The enshittification of the major social media platforms has become impossible to ignore… and has led many to predict a more decentralized future for the web. But as William Gibson famously observed, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Case in point: Ben Smith‘s blockbuster Semafor post on the flourishing ecology of private chat groups that has emerged, starting with…
Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right. That same week in Chatham House, Lonsdale and the Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban sparred over affirmative action, and Cuban and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro discussed questions of culture and work ethic.
This constellation of rolling elite political conversations revolve primarily around the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and a circle of Silicon Valley figures. None of their participants was surprised to see Trump administration officials firing off secrets and emojis on the platform last month. I did not have the good fortune to be accidentally added to one of the chats, which can be set to make messages disappear after just 30 seconds.
But their influence flows through X, Substack, and podcasts, and constitutes a kind of dark matter of American politics and media. The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed. The group chats are “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion,” wrote one of their key organizers, Sriram Krishnan, a former partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (typically styled a16z) who is now the White House senior policy adviser for AI.
Of course, these are hardly the only power group chats. Anti-Trump liberals are now coordinating their responses on Signal. There are group chats for Black political elites and morning show producers. A vast and influential parallel set of tech conversations take place on WhatsApp. There’s a big China-friendly group over on WeChat. Elite podcasters have one…
… Many of the [Chatham House] chatters celebrate their success in driving the ascendant politics of the Trump era, which they hope will bring back patriotic industry and traditional cultural norms. Some who have left or lurk consider it a sinister phenomenon in which Andreessen exerted unspoken gravitational pull, as one participant put it: “You’d see that the writers were bending toward the billionaires, and even the ones who prided themselves on being iconoclastic were bending to the tastes and the centers of gravity of power.”…
… You should therefore be very suspicious of anyone who claims to be in the Genuine Ideas business but who is afraid to fully speak their mind in public. For the past half decade at least, America has been bombarded with the grumblings of influential people griping that they are not “allowed” to say what they really think, these days. Because of wokeness, and witch hunts, and things like that. What do they mean when they argue that they are not “allowed” to say something? Do they mean that they might be snatched by government agents and deported for writing a humanitarian op-ed in a student newspaper? No. What they mean, usually, is that they hold opinions that many people would find objectionable and if they say those opinions out loud people will get mad at them. In many cases, they also hold prestigious positions at media or business or academic institutions that claim to have some anodyne progressive values, and because their objectionable ideas are objectionable in the specific sense of “being some variety of bigotry,” their colleagues at those institutions would be mad at them, making their lives unpleasant. (It is darkly funny that, in the years that all of these people have been complaining about the woke censorship they are suffering, the people who have actually suffered the most professional retaliation for voicing their beliefs have been those who spoke out for the human rights of Palestinians. That has proven to be far more dangerous to one’s livelihood than being a bigot.)
It is important to notice the fact that, in truth, all of these whining people very much are allowed to say what they think. They sure can. No one is stopping them. What they are really objecting to is not censorship, but rather the honest reactions that their honest ideas will elicit. In other words, they cannot handle The Discourse. They are not equipped to participate in the Ideas industry. They are unable to carry the burden of telling the truth as they see it. This is fine, if you’re a regular person; no one is obligated to get yelled at for their beliefs. But it is not fine if you are someone—a writer, a leader, an intellectual influencer of the public—who is supposed to be pushing ideas. Those people must either say what they believe, change what they believe, or accept the fact that they are intellectual cowards.
These are the things that I thought last night when I read Ben Smith’s Semafor story about the many exclusive group chats, full of pundits and quasi-journalists and Substack writers and Silicon Valley business titans and political activists, that have served as private petri dishes of reactionary thinking since the start of the pandemic. It is a juicy story, replete with tales of the wounded signatories of the infamous Harper’s Letter forming and reforming little Signal chat groups where they could hold masturbatory agreement sessions with Marc Andreesen and Mark Cuban and similar tech gurus who fancy themselves masters of the nation’s future. Over and over again, participants in these chats explain that they were places where they could speak more openly than they would in public. “People during 2020 felt that there was a monoculture on social media,” goes one typical comment from an entrepreneur, “and if they didn’t agree with something, group chats became a safe space to debate that, share that, build consensus, feel that you’re not alone.” It’s not just the businessmen— “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens,” agrees one popular blog thinkfluencer, who presumably is not giving his public readers his important or interesting stuff…
… Sometimes you say what you think, and guess what happens? People get mad. People yell at you. Yes. That goes with the territory. I will put the = hate mail and death threats and angry internet comments that I received during my Gawker years up against anyone’s. And, hey: that’s the fucking job. Whether you write for Gawker or Substack or the New York Times or Harper’s—or whether you are a CEO or tech visionary or a venture capitalist who goes to the Aspen Ideas festival and has a bazillion Twitter followers—the only requirement of the job is to speak your mind honestly. Because, because, by asking the public to listen to you, you are telling the public that they will be getting, as best as you can manage it, your truest ideas. We ask people to give us their attention, and their time, and in turn we give them our honest thoughts. When you are operating in this world and you stop giving people your honest thoughts, you begin ripping people off.
Feel free to hide your honest thoughts in private group chats if you like. Rather than speaking forthrightly, retreat into a little hole where you can stage manage and coordinate the rollout of soft versions of your unpopular ideas in friendly forums. But if you do, don’t pretend that you are a member in good standing of the (absurd, enraging, pompous, but ultimately socially valuable) Ideas industry. Say what you think, cowards! Or stop pretending that your beliefs are important enough for other people to care about in the first place…
… it’s worth pointing out that the dynamics of these group chats only makes sense when you keep in mind that these people are doing something literally everyone on Earth does — post in a group chat — but think they literally invented the future of media. Peak rich guy brain at work here. They, also, spent the lead up to Semafor publishing their piece freaking out about it, which hilariously hyped the shit out of it.
The interesting thing here, though — well, beyond the fact that we now have hard evidence that a secret network of the country’s richest men have been using Signal groups to coordinate a soft coup and inadvertently crashed the global economy in the process — is the timing. According to Semafor, the big digital rats nest of middle-life-crisis-havers started forming after Andreessen published the “It’s Time To Build” blog post, one of the many manifestos he would publish during his manic post-COVID era. The essay went viral on Clubhouse (lol) and led to the earliest versions of these group chats forming on, first, WhatsApp, and, then, Signal.
I was particularly vicious about Clubhouse when it launched, a site I’ve often referred to as a dinner party simulation app. And I was especially angry that the social network was being astroturfed into a “thing” by men like Andreessen. To me, Clubhouse stands as the moment Silicon Valley fully lost the plot, effusively hyping up an app that literally just let them hear their own voices. The snake finally eating its own tail. As I wrote back in 2021, “Clubhouse, by the very fact both its initial user base and its subsequent hype was basically dreamt up by Silicon Valley insiders, was, in my opinion, a test of whether or not venture capitalists had enough influence to dream up a new — honestly, very bad — social network and force it upon the rest of the internet.”
Well, it turns out Clubhouse’s hilariously fast crashout did not deter these guys from continuing to try and make fetch happen and they’ve spent the last four years coordinating behind the scenes to remake the country in their own image. Well, at least until President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement last month, which seems to have really broken the right-wing tech coalition that’s been flourishing on Signal since COVID.
And according to Semafor, these group chats did have a profound impact on how we’ve understood the world for the last four years. These groups coordinated harassment campaigns — they especially hate journalist Taylor Lorenz, apparently — and affected how narratives were shaped online and in the media.
Networked oligarchy, but, also, the most typical radicalization story you could ever tell. Men, isolated by the pandemic, found each other on a public network, Clubhouse, and moved to a dark social platform, Signal, to speak more freely and openly and then spent years radicalizing each other. This is as true for the Silicon Valley dorks as it is for QAnon as it is incels as it is for ISIS. And it’s darkly funny that some of the men who built the internet as we currently use it were not immune from the indoctrinating social pathways they funded or built. Or to put it more simply: Silicon Valley has secretly getting very high on their own supply for years.
But the ultimate takeaway is that, yes, the intellectual dark web is real. The right wing are working together closely. They are texting each other constantly and sharing resources and tactics and if we have any shot at getting ourselves out from under their thumb, we have to have the same level of coordination…
The future of the web- not so “public” (nor “civil”) discourse?
* Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language
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As we ponder pontificators, we might recall that it was on this date in 2015 that a baseball game between the Chicago White Sox and the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards in Baltimore set the all-time low attendance mark for Major League Baseball: zero fans were in attendance for the game, as the stadium was officially closed to the public due to the 2015 Baltimore protests over police brutality to Freddie Gray.
Woodcut illustrations from Anianus’ Compotus cum commento (ca. 1492), an adaptation of Bede’s computus system — Source.
Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms. Kensy Cooperrider leads us through a millennium of “hand mnemonics” and the variety of techniques practiced by Buddhist monks, Latin linguists, and Renaissance musicians for remembering what might otherwise elude the mind…
In the beginning, the hand was just a hand — or so we can imagine. It was a workaday organ, albeit a versatile one: a tool for grasping, holding, throwing, and hefting. Then, at some point, after millions of years, it took on other duties. It became an instrument of mental, not just menial, labor. As a species, our systems of understanding, belief, and myth had grown more elaborate, more cognitively overwhelming. And so we started to put those systems out into the world: to tally, track, and record by carving notches into bone, tying knots in string, spreading pigment on cave walls, and aligning rocks with celestial bodies. Hands abetted these early mental labors, of course, but they would later become more than mere accessories. Beginning roughly twelve hundred years ago, we started using the hand itself as a portable repository of knowledge, a place to store whatever tended to slip our mental grasp. The topography of the palm and fingers became invisibly inscribed with information of all kinds — tenets and dates, names and sounds. The hand proved versatile in a new way, as an all-purpose memory machine.
The arts of memory are well known, but the role of the hand in these arts is often overlooked. In the twentieth century, beginning with the pioneering work of Frances Yates, Western scholars started to piece together a rich tradition of mnemonic practices that originated in antiquity and later took hold in Europe. The most celebrated of these is the “memory palace” [see here]. Using this technique, skilled practitioners can memorize vast collections of facts by nesting them in familiar places (or “loci”): the chambers of a building or along a well-known route. (To make these places more memorable, a bizarre image is often added to each one, the more jarring the better.) It is an odd omission that hand mnemonics are rarely mentioned alongside memory palaces. Both techniques are powerful and broadly attested. Both are adaptable, able to accommodate whatever type of information one wants to remember. And both work by similar principles, pinning to-be-remembered items to familiar locations.
The two traditions do have important differences. Memory palaces exist solely in the imagination; hand mnemonics exist half in the mind and half in the flesh. Another difference lies in their intended use. Memory palaces are idiosyncratic in nature, tailored to the quirks of personal experience and association, and used for private purposes; they are very much the province of an individual. Hand mnemonics, by contrast, are the province of a community, a tool for collective understanding. They offer a way of fixing and transmitting a shared system of knowledge. They serve private purposes, certainly — such as contemplation, in the case of the Mogao mnemonic, or calculation, in the case of Bede’s computus. But they also have powerful social functions in teaching, ritual, and communication…
As we give it (to) the finger, we might recall an occasion for counting that required no fingers at all: on this date in 2015, a baseball game between Chicago White Sox and the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards set the all-time low attendance mark for Major League Baseball. Zero (0) fans were in attendance, because the stadium was closed to the public due to the 2015 Baltimore protests (over the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody).
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