For the past four weeks, car-sized objects have been reported flying over critical infrastructure and military assets in New Jersey. They come from the ocean, appearing around sunset, and sometimes turn off their lights. Residents demand answers, but despite scrambling for information, state and local authorities say they remain largely in the dark.

But on Wednesday, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) offered what he said was “the real deal” explanation of the mysterious drones. “Iran launched a mothership that contains these drones. It’s off the East Coast of the United States of America,” he told Fox News.

Van Drew’s account, which he said came from “very high, very qualified, very responsible” sources, was startling.

Yet in a matter of hours, the Pentagon dismissed his claims out of hand. “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States and there’s no so-called ‘mothership’ launching drones toward the United States,” said Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon spokeswoman. “We’re going to continue to monitor what is happening, but at no point were our installations threatened.”

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I am a 60-year-old Scotsman with a penchant for red suspenders, oolong tea, and the novels of Walter Scott—so no one will ever accuse me of being an arbiter of cool. But to understand politics and even geopolitics you have to understand culture, which is sometimes—often—upstream of both. And to understand culture you have to understand, well, vibes.

Specifically, vibe shifts.

The pop culture commentator Sean Monahan identified three mini-epochs between 2003 and 2020: Hipster/Indie (ca. 2003–9), Post-Internet/Techno (ca. 2010–16), and Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20). Each was defined by a distinct aesthetic, and the vibe shift from one to the other was swift and palpable. As the pandemic receded, New York magazine’s Allison P. Davis predicted that another vibe shift had to be approaching. (And indeed, Monahan has dubbed the new epoch “Pilled/Scene.”)

I confess none of this meant much to me. I couldn’t tell a hypebeast from a hipster if my life depended on it.

But the term finally clicked—and acquired a powerful significance—when it was imported to the world of tech. In a clever Substack post in February, Santiago Pliego tried to sum up the change that had occurred from the epoch of woke—which began with the cancellation of James Damore by Google in 2017—to the unfiltered era of Elon Musk’s X.

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