the vibes shift or post-social media
things right now 050—week of 09.29.25
Vibes or Meta’s new AI app
Sora or OpenAI’s new AI app
Peak Social Media or social media has been in decline since 2022
Gen Alpha or youth preferences for film viewing
Over lunch at Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, an eighty-something-year-old artist muses that her nephew’s children may be the last to remember a world before AI. We’re discussing Vibes, the new Meta app, that serves up a stream of AI-generated content with no human creators involved. She’s right, of course. Gen Z will be the last generation to remember a world before AI, just like millennials are the last generation to remember a world before the internet.
My friend Alberto, a recent transplant from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, had invited me to lunch with his octogenarian friend on my last afternoon in San Francisco. From Mario’s, we headed to the Transamerica Pyramid, the brutalist concrete pyramid that spent almost half a century as the tallest building in the city (only to be displaced by the Salesforce Tower in 2018). They had a show of Max Ernst bronzes in the neighboring park and an Eames exhibition on the ground floor. All of this, we were told, by an excitable docent with a greying ponytail named Gary, was part of an attempt to revitalize the city’s doom-loop-battered downtown.
Shielded from the shadow of the skyscraper by a thicket of redwood trees, twelve Ernst sculptures, never previously exhibited together dotted the park’s landscaping and fountains. Atavistic and surreal, the felt at home under the hundred-foot trees in the fresh, oxygenated air. Mermaids, sphinxes, owls, and ghosts in biomorphic, rough-hewn shapes, freshly unearthed from a Swiss freeport no doubt, and planted here amongst the concrete and the pine needles, they felt ominous. Completed in France between 1938 and 1939, just before the outbreak of World War 2, they were from the last year of the last age; the last time the world order was remade.
Inside, the Eames show featured the design vernacular of the world order we now seem to be leaving. Titled “Past as Prologue”, its curators are more optimistic than I am that we are heading into a new age of rationality. Although maybe there is something to it. "WHAT WORKS GOOD IS BETTER THAN WHAT LOOKS GOOD, BECAUSE WHAT WORKS GOOD LASTS" a wall text blares. That seems somewhat relevant to artificial intelligence. AI slop does not look good. But will it work good? That’s the question to ask.
Somewhere over the arctic, while the flu incubated in my bloodstream, OpenAI released Sora 2. Hot and tired, I decide to take a cab from Heathrow to the furnished flat I rented for the month, a stone’s throw from the eastern edge of the City of London. Like every other time I’ve taken a cab from a London airport, I immediately regret it. The hour and twenty minute estimated drive time stretches to two hours and ten minutes. Fever climbing as we crawl through Knightsbridge, I open X and see Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, in blackface; Sam Altman dressed in a French maid’s uniform; Sam Altman being recorded by a body-camera after being detained by the California Highway Patrol.