In today’s society of re-emerging friend–foe distinctions and inward-turning social bubbles, the notion of tribalism has resurfaced to capture some of the underlying social dynamics of our digital age. But how should we understand these contemporary social bonds? This ‘neotribalism’ is not a simple return to a premodern tribal way of life. When we say tribes are back, we do not mean it in the ethnological sense, but as a powerful lens for understanding how belonging and identity take shape in the digital age. Politics and culture today are increasingly organized around affective resonance chambers bound less by ideology than by shared moods and loyal hangouts. Identity politics, it seems, is giving way to vibe politics.
Drawing on Marshall McLuhan and Michel Maffesoli, this essay explores how shifting media environments have made these new forms of tribal belonging both inevitable and troublesome. Finally, through the lens of Chantal Mouffe, it asks how democracy might channel tribal energies without succumbing to overpolarization. Together, these thinkers offer a nuanced perspective on the return of the tribe, one that not only condemns its nature as a threat for democracies, but seeks to understand its ambivalent power in shaping contemporary life. Because contemporary tribes push back against the isolated individualism of modernity and the political numbness of the neoliberal age, there is something to be defended in it; yet at the same time, these tribes also signal the further decay of the ideals of the open society.
Marshall McLuhan, who already spoke of the ‘retribalization of society’ in the 1960s, provides an first valuable lens to interpret these shifts. For McLuhan, tribalism was not an ethnological category but a media condition. The transition from the print-based ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ to the electronic age of radio and television, he argued, transformed human consciousness and sensibility and its relation to the surroundings and others. Media extend our senses and physiological capacities (e.g., the car extends foot and the camera the eye), but in doing so, they also remake us. As McLuhan observed: ‘we first shape our tools, and afterward our tools shape us.’
The retribalization in the electric age McLuhan speaks about has thus not so much to do with a premodern tribal way of life, but has to do with a sensibility that is becoming postliterate. During the Gutenberg era, the book and written word dominated, and these are extensions of the visual mode of being. They represented the hegemony of the eye over the ear of oral-auditive cultures preceding the book and written word. In other words, the media condition solidified for centuries in what we call a literate society. This dominance of the eye and the visual mode enhanced certain qualities, but made our other senses weaker or numb. According to McLuhan, the media environment of print and writing fostered a distanced, visual mode of perception, that is, a way of seeing the world that encouraged detached involvement and privileged the rational mind over the involved body. This sensibility, rooted in linearity and unambiguous, in other words, literal reasoning, defined the literate era. Yet with the rise of new media that undermined the book’s visual and analytical dominance, this epoch gradually came to an end.
In the 20th century, the linear, detached, and analytic rationality cultivated by print culture, gave way to a more intuitive, ambivalent, mosaic, and participatory mode of perception. In our electronic age, the human sensorium would be rebalanced: the dominance of the visual and the logical was slowly shifting to more immediacy, affect, and collective resonance. For example, McLuhan remarked that television should not be understood as a further extension of the eye, as one would expect, but of the skin. It is not to be seen as another device in the lineage of glasses, telescopes, or cameras—all extensions of sight—but as part of our externalized nervous system. In the contemporary flood of images and videos on social media in which we constantly see everything what happens elsewhere, this observation might feel contradictory but also more relevant than ever: our sensory nerves have indeed grown acutely responsive to the entire world’s suffering.
However, this heightened sensitivity, in which ‘the entire world gets under our skin’, simultaneously triggers what McLuhan identified as an emotional immune response: a protective numbness required to withstand the continuous info-emotional overload generated by our extended technological selves. Most intriguing, however, we might add decades later, is when these tendencies coincide: when cosmopolitan spaces, open and worldly-oriented, themselves become enclaves of the in-crowd, such as self-encompassing communities of expats, the luxury gated communities of billionaire entrepreneurs, or, in the Netherlands, the so-called ‘havermelkelite’.
Another key aspect of McLuhan’s contribution to understanding today’s retribalization lies in his insight into how changing media conditions transform the very nature of the individual. The printed word, by isolating the reader and enforcing a sequential, left-to-right logic and discursive reasoning—exactly the way we read and interpret a text word-by-word and built an argument layer-by-layer, had once fostered individuality and linear causality. The electric media, by contrast, dissolve these boundaries and, according to McLuhan, invite new, networked forms of togetherness and associative, mosaic and more immediate forms of reasoning. Instead of linear causality, they are keener to circular causality, as we today might recognize in systems theory or complexity thinking.
On a societal level, tribalism then points to a resurge of the social. While the modern era and its media extensions fostered the rise of the rational individual, the ‘autonomous subject’, gradually isolating them from their attunement to nature and to others, the retribalization of the electric age may, in some ways, reverse the conditions that produced the modern detached subject.
Although McLuhan warned that retribalization might entail a loss of critical distance and an increase in emotional polarization, he thus nevertheless welcomed the emergence of the new tribal sensory apparatus. Humans would be re-embedded in the full range of sensory and communal experience, especially within the context of the global village. In the electric age, he argued, our sensory balance is reorienting: the oral–auditory dimension reopens, and the tactile sense is reawakened. This renewed sensorium is characterized by characteristics such as all-at-onceness, immediacy, and wholeness. Sound media, for instance, envelop us: we are immersed in it rather than observing it from a distance. We can fully close our eyes, but not our ears. In this acoustic space, the new media call for intimate involvement rather than detachment. McLuhan explored this dynamic mainly through the medium of radio, but a contemporary analogue can be seen in the parasocial bonds audiences build with podcast hosts, whose voices they listen to in intimate, daily rituals.
Thus, in many ways, McLuhan’s analysis seems remarkably prescient. It speaks not only to the rise of interactive multimedia of the ‘world wide web’, but also to the intimate, auditory world of long-form podcasts and to the haptic intensity of social media platforms that excite constant feelings and nerve stimulation in globally circulating ‘vibes.’ Yet, his framework also encounters limits. The dominance of short-form video content, for instance, appears to also reinforce a primarily visual mode, one that, as we all know, just as much encourages numbed, detached habitual scrolling rather than genuine engagement or involvement. Similarly, the widespread use of noise-cancelling earbuds often mirrors a kind of individual self-enclosure, echoing the detachment of the literate individual absorbed in private reading, solitary browsing and scrolling, etc.
For these reasons, we must approach McLuhan’s relevance for today’s neotribalism with caution. Still, his insights remain invaluable, especially when enriched with more recent reflections on the resurgence of tribal bonds in postmodern society.
From the 1980s-1990s onward, a different strand of thought on neotribalism emerged, rooted more directly in ethnological and sociological studies. Thinkers such as Michel Maffesoli described the surge of tribes in a postmodern society, from football fan communities to online Telegram groups, which provide belonging and emotional safety in an era of uncertainty and hyper-individualization. These are bound by shared emotions and symbolic resonance and they are rather affective than intellectual.
The typical postmodern context of ‘neo’tribalism here primarily refers to the fact that individuals often belong to more than one tribe. Moreover, compared to ‘communities’ rooted in modern enlightenment the postmodern ‘tribe’ is more bound by symbols and lifestyles than values, labelled as the ‘aestheticization of the social’. And last, Neotribes are both strong and fleeting: bound by affect rather than ideology, and defined as much by their transience as by their loyal cohesion. For instance, while WhatsApp and social media are often said to make friendships more fluid and superficial, favoring loose connections over deep relationships, they have also enabled new forms of lasting social and loyal ‘tribal’ bonds. WhatsApp groups, for example, allow hometown friends to stay in touch and organize gatherings even while living scattered across the country. Instead of breaking away from your hometown to become a cosmopolitan wanderer, the roots and ties to where you came from endure, kept alive, almost paradoxically, by the uprooted flow of the digital world.
But why now? McLuhan traced this development to a transformation in the media environment. In Maffesoli’s work, however, tribalism is not romanticized as a sensory reawakening, as it is in McLuhan, but nevertheless understood in a comparable way as a compensatory response to the atomizing and individualization effects of modernity. The contemporary rise of tribes Maffesoli speaks about, visible in fan communities, subcultures, urban scenes, and lifestyle movements, can indeed be seen as the materialization of the media condition McLuhan described in the electric age. For Maffesoli, these new tribes are grounded less in modern institutions (corporates, unions, civil society, political parties etc.) bound by rational interests or long-term ideological commitments than in shared feelings, tastes, and intense emotional bonds. While these other forms of the social persist, they are now interwoven with these new tribal structures, and more and more they also seem to restructure the ties of modern institutions itself, especially political parties.
The downside of the resurge of tribal dynamics is much-discussed. They offer recognition and belonging for the in-crowd, but often do so by drawing strict and coercive boundaries: they are simultaneously inclusive toward insiders and hostile toward outsiders or renegades. This dynamic shows resemblance with today’s populist and nationalist movements, which thereby inherently bear the risk to erode democratic norms and obscure liberal values of openness and plurality. Tribal loyalties instead have the tendency to legitimize rule-breaking and authoritarianism in the name of protecting one’s own community. However, as noted earlier, one of the paradoxes of the Enlightenment lies in the fact that the very ‘open’ and ‘pluralistic’ social, cosmopolitan groups, those who often perceive themselves as the guardians of the democratic and liberal society, are not immune to tribal dynamics. This was already evident in the time of Robespierre, but it may be even more pronounced in contemporary digital society, especially if we understand such environments as hotbeds of tribalism. The widespread use of the phrase ‘the bubble’, which seems to define us all, is telling in this regard. In the Netherlands, for example, twelve of fifteen political parties currently have proposals that directly contradict the democratic constitutional state, an indication of how tribal antagonisms have re-entered political life under the guise of communal authenticity in almost all political fractions.
If we now bring McLuhan’s and Maffesoli’s conceptualizations of the tribal into dialogue, what makes this perspective valuable? A first thing is that if we consider tribalism a useful lens for understanding contemporary society, we must be careful not to conflate it with nationalism or populism. While nationalism aspires to unity and transcendence of regional differences (in all its historically documented beauty and horror), neotribalism remains primarily local and fragmented. This tension was visible in recent Dutch riots, where symbols of national identity coexisted with regional, city, or football-club loyalties. They were united as ‘Dutch’ by a common enemy (the migrant), yet divided in identity. When the identity of individuals is primarily produced within these tribal enclaves (one or multiple), one may rightly ask what remains of the national as a shared imaginary and symbolic way of living beyond these tribes and beyond trivial abstract notions of Dutch values.
An interesting comparison can be drawn here between, on the one hand, Joan Derk van der Capellen’s Aan het Volk van Nederland (1781), which ultimately contributed to a civil war between the Patriots and the pro-Prince faction, and, on the other hand, the contemporary online political activism of figures such as Els Rechts. Her Twitter/X ‘pamphlet’, which called for public demonstrations, likewise sparked riots against the status quo and so-called (now leftist) elites, even culminating in a visit to the headquarters of a political party that would go on to win the election a few months later. Van der Capellen used the printing press, then the revolutionary medium of his age, to forge a national consciousness among the fragmented provinces of the Dutch Republic. His anonymous pamphlet, secretly distributed at night, united dispersed patriots under a single cause: resistance to Orangist absolutism and the articulation of a shared Dutch identity. In McLuhan terms, the medium of print was crucial here: it created a standardized national discourse and synchronized the minds of geographically scattered readers.
By contrast, Twitter/X, which would for McLuhan be an archetypal medium of the digital age, works in the opposite direction. Although in potential social media offer more instant possibility of national synchronization than any printed medium Van der Capellen could have ever dreamt off, what we have seen in the past decade is that this fragmented, real-time, emotionally charged environment has scattered attention into co-existing yet also co-isolating bubbles (together shaping a foam as Peter Sloterdijk names it). If the printing press contributed to forging nations, Twitter/X fuels tribes.
According to McLuhan’s logic, a platform like Twitter/X cannot sustain nationalism as a coherent, unifying project; it belongs instead to the ‘post-Gutenberg Galaxy,’ characterized by simultaneous participation, affective contagion, and endless tribe-fragmentation below the nation and the global village above the nation. Of course, this is a heavily simplified distinction, but whereas Van der Capellen’s pamphlets helped to bring the patriotic regions ‘on the same page’, a figure like Els Rechts might only orchestrate digitally mediated tribes, loosely connected, emotionally resonant, but lacking the structural cohesion of a national movement. The digital medium produces a chorus of chieftains rather than a single national voice. And these regional tribes might have more in common with their digitally mediated American or Italian peers than their neighbors, which are often enemies.
A second important insight is that this ‘tribal orchestration’ may also help us better understand contemporary politics in a posttruth, social media landscape where no one, not even an autocrat, truly owns the narrative. And perhaps it is no longer about narratives anymore, but about vibes. On social media, the age of narrative self-presentation through selfies, blogging, and sharing stories, has given way to mood channeling and what we might call vibecasting (more on this in a forthcoming article). It’s likely only a matter of time before Instagram rebrands its Stories as Vibes. Postmodern tribes, after all, care more about vibes; the era of Grand Narratives lies far behind them. Politics, always a step behind cultural shifts, now seems to have finally caught up with the peculiarities of the vibe-and-tribe era.
Trump’s rise from a tribal and media-ecological perspective, for example, cannot be reduced to the charisma of a single strongman with a flair for memes and mocking nicknames that appeal to the disaffected Rust Belt. Moreover, we doubt that the MAGA movement is best understood as a narrative people cling to, one that the left so desperately failed to tell. Rather than relying solely on these explanations, we should enrich them with a tribal analysis of MAGA’s remarkably effective coordination across social media. This includes examining the feedback loops that connect its sprawling digital diaspora, linking central figures and the decentralized 'new media goliaths' in an intimate cybernetic structure, held together by affect, both humor- and anger-driven, by love and shared worriedness, but also by fury and shared ressentiment. From this perspective, in today’s digital media landscape, Trump operates less as a monarch or autocrat than as a cyberchief among chiefs, concentrating, amplifying and then channeling back the energies of his dispersed followers. According to McLuhan and Maffesolli, this also means that there is no such thing as the typical Trump voter. His base is dispersed across a mosaic of digitally mediated tribes, each with its own codes, memes, and emotional registers. Within the context of digital postmodernity Maffesoli provides, these fragmented in-crowds gain a new kind of synchronicity made possible by the existence of worldwide networks providing the infrastructure, that is a capacity for fluid tribal resonance across distance.
The 2024 election night illustrated this transformation vividly: for the first time, audiences tuned in predominantly to YouTube channels hosted by political streamers and long-form podcasters rather than to traditional television networks. Commentators have since dubbed it the first long-form podcast campaign, following earlier milestones such as the first television campaign (Kennedy–Nixon, 1960) and the first social media campaign (Obama, 2008).
Within our framework, we might observe that nearly all of the most-watched streaming channels on election night—dominated by right-wing figures, with nine of the top ten hosted by MAGA supporters—functioned as tribal resonance rooms: immersive, multimedia environments where audiences gathered not simply to consume information, but to participate, to belong, to attune, and to vibrate together. The left exception in this lineup was Hasan Piker. As a The New Yorker profile insightfully notes, Piker seems to understand that in the new media era, success lies in cultivating a kind of tribal hangout, one that nurtures (para)social relationships, symbolic resonance, and, above all, a shared space for mood channeling or, quite simply, hanging out together. As one popular U.S. podcast aptly captures the current zeitgeist, it describes itself as "the greatest hang in the universe". Similarly, another channel brands itself as “the best hang, disguised as a podcast”.
While the dialogue between McLuhan and Maffesoli reveals important aspects of the tribal dynamics shaping contemporary society, we are perhaps still left with a pressing question: what should we do with tribes? Or, to put it differently, should we celebrate them or condemn them? To address this tension, we conclude with a final reflection through the lens of Chantal Mouffe’s work.
If we take the phenomenon of tribalism seriously, in both its constructive and destructive dimensions, our aim should not be to fight it. Indeed, the very impulse to eradicate tribalism often feeds the dynamics that sustain it. As long as politics seeks to purify itself from passion and division, new tribal forms will emerge to fill that emotional and symbolic void. Moreover, in the process of purifying you not infrequently end up doing what you tried to avoid.
This intuition resonates strongly with the work of philosopher Chantal Mouffe, who offers us a final lens through which to not only understand, but more importantly, situate neotribalism within democratic life. Rather than condemning political tribalism as a democratic failure, Mouffe reinterprets it as the agonistic dimension of politics itself. For her, democracy depends on the presence of conflict, not its erasure. Models of deliberative democracy that idealize rational consensus risk suppressing the very passions that make politics meaningful and alive.
Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s concept of the friend–foe distinction and ‘the political’, Mouffe argues that politics without strong divides and antagonism becomes depoliticized, emptied of its existential and affective charge. The challenge, therefore, is not to abolish tribal energies but to ‘domesticate’ and channel them within a pluralistic, agonistic framework. In this sense, politics must learn to work with our tribal impulses rather than against them. As Mouffe reminds us, the political is always emotional, symbolic, and communal — or, to borrow and twist Latours phrasing once more, we have never not been tribal.
However, most of Mouffe’s work was written as a response to the depoliticization that characterized the neoliberal era (roughly 1980–2020). In this context, the current resurgence of tribal formations, though entirely different from what McLuhan envisioned, might likewise be seen as both welcome and necessary, in Mouffe’s case serving as a safeguard against the more authoritarian forms of what Schmitt called decisionism. Unfortunately, as we have also seen through our media-theoretical lens and the tribal turmoil of recent years, the ways in which these communities are now organized and entangled in transnational culture wars, echo chambers, and borderless digital hangouts — these all suggest that the bandwidth for a productive notion of Schmitt’s ‘the political’ in digitalized societies is rather narrow, and often in tension with the parliamentary systems of territorial nation-states. In other words, looking forward, while we must clearly avoid a relapse into the depoliticized centrism of a hollow consensus that erases ideological differences, the hyper-polarized over-tribalization of the present is hardly something to celebrate and will be very difficult to keep anchored in national democracies.
