by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
This is all very moot for various reasons, but it is fun to idly daydream about this idea again. Listening to British duo “Wet Leg,” I can hear a deep music echo of the last time there was “good” music on the radio — that gauzy era known as “the 90s.”
Anyway, I keep thinking about the idea of a “vibe shift” and if it’s even possible for there to be one for various reasons. It’s a lot harder for a real vibe shift to happen than you might think. The reason is simple — for a vibe shift to happen, everyone has to be exposed to the same thing at the same time and make a collective decision as to what it all means.
So, yes, there may be the occasional general vibe shift, but I just don’t see there being a huge swings in vibes that happened up until the rise of social media. But, having said that, I was reading New York Magazine’s personality profile of the new Executive Editor of The New York Times, Joe Kahn, and it occurred to me we desperately need a new Spy-Gawker type publication to record this surreal post-Trumplandia world we live in.
I will note, as an aside, this passage from the piece, which definitely gives one some insight into who gets things published in New York Magazine.
Until last fall, I spent four years working at the Times, as a clerk for the columnist Maureen Dowd, whose only real input on this story was that she’d personally strangle me if I didn’t give Kahn a fair shake.
I mean, where’s snark?
The answer is, of course, snark is all over Twitter and no one cares about blogs anymore. Yet, it sure would be fun to have a blog that was obsessed with Julia Fox and mixed silly celebrity snark with biting media commentary. That’s just not going to happen. And if it does, I will be no where near it when it does happen.
But having said that, it continues to be extremely frustrating to me that I know that I could do something really interesting given the resources. We need a blog in the tradition of Late Night With David Letterman, Spy Magazine and Gawker. I just don’t see that ever happening again.
If it happens, it’s going to happen in, I don’t know, the metaverse or something. The era of print blogs is over. Long, long over. That will be the real vibe shift, when we’re so consumed by the metaverse that some snarky application of it will become popular.
Anyway, it is fun to think about.
