Somebody Please Columbine The Entire The Cut Editorial Staff
Why has The Cut tried to turn the Long Vibe Shift At The End Of Time into a fashion brochure time travel puzzle about nothing?
The vibe shifted right through my soul like a katana through a watermelon.—Honor Levy, 1 July 2021, ‘Playground Poems, Part 1’
THE RETURN OF ‘THE RETARD’
And so, the retards are back. Much as expected, their time was not over. On 16 February 2022, on the anniversary of the death of the Buddha, with a full moon screaming ten indestructible laughters thru the skylines of a world, we were treated to one latest spree of the nil generation and their monumental ‘NYC’ amnesia.
This time it’s in the form of an article in The Cut by Allison P. Davis called ‘A Vibe Shift Is Coming: Will Any Of Us Survive it?’ that has no vibe. It’s hard to say just how off-beam the piece is, why it was written, or even when, but it does at least allow us to recapitulate what the ongoing ‘pure vibe’ is, was, will be.
Davis’ essay is actually about a kind of VIBE-FOMO and ends up acting as a palliative for those either too old to get it or too inflexible for morphic transition. The Cut cuts into the thing in the guise of bad infinite montage, never quite allowing you, the reader, the chance of taking on a mask and knocking on the ‘any parties’ door. Don’t worry, humanity ‘22, just remain stuck in the past.
We’re not just talking about Davis, we’re talking about a whole sudden bad moon rising of omnilapsing terminal not-getting-it. On pretty much the same day as ‘A Vibe Shift Is Coming’, there also appeared the new New Models ‘short’ ‘Indie Sleaze w/ Taylore Scarabelli’, occasioned by Scarabelli’s fun but vacuous essay in the March issue of Interview. Both articles look and read out of step as far as trend analytics go but also terminally—almost pathologically—out of time.
The temporality of the Davis article is legit confused. It’s like the dreaded essay that got lost in the proverbial ‘bottom draw’ of a distracted editor for a whole year back when this was even a relevant metaphor. Does the article describe a vibe shift or predict one? Was Sean Monahan paid to be interviewed here and why? Why not pick someone who doesn’t think Arcade Fire is even a thing in 2022? The details are tiresome and would be tiresomely easy to pick apart.
If there is still (a) ‘vibe shift’—we have to suspend the whole thing all the time to keep it real—it now has to do with a certain end, with what’s been called ‘the last night in heaven’ or ‘the long vibe shift at the end of time’. We can see that this is a matter of delicacy, and even medieval cosmic romance.
What’s not even surprising by now is the extent of the deafness. It’s like bruh, here we are building delicate concepts and memes for the long vibe shift on the last night in heaven at the end of time and there you are are replaying what we did last summer as yours as if years don’t matter and nothing belongs, which they don’t and it doesn’t. This isn’t really a look at all, either intentionally sleazy or retro or beautiful or whatever.
It is normal right now for all systems, cultural or otherwise, to reinitialize themselves when most threatened. ‘2022’ is an ongoing moment of profound—almost absolute—dissolution. To understand this, we can form images of a niche finitude, a heavenly proximity as much iterated in terms of ‘pure vibe’ and ‘very onlineness’ as meditation practices and Chinese internet addiction clinics. The ‘last night in heaven’ means just that. The ‘long vibe shift at the end of time’ means just that. Without these immediate images (memes are not just memes) what else are we except vibeless and totally dumb?
WHY WRETCHED WORM IS THE GREATEST TWEETER SINCE TRUMP (WALTER PEARCE IN SOUTH AFRICA)
After Trump somebody had to take over as the GOAT on Twitter. Whatever we say about Twitter, it exists. Not using it doesn’t solve the problem of others using it or tell us exactly why it sucks up attention. When Trump was assassinated and left the TL, Wretched Worm took over for a while as the GOAT. Sorry pretenders, don’t @ us. Nobody or nothing tweeted with anything like the same consistency, variety, and spiritual congruence during this time. Nobody changes their style every day, like, ugh, Picasso Nightcore. Very few—in the age of the Internet of Money—give you all this for free.
We can establish a timeline for the 2021 vibe shift—which hasn’t finished not starting yet—if we really want to, but that would only allow the ‘retards’ to catch up, which they never will. So why bother? The vibe is never possessive anyway, not unless it needs to be. At the time of writing, Taylor Lorenz is grappling with a new piece of vocabulary (‘vibe shift’) and trying to pretend she’s got it like someone learning Latin with a headache in the middle of an earthquake. But even Taylor Lorenz can be resurrected. The following is what Worm said in June 2021. This is what the shift ‘really means’, lol:
Walter Pearce is one of my favorite online friends/human beings and last week on the post-world podcast Wet Brain he was doing a bit all the way from Cape Town and kept saying ‘NYC style’ in this super funny and post-post-retro-ironic way. Bruh. Walt reminds me of Ira Glass crossed with RX Papi. Walt is pure savage, spitting truth from the moment he wakes up till the moment he puts his head on the pillow and drops extinct of tiredness at the end of the day. Walt has been places you don’t know, so he understands the century better than you. But Walt is a savage who resurrected himself and now develops thoughts and images in the face of God with a rare degree of liberated mad wild mode beauty (check out a series of anonymous Instagram accounts as good as anything else online). This is what the vibe shift means. This chance. This infinity. This rising up of thoughts in the face of God. This savage shifting into grace. This Worm-like slinky of ontological and changeful change. A psychic change. A greater health in the face of annihilation. Hanging out in Cape Town with the hoes. Seeing Charlotte Fang in Buzzfeed. It’s why someone writing for The Cut who is a staff writer for the miasma of degenerescent Bidenism called The Atlantic will always misread what’s happening when it comes to ‘vibe’.
As Worm be implying, cancel culture ruled the pre-vibe Trump years, those years when the whole world went mad with monumental amnesia NYC style and René Girard’s The Scapegoat turned out to be more true than anyone ever grocked. Wretched Worm, as one of the OG quirked up white girls eternally goated with the sauce owners of the vibe that cannot be owned, is impervious to the art world diaspora precisely because that diaspora has been left behind, frozen in Arctic Riviera thermal mist.
THE HISTORY OF AN ERROR
So what happened in 2021, and is happening now in 2022? Too much to survey, too much to summarize, too much to remember, too much to bear, too much to live through. Hence, at least, the emphasis in Davis’ article on ‘survival’:
The ‘vibe shift’ is a matter of survival not just because of the psychic torsion and vulnerability it incurs (think of Dean Kissick’s touching insider account of last summer’s blackface romp). Rather, what makes vibe shifting dangerous is that it involves risking the intensity out of life as a whole. What shifts now shifts in the context of life, death, and extinction. Having a vibe shift is intense, fragile and irreversible precisely because we’re in the middle of a major extinction event.
The article does capture some adjacent sense of this, as well as of the ways in which an individual psyche can choose to opt in or out from being an evolutionary beacon:
Monahan reassured me that it’s okay not to survive the shift. We all have permission to stay stuck at whatever makes us feel comfortable, and if that’s in 2016 or 2012 or 2010, that’s fine.
That’s perfect as far as it goes. No doubt it suits Monahan and Davis to say that. And to sit this out. Anyone staying stuck wants to think that staying stuck is the only option, or that there is conflict in any case and not structural indifference between individual psychic choices and impersonal irreversible Big Vibes. But it’s considerate of Monahan to give us permission to peace out.
At the end of last year Hannah Black tweeted,
How would the primo cancel culture 1.0 Hannah Black know this when she now belongs to a centre that no longer has anything do with a super finite now? When she says ‘no one’, who does she mean and know? Just black pessimists and everyone who was had by BLM summer’s lost Sorosian millions? Why did Frank Wilderson talk shit about the Palestinians? Why was Fred Moten’s trilogy a glorious wash out? She’s more and less than wrong, of course. Or let’s simply say, since she did not read everything in 2021, watch everything in 2021, listen to everything in 2021, she is simply wrong.
Her tweet does lead to a quiet breakthrough at the level of the concept though, insofar as it is hard to work out how The Cut magazine/New Models/post-BLM/whatever universe is able to act like the Wet Brain/vibe shift/Remilia/Honor Levy/whatever universe doesn’t exist. By now, it’s not just a matter of irrelevance but vanished regard.
HOPEFREE VIBE SHIFT FUTURISM
‘Vibe shift’ carries with it multiple traces. From Stockhausen’s Stimmung composition—which Jacques Derrida used as background music in a tape recording of his book Feu La Cendre—to Peli Grietzer’s impressive but too localized ‘Theory of Vibe’, vibes vibe freely and repeatedly repeat what seems all over. Perhaps Honor levy described it best as a kind of code command of impersonal ai poetry last summer when she wrote of how ‘the vibe shifted right through my soul like a katana through a watermelon’. This slicing, this seeing-through even of invisibility, is what was meant. Vibe vibes and belongs to noone—which is not to say misreading fails to join in.
With regard to what comes before, after, and through any multiple shifts, we can at least pretend to be able to make taste decisions. Criticism as the act of discrimination and dividing compelled by the uncontainable shifting of the amazingly beautiful has yet to absolutely vanish. We can play with our friends at the end of the universe, comparing sad and tender toys, sad and tender hearts, sad and tender eyeballs. What Worm’s tweets crystallize for anyone that even Trump couldn’t be concise about is the iteration inside the end of time itself, the ‘long vibe’.
Merleau-Ponty once wrote that ‘the world is an organism of colors across which the receding perspective, the contours, the angles, and the curves are set up as lines of force; the spatial frame is constituted by vibrating’. Certainly the vibrating spatial forces of 2021 came alive between stern cultural judgement calls. From one ongoing shift to another, it’s a matter of vibration, color, sending out mating calls across the sky of the Internet. But also of the harsh evolutionary selection process between ‘retards’.
Insofar as something new is found, perhaps it is nothing but the vibration in its pure state of psychic contrast with niche finitude (pure vibe as pure iteration of the end). If the vibe shifts, it seems to be down to a heightened sense of finitude. What we really just now encountered was the Real of extinction qua extinction. This is the vibe that’s coming now. And, freal, few if any of you will survive.
VIBE SHIFT BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SCREENSHOT COLLECTION . . . TO BE COMPLETED
'like someone learning Latin with a headache in the middle of an earthquake'...incomparable is insufficient here, infinicomparable you are, this is. To close off here, plié, straighten, perfection...the light...pneuma, the screen, reading all the time, reading nothing, asleep and extinct while reading, being read, being dead, being beautiful, going extinct, in love.
These articles aren’t worth your time-- I mean, The Cut one. Reporters just scrape Substacks, Twitter, imageboards etc for stories. Everything in these prestige pubs is a summary of a summary. They think they hit the jackpot when they find someone they can really scrape from, like Sean, but of course, no one is going to do the work involved in critiquing or bolstering the case