It’s All About the Vibes
Attacking bureaucracy produces good vibes and good vibes create political capital.
Everywhere you turn these days, people are talking about vibes.
There’s vibe coding.
‘Vibe coding (or vibecoding) is an approach to producing software by depending on artificial intelligence (AI), where a person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned for coding. The LLM generates software based on the description, shifting the programmer's role from manual coding to guiding, testing, and refining the AI-generated source code. Vibe coding is claimed by its advocates to allow even amateur programmers to produce software without the extensive training and skills required for software engineering. The term was introduced by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 and listed in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary the following month as a "slang & trending" noun.’
Anyone, it seems, can be a developer, now.
In truth, anyone can build a prototype of an application. Whether it’s sufficiently robust for a production environment is another question.
Instead of deploying code written by artificial intelligence, this may end up being a way for businesspeople to prototype applications rapidly. It cures the language gap between professional developers and end users. It’s a way for businesspeople to be able to describe what they need in ways that developers can understand. The developers will then build the real application from scratch, based on what they see in what is essentially a mock-up.
The logic here is that some savants (who cannot write code absent the AI intervention) will be more tuned into the “vibe,” i.e., software solutions people actually want with a user experience they will use and enjoy.
In theory, we should see an explosion of new apps to test these various hypotheses.
There are vibecessions.
‘Vibecession is a neologism that refers to a disconnection between the economy of a country and the general public's negative perception of it. The term was coined by Kyla Scanlon in a June 2022 newsletter about Americans' view of their economy. It is a portmanteau of the words 'vibes' and 'recession'.’
The economy can be strong fundamentally, but if people think it’s weak, it can still rollover as consumers pull back on consumption, for example. This would be an example of a recession induced by sentiment.
The truth is that many of the decisions we make and the way we react to the world is emotional. We’re not all focused on making a purely intellectual assessment of the pros and cons. We are very sensitive to what feels good and what doesn’t.
A rational decision is one that integrates this analytic approach with the emotional conclusions our body reveals to us. Here’s Psychology Today:
‘The latest research has established that emotion is crucial in a rational decision-making process. Antonio Damasio and his colleagues concluded that in the absence of emotional markers, decision making is virtually unattainable. Our emotions will drive the conclusions we make, and our well-being may depend upon our ability to understand and interpret them while integrating them with a rational mind to make an appropriate decision. While it is important to consider and process emotional signals, we need to evaluate our responses and see if they are proper to the relevant situation.’
Spock is a fictional character.
We need to be careful when it comes to recognizing the influence of emotions.
‘Because of their survival nature, emotions can create biases that affect how we perceive information and interpret situations. Remember that the emotional brain cares more about being safe than about being correct. Listen to its alarm signal, and at the same time question its message.’
It’s a real skill to be able to manage one’s emotions to avoid the various distortions emotions can impose upon our rationality. This is one aspect of emotional intelligence.
The theory of bureaucracy, though, seems to have been developed for robots without sentiment. Logical experts ignore emotion. They reduce the equation by eliminating the inconvenient parts of it that make solution intractable.
This is not satisfying. It is absurd to think that this is something human beings will accept. Bureaucracy is a pill they do not swallow easily.
Ask people what they think about bureaucracy, demand to know the first thing that pops into their head on hearing the term, and you’ll get a litany of negative descriptors.
Disgusting, painful, drudgery, waste, headache, dread, fear, anger, frustration, delay, inflexible, unhelpful, inconsistent, arbitrary.
Bureaucracy is the kind of phenomenon that only bureaucrats could love. They will defend its efficiency and its fairness, as they see it. You might be a bureaucrat if you cannot (or will not) imagine any alternative. They’ll tell you it’s just process, that you cannot have scale without procedure.
But that doesn’t mean the process we get is the process we deserve.
No, it’s safe to say that the vibes when it comes to bureaucracy and regulation and process are overwhelmingly negative.
This provides a sentiment tailwind to anyone who manages to reverse it or who happens to be in charge when the benefits of its turnabout kick in.
Even to be seen as opposed to bureaucracy is a positive. Nobody likes the busybodies who make rules and enforce them. If, however, you can be the person to stand up and to try, in public, to make a dent, then you will have earned some measure of popularity by default.
You will have gained some political capital in the sense that people will be disposed positively towards you and your ideas.
You will have cloaked yourself in positive vibes in inverse proportion to the strength and invasiveness of the bureaucracy you oppose.
If this theory is true, it’s shocking that some people pursue the regulatory agenda with such glee, either in government or in the workplace. Also, if it’s true, then those who would cloak themselves in the mantle of reversing rules and regulations should benefit precisely because of the emotional appeal of such a stance. Only when the need for process is so obvious and its implementation makes people feel more safe or more comfortable will the bureaucratic expert benefit, at least emotionally.
The political capital that deregulation and being seen as opposed to bureaucracy generates is a significant tailwind. It can afford the deconstructionist much leeway to pursue all manner of policies.
Would we have had the tariff shenanigans without the positive sentiment accruing to someone who would take on the Leviathan so publicly?
When the benefits of deregulation start to appear, what new policies will the attendant political capital gain enable?