Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology, Tech, and Contemporary Biopower

Talk by Robin James.

This talk addresses the main argument of my forthcoming book Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology, Algorithms, and the Politics of Legitimation (Duke, fall 2026). There, I argue that the mathematical vector and density models behind things like recommender or machine learning systems and vernacular “vibes” together form a new form of biopower. Whereas Foucault says that “a normalising society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centred on life” (HSv1, 144), this new form of biopower centres on speculative probabilities and their alignment with existing orders of patriarchal, racial, and capitalist property and personhood. No meat, just vibes, so to speak.

Like normalising biopower, this new form of biopower has both a quantitative and a qualitative dimension, each of which are different way of modelling a phenomenological orientation. Situating both the vector- and density-based models behind recommender and machine learning systems and vernacular ‘vibes’ discourse on social media alongside Sara Ahmed’s theory of phenomenological orientation, I show how each practice creates orientations as objects of knowledge and governance. This form of governance is neither a disciplinary nor a regulatory norm; taking Ahmed’s analysis of the role of debt in the heritability of orientation, I show that this new form of government is a practice of lineage and legitimation: anything goes as long as it facilitates the transfer of patriarchal racial capitalist distributions of private property into speculative, counterfactual realities.

To conclude, I will briefly discuss how the “TESCREAL bundle” philosophies are a form of corporate phenomenology that implements qualitative philosophical models of the math driving the technologies at the centre of those schools of thought, and then argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s existential phenomenology offers a productive critical framework for thinking orientation in a more ethical and politically just manner.

Bio

Robin James, PhD is author of five books, including Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology, Algorithms, and the Politics of Legitimation (Duke, forthcoming 2026), The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence (UNC, 2023), The Sonic Episteme (Duke 2019), and Resilience & Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, an expanded second edition of which will appear in spring 2027 from the University of Michigan Press. Trained as a continental philosopher, her writing has appeared across the scholarly and mainstream press.

Current projects include a 33 1/3 volume on The Breeders’ LAST SPLASH (Bloomsbury, 2028) and research on 90s alternative rock, affirmative action backlash, and contemporary reactionary masculinity. She is also a DJ at Cincinnati’s Independent Radio station Inhailer.com 90.9 WGUC HD3.