“Vibes” have become a common reference point across social media, where the #vibes hashtag is used as a way to describe content that foregrounds a mood or other extra-verbal disposition, as with the “sad vibes” of this rainy nighttime urban TikTok montage. In The Time of Money, economic sociologist Lisa Adkins argues that finance capitalism has reworked money and debt so they function “not as quantity, volume, quantum, or substance but as heterogeneous processes that … surround life.” Value, in other words, is less an objective quantity and more a milieu, an ambient affect, or - to use a term whose popularity is currently cresting - a “vibe.”
