Paradigm Shift

The concept that our thoughts form who we are and what we attract–rendering the universe a passive object–isn’t new. Florence Scovel Shinn, the Mother of Christian Science, felt that one could control their fate with their thoughts, particularly when it came to money. The groundwork for modern prosperity theology and manifestation can be seen in several of her early publications (well before the publication of The Secret). Shinn’s philosophies lend themselves well to what the late Franklin Covey, the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, referred to as “personality/charisma ethic,” which is an ethic oriented toward the superficial. In today’s nomenclature, this is often referred to as “self-optimization”: how to make oneself richer and hotter to produce an aura of glamor. Carl Jung referred to the “personality/charisma ethic” as the persona realm. This is where most of us comfortably exist, estranged from our shadow, driving us to glamorize and aestheticize mediocrity by sprucing up ideas with a pseudo-intellectual or spiritual polish.

In 2020, TikTok users embraced the idea of CIA-backed “science,” sparked by the circulation of documents from a 1983 CIA study, dubbed “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process,” declassified in 2003. This study proposed that consciousness operates as a “complex system of energy fields,” suggesting humans can manipulate it through the Gateway Experience. Shared visually, without the need for reading, this information was touted as scientific evidence for beliefs such as manifestation, the Law of Attraction, and astral projection. A parallel trend in New York City dubbed “vibe shift” mirrored this phenomenon with similar substance-lite ideas.

Whether it’s the incessant naming of fashion trends I wrote about for Vox, or the phenomenology of “vibe shift” or “culture is stuck,” herds of people rapidly communicate through the collective unconscious, marrying vibes to aesthetic cues because, in our hyper-visual world, aesthetics spread quickly, boosting visibility and lowering the bar for in-group adoption of ideas.

This Baudrillardian hyperreality, or what I refer to as hyperreal individualism, is driven by platform capitalism and an unprecedented level of social connectivity, fostering meta-communication—how information is interpreted— that’s increasingly intuitive, mimetic, and vibe-oriented. There’s no universally agreed-upon reality to anchor truth; instead, there’s an endless stream of cultic milieus, entropy. Hyperreal individualism, then, becomes a performance of identity-as-capital amid the absence of a shared reality and cultural centrality, embracing identity performances, aesthetics, affects, symbols, signals and gestures over tangible facts.

Influencer-messiahs such as Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan — with Marrianne Williamson trailing softly from a certain feminine remove — capitalize(d) on our energy-sensitive contemporary landscape. Their savvy marketing looked like interpretations of “truth” reorganized around new words, often with a repackaging of traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, neoliberalism, and American exceptionalism. Their followers, much like the “vibe shifters,” believe they challenge established “mainstream” ideologies. Their perceived ideological adversaries may indeed represent mainstream viewpoints, but their own highly popular and derivative stances—along with the various “-pilled” epistemes they’ve inspired—are not in conflict with contemporary morality simply because they contradict the equally prevalent, competing worldviews that they have rejected and reconfigured.

The incoherence and illegibility of these logics is a ploy to attract attention and generate profit—a gimmick. As explained by Sianne Ngai in Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, the gimmick is an aesthetic category that is simultaneously laborious, yet underperforming, working overtime to signal fluency but insufficiently demonstrating it.

In a post titled “Gimmick Girl,” I wrote about the gimmick, broadly applying Ngai’s ideas to those performing the identity of the Substack girl for capital:

The best gimmicks come to me during bouts of interrupted sleep. That is when I become a student of neuroplasticity, growth hacking, manifestation, human design, shadow work and astrology by way of Tiktok. Crunching the numbers like the meme of the guy with the complicated formulas on the chalkboard, I do supermath, multiplying the blessings promised at the intersection of science and woo-woo.

A woman calling me “bestie” in an overfamiliar tone insists that I purchase a product from the Tiktok shop. I venture to her profile where there’s a curated playlist of affirmations and a playlist discussing various healing modalities. She is not a licensed therapist or doctor, despite performing therapy in front of her camera.

The infomercials on basic cable back in the basement of my childhood home came to me during similar bouts. I would sit transfixed by the glow of the old school, fat-backed television as a familiar mantra repeatedly buzzed: “Call now—this amazing offer won’t last long!” The ad’s narrators always promised fulfillment with such urgency, and I would believe them every time because I desperately wanted to be cured of being a modern girl.

Similarly, watching Oprah in the 1990s and 2000s quelled my desperation and hopelessness with an almost irresistible urge to act, though I never quite made it off the couch. Oprah was everything—a teacher, cultural critic, therapist, and spiritual advisor rolled into one—even before our information-dense culture demanded it.

Gullibility and susceptibility are directly proportional to that hopelessness, that desperation. All these years later, I still often feel desperate and hopeless enough to call the number on the screen, even as the numbers and the screens have changed. I still cling to empty Oprahisms like Reva does in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I still crave the fast-food fantasy of change as the solution to the modern problem of identity (and the modern problem of the performance of identity as capital), as the solution to the hopelessness it produces as well. I’m no less immune to the allure of the gimmick or the despair that drives us toward it. This hopelessness pushes us to speed-run self-actualization alongside self-optimization because careerism, the persona realm, and the performance of identity for capital demand it. This is an exploitable condition under capitalism. It’s the space from which the identity of the therapist is performed and commodified on TikTok, outside its traditional context, and the space many try to perform the identity of a writer on Substack.

Identities—the desires, politics, and social constructions of them—aren’t solely our own. They are communally authored, shaped by a never-ending dialogue with the world, the social internet, and the systems and algorithms of modernity we’ve all found ourselves ensnared in due to the widening information sphere and platform capitalism, contributing to an increasingly intuitive, mimetic, and vibes-oriented cultural landscape. In the age of hyperreal individualism, there is only post-truth “identity performances, aesthetics, affects, symbols, signals, and gestures” meant to alchemize us from girls into gimmicks.

To become a gimmick itself—no credentialism, just vibes—is to be consumed by those seeking language, tools, and frameworks to fill their voids. They graft our words and highly curated identities onto their own like collage, becoming one—not with the universe—but with the gimmick girl, mimetically intertwined with and -pilled by her, wholly supplanted by knowledge divined from her at a pace that aligns with the limitless vision of “having it all,” which includes hypervisibility.

Writer is an easier identity to adopt than therapist, especially with the use of aesthetic cues that make the adoption even simpler. Anyone can be a writer, bypassing the hopelessness—and the labor of real change (practice, apprenticeship, schooling, professionalizing, being edited and mentored)—for a dubious performance of it. Hypervisibility through the aesthetics of information is what it means to be a writer now. It means being a glamorous philosopher, a hot-girl social critic, an esoteric baddie, a femcellectual, a hegelian e-girl, a nymphet public intellectual, a literary it girl, a thought daughter, a gimmick girl.

On Substack, demonstrating competency isn’t a quality issue; it’s about how well you can perform the gimmick—the identity of a writer online—not just for your readers, but also for media workers eager to capitalize on the aesthetics of information with their link round-ups, yet panicked by less credentialed writers doing the same.

We are driven to recycle old ideas in search of a sense of control and meaning, hoping to recapture the novelty of life before our identities were diluted by capitalism and the social internet, as nothing truly feels original anymore. Consequently, in an attempt to revive the novelty and thrill of bygone eras, all current cultural phenomena are imitative—mimetic—in nature. For instance: the transformation of 80s and 90s political correctness discourse into “cancel culture”; trend analysts’ fixation on Gen Z mirroring past cultural discussions about boomers, Gen X, and millennials; and the revisiting of modern men’s and women’s identity crises using new terminology.

Recent years have seen a surge in creators attracting attention through the deliberate aping, and appropriating of various roles. Some unlicensed therapists even perform self-indulgent “therapy” in front of their cameras because now being a therapist is like any other identity that is performed and commodified outside of the traditional academic framework—outside of its established environment. The rise of unlicensed therapists mirrors the emergence of other voices—like hot-girl dilettantes, myself included, as this is what’s required to stand out amidst the cacophony of vibes-driven articulations saturating our contemporary discourse. Aesthetic signaling often marries cultural observations to glamor, cashing in on thinness and beauty. These signalers know that–in the persona realm where an ethic toward the superficial and glib is glamorized–they effortlessly float to the top of an oversaturated ecosystem, algorithmically prioritized over less valued performances of identity.

But similarly, surrealist symbolism juxtaposing the familiar and the absurd resonates with the social internet’s expansion of the information sphere and our increasingly visual world. A notable example is Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, where a perpetually unconscious young woman’s self-absorbed hikikomori lifestyle contrasts with the surreal setting of New York City, highlighting the story’s central paradox: the absurdity of seeking perpetual rest in a cultural epicenter. Moshfegh’s unnamed protagonist is subdued to a rested state devoid of all feminine excess, ironically detached and conventionally beautiful, the perfect vessel for the cultural transmission of the idea that New York City, in the shift from mainstream culture to internet culture, has lost its centrality.

Young girls and women—girlbloggers, babygirls—are responsible for that shift, and conversely, for the virality and cult status of MYRR. No longer are the enthusiasms and cultural products championed by young women confined and ghettoized to a single sphere of influence like in the 2010s with large boyband fandoms or even the microcosmic constellation of social media spheres that make up today’s so-called “femisphere.” Much like the omnipresence of the Google search engine, girl culture now holds a central position, decentralizing previously dominant narratives of maleness, Western spirituality, neoliberal feminism, American exceptionalism, and coastal elitism.

But the heightened visibility of young women does not equate to equality. It does not even signify preferential treatment by algorithms, as racism and sexism remain deeply entrenched within these platforms and the institutions that uphold them, perpetuating resistance against collective influence. Instead, our increased visibility reflects the organic power of our collective presence, which has raised awareness of racial and gender disparities, decentering privileged ideologies while elevating feminine expression and cultural contributions from perspectives traditionally overlooked. The democratization of media made it so there was no barrier to entry to be published, and the strategic leveraging of social media platforms such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook positioned underprivileged groups to the forefront of cultural discourse.

Some individuals oppose these advancements, viewing attention and cultural capital as a zero-sum game where one person’s gain is directly balanced by another person’s loss, thus increasing mimetic rivalry. This heightened competition exacerbates tensions as individuals vie for the same resources much like on Netflix’s The Circle, a reality competition show where players live in separate apartments in the same building, communicating via a social media-like application on their TV screens as avatars, dictating their messages instead of communicating through video calls or typing. Players portray themselves as their real world identities, but occasionally some players knowingly “catfish” as something other than themselves. The assumption is that “catfishing” gives one a competitive advantage, affecting how the game is played. But in practice, it makes almost no difference if the player is playing as their authentic self or not. Nevertheless, it doesn’t stop players from colluding against the perceived “catfish” in an effort to gain social control, effectively isolating and scapegoating them with zero evidence of wrongdoing. The inclusion of so-called “catfishes’‘ showcases our belief that a simple edit to our identities can give us a tactical edge against competitors, even within the context of a game show competition, thus manufacturing authenticity panic: a moral panic regarding aspects within American culture that deal in affect, vibes and perception that can’t be concretely validated and thus resemble fiction.

There’s nothing more American than fear of an arbitrary “other,” whether it’s someone not being what they portray themselves to be or something being presumed a duplication of an original–however inconsequential to our material realities–just because we can’t touch it or taste it. In 2001, Johnathan Franzen attempted to preempt this fate by scoffing at the inclusion of his novel, The Corrections, in Oprah Winfrey’s book club. He didn’t want to become the face of “selling out”–a refrain echoed throughout the media before the normalization of performing one’s prefigured identities for capital made it a moot point. “Selling out” functioned as the ascendent authenticity panic. The shadow of the authenticity panic was Franzen’s inability to see Oprah, a black woman, as an authentic arbiter of taste.

The psychic proxemics of “Dime Square” mirror the Franzen-Oprah feud almost identically. The Dime Square imaginary aims to establish a clear separation from black women, with our deliberate exclusion being the primary means to restore a sense of novelty to the social internet, as well as coolness to whiteness.

This is all facilitated through an aesthetically displeasing indie sleaze revival masquerading as a nod to nostalgic content from girlbloggers. The digital—where the black people are—can’t be the container for a white grievance culture built on opposition to sincerity, vulnerability, and earnestness. That would be giving the blacks a chance to respond to it.

It must be quite destabilizing for these white New Yorkers, who see themselves as groundhogs emerging to tell us what’s happening in the culture, to realize they’re no longer the sole holders of cultural authority and centrality. The recent cultural shift seems to threaten them, leading them to yearn for a return to their former dominance, when white mediocrity—and quite frankly, dirtiness— were glamorized. But now, it’s enclosed in reactionary bubbles of hostility, which is evident in their love of evil internet personalities.

It has become increasingly challenging and depressing to navigate creative production in this cultural climate. The challenge mostly lies in crafting work that resonates authentically within a landscape where there is a small but obnoxious group of people actively trying to make authenticity synonymous with whiteness, and the black woman synonymous with wokeness, cringe, and complaint.

The only black woman who congregates with them, as far as I can tell, hides behind a Paul Dano avatar and images of thin white women, never showing her face. She probably knows what a weak signal it produces among a group of people whose crises—of coolness, taste, and “alternative”—are because they want to reinforce her subordinate position in their game, a non-playable character beholden to the whims of their collective of main characters. The only way to escape that fate is to simply transcend it, to simply paradigm shift.