Riding the Vibe Shift

Zuck gets it but Dutton doesn't

I used to be a devotee of the “politics is downstream of culture” trope. I still think culture informs politics but it is more complicated than that. Everything is culture and culture is everything. It is a big messy stew of influences that can go both ways.

And it is always the party with the ability to “lean on” the other which will have the most influence until there is such a large preference cascade or a respectability cascade that people feel brave enough to go against the previous incentives and influences.

Today, as in 13 January 2025 when I am writing this, we are referring to this as a “vibe shift” (tomorrow we might be calling it something else, that being the nature of this era).

And of all the various ways an incoming Trump presidency - according to the commentariat - has either ridden or created this vibe shift wave the most talked about person to surf it this week (and I repeat, this week, not last week when it was the resignation of Trudeau, and not whatever shift the vibe has created next week) is Mark Zuckerberg. Who, after years of Meta censorship, has decided that the platforms he has full ownership of are to be a bastions of free speech.

This is good news.

But also a total one eighty. So much so that people are doubting whether Zuckerberg is earnest or if he is only doing it to be in the good graces of the new administration. Then there are all the conspiracy theories that think that Zuckerberg has been chemically altered into a new personality (most involve things given to him after his injury) which are highly entertaining but unverifiable.

But who cares if he is self interested or latently benevolent, the outcome is good.

Likely it is a bit of self-preservation combined with a genuine desire on the part of Zuckerberg to not have to censor anymore. I believe him when he says that he didn’t enjoy having to do the government’s bidding when they would ask him to censor particular content. Now, you might ask, why if he didn’t like what he was being asked to do by the Biden administration or the bureaucracy, why did he do it? Isn’t Meta big enough not to care what the US government thinks… well not really and even if it is, going against the vibe when the vibe has the force of the US government is not easy.

Meta joins a long list of companies that did whatever the zeitgeist demanded of them, so long as they can keep doing the business of business. This includes companies that are still around today that fell inline with the Nazi regime.

Reminding people of this can be amusing.

There are many on the right that valorise the old school business people that had a sense of civic duty and patriotism and would meddle in politics accordingly (either directly or through gifts of money). But it was easy to be a patriot when being one was in vogue. Just as it is easy to billionaire investment activist when activism is in vogue. It is way more difficult to be an Oscar Schindler.

Conservative maybe ask too much of business leaders. We shouldn’t expect them to pushback against the vibe - particularly if it would be bad for business which challenging governments tends to be. Very few business people have ever done this and particularly not founders who have built their business and now are out to protect it at whatever cost (the inheritors of family businesses seem to be a bit different).

We shouldn’t wait around for business to change the culture and influence politics as so many on the right have done for so long. We need to change the politics to change business. And only when that happens do you see the preference cascade of all the people, like Zuckerberg, that went along with whatever the previous “current thing” was.

Sitting in Australia it feels like the vibe hasn’t shifted in any realm. Corporations are still Woke and DEIing, and the announcement from Zuckerberg has led to a deluge of articles about all the hate speech and misinformation this will lead to.

Peter Dutton launched his campaign slogan for the upcoming election “Get Australia Back on Track” and - to use the Gen-Z vernacular, it is giving beige. Like the Albo government was a small blip on an otherwise stellar track record of Australian governance. When Labor hit back with the fact they inherited a massive budget deficient, they aren’t wrong. All that COVID cash, that was a Coalition government. Albo’s government has just made it a whole lot worse.

And that is just one issue. Censorship is another that the Coalition started, the e-Karen is on them, Albo just turbo charged her. And the recent suite of awful bills like the Digital ID and social media age restrictions all passed with Coalition support.

Does anyone want to get back on track? I am really not feeling the vibe here.

The track hasn’t been right for a long time now. Albo has just sped up the pace.

If there was a time for a bold move, to ride the vibe shift wave it would be now, but nothing about Dutton tells me he “gets it”.

It’s just another election between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Unless something drastic changes, I will be voting for a minor party again.