I find Sean “VIBE SHIFT” Monahan to be almost insufferably smug, in a way that takes the previously-discussed professional certainty of the trends thort-lord and cranks it up to a level of stereotypicality that even a cheap Hollywood writer’s room would probably find a bit too much. But when someone is right, they’re right.

The vibe shift this time is a story about progressive Millennials realizing that when they declared total victory for their politics in 2020—it was a Pyrrhic victory. They aren’t out of the running, yet. But they are going to have to think much more pragmatically about the trade-offs involved in their policy preferences, walk back activist overreach, and give up on the idea The New York Times or FBI or any other institution has a monopoly on truth. They have to get into the trenches and convince people that their interpretations of reality are correct.

Admittedly, he’s right mostly in the sense that he’s found a fairly concise way to state the essential thesis that the theorists of the postmodern condition, Lyotard and Baudrillard in particular, were advancing four decades ago.

But he’s still right, nonetheless.