Blink. Wednesday afternoon, shortly after Twitter increased character limits on tweets for verified users, a major bug took down most of the site. For a few, harrowing hours, with direct messages nuked, tens of millions of users who attempted to post were blocked from doing so, and provided with the following, brief message: “you are over the daily limit for sending tweets.” It was as if Elon Musk himself were telling our nation of the too-online to calm down. You’ve had a long year getting mad about a lot of loser bullshit, now it’s time go outside and live your life.

It was a culture war détente. It was a pause, a long, reflective breath, and a heavy sigh. It was also a familiar feeling.

In the context of our recent breaking stories, not only on Twitter but across all the major platforms, it’s clear this phenomena — this exhaustion with the drama, this social media malaise — runs deeper than Elon’s recent Twitter growing pains. In tech, between layoffs and hiring freezes at almost every major company, and a significant decline in funding for startups, winter is here. Last year’s crash gave way to a single, industry bright spot in artificial intelligence, a rapidly maturing, paradigm-altering technology now challenging us with questions well outside our standard box of angry, happy colors. Back on Main Street, record inflation and skyrocketing interest rates have given way to broad, genuine concern for the future. Such anxiety has likely been exacerbated by a new Cold War with Russia, itself at hot war in Ukraine, and almost daily new displays of aggression from China, the agent of our last pandemic. But the pandemic, at least, seems (close to (perhaps!)) finally over. With viral panic expired in all but the most agoraphobic corners of the Washington Post, a sober look around reveals our cultural trends have all turned decidedly against 2020’s “mostly peaceful” riot culture. Altogether?

I think we’re in the middle of a vibe shift.

If you’ve been anywhere near social media these last six months, you’ve probably noticed a trend of young, scantily clad TikTok girls deploying the language of “#MeToo” while harassing nerds at the gym. In the typical clip, a workout tokstress filming herself in the middle of a leg lift pauses as a man walks by, turns to her camera — just horrified — and breaks the fourth wall. “Do you see,” she asks her audience of thousands. “This creep is staring at me.”

Safely enshrined in the language of female danger, the purpose of the tockstress’ siren song is to elicit sympathy, which is another way of saying attention — the currency of social media. “Tell me I’m beautiful,” she’s really asking, “follow my channel,” she really implores, and, most importantly of all, “buy my toxic fitness supplements.” This is the kind of thing that used to work, if at the expense of random passersby. But for the last several months, when no clear sign of real male misbehavior is captured on video, the furious mob response, which was purposely provoked, has turned back on its creator. Indeed, morally policing our moral policemen has become a wildly popular content genre of itself.

Welcome to the world of JoeySwoll, a “gym positivity” influencer who has racked up millions of views — not only on Twitter, but more notably on the infamously woke TikTok — by responding to would-be hall monitors engaged in every sort of bad gym behavior from filming other men while they change in the locker room, to chastising people who ask to “work in” (or share equipment), and — the most popular by far — attempting to cancel “creeps” for glancing at people filming content. For his charitable contributions to our world, this man, this actual living Chad, has been made a folk hero by his adoring fans.

A couple weeks back, Gawker, the once-wildly popular misery engine, died (again). You probably didn’t realize it died, because “New Gawker” was never popular, and most people forgot it existed. But as the company closed its doors, the final words of its editor-in-chief — if literally nothing else — did manage to achieve relevance, if not in the way she intended. On her way out, Leah Finnegan attempted to rouse one, final mob:

This one is a little convoluted, so let me quickly break the drama down: 1) Gawker writers lied about a public intellectual they didn’t like in hopes of materially damaging that person’s reputation, 2) that person lawyered up, 3) Gawker’s editor-in-chief attempted a final act of retribution in provoking outrage at the man — who, again, truly just wanted to not be lied about — for the crime of harassing her, I guess, which finally 4) triggered a pile-on in the opposite direction. The question, generally, was “how do you not understand you’re being low key evil, sis?” The editor was ratio’d into outer space. The tweet is now deleted.

We did it, Joe.

Elsewhere, Mr. Beast, a massively popular YouTube streamer, gained significant attention while paying for life-changing eye surgery for 1,000 blind people. In response, Buzzfeed produced its standard sort of “all sides” piece exploring the subject, in which it was suggested “many” felt it rude of the influencer to use the word “cure” while referring to the people Mr. Beast was helping to cure. There were many blind people, the author suggested, who felt there was nothing actually wrong with being blind. It’s just, like, a different way of living or whatever. Stop being such a Trump about blind people, Mr. Beast!

Backlash against the Buzzfeed hit was immediate, significant, and — again — basically universal. This part is important: all of these stories were framed online as “everyone is saying this crazy thing I disagree with,” and “typical media bullshit.” But a quick glance at the comments makes perfectly clear the authors of each attempt at moral policing were totally alone. In the case of the Buzzfeed hit, not even other tech reporters agreed:

The institutional press is itself a useful bellwether of the broader vibe shift. After the last election, the New York Times took major strides to quell the partisan social media behavior of its reporters, concluding famously in its breakup with star Tweeter Taylor Lorenz (a mutual parting, we’re told). The Washington Post, on the other hand, dove into the opposite direction, with a disorienting embrace of overt partisan politics. A couple years in, and the Times continues to thrive, while Post subscriptions have plummeted.

Culturally speaking, there remain echoes of the past five years. The schizophrenic Twitch Nation is currently embroiled in a full-scale war on Hogwarts Legacy, for example, a new Harry Potter video game. The grievance is familiar: J.K. Rowling, we’re told, must be held accountable for her belief that biological men should not be sent to prison with biological women. Okay.

Boycotting this game is meant, in some way, to “hurt” Rowling, a bad person with a bad opinion. But, predictably, in the mob’s unquenchable thirst for justice, not only have people who publicly supported the game been targeted along with Rowling, a list of people who just so much as played the game has been created. Overtly, the purpose of the list is to target random Rowling fans for punishment. But the furious mob of they/them communist anime avatars will have a lot of punishing to do. Hogwarts Legacy has just become the most watched single-player game in Twitch history. Here, the moral cops were not themselves policed. But they were less effective than they’ve ever been.

The Grammys, which just prominently featured artist Sam Smith in an explicit celebration of Satan (following the release of Smith’s much celebrated music video in which he ecstatically bathed in human piss) was actually, I think pretty obviously, designed to trigger our culture war live wires. But did you even hear about it? Sure, some people were very mad, and yes, Sam predictably reframed the anger as hatred of his “fat queer body.” All clown world table stakes. But do you actually care? When Miley Cyrus took off her clothes and hopped on a wrecking ball America talked about it for months. But Sam’s biggest problem, despite his desperate public commentary to the contrary, is not that people hate him, it’s that they already forgot about the Grammys.

It’s not just the woke stuff that isn’t hitting like it used to. The entire cottage industry of anti-woke content has also been depressed. Kanye West has vanished. The most prominent right-wing influencers in the country are all at war with each other over… a contract dispute, or something? Back in September, Andrew Tate, the nation’s most improbable polygamous Muslim convert champion of the anti-woke teenaged boy, was the most popular man in the country. Then, at the height of his tremendous celebrity, a handful of powerful tech executives erased him from the internet. This year, Elon set him free, an act we were all assured would herald in a new age of toxic horror. In fact, people wound up not really caring. Today, Tate is in a Romanian prison. People still don’t care. This is probably because they have a lot of other things to worry about in 2023.

The cost of a home had already reached unattainable heights for a majority of Americans before the endless money printing under Trump and Biden inflated our currency. Interest rates were spiked in hopes of controlling the inflation, but wages haven’t adjusted to our new normal, and the cost of housing has barely moved. That means real estate and debt are now both too expensive to afford. In a country critically challenged by manufacturing insecurity, at increasing odds with a manufacturing powerhouse, Biden invoked the growing threat of China in his recent State of the Union Address. Cold War 2.0 with Russia carries on. Months into a major tech correction, layoffs and funding depression have not only nuked our roaring 2020s crypto casinos (a mixed bag). Every company, in every space, has been diminished.

Well, every space has been diminished but artificial intelligence.

The code switch switch from “Web3” to AI was more rapid than anything I’ve seen in fifteen years. The pace of this transition is partly product of a meme, and the power of groupthink. But mostly the switch has taken place because artificial intelligence is working. There is no interacting with AI, at almost any level, without perceiving its potential impact — and not on blue collar work, as most people predicted, but on everything else. Accounting, bookkeeping, administration, design, reporting, law, research, education: there is almost no category of thoughtful work that isn’t now facing its own, imminent, radical transformation. In the face of such tremendous change, anxiety is unavoidable, and the anxious mind just doesn’t have a lot of time for Sam Smith in a corset.

The most obvious indication of America’s vibe shift has been a meme-y reach for language to describe our new reality. The phrase “zero interest rate phenomenon” has been jokingly employed to reference a class of trends, objects, people, and business practices that have — abruptly — ceased to make sense: Day in the Life TechTok videos featuring happy young Zoomers at their Google retirement village, 4-day work weeks, NFTs , venture-funded groceries, the phrase “working from Tulum,” the Metaverse, endless Netflix password sharing (well, maybe not), Rolex shortages, affordable Uber rides, SPACs, stonks, scooter culture, expensive fake meat, and of course FTX. All of these things are great, by the way, and none of them are gone, let alone gone forever (well, other than FTX). It’s just the people now have questions.

The economic reality inherent of the “zero interest rate phenomenon” highlighted a broader change we’ve already been experiencing, now more obvious than ever on a freer social media. But along with shifting economics, bizarre social trends, and the staggering rise of AI, it’s worth noting our freedom, culturally, to talk about this stuff. The hall monitors are in retreat. Still, it would be a mistake to declare some kind of victory. While the era of the blue-haired Stasi may be in decline, the conceptual censor has not lost. We’re only freer now to parse and challenge all the sacred topics of 2021 because no one knows what “sacred” means in 2023. The world is rearranging.

I’m not making any huge predictions here. The truth is I don’t know where we’re going. I just know the last ride is over, and in this cloud of confusion following Covid endgame, we are entering a brief period of the soft-Wild West. Thank God.

So dust off your hot takes, gentlemen, and ladies let your hair down. The calm won’t last forever. But today, at least, anything goes.

-SOLANA