The 'vibe shift' was a leveraged buyout
Media ownership matters
Far too many people in my cohort believe, albeit subconsciously, in the “marketplace of ideas.” Even for media professionals who have come to identify as leftists, who study the political economy of communication, who oppose “tech” domination of the public sphere, those deep-liberal assumptions are tough to kick. We tend to believe that the cream rises to the top, which is of course a very self-serving myth for the tiny number of people who still manage to work as professional writers and reporters.
This class behaved in a strange way when Elon Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022. Instead of saying: “this is an abuse of economic power and should not be permitted,” their response was often “he is going to fail” and “we are all going to laugh at him.” The oligarch secured billions in financing from Larry Ellison and Saudi Arabia to remake part of the internet in his own image, and the left-liberal media set insisted that it wasn’t going to work, either because he would lose money, or because Twitter would remain a place where everyone made fun of Elon Musk.
You may remember an absurd media cycle in which journalists gleefully reported that Musk was losing advertising revenue, because major brands did not want to appear on his platform. As if the Chief Marketing Officers for Oreos and Pfizer were allies! My class is facing the possible extinction of journalism itself, as a result of the logic of digital advertising, and prominent members were cheering that Corporate America could exercise veto power over the global “digital town square.”1
As if it actually mattered to Elon if Twitter became profitable in the short term! As was the case with Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, when an oligarch buys a media property, we must see the acquisition as subservient to his larger goals. Musk clearly bought the platform to change its shape and ideological content, not to boost quarterly earnings.
Twitter moved to establish a subscription model for supporters of the project — that is, the exact same one we employ here, and in my opinion a far more stable and honest basis for a media business than advertising — and this was also ridiculed. But leftists would kill to have ownership of a few media properties reliably funded by subscribers.
By elevating the posts of his paying supporters Musk changed the rules of Twitter; that was the whole reason he bought it. Theoretical equality was abolished. Then, he simply programmed the website to promote himself and his ideological allies.
Elon Musk obviously succeeded. By purchasing Twitter, he made himself more central to global politics and was able to engineer a right-wing shift on the site. I barely log on anymore, but I still know far more about reactionary culture than I did in 2021. I am familiar with a wide range of flavors of racism now, and I understand all kinds of racist posts at a basic grammatical level. I know what London is actually like, but I also know what libertarian “founders” in Texas think London is like. All of that is inevitable if you have any contact with x.com. Musk used Twitter to help get Trump elected and exert even more personal control over the state. The SpaceX IPO in June briefly made him a trillionaire, so it’s not like revenue problems at a microblogging site he bought with funny money matter much to his overall project.
My own assertion, itself vibes-based and therefore entirely unfalsifiable, is that the “vibe shift” was the unconscious cognitive effect of hanging out on Twitter after Musk’s acquisition. It was experienced, and only needed to be experienced, in the minds of the US American media class. One of the main skills required of contemporary journalists is the ability to detect which way the wind is blowing, to carefully trace the hidden boundaries of discourse. For those who spent too much time on his platform over the last four years, Elon made the left appear less popular (in the middle-school sense).
Towards the end of the Joe Biden administration, media professionals employed the trend-forecasting term to denote that the country was moving to the right. Anti-woke rising. Hey, what about young, sexy fascists? Maga chic.2 What was this based on? It’s right there in the name — vibes. And where did New York writers and podcasters spend all their time, and how were they learning about the world? How is it not going to affect the ideological compass of a careerist class when the social hierarchy changes on the screen we stare at nine hours a day?
In 2024, Republicans re-ran the guy who had been kicked out by voters in 2020. An unpopular Democratic president had to quit in the middle of the campaign, demonstrably incapable of doing much of anything, and was replaced by an unpopular vice-president. Amidst a cost-of-living crisis, she lost by 1.5%. But it was more than that, our pundit class declared. Something was in the air.
Do you think that in the second quarter of the 21st century, reporters walk the Earth, observing concrete reality and assembling truth from scratch? We don’t have the resources for that. Just like everyone else, journalists look at their phones — but then they call two guys at think tanks funded by weapons contractors to confirm.
At some point in the 2010s, it became clear that Elon was obsessed with an incongruity in digital space. The man was getting richer and richer, and everyone around him was telling him he was cool and successful. But on Twitter, a site that mattered a lot to his social cohort, a bunch of Bernie brothers and Commie sisters were always going viral for calling him a stupid bitch. It clearly drove him mad. My contribution at the time:
Looking at Zohran Mamdani’s victory and actual data, the perceptive David Wallace-Wells concluded this summer that the (political) “vibe shift” was a mirage. Yes, it was. But the appearance of a mirage is also a phenomenological fact, a historical event, and Elon Musk used economic power to create it. Whether x.com still matters in 2026, or will matter at all in 2030, he did solve the problem I identified in 2018. He destroyed a part of the public sphere where his enemies used to thrive. Along the way, he made racist and reactionary positions feel more normal to journalists.
The “marketplace of ideas” is a myth, but the dialectic is real. Given conditions of widespread and equal participation in public discourse, some ideas will win out through argumentation. If the media landscape were a simple reflection of economic power, there would be no point for us to do much of anything. Of course, it is not. The press has been a powerful revolutionary force over the last five centuries. But it is also possible to simply buy a newspaper or a website and make it illegal to make fun of the owner or oppose his business interests. That is why control of the press has been a vital political struggle over the last five centuries. It is folly to think that Musk was going to be made a fool on his own property, or that Jeff Bezos would buy Washington Post and allow the paper to get in the way of his larger business goals.
Of course, I still personally believe that Elon is a loser (in the middle-school sense), a desperately uncool man who will never achieve the acceptance he so obviously craves from cultural elites. I still believe that his business empire could collapse like a house of cards, and we may believe that it should — in the moral and political sense. But should is different than will; the latter always depends on future human action. It is a political question.
In the 20th century a classic left-wing critique of commercial media was that advertisers have the ability to block content for ideological or economic reasons. This was seen as a deep perversion of the ideals of the press, so both advertisers and outlets tended to loudly declare that it didn’t actually happen. In the precarious 21st century, we have apparently internalized all of this as deeply natural.
The Cut published a big “vibe shift” piece in early 2022; the political use of the term became common in the final two years of the Biden administration.
I'm appreciating this update about x, since I've been missing out on all this stuff since Trump's second inauguration when I was quietly removed -- probably for restacking too many pro Palestinian posts.
A few years before that my FB account was hacked a short time after I asked if anyone else had heard of BRICS.
So far, BlueSky hasn't kicked me off, and I still have a Substack account....