"So you start to f with your sleep schedule. You get up at four AM so you can
chat with your friends. You go to bed at nine, 'cause that's when they go to
bed. Used to be that it was stock brokers and journos and factory workers who
did that kind of thing, but now it's anyone who doesn't fit in. The geniuses and
lunatics to whom the local doctrine tastes wrong. They choose their peers based
on similarity, not geography, and they keep themselves awake at the same time as
them. But you need to make some nod to localness, too -- gotta be at work with
everyone else, gotta get to the bank when it's open, gotta buy your groceries.
You end up hardly sleeping at all, you end up sneaking naps in the middle of the
day, or after dinner, trying to reconcile biological imperatives with cultural
ones. Needless to say, that alienates you even further from the folks at home,
and drives you more and more into the arms of your online peers of choice.

"So you get the Tribes. People all over the world who are really secret agents
for some other time zone, some other way of looking at the world, some other
zeitgeist. Unlike other tribes, you can change allegiance by doing nothing more
that resetting your alarm clock. Like any tribe, they are primarily loyal to
each other, and anyone outside of the tribe is only mostly human. That may sound
extreme, but this is what it comes down to.

"Tribes are *agendas*. Aesthetics. Ethos. Traditions. Ways of getting things
done. They're competitive. They may not all be based on time-zones. There are
knitting Tribes and vampire fan-fiction Tribes and Christian rock tribes, but
they've always existed. Mostly, these tribes are little more than a sub-culture.
It takes time-zones to amplify the cultural fissioning of fan-fiction or
knitting into a full-blown conspiracy. Their interests are commercial,
industrial, cultural, culinary. A Tribesman will patronize a fellow Tribesman's
restaurant, or give him a manufacturing contract, or hire his taxi. Not because
of xenophobia, but because of homophilia: I know that my Tribesman's taxi will
conduct its way through traffic in a way that I'm comfortable with, whether I'm
in San Francisco, Boston, London or Calcutta. I know that the food will be
palatable in a Tribal restaurant, that a book by a Tribalist will be a good
read, that a gross of widgets will be manufactured to the exacting standards of
my Tribe.

"Like I said, though, unless you're at ground zero, in the