Thinkers Reframe Vibe As Shared Environmental Knowledge

An essay traces how the contemporary idea of “vibe” — a 1960s US slang shortened from “vibration” — connects to earlier concepts like Raymond Williams's 1954 “structure of feeling” and Gernot Böhme's atmospheres. It documents how brands now engineer atmospheres through design and marketing, and argues that as AI automates creative tasks, human skills in sensing and shaping collective mood may grow more important.