If there is a trend toward identity and tribalism, it would be a pretty natural response to the midcentury trend toward isolated nuclear families and hyper-individualism. My recollection was that culture in the '90s was actually quite obsessed with "tribes" and identity as a direct reaction to the dog-eat-dog '80s.

I see it as more of a deliberate community building choice, one that we've seen for decades and one that's more popular now than ever, I'd argue, and not some "millennial" propensity towards tribalism.

Every brand/product/service/etc is trying to create communities around themselves, with fan clubs, VIP memberships, social media groups, email lists, Zoom/in-person conferences/webinars, etc.

It used to be you had to have a ton of reach and value to pull those off before the internet, now every project has marketing and social media people doing the same thing online.

Really? I know it was mostly 2000s, but a lot of Paul Graham's writing was about how great Lisp is [1]. It also sounds like the C versus C++ arguments were wild too if Linus is still riled up about it.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/iflisp.html

I used to program Perl and C on various *nix systems in the 90s. I wasn't a Perlist or C-ist or Unix-ista. I didn't need to hate Macs and Windows and C++ as part of my identity.

There was, if you had access to Usenet.

Delphi versus VB, VB vs C++, Pascal vs C, C vs C++...

Tribalism is pretty clearly biologically wired into our species.