Vibes can inspire action, in part by refracting vague individual feelings into focused behaviors targeting other individuals. This has become key to the “culture war” targeting everyone from trans people to Black people to anyone in need of an abortion. It can reduce all matters of substance to vibes-to theatrical emotion and performances of feeling. You’re given an aesthetic Rorschach inkblot to associate with, to develop an emotional attachment to.īut that same affordance of vibe-generation has a darker side. It’s the way the internet manages to speak to millions while somehow appearing to know you specifically. That efficiency is born of the same internet that gives us chill lo-fi beats, mood boards, and aesthetic Toks: the vague fuzziness of a feeling, a vibe settling around you like a blanket of serotonin. But what is new is the efficiency with which men like Gowan’s harasser are mobilized. Such bigotry isn’t new even the strategy of linking queer people to pedophilia isn’t particularly new. She was targeted simply because she was a transgender woman her attacker’s profanity-laced tirade was a perfect echo of rhetoric used by Republican politicians and, most especially, cadres of internet users who’ve seized on incendiary language like “grooming” to describe the mere existence of trans and queer people in public spaces. On Saturday, April 9, Saorise Gowan was riding the Washington DC Metro’s Green Line to visit friends when a man began to film and verbally abuse her-accusing her of “grooming” children for sexual abuse.
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