In June of 2021, Sean Monahan, one of the founders of the trend forecasting group K-HOLE (of “normcore” fame) who now writes a newsletter called 8Ball, coined the term “vibe shift” to refer to an emerging cultural transformation, one whose contours were at the time hazy but that has since come into focus: a rejection of the background left-liberal consensus, a political shift to the right, and a new cultural decadence and nihilism. When he wrote at the tail end of the pandemic moment, the reference point for “the vibe shift” was the micro-neighborhood in downtown New York referred to as Dimes Square, known mostly to trust-fund skateboarders, artists, and the people (like Monahan) paid to market their tastes to large corporations. Three years later, the term “vibe shift” was being used by Very Serious People—people living inside the Beltway, people who write for the Times and the Post—to describe the historical significance of Donald Trump’s comeback, and the Canadian government was enacting tax holidays to stave off what the Deputy Prime Minister referred to as a “vibecession.”
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