What Does the “Vibe Shift” Really Mean?

How the end of novelty is crippling creative industries.

Lately, I’ve been on a fraudster kick. The Dropout is just the second in a trio of biopics about business-savvy con artists to appear on the streaming stage. Netflix has Inventing Anna, Hulu has The Dropout, and soon, Apple + will have WeCrashed, the story of Adam and Rebecca Neumann and the rise and fall of WeWork.

Most of the audience for these shows will find the stories familiar. Each of them has already been the subject of a magazine feature, a book, a documentary, or some combination of these. It’s part of a larger trend that has taken hold at major studios of investing more in adaptations, sequels, and remakes.

Instead of being defined by novel trends, we’ve become a society of throwbacks, recycling media, fashion, music, and aesthetics from the seventies, eighties, and nineties.

“From a business model perspective, this all makes perfect sense,” James Greig writes in VICE. “The idea is that audiences will be more likely to shell out for the cinema (or, in many cases, a Disney + subscription) if they’re already aware of the “intellectual property” that a film or series is based on.”

It’s not just film and TV, though. According to a spate of articles published last year, our lust for overconsumption has now consumed the idea of cool itself. With everything at our fingertips and social media making it possible to market to any given consumer at any given moment, these authors argue, the idea of cool is now defunct. Instead of being defined by novel trends, we’ve become a society of throwbacks, recycling media, fashion, music, and aesthetics from the seventies, eighties, and nineties.

Last month in The Cut, Allison P. Davis analyzed a coming “vibe shift,” which was theorized by the same dude who came up with the term “normcore” in the early 2010s. The piece’s featured picture is of a woman doused in Julia-Fox style eyeshadow wearing a fringed leather jacket with a fur vest and a black crop-top, her stringy hair covered by a trucker hat topped with a dollar-store red and gold crown while she leans against a white limo…