The Abundance Vibe Shift

What is Abundance, where did it come from, and what is its wife's name?

Society if it embraces Abundance ideology.

Podcast Plug: For episode two of The Abundance Agenda, my new podcast about growth and progress, Martin and I talk about what’s in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and why it’s a big victory for the YIMBYs. We also talk about progress on cultivated meat, and how maybe – just maybe – it could be on shelves in a couple of years time.

Listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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LAST CALL! My event with housing hero Anya Martin is next Tuesday, 25th March. We’re going to be talking about how the YIMBY movement has transformed British politics. There’s still a few tickets available, so come along and hang out!

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“Woke” is dead. And the fight to replace it has begun.

Back in 2022, the writer Sean Monahan coined the term “vibe shift”, which The Cut defined as follows:

A vibe shift is the catchy but sort of too-cool term Monahan uses for a relatively simple idea: In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated.

The piece goes on to describe the vibe shift in terms of fashion, and how when the article was written, everyone was apparently switching from wearing Red Wing boots to Nike Frees.¹ Though frankly, I am too old and out of touch to understand this specific example, because I’ve dressed exactly the same way my entire adult life, like a cartoon character.

But I do think “vibe shift” is a useful term for capturing the amorphous evolution of cultural trends. And this applies just as much to trends in politics as it does to clothes and shoes.

I can see this because as someone on the internet with opinions, I’ve been a participant in the political and cultural conversation for close to two decades, and I can look back and recognise several distinct vibe shifts on the centre-left.

For example, in the years after 9/11, there was the rise of the “skeptics”, a movement of people who believed in promoting a scientific worldview, that drew on humanist and rationalist ideas in reaction to both the Islamism of Al Qaeda, and the fundamentalist Christianity of Bush-era American politics.

Eventually, by around 2010, it felt like these ideas were very much in the ascendent in the culture. Politicians and journalists wanted to align themselves with the skeptics, groups that wore the “skeptics” label advocated for policy changes, such as reform of the libel laws to promote free expression, and it felt like every comedian had a bit expressing incredulity at creationism. ‘Skepticism’ was perceived as a cool thing to be associated with.

But then there was a vibe shift. Over time, the culture gradually moved on and what once felt like a coherent intellectual community with a shared set of goals splintered.

What emerged instead was a new vibe that centred feminism in political and cultural conversations. This was the era when there were a number of proto-#MeToo-style scandals, the ‘Gamergate’ controversy, and slightly more happily, Caroline Criado-Perez’s campaign to feature women on British banknotes.

The vibe shift was visible in the political discourse too, with the publications of books like Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism, and the ascendance of writers like Laurie Penny and Roxane Gay.

However, vibes do not last. By 2016, the vibe shifted again, around the time of Trump’s first election victory.

Suddenly the feminist ideas that were previously in-vogue were dismissed as “white feminism”, by detractors. This new vibe shift was instead driven from the cauldron of American racial politics and the emerging trans rights movements. Eventually, we started to call it “wokeness”, and it elevated a new set of ideas that have proven extremely influential on politics and culture in the years since.

And this brings us to 2025, and the vibes are once again shifting. Though the decline of “wokeness” as an intellectual force began much earlier.

For example, a couple of years ago, major American corporations began dumping the “DEI” commitments made in response to demands from activist staffers, and last year, the publication of the Cass Review on the evidence base for youth gender medicine caused many medical and political institutions to walk back from the more radical positions they had staked out.

The final nail in the coffin of “wokeness”, though, came with the re-election of Donald Trump.

What made his victory so devastating for the vibe was that the victory was overwhelming. It was not a win on a technicality: Trump did not just win the electoral college, he won the popular vote too. He increased his share of the vote with black, latino and other minorities – the people who “woke” ideas are ostensibly supposed to help. And he did it partially by weaponising “woke” ideas, which are unpopular with the broader American electorate.

So now the cultural dominance of “wokeness” has been broken, the vibe is shifting, and it isn’t yet clear where it is going.

Fuzzy boundaries

Let’s zoom out for a moment.

As you can probably tell from the narrative that I’ve spun above, it’s hard to disentangle ‘vibes’ that really were dominant on the centre-left, with what was just my own personal experience.

I’m sure there are better adjusted people who weren’t chronically online in 2015, and have no idea what “gamergate” was (lucky them). Similarly, there are probably people who were working in politics at the time who completely passed “skepticism” by.

But I think if you’ve been a participant in “the discourse” – the messy blob of political professionals, journalists, activists, and posters who drive the elite political conversation – for as long as I have, then you’ll recognise at least some of the intellectual currents that I’ve described above.

And to be clear, those dominant cultural vibes I’ve described are for sure not the only ideas that have proven influential in the same timeframe. I’m sure someone on the right could write a similar narrative tracing the vibe shifts from Cameron/Osborne-style globalism, to the Brexit era’s embrace of Juche ideology, to the fascism chic of Steve Bannon and Musk Twitter’s “For You” feed.

So I realise what I’m writing about here is inherently squishy and poorly defined – but that’s what a cultural mood – or ‘vibe’ is.

And that’s also why it’s impossible to separate British and American vibes, as even though our politics are very different, we have a broadly shared intellectual life. That’s why the England team got embroiled in controversies about “taking the knee”.

To paraphrase Bannon’s former colleague Andrew Breitbart, both British politics and American politics are downstream from this shared culture.²

Anyway, this brings us to the current vibe shift. Right now the centre-left is in flux. On both sides of the Atlantic, with the Democrats completely broken and in dire need of intellectual renewal, and the Labour government lacking a solid ideological core,³ it’s an open question about what the next ‘vibe’ will be.

And here I’m going to make a prediction. I think the next dominant vibe is already emerging. We’re shifting to the era of Abundance.

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The emergence of Abundance

New vibes don’t arrive fully formed. New vibes are currents in the discourse for years before they bubble up to the surface.

For example, the “skeptics” vibe was rooted in a tradition that began with the likes of James Randi, the magician who spent his career debunking psychics and fortune tellers. Then it was the “New Atheists” – people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens – that catalysed the skeptics moment and took it, for a brief period, to the intellectual mainstream.⁴

Similarly, the “woke” vibe can trace its origins to the likes of Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and even old-timey philosophers like Foucault and Derrida.⁵ But it was the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 article The Case for Reparations, and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility that injected the new vibe into the political bloodstream.

And I think if you look back over the last few years, you can start to see the emergence of something new.

For example, take the success of the YIMBY (“Yes In My Back Yard”) movement, which emerged to campaign against housing scarcity in California, but quickly spread to other parts of the world where houses are wildly expensive. Here in Britain, YIMBY-aligned groups like PricedOut were formed, and they’ve been hugely successful – as evidenced by the recent publication of the Planning Bill.

Similarly, a cadre of influential American writers has spent the last few years incubating these new, more materialist, ideas. Matt Yglesias wrote One Billion Americans, where he argues that America should stand up to China by rapidly increasing its population – through both natalism and immigration – and that increasing population would unlock economic growth, innovation and economic dynamism.⁶

He’s also written extensively about ideas like energy abundance – and what good things can happen if we don’t just decarbonise, but produce dramatically more energy than we need.

Then there are dozens of other writers like Noah Smith, and everyone in the orbit of the more centre-right coded Works in Progress, who have similarly promoted ideas around building, quality of government and so on. Similarly here in Britain, there are writers like Zion Lights and Hannah Ritchie, whose work speaks to the idea that politics isn’t zero-sum, and that we can make progress that improves the lives of everyone.

And hell, there’s even this guy called James O’Malley who runs a newsletter dedicated to the idea that we can “build the future”.

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To be clear, these new ideas have spread much further than just the centre-left.

In fact, billionaire Trump supporter Marc Andreessen once wrote an influential essay titled Time to Build. And then there is Dominic Cummings, writing from his volcano lair. People with my politics might disagree with his policy ideas, but you can’t deny that he’s asking the right questions about how governments can deliver effectively, and how to wrestle the machinery of government into action.

In other words, though a vibe is by definition hard to pin down, the cultural mood is clearly shifting and like skepticism, fourth-wave feminism and wokeness before them, it really feels like these ideas are in the ascendent.

And I think it is starting to feel almost like a coherent ideology called ‘Abundance’ – a name that (as far as I can tell) was coined by Derek Thompson in 2022.

This is pinched from James Medlock.

The Abundance vibe

This is a hostage to fortune, as it was only released a few days ago, and I’ve not yet read it, but I think Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, simply titled ‘Abundance’ will be viewed as a similarly totemic moment as the publication of The God Delusion, or White Fragility were, in terms of marking the boundary between one vibe shift, and the next one.

This is because Klein is probably the single most important and influential thinker in Democratic Party politics today. For example, from his New York Times column, he essentially legitimised the push to remove Joe Biden from the ticket and opened up the conversation, so that when the disastrous debate took place last June, it wasn’t paralysed by intra-party taboos.

Similarly, since Trump’s victory, he has been carefully leading the Democrats to examine some of the particularly toxic positions the party had held, that were considered untouchable not so long ago. He’s well-positioned to do it, as he’s not an outsider or a contrarian lobbing bombs – he has credibility with the party’s power-brokers and activist classes. He has the power, influence and the platform to move the conversation.

And the fact that he’s now latched on to Abundance as the centre-left’s next ideological frontier I think is a clear indicator of where the vibe shift is going to land.

So as a result, I won’t be surprised if the Democratic politicians and activists also now embrace the idea of Abundance.

And perhaps the British Labour Party under Keir Starmer will do so too, as the way Klein puts it provides something of a coherent ideological frame, and a positive vision – something that the parties on both sides of the Atlantic have been lacking. Here’s how Klein sells it in a recent column:

The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government to make sure there is enough of it. That doesn’t lend itself to the childishly simple divides that have so deformed our politics. Sometimes government has to get out of the way, as in housing. Sometimes it has to take a central role, creating markets or organizing resources for risky technologies that do not yet exist.

Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? Valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt. If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not? If the government is repeatedly failing to complete major projects on time and on budget, then what is going wrong, and how do we fix it? If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do we pull these inventions from the future and distribute them in the present?

Word on the street

So that, in a nutshell, is why I think Abundance is the next big vibe shift.

Of course, we might end up calling it something else. Perhaps “YIMBY” will just adopt a more expansive definition. Or perhaps we’ll call it “supply-side progressivism”, or some other term.

Hell, one idiot who fancied himself the next Karl Marx once attempted to brand these ideas “O’Malleyism”.

But whatever it ends up being called, I think the ideas we now label Abundance do represent a new and exciting way of looking at politics.

And this is just as true in Britain as it is in America. Even though our political situation isn’t as dire as the United States, we have endured a generation of zero growth, a persistent housing crisis, a planning system riddled with veto points, and a sclerotic political system that reduces the capacity of the government to do, well, anything.

But with these new ideas, we can reframe how we think about politics. We don’t have to accept a worse standard of living to tackle climate change, we don’t have to accept that housing will always be expensive, and we don’t give up on politics as a mechanism for change. If we can get beyond zero-sum thinking, and shift the vibe to an Abundance mindset, we can actually build a better future.

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In addition to writing about Abundance ideas in my newsletter, I’ve also just started a new podcast with my friend Martin Robbins called… relevantly… The Abundance Agenda.

My slightly too grandiose ambition is that the show will one day play the same sort of role for the emerging ‘Abundance’ scene that Pod Save America does for the Democratic party in the US. Each week, we’re going to talk about the news from an Abundance perspective, and hopefully help draw attention to emerging ideas from across the Abundance-verse.

In our first couple of episodes, we’ve talked about our own radicalisation journeys, the recently published Planning Bill, lab-grown meat, and, er, car parks. We’ve even had our first guest, in the form of Labour MP Chris Curtis, who talked to us about why Milton Keynes isn’t afraid of growth.

You can listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack, or wherever you get your podcasts. Go check it out if you want to understand the vibe shift.

1. It’s a real mystery how the elite New York media missed the rise of Trump in 2016.

2. That’s why in 2020, British people were just as enthusiastically changing their profile photos to black squares to protest police violence, and why a lot of people on the British right have been driven mad by “wokeness”.

3. I’ve just finished reading Get In, the account of how Keir Starmer (and Morgan McSweeney) won power, and it paints a picture of the former of a bit of a blank slate, at one point claiming that he once said “There is no such thing as Starmerism”.

4. Obviously by “mainstream” in the piece, I’m referring to “mainstream” in the sense of “popular with the sort of weirdos who read long essays about politics on the internet”. People like you. I’m not expecting Abundance to be the name of a new Gladiator next series, or for Taylor Swift to write a song about how a “regulatory sandbox” approach could speed up the deployment of small modular reactors.

5. When I learned about them in university, they could have been as ancient to me as Voltaire and Rousseau, but despite their making everything so fucking tedious important contributions to philosophy, they only died in 1984 and 2004 respectively.

6. He recently described as the “original Abundance book”.