Welcome to the Pandemic: Vibes Discourse and Bo Burnham’s Inside

ABSTRACT: In the throes of COVID-19, the term “vibe” seemed to be everywhere. By 2021, a burgeoning vibes discourse sought to explain the term’s myriad valences as a style, genre, affect, or orientation. In the context of the pandemic’s uncertainty and an increased dependence on platforms to mediate social experience, vibes come to reflect anxieties about social recognition. This article draws on Robin James’s work on vibes to articulate how they operate in aesthetic texts and as frameworks for their interpretation. Through Bo Burnham’s 2021 Netflix special Bo Burnham: Inside , the article shows how the algorithmic form of categorization that James associates with vernacular vibes produces an anxiety about the forms of social recognition on which aesthetic categories are usually predicated. Inside both critiques algorithmic vibe culture and attempts to carve out space for its own, more human-coded, sense of vibes as shared affective resonances.