Tribal Think

This album discusses our biggest digital divide, inspired by the song "War Paint" from my album Digital Divides and the current political climate. My focus here is how we divide using technology, social media mobs, and separate digital spaces to maintain distance and tribal thinking. It's a non-partisan look at the state of politics now and how we're responding to modern times.

I'll be honest: this album will likely not be well-loved by many. But I thought each topic through carefully. I saw a lot of sides and discourse, consuming all perspectives to try to understand why we are here now. This is hard to write about without fear, and there's something scary in that fact itself, in a democracy with free speech. That fear shouldn't exist, but it does.

Here's the truth I keep coming back to: there are no sides. As long as we are this unable to talk to each other, everyone loses. Not the left. Not the right. Everyone. We're all trapped in this toxic dynamic where nuance dies, where complexity is treated as weakness, where changing your mind means betrayal rather than growth.

"Echo Chamber Collector" starts the album and names the massive divide. We consume what we want to, a confirmation bias media diet designed to protect our critical thinking and opinions while vilifying anyone outside. "Digital Pitchforks" focuses on digital mob justice, inspired by Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter. I cannot help but return to this idea of societal sacrifices to the altar of social cohesion, cruelty as outlet for other pressures. "Rage Economy" zeroes in on the platforms, from social media to old media and everything in between, whose focus is to keep us divided, to feed us these partisan diets. Rage sells, rage pays bills. Who knows if they believe what they sell, but if it sells, it doesn't matter that it hurts the consumer or society.

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" was published in 1948, and readers were horrified. How could a community randomly select someone to stone to death? How could neighbors turn on each other so easily? How could ritual sacrifice be normalized, tradition unquestioned, cruelty disguised as social cohesion?

We read that story in school and think we're better than that now. We're civilized. We're evolved. We would never participate in mob violence for the sake of maintaining social order. Then I look at Twitter, at cancel culture, at the way we collectively descend on someone who said the wrong thing, and I realize: the lottery never ended. We just moved it online.

"Digital Pitchforks" explores this ancient pattern in modern form. The dehumanization of the victim. The way it's no longer about justice but about vengeance, a desire to cause damage undercover of noble intentions. We see this in The Handmaid's Tale, where the pain and anguish of the Handmaids' lives comes out as a horrific attack when given a space to release that pressure valve. The cruelty isn't a bug; it's a feature. It's an outlet.

Hester Prynne wore her scarlet letter in Puritan New England. She was marked, separated, made into a cautionary tale. Today we don't need physical letters sewn onto clothing. We have screenshots. We have Google. We have permanent digital records. The scarlet letter never fades. Your worst moment, your stupidest tweet, your most poorly worded argument: it all stays forever, ready to be pulled out whenever the mob needs a sacrifice.

And we participate. We retweet. We quote-tweet with outrage. We add our stone to the pile. Behind our screens, we feel righteous. We're fighting for justice, we tell ourselves. We're holding people accountable. But if we're honest, really honest, sometimes it just feels good to be part of the mob, to channel our frustration and anger into a socially acceptable target. The lottery continues because the urge for societal sacrifice never left us. We just found new altars.