The Tribe Has Wi-Fi: Why the Internet Recreated the Bronze Age

The early internet was sold to us as a triumph of Enlightenment values: a frictionless marketplace of ideas; a global coffeehouse where facts would politely elbow superstition aside, democracy would flourish, and everyone would finally admit you were right all along.

What we actually built looks less like a salon and more like a fortified hill settlement, complete with banners, shunning rituals, sacred symbols, and the occasional ceremonial sacrifice of a public figure.

If modern online behaviour feels strangely archaic, that’s because it is. Strip away the fibre optics and UX copy, and much of internet culture behaves less like a liberal democracy and more like the social systems of the Bronze Age: intensely tribal, status-obsessed, myth-driven, and deeply suspicious of outsiders. We haven’t transcended history. We’ve reinstalled it as an app.

A Brief Return to 1200 BCE

When people say “Bronze Age,” they tend to imagine loincloths, grunting, and hitting one another with rocks. In reality, Bronze Age societies were complex, hierarchical, and meticulously structured. City-states such as Mycenae or Ugarit ran on dense networks of kinship, patronage, honour, and ritual.

Identity was collective. Survival depended on belonging. Being cast out was not a metaphorical inconvenience; it was often a death sentence.

Reasoned debate between rival groups was not the social glue. Loyalty was. Status was. Myth was. These societies understood something the Enlightenment later tried very hard to forget: humans are not primarily rational creatures who occasionally become emotional. We are emotional, tribal animals who occasionally manage to reason, usually in defence of the tribe we already belong to.

This matters because the internet, far from dissolving these instincts, has poured petrol on them.

The Human Brain: Not Updated Since the Holocene

Our social hardware evolved for small groups where everyone could see everyone else, where reputation was local, and where threats were immediate and physical. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar famously argued that humans can maintain stable social relationships with roughly 150 people. The internet blithely ignored this, handed us social networks of millions, and then feigned surprise when things went feral.

Faced with overwhelming social scale, the brain reaches for shortcuts: Us and them. Friend and enemy. Sacred and profane. Online platforms don’t merely allow this; they optimise for it. Algorithms reward outrage, emotional certainty, and moral drama because these keep you scrolling. Nuance is terrible for engagement. Tribal signalling is excellent.

Memes, Totems, and the Art of Not Explaining Yourself

In Bronze Age societies, symbols did a lot of heavy lifting. A banner, a tattoo, or a style of dress could communicate allegiance instantly. You didn’t need to explain your political theory; your shield did that for you.

Online, memes perform the same function. A meme is not an argument; it is a tribal marker. It compresses an entire worldview into an image that can be recognised, shared, and defended without the friction of thought. Sharing the correct meme signals loyalty. Sharing the wrong one is an act of provocation. Refusing to engage with memes at all marks you as suspicious, possibly hostile, and almost certainly boring.

This is why online arguments feel less like debates and more like ritualised shouting matches. The goal is not persuasion. It is visibility, dominance, and reassurance that your people are still your people.

Chieftains With Ring Lights

Every tribe needs leaders, and the internet has produced them in abundance. Influencers, streamers, prominent posters, and community moderators function less like public intellectuals and more like Bronze Age chieftains. Their authority rests on charisma, perceived authenticity, and control of narrative, not on being consistently correct.

Challenges to these figures are rarely treated as disagreements; they are treated as attacks on the tribe itself. Followers respond reflexively, often more aggressively than the leader would bother to. This is not because everyone is stupid. It is because status defence is a collective activity. If the chief looks weak, the whole group feels threatened.

The fact that many of these chieftains insist they are “just asking questions” or “starting conversations” does not make the dynamic less ancient. It makes it more so.

Exile, Cancellation, and the Joy of Purification

In pre-state societies, exile was the ultimate punishment. You were not merely punished; you were removed from the social universe. Modern “cancellation” operates on the same logic. It is not primarily about correcting behaviour or improving norms. It is about purification.

When someone is targeted for expulsion from an online community, the process follows a familiar pattern: accusation, amplification, moral certainty, ritual apology demands. Failure to apologise correctly results in escalation. Success does not guarantee reintegration. Often, nothing does. The goal was never rehabilitation. It was to reassure the tribe of its own moral boundaries.

The anthropologist René Girard would have recognised this instantly. His theory of scapegoating argued that communities stabilise themselves by projecting internal tensions onto a chosen victim. The internet has simply made the process faster, messier, and searchable.

Symbolic Warfare and Bloodless Raids

Bronze Age warfare was not always about annihilation. It was often symbolic: raids, displays of dominance, and ritualised violence meant to establish hierarchy rather than eliminate enemies entirely. Online conflict mirrors this beautifully.

Ratioing, dogpiling, mass reporting, and quote-tweeting with performative contempt, these are not attempts to resolve disagreement. They are dominance displays. Victory is measured in humiliation, visibility, and narrative control. The defeated are expected to withdraw, apologise, or disappear. Occasionally, they do all three.

The fact that no one physically dies does not make the violence unreal. Social death is still death, just without the paperwork.

Myth-Making in the Age of the Algorithm

Bronze Age societies relied on myths to explain misfortune, justify power, and identify enemies. Online communities do the same, only now the gods are replaced by recommendation engines.

Simplistic narratives flourish because they are emotionally satisfying. Villains are flattened. Context is stripped away. Complex systems are reduced to malicious actors. Algorithms reward this because anger spreads better than uncertainty. A nuanced explanation might be accurate, but it won’t trend.

Modern case studies abound. Conspiracy movements that frame the world as a battle between hidden cabals and righteous insiders behave exactly like ancient cults, complete with secret knowledge and initiation rites. Political fandoms treat policy disagreements as moral contamination. Corporate scandals are narrated as morality plays rather than structural failures. None of this is accidental. It is how tribal storytelling works.

Why Liberal Democracy Malfunctions Online

Liberal norms assume a great deal: good faith, a shared reality, and the possibility that being wrong is survivable. These assumptions hold reasonably well in institutions with rules, accountability, and friction. The internet removes friction, accelerates feedback, and strips away consequences while amplifying social rewards.

In tribal environments, speech is not evaluated for truth but for loyalty. Silence is suspect. Ambivalence is betrayal. The result is not free expression but constant signalling under threat. People do not say what they think; they say what their tribe expects, or they say nothing at all.

This is not a failure of individual morality. It is the predictable outcome of placing millions of primates into a permanent reputational cage match and calling it discourse.

Are We Doomed to Eternal Clan Warfare?

The Bronze Age lasted a long time. What eventually changed things was not better arguments but stronger institutions: legal systems, bureaucracies, and impersonal rules that reduced the importance of personal honour and collective vengeance. The internet, structurally, resists all of these. It is fast, informal, emotionally charged, and globally scaled.

There are glimmers of hope. Smaller online spaces with enforceable norms sometimes function like city-states rather than tribes. Anonymity, paradoxically, can reduce status anxiety when properly managed. Design choices matter. But none of this is inevitable, and none of it is neutral.

What is clear is that the internet did not make us regress. It revealed what we were always capable of once the scaffolding came off.

Welcome Back to the Bronze Age

We like to think history is a straight line pointing upward. It isn’t. It’s a messy loop with occasional detours through reason. The Enlightenment was not humanity’s default mode; it was a fragile social achievement that required constant maintenance. Online, that maintenance has failed.

So here we are, hurling memes instead of spears, banishing enemies with clicks instead of torches, and telling ourselves this is progress because the interface is sleek. The tribe is back. It never really left. It just learned how to use Wi-Fi.

If that makes you uncomfortable, good. Bronze Age societies were uncomfortable too. They were just very, very familiar.

References

Cline, E.H. (2014) 1177 B.C.: The year civilization collapsed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Dunbar, R.I.M. (1992). ‘Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates’, Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), pp. 469–493. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J (Accessed: 17 December 2025).

Girard, R. (1986). The Scapegoat. Translated by Y. Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York: Pantheon House.

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