Today we don’t have listeners anymore; we have tribal scouts.
today we are either the film composer, the Muse Score conservative or “notation guy” (as if Notation were a nation with a folk), the avantgarde composer, the trumpist, the liberal etc . Everything you do is a “sign” for the tribe.

If you share this text, for example, you are not only someone who finds this video valuable: you are immediately seem as tribal member. Now, automatically that reedit moderator — with his average sense of proportion and judgement — will make a very logical equation in his head: hm, this guy shared a video from a channel of a someone who played organ concerts 10 years ago, therefore he is a christian-trumpist. Then you read the community guidelines: “ We avoid any polemic and controversial topic here. Please fear the anonymous moderator and never argue”. So you don’t share my video, the risk of losing that perfect fake social comfort and validation and parassocial persona that you built for years and being left having to interact to real people — i mean people who are loud, who speak too much, or people who visits your home at the bad time — is not worthwhile.

But here is the kicker: the aesthetic value of what you do is only valid when it is a CORRECT sign for the tribe. A piece is “good” or “serious” not first by its inner coherence, sonic richness, or compositional intelligence, but by whether it fits the expected profile of “avant‑garde,” “film‑composer,” “political‑message,” “safe‑classical,” etc.

Aesthetic value is now mediated by tribal correctness, not by the ear, the form, or the composition.

What happens in the Identity Art phenomena — where your art must serve a political cause in order to be even considered for that best museum opportunity  — starts to influence everything somehow: now you are either the Group A identity or the Group NON-A.

Notice well this: if you don’t join the Group A you ARE the Group NON-A.

This is different from older “schools” or “aesthetic doctrines” (classicism vs. romanticism, serialism vs. tonality, etc.), because those schools were still oriented toward an internal aesthetic project, a search for “the best” form, expression, or structure while Identity Art (in its more rigid forms) treats affiliation with a group and its values as the primary criterion, often before close listening, viewing, or formal analysis.

You could say any taste gonna form a lifestyle; and is true. But here we talk not about “schools” or aesthetic doctrines searching for the best, for excellence, but groups enclosing themselves OUT of this natural “aesthetic competition”. Do you see ANY one searching for excellence out there? No, you see animals trying to bond and survive at any costs.

THE SUBORDINATION OF VALUE TO NARRATIVE

Worse is how not the artwork is judged by its intrinsic match or not match of some artistic value that promotes this or that culture, this or that lifestyle, but the contrary: the discourse and indirect signals DETERMINE (from top to bottom) what the artwork is. Notice how quickly, for example, works are dismissed or praised based on the artist’s identity, genre, and politics, even before detailed listening or analysis.

If Hans Zimmer composes music to save the planet — by the way, from a hoax that Bill Gates himself denied years later after promoting it — he is a genius already by the good intention: today — from Hollywood to Academia — the concept and social proof (and by social proof here I mean someone’s ability to give you a job) can fix the most banal combination of sounds possible.

The tribe will always chose as king the one that defends it the best. And the best defense is gonna be the more furious. But furious here does not mean with brutal force, but with the right social game, the right mastery of SEO, the affinity to nomos by total surrender of any sense of internal dignity. And one way to do this, for example, is to avoid the word nomosat all: the SEO does not like that much, and someone might not have the time to check what it means.

But still more important — in case you really decide to write nomos (because only this word defines this article) and nowpay the price of atrocious elitism — which display of social mastery beats the confidence to apply thumbnail-face 😮? Well, it is easy to understand how any moron is devastated by the most banal events; what is not so easy to understand is how they now toke the lead of our beloved , of our hated, of our beloved, and hated… Western Civilization.

And if you are serious about this, at least you can force a smile and show that your community, your tribe, is doing well, the more self-centered it gets.

(…)

The more identity brands manufactured by these clowns of the algorithm, the more products we can produce: now — from kitchen utilities to computer products — you can not only produce the car that works, but the car that confirms a certain belief. You can soon perhaps fabricate the christian car, moved by a prayer-app, and with so well designed doors that the car now looks like a gay angel, almost flying…

But there is a reason why a true pluralism of goods (and this would mean different attempts of the best solution for highly valuable and objective problems ) does not happens exactly like this yet: I agree with Varoufakis that we live in a technofeudalist age, and pure capitalism under idiocratic algocracy is not possible anymore.

However, we still find ourselves in this tension between multi- and mono culture. Or worse: we do at the same time lack of any shared culture and are dominated by the tendency to monoculture — both while missing any shared experience of meaning.

It seems that the tribalist chaos is just the subordinated event, while the coordenated event is the plan of achieving a static monoculture.
Paradoxically we also notice a big rise of monoculture, but this monoculture is exactly one based on the principles that lead to the tribalist signalling I am talking about.

And why is this state of affairs promoted? Why is the “Narcissism of Small Differences” our highest value today? Because fear and division is the condition to conquer. This is how the technofeudal elite profits from identitarian generators of capital.

You are allowed to form your tribes, but you all must surrender to the Master of Puppets.

The tribalization of everything gonna conduct to an absurd, because soon we gonna have the “fuguists” versus the “sonatists”. You just need one youtube channel of 1 M subs fighting with another YT channel of 1M subs over a pointless Discord polemic. They gonna naturally become self-centered bubbles fighting each other.

Exactly here lays the impossibility of any cultural development . Because cultural development is a direct result of a sophisticated interplay of synchretisms and conciliations. See how the ancient Romans adapted the ancient Greeks, and how the Italians adapted both, and how german idealists toke almost everything they could get out of these cultures, for example. In short, the current culture runs toward the wildest uncivilised state possible, and the reason for this is a coward and sick attachement to an undeveloped ego, that prioritises the categories of fear and survival, while it demonizes the dimension of integration, conciliation, selection, and — why not- love.

The absurdity of the “Fuguists vs Sonatists” culture from my previous thought experiment hides the real tragedy: a fear‑driven ego that rejects syncretism and conciliation in favor of tribal purity. Cultural development thrives on integration, but integration requires sharpness of intellectual judgement; today’s identity‑war culture is the precise opposite — an uncivilized, self‑sabotaging regression justified as “authenticity.”

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