The vibe shift is a myth

There is a potted but popular story we now like to tell ourselves about cultural life and politics in the 21st century. It goes something like this: after the financial crash, the failure to change the system led to a period of irony and cynicism, a listlessness that eventually bored itself into the fanatical extravagances of woke. 

Inevitably this came to be killed off by the pandemic and the second coming of Trump, a period that marked the coup de grâce of a new vitalism born from the more irreverent corners of the internet and the end of the old media monopolies.  

The vibe shift is supposed to be a final casting off of the end of history, a spiritual awakening cum bootstrapping realism. The “spurning of the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete,” as Niall Ferguson put it in one of many TED Talk-style salvos to proclaim this new age. “Living not by lies but instead speaking the truth”.

The idea has broken containment, with public relations firm MHP Group forced to remind its corporate clients that the vibe shift has marked the “the end of old, comforting assumptions”. The brief, headlined with the titles like the end of history to fierce competition, informs us we are living through a transition from consensus building to decisive decision making,  stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, virtue signalling to the pursuit of greatness. 

In Britain of late, this brave new world seems to be going through a difficult labour. The incoming Prime Minister is a man who wants to move part of No10 to an industrial estate outside Manchester and has managed to cobble together an entire political philosophy overnight via May-era devolution powers and Oasis songs. He enjoys the novels of David Peace — a terse, staccato stylist preoccupied with the hauntology of post-war northern Britain. 

This summer’s World Cup is very much a David Peace set piece — a spectacle of post-war togetherness underpinned by the grisly truth that it is a distraction from the now annual expectation of atrocities, pogroms and deepening malaise. Despite being watched by just half the nation, there is a general expectation that a win might even provide a respite from the forces of populism, and provide Labour another throw of the dice at trying to keep social democracy plodding on. 

Emerging from this fugue of reaction is Count Binface, the creation of journeyman comedian Jonathan Harvey. He’s already been claimed by Silly Sausage Britain — a hastily assembled tradition of “kindness, self-deprecation and fairness” that dresses up the rainbow political coalition that stretches from Edinburgh to the shires of Sussex, now willing to sacrifice the cultural sensibilities of any discerning adult in their frenzied bid to stop Farage from becoming Prime Minister

Harvey, contrary to our apparent new age, is very much a figure of the Ancien Regime. His inner clown, as his memoir informs us, was a desire to make sense of the trauma from the death of his overweight, diabetic brother. He has a degree in classics and has appeared on Radio 4, automatically making him an intellectual in modern Britain, and providing him with a free pass to smuggle in social democratic jeremiads — ending homelessness, punishing irresponsible corporates — without ever really offering serious diagnostic or prescriptive analysis.

The prevailing mood in Britain … is a visceral fear of anything that bears the whiff of having emerged from beyond the imagination of people like David Beckham and Stephen Fry

Even a decade ago, Binface would be reviled by the roving cynicism of a world now seemingly desperate to prop him up, lampooned on Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe or dismissed as a pastiche of the Mighty Boosh by the once selective critics of the liberal left. But those who came of age in this world have long since lost their sense of humour, satisfied instead by the thought that a 46-year-old man in a cartoon costume might provide a sense of light relief to everyone from the audience of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver to a care home in East Sussex. 

The prevailing mood in Britain, after all, is a visceral fear of anything that bears the whiff of having emerged from beyond the imagination of people like David Beckham and Stephen Fry. A discouraging of the unconventional, the eccentric and the irreverent for a fevered interest in bringing people together at any cost. This is a prejudice inherited from the pandemic, when the pseudoscience of disinformation led to a vilification of the newfound agency of the individual in the 21st century, unmoored from the collective hearth of the BBC and any blithe trust in the country’s institutions, and presented somehow as a threat to society.

The politics of this new reaction now have their own popular will to evoke — a pointed shunning of wokeness for a new ethos of common sense and fairness. Its whisperers are people like Piers Morgan and the cod sociology pumped out by the new generation of pollsters, teasing out the views of no-nonsense mums and plumbers from the recesses of Broken Britain. These are the grumbles used to give justifications for things like social media bans, national service  and other civilly minded foibles intended to patch up the unravelling of Britain. 

Everyone, it would seem, is now forced to play this parlour game

Even more cynically, this reaction is presented as a prerequisite for the nation state surviving the 21st century. One of its attendant pursuits is now the search for a popular national culture in the name of “cohesion” and even “nation building”, perhaps the only intellectual pursuit that unites Britain’s derisory political landscape, and leads to a demoralising parade of team sports, television programmes and tired historical references. Collective culture, at its nadir, has somehow become a source of political legitimacy. 

Everyone, it would seem, is now forced to play this parlour game. At a recent Civic Future conference in Cambridge, attendees were asked by a panel to define an inclusive national culture fit 21st-century Britain. What no one cared to mention is why such a top-down alien concept is required at all — not least one suddenly demanded by the scale of recent immigration into the West. The mass cultural consensus of the 20th century, despite one being vilified by intellectuals on both the left and right, must now be revived at any cost. 

This tedium is only accelerated by the further flattening of language, idioms and ideas, brought about by the mass adoption of generative AI. The largest capital allocation in history, far from liberating people, is further chaining them to their desks with a churn of pointless work, and accelerating the general exhaustion that now comes with having to interact with ideas in the public sphere. A new cult of deference to the reasoning powers of LLMs is already taking hold, —one intended to further discourage the agency of the individual and hobble his confidence in any dissenting narratives. 

Far from living through a vibe shift, this reaction to the 21st century seems to be ushering in a new era of stifling conformity. A world of flag waving, rote appreciation of national icons, and therapeutic, all-knowing chatbots. A reassembling of society and its mass culture with hollow truths and anaemic national treasures. What comes next is not a future at risk of drifting into further atomisation, madness and despair, but one that is simply dull.