A short note about cultural evolution.
I saw today that Joshua Citarella was crowned the Left Joe Rogan via the NYT. In response, I’ve been watching a ton of people on X talk about how various reactionary & escapist internet subcultures are in slow-motion collapse or capitulation.
The following is a short note I shared in reply to someone talking about this “vibe shift”:
“Memetics” is just one primitive. Vectorculture is the evolution of this primitive into something that can be qualitatively assessed, and eventually quantitatively measured.
What we are seeing right now is an “exchange motion” between two unrelated cultural vectors: the Status Quo, which burned its momentum on hyperborean internet memes and overleveraged itself against an uninterested public (hitting a social liquidity crunch), vs. a nebulous, big-tent nascent Nietzschean Progressive movement -- a xenomorphic form of upwing leftism which sidesteps and ignores weaknesses, promotes individual mastery over the self, and is yet to fully materialize outside of examples like Joshua Citarella and a few others aware of the progeny of a forthcoming Vibe Nuke.
Dimes Square snaps back self-assembling an indie-verison of itself from the future: unfunded as it is cannibalized by people with visions of a better future building ropes between the useful, cut out of the garden for not being Based enough. The public watches in slow motion as the dim reality of a government which starves its people for memes removes the kinetic fuel of the internet reactionary movement. Curtis Yarvin was right. Those in power didn’t go hard enough. Now they are lame and weak and being eaten by maggots and wolves alike.
Now, here are some things in the short to medium term to watch for:
- Heterodox thinkers from both the Right and the Left achieving synthesis against a common enemy of a future stolen from them by people with more assets who rigged the game.
- An anti-psychedelic, woo-skeptical renaissance which refuels Reddit Atheism against a much softer target.
- Reinvention of the Tech Upwing away from revolving around SF’s revenge politik and from the immaterial to the material: spirits and vibes into atoms and flesh.
- Cryptography and privacy movements where people get dangerous and fight for the right to a world where they aren’t watched.
The clock is ticking. Very few are prepared for what comes next. But no matter what happens -- remember, nothing lasts forever, culture is a gyre, and we are all surfing chaotic toroidal motion of a culture represented by entities which have both direction (falling on or falling off) and magnitude (how fast?).