Vibe Policing and Aesthetic Authority: A Multimodal Digital Ethnographic Report

This record presents a multimodal digital ethnographic study examining a contemporary online interaction centered on the comment “I feel AI vibes,” posted in response to an original music release. The archive treats the comment, the creator’s investigative response, a genre-faithful diss track, and supporting screenshots as a single integrated cultural event rather than isolated artifacts. Drawing on qualitative digital ethnography, media studies, and cultural signal analysis, the study argues that low-information aesthetic judgments function primarily as claims of authority rather than technical critique. The included diss track operates as a reflexive counter-artifact, reproducing the commenter’s stylistic genre with high fidelity while exposing the asymmetry between evaluative posture and creative accountability. By converting an ephemeral comment into a persistent, citable archive, the record demonstrates how algorithmically mediated platforms reward vague cultural signaling, and how archival practices can invert this dynamic by transforming engagement into longitudinal ethnographic data.