and make up their own minds, gathering information from sources that not long ago would have been considered flimsy or even inaccurate.
But what does it mean if we no longer share the same starting point about what is real? A shared reality with divergence of opinions, customs and views has always been considered a crucial building block for a flourishing society.
If there is no consensus, how do we navigate the world together? How does anything get done?
The world keeps shrinking
By late 2024, reality was shifting in other, strange ways. As the impact of the vibe shift intensified, people started looking different.
The widespread use of GLP-1's like Ozempic, developed to treat diabetes but frequently now used for weight loss, have meant there were some friends who I struggled to recognise after they lost large amounts of weight, quickly, on the drugs.
Then there's MAGA face — a new look that came in with the second Trump presidency. Jaw implants for men, and fillers, Botox, hair extensions and heavy make-up for women. It's not meant to be subtle. It's a signal of the type of politics you follow.
If you didn't go under the scalpel you could give yourself a MAGA face, or younger face, or slimmer face, or whiter face, just by slapping a filter on your social media photos.
But how could you feel grounded if you looked into the faces of old friends on their social media pages, and didn't know if their face was real?
Time and time again I had that funny feeling we had tipped into something new and bad. Perhaps all these current crises didn't exist in isolation but fed into one another in a way that strengthened some of the more bleak forces at work and further stimulated the vibe shift.
Let's say the pandemic made you spend more time online with apps and notifications that are deliberately designed like a pokie machine, to keep you on there as long as they can.
Predictably, you become an addict, which means that you don't get out in real life enough, and relationships outside your screen stagnate.
You become lonely and your mental health suffers. But because of the cost-of-living crisis you don't go and see a therapist (or maybe you couldn't afford a social life IRL and dinner out) and so you end up seeing an AI bot, which has come along just in time to provide you the companionship and understanding you so desperately crave but couldn't access or afford.
That is how your world keeps shrinking. Each new development with technology further ensnares us in this new reality.
Multiple forces ensnaring us means that it's easy to feel trapped in this moment, in this new, bad vibe.
The roaring 10s
Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick writes about vibes from his home in Barcelona and publishes his thoughts on his popular and influential Substack — the Trend Report. He believes times are reminiscent of the Great Depression.
"The 2010s was like our roaring 20s, and I think we are in the depths of what has come after, that's what we are in now, a new low," he says.
"The 2010s was a great era of an amazing excess and that came crashing down. That is what the vibe shift is getting at. The 2010s were a luxurious period."
Fitzpatrick lists the excess: "It was like 'I can take an Uber everywhere', Prime overnight shipping, capitalist luxuries, cheap travel, everyone getting Botox. You could afford the luxuries that previously were only for celebrities. Everyone felt they were richer than they were.
"Things have changed. Income inequality means a corporate worker may have to pick up an Uber shift to make ends meet. Everyone is working harder for less money in real terms and worries about losing their job to AI."
Fitzpatrick says people are more and more likely to calculate if they can afford to go out to see friends and worse: Maybe, they wonder, I don't even have friends.
But for Fitzpatrick, the job losses that look set to happen with AI can provide moments for connection.
"Having to drive Uber and work in a supermarket because your creative dreams to be a writer or illustrator were killed by AI, shows you that 'I am disposable too'," he says. "That puts you in solidarity with the people who have also been discarded by capitalism."
He argues that rejecting the comfort culture of the 2010s and improving conditions for the working class allows us to "harness this moment".
The death rattle
If I had to isolate what I have been searching for in these vibe shift times, it's not hope, its clarity. I want to know what reality is.
Right now, as social media draws us into information bubbles more quickly and more dramatically than ever, it's important to seek and understand what's real. To not be numb or fed a lie or "waterboarded with information" as writer Jia Tolentino put it — but just to know it and act rationally.
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not fact. Everything we see is perspective, not the truth," warned Marcus Aurelius almost 2,000 years ago.
The Stoic philosophers from their ancient perch during that same era, believed we should strive for facts. That we should separate perspective from truth and realise they are not the same thing.
As AI rises, that distinction is more important than ever: if we can't agree on what reality is, how can we operate effectively in the world?
Rather than drift into the soothing, smooth, fake world of artificial intelligence, or the frictionless and reassuring communities on social media that don't present us with unpalatable truths, we can choose reality.
We may not be able to control what is happening in society right now, but we can make being able to know what's real in the world a priority.
Alongside imagining a society gone to ruin, as dystopian literature and television has its moment, we must embark on the task of imagining a future that saves itself. A society healthy enough to take us out of the algorithm and the frictionless experience of the digital and into the unpredictable and messy realms of lived human experience. This is not a return to the past, but a way of living with technology that doesn't diminish or destroy our lives in the real world.
Both Kyles I spoke with were optimistic that there would be a backlash to this current vibe. That when we wake up to its fundamental anti-humanness we would be disgusted and enraged at the tech companies and the forces that brought us here. That we would throw our phones into the sea.
"On the other side there will be a total rush for an offline experience. Going to a party, climbing a mountain, seeing your friends — anything that is not reliant on experience though a screen," says Chayka of how it might go.
Already we are seeing the return of the novel, of reading challenging books — with popular initiatives such as Dua Lipa's book club — alongside a broader resurgence of analog hobbies, including vinyl records and film cameras.
"I think people are logging off, this is what's changing. People are realising that social media is not what it used to be and you don't get those community rewards," Fitzpatrick says.
There was an in-between moment last year where friendship apps were getting a lot of buzz.
"And then people realised that they didn't solve things," Fitzpatrick says. "Dating apps are collapsing, people are living life in a way that is IRL."
Everything is temporary. Even this.
What if this vibe shift was a dark but crucial reordering before a new Enlightenment? Those of us imaging utopias can see it. We are already touching grass, trying to break free and hoping to see you all on the other side.
"What we are witnessing and experiencing is a death rattle, the dam that needs to break," Fitzpatrick asks. "The real vibe shift will come next, creating more economic equality, where we can use technology to see the greed and we can check it. Where we can see injustice because we have millions of screens showing what's happening."
Zoom out, he says, and these are the best of times.
"There are so many solutions to so many things, there is so much tech progress, there is so much medicine," Fitzpatrick says. "We are living in the spoils. We really are living in the best of times."
We just have to remember to get out there and live.
Brigid Delaney is the author of a book of Stoic philosophy, The Seeker and the Sage.