Nameless Feeling — Real Life
Nothing else needs to be said or thought when you can appeal to vibes
While seemingly open-ended and allowing for an infinite recombination of elements, the idea of “vibes” is reductive. It discourages the more difficult work of interpretation and the search for meaning that defines human experience.
As an analytic, vibes don’t connect feelings and consequence; as such, it is symbiotic with passive modes of media consumption.
neural networks behave in ways similar to vibes in capturing patterns in media and culture, online or otherwise. Both serve as perspectives that focus on associations across vast amounts of data or impressions.
These systems can only instrumentalize taste; they turn any expression of self into a reductive data point meant to generate more data at the same level. They presuppose that “liking” just means more “liking” and that is as deep as our desire can be. As with vibes, these metrics carry no context or narrative; they can tell you nothing about how or why something might be desirable, only that they vaguely seem like they might be desirable because they seem similar to other things that are desirable.