(2024-12-26) Savina Yet Another Vibe Shift With Sean Monahan

Anya Savina: Yet another vibe shift with Sean Monahan. This week, I got a chance to chat with writer and K-HOLE co-founder Sean Monahan about his latest trend report for 8Ball, Live Players. ((2023-11-30) Monahan Live Players)

You're known for coining the term "vibe shift," but it has become so popular that its original meaning has been lost. What were you originally describing in 2021?

In that report, I talked about a return to scene culture, which was my focus even before I wrote about the vibe shift. This was before COVID. I discussed the resurgence of scenes as a response to cancel culture, where building your own community with like-minded friends allows you to bypass the social consequences of cancel culture. (cozy web?)

Another prediction I made was that fewer people are interested in art, but there has been an explosion in the number of people writing indie fiction or small press novels. The younger generation seems to be more interested in literature than traditional arts.

Lastly, I hypothesized a comeback of rock music.

In your report, you mentioned the strong interest in the early 2000s aesthetic, but there is also a lot of nostalgia 2013-2014 online. What do you think is the reason for this?

I recently had a conversation with a younger person about the timeline of indie sleaze. It seems that the perception of indie sleaze depends on a person's age.

The perception of time depends on one's social class and proximity to cultural producers.

The further down the social ladder and the more one's consumption patterns are influenced by mass culture, the later they believe something happens. For example, normcore was a term that gained mass popularity in the United States around 2017-2018, even though the original paper was written in 2013.

living in New York City, surrounded by artists, designers, and musicians, can create a perception that things happen quickly. However, it takes about five years for trends to truly permeate the culture. I think information is moving faster than ever, but cultural change is still pretty slow.

A lot of people don't like generational discourse, but I think there's something that's fundamentally true about people being marked by the era they grew up in and the kind of technology that was available. In the second part of my report, I'm going to address my thoughts on nostalgia and a generational approach a little bit more directly.

Looking back, I think my vibe shift report resonated so much with people because I wasn't trying to be mean about it, but I was calling millennials old. That was the experience of coming out of the pandemic — a lot of people went into it feeling pretty young. Now you're like, "Oh, wow, I'm really an adult."

Another observation you make in your new report is about the disappearance of counterculture. Do you think there is a place for countercultural communities online? Or where can creative people work out new ideas?

I don't think there is such a place anymore, and there isn't really a coherent elite either.

Many predictions about a massive explosion of creativity did not come to fruition, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that creative people are overwhelmed with social media today.

I ended up taking a break because going viral gives me writer's block, and because you start to feel trapped by your audience. You begin to anticipate what you should do to make small pieces of content perform better, but they don't necessarily add up to a whole.

After I published my report, I didn't link to Samo Burja's essay, Live versus Dead Players, that I've discussed a lot in the last year with my friends from San Francisco. Burja lists people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman as live players. They are simultaneously feared and regarded as people who make things happen. And there are live players in culture as well — what makes them stand out is that they work against algorithmic expectations. ((2018-03-14) Burja Live Versus Dead Players)

People in the tech industry are hesitant to admit that algorithms restrict cultural production.

Has your approach to creating change changed in the last couple of years? When you started in 2013 with K-HOLE, you were one of the very few people producing anything in this format, and now there are dozens of Gen Z trend reporters and forecasters on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms.

Yeah, trend reporting has become a content vertical in and of itself. I enjoy reading a lot of those things. What I do is a little bit different because I am just not so deeply interested in TikTok trends, and they're very ephemeral. This is how people end up missing the forest for the trees. They're constantly chasing memes, which are more like fads than trends. A lot of it just has to do with imprecise language. Some trends are so big, slow-moving, and transformative that it can feel a bit redundant to even address them.

I think I'm interested in talking about trends that are metacultural and influence how people behave and how people see themselves and see the world. It's less about the memes and more about the people posting them.