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28 April 2025 -- Early this morning (U.S. time), Semafor’s Ben Smith published a bomb shell piece entitled “The group chats that changed America” - and that is not hyperbolic.
According to Semafor, egg-shaped investor Marc Andreessen has been powering a “constellation of rolling elite political conversations” in Signal group chats that include the most powerful men in tech, media, and, now, politics.
One group chat, called Chatham House (really? 🤦♂️), includes figures like Mark Cuban, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro ... and Democratic analyst David Shor 😳. That last one feels like ... what in hell??!!
Also, 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.
This is "peak rich guy brain" at work here.
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. All of which I have skewered in previous posts.
In fact, that main essay ... "Time to Build" ... went viral on Clubhouse (lol) and led to the earliest versions of these group chats forming on, first, WhatsApp, and, then, Signal.
I was somewhat critical about Clubhouse when it launched (yes, I was on it or awhile), a site pundits often referred to as a "dinner party simulation app".
But most of us were angry that the social network (was it a social network?) was being astroturfed into a “thing” by men like Andreessen. Clubhouse, said media analyst Noah Cohen, showed that "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 Noah said 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 his 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. They did.
Except that Clubhouse had a hilariously fast crash-out - but that did not deter these guys from continuing to try and make fetch happen and they’ve spent the last 4 years coordinating behind the scenes to remake the country in their own image.
Well, at least until 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.
It is what I have been pounding on about for years. The industrial-media-political complex (a direct offshoot of the military–industrial complex) is a snake. Take nothing at face value in the media. Traditional journalism has been blasted to pieces. I have been embedded in the journalism/media industry all my life. As I have noted many times, to be an informed citizen is a daunting task. We move through myriad, overlapping spheres, ones that are forever entangled. All moving at an exponential pace. We are living through social and political and technological change on the scale of the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution. But occurring in only a fraction of the time. And most of our information about it is controlled by that industrial-media-political complex.
It is a 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.
But 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 very 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.
Hey, guys!! Invite me to some group chats!
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