I left Tribal Dawn over a year ago. I hear they’re doing quite well without me. Given the number of people I inspired with Tribal Dawn’s example, though, I consider it my obligation to finish that story truthfully. I waited for a full year to pass, to give myself the distance to write this. It is my own account of how it happened; I am sure the members of Tribal Dawn remember things differently. I have changed the names, in order to avoid recriminating any of them. These were once my closest friends–nigh family–and I still wish them the best. My intent is not to malign them or Tribal Dawn, but for all I once wrote in their praise, I owe it to the world looking on to say why I no longer believe there is anything tribal about Tribal Dawn.

Once I was sure Daniel Quinn was essentially right (if a bit off on the details), I was faced with the challenge of actually doing something about it. In Beyond Civilization, Quinn suggests a “New Tribal Revolution” of latter-day “occupational tribes”–small businesses lacking a hierarchy, cooperative communities working together to make a living on the “give support/get support” model of the reciprocity economy. The business itself could be anything. With my love of video games, particularly adventure games with a rich, character-driven story, I decided that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to create digital, interactive literature, an electronic mythology for a new, tribal world. “Tribal Dawn” would serve as an example that tribalism is possible even in a modern American city, while our games would tell stories to weave a new mythology, one that undermined the psychosis of the civilized worldview, and promoted a tribal, shamanic view of the world, humanity, and how those two relate.

In the Beginning

The idea of a video game tribe was actually my brother’s first. When I began to actually implement it, he wasn’t sure it was something he wanted to dedicate his life to, and held back. As a tribe of one is no tribe at all, I was left in a bit of a bind with a need to recruit.

Being an undergraduate in the University of Pittsburgh’s Computer Science Department¹ provided me with ample recruiting opportunities. The first was an eccentric, extremely charismatic and brilliant young man who came to be one of my closest friends; we’ll call him “Tyler.” I met Tyler in Pitt’s operating systems course, and while I was a good designer and a solid high-level programmer, Tyler was an absolute wizard with low-level programming and hardware–the sort of things I would never touch, like Assembly and raw C code. I was an object-oriented, C++ programmer. I do my best work in PHP and XML. Meanwhile, Tyler took care of the low end. We made quite a team.

Things went very slowly, until one Saturday night in January 2002. I had made three different friends whom I thought might be interested in joining my tribe. One was Zhenya, a Jew who’d left the Soviet Ukraine as a child with his family; there was Romeo from Ghana; and finally, there was a young man we’ll call “Mark.” Mark was one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met. His programming ability was above par, but not brilliant; what he brought instead was passion and madness. Never underestimate the power of madness in any creative endeavor–it is the essence of creativity, but it bleeds out all too quickly. Without a constant source of madness, any work will quickly become insipid. Mark was our madness, our muse, and in many ways, the heart of Tribal Dawn.

That night, we met at Hemingway’s, a popular spot on Pitt’s campus. The original plan was simply to meet with Mark and Zhenya, but we had happened upon Romeo earlier in the day and naturally invited him along. When we unfolded our critique of civilization, Zhenya thought we were outlining the plot of our first video game. Mark and Romeo, though, agreed with our philosophical basis, and were excited by the dream of Tribal Dawn. They joined us.

A snowball effect began. The energy of that night translated into a hefty design document for our first game and quite a bit of code written over the next few months. More people joined, who spread the dream to more people, who wanted to join…

Tribal Dawn was off to a strong start, and we all were very hopeful for the future.

Ko, Kuna & Ga

Tribal Dawn quickly grew to nine people. There was an even larger pool who wanted to help us in what we were doing and wanted to be part of our lifestyle, but weren’t sure they wanted to take the plunge of total commitment involved in outright joining our tribe.

One of the great moments of consilience between my backgrounds in computers and the social sciences occured then. As we were trying to make a livelihood from computers, there was no room for ambiguity. There is no shadowy region between 1 and 0. We had files and servers and users with different permission levels, and we needed to be able to define what was available to everyone, and what was available to only the tribe proper. We faced a unique problem. What my unique education allowed me to understand was that it was a set problem.

A tribe is formed of two groups; the work group and the social group. The work group is the set of individuals who bring in resources. The social group is the reciprocity network. In a traditional, ethnic tribe, this is indiscernable; the two sets are always identical. Our postmodern tribes face a unique challenge, in that we cannot guarantee this. Our social and work groups will not match perfectly; rather than a single, unified circle, we have a Venn diagram with three regions. In Tribal Dawn, I named these regions the Ko, the Kuna, and the Ga. The names came from Khoisan kinship terms; we used the female terms rather than male, because we have all been female at one point or another (even if only for a few months in the womb), but only half of us have ever been male.

The Ko was the tribe proper, the overlap of the two sets. The name is the Khoisan word for “sister,” suggesting the intimacy of the relationship expected of the Ko. All decisions required the concensus of the Ko; major decisions, such as accepting new members, required unanimity among the Ko.

“Kuna” means “cousin,” and we applied the term to those in the social group only. They joined in our reciprocity network, enjoyed the tribe’s hospitality, and contributed what they wanted, when they wanted. There was little expectation or obligation associated with the Kuna, and correspondingly limited priveleges. By calling them “cousins,” we hoped to denote a warm, friendly relationship, but a generally lesser relationship than that in the Ko.

The Ga was always theoretical in my time with Tribal Dawn. It was the working circle alone. It was devised for the eventuality of working with wage workers, cotnractors, consultants, and others who may be interested in working with us, but less interested in our tribal lifestyle. “Ga” is the Khoisan word for aunt, suggesting a more formalized relationship.

Work continued feverishly. I worked tirelessly, often coding for 48 hours at a stretch. Not even the rest of the Ko combined equalled my number of man-hours, but it didn’t bother me in the least. I reasoned, even if they work for just five minutes, that’s five minutes less than I would have to work without them. Tribal Dawn was my dream first, and if I had to prove it to them by my own labor first, that was hardly unexpected. We were in no position to provide for their day-to-day needs, so I could hardly expect them to commit any bulk of their time to the tribe yet. Before I could expect support, I first had to give it, and I was prepared to give a great deal before I expected any return.

Second to me in man-hours was Tyler. A distant second, to be sure, but still much more than any of the others. However, where I appreciated what little the others contributed–even if it was only criticism that helped us refine our work–Tyler grew increasingly impatient with the lack of others’ contribution. Tyler began increasingly to emphasize how much he had done for the tribe, and how little anyone else had contributed. His sweeping generalizations eventually included even me, even though my work load far exceeded his. While I didn’t have Tyler’s concerns about the lack of contributions from others, I did begin to chafe at his nonchalant dismissal of my own.

The Culling

Dismissing someone from the tribe was always a major event. It must be, to be a tribe. One of the key aspects of the drudgery and turmoil of normal corporate life is the constant fear of dismissal. Members of a tribe must feel safe and accepted. Being dismissed from the tribe must be an extreme measure. In Tribal Dawn, it required a unanimous vote of the Ko (sans the member in question, of course). Our reasoning was that if every other person in the tribe wanted said person gone, it was probably already a disruptive situation that needed to be addressed.

Tyler began trying to convince the other members of the Ko to remove a large number of them, convincing each that nearly everyone in Tribal Dawn (except themselves, of course) needed to be removed. Tyler was extraordinarily charismatic, and convinced the rest quite easily. I do not generally respond to personal charisma, yet even I often found myself trapped in Tyler’s web. It was difficult to disagree with him, even when I knew he was wrong. He–and later, the rest of the tribe–constantly needled me to join them. I was the last vote holding out, the only thing keeping them from the mass dismissal Tyler had in mind.

During my years in college, I also made a good and true friend in Jason Putorti, an ambitious young man who had graduated from Pitt by the age of 19, having already founded Novaurora. Jason has excellent business sense, and saw Tribal Dawn first and foremost as a business, and as a good friend, he gave me his most earnest advice–to drop the deadbeats from our payroll. Let it not be said that Putorti is uncharitable; he most certainly is not. This web space was donated to me by him. Nor is he entirely unsympathetic to the primitivist philosophy, though to call him one would be wildly inaccurate. His advice would have been very sound, had Tribal Dawn been a company first and a tribe second.

Therein was the problem for me; this was the move of a corporation, not a tribe. By removing those who don’t “work hard enough,” we set a dangerous precedent. Must we fear forever more what will become of us if we do not fill our quota for the day? Will we toil mindlessly and endlessly for fear of losing our “jobs”? I wanted a tribe to escape such mindless drudgery, not to recreate another pocket of it myself.

It happened that one of the prime examples Tyler pointed to, and the most egregious offender, was a woman I was quite taken with at the time. The argument was often used against me that my ideals were not so lofty or high-minded as I claimed, but simply that I didn’t want to sack a girl I was so infatuated with.

After months of bombardment on all sides, I finally caved in, and “The Culling” began. In one, all-day meeting of the tribe, we went from nine to four: myself, Tyler, Mark and Ahmed.

Why I Left

I cannot speak for the others, but I know that for me, nothing was the same after the Culling. I worked tirelessly, no longer for love of the tribe, but for fear of being thrown out. I felt like I was under a constant threat, with the ax continually above my head, waiting to fall. It felt like, well, a corporation. But at least there was still our community; at least our decisions were still communal and consensual.

Things started to pick up again. With the expansion of Tribal Dawn into web design & development, I lined up half a dozen prospects, and was closing in on signing some contracts. So was Tyler.

Mark had recently gotten a job, and like most jobs in this day and age, it included a non-competition agreement, barring him from any activities that might be in competition with his company. Said company was then floating rumors of developing some speech-to-text software. The contract Tyler was working on included a component for text-to-speech.

It was an ambiguous situation. Mark was worried at first. I had a much better understanding of law than anyone else in Tribal Dawn, and recognized that while it was not assured, Mark would make an excellent case should his company decide an example needed to be made. If that should happen, Mark would effectively be spending the rest of his life paying his employer in “damages.” To avoid that, if we did take the contract, Mark would have to cease all contact with us not only while we worked on the project itself, but for one full year following the project’s end.

We decided that since the contract was so small, and I was so close to finishing such larger contracts, and since it involved such risk to Mark, we would not pursue it. Until the next day, when Tyler signed it anyway.

I was furious. The Culling had been a major turning point for Tribal Dawn, but this destroyed the last vestiges of tribalism. Tribal concensus had been ignored, and individuals in the tribe were being gambled for chump change. The Culling began the process, and this ended it; the people in Tribal Dawn now took second place to the bottom line. Tribal Dawn was never profitable in the two years I worked with them. Red Hat took eleven years to be profitable. For a new business to turn a profit in just a few months of earnest, full-time work is exceptional. That was exactly what Tribal Dawn was on track to do, with the number and size of the contracts I had lined up. But we had allowed our anxiety over our lack of profitability to run us into the most dastardly corporate practices.

I was also terrified of when they would do the same to me, and gamble with my life as they had gambled Mark’s. The others in the tribe were furious at me for daring to suggest that this was wrong. Mark, being such a meek and gentle person, forgave Tyler for gambling with his future, but was furious with me for “tearing apart” Tribal Dawn. My response is the same now as it was then; there was nothing for me to tear apart. Our tribe died the day of the Culling. Now there is an excellent computer services corporation called “Tribal Dawn,” but I do not believe there is a tribe there. There certainly was not one when I left. It just took me several months to realize it.

The Big Man Problem, or, Is Tyler Durden Raising an Army?

Tribal Dawn has not failed. It still exists. They may even be making money. But it did fail as a tribe. Since I held it up as a shining example of a tribe in years past, I must now ask why it failed to hold that standard.

The charge was often leveled against myself and Tyler that we undermined the tribal nature of the endeavor by holding de facto leadership. Tyler, as I said, was an incredibly charismatic young man. You wanted to like him, to agree with him. He was, in many ways, a Big Man. His charisma gave him undue power and influence. As the founder of Tribal Dawn, my seniority gave me power and influence. But where I constantly took steps to limit that influence, Tyler took steps to consolidate it. I recognized this even then. Tyler was actively trying to ascend to Big Man status, even as I was actively trying to undercut my power base. It became a constant chess match for me–how to undercut my own power, while also blocking Tyler’s rise.

I did not choose the pseudonym speciously. I have referred to my old friend with the name of Tyler Durden, from Fight Club, because of all they held in common. Like Tyler Durden, he was charismatic, with a powerful personality. He even loved sparring to the same degree.

Tribal Dawn failed as a tribe because of the Big Man problem. This is the most crucial reason why I needed to set down this account. It is the single greatest bane for the formation of our postmodern tribes, and this case study may prove valuable in forming some manner of defense against it. As of yet, I have no solution. It was charismatic men like Tyler who, 10,000 years ago, first became Big Men, and then chiefs, and then kings. The origins of agriculture and hierarchy lie with such men. Coming from civilization, we have a disposition to look for leaders in our midst, making us even more prone than our primeval ancestors. Without some defense, we cannot guarantee that civilization will not arise again. We cannot even guarantee the success of our own tribes.

The failure of Tribal Dawn was very sobering to me. But ultimately, nothing in life is guaranteed, and the threat of the Big Man does not make tribe formation any less worthwhile.

This account will no doubt stir up some long-past passions, and rekindle hatred and rages now a year old. If this must be, it must be. I wish my old friends the best, and I hope Tribal Dawn is a successful company. But I was looking for a tribe, not a company, and when Tribal Dawn ceased to be that, I needed to look elsewhere. I wish them luck, and if this account makes them hate me all the more, that is most regrettable. My obligation to tell the world the end of the tale I began is now fulfilled. I intend to leave this be forevermore now, and never revisit this again.

Footnotes

¹ No, I wasn’t lying before; I recieved a Bachelor of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in April 2003 in Computer Science and Anthropology; I was a double-major. I told people it was the combination of what I wanted to say, and how I wanted to say it. [ Back ]

My Autobiography

1. My Catholic Faith
2. Testing the Gorilla
3. Tribal Dawn
4. The Dream that was Anthropik
5. A Student With No Master