Astral Codex Ten

social media

11 min read

social media

Article

social media is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 29, 2022 and December 31, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “the performative yet relatively ephemeral space of social media”; “been exposed to a constant stream of social media since middle school”. It most often appears alongside Biden, Boston, China.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: September 29, 2022
  • Last seen: December 31, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Universe-Hopping Through Substack
September 29, 2022 · Original source
It’s the performative yet relatively ephemeral space of social media, where a controversial photo can be quickly posted then deleted, that Ayanna Thompson argues has provided an environment especially ripe for the Kardashian-Jenner sisters—with their combined social media audience of 771 million followers—to experiment with racial performance by way of Blackfishing, which Ayanna Thompson sees as following in the racist tradition of Blackface minstrelsy.
The PERCEPTION WAR takes the form of liberals doing bad things!! You may think that they are isolated bad things, but they are actually part of a plot!! The plot is to create a FEDERAL POLICE FORCE, after which they will institute a police state!! Legacy and Social Media, Corporations, and Liberal Senators “have been exposed as the literal Fourth Reich”!! In fact, this isn’t just a PERCEPTION WAR:
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
Hi! I’m the person who coined and first published this term. I’ve been studying this phenomenon for the past four years, so forgive the rather long comment! A quick factual clarification: the Vibecession began in 2022 as the sentiment–data divergence that opened up that summer is the real starting point. The decade before didn’t have the same shape of malaise, which you can see in the sentiment data you included. People who’ve also been working on this topic tend to focus on the same pressures you outlined like housing, education, measurement problems which are absolutely part of the story. Maybe this is what you meant by smoking gun, but the Vibecession has crossed into somewhat of a meaning-making crisis which shows up in collapsing trust and inconsistent reactions to the data. Every generation has one of these, but ours is flattened across all ages due to social media and those tighter economic constraints. Expectations around future stability collapsed at the same time institutions lost credibility, and that combination changes how people interpret even good data. Also the post-2020 political environment runs on performance and constant identity signaling, and economic sentiment gets lost in those dynamics, which is why the usual models don’t fully explain what’s going on. Finally, we really aren’t in one right now, as the economic data has deteriorated meaningfully and the negative sentiment is warranted at this point.
I think the same principle applies more generally. People are unhappy, and they can easily determine that. But that doesn’t mean they know what would change that fact. Money and material standard of living are easy to point to as things that would make life better, but my understanding of the research is that how much happier people think they will be after making more money is higher than how much happier they actually become. People in their 20s are now Gen Z, i.e. people who were raised after several generations of an increasing trend to shelter children and prevent them from having any independence, and who have been exposed to a constant stream of social media since middle school. One can debate whether these really are the problem, but I certainly wouldn’t expect zoomers to say, “oh yeah, obviously I’m unhappy because I was protected from challenge as a child, had to be driven everywhere, was never allowed to practice being independent until after college, community life has been severely hampered, and I’ve been exposed to brain-rotting forms of media since I was old enough to read, in total contrast to my parents and every previous generation” even if that’s true.
This is what they took from you. They never should have passed the ‘Make It Illegal To Wear Hair Gel And Marry A White Woman Act' back in 1959! He argues that the reason most wives work these days isn’t because we’re poorer (and they have to work to survive), but because we’re richer (and so wives can make so much money working outside the home that the opportunity cost is too high to pass up). A single earner could still support a family on a 1950s lifestyle. It would just feel like a failure, because we don’t realize how much worse than 1950s lifestyle was compared to our current conditions. The article’s paywalled, but you can get a pretty good sense of the argument from these paragraphs. After determining that the median man makes about $80,000/year, he writes: Let’s say our $80,000-a-year man is living in the Jacksonville area. The Department of Housing and Urban Development calculates what are called Fair Market Rents for each American metro — this means the 40th percentile rent for a home with any given set of characteristics. They say F.M.R. for a three-bedroom home in the Jacksonville area is $2,163. That comes out to about 30 percent of Mr. Median’s annual income. Can you really get a place to live for that little? Here’s a lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, and it’s zoned for an elementary school with a 10-out-of-10 ranking from GreatSchools. It’s true that 1,617 square feet is on the small side for, say, a family of five in the contemporary United States. But the average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970. Two of your kids are going to need to share a bedroom, but that’s how people lived back in the day. There’s more to life than housing, of course, but I started there because that’s the largest item in a household budget. Durable goods like furniture, cars, and appliances have all become better and more affordable since the mid-1960s. That’s partially offset by rising prices for things like college tuition, child care, and health care. But in the 1960s, most young people didn’t go to college. The way health insurance works, you only need one worker in your family to get a job-based health plan. And of course, with your wife serving as a full-time homemaker, you don’t need to worry about child care expenses. The big thing is that, with a larger family, you literally have a bunch of mouths to feed. But the model here is to replicate how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, which is that they dined out much less frequently and also spent a much larger share of their total income on food. When I try to retrace this, it seems possible, but barely. I imagined doing this in Sacramento, to be near family. Suppose I make $80K pretax = $6.6K/month pretax = $5K per month posttax. A cheap 3-bedroom house on a nice-enough block is $2200 mortgage, assume $3K after property taxes etc. A cheap new car is $350/month. Food can be arbitrarily low if you’re willing to eat rice all the time, but let’s say $250/month. CoveredCalifornia offered my family of four healthcare for $600/month. So top four expenses take $4200/month of the $5000/month pretax income. I don’t know; seems tough. I would like to see a more thorough breakdown of an average 2026 vs. 1956 man’s likely budget. There are also some areas where it’s harder to separate genuine declines from rising expectations. Most people in the 1950s didn’t have health insurance. Was that because they accepted lower levels of health, or because medical care was cheaper, and easy enough to afford out-of-pocket? Probably some very complicated combination of both. And it might be impossible to get certain kinds of 1950s medical care today, i.e. a bed in a cheap low-quality shared hospital room. (some of the best discussion around this came from the response to Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, see eg Matt Bruenig here) Still, I find this tangential to the main point. Yes, a few conservatives complain that it’s hard to have a single-income family. But most vibecession complaints come from singles or dual-earner households! 4: What About Other Countries? … Dionysus writes: Did you know that China also has a vibecession? If even China can’t regulate social media heavily enough to prevent this phenomenon, how can any liberal society possibly hope to? The link goes to an NYT article, which includes quotes like: Using apps like RedNote and Douyin, people are reviving memories of the 2000s and the early 2010s with photos of daring outfits, upbeat songs and vintage TV commercials, all of which, in different ways, evoke a time in China that pulsed with optimism. “The music back then throbbed with exuberance, brimming with the sense that the future could only get brighter,” a middle-aged man said in a RedNote video. “Today’s lyrics begin with lines like, ‘We’re trying our best to survive.’” And The boom-time beauty meme is the latest expression of a Gen Z counterculture born of disillusionment, the recognition that they may be the first generation in half a century unlikely to surpass their parents’ standard of living, no matter how hard they try. Over the past five years, this quiet resistance has taken many forms. It began with “lying flat,” a refusal to join the rat race. Some chose to pursue the “run philosophy,” or emigrating in search of freedom and brighter prospects. Others declared themselves the “last generation,” vowing not to have children. Still others embraced “let it rot,” giving up on difficult goals rather than battling for uncertain rewards. To show they could care less about career prospects, many took to wearing “gross outfits” at work. This is especially crazy in China, where GDP per capita is now ten times what it was back during the “Boom Years” that everyone reminisces about. This might be the smoking gun that people’s economic beliefs are totally unmoored from how rich they are. The Chinese story has an obvious moral: people care about growth rate more than level. But even this doesn’t work for America - our Vibecession doesn’t correspond to a period of unusually low growth. machine_spirit writes: It’s interesting to compare it to Europe as the control group. Unlike the US, whose economy muddled through just fine during the last decade, we are currently experiencing a massive economic decline that could soon turn into a full-blown collapse. And yet, outside of debates about immigration or foreign policy especially regarding Ukraine you don’t really hear the same level of rancour about ‘things being bad’ in the local media. I’m surprised to hear this. I hear many economic complaints from Europeans, but I suppose this passes through my own American filter bubble which is incentivized to talk about economic hardship for its own American reasons. Golden Feather writes: I am an Italian currently living in the US. My main guesses would be: Right-wing parties control a supermajority of TV and print media. They have also been in the govt most of the time, which means they control the state TV and have an interest in presenting things as rosey. The much older population makes the internet less relevant for public sentiment. Even in the few years where they were at the opposition, they mostly focused on immigration and crime to rile up popular sentiment, I guess because the population is older, their voters even moreso, so they care more about that than about the economy
Inline links: They say, lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970, how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, dined out much less frequently, see eg Matt Bruenig here, writes, China also has a vibecession?, lying flat, run philosophy, gross outfits, writes, writes