16 Comments

i'm fascinated by how people involved in this scene are quite self-referential yet with a strong touch of the current zeitgeist; of course the new york scene has had a big cultural influence (mainly because of podcasts and meme pages) but i'm not sure how much that can be seen as a singularity of consequences of the times, rather than something that is happening everywhere in the world. but, given the notorious ego-centrism of the USA (plus obvious and righteous reasons - such as language, cultural diversity, etc) it seems that this "vibe shift" only involves the socio-cultural associates within a specific new york city scene.

That said, I like your style and your approach on that matter, your critical sense and overall insight are what make it interesting.

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Jun 13, 2022Liked by Mike Crumplar

Yeah, I can't tell if it's dumb or just funny that a few nerds latched onto reactionary ideas and some neurotic nerds took that at face value. Rather than just going out to a 3am rave like a normal person. Nope they gotta have a lil political culture war. But it makes sense lit/fashion nerds don't fuck with ravers. They gotta squabble amongst themselves instead of engaging with the rest of NYC's every expanding hipster masses that basically dominate anything south of 14th street in Manhattan and everything near of Prospect Park in Brooklyn now. What a Time to Be Alive.

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Jun 13, 2022Liked by Mike Crumplar

Great piece. I too was in NYC (downtown) June 3-6, 2021 (for a friend’s wedding) and that remains the only time I have been to the city since November, 2019. I felt something ecstatic and illuminated (the light was different) but didn’t have a mythological syntax to superimpose on the experience until I only recently began tracing the Angelicism networked currents and retroactively read that discourse onto my experience that was very much IRL. I think you’re right that there had to be something geographically particular and concrete about the vibe shift window. Negation of negation, absolute positivity, if you will: imaginary and Real, actual and abstract, virtual and concrete, online and IRL.

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I really liked the context this has given some of your recent pieces. As a reader from across the pond the Dimes Square ‘scene’ you describe only reminds me of Spiked and Unherd – the backwater of UK anti-woke and post-left rhetoric. The only creeps worse than the writers are the financial backers. Ultimately, I feel these people will be just as irrelevant as the British columnists: only existing to trigger sensitive types and occasionally act as an outrider for fascist sentiment (and to be honest I think this applies to Red Scare too). The right is anti-intellectual, writers and artists are too soft and feminine, too Jewish. Who can possibly materialise from such a scene? I doubt it will be the boring conservative modernism of Eliot or the ever so horny back to the land romanticism of Lawrence. Celine’s nihilism perhaps. But Celine was at least funny and good at writing. Then again I’ve only named Europeans. Maybe you’ll meet the next Brett Easton Ellis, think how awful that would be.

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A legend in your own mind

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The Vibe Shift is hyperstition...

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tap in for vibe shift 2.0: 2022 CIA astroturf edition: reloaded

Summer is classically the season for war and campaigning

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ok envy write large bro well done 👍😂

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as someone who's hurriedly dumped a little baggie of mids into the toilet at DC union station just before my acela was due after a feverish series of google searches about amtrak drug dogs, i appreciate your caution.

a great read as always.

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Jun 13, 2022·edited Jun 13, 2022

"It certainly didn’t have anything to do with people being vaccinated, that New York had already opened up with the George Floyd protests"

Strongly disagree. The atmosphere around the time of the George Floyd protests was still extremely covid-conscious (even as someone who participated in multiple protests), and there was indeed finally a feeling of openness and safety that _only_ started in the Summer of 2021 once most people had been fully vaccinated.

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