it is not an overhyped (and ill-conceived) product: It is pure hype, without a product

Colloquially, “vibez” is used to express an intention, a situation/one’s geographic and sociological position, an ambience, a stateofmind, one’s material surroundings, and other sorts of contexts that orient present and future possibilities. Similarly, “lofi” and “chill” are ergonomic devices individuals use to regulate psychological and affective states for optimal present and future productivity, just as Oh Hello Again’s mood-based catalog system was designed as part of a broader philosophy of “biblotherapy,” where people use reading to manage their emotional and affective comportment.

In the social-media era, though, “vibe” has come to mean something more like a moment of audiovisual eloquence, a “sympathetic resonance” between a person and her environment, as Robin James, a professor of philosophy at U.N.C. Charlotte wrote in a recent newsletter. What a haiku is to language, a vibe is to sensory perception: a concise assemblage of image, sound, and movement. (#Aesthetic is sometimes used to mark vibes, but that term is predominantly visual.) A vibe can be positive, negative, beautiful, ugly, or just unique. It can even become a quality in itself: if something is vibey, it gives off an intense vibe or is particularly amenable to vibes. Vibes are a medium for feeling, the kind of abstract understanding that comes before words put a name to experience. That pre-linguistic quality makes them well suited to a social-media landscape that is increasingly prioritizing audio, video, and images over text. Through our screens, vibes are being constantly emitted and received.

“It’s a placeholder for an abstract quality that you can’t pin down—an ambience (‘a laid-back vibe’),” Kyle Chayka wrote in the New Yorker last year in his essay on vibes, which explored how TikTok is increasingly buying into what philosophy professor Robin James called “sympathetic resonance” rather than narrative (on TV this is story) or personality (on TV this is character). “Vibes are a medium for feeling, the kind of abstract understanding that comes before words put a name to experience,” writes Chayka. “That pre-linguistic quality makes them well suited to a social-media landscape that is increasingly prioritizing audio, video, and images over text.” It also makes them well suited to a streaming industry that prioritizes quantity over quality. As long as you get the sense of the thing, you don’t need the thing. In this context, “vibes” lose that hippie dippie twin soul undertone and replace it with a counterfeit connection—a product of poor quality that looks good enough to trick everyone (including me—I did watch it to the end) into passing it off as good because it looks good, sounds good and feels good.