The Shift to Vibes or Nick Catucci's 'vibe shift' roundtable

It's been five years since I diagnosed the vibe shift, and in that time I've been approached innumerable times about what is the new vibe. Were we in a vibecession? Were the vibes shifting left and against the right? Was there a Kamala vibe shift? An anti-Trump vibe shift? Had woke returned, shifting the vibes once and for all?

Something I've noticed over these last five years is that vibes, like presidential elections, happen at the margins — and the shifts, like the political narratives that come in every election's wake, are attempts at making the marginal general. Trump may have won the popular and the electoral votes in November 2024, but did his 1.5% margin of victory really give him a sweeping mandate?

The big swings, like Reagan's blowout election in 1984, or the death of disco, just don't happen anymore. Even vulgar decade-ism feels inadequate to describe our present — though this may be more an artifact of our ability to see clearly congealed decades retrospectively, not when we are in the midst of them.

Vibes have become our preferred unit of measurement because they work well to describe a culture that is in the process of fragmenting. Vibe shift worked well to describe the moment millennials handed the baton to Gen Z as the stewards of youth culture because Gen Z will likely be the last generation to remember any semblance of a mainstream, just as millennials are the last generation to remember a time before the internet.

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This is the way a trend ends. This is the way a trend ends. This is the way a trend ends. Not with a bang but a whimper…

Today OpenAI’s merch arm, Supply Co. released what we can only hope is the last in a long line of attempts at merging the Silicon Valley sweater set (T-shirt and hoodie) with the hypebeast culture of streetwear. It's all very 2010s—but…

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Sometimes I sense an exhaustion with the neologism Olympics. Portmanteaus, Germanic-inflected compounds, digital gobbledygook, and meme suffixes—most recently -maxxing and -slop.

And yet…the language engine that is the Internet chugs on.

Some of the eye-rolling stems from a desire for more thoughtful discourse. Something the academy has not been providing for twenty-some-odd years. And no, Substack is not providing this either.

Some of it stems from living in an era where the median age ticks ever upward and the number of young Americans declines. Perhaps rightfully, forty-year-olds resent the idea they should have to keep abreast of teenage slang.

Slang is supposed to annoy people. Its linguistic purpose is to create boundaries between subcultures, stymying outsiders from understanding what is being said.

But it’s also supposed to be fun. The friction is part of the pleasure.

In that vein, here are some new words I heard on a recent trip to New York.

yachtstitute

/ˈjɒtstɪˌtuːt/ noun · informal, often derogatory

1. A person — typically a young woman — who cultivates the company of wealthy men aboard yachts and at attendant events (regattas, film festivals, resort seasons) in exchange for luxury, access, or payment. “How many yachtstitutes did you see at Cannes?”—my friend Lauren at Sant Ambroeus

2. (broadly) Anyone whose glamour is contingent on proximity to someone else’s boat. “He wasn’t crew and he wasn’t a guest — just a yachtstitute in good linen.”

plural yachtstitutes · (often used attributively: yachtstitute economy, yachtstitute season)

Origin: Blend of yacht + prostitute, following the productive slang pattern of -stitute coinages. Popularized in tabloid and social-media commentary on the Mediterranean superyacht circuit. First known use: 21st century (informal).

Synonyms: yacht girl, deckhand-adjacent (euph.), charter companion

Related forms: yachtstitution (noun)

wordslip

/ˈwɜːrdslɪp/ noun

1. The process by which a word’s mistaken use — a malapropism, a hypercorrection, an inference drawn from its parts rather than its history — hardens into a standard sense, eventually displacing or rivalling the original. ”Gen Alpha’s new definition of preppy is a classic wordslip.”—my friend Paul walking home from another Paul’s Casablanca.

2. The resulting word, especially one caught mid-transition, meaning two contradictory things at once depending on the speaker’s age. ”Nonplussed is a live wordslip: to one generation stunned, to the next unbothered.”

Origin: Coined compound, word + slip, in the sense “small inadvertent error.” No attested usage.

Related forms: wordslipped (adjective, of a term already relocated); wordslippage (noun)

Examples:

• literally — hyperbole hardening into an intensifier, until the word answers to its own antonym.

• nonplussed — reanalysis from the parts (non- read as “not bothered”), producing a sense opposite to “bewildered.”

• prep — wholesale re-referencing: a class marker hollowed out and refilled with a color palette, by a cohort that never held the original referent.

narcglasses

/ˈnɑːrkˌɡlæsɪz/ noun · plural, informal

1. Camera-equipped smart glasses, especially Snap’s Specs and Meta’s Glasses. “Does anyone even know if the narcglasses are on?”—discussing the Kylie Jenner campaign for her new Meta collaboration.

Origin: Coined compound of narc (informant, narcotics officer; by extension, anyone who surveils and reports) + glasses, on the model of beer goggles.

brand victim

/ˈbrænd ˌvɪktɪm/ noun

1. An update of fashion victim for an era when the allegiance has spread past clothing to the entire field of consumption: a person whose identity is organized around the brands they buy — not merely overdressed but over-affiliated, performing membership in Erewhon, Stanley, Aesop, Rhode, Labubu as a substitute for taste or self.

2. (broadly) The consumer as unpaid marketing: someone who does the brand’s advertising for free, mistaking loyalty for identity. “The queue outside the drop was fifty brand victims deep before sunrise.”

plural brand victims · (often attributive: brand-victim economy)

Origin: Modeled on fashion victim, the term attributed to Oscar de la Renta for a person unable to recognize the boundaries of style — at risk, in the classic formulation, of becoming a “walking billboard.”

notes on brand victims

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It struck me last night: social media has lost the ability to generate mass hysteria.

It ended sometime in 2021, as the pandemic was winding down and I declared a vibe shift.

Discourse has rushed around, chasing after new social and technological developments—but the masses seem nonplussed in both the modern sense of the word and according to the traditional definition.

A quiver moves through the social body and then abruptly…stops.

Remember:

• wokeness?

• MRNA vaccines?

• social media censorship?

• misinformation?

• crypto?

• NFTs?

We’re now in the midst of the same cycle with AI and its corollary slop. It’s all discursive feints. And every one misses the mark.

Everyone is in a rush to declare Year Zero. But no one seems to care.

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Last week, I released a timeline tracing the genealogy of prep. A comment from a subscriber alerted me to a new usage of the word among Gen Alpha—a new term now used for middle schoolers and younger. (I've already written that I’m not convinced our current generational schematic is correct—but let's go with it for the sake of this post.)

I asked Claude about the new Gen Alpha usage of the word and it replied with a cache of TikToks from the last two or three years: befuddled Gen X parents, middle school teachers, and memeologists all detailing Preppy Nation. The aesthetic is neon pink, frilly, features ubiquitous smiley faces and has a fascination with Stanley cups. It's counter-positioned to emo, which does feel in line with preppy's original meaning. In the eighties, preppiness was juxtaposed to punk and goth. In the nineties and 2000s, the same dichotomy prevailed but in a more productized suburban setting: Hot Topic vs. Abercrombie & Fitch.

If I were to add Preppy Nation to the chart, it would descend from Lilly Pulitzer and Abercrombie & Fitch, with a dose of Golden Goose and Love Shack Fancy—the tacky post–Gossip Girl brands that dominated the tween wardrobes of Upper East Side private girls some years back.

The tension between tacky and tasteful has always defined preppiness.

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Doom is the prefix du jour. Doomscrolling, doomposting, doomsplaining, doomspreading, doomgooing, and doomliving dominate discourse. (Ok, I made the last two up.) Doom joins other recent meme morphemes—the suffixes -maxxing, -pilled, and -slop—in giving our discussions about a contemporary life an overtly negative cast. Doomspending, …

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A few years ago I had a phase where I would watch old seasons of The Real World on The Internet Archive. These were seasons not included on Paramount+: Boston, Seattle, New Orleans, Hawaii. Incidentally, the last good seasons of the series. They aired before the debut of Survivor (2000), the hit show that introduced mainstream America, not just MTV's youth audience, to unscripted content; before Paris Hilton's The Simple Life (2003) popularized the idea that reality television could be a vehicle for celebrity status. This was before the Writers Guild of America strike of 2007–2008 taught Hollywood that producers could craft narrative arcs just as well as writers.

Early participants in reality television, like David Burns from The Real World: Seattle, were innocents. The project was pitched as a social experiment—an interesting experience for those in their early twenties, uncertain about their place in the world—not a path to fame. But as he recounted in a 2019 Jezebel interview, by the time his season aired in 1998 the game had already changed:

It was a complete shock for me. I had gone on a study abroad trip to Morocco five days after we wrapped shooting. I went and lived in Fez and Marrakesh for an entire summer. I was in a different headspace. I actually kind of forgot that I had done the show. Then, when I got back, I got off the plane in JFK Airport and I was swarmed by people outside of customs. I had no idea what the fuck was going on.

Clavicular, of course, is nothing like David Burns, despite his content's uncanny resemblance to MTV's original unscripted franchise (the ambient apartment settings, the dark nightclub confrontations, the confessional asides to the camera, the socially relevant scandals). His rise to fame and notoriety was calculated. His onstream antics are calibrated to maximize outrage. He is a Chad in search of virality. All of which is true, and yet there is something experimental about his endeavor.

I'm not so sure he intended to overdose or to be sued for sexual assault. His forays into the grey market of peptides and body modifications have already had potentially life-altering side effects. (Clavicular claims he is infertile due to the testosterone and steroid protocol he began when he was 14.) In unguarded moments onstream—perhaps when the meth is wearing off—he looks exhausted. One wonders when the show airs 24/7, how long can it go on?

Harmony Korine claims streamers from Clavicular's generation are the new filmmakers, "iShowSpeed is a movie. Kai Cenat is a movie." Or, put even more grandiosely, "iShowSpeed is the new Tarkovsky." iShowSpeed is the new Road Rules, The Real World's Winnebago spin-off. His recent trip through Africa is just another iteration of the travel show, broadcast on Twitch rather than cable.

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the dancefloor is dead

In the last twelve hours, Charli XCX’s new single has racked up over 3 million views on X and is charting at #17 on YouTube’s music Trending chart. Ever since Charli teased the refrain in British Vogue, "They say the dance floor is dead / So now we're making rock music," the song has courted controversy with her dedicated Brat-era fanbase.

The first line's observation that the dance floor is dead is well borne out statistically. Bars, restaurants, and clubs are closing at a frightening clip as alcohol consumption—their primary revenue source—falls off a cliff. In a recent clip from The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference, the DJ and producer Diplo, who has worked with Charli XCX in the past, claimed run clubs would replace nightclubs. "More peptide shots, fewer tequila shots" was how Gunjan Banerji, host of The WSJ Money Interview, framed it.

but are we making rock music?

Despite AI-drafted letters from disappointed fans framing the single as "trend-chasing," "Rock Music" feels nothing like rock revival darlings Geese or Fontaines D.C., or "indie sleaze"-adjacent acts like The Dare or The Hellp; nor is it a pastiche of 2000s indie icons like The Strokes or The Killers. The song is minimal: a simple electronic synth and guitar riff repeating across two verses, broken up by crashing drums and glitched-out vocals on the final phrase of each refrain—"rock music."

The song is an earworm, coming in at a tight two minutes and three seconds. It’s optimized to be listened to on repeat, and we can already see the meta-calculation paying memetic dividends. The rock glitch has already become a TikTok template. Like the "Apple" dance from her breakout album Brat, music in the 2020s flourishes when it compresses motion and sound into a viral meme.

This is where rock music has historically struggled.

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In the shadow of the Duomo, I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2. Throughout the surrounding piazza, advertisements for the sequel set in fashion's iconic second city spread behind the cathedral, including a selfie station featuring six-foot-tall red pumps with the film's trademark pitchfork heels. The May Day crowds—those shopping not protesting—happily posed with the diavolo.

Their excitement has already registered at the box office, both domestically and internationally. Early figures anticipate the film may clear $75 to $100M globally.

As a recent Fandango study reported, Gen Z and millennials are returning to theatres and to no one's surprise, all the summer's most anticipated movies are reboots or sequels, The Devil Wears Prada 2 included.

Nostalgia is the greatest cultural force of our decade. Millennials want to relive their childhoods. Gen Z wants to relive someone else's. (47% of American 18-29 year-olds wish they lived in the 80s, 90s, or early 2000s, according to a recent NBC News Desk poll.)

The Zoomers yearn for the sidekick.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 delivers on what nostalgic audiences want: the same movie but different. Meryl Streep returns in cinematic Anna Wintour drag as Runway's editor-in-chief, Miranda Priestly. Anne Hathaway resumes her role as Andy Sachs, the plucky journalist slash self-insert for Lauren Weisberger, author of the original bestseller. Stanley Tucci is Nigel Kipling is André Leon Talley and Emily Blunt is Emily Charlton, recently revealed to be loosely based on celebrity stylist Leslie Fremar.

But the film quickly becomes bogged down in characters. We get three new assistants: a new Emily named Amari, played by Simone Ashley (clearly a mispronunciation of the LA streetwear brand Amiri); comedian-cum-podcaster Caleb Hearon as the new Andy, nicknamed Chair by his co-workers because he's not allowed to leave his desk; and Helen Shen as Jin Chao, Andy's striver sidekick. Andy's boyfriend Nate is absent—Adrian Grenier has been replaced by Patrick Brummel, who plays Andy's new love interest Peter, a depressingly middle-aged real estate developer. Tracie Thoms returns as Lily, Andy's best friend. Once again, she is gifted a bag. But rather than an of-the-moment it bag, she receives a semiotic stinker from Valentino.

Additions that drive the plot include BJ Novak as Jay Ravitz, Runway's new nepo-baby owner, and Justin Theroux as Benji Barnes, Emily's looksmaxxed billionaire boyfriend, a caricature of tech wealth so ignorant and eccentric that at a dinner party in the shadow of Leonardo's The Last Supper, he muses that he doesn't want to go to the moon, but rather the sun. Unaware of the irony, he declares his solar craft will be called Icarus. Lucy Liu plays his ex, Sasha Barnes, a fictionalized version of impact investor MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos' former wife, technically a tech billionaire, but an ostensibly ethical one.

Cameos included but were not limited to: Tina Brown, Jenna Bush Hager, Winnie Harlow, Heidi Klum, Donatella Versace and Lady Gaga, who released a pastiche of Madonna's "Vogue" with Doechii for the film's original soundtrack. As in the franchise, "Vogue" is called "Runway."

Like all successful sequels, The Devil Wears Prada 2 relies on layers of self-referential in-jokes. We open with an establishing shot of the New York skyline, the post-9/11 absence of the Twin Towers now filled by One World Trade Center. The same opening song, "Suddenly I See" by KT Tunstall, plays as Andy Sachs once again bops through her morning routine.

Crosstown, Runway readies for their imitation Met Gala, unveiling a cerulean carpet. (Remember Miranda Priestly's infamous speech about the color blue?) In a twist, the theme is "Spring Florals." In 2006, Priestly could roll her eyes: "Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking." But Runway in 2026 is not Runway in 2006.

Concessions must be made.

Inevitably with a film so mired in its own past, The Devil Wears Prada 2 lacks the timeliness and timelessness of the original. Similar to And Just Like That, the costumes are overblown and not particularly contemporary. They share a costume designer, Molly Rogers, who worked under Pat Field, the genius behind the iconic looks in Sex and the City and the original film. Down-to-earth Andy brags about her vintage Margiela and owns a pair of sequined gaucho pants. Emily works for Jonathan Anderson's Dior and yet seems to only wear logomaniacal pieces inspired by Demna's tenure at Balenciaga. And every female character wears the same cat-eyed sunglasses shape. Is it product placement or a trend I am unaware of?

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There are three brands that recur over and over in slop: Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci. They form the brandslop triad. On the one hand, this highlights the legibility of the brands for a mass audience. The Louis Vuitton monogram print, Gucci G’s, and sans-serif Balenciaga font trigger instant brand recognition. But in the era of AI slop, legibility means loss of control.

Legibility allows luxury brands to appeal to the lowest common denominator of fashion consumers. This makes a brand like Louis Vuitton a sales powerhouse. But it’s also why when Andrew Tate decides to knock off a brand and designate a style of eyewear “Top G” sunglasses, Louis is the brand that lands in his sights.

You can only trade aura for market share for so long.

The brandslop triad is how you signal luxury to the masses. They appear in AI Fruit Love Island. They appear in the new viral Dripwarts videos, playing on the HBO reboot of Harry Potter.

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The ghost of status continues to haunt our cultural discourse.

Its current avatar is the dinergoth: the downwardly-mobile, vape-puffing, cat-ear-wearing, blue-haired, tatted-up denizen of small town and suburban America. The dinergoth works retail, collects benefits, does OnlyFans. They're adventurous in their sexual appetites and gender identities; addicted to video games and social media; and immune to old codes of conformity.

And while I'm wary of calling this phenomenon a subculture. They do share one trait with their goth forebearers. They’ve spawned a moral panic.

According to The New Atlantis, the publication that popularized the viral term, American dinergoth describes:

Placelessness without cosmopolitanism and with complacent downward mobility. A post-subcultural 'alt' aesthetic. Queerness but casual and prole-ified.

Dinergoth: 'diner' for provincialism, 'goth' as lazy shorthand for alternative aesthetics.

The term is supposed to name something new, but subcultural aesthetics have always been downwardly mobile. That's why the classic subcultures people always point to—punk, grunge, goth, and emo—were all seen as symptoms of social decline. The best neologisms describe something genuinely new in the world. Others work because they reframe the familiar. Dinergoth is an example of the latter and not a particularly sharp one.

The triumph of this new term is apparently symbolized by a cover from Emmy Magazine featuring mainstream cartoons such as Bob’s Burgers, which began airing in 2011. Even Helluva Boss, the adult animation that the accompanying piece "Vibing in the Ruins" goes into detail framing as paradigmatic of this aesthetic, began airing roughly six years ago and shares a visual affinity with Invader ZIM, which ran on Nickelodeon from 2001 to 2006.

Once again, the new thing is that there really aren't any new things.

the rationale of the striver class

Most of America is in decline. This is true in both spatial and demographic terms. Midtier cities, inner-ring suburbs, un-gentrified downtowns, rural counties, small towns. The anxiety of our rising striver class is reasonable.

What does it mean to cast yourself as an elite in an era of decline?

This sentiment is the origin of Europoor discourse too. America may not be doing well, but it’s doing marginally better than its peer competitors. It's not ideal. But it's something.

That’s why complacency is key to understanding this framing of downward mobility in 21st century America. The upper middle class needs to believe that the economic woes of others are due to a moral failing. That if the dinergoths really wanted to succeed in America, they could. To contemplate that maybe there are structural forces at play which prevent everyone from being upper middle class is to admit that maybe forces beyond your control could one day push you down that same slope.

your half-zip won’t save you

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This image stopped me in my tracks:

I knew things were bad. But seeing it laid out hits different.

Has there ever been a decade in which technology has been so aesthetically stuck? The issue isn't price. These may be Apple's "low-cost" offerings, but the premium tier looks more-or-less exactly the same. Why is this the case?

Because Apple is the most successful company in the world. Only the Latin American cartels and parastatal conglomerates like the British East India Company can compete for the title. Addiction—whether to dopamine (screens), caffeine (tea), or narcotics (drugs) is immaterial—is the only way to achieve S-tier success.

The form factor of Apple devices is immaterial to the addictive properties of its products. Samsung's phones buzz, condition, and hypnotize consumers just as well. But people are finicky about their addictions, especially the upper-middle class, whose spending powers the consumer economy. (The much cited statistic is that the top 10% of U.S. earners account for half of all consumer spending nationwide.)

The iPhone is the spritz cocaine to the off-brand smartphone's crack rock. It's Maru Coffee versus Monster Energy. Adderall pills instead of trucker speed.

You’ll notice, most of the "better-than" versions of addictive products are not conspicuously sophisticated. They're premium mediocre as tech writer Venkatesh Rao once put it. Brand as vestigial social anxiety. Just good enough to prove (so you think) that you are not downwardly mobile, to prove you are 'normcore' not normal.

That story still dominates the upper-middle class psyche, the millennial upper-middle class psyche especially. They didn't want to be conformist suburbanites like their parents, they needed another rationale, another alibi. But the athleisure and millennial grey remodels betrayed that this was a fear-driven consumer trend.

Like so many trends, its origins come from misinterpreted class codes of the past.

The casual, inconspicuous WASP of the popular imagination, hiding out in his white clapboard New England colonial, his Cape Cod covered in cedar shingles bleached grey by salt and sun, his clothing frugal and frayed. His car might be rusted and rumbling, but he has no social anxiety. His real estate is like his status, inherited.

That's always been the issue the American upper-middle class has confronted. How to flex without flexing? But when you have to buy your own furniture.

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Baby Batemans or “Meet the Finest Boys in Finance”

Vape Shop Chic or Gucci FW26

Taste or ‘the new core skill’

Ugly Americans of Pew’s new survey on public morality

Two things caught my eye this fashion month: Demna's runway debut at Gucci and Interview Magazine's editorial "Meet the Finest Boys in Finance". Both are statements about status in 2026 and the degree to which nobody knows what is high-status anymore.

Luxury goods used to be a reliable indicator. But as Demna well knows, a Gucci cross-body bag is more likely to be worn by a drug dealer than an Ivy League alum. And even if an Ivy League student bought one, are we sure that student is even literate? Princeton isn't. The university may introduce proctors to its examinations for the first time since its honor code was introduced 133 years ago. But as the viral success of the cheating startup Cluely proves, honor codes don’t work in our newly low-trust culture. We are living through the 'looting the treasury' phase of the American empire, and there is no honor among thieves.

That bag is a dupe and so is that degree.

This was the issue Demna had to solve: how to reinvigorate a brand whose truest expression is the knock-off? Whose essence is distilled in the musty basements beneath Canal Street? The semiotic code of Gucci is tackiness. It's status anxiety. The Gucci consumer believes the monogram, the racing stripes, and, more than anything, the logo hold magical properties that will transform the wearer, that will make them wealthier, more beautiful, more respected. And if you believe these symbols hold these fantastical powers, why shouldn’t they transform the lowly knock-off too?

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first, the depressing part:

People like to say we live in a 'post-literate' society…

I'm not so sure. 'Post-literate' seems more like a polite way to say 'illiterate' than a description of a fundamentally new reality. In a viral article published in The Atlantic’s October 2024 issue, Rose Horowitch detailed the decline in reading whole texts (as opposed to excerpts) even in America's most elite educational institutions, the Ivy League.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Perhaps this is what 'post-literate' means: a person who should theoretically be able to read a book, but due to the attention-atrophying effects of technology simply cannot.

And this is, again, our most elite students.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a federal agency within the Department of Education, our literacy rate dipped from 82% in 2017 to 79% in 2023. By another metric, published by the National Literacy Institute, 54% of Americans read at or below a sixth-grade reading level. This translates to difficulty comprehending a newspaper article or following detailed instructions for medication.

Again, The Atlantic covered the matter. This time in their October 2025 issue. Idrees Kahloon writes:

We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is "below basic"—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992.

As AI doomposters keep reminding us on X, we only have three years to escape permanent underclass! Presumably literacy will be a requirement to accomplish that.

But who knows. Claude is perfectly capable of reading to its users.

Maybe that's what post-literate really means: rule by illiterate oligarchs.

I, for one, welcome our illiterate (or is it post-literate?) overlords.

• The School for Kids Who Can't Read Good or Ivy League illiteracy

• Post-COVID Problems or the decline in educational attainment

now, the silver lining:

Recently, I’ve noticed an uptick in must-read articles.

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My dear friend and sometimes astrological, Chris Gabriel gave me a rundown of the portentous celestial movements of 2026. Subscribe to his Substack below:

Effluvia

MemeAnalysis, the Internet, and the Paranormal

By Chris Gabriel

2026 astrological forecast

• January 26th—Neptune enters Aries

• February 13th—Saturn entered Aries, conjoining Neptune

• February 17th—Solar Eclipse in Aquarius

• April 25th—Uranus enters Gemini

If one wants to understand cultural movement, one has to zoom out. Most people are familiar with sun sign astrology, they know the day they were born falls into one of 12 signs, this is useless for understanding trends and greater cycles, for that purpose we must look at the “Outer Planets”, the three slowest in solar system: Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (it is a planet!)

Uranus is electricity, radiation, technology, revolution, and shock. While the 7 traditional planets bear a marked resemblance to their mythic namesake, the new planets relate moreso to the environments and dynamics at play in the myth. Uranus is the first Sky Father, his name literally means Sky, he was married to Gaia, Mother Earth, but angered her when he trapped his monstrous children underground, Gaia had her son Saturn castrate and murder Uranus. As such, planetary Uranus is about revolution and overthrow, rather than the sky.

This year, Uranus returns to Gemini. It dipped into Gemini last year, from July 7th to November 7th, but after April 25th, it will be there until 2033.

This is particularly significant for the United States, which was “born” under Uranus in Gemini, as such it tends to play a significant role for the country: Uranus was in Gemini from 1859-1866, coinciding with the Civil War, and again from 1941-1945, coinciding with the second World War.

Gemini is the sign of duality, the Twins. Though this is by no means a sign of simple brotherly love, here the brothers can in fact be Cain and Abel, as with the wars Uranus Gemini has influenced.

Neptune is dreamy, confused, delusional, and vast. Where Neptune the God is angry, Neptune the planet is his domain itself, the Waters. When we think of Neptune we should think of the Odyssey, of strange islands and monsters, confusion and misdirection. It entered Aries on January 26th and will be there until 2039. This is the second time in United States history, the previous being from 1861-1875, which again, coincided with the Civil War.

Aries is the sign of aggression and war, as such this is confused anger and violence.

Pluto is extreme, destructive, primordial and terrible. While Pluto the God is solemn and sad, the Planet is Hell itself. Pluto started dipping into Aquarius in 2023, but fully entered toward the end of 2024 and will be there until 2043. This is the first Pluto return for the United States. Pluto was in Aquarius throughout the American and French revolutions.

Aquarius is the collective, the mob, and the people, whereas Leo is the Monarch and individual. Pluto radically transformed and enraged the people.

All of this is to say this is a year where immense, long term changes are beginning. All of the outer planets are in new signs, with a particular relationship to the United States.

In the shorter term though, let’s look at Saturn’s entry into Aries which occurred on February 13th, conjoining Neptune at 0*. Saturn is labour, work, difficulties, and material reality itself. Both Neptune and Saturn were in Pisces the last several years, under which we saw the dreamy moralistic nature of Pisces flood out into the world, Social Justice, New Age spirituality, digital religions, and extreme politics all began to spread under Neptune in Pisces, as Neptune travels through Aries, we will see spiritual and ideological conflict come to a fever pitch, and with the help of Saturn, come into reality, if I were a betting man, I would bet on war.

On the 17th we will see a Solar Eclipse in Aquarius, far from Pluto which is only at the 4th degree, this Eclipse is at the 28th degree, which places it in square with Uranus in Taurus It is going to show us about the next few years and the influence of Saturn and Neptune in Aries.

the eclipse, the age of aquarius, and what comes next…

The following is a transcript of our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity:

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