Much of the world was mesmerized a couple of weeks ago by the drama of international negotiations taking place right before our eyes between President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and President Zelensky of Ukraine. Trump, always the hypnotic master of the attention economy, decided to allow television and news crews access to negotiations such as this with the pretense that it makes our government more transparent. But the question of whether this “transparency” actually gives us any ability to understand and come to a consensus on what is actually happening is very much in doubt.
Here’s is Democratic Senator Cory Booker’s response to Trump and Zelensky’s exchange, which I think is representative of many on the Left’s feelings about what took place:
“Donald Trump and JD Vance didn’t show strength today – they showed weakness. They belittled a giant and showed just how small they are.”
Meanwhile, here is the interpretation of the same events from Milo Yiannopolis, which I believe is more representative of the populist MAGA perspective: “Today was the first day any world leader treated Zelensky like the shabby, corrupt con man he is. The world owes Trump and Vance a debt of gratitude for resetting the bizarro world frame of lies.”
We are all watching the same events, yet our understanding of them is so deeply divided and incongruent that it seems as if we are living in different worlds. Despite—or because of—global communications technologies, we are reverting to a kind of tribalism in which the different worldviews of each separate group are so profoundly at odds that it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate with one another, much less live peaceably together.
While it is normal for there to be political disagreements within societies, and for the interpretation of events to be filtered through divergent points of view and experiences, it increasingly seems as if the complete misalignment of our political tribes is becoming so stark that we are unable to agree on what is and is not real. A society that cannot agree on some baseline of shared reality will not be able to function.
The work of Marshall McLuhan, and particularly his brilliant War and Peace in the Global Village, illuminates the toxicity and tribalism of the current political climate.
McLuhan argued that our technologies (most especially our media and communication technologies) shape our environment as well as the response of our central nervous system and our subconscious. It is impossible for us to understand any social or cultural change without grasping that our media technologies act as environments. Just as fish are unaware of the water that constitutes their environment, so too are we unaware of how deeply technological media frame our perceptions and our world and shape the basis of what we are.
In War and Peace in the Global Village McLuhan expands upon his account of how electronic media and technology function as environments, and how we as individuals and as a species respond to these changes. One of his most important insights is that because we are unaware of and not adapted to the changes brought about by our new electronic environment, we unconsciously revert to tribal, instinctual, and even violent behavior. The electronic environment threatens our identity on such a core level that we lose our sense of who we are and what our place is. As a result, we cling tighter and tighter to the manufactured identities in which our screen worlds trap us.
How does this all play out now in 2025? For the past 20 years our environment has increasingly become determined by digital screens. This change has been profound, and we are still struggling to adapt to a deluge of information and stimulation. Just as McLuhan predicted, we have reverted to tribalism as a way to make sense of this chaotic and violent environment. The us vs. them is an intense characteristic of this environment, and differing political or cultural tribes have constructed what are almost entirely different realities through their screens. The conflict across political worldviews even causes rifts within families, but those on neither side typically acknowledge that the conflict is a product of our media more than any particular political issue. The reversion to tribalism and its warfare mindset defines the digital arena as a place of conflict. To take just one example, it is common on internet forums to see people refer to others who express political ideas that they disagree with as “bots.” Digital technology facilitates the dehumanization of other people and enables us to relate to them as enemy combatants.
McLuhan begins his famous work The Medium is the Massage with a quote from A. North Whitehead: “The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” A similar social breakdown and division happened during the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe. On the surface, the conflicts of that age were based in theological disagreements (just as on the surface our current political tribalism stems from a conflict over political and cultural ideology). On a deeper level, however, the violence of the Protestant Reformation is entwined with the introduction of the printing press and the adoption of widespread literacy. The transition from a manuscript to a print culture transformed authority and allegiances: see the rise of vernacular literatures, the emphasis on “sola scriptura,” and the emergence of newly imagined communities. This new technology shook European identities to the core as the people struggled to adapt to their new media environment.
We are experiencing a similarly profound change in contemporary society with the adoption of screen media—television, the internet, and social media. As McLuhan states, “new technology disturbs … any society so much, so that fear and anxiety ensue and a new quest for identity has to begin.” Our political and cultural convulsions are the result of us attempting to imagine new identities and communities in our globally interconnected screen environment.
To connect McLuhan’s theories to our current political moment, it is clear that Trump is a hypnotic force in our age of screens. The extremely strong emotional reactions that he brings out of people, whether positive or negative, are overpowering because we are either having our sense of identity profoundly threatened or affirmed by what he represents to us. But as McLuhan stated, the medium is the Message; the reason our identities are so threatened in the first place is that so much is up for grabs in the chaos of the screens’ endless flow.
Much of our media is now dominated by algorithms, whose sole focus is to keep us engaged, to hold our attention. Anger, fear, disgust, etc.; these are all extremely powerful emotions that pull on our attention in subconscious ways. Even more dangerous is the fact that we are so often unaware of how much we are being emotionally manipulated. In this state of precarious emotional intensity, we cling tighter and tighter to any sense of identity we can hold on to and also to potentially lash out violently at perceived threats.
It’s possible to understand our modern media technologies as the most powerful weapons of war in the history of our species. These tools keep us engulfed at all times in fear, anger, and a tribal mindset of us vs. them. We think that it is our political antagonists who are causing these reactions in us, and to some degree that is true, but on a deeper level it is the media environment itself that has us amped up and fearful at all times.
What can we do with all of this? Unfortunately, McLuhan is not very prescriptive when it comes to solutions. But he does argue that recognizing the issue is rooted in environmental change can help us face what is happening. He states, “If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them. But, if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.” Often we search for new technological solutions to problems that are caused by technology in the first place.
But it may be that solutions can be found outside of the technological and rationalist perspective. It was Martin Luther King Jr. who once said, “Modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance. We’ve learned to fly the air like birds, we’ve learned to swim the seas like fish. And yet we haven’t learned to walk the earth like brothers and sisters.” If our poverty of spirit leads us to watch the endless drama from the Oval Office with a sense that our very selves hang on its outcome, perhaps we ought to cultivate thicker, calmer, wiser selves by walking the earth of our neighborhoods with those whom we are tempted to view as enemy bots.
Image Via: Free Malaysia Today
