Monitoring the Situation: from 1950s-2020s
A ridiculous generated photo essay taking a meme much too far
I had a ridiculous thought that I’d like to go to the Situation Room type bar (apparently it didn’t go well) to monitor the situation if it had a more 1950s Cold War vibe. That led me to make a series of images, decade by decade. Which turned into this photo essay. I hand-crafted the prompts for the 50s, 60s, 80s, and aughts, then had ChatGPT interpolate — it nailed the 60s —> 70s and 80s —> 90s vibe shifts which were unclear to me. The 10s and 20s were easy.
Note that all the sample situations being monitored in the images are 2026 vintage, which makes the images extra funny to me.
Then I had ChatGPT generate one-liner narrative mood captions based on my section headers and the images. My favorite is the 70s one.
People who have opted out of my sloptraptions are really missing out on some quality slop here 🤣
1950s: Cold War Organization Man Vibes
A regimented army of anonymous specialists methodically watches the world, confident that disciplined bureaucracy can catalog every emerging threat before it becomes history.
1960s: Mad Men Vibes
Confidence becomes stylish and managerial as modern corporate optimism embraces creativity without yet surrendering its faith that competent professionals remain firmly in control.
1970s: Towering Inferno Vibes
The machinery of management expands into sprawling institutional complexity, with endless paperwork and specialized desks quietly straining under a world growing faster than organizations can comfortably absorb.
1980s: Gordon Gekko Vibes
Bureaucratic patience gives way to relentless competitive urgency, where information becomes a weapon and every ringing phone feels like an opportunity or disaster measured in minutes.
1990s: Dotcom Boom Vibes
Hierarchy dissolves into networks as collaborative engineers, whiteboards, and connected computers replace command structures with the exuberant belief that software can reorganize the world.
2000s: Blue Sky Vibes
The office becomes a polished machine for ambitious invention, where elegant technology and casual confidence suggest that innovation itself has become the default operating system.
2010s: Culture War/Doomscrolling Vibes
Continuous streams of feeds, dashboards, and notifications fragment attention into dozens of simultaneous crises, leaving workers suspended in an atmosphere of permanent online vigilance and ambient anxiety.
2020s: WFH Vibe-Coding/Polymarket Vibes
An entire institutional monitoring department has collapsed into a quiet home office where two people, surrounded by autonomous AI agents and prediction markets, supervise a world increasingly interpreted by machines on their behalf.
Coda
I’d go monitor the situation in bars with any of these vibes. I’d even be willing to dress appropriately for the larps. It would be fun to redo this series for Europe, USSR/Russia, and China. I could probably do India, but I’d have to think carefully about it. There wasn’t much global situation monitoring going on in India until quite recently.