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.

What would a return to gold look like? Jim presents multiple scenarios, including a partial gold backing of new international reserve currencies. He notes that prior attempts to stabilize the global economy – such as the Genoa Conference in 1922 and the postwar Bretton Woods system – centered on gold’s role in anchoring currency values.

As history has shown, when trust in paper currencies erodes, gold emerges as the ultimate safe haven. The world looks to be on the cusp of another monetary realignment, and this time, gold will play a critical role.

Our task here at the Grey Swan HQ, as we head into year 250 of this American experiment, is not to choose a tribe or a slogan — but to recover clarity.

To understand what is being offered, what is being denied, and what quietly slips away when arithmetic, history, and human nature are treated as inconveniences.

That work is slower. Less satisfying. And far more necessary.

Because when the idea of America becomes unmoored, it’s not necessarily yielding to an improvement on the original, is it? The news cycle, for today at least, just reveals it’s being replaced… by something louder.

Louder is rarely wiser.

The advance/decline ratio looks at the percentage of stocks in an index that are rising compared to the number that are falling.

While the index has been flat the past few weeks, the advance ratio has been improving. Only A few names – notably Oracle – have been keeping a lid on markets.

A generation ago, a single income could support a family, buy a house and pay for a vehicle or two in the driveway.

Today, even two high earners are struggling to purchase a new home.

According to a recent report from Bankrate, a household earning $80,000 a year is now priced out of 75% of all new homes on the market. A family now needs to earn at least $113,000, and in some major metros, it’s closer to $200,000.

Meanwhile, the homeownership rate has slipped to a six-year low, with further declines expected next year. Families are being squeezed from every angle.

The point I want to make here is that the so-called affordability crisis isn’t just about the cost of homes or other assets. It’s about the cost of money.