Data Shows The Vibes Are Bad

The Bay Area has long been shaped by two seemingly opposing cultural forces: data and vibes.

For the uninitiated, data is what Silicon Valley wrought. Data is something beyond metrics — it’s tech culture, from Arc’teryx to Zoom. While more resistant to definition, vibes exist on the continuum between the “Summer of Love” and ethical non-monogamy. If data implies “cold hard facts,” vibes are its opposite, full of unfixed notions of “feeling your feelings,” “being free,” and, classically, “not being judgmental.” Simply put, vibes are “classic Bay Area,” and data is “new Bay Area,” courtesy of tech and the recent AI bubble.

At first I had a bias for vibes over data — vibes were old school and chill, while data I took to be responsible for ruining the Bay. My instinct had been to map these two forces — the good and the bad of it — onto the geography of the Bay.

In this vision, the East Bay, and Berkeley in particular, is all vibes, while the South Bay, with Silicon Valley, is data. San Francisco seems to represent the clash of these values: Hayes Valley and the Marina, given their high percentage of tech and tech-adjacent workers, lean data, while The Haight and North Beach, riding on their hippie and beatnik pasts, are more vibrational. The North Bay is contested territory. Marin, once commune-filled, is now only affordable if you have a high-paying data job while Bolinas and Point Reyes Station still feel vibe-y despite the influx of Oura Ring wearers.

When considered this way, the twin forces of data and vibes seem opposing and fundamentally at odds with one another. Data is the “oil,” which greases the wheels of capital within Silicon Valley and its surrounding areas, and the vibes are “water”— an apt metaphor for that open, fluid NorCal way of being. You have to choose between disrupting society through code or cuddle puddles. There is no in-between.

Or so I thought.

I soon realized I was mistaking data and vibes for different, mutually exclusive cultures. What I didn’t understand was how similar they were, that they’re two sides of the same optimizing coin.

The vibes are gestalt. The vibes are Wavy Gravy. The vibes are passive aggressive natural food co-op. The vibes are grief mandala. The vibes are the spring equinox accountability process.

The line between these two forces starts to get fuzzy when, for example, my arts job sends me to a mandatory professional development training and I end up in a group facilitation class with no less than six full-time employees of the nonprofit Burning Man Project where people say things like, “the 60 minute meeting is an inhumane technology.” It’s not exactly that I disagree, but there’s something unsettling about the way they phrase it.

Things get even more confusing, more slippery, when at my weekly pick-up game I notice players starting their Fitbits to count their steps and heartbeats as they arrive at the courts.

I initially attributed these incidents to tech creep — the undeniable fact that tech and its ideology are permeating everything in the Bay. Once I start to see it’s everywhere, I realize it’s always been everywhere.

It was the A’s doing the whole moneyball thing. It’s all-staff PowerPoints that read “We Are: Our Relationships” alongside a table of “Key Performance Indicators.” It’s microdosing LSD or mushrooms to optimize your workflow. It’s the Tesla drivers in the Berkeley Hills with those bumper stickers; it’s a graphic tee that reads “Effective Altruist.”

That’s when it dawned on me: tech is just an aesthetic, one that gives the illusion of deeper understanding and undergirds the belief that knowing what’s happening — having those percentages and projections, having that abstracted knowledge — allows you to make improved choices, to create efficiencies. So often, the actual data seems to be jettisoned. It’s not really used to inform or make decisions, but rather manipulated to justify them. All those numbers are really just a way to convey the vibe of intelligence, of smartness, of being the adult in the room. It means you might be a nerd, but you’re winning.

But the more I think about the vibes, the more similar to data they become, the more I realize they are different aesthetics in service of the same thing.

The vibes are human potential movement. The vibes are the Zodiac glyphs. The vibes are gestalt. The vibes are Wavy Gravy. The vibes are passive aggressive natural food co-op. The vibes are grief mandala. The vibes are Erotic Blueprints. The vibes are the spring equinox accountability process. The data is plasma exchange. The data is soylent. The data is wearables. The data is AI. The data-vibes are HR guiding you through a breathing exercise as they announce imminent layoffs.

Vibes, I realize, are ultimately about self-knowledge and the belief that one can lead a better, smoother, more optimized life. And, while vibes and data each have their idiosyncrasies, their own histories, they are part of the same psychology and culture. These vibes let you empty yourself out so you can let yourself run — without any friction — for capitalism. (Like, what if the biggest beneficiary of your therapy session isn’t your mental health, but your boss, who gets to manage an easier-going, more compliant and integrated you?)

So, it seems we have come full circle (or full grief mandala). Ultimately, vibes and data are two ways of saying the same thing: that life can be managed, perfected. That we can be optimized. But optimization — whether of people or the institutions they make up — is a foolish fantasy and a distraction. We are our mistakes, our mispronunciations, our psychic deviations, our mutations and our irrationalities. We’re never going to be optimized. Nor should we be.