From Triumph of the Will to Twitter: Modern Media and the Evolution of Tribalism Roger F� Cook University of Missouri, Columbia Abstract: Focusing on the constitutive role media plays in shaping human culture, this essay analyzes how the contemporary American political culture has evolved in relation to advances in technology� First, it compares the Nazi film Triumph of the Will with Donald Trump’s unprecedented use of Twitter as a political tool to highlight how shifts in the human-media interface are integral to the changing political dynamic� Situating the recent trends in American politics with respect to the explosion of digital media over the last thirty years, it contends that this new technology has radically altered human interaction and enabled the hybrid mode of tribalism that Trump has exploited to build a substantial base of supporters� The last part of the essay looks at Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel The Circle to ask whether the continued spread of digital technology into all areas of culture might lead to a new political agency, a posthuman tribalism that could engender a new form of totalitarianism� Keywords: Nazi propaganda, American politics, Twitter, tribalism, digital media In the attempt to explain the willingness of such a large portion of the American public to dispense with traditional standards of sense-making, decorum, and respect for facts commentators have taken to describing the contemporary political divide as tribal. I find this characterization useful, especially as it applies to Donald Trump’s surprising rise to power over the last few years� Even so, I would warn against regarding this phenomenon as an anachronistic interlude that will soon fade, followed by the return of politics to the norm that existed previously� I am not suggesting that the particular complex of forces that have propelled Trump to power comprise a new political order that will exert a dom- 316 Roger F� Cook inant influence after his presidency. Nor is there even convincing evidence that his supporters have coalesced into a unified movement that will continue to play a significant role in American politics. However, the surge in tribalist tendencies does stem from a confluence of evolving cultural forces that are producing far-reaching and lasting changes� Focusing on the constitutive role media plays in shaping human culture, my essay analyzes how the contemporary political culture has evolved in relation to advances in technology� In particular, I situate it with respect to the explosion of digital media over the last thirty years, a development that has, I will argue, radically altered human interaction and enabled a new form of tribalism� I begin by comparing the contemporary American experience, and specifically the avid support for Trump, with the neotribalism that fueled the Nazi movement� In some ways, Trump’s following is as deeply rooted in tribal patterns of cohesion as the Nazi attempt to revive old Germanic culture and mythology. There are of course obvious and fundamental differences between the two� Nazi ideology was grounded in a traditional framework and depended on an exclusively inhabited territory, physical proximity of the group, and conformity to customary forms of organization and exchange� None of these features figures prominently in the political community that has formed in support of Trump� Nor does it adhere to an integrated historical vision or even a consistent ideological perspective� His following is sustained by a hybrid form of tribalism in which traditional elements adapt to a postmodern cultural environment� In keeping with my focus on the role information technology has played in this development, I contrast the intersection of media and politics in 1930s Germany with the current situation in the U.S. A comparison of the Nazi film Triumph of the Will with Trump’s unprecedented use of Twitter as a political tool will highlight how shifts in the human-media interface are integral to the changing political dynamic� This analysis will help demonstrate how digital media have contributed to the hybrid mode of tribalism exploited by Trump� In the last part of the essay, I turn to Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel The Circle to ask whether the continued spread of digital technology into all areas of culture might lead to a new political agency, a posthuman tribalism that could engender a new form of totalitarianism� Reacting to the ever-accelerating pace of technological and social change at the beginning of the twentieth century, the National Socialist movement tapped into a collective national resistance to the inevitable advance of modernity and the impending loss of a traditional way of life� Nazi leaders vowed to restore age-old German traditions in all areas of society and culture and to build a national empire that would last a thousand years� The rapid advances in technology that produced new mechanical means of transportation and electronic From Triumph of the Will to Twitter: Modern Media and the Evolution of Tribalism 317 forms of communication around the turn of the twentieth century dramatically changed the individual’s temporal orientation to the surrounding world� The modern urban dweller encountered new images and formed new impressions much more frequently (Simmel 173-78)� This generated an increased intensity of life in the present and concentrated human energy into an expanding synchronic space with diminished relations to both the past and the future� The result was not only a weakening of particular traditions steeped in the past but also the atrophy of the diachronic dimension of cultural experience more generally (Huyssen 31-32)� To counter this trend the Nazi party could not simply abandon new technologies� Rather it sought to assume the lead in developing and adopting them to its purpose. Recognizing the power of film to engage the viewer emotionally and physically, Hitler attempted to deploy its affective power against the cultural evolution that was being propelled by film and other forms of modern media. To that end, he enlisted the popular actor and director of Bergfilme Leni Riefenstahl to generate the myth of a natural vitality that was driving German destiny� He believed her film persona embodied the physical and mental traits needed to stem the tide of a degenerative modern culture and to create a robust nation with an unrelenting will to power� In Triumph of the Will , the propaganda film portraying the events of the September 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Riefenstahl employs film’s ability to create a strong sense of presence and involvement in the events of the moment to generate the sense of belonging that Hitler promoted in his speeches to the assembled party members� Exploiting tribalist tendencies that have survived in modern technocratic culture, the film tries to forge the viewer into a strong-willed subject who could serve as a devoted participant in a dynamic movement� It repeatedly shows the healthy bodies of Hitler Youth members and Labor Service workers and disciplined regiments of the SA and SS involved in Nazi Party activities. These figures serve as models for what the German people needed to become to be a part of the new Reich� Correspondingly, the film frames Hitler as the leader of the movement in a way that imparts mythic weight to the role each individual German has to play� He stands before organized masses of followers as the figure of the Führer who can incorporate the entire German national body, past, present and future, in his own being� 318 Roger F� Cook Image 1: Scenes at the Luitpold Arena in Triumph of the Will He concludes his closing speech of the rally on this note: Hitler: “Es ist unser Wunsch und Wille, dass dieser Staat und dieses Reich bestehen sollen in den kommenden Jahrtausenden� Wir können glücklich sein zu wissen, dass diese Zukunft restlos uns gehört! Wenn die älteren Jahrgänge noch wankend werden könnten - die Jugend ist uns verschrieben und verfallen mit Leib und mit Seele! Nur dann, wenn wir in der Partei durch unser aller Zutun die höchste Verkörperung des nationalsozialistischen Gedankens und Wesens verwirklichen, wird sie eine ewige und unzerstörbare Säule des deutschen Volkes und Reiches sein� […] Es lebe die nationalsozialistische Bewegung, es lebe Deutschland! ” Rudolf Hess: “Die Partei ist Hitler! Hitler aber ist Deutschland, wie Deutschland Hitler ist�” This vision of a unified body that incorporates the leader and his host of followers from all periods of German history offers in and of itself resistance to the conditions of modernity denounced by Nazi ideology� The national myth in Triumph of the Will invokes a twentieth-century neotribalism as it seeks to stem the tide of cultural evolution driven by modern technology� Just as the Nazi movement employed the modern medium of film to build its political movement, twenty-first-century American nativism has exploited contemporary digital media to fuel its anachronistic ascent� These media are not merely effective instruments for conveying the message of political movements in the respective time periods� As products of the particular stage of socio-technological progress at the time, they frame the conditions under which new populist movements can emerge and shape the forms of tribalism that they can generate� The explosive growth of digital technology over the last quarter cen- From Triumph of the Will to Twitter: Modern Media and the Evolution of Tribalism 319 tury has led to a media culture that is not well suited for generating grand narratives grounded in revered traditions or even any sense of historical continuity� In the age of an all-encompassing information technology increasingly situated in what is tellingly called the Cloud, the archive is supplanting narrative as the dominant structural element for recording experience and accessing knowledge� In Triumph of the Will all the events and speeches are carefully choreographed and dynamically filmed to present a compelling story of a strong, unified community of ideally embodied followers� The role Twitter and other social media have played in the recent growth of right-wing populism reveals how they are not suitable vehicles for the kind of ideological vision conveyed in Riefenstahl’s film. Twitter, like other real-time social media such as Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, requires a hyper attention rather than the deep attention needed to comprehend and assess narrative-based arguments and concepts� The content, information, and ideas that circulate through these online platforms are less important than the affective responses they generate. In the case of Twitter, the restricted length of a tweet does not allow for the exploration of a topic via extended exposition or documentation� The short lifespan of the message also renders it a fleeting thought that is divorced from deeper investigation into context and significance. For the most part, those who follow and support Trump’s Twitter campaign do not adhere to an integrated historical vision or even a consistent ideological perspective� They remain simply social media respondents whose likes, dislikes, and retweets contribute to a digitally generated affective force. 1 Similarly, the way Trump presents himself on Twitter as the leader of a populist resurgence contrasts starkly with the portrayal of Hitler in Triumph of the Will � In Trump’s Twitter campaign his body and persona are largely eclipsed by the circulation of messages� Tweets from his account are always accompanied by the same small circular photograph of his smiling face� Image 2: The header for Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account This emblematic visual suggests how in real-time streaming media the constant flow of information effaces the embodiment and identity of the sender. As opposed to Hitler’s persona as the Führer, which had to be carefully constructed through image and word, on Twitter the message and the sender merge into a singular media event and the actual person is reduced to a user account� Conse- 320 Roger F� Cook quently, the account name @realDonaldTrump must insist on the authenticity and existence of the person, who otherwise is reduced to the language of the tweet� In the same vein, because the content of the message is no longer paramount, simple, emotive language can be more effective than elegant, articulate formulations� Indeed, Trump’s success using Twitter stems from his frequent and repeated use of personally evaluative terms that are decisively negative or positive� His opponents are “weak,” “stupid,” “bad,” “a moron,” “a loser,” or “a lightweight,” while his supporters and allies are “great,” “tremendous,” “smart,” “terrific,” “a quality guy.” He employs labels, sometimes as hashtags, to define his political opponents: “#CrookedHillary,” “Lyin’ Ted Cruz,” and “Failing NY Times.” And he punctuates his tweets with pointedly evaluative modifiers: “sad,” “pathetic,” or “amazing,” “tremendous�” Turning the tables on those who criticize his crude language skills, he touts his refusal to conform to the traditional standards of public discourse as a sign of his authenticity that distinguishes him from typical politicians: “I went to an Ivy League school� I'm highly educated� I know words� I have the best words, I have the best, but there is no better word than ‘stupid�’ Right? ” (Trump)� The tribalism at work in the current cultural environment is a hybrid form that combines traditional elements with new forces that have surfaced in conjunction with the contemporary stage of socio-technological development� What binds Trump’s followers together works through subject formations and affective flows that do not require an integrated identity. Rather, the volume and extensive circulation of social media messages serves in and of itself as confirmation of the individual’s role in a momentous movement� The technological ability to process huge quantities of information and utilize it for enhanced communication, management, and entertainment fosters the notion that digital culture represents a qualitatively enhanced way of life� In his attempt to forge a critical theory of digital technology, David Berry employs Heidegger’s concept of the “gigantic” to explain how the unfathomable quantity of information processed and deployed via social media does not so much overwhelm the individual as it endows one with “a feeling of pure will-to-power” (Berry 203)� We see this in the role Twitter played in the 2016 election, even when the tweets did not convey a clearly defined political message. The computational structure of the medium reinforces the depreciation of context, narrative, and meaning in favor of impulse and the volume of circulation. Affective expressions of user interest are compiled and sorted by algorithms that ensure that posted messages find their way to both the most receptive and the most hostile users� The impact of a message is measured by the number of likes it receives and how often it is retweeted, with those tweets that produce the most visceral reactions being retweeted most often� It is the pure number and intensity of From Triumph of the Will to Twitter: Modern Media and the Evolution of Tribalism 321 the responses that counts, regardless of what stance they reflect or whether they adhere to any position or principle at all. As affect circulates in this diffuse pattern through Twitter, the user experiences “the gigantic as a manifestation of oneself ” (Berry 203)� To explore how the mode of posthuman tribalism stoked by social media might produce a form of populist totalitarianism, I turn to Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel The Circle . In it he offers a vision of the future in which a single Silicon Valley corporation, called the Circle, has consolidated the various social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube into a single platform� All employees of the corporation are pressured to reply quickly to all zings - a zing being the novel’s version of a tweet� One’s status in the Circle depends on how many followers one can attract and how many positive responses ( smiles , as opposed to frowns ) one receives� To establish a monopoly, the Circle exploits the pressure social media exerts on individuals to participate or risk losing social relevance� On the surface, this pressure seems to stem from traditional modes of control, such as anxiety about belonging or the number of friends one has. At a deeper level, a more pervasive influence is driving the compulsion to familiarize oneself with and use digital media� And although Eggers focuses primarily on social media, the corporation he envisions would include all the tech conglomerates that have expanded from their original focus in one particular area to encompass digital technology’s reach into all facets of contemporary culture: including among others, programming, data processing, information services, communication, entertainment, retail sales, and research� The Circle would result from a merger of what has now become known as the “frightful five” (Manjoo) - Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet (the parent company of Google) - that would also eventually bring all the current social media platforms under its control� In The Circle Eggers envisions how this culture of technological magnitude might be employed to generate a new kind of political community� As the Circle collects extensive information about all those who join, it creates a single online identity for each person - called TruYou - that is constantly expanded and adjusted with increasing participation� It seeks to extend the reach of its online community, eventually making it mandatory to have an account� In language that evokes a sense of counter-cultural freedom often associated with social media, the leaders of the Circle describe their ultimate goal of Completion as a utopian state of openness� Complete knowledge about everyone would be compiled and made available online, and the resulting total transparency would eliminate the misinformation and deception that has always plagued political discourse. Everyone’s voice would find expression through the Circle network, enabling, its leaders claim, a state of pure and complete democracy� At this 322 Roger F� Cook point, the Circle would begin to assume functions traditionally entrusted to the state, such as administering government services and conducting elections� Image 3: Apple Park, the new headquarters for the Apple corporation in Cupertino, California—opened in April 2017 Eggers’s novel warns that the unchecked expansion of social media toward this grandiose vision would in reality have disastrous consequences� The push to Completion seeks to eliminate the traditional mode of politics, the cultural practice where opposing views compete for support in the public arena� The result would not be the elimination of tribal forms of cohesion but rather a tribal community without external enemies� The power of new media to unite users around undefined affective affinities would supplant ideological doctrine as the unifying force capable of producing an authoritarian state� The original founder of the Circle becomes the lone, unheeded voice warning that the idealistic goal of total transparency would not create an ideal democratic state but rather a “totalitarian nightmare” (486)� In The Circle the hybrid form of tribalism that informs Trump’s use of Twitter has morphed into what I would term a posthuman tribalism� “Posthuman” refers here to changes in the human interface with a cultural environment that has become permeated with digital technology� In this context, social media are not viewed merely as a tool employed by political forces, but rather as the culture medium in which a political movement grows, and which also determines to a substantial degree what shape populism can take� The biological term is applicable here because digital technology increasingly engages the user through subphenomenal responses that demand bodily attention but not mental awareness� As a result, judgment and decision-making depend more on bodily operations and capacities that are not accessible to phenomenal consciousness� The programming industry exploits the new technology to persistently target what Berry has From Triumph of the Will to Twitter: Modern Media and the Evolution of Tribalism 323 aptly called “the crucial half-second of preconscious decision-forming processes whereby we literally ‘make up our own minds’” (211)� He employs this idiom to highlight how automatic neural processing creates a physical state of mind that predetermines our cognitive assessments and deliberations to a larger extent than the scholarly and scientific community has previously acknowledged. In stressing the primacy of human subphenomenal operations, some roboticists and advocates of automated technology have even declared consciousness to be an epiphenomenon in the course of human evolution (Hayles 237-38)� As technology companies increasingly engage consumers at this level, they emphasize that the public needs to accept this view of how the mind works and adapt to it� For example, Google has pitched its virtual assistant - introduced as Google Now and now named Google Assistant - as an intervention into forethought that can overcome the weaknesses of human consciousness and create what it has called an “augmented humanity” (Eaton)� To the extent that individuals reject this onslaught of digital interfaces and real-time media platforms, the consumer technology industry attributes it to an inability to adapt, a shortcoming in human cognitive abilities that must be remedied by enhanced interfaces and increased use� Its solution is to create computer services that anticipate needs and wants and fulfills them before the user is even aware of the need. During the 2016 presidential election the same data science companies that produce prediction models for consumer targeting through advanced machine learning, natural language processing, and pervasive cross-platform personal data collection were employed to assess voting tendencies and susceptibility to political messaging� These services specialize in not only determining but actually generating virtual identities that correspond to online users’ choices of which sites they visit and what content they access. The online profile, in this case a real-life political version of the TruYou of the Circle, is linked to detailed information about how we live our lives - what we buy, what we talk about, when and what we eat, who we associate with, the political commentary we read, and the GPS location where we do all these things� Deploying the strategies of behavior modification developed in online advertising, global companies identify voters in real time and target them with specifically tailored messages at the most opportune time and place� Political data mining focuses in particular on emotional hyper-targeting that stirs implicit biases without letting racial, ethnic, or religious prejudices rise to the level of conscious scrutiny� The constant barrage of visceral social media messages aimed at potential Trump supporters operated at the level of preconscious mind-forming processes to influence which lever they would pull in the voting booth more than deliberate decision-making� The narrative of national destiny presented in Triumph of the Will fomented explicit racial and ethnic biases against Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and 324 Roger F� Cook others the Nazis considered inferior to Germanic peoples� Trump’s American nativism fuels the visceral energy of similar biases but does so in a way that enables quasi-plausible deniability at the level of conscious thought� Since the surprising results of the November 2016 U�S� election many have been asking whether the diminished influence of reason, judgment, factual knowledge, and objective evaluation in the political sphere, which has been observed with increasing concern over the last few years, will continue and perhaps even intensify� Are we headed toward the “totalitarian nightmare” that The Circle warns of ? To be sure, Eggers’s novel raises the question whether this kind of political development poses perhaps an even greater threat to individual freedoms and tolerance than a nativism that posits other peoples and cultures as interlopers or even dangerous intruders� Certainly, the danger exists that the addiction to individualized stimuli fed to media users via highly sophisticated algorithms will leave a broad swath of the public subject to manipulation by the tech industry and political parties� Anticipating the kind of resistance Eggers stirs with the fictional scenario of his novel, former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt declared in an oft-cited quip that “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it” (Schmidt)� Whether the programming industry has crossed it or not, it has opened in the political sphere a Pandora’s Box of real-time computational technology that has given us President Trump and altered the U�S� political culture in an alarming manner� Still, I would caution against overindulgence in nightmarish fantasies about decision-making processes that bypass our higher-order mental capacities� Science fiction has always abounded in such apocalyptic scenarios because it is easier to imagine how things can go wrong than to envision a positive outcome in an unknowable future� These visions haunt humankind in large part because we fail to understand how humans and technology have always been inextricably intertwined� It is literally part of our DNA that we will continue to create new technologies and, when we do, we will be compelled to use them� Awareness that we are inevitably bound up with our own technicity produces fantasies about machines that become autonomous agents and enslave the human race ( The Matrix ) or algorithms that operate on their own without input from those humans who created them� We become victims of this paranoia and thus more susceptible to exploitation by new technologies when we do not understand how they are an integral part of our being - that is, when we fail to comprehend how the reciprocal interaction of biological and technological processes at a precognitive level has always been an essential part of human intelligence and creativity� This network of automatic bodily operations is not merely a secondary contributor to the complex system that is the human� Rather, as Andy Clark wrote in in Natural Born Cyborgs : “The most seamless of all From Triumph of the Will to Twitter: Modern Media and the Evolution of Tribalism 325 integrations, and the ones with the greatest potential to transform our lives and projects, are often precisely those that operated deep beneath the level of conscious awareness” (34)� Indeed, those processes occurring in that “crucial half-second” prior to conscious deliberations are as important to all human endeavors as the top-down cognitive operations that humanity has come to think of as the essence of the human� The ability to stave off the new threat of totalitarianism that has helped drive Trump’s recent rise in U�S� politics will require a nuanced understanding of how fast-evolving new media are changing the cultural environment and the preemptive steps needed to adapt to those changes on one’s own terms� The posthuman conception of how humankind establishes and manages its existence in the external world largely through automatic, subphenomenal processes is, almost paradoxically, the key to assuring that reason, judgment, and objective knowledge remain viable in a world inundated with digital technology� The ability to guide and control the direction political culture takes as it moves into an uncertain future requires the insight that people are not fixed targets simply waiting to be overtaken by new, more powerful technologies� Humans advance and evolve along with these technologies, developing new capabilities to remain creative and to reinvent the world we inhabit according to our own imagination rather than falling prey to the kind of brutal manipulation that leaves us addicted to a boring and predictable existence� Only by tapping into the expansion and deterritorialization of the human sensorium that these technologies bring with them at the level of preconscious, automatic bodily operations will societies be able to fend off nefarious attempts at delimitation and control, both from the marketing strategies of the commercial sphere and manipulative political instruments� Notes 1 My analysis focuses on the affective forces generated by Twitter and other social media. However, the visceral effect of social media can also be combined effectively with a more consistent ideological message. This is generally true for the populist movements in Europe that have gained momentum in concert with Trump’s ascendance� For example, during the recent German Bundestag election campaign, posts by Alternative für Deutschland received considerably more likes per Facebook post than any other party� The AfD built up a large following on both Facebook and Twitter by posting highly provocative messages, in particular those that responded to terrorist attacks in Europe� And even when the responses were “angry” emojis expressing opposition to the posts, this increased the volume and intensity of the circulation and helped fuel support for AfD (Davidson and Lagodny)� 326 Roger F� Cook Works Cited Berry, David� Critical Theory and the Digital � New York: Bloomsbury, 2014� Clark, Andy� Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford UP, 2003� Davidson, Thomas, and Julius Lagodny� “Germany’s far-right party AfD won the Facebook battle� By a lot�” washingtonpost.com. The Washington Post, 26 Sept� 2017� Web� 28 Oct� 2017� Eaton, Kit� “The Future According to Schmidt: ‘Augmented Humanity,’ Integrated Into Google�” fastcompany.com � Fast Company, 25 Jan� 2011� Web� 28 Jul� 2017� Eggers, Dave� The Circle � New York: Knopf, 2013� Hayles, N� Katherine� How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics � Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999� Huyssen, Andreas� “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia�” Public Culture 12�1 (2000): 21-38� Manjoo, Farhad� “Tech’s Frightful Five: They’ve Got Us�” nytimes.com. The New York Times, 10 May 2017� Web� 22 Jul� 2017� The Matrix � Dir� Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski� Warner Home Video, 1999� Schmidt, Eric� “Eric Schmidt Remarks�” c-span.org � C-SPAN, 1 Oct� 2010� Web� 17 Jul� 2017� Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Transl. Kurt H. Wolff. Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings � Ed� Mike Frisby and David Featherstone� Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997� 174-85� Triumph of the Will � Dir� Leni Riefenstahl� Synapse Films, 2015�