A universal, absolute, and infinite theory of vibes
We have all been wearing hideous jeans, all the time
I’ve recently got back from America, where I stomped around Washington DC in the January cold and badly failed to attend the inauguration of President Donald Trump. It was a generally weird and unpleasant weekend, and you’ll be able to read all about it later, in another venue. But it’s also exactly eight years since the last time I went to America, stomped around Washington DC in the January cold, and failed to attend the inauguration of President Donald Trump. The big crystal wheel that turns the stars had delivered me to the exact same place at the exact same time for the exact same reason. Maybe in eight years I’ll be there again. I hate DC, but apparently I don’t have any choice in the matter. I’ll be trudging along the same slushy avenues, as a wizened little gremlin of a Trump is sworn in for the third of its infinitely many inaugurations.
The 2017 trip did feel different, though. That time, I went to America with three other lefty British journalists. Two nights before the inauguration, I interviewed some of the organisers behind the Disrupt J20 protests, which ended up blocking several police checkpoints around the city. They were cagey around me; they didn’t like journalists, even journalists who’d read Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J Sakai. It didn’t help that I referred to the 2015 riot in Baltimore as a riot rather than an uprising. It was so important in those days to use exactly the right words. The next night I went to a party hosted by some people associated with Metro DC DSA. In the wake of Trump’s first victory all the Bernie youth were flocking to the DSA, which had been transformed overnight from a political nursing home for gefilte fish-eating Trotskyites into the cool guy socialist organisation for epic meme kids who love to hang out. But for some reason, while we were hanging out, the epic meme kids all wanted to tell me about how everyone else in Metro DC DSA was a reactionary, a careerist, a lifestylist, a narcissist, or an abuser. I had a fun night. On Inauguration Day itself, after a few hours pointlessly stomping around DC, I was a guest on an episode of Chapo Trap House, which we recorded sitting on the floor in an Airbnb. The next day, along with maybe half a million people, I took part in the Women’s March. Afterwards, I praised the Women’s March in an online magazine for not having any real political programme, just an endless list of constituencies it was supposed to represent: women, and women of colour, and indigenous people, and trans people, and LGBTQ+ people more broadly, and workers, and the Global South, and… ‘If there’s hope,’ I wrote, ‘it’s in the and, an endless train of ands, a long, endless run-on sentence that keeps going, cycling through every permutation and particularity of a world that could be as rich and inventive as our language is, until we’re free.’
That magazine no longer exists.
A few of these things have managed to survive, but whatever spirit once animated them is gone, and now they just claw around automatically in the dark. Metro DC DSA is still here. They left some stickers around the city. ‘BUILD THE LEFT—FIGHT THE RIGHT.’ Stylised image of a worker’s muscular fist, crushing a snake. The Trump fans who’d come to stand around patiently in the cold all day found that one pretty funny. Fight how? They also liked the signs someone had plastered on a bus stop, saying ‘RACISTS OUT OF DC’ and ‘TRUMP SUPPORTERS GO HOME,’ because, well, the racists had been voted into town, and if the person behind these anonymous instructions could actually do anything about it besides putting up posters, they would have. I did see exactly one protest: in DuPont Circle there was a solitary woman holding up a homemade banner that said ‘LUIGI OVER FASCISTS’ and shouting at nobody in particular. Soon she was at the centre of a small crowd of young, attractive people in MAGA hats, all competing to buy her a one-way plane ticket out of the country if she hated it so much. These people weren’t frothing or yelling. They were playing, like a pod of orcas plays with a single seal on a melting nub of ice. The calm determined play of nature taking its course.
Something has changed, and it’s not just that Donald Trump got 4% more of the vote than he did in 2016. The general sense is that there’s been a movement in the vibes. A high pressure vibefront heads in from the Pacific, and suddenly tech moguls are dressing like fuckboys and the hot girls are getting into the skull-measuring type of racism. Vibenadoes whip across the plains; whole structures of thought and feeling reduced to splinters overnight. How many of the people I met in DC posted black squares in 2020? Not none. You thought you were a rational individual forming your own conclusions about the world; in fact you’re a leaf flapping about in the psychic winds.
But where does this wind come from? As Becca Rothfeld points out, explaining things by reference to vibes leaves a lot of questions unanswered. ‘What is a vibe shift? What, for that matter, is a vibe? Where is a vibe? Does a person have a vibe? Does an entire community have a vibe? Can one community have conflicting vibes? How are vibes delineated, anyway? How are they identified or detected? Is a vibeshift an epiphenomenon of an institutional change, or are vibes the drivers of concrete reforms?’ These are useful questions, but I think the reason they’re useful is that they have a very definite answer.
When people talk about the vibe here, they’re not talking about the same kind of vibes you might find at a party. They’re talking about the thing that GWF Hegel called Geist, ‘that Spirit whose nature is always one and the same, but which unfolds this its one nature in the phenomena of the World's existence,’ through the process that we, who are only small fragments of this Infinite Energy, experience as History. It’s a hazy thing, bodiless, ghostly, but at the same time it moves around the heavy stuff of the world—armies, monuments, empires—like they’re nothing. For Hegel, the fall of Rome didn’t have to do with imperial overextension or steppe migrations, it was because Rome had bad vibes. Rome was ‘chosen for the very purpose of casting the moral units into bonds, collecting all Deities and all Spirits into the Pantheon of Universal dominion, in order to make out of them an abstract universality of power,’ but once the vibe had fully shifted to the infinite and supersensuous inwardness of Christianity, that ‘finite, unhallowed order’ started to feel washed and actually the whole empire kinda fell off. Whenever Hegel talks about the Absolute, the drifting totality of all relations, this is really just fussy nineteenth-century speak for a vibe. If we update the translation, the solution to most of Rothfeld’s questions falls very quickly into place. Where is a vibe? Everywhere. Does a person have a vibe? No, the Vibe has a person—except when it comes to a few very significant individuals, like Napoleon, and, apparently, Trump. Does a community have a vibe? Yes, if it’s big enough; it’s the presence of Vibe that makes a community into a meaningful object. Can it have conflicting vibes? Yes and no. Vibe is singular, but it will always give the appearance of opposing itself, because it moves through the dialectic. How are vibes identified and detected? By the exercise of reason through the historical process that brings us to Absolute Knowing. The last one is harder, though. Does Vibe transform the world, or is it an index of the world’s transformations?
Look: I’m a good Marxist. We’re all good materialists here, we all know what the right answer is. But you’ll still have noticed that there’s been a trend, lately, towards a totally vibe-based ontology. The vibe shift is also a shift towards vibes. Back in 2021-ish, even the political right was gesturing at materialism, pretending to believe that everything they hated was reducible to factories closing in the Midwest. Whole magazines that just repeated the words industrial policy with punctuation thrown in at random. Politics is downstream of the labour market. That’s gone. Tucker Carlson used to talk like a slightly creepier, gigglier version of a Christian Democrat; now he believes that one of the foundational technologies of twentieth-century modernity is actually powered by demons. Ashmodai, Malephar, all the invisible and incorporeal legions of Hell, pouring into this world through the gate opened by a single fissioning atom of uranium-235. He’s lost it. His brain’s melted. He’s started talking like me. But he’s not alone. A lot of the people rambling about vibes in the wake of Trump II are liberal-managerial wonks with high, grating voices and totally bald heads. God made these creatures to look at spreadsheets, but now they’re trying to sneak into the world of the soul. And don’t kid yourself: you’ve felt it too. At some point in the last few years you have been drawn to the idea that what really matters is lighter than air and fizzier than thought, and the whole weighty material world is dragged along in its wake…
Still, as Rothfeld (along with, just earlier today, John Ganz) points out, because of the vibes is not actually a very impressive explanation. Any forty-something loser can wear a blazer over their tshirt, attribute all social and political events to vibes, and call themselves a trend forecaster. People will still spit on you in the street, and you’ll deserve it. The task of the serious thinker is to explain why the vibes went this particular way. To not just identify the current content of the vibe, but the inner logic of its movement. This is the task Hegel set himself; he ended up deciding that beyond the grand chaos of world history, ‘the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created,’ the world has a shape, a deep structure. That shape is Vibe slowly coming to awareness of its own nature, which is freedom. But the only way to knowledge and freedom runs through ignorance and slavery. The movement towards Absolute Knowing begins with one half-human savage trying to bludgeon another to death. In every contest between dumb grasping empires the little ember of freedom gets just a little bit brighter. Across all of history, Vibe has been yearning towards its endpoint, which is of course nothing other than the philosophy of Hegel itself, in which Vibe is finally explained. A bad philosopher wonders why the world exists; a truly great philosopher knows the world exists for the sole purpose of containing his book.
A lot of people like to accuse the Hegelian system of being fiddly and baroque, but this is actually an incredibly elegant model. The world is a machine powered by its own explanation. Very few moving parts. But while seemingly everyone has ended up regurgitating his general notion of Vibe, in the centuries since Hegel it’s become much harder to imagine that everything that happens in the world is part of one great inexorable movement towards freedom. We need another universal theory of vibes.
1. The binary automaton
The absolute simplest vibe-shifting machine is the binary automaton. It works on one very simple rule: every 1 is followed by a 0; every 0 is followed by a 1. It eats through history like a termite, converting everything into the opposite of itself.
Binary automata are everywhere. I’m now old enough to have experienced four cycles of the skinny jeans-baggy jeans automaton. Somehow, every time it happens, people are still amazed that they managed to spend the last decade wearing such objectively incorrect jeans. Like waking out of a dream. How could you have possibly believed that these revolting things actually looked good? Then a few years later it switches the other way, and you’re once again yelping in horror at your own trousers. The jeans automaton is a dialectic without sublation: it never goes anywhere, and nothing is ever learned. We are all doomed to repeat it for the rest of our lives. A lot of other binary automata line up with the jeans cycle, so you may as well bundle them all together. Skinny-jean eras are manic and expressive. Statistically, large new reserves of natural resources are almost always discovered while skinny jeans are in fashion. In economics, Keynesian interventionism predominates. Artists engage with the forms of pop culture; US Presidents announce missions to Mars that never happen; teenagers learn to play the guitar. Skinny jeans tend to coincide major conflicts between states. Baggy-jean eras are tetchy and introspective. Economically significant uptick in the consumption of raw vegetables. Neoclassicism in economics, lots of mirrors hung up in galleries, Middle East peace initiatives instead of Mars missions, teenagers making electronic music in their bedrooms. When you see a lot of baggy jeans on the street, you’re in a time of civil war.
Sometimes the scale is larger. Take sex. No society has ever actually managed to repress sex altogether, but the idea that sex can be made visible in art, that it has some place in public discourse, seems to have spent the past few hundred years flickering on and off like a light. There’s a period of plague-ridden late-medieval bawdiness around the time of Boccaccio and Chaucer, which then vanishes into Inquisitorial prudery. It comes back with Titian’s horny portraits of Venetian whores and Shakespeare’s fart jokes, but this is followed by an era of pinch-faced men in Puritan lace banning football and burning icons. There’s a long era of renewed libertinage lasting roughly from the Earl of Rochester to the Marquis de Sade, then an increasingly frantic industrial repression as large numbers of human bodies are requisitioned for work and war. Hygienic Victorian primness starts to break with Freud at the end of the nineteenth century, and collapses entirely around the middle of the twentieth, but as of 2025 it’s back. They don’t show tits on HBO any more. In a lot of blockbusters the male and female leads don’t even kiss. You can show sex in a film about sex, Saltburn or whatever, but sexuality is no longer the fundamental fact of daily life; it’s confined to its own private realm. The kids all spell it seggs. It might be another century before we come out the other side.
Binary automata exclusively produce bad vibes. They can keep running by themselves for centuries because each output is also an input. The vibe that carried Trump to power is the inversion of the vibe that preceded it, which stretched too far and is now snapping back like elastic. You might think this is well-deserved; you might think it’s a reactionary backlash; it hardly matters. Nothing the binary automata spit out is complete, none of it actually follows the contours of reality or meets our human needs; they just blanket the world in one particular vibe for long enough that we all end up running for its direct opposite. In fact, though, we have all been wearing hideous jeans, all the time. The binary automaton is the simplest form of a structure that recurs everywhere in human life: a machine that only works because it’s broken.
2. The rotor
A rotor is an automaton with more than two states. Many binary automata are tiny fluttering hummingbird-things, but rotors are almost always large; it’s rare to find one that completes its vibe-cycle in less than five hundred years. Most rotors generate an entire civilisation.
One of the simplest rotors is a beautiful little self-propelling mechanism described in 1377 in the Muqaddimah or Prolegomena of Abu Zayd ‘Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami, known to history as Ibn Khaldun. We begin with Bedouin tribes in the primordial desert, which is the womb and reservoir of all human society. The desert is an empty and unforgiving place. The people that live there have to be empty and unforgiving themselves; fierce and frugal warriors. But it’s impossible to live alone in the desert: survival means relying on your clan, and Bedouin societies have a very high degree of asabiyah, which is a vibe of rigid conformity and strong in-group cohesion. Any tribe with enough asabiyah will inevitably end up attacking and overcoming its less vibey neighbours, and eventually it will become powerful enough to raid the settled societies nearby. ‘Their sustenance lies wherever the shadow of their lances falls.’ Eventually the tribe becomes a kingdom, and ten thousand screaming Bedouins hopped up on merciless vibes pour out of the desert to smash any nearby empire like a rotting fruit. At which point they all stop living in the desert and move into the city to rule over the conquered population. Once you’re in the city, though, it’s very easy to start prioritising your own wellbeing over the collective. Vibes turn sour; the tribe becomes flabby and decadent. Civil conflict blooms. With everyone busy grasping for their share, it’s harder to keep control of the desert hinterlands, but who cares about those? Empty places of no account. Meanwhile, in the empty places, a young warrior plods on camelback through endless sands under the white and bloodthirsty sun.
Every rotor is reactionary. The stages it introduces between the on and off positions of the binary automaton are the stages of decadence and decline. An energetic charge burning through its own filament. You can see this in the anacyclotic rotor of Polybius, a rotor so primitive it’s essentially just three binary automata strapped together. The best man in any society will inevitably become its king; after three generations his heirs forget their virtue and monarchy switches into tyranny. The best men in the society band together and overthrow the tyrant; since monarchy was too fragile they rule collectively; after three generations their heirs have forgotten their virtue and aristocracy collapses into oligarchy. The good citizens suffer under the oligarchs until it finally becomes unbearable and they overthrow them; they decide hereditary power is always unjust and set up a democracy; after three generations absolutely everyone has forgotten their virtue and society collapses, at which point the survivors pick the lest debased among them to be their king. Through each microcycle the circle of corruption expands. First one man, then many, then everyone, until there’s only one man untouched.
The grandest, most intricate, and most reactionary rotor is obviously the one laid out by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West. Spengler identifies seven distinct revolutions of his rotor over the course of world history. These are what he calls the Egyptian, Apollonian, Magian, Faustian, Indian, and Chinese cultures. At the core of each culture is what Spengler calls a world-feeling, by which he obviously means vibe; a culture is born when ‘a great soul awakens out of the protospirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless.’ This vibe settles over a group of people and starts to express itself through them. The vibe that became Egyptian culture was a sense of the past, the swallowing hugeness of time. Out of that vibe you get monumental stone architecture built to last forever with mummified kings inside, preserved for their long voyage through immortality. In Apollonian or classical culture the vibe is all about the sensuous immediacy of the present. Its characteristic form is nude marble sculpture: intense attention to the individual human body. ‘Never in Corinth or Athens or Sicyon do we find a landscape with mountain horizon and driving clouds and distant towns; every vase-painting has the same constituents, figures of Euclidean separateness and artistic self-sufficiency.’ The Magian culture—a fun invention combining late Rome, early Christianity, classical Persia, Judaism, and Islam—springs out of the sense of reality as a dimly lit ‘World-Cavern’ in which we’re all hunched.
This is weird, but it’s not important. Ultimately, what matters is less the vibe itself and more the vibe shifts it undergoes. Every culture starts ‘young and trembling,’ still haunted by the monsters of childhood, ‘all the dark and daemonic in itself and in nature.’ The Old Kingdom of Egypt, the Homeric epics in Greece, the Vedas in India, the fractured bones of the Shang dynasty in China, the Gospels and Apocalypses of the Magians, the Gothic mode in Europe. From there it grows into self-confident youth: pyramids, Doric temples, the Upanishads, the early Zhou, the great theological councils, the Renaissance. When it reaches maturity there’s usually some great conceptual achievement, the vibe fully realising itself in thought. Socrates, the Buddha, Confucius and Laozi, Mohammed, the Enlightenment. That’s the high point: it’s all downhill from there. Culture becomes intellectualised and abstracted; it still repeats its previous forms, but in a less and less organic and vibey way. It’s become ungrounded. In the last stage before it dies, a culture ossifies into a civilisation, which is universal and all-encompassing because it lacks any other qualities. For Hegel the universal is the telos of history; for Spengler it’s the death-knell. Lifeless and deformed new ideologies, the corpse-form of the original vibe: Stoicism, Buddhism, Chinese Legalism, socialism. ‘Finally, there arises the monstrous symbol and vessel of the completely emancipated intellect, the world-city.’ Babylon, Rome, New York: the horror.
It’s a lot of fun, Spengler’s little spinning machine. It has a lot of potential for schizo charts like the one above. It’s obviously very stupid and full of obscene cultural essentialisms, but since we’re talking about vibes here that’s probably inevitable. Spengler’s motivations are pretty transparent: every monstrous late form is really just a cipher for the shameless gays of Weimar Germany. He created a whole theory of history so he could claim that the creative explosion happening around him didn’t actually count. (His notion of decline is very idiosyncratic: he thinks Chinese culture was entirely extinct by the early Han dynasty; the death of Magian culture is placed exactly halfway through what we call the Islamic Golden Age.) I think the most potent critique, though, is that this system is not actually as fun or complex as it could be.
Imagine the deranged system of gears you could come up with by modelling how all these different cycles interact. What happens in the contact-zone between a youthful world-cavern vibe and a declining world-garden vibe? Because that’s what happened when the first Nestorians arrived in Chang’an. You’d need a whole new set of schizo charts. But Spengler won’t do it. He insists that ‘the history of humanity has no meaning whatever and deep significances reside only in the life-courses of the separate Cultures. Their inter-relations are unimportant and accidental.’ There is no general history, just a soupy haze of spinning rotors. The notion of a general history is a provincial product of just one of those rotors, the Western culture, with its vibe of infinite space and time. Spengler thinks he’s performed a Copernican revolution in history; in fact he’s just switched one of his rotors for another. The Indian culture, he writes, has dreamy, soupy, ahistorical vibes. ‘No history, no life-memories, no care. The millennium of the Indian culture between the Vedas and Buddha seems like the stirrings of a sleeper; here life was actually a dream.’ The great symbol in the Indian culture is the turning wheel. It makes sense that this would end up filtering into the grand structure of the book: Spengler poached his whole vibe from Nietzsche, who poached it from Schopenhauer, who poached it from the Hindu and Buddhist classics. Hegel made a place in his system for his own philosophy, but Hegel was a much more subtle thinker than Spengler. The theory of cultural lifecycles is not supposed to contain itself; if it does, it’s only a symptom.
This is the secret of all rotors: over time, the mechanism wears down. Just like the vibes produced by the binary automata, they don’t quite fit right in the world. But the people who love to play with rotors are so wrapped up in their game that they assume that what’s wearing down is the world itself, and not their favourite toy.
3. The Jacquard device
A Jacquard device is an elaborated rotor that tries to prevent this degradation by switching between states in a non-linear order. Unlike binary automata and rotors, which use their own outputs as inputs, Jacquard devices produce a series of vibes based on an external algorithm, which is slotted like a punch card into the device.
There is one really major Jacquard device, which is astrology, in which the algorithm powering the vibe-machine is the entire cosmos. Before people started asking you your sun sign on a first date, before it was all about the individual personality, the stars governed questions of statecraft and destiny. Astrological systems generate the terrestrial vibe in its entirety; farmers and kings would consult astrologers to learn if the vibes were right for planting wheat or starting wars. The main element in the system is a toroidal disc extending around a thousand light years into interstellar space. This disc is divided into twelve regions, each of which generates a distinct vibe. The actual qualities of each vibe are determined by the sector’s polarity (positive or negative), modality (cardinal, fixed, or mutable), and element (earth, water, fire, air). My sun sign, Virgo, is a negative mutable earth sign; its vibe is introspective rather than active, practical rather than passionate, grounded, critical, detail-oriented. The sun moves through these regions in two distinct cycles. The first is a regular, programmatic cycle across the calendar year, allowing each vibe in turn to wash over the earth. The sun is in Virgo during the start of the academic year, when the fury of summer (Leo: positive, fixed, fire) has died down and it’s time to get back to work.
In the second cycle, the sun moves backwards through the disc over a ‘Great Year’ lasting 25,772 ordinary years. The world was last ruled by Virgo between 13,000 BC and 10,750 BC, which would have presumably been an age of critical, practical, detail-oriented Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. The most recent change was around 1 AD, when we moved from the age of Aries (positive, cardinal, fire; aggression and arrogance, restlessness; the great and brutal Bronze Age empires, their collapse, and the new and brutal empires of iron that followed) to Pisces (negative, mutable, water; aloofness and intellectualism, compassion tinged with self-regard; the grand sweep from Christianity to liberalism). This system really does work. It’s just a bit dull.
Sun-sign astrology is the most popular and accessible register, but as a vibe machine it’s limited: one spinning wheel, one fixed point, repeating the same programme over and over again. Astrology opens things up through the planets, which dart unpredictably across the wheel, directing cosmic vibes to particular areas of human life. The individual positions of the planets are significant; so are the aspects, the relations between those positions. On Inauguration Day, for instance, Jupiter—the king-star, seat of power—was in Gemini: positive, mutable, air. Gemini’s vibe is playful, effervescent; it’s the sign of ironic doubling; you know it’s all hollow, but you can’t help playing along. Donald Trump is a Gemini. Jupiter’s been up there ever since last summer, when it left Taurus: negative, fixed, earth; stubborn, stupid. Almost immediately, Joe Biden dropped out. But look at the other planets. In 2020, Jupiter and Saturn formed a Great Conjunction in Aquarius, the first time they’d appeared together in an air sign for two centuries. This was the end of the earth era, the age of struggles over the means of production, which has lasted from Charles Fourier to Bernie Sanders. Suddenly everyone was talking about vibes. But now Saturn, which governs law and responsibility, is in Pisces: square to Jupiter, at right angles across the zodiac. Squared planets are in friction, straining against each other. Power opposes law, which is why the new Trumpian vibe has such an illicit feel. It’s great fun to be able to say retard again, but behind it all you are aware of the presence of a great and terrible crime. Meanwhile Mercury, lord of flight and messages, ruler of Gemini, and Trump’s patron deity, is in Capricorn, sextile to Saturn. When planets are sextile, this indicates an easy and unrestricted flow of vibes between them. In the moment of Trump’s triumph, his own deity chose law over loyalty. Ever since the inauguration, planes have been falling out of the sky all over the United States, one after another. This doesn’t seem like a great augur for the new regime.
The other major Jacquard device is the fractal chronology of the rogue seventeenth-century rabbi Gershon of Pinsk. Rabbi Gershon’s device is also a linear sequence of stages; unlike astrology, it has no other moving parts. His innovation was to nest the machine inside itself.
The algorithm for his fractal chronology is the Hebrew creation myth. In Psalm 90, Moses addresses God: ‘A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.’ Traditionally, Talmudists have taken this to mean that history will last for six thousand years, mirroring the six days of creation, with the age of the Messiah corresponding to the seventh day in which God rested. Gershon took this idea much more seriously than his contemporaries. The world, he reasoned, is not just a mirror of the act of creation; those six days form the substance of all material reality. Therefore, if we look at the history of the world, we should find that it precisely mirrors the sequence of the first chapter of Genesis. And when he looked, he found that it did. This is his sequence of world history:
The first day: ‘Let there be light.’ AM 1-1000 (3760-2760 BC). The generations of Adam. God is present as the residue of His great light upon the earth. Ends between the death of Adam (930) and the birth of Noah (1056). God saw that it was good.
The second day: ‘Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, and let it be a separation between water and water.’ AM 1000-2000 (2760-1760 BC). Separation between the just and the wicked. The age of the great Flood (1656) and the confusion of the tongues at Babel (1757). God appears not as a light, but as the fury of the great waters. Ends with the birth of Abraham (1948). Much suffering; God saw that this, too, was good.
The third day: ‘Let the water that is beneath the heavens gather into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ AM 2000-3000 (1760-760 BC). God makes his covenant with Abraham (2018), gives the Law to Moses (2448), establishes David as King over Israel (2892), and ordains the First Temple (2928). Here He appears as a firm bond, solid ground, the Rock of Zion. Ends with the death of Solomon and the rupturing of the kingdom (2964). God saw that it was good.
The fourth day: ‘Let there be luminaries in the expanse of the heavens.’ AM 3000-4000 (760 BC-240 AD). Proliferation of powers, princes, and foreign empires, all given power over the land of Israel. Exile and devastation by the Assyrians under Tiglath-Pileser (3187) and Sennacherib (3213), the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar (3338), the Greeks under Antiochus (3593) and the Romans (3829). Here God is distant as the stars, but speaks through a diffusion of prophets. Ends with the completion of the Mishnah (3949). God is terrible in justice and all His deeds are good.
The fifth day: ‘Let the waters swarm a swarming of living creatures, and let fowl fly over the earth, across the expanse of the heavens; let the earth bring forth living creatures, cattle and creeping things and the beasts of the earth.’ AM 4000-5000 (240-1240 AD). Again a great diffusion of forms. Rise of the Notzrim and Yishmaelim. The Jewish people disperse among the swarming of new nations. Here God is a whirlwind. Still the earth brings forth great teachers: the Geonim, Rashi, the Rambam. Ends with the death of the Rambam (4965). God saw that it was good.
The sixth day: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and they shall rule over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the heaven and over the animals.’ AM 5000-6000 (1240-2240 AD). Through the dispersal and fracturing of the earth, what is good has been spread over the entire earth; now it rises in the luminous shape of a man. The age that will see the coming of the Messiah. Here God appears with a human face, and all nations will know Him. May he see that it is good.
History is a series of discrete stages: a fading fire, a watery division, an earthly reunification, a sidereal scattering, an aerial sundering, and finally a single fiery thread that completes the cycle. But Rabbi Gershon wasn’t satisfied with plotting the course of world history. Since the entire universe is made out of this sequence, it should reproduce itself in any period of time, however arbitrary. And it does. A human life follows the exact same sequence. First you’re brought into the light of creation. When you’re young you’re tempestuous; you want to distinguish yourself, divide the world into I and not-I. Once childhood is over you start to seek out a solid ground for yourself. As you get older your strength fails, your troubles grow, you become weak—until, as an old man, you find wisdom, which is the intellectual form of the Messiah. A day passes in the same way. First a fading light (the Jewish day begins at sunset), then the division between soul and body during sleep, then the firm purpose of the morning drifting into the listlessness of the afternoon. So does a year. (The Jewish year starts and ends in early autumn.) Therefore, two things are simultaneously true. Firstly, that the world is still uncreated, and God will not have created the world until it ends. Secondly, that the world has already ended, and the Messianic age is now. It was for that second conclusion that Rabbi Gershon was excommunicated as a heretic by the Council of Four Lands. His intricate spiderweb diagrams, showing how every age of human history sits inside every other, were piled up and burned.
In his later tractates, Rabbi Gershon wrote that the reason the smallest possible unit of time is shaped like the entire history of the Universe is that his six-stage process ultimately describes not the act of creation but the fundamental quality of time. He imagines the smallest possible unit of time, experiencing it languidly, as if it were a day. At first the moment is solid, contemporaneous to itself, a burst of light, but to become duration it has to wrench itself apart, separating past from future. The solid ground of the present moment forms between these poles, but as soon as it arrives it instantly starts to disintegrate. But finally, just before the moment fades, it comes to know itself. The rush of what is becomes the consciousness of what was; in that fraction of an instant everything achieves its resurrection and is raised out of time and into the mind of God.
Other, more minor Jacquard devices include liberalism, cliodynamics, and historical materialism.
4. The monotonic escalator
Jacquard devices are, obviously, a hybrid form: they are vibe-machines that run on something other than vibes. This protects them from the degeneration that seems to afflict all cyclical machines, but at the cost of muddying the signal. As critics of astrology have pointed out, the system is arbitrary enough that you can plausibly explain any vibe by reference to any arrangement of the stars; meanwhile Rabbi Gershon’s fractal history implies that all vibes are actually running on full power at every point in time. The monotonic (or negentropic) escalator avoids all these problems by removing the need for a succession of vibes. On the monotropic model, there’s actually just a single vibe, which is continually self-reinforcing through feedback mechanisms. This buildup of vibe is mathematically predictable on a long enough scale, but it’s not always perfectly smooth: vibe is a compressible fluid, and it can squeeze into tight reservoirs until it reaches maximum density and bursts out of its container. This is what we experience as a vibe shift; really, it’s just the continual intensification of the univibe.
We’ve already encountered one monotonic escalator, which is Hegel’s theory of history, in which the constantly intensifying vibe is freedom. There are others. Unfortunately, no monotonic escalator has conclusively been shown to exist.
For a while, the best candidate was the global economic escalator identified by György Lerner in 1959. Lerner was an economist at the University of Cambridge, and the leading authority in the econometrics of the Palaeolithic era, mostly because he was the only authority on the econometrics of the Palaeolithic era. Before the escalator, his major contribution was a 1955 study demonstrating the existence of a fluctuating inflation rate in small ceremonial arrowheads across fifty thousand years of prehistory. Lerner used Cambridge’s EDSAC computer to process data from Stone Age grave sites into a reasonably complex model of the prehistoric economy. He was the first to assign a per capita GDP rate to the Creswellian culture, which was eleven pounds and six shillings in mammoth-ivory rods. He examined the structural causes underlying the collapse of the European amber bead market in 16,000 BC. (Overproduction, low market transparency.) But his breakthrough came when he started trying to investigate prehistoric economic growth.
All this work took place during the most intense phase of the Great Acceleration. In 1959, the global population was very nearly three billion. This was up from two billion in 1927. It had taken 123 years to get there from 1804, when the population was one billion; reaching that first billion had taken roughly three hundred thousand years. Since 1804, the world economy had doubled in size nearly four times, faster and faster; it had taken pre-industrial civilisations five thousand years to do the same. At the time, the consensus was that something had happened. Some break with the general pattern of history. For most of human history, almost everyone who lived was living in miserable poverty, three steps away from starvation. Humans were like rabbits, their numbers kept in check by famine or disease. But after the Industrial Revolution things were suddenly different. Humanity had escaped the Malthusian trap.
Lerner’s investigations showed something else. Malthus had been wrong from the start. Economic and population growth during the early Stone Age was extremely slow, between 0.01% for the Gravettian culture and 0.02% for the Magdalenian; it took around five thousand years for the Palaeolithic economy to double in size. But the Palaeolithic lasted for a very long time, which meant there were enough of these doublings for Lerner to notice that their rate was very, very slowly accelerating. Stone Age man was already on the long lower slopes of the exponential curve that would take him into modernity. If the Magdalenian culture had econometrists, scratching their calculations into elk antlers with a piece of flint, passing them down through the generations, the flows of amber beads and ivory rods would have told them that the world was growing geometrically. By the nineteenth century, its doubling time would be shorter than a human lifespan. In the twentieth century, it would achieve liftoff. They wouldn’t have been able to conceive of the particulars: steam power, electricity, the atom. But the trajectory was absolutely fixed from the start.
Lerner wasn’t particularly interested in what his monotonic escalator said about the future; his main interest was in the economic analysis of prehistoric middens. But it did make other people quite excited. If we’re on a hyperbolic curve, then around one-quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, the world will become infinitely large. There will be infinitely many people, with infinite resources, infinitely technologically advanced. What would that even look like? In the face of the curve we’re all cavemen trying to imagine the nuclear bomb. Unlike the cavemen, Lerner’s contemporaries weren’t protected by the thick wadding of time. Their world would go infinite in roughly sixty-six years.
It’s now 2025, the year the line goes vertical, and the line will not be going vertical. Essentially from the moment Lerner identified his escalator, the exponential growth started, almost imperceptibly, to slow. But it’s perceptible now. By the end of the twenty-first century, world population will start to shrink. People used to panic about overpopulation; now they panic about demographic collapse. Advanced economies are stagnating; third-world growth engines have started faltering too. There are some new headline-grabbing technologies, but instead of opening up new fields of human potential their main utility seems to be making it easier to run various sinister online scams. At some point between 1959 and 2025, the monotonic escalator that had been running for three hundred thousand years suddenly stalled.
There are two explanations. The first is that the escalator never really existed. Instead, what Lerner had identified was one phase of an incredibly slow binary automaton. For three hundred thousand years, this automaton had been producing its 1-vibe, which had something to do with increase and expansion. The vibe was on for so long that we’d confused it for a static fact about human life. Clearly this vibe machine operates on a geological or cosmological timescale; the same vibe that produced the age of exponential growth might also be responsible for the sun and the stars; the automaton’s first flick might have been what caused the Big Bang. But now it’s stretched almost as far as it can go, and it’s twanging back into its opposite. It’s hard to say exactly what the 0-vibe might be like, since the 1-vibe contains all of human history. Is this what killed the dinosaurs? Maybe. But the vibe that’s ushered in the second Donald Trump era might be our first clue, the first thing to fully express this fat, hot, decaying new world. Somewhere in the weird morass of feelings that generated the inauguration is the secret to our next million years.
That’s the first explanation. The second is that Hegel was wrong, and whatever it is that generates the vibe does not want to be known. The monotonic escalator was real—but only until György Lerner identified it, at which point it vanished. Whenever the vibe is fully identified, a vibe shift takes place. Which keeps us all very busy, watching this strange new vibe as it upends our world, coming up with annoying new opinions about it, arguing over where the vibes come from or whether the vibes even exist—so busy we don’t notice, in the gutters of Washington DC, the quick movements of some scaly creature, author of all our desires and misfortunes, as it scurries hastily into the gloom.