The Tribal Election

“Political tribalism really does break people’s brains” – Elon Musk

“A feeling I’ve been keeping mostly to myself: this doesn’t seem like an election year to me. I just don’t see 2024 as a presidential election. I really don’t know what this is, and lack the language to describe it. Anyone else feeling like you don’t know what we’re watching?” – Eric Weinstein

America’s 2024 election is the first presidential election dominated by networked tribes.

People aren’t choosing candidates; they’re selecting a tribe.
People aren’t voting for their tribe; they are voting against the other tribe (both candidates/parties/tribes have higher negatives than positives).
People aren’t debating competing policies and programs; they’re talking past each other about the threat posed by the opposing tribe.

There’s a lot at work here. Let’s dig into it, one step at a time.

Networked Politics

As a refresher, networks haven’t just changed how we communicate (see the GG Report; Packetized Media for more detail);

Exposure to networks has rewired our brains. We process information differently now. Specifically, we scan torrential information flows instead of reading or watching long-form books and broadcasts to uncover new, novel, or interesting information.
We use pattern matching to make sense of the packets of information we find through scanning. We can do this independently (few people) or rely on popular podcasters, X accounts, or YouTube personalities to pattern match for us (many people).
Overwhelmingly, people have opted to join large (tribal) networks engaged in collaborative pattern matching since it simplifies processing torrents of online information. Due to this adoption, collaborative networks are now in the process of rewiring our politics and our society.

Networked Tribalism

Inevitably, the most successful collaborative pattern-matching networks to emerge over the last eight years (when I started writing about this shift) organize tribally.

Traditionally, tribal organizations use stories (why we came together, what we have successfully endured, why we are better together) and rituals to create a fictive kinship that can bind people together as if they were blood relations.
Network tribalism uses the opposite approach. It binds people together in their opposition to a common threat. Tribal networks use collaborative pattern matching to create patterns of behavior that can indicate a person or an organization is a threat.
Networked tribes go to war by mobilizing their tribe to defeat the threat they manufacture. They win when the enemy is defeated, and the entire network, at both the human and system levels (from algorithms to AIs), is aligned with their pattern to suppress the enemy completely.

Turn Your Images On
Tribal Elections

Open Source Dynamics

Tribal networks don’t have organizational hierarchies. They are open-source networks where anybody can join and contribute. Let’s explore this;

Leadership is conditional. It’s earned by damaging, defeating, and vanquishing tribal enemies. If a leader begins to delve into the policies, agendas, platforms, and narratives of traditional politics, they will quickly find they are not leaders anymore.
Open source networks are also multi-cephalic (with many potential heads), meaning that any participating individual, group, or organization can become a leader (head) if they move the tribe forward. As a result, if a currently successful leader is removed (assassinated, banned, or jailed), another person will quickly take their place.
They are innovative. They are constantly finding new ways to damage the enemy, and network connectivity amplifies and accelerates their ability to share those methods, targets, and support.

Opposing Tribal Orientations

The two great tribal networks at war in the US, the tribes that have completely consumed the US political system, are based on competing national decision-making orientations (see the GG Report; “What went wrong with America?” for more details on these decision-making orientations).

NOTE: Orientation sets the direction for decision-making at the individual and national levels. It sets you on the decision-making path towards the goals you want to achieve. If your orientation is wrong, every decision you make advances you toward disaster, defeat, and crisis.

Anti-Globalist Tribe: This tribe is at war with the post-Cold War globalist orientation. Since opposition to this ruling orientation was structurally repressed (marginalized by bureaucratic institutions, traditional media, and the dominant political class), the anti-globalist tribe emerged as a network insurgency in 2016 (which explains why the efforts to defeat and oppose it became so frantic).
Anti-Nationalist Tribe: The dominant orientation within the institutional, media (broadcast), and government establishments. It became aggressively anti-nationalist once it took back power in 2020.
Anti-orientation. These tribes aren’t proponents of an orientation they support; they are opponents of an orientation they despise. They know what they hate and will see no fault in any policy, program, or leadership that isn’t connected to the enemy tribe’s orientation. This stance makes reform, productive discussion/debate, and holding anyone connected to the tribe in power responsible for failure nearly impossible.

Note the attitudinal shift between this Saturday Night Live skit featuring Trump in November 2015 and the tribal hatred that emerged a year later when it became evident he had adopted a nationalist orientation. ~~ John Robb, Global Guerrillas

The Tribal Election

John Robb, Global Guerrillas

“Political tribalism really does break people’s brains” – Elon Musk

“A feeling I’ve been keeping mostly to myself: this doesn’t seem like an election year to me. I just don’t see 2024 as a presidential election. I really don’t know what this is, and lack the language to describe it. Anyone else feeling like you don’t know what we’re watching?” – Eric Weinstein

America’s 2024 election is the first presidential election dominated by networked tribes.

People aren’t choosing candidates; they’re selecting a tribe.
People aren’t voting for their tribe; they are voting against the other tribe (both candidates/parties/tribes have higher negatives than positives).
People aren’t debating competing policies and programs; they’re talking past each other about the threat posed by the opposing tribe.

There’s a lot at work here. Let’s dig into it, one step at a time.

Networked Politics

As a refresher, networks haven’t just changed how we communicate (see the GG Report; Packetized Media for more detail);

Exposure to networks has rewired our brains. We process information differently now. Specifically, we scan torrential information flows instead of reading or watching long-form books and broadcasts to uncover new, novel, or interesting information.
We use pattern matching to make sense of the packets of information we find through scanning. We can do this independently (few people) or rely on popular podcasters, X accounts, or YouTube personalities to pattern match for us (many people).
Overwhelmingly, people have opted to join large (tribal) networks engaged in collaborative pattern matching since it simplifies processing torrents of online information. Due to this adoption, collaborative networks are now in the process of rewiring our politics and our society.

Networked Tribalism

Inevitably, the most successful collaborative pattern-matching networks to emerge over the last eight years (when I started writing about this shift) organize tribally.

Traditionally, tribal organizations use stories (why we came together, what we have successfully endured, why we are better together) and rituals to create a fictive kinship that can bind people together as if they were blood relations.
Network tribalism uses the opposite approach. It binds people together in their opposition to a common threat. Tribal networks use collaborative pattern matching to create patterns of behavior that can indicate a person or an organization is a threat.
Networked tribes go to war by mobilizing their tribe to defeat the threat they manufacture. They win when the enemy is defeated, and the entire network, at both the human and system levels (from algorithms to AIs), is aligned with their pattern to suppress the enemy completely.

Turn Your Images On
Tribal Elections

Open Source Dynamics

Tribal networks don’t have organizational hierarchies. They are open-source networks where anybody can join and contribute. Let’s explore this;

Leadership is conditional. It’s earned by damaging, defeating, and vanquishing tribal enemies. If a leader begins to delve into the policies, agendas, platforms, and narratives of traditional politics, they will quickly find they are not leaders anymore.
Open source networks are also multi-cephalic (with many potential heads), meaning that any participating individual, group, or organization can become a leader (head) if they move the tribe forward. As a result, if a currently successful leader is removed (assassinated, banned, or jailed), another person will quickly take their place.
They are innovative. They are constantly finding new ways to damage the enemy, and network connectivity amplifies and accelerates their ability to share those methods, targets, and support.

Opposing Tribal Orientations

Anti-Globalist Tribe: This tribe is at war with the post-Cold War globalist orientation. Since opposition to this ruling orientation was structurally repressed (marginalized by bureaucratic institutions, traditional media, and the dominant political class), the anti-globalist tribe emerged as a network insurgency in 2016 (which explains why the efforts to defeat and oppose it became so frantic).
Anti-Nationalist Tribe: The dominant orientation within the institutional, media (broadcast), and government establishments. It became aggressively anti-nationalist once it took back power in 2020.
Anti-orientation. These tribes aren’t proponents of an orientation they support; they are opponents of an orientation they despise. They know what they hate and will see no fault in any policy, program, or leadership that isn’t connected to the enemy tribe’s orientation. This stance makes reform, productive discussion/debate, and holding anyone connected to the tribe in power responsible for failure nearly impossible.

As copper flowed into the United States, LME inventories thinned and backwardation steepened. Higher U.S. pricing, tariff protection, and lower political risk made American warehouses the most attractive destination for metal. Each new shipment strengthened the spread.

The arbitrage, once triggered, became self-reinforcing. Traders were not participating in theory; they were responding to the physical incentives in front of them.

The United States had quietly become the marginal buyer of the world’s most important industrial metal. China, long the gravitational center of global copper demand, found itself on the outside.

Under the frost-crusted shrubs, the bears are sniffing around for scraps of bloody meat.

They smell the subtle rot of credit stress, central-bank desperation, and debt that’s beginning to steam in the cold. They’re not charging — not yet. But they’re present. Watching. Testing the doors.

Retail investors, last in line, await the Fed’s final announcement of the year on Wednesday. Then the central planners of the world get their turn: the Bank of England, Bank of Japan, and the European Central Bank.

Treasuries just suffered their worst week since June. And in Japan — the quiet godfather of global liquidity — something fundamental is breaking.

Silver continues its blistering ascent. Gold and bitcoin have settled in at $4,200 and $92,000, respectively.

It’s absurd, really, for any politician to be talking about “affordability.”

The data is clear. If higher prices are your goal, let the government “fix” them.

Mandates, paperwork, and busybodies telling you what you can and can’t do – it’s not a surprise why costs add up.

In contrast, if you want lower prices, do nothing– zilch. Let the market work.

For 30 years, Japan was the land where interest rates went to die.

The Bank of Japan used yield-curve control to keep long-term rates sedated. Traders joked that shorting Japanese bonds was the “widow-maker trade.”

Not anymore.

On November 20, 2025, everything changed. Quietly, but decisively.

The Bank of Japan finally pulled the plug on decades of easy money. Negative rates were removed. Yield-curve control was abandoned. The policy rate was lifted to a 17-year high.

Suddenly, global markets had to reprice something they had ignored for years.

What happens when the world’s largest creditor nation stops exporting cheap capital and starts pulling it back home?

The answer came fast. Bond yields in Europe and the United States began climbing. The Japanese yen strengthened sharply. Wall Street faltered.