Feelings belong on that chaise longue where your posterior chain has left a visible dent, sinking deeper each week. They’re socially two-dimensional signifiers, clinging to the outdated paradigm of reaching for authentic self- expression. Once feelings leave your therapist’s office, they become weaponised individualism. Vibes, by contrast, resist the individual psychological subject that feelings presuppose. They’re pre-cognitive, post- structural, representing an ambient form of knowing and a distributed model of perceiving, actively building the network of our collective affect.
When something “passes the vibe check,” it’s not about your precious inner world, about how it makes you feel; it’s about how it resonates with our collective, algorithmic nervous system. Vibes are procedurally generated, emerging from the friction between user and interface, resulting from the perfect calibration of surface tensions. While feelings demand „emotional authenticity“ (whatever that means), vibes thrive on surface polyphony. They’re not meant to be invoking emotional depth, naked vulnerabilities or radical truths (again, whatever that even means) but rather a tuned alignment of procedural affect. It’s vibe-detection as social attunement, reflecting how our collective preferences emerge not from emotional depth but from shared, distributed pulses of attention. In this cultural domain, where social relevance hinges on immediacy and alignment, vibes matter more insistently than feelings because they function as connective tissue, weaving individual behaviours into broader cultural flows. Recommendation algorithms have birthed a new mode of preference. Ambient taste; preference without emotional attachment and desire outside of hyperconscious choices. And let’s be clear, I’m not saying that TikTok understand your feelings; it’s just intercepting your vibrational signature. Your likes, scrolls, and pauses form a resonance pattern, a vibe in itself, that dictates what comes next, reflecting a collective, networked affect that makes vibes, for now, more socially relevant than legacy feelings. Feelings are a Freudian excavation, and vibes are what I might temporarily, for the lack of a sexier term, call algorithmic surfers. We’re no longer diving deep, bending over backwards to make others understand our individual feelings. Instead, we’re skipping across interfaces, reading ripples, and optimising vibrational outputs for resonance not for self expression. We’re less interested in who you really are; we’re interested in what you’re transmitting. Stop trying to understand yourself. Forget the authenticity industrial complex.
While speculative realism was trying to peek behind reality's curtain, Reality TV kicked down the fourth wall and installed ring lights. Speculative realism whispered about escaping correlationism; The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills just filmed it screaming in a restaurant.
Reality TV doesn’t mimick reality, it constructs hyperreality. Each episode is a metaphysical framework, where truth isn't discovered but produced under studio lights. When a Housewife flips a table, she's not just creating drama, she's constructing ontology. In fact, when a Real Housewife screams, "THE TRUTH WILL COME OUT!" at a reunion show, she’s performing a more honest epistemological practice than any Kantian critique. The truth isn’t discovered, it’s produced through the very act of seeking it. Forget accessing the thing-in-itself. Reality TV knows the thing-in-itself needs a glam squad and a storyline. While speculative realists debated how to transcend human perception, Bravo executives were already manufacturing realities that exist independently of whether anyone believes in them. Its correlation over content. The confession room isn't just a backdrop for mascara-stained testimonials, it's a Heideggerian clearing with better acoustics. Truth emerges not through philosophical inquiry but through strategic editing and product placement. Reality TV achieves what object-oriented ontology could only theorise: a world where even humans become objects, ready to be edited, distributed, and monetized. It's speculative realism with a spray tan and a social media strategy. In this hyperreal playground, truth isn't hidden behind phenomenological veils, but rather it’s being manufactured in real-time, it’s sponsored and trending on Twitter. The parasocial web it weaves isn't just connecting viewers to actors; it's creating an ambient network (hello again vibes) where authenticity is both currency and commodity. Here truth doesn't need to be uncovered, it needs to be produced. Back to the curtain that philosophy wanted to peek behind, Reality TV turned it into content, monetized the reveal, and made it go viral. The real question isn't whether we can access reality independently of human perception. It's whether reality can exist without a production credit.Hyperculture is our mediatic land of cockaigne; a gluttonous feast where meaning gorges itself into liquid figures of speech. It's not decadence as decay, but decadence as apotheosis.
Meanwhile, hypoculture—that self-proclaimed sanctuary of the slow, the underground—performs CPR on a patient that not only just died but probably never truly existed. Subcultures aren't dead because capitalism absorbed them - they’re just worn out from fighting against a unified mainstream culture that was actually always fractured. Hyperculture doesn't just blur the binary, it reveals it was always a hallucination. In this shattered cultural landscape, traditional resistance becomes quaint. Yet resistance isn't extinct. It manifests not in grand revolutionary gestures but in viral mutations, in memetic insurgencies, in the competence of turning algorithms into accomplices. The "slow movement" in contemporary art has become a monastery of aesthetic conservatism, where analog craftspeople perform rituals of resistance while desperately trying to commune with dead paradigms and extinct ways of being. Their handcrafted authenticity isn't revolution, it’s an elaborate costume party where everyone dresses up as their favourite version of their past self. (I apologise, I am harshly exaggerating. All is fine as long as its a conscious choice, perhaps, even if consciousness doesn't automatically guarantee relevance.) Hypoculture masquerades as digital detox while actually functioning as cultural orthorexia, a privileged starvation that mistakes self-denial for transformation. The fetishisation of slowness isn't preservation; it's meditative hoarding, masking the aversion to innovation behind a veneer of craftsmanship. Digital fatigue, as a result of this cultural dynamic, isn’t our enemy, it’s should be our medium. Hyperculture isn't noise we need to filter, it’s not a problem we need to solve, it’s metaphysical clay, go sculpt with it, or eat it and learn to metabolise it. The slow art movement thinks it's staging a prison break from platform capitalism, but it's actually just building a prettier cell. Subversion doesn't step outside the algorithm, it seduces it.1990s feminist epistemology gave us situated knowledge, that quaint notion that truth comes pre-packaged with its observer's coordinates. How refreshingly analog.
Let’s update to epistemological situationships: knowledge that refuses to define it's relationship. While its precursor insisted on mapping standpoints, it’s postmodern offspring frolics in uncertainties. Our truths and our tools, like our hookup app personas, are performatively fictitious and cyclically updated to and by our needs. Certainty is awkwardly forced. Provisionality is nonchalant. Situated knowledge assumed we could GPS our cognitive location. Situationship knowledge knows we're all just cognitive couch-surfers, intellectual grifters, trading permanent addresses for the thrill of cyclical relocation. Expertise is monogamous devotion. We should all be promiscuous technophiles, maintaining simultaneous and ambiguous relationships with multiple tools, platforms, interfaces, url and irl lovers. The true virtuosity isn't in mastering any single mediatic dialect, but in cultivating a commitment to flexibility. Don’t master tools, flirt with them. Be mediatically polyamorous, fully embrace technological promiscuity. Be silly. Be uncomfortably comfortable with not really knowing anything.Monophonic art is creative taxidermy preserving the obsolete myth the rest of the art world still loves orbiting around; the individual genius. Musicians have long known that the most interesting things happen in the spaces between voices, moving fluidly between solitude and communion.
The myth of the isolated creator has grown threadbare. Culture’s attachment to originality has become less about innovation and more about maintaining familiar boundaries, that now digital platforms are slowly reshaping. TikTok's duet feature transforms creation into a conversation, inviting us to add a new dimension to the original. It's an ecosystem in which ideas evolve through contact and combination, where creativity becomes less and less about individual genius (whatever that latter word even means) and more about collective exploration. This shift challenges our understanding of artistic harmony. Unity doesn't require the sacrifice of distinct voices, instead, it thrives on their preservation. The tension between different perspectives isn't a problem to solve but a source of energy, generating new possibilities through productive friction. The focus on a solo genius increasingly feels like an attempt to simplify something that's naturally complex. In this emerging landscape, collaboration becomes a form of exploration rather than compromise. Each voice maintains its clarity while contributing to something larger than itself. The question isn't who owns a voice or an idea, but how it changes as it moves through different minds and contexts.Hyperculture is our mediatic land of cockaigne; a gluttonous feast where meaning gorges itself into liquid figures of speech. It's not decadence as decay, but decadence as apotheosis.
Meanwhile, hypoculture—that self-proclaimed sanctuary of the slow, the underground—performs CPR on a patient that not only just died but probably never truly existed. Subcultures aren't dead because capitalism absorbed them - they’re just worn out from fighting against a unified mainstream culture that was actually always fractured. Hyperculture doesn't just blur the binary, it reveals it was always a hallucination. In this shattered cultural landscape, traditional resistance becomes quaint. Yet resistance isn't extinct. It manifests not in grand revolutionary gestures but in viral mutations, in memetic insurgencies, in the competence of turning algorithms into accomplices. The "slow movement" in contemporary art has become a monastery of aesthetic conservatism, where analog craftspeople perform rituals of resistance while desperately trying to commune with dead paradigms and extinct ways of being. Their handcrafted authenticity isn't revolution, it’s an elaborate costume party where everyone dresses up as their favourite version of their past self. (I apologise, I am harshly exaggerating. All is fine as long as its a conscious choice, perhaps, even if consciousness doesn't automatically guarantee relevance.) Hypoculture masquerades as digital detox while actually functioning as cultural orthorexia, a privileged starvation that mistakes self-denial for transformation. The fetishisation of slowness isn't preservation; it's meditative hoarding, masking the aversion to innovation behind a veneer of craftsmanship. Digital fatigue, as a result of this cultural dynamic, isn’t our enemy, it’s should be our medium. Hyperculture isn't noise we need to filter, it’s not a problem we need to solve, it’s metaphysical clay, go sculpt with it, or eat it and learn to metabolise it. The slow art movement thinks it's staging a prison break from platform capitalism, but it's actually just building a prettier cell. Subversion doesn't step outside the algorithm, it seduces it.(I just have to make a stupid joke here, I apologise preemptively.) Cardio walked so hypertrophy could run. But the tortured artist that jogs literal marathons around their practice just dropped dead. Cardio belongs to modernism's exhausted paradigm: the endless hours at the easel, the romantic myth of uninterrupted flow, the linear march toward an artistic peak. It's disciplinary society's dream: stable repetition masquerading as growth. Progressive overload demands you shatter it, repeatedly and deliberately. Where cardio seeks flow, progressive overload courts productive failure, turning breakdown into breakthrough with calculated precision. The mathematics of muscle aren't written in steady-state equations, but in jagged intervals of stress and synthesis. Similarly, contemporary art doesn't emerge from meditative endurance but from tactical overload, pushing concepts until they fracture, to later rebuild them, stronger. What we’re really just talking about is a shift from romantic exhaustion to strategic destabilisation. The old model venerated the artist-as-martyr, (probably a hypocultural beast as well), running themselves into transcendence. The new paradigm understands that growth requires not endless movement, but calculated resistance - not the long slow burn, but the precisely timed explosion. Each creative "set" is a controlled experiment in capacity expansion, each "rest period" a crucial moment of integration and synthesis. We're not training artistic stamina anymore - we're engineering creative capacity through deliberate cycles of overload and adaptation. The question isn't "How long can you run?" but "How precisely can you fail?“
(I wanna end this list with a stupid startup idea. I swear to god if you’d pitch this to a bro-filled-office, they’d eat that shit up.)
Post-film should be short for postable film. Vertical cinema isn't merely TikTok scaled up; it's an inversion of cinema's gravitational field. Where horizontal frames mimic human eyesight like well- behaved children of Renaissance perspective, vertical frames transparently reveal hierarchies of visual information previously flattened by panoramic convention. After a century of horizontal stasis, at least some of our screens have suddenly rotated 90 degrees, and with them, our entire visual metabolism. Traditional cinema's horizontal gaze was agriculture, a methodical cultivation of narrative fields. Vertical cinema is vertical farming, stacking stories in dense informational towers. The architectural implications are engagingly destabilising. Instead of theatres as perspective machines pointed at rectangular altars, let’s imagine vertical viewing chambers, where narrative gravity pulls down instead of across. This isn't just disrupting the horizontal hegemony of cinema – it's rewiring the vestibular system of storytelling itself. Horizontal cinema was about journey and return, the hero's circular path. Vertical cinema is about ascent and descent, about narrative free-fall through content stratospheres. It trades the comfort of the horizon for the vertigo of the scroll. Each frame isn't a window but a trap door, each scene not a sequence but a sedimentary layer. The business model writes itself: Vertical Cinema™ – where every screening is a controlled fall through curated visual space, where stories don't unfold but unfurl, where narrative isn't a line but a stack. It's not just disrupting the grammar of film; it's introducing a whole new gravitational syntax for visual experience. It’s not just about rotating pixels but about rotating the entire phenomenology of spectatorship towards narrative hypercustomisation. Traditional cinema asked us to drift horizontally through it’s narrational structures. Vertical cinema demands we free-fall through them, vertically alert.