Welcome to the Vibellion

The first online headline I saw today, was this shared on BlueSky.

Matt Novak, a reporter with Gizmodo, then posted this interesting thread on BlueSky.

(Full thread here: https://bsky.app/profile/paleofuture.bsky.social/post/3lcmfspiygk2s )

That thread captured me. I too am not upset by the brazen murder of the UnitedHealthCare CEO. I don’t even care what his name is. I can’t be angry about the murder of a wealthy CEO who heads a Health Care organisation that makes its profits by denying health care coverage to people, allowing them to sicken, suffer and die by the thousands. Evil begets evil, you reap what you sow, and all that.

But what captured me is how I related to the point made by Matt,

“I don’t think the point is that these people are about to start a violent revolution. The point is that they’re talking in a way that I’ve never seen so many normal people talk about murder online. These aren’t edgelords. There’s a real shift in the way the average American is discussing this.”

There’s a vibe shift happening, the people are starting to really dislike the wealthy elite. I commented on BlueSky thusly:

I’m not sure when I transitioned from Peace, Order and Good Government (I.e. “Trust the system”) to “Eat the rich”, and it’s interesting to note that it might be part of a wider social vibe-shift. A Vibellion as it were.

I think it ties into the democratization of information. It started with blogs, and flowed from there to other social media platforms. How we were able to bypass the gatekeeping nature of traditional journalism and learn from and inform each other.

Huh. Maybe I have more reach than I thought. We all do. As part of a larger collective sharing information directly. We are the media now.

If you feel it, if you intuitively react the same way, Welcome to the Vibellion.

The Time of the Mob

It is pretty much accepted that we are in a new and different era in Western Society. How the people have largely decamped to two solitudes, “The Far Left” and “The Far Right”, however accurate those labels are. We have been treating them as political solitudes, but I think to is more accurate to call them mobs. And between those two mobs is the traditional center. But not a politically ideological center. The center is the last bastion of those that hold back change. Both mobs want change, and are no longer that willing to work within the norms of the system to bring about change. The center is the current social order of society itself, the fabric within which we all live, work and play.

The traditional model of change, is to work within the system, and bring about incremental change. The changes are so slow, we don’t really recognize they are happening, until the retrospective analysis is published in a magazine or newspaper somewhere that details how we got from there to here. The long drawn-out process of work within political parties, advocate for new legislation, new regulation, etc. It works, but it is used by both for those that want a better society for all, and also by those that want a better society for themselves.

An example of how incremental change affected the availability of groceries in the USA was published in the Atlantic.

The Great Grocery Squeeze — How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert

Tens of millions of Americans live in low-income communities with no easy access to fresh groceries…

In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it.

That move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers, just as A&P had done in the 1930s. Walmart was the first to fully grasp the implications of the new legal terrain. It soon became notorious for aggressively strong-arming suppliers, a strategy that fueled its rapid expansion.

A massive die-off of independent retailers followed. Squeezed by the big chains, suppliers were forced to offset their losses by raising prices for smaller retailers, creating a “waterbed effect” that amplified the disparity.

Regulation that helped foster competition, and held back the power of wealthy monopolies, was dismantled, and over the ensuing decades, the retail landscape in the USA changed. This phenomenon spread throughout western nations, as large brands dominate the landscape. And then switched to online organizations like Amazon.

As 2024 draws to a close, incumbent democratic governments are toppling, autocratic populists are winning power, drawing support from unhappy people, and placing blame on the poor, immigrants, LGBTQ, and a multitude of others. This is the mob on the right. They have seen their economic power wither away, and they are angry.

The mob on the left, the mob I have joined, sees things differently. We see a world where the rich have gained unimaginable wealth and power to themselves, and have essentially bought our governments and bent them to their needs. They own the system, and since they own it, we do not see a way to change the system from within.

In the middle, is the current system, and those that defend it. This is the domain of mainstream journalism, and the comfortable near-elite. They see threats all around to the stable order of things. They fear the mobs on either side, and the way they wish to change things. As a result, they sane-wash the threats from the right as the mob on the right seizes key areas of the system they rely on. They justify it, hoping to control it, and shape it. The center must hold.

Why do I use the term “mobs?” Mobs are unruly, and hard to control, and when they are large enough, they unleash change that causes mass upheaval and disruption. Mobs, are dangerous. But it appears they are a key part of humanity, and how we get the change we think we want. Upheaval and chaos is the tale of humanity, and great wrenching changes result.

The only problem is that though both mobs see the same problem, each has arrived at wildly different conclusions about the cause of the problem.

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all wanna change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all wanna change the world

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out?

We have arrived at this juncture in western society after decades of slow change, slow change that has consolidated power and wealth, and the regular people that inhabit our communities are unhappy with their place outside this consolidation of power and wealth. There is something of a irony that the stable system itself precipitated this reaction. The system morphed into a tool for wealth to accumulate wealth, and as such sowed the seeds that created the mobs that are now attacking it.

The mob on the right, as mentioned earlier, has adopted the mantras of Nationalism and Populism and are seizing the system through democratic means. They are perverting the system to control it for their own ends. The re-election of Donald Trump as President of the United States appears to be the climax point now for Liberal Democracies everywhere. The mob on the right has seized the system of governance of the most powerful economy and military power in the world. And is very clear about what they want to do with it when the transition of power completes. The whole world is in crisis as a result.

The mob on the left, appears to have understood that the change we want isn’t through the system itself. That change must happen by fighting the system itself. The center is aligned with the mob on the right. The enemy is the rich and the powerful, and those that support them. The mob on the right has allied itself with the very forces that worked to pervert the system in the first place.

We on the left were or are still hoping to enact change through the system itself. We recognize the power of stability, the advantages it has, and recognized that the tools of violent overthrow are counter-productive when trying to ensure fairness and equality for all. So right now, the left only has a vibe, it is a shared sense that is communicated through social media platforms and other online technologies. We are talking, we are sharing, we are communicating. We are at the precipice of understanding our place, and where we are. We haven’t organized and acted on that vibe, we haven’t truly become the unruly mob…

…yet.

But for all that feel that vibe, welcome to the Vibellion. Let’s see where it goes, shall we?