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We live in an era where identity politics is challenging the politics of ideas. At its core, identity politics raises a profound question: Is a person’s social standing defined more by their actions or by who they are—in particular, by the group they belong to? This debate reflects an ideological divide: Those who emphasize individual efforts and responsibilities are likely libertarians and free market advocates, while those who prioritize identity over merit often support the “just” distribution of resources by an entitled caste, ultimately steering toward the Big State and socialism.
This seemingly political divide was, in fact, produced by media. Over time, media evolved from forms that largely ignored human differences to forms that now emphasize and spotlight them. Since the mid-1800s, media has increasingly targeted audiences rather than ideas, intensifying society’s focus on group identities—a trend that culminated in social media’s focus on personal data. Cultural settings began to reflect this development of media; this is why identity politics is a media effect.
Writing: Separating the Knower from the Known
The introduction of writing made communication indifferent to the personalities of the communicators. Writing was “reader-blind”; it presented ideas. This was a pivotal turn from the conditions of oral communication, where the speaker needed to persuade the listener, and so the personal characteristics of both were crucial for the success of communication. As literary scholar Eric Havelock observed [ [link removed] ], writing separated the Known from the Knower, allowing the Known to be contemplated on its own, regardless of who was communicating or to whom.
Written, detached, depersonalized knowledge enabled something previously unknown to oral-tribal culture: abstraction and objectivity in thought. Ideas gained value independently of the speaker. This is what Aristotle meant when he said, “Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is the truth.” Choosing some abstract “truth” over Plato—Aristotle’s teacher and elder—would have been unthinkable in an oral-tribal community. Writing dismissed Plato’s identity characteristics, changing the focus entirely to the merits of his ideas. With the advent of writing, knowledge shifted from personal experiences to universal ideas.
The Age of Print: Uniformity and Standardization
The universalism of knowledge was further reinforced by the printing press. Before printing, hand-copied manuscripts accumulated errors made by scribes. Printing not only made identical copies available for rapid distribution but also facilitated swift feedback. Printers competed by producing exact copies, translations, maps, blueprints or biological atlases. Precision became a commodity and a virtue—the publishers welcomed corrections to produce the finest editions. Thus emerged editing and fact-checking. In manuscript culture, corrections were sporadic and nearly impossible; in the printing business, they became a systemic factor ensuring precision and uniformity.
The development of map printing provides a vivid illustration. Before printing, hand-drawn maps were privately held by merchants and sea captains and kept in secrecy. This lack of sharing led to the preservation and accumulation of errors. A captain would discover an error on a map only through personal misfortune, and even then, others would rarely learn of it. Once printed maps became available, captains and merchants complained about errors, and publishers would promptly correct them if they wanted to stay competitive.
The rapid and mass production of copies introduced by printing enabled a collective mechanism for improving and standardizing maps. Because of it, by the way, mankind lost Paradise for the second time. Many medieval hand-drawn maps featured the Garden of Eden, located somewhere in the Near East. However, the circulation of printed maps could not confirm any of its locations, and Paradise ultimately vanished from the maps of the known world for good.
Such mechanisms of “crowdsourced” editing inherent in print production eventually enabled standardization and “user-agnostic” accuracy across all areas of knowledge soon after their respective texts began to be printed and reprinted. Yet, the very commodification of print production that facilitated corrections and led to universalism paradoxically ignited the process of corrupting the impartiality characteristic of written language.
Text as Commodity: The Fragmentation of the Audience Commences
At first, the reading public was eager to read whatever the printers offered. As time passed, however, market saturation made the public more discerning. Different groups became aware of what they wanted to read, and the printers had to tailor their production to more diverse and specific demands. This way, the characteristics of readers—their wants and social demographics—became relevant for content production. Writing was reader-blind, but printing could no longer disregard readers. Industrial production eventually leads to more nuanced audience targeting.
In the mid-19th century, the invention of the rotary press and cheap paper made from wood pulp significantly reduced the cost of newspaper production. Before that, newspapers were primarily funded by those wishing to distribute specific political agendas: the then-dominant party press focused on ideas. The decrease in production costs led to the emergence of the penny press—cheap newspapers sold on the street to a broader public. With the penny press, mass media became truly “mass.”
News publishers were freed from party dictates—and money—but became dependent on the money and tastes of the masses instead. They needed to tailor their content to what readers wanted. The news market shifted from being idea-centered to being reader-centered, prompting news publishers to discern who their readers were.
Mass media ignited the interest of the masses in public issues. It was no coincidence that the broadening of electoral rights occurred at the same time, eventually leading to universal suffrage. Electoral populism emerged; similar to industrial production, the electoral populism of the industrial era quickly evolved toward more nuanced audience targeting. Competing for votes, politicians had to address different socio-demographic groups with their specific interests. In the 20th century, the group identity of the reader-voter became a significant factor in public life.
Broadcast Media: Know Your Customer
Radio and television furthered the shift from a content-centered to a more audience-centered approach: As electronic media, they enabled a revolution in audience measurement. It began in 1937 when two sociologists from Columbia University, Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton, designed the program analyzer [ [link removed] ], a machine that registered listeners’ reactions to radio shows. The test group would listen to a program and press the left or right button when they liked or disliked what they heard. The machine drew chronological graphs of their reactions, allowing producers of news, shows and ads to see which audience members, both individually and collectively, preferred which types of content. (This is how the “like” button was invented, 70 years before social media.)
Similar methods were introduced for television in the late 1940s. By the 1990s, an entire audience measurement infrastructure had emerged, connecting TV remote controls in thousands of households to new program analyzers, now called people meters. Each household member involved in the measurement was required to log in while making program choices with the remote control. The measurers could learn a viewer’s TV choices immediately, in real time. Armed with this knowledge, TV producers could customize their content not just for kids, men and women, but for groups with very specific demographic characteristics, such as an “older working-class Black man” or a “middle-class, middle-age single white mother.” (This precise and overlapping individual identification closely resembles what is now referred to as intersectionality in contemporary identity politics.)
Media producers were obsessed with using identity profiling to manipulate people’s behavior long before identity politics took its contemporary place in public discourse. Suffice it to recall the movie “What Women Want [ [link removed] ]” (2000), an anthem of identity targeting in marketing. It would not be an exaggeration to state that the basics of identity identification, along with the belief that identity is the fundamental principle of social interaction, first emerged in media and marketing—to increase revenue.
It was not coincidental, once again, that social theories began developing similar concepts in the era of television. Beyond the emergence of the term “identity politics [ [link removed] ]” during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1970s, the question of identity was central to the theories of postmodernism. For instance, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued that modern technologies transformed indivisible and holistic individuals into “dividuals”—divisible entities with specific markers that can be identified by card readers at factory gates, ATMs or profiling settings in databases. Deleuze revealed that defining and assigning these identity markers served as a tool of social control [ [link removed] ].
Social Media: The Ultimate Targeting and the Activation of Users
Today’s digital technology has enabled media to fully complete the transition of their mode of operation from focusing on content to focusing on users. Unlike media of the past, which could target only large groups, social media allows for highly refined personal customization of news and ads. To achieve this, social media algorithms closely survey users and learn all their preferences. Social media business is content-ignorant but very much user-oriented. Algorithms identify users’ preferences through dozens of extremely nuanced identity markers.
In addition to the incredible personalization of the newsfeed, social media has flipped the formerly passive audience into active users, who can share their news, thoughts and choices. By sharing, users count on self-actualization through recognition, the highest value in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The entire social media environment is designed to reward users for this identity signaling. Heavy content [ [link removed] ] isn’t necessary—one might get “likes” for simply posting a selfie or geotag.
Even tools of automation were introduced to help users speed up their socialization. By clicking the “like” or “repost” buttons, users express themselves to each other—and to the algorithms. To these algorithms, users’ sharing functions much like the people meters of the previous electronic era. Any user’s online activity, even the most minuscule, signals preferences and helps algorithms calibrate the personal customization of news and ads.
Five billion users find themselves in a media environment that encourages self-expression, often in a fairly meaningless way. This environment has conditioned people to believe that identity signaling matters. Consequently, the more time people spend on, in and with social media, the more this focus on identity signaling permeates all other social practices. Social recognition has shifted from what a person does to what a person is.
This is how identity has come to signify more than merit. Media is the hardware of society, and culture is its software. The hardware has evolved from expressing ideas to centering on identities; the software—our culture—has followed suit. Politics has mirrored the development of media, reflecting its cultural consequences. The prioritization of identity has now reached the highest levels of political hierarchy. For example, presidential candidate Kamala Harris can be seen as an identity candidate of the second generation. Joe Biden was selected in 2008 to balance the identity of Barack Obama, and Harris was selected in 2020 to balance the identity of Biden. Tim Walz, in turn, was selected to balance the identity of Harris; he is an “identity great-grandson” to Obama.
In general, selecting the vice-presidential candidate has become almost exclusively a matter of identity balance—on the Republican side, too, though to a lesser degree and with a different message. (In the latest electoral cycles, the Democrats emphasize race/gender, while the Republicans emphasize class/profession). The VP position is rather symbolic, and signaling diverse identity representation for better political targeting seems reasonable.
But the vice presidency can also be a path to the presidency, as showcased most recently by Biden. Under certain circumstances, an identity-based pick can lead to the highest decision-making positions at a planetary, so to speak, level, representing the truly terraforming power of media. A byproduct of media evolution, identity politics has come to dominate cadre policy across many areas and on many levels, expanding from academia and politics to healthcare [ [link removed] ], aviation [ [link removed] ] and elsewhere.
Digital Retribalization and What We Can Do About It
Digital media’s focus on identity signaling reverts the conditions of the literate mind to a state more typical of tribal societies based on oral tradition. Once again, who Plato is matters more than what Plato does. However, there is a significant difference between oral tribalism and digital tribalism. In oral cultures, identity served as both a predictor and prescriber. Defining or assigning a person an identity allowed for the allocation of tribal roles and tasks. Identity prescribed behavior. In contrast, in today’s social media environment, identity is behavior. Any action on social media functions as identity signaling, which serves as a request for affirmation and basically nothing else. Signaling identity is the digital labor that converts into the benefits of socialization within respective digital tribes.
Being trained by media around the clock, people have internalized the ethos of identity signaling as something worthy of reward (or punishment). Numerous psychologists and life coaches, for example, urge us to discover our “true selves” as a solution to problems that normally used to be solved through applying relevant efforts—through doing something.
While our experience with media has spotlighted the role of identity and thus provided new ways of seeing the correlation between group belonging and systems of privilege or oppression, human individuality is immeasurably more complex than even the most intricate identity profile.
The entire evolution of media has led society to view identity, rather than deeds, as the primary determinant of social interactions. It would be impossible to revert to a state where dominant media, such as writing or early printing, focused on ideas and ignored personalities. The media-driven focus on identity is here to stay; no one can return it to supposedly healthier factory settings because this focus on identity is the factory setting of the current media hardware of society.
It is possible, however, to address some of the fallouts of media evolution, particularly the most detrimental: the demise of meritocracy. We can still choose to judge others, when relevant, by what they do rather than by who or what they are. Identity, in itself, conveys worth or shame only within a caste society, which identity politics is steadily reintroducing. Distinguishing between who Plato is and what he accomplished is becoming as challenging and contrarian now as it was in Aristotle’s time—this illustrates how far back retribalization has already thrown us. However, Aristotle managed to make this distinction, offering us a glimmer of hope.

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