11 ms·

The group chats that changed America

154 points by necubi 1y ago

techpineapple 1y ago
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mindslight 1y ago
So like, is knowing someone who knows someone in these chats the key to getting your family out of the concentration camp, just like knowing someone who knows someone who works at Google is the key to getting your account unlocked? Post facto, it seems given the monster that these people have actually unleashed and empowered, the preemptive negative reactions to what they had been saying in public were actually pretty fucking justified. And I say this with the perspective of someone who generally believes in open debate, hates cancel culture, and who was reading Yarvin as he was writing under the Moldbug nym and found much of his analysis compelling. But it always struck me that Yarvin came to the exact wrong conclusion wanting to run thermodynamics backwards. Even Urbit, I had thought there was something novel and universal there, until I realized it was actually just describing another Java 1.0 dressed up in fancy equations and four-letter words. Like sure, if you could travel back in time and make all computing equipment run Urbit, Java, or Rust that sure would make a lot of things easy. Except in the real world, other languages already exist and have anchoring utility that is likely to keep them existing. I keep pondering a steelmanning of this idea of the Elite Jewish Conspiracy, pushing this radical acceptance of non-traditional lifestyles onto our society through various distributed leadership positions. I think that needed to get more mainstream treatment - stepping back and looking at it impartially, does this not seem an awful lot like what one would expect as counterbalance to the cultural memory of the Shoah? An attempt to prevent such an utter industrial-scale waste of human life and potential in the name of uniformity from ever happening again? And maybe the right answer is that we needed to get past its cloying overreactions, incorporate it into our baseline society, and move forward - instead of giving in to the simpleheaded authoritarian powermongers promising to simplify the world for us if only we hand them the power with a mandate to destroy.
- dang 1y ago
  Edit: I think I misread the comment somewhat—sorry. I've restored it, and will autocollapse this moderation bit. --- > getting your family out of the concentration camp Could you please not take HN threads straight into flamewar hell like this? We're trying for something quite different here, and it's way too aggressive to kick off a thread with rhetoric like that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - mindslight 1y ago
    It's a straightforward reference that shouldn't be controversial to anyone looking to substantively discuss what is happening to our society. I know there are a lot of true believers and bots that want to shout down uncomfortable truths which makes for flamewar, but if we let that prevent good faith discussion then we might as well throw in the towel because that reality distortion field isn't going away. I thought the rest of my comment was insightful as well, despite having to trade in some inflammatory terms. We're apparently at a time of pulling on these threads that had remained unpulled. The only way forward is to hash these uncomfortable ideas out in the open. Because as the article describes, they're certainly getting pulled on in less public forums where other uncomfortable truths have an easier time remaining unvisited.
    - dang 1y ago
      Looking it at again the next morning, I think I just misread your opening sentence. Sorry! (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823347) On the other hand, other people would probably have misread it in the same way, so the point still applies, just not as much, and probably not enough to justify my mod response. This may be a little embarrassing, but I don't read people's comments very closely. There isn't time, and it isn't necessary. It does mean I sometimes guess things wrong, though, (moderation is guesswork*) and that sucks. * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20guesswork&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
dang 1y ago
HN thread about the 2024 post referenced in the OP: Group chats rule the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660867 - June 2024 (184 comments)
neilv 1y ago
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- watwut 1y ago
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  - handoflixue 1y ago
    > Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those. Do you know OP personally? Do you really think it's reasonable to assume that everyone in the universe (except for you, perhaps) is a hypocrite like this? There's plenty of people that feel the administrative force of the university shouldn't be used to suppress either side. Let the gun club invite Luigi. Let the trans club invite the Stonewall rioters. You're welcome to say you dislike the speaker. You don't have to attend. But you shouldn't have the authority to stop other people from inviting them to speak, or to stop other people from listening.
    - aaomidi 1y ago
      So, you’re saying basic protesting and sitins shouldn’t be allowed? Nah I’m sorry disrupting other events is a cornerstone of freedom of speech.
    - watwut 1y ago
      I don't need to know OP personally. The knee jerk "right is the way they are because of the left" gives the game away. Left is responsible for ehat they so and never ever excused with "right made them do it". Not even when they were 100% right in the hindsight. Right is not responsible for what they do. They are victims of circumstances even when they caused the circumstances.
      - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
        I see it not as 'right is the way they are because' but 'this is what the right exploited, and I too allowed myself to go down a crappy path'. It's a pretty brave, honest, and self reflective post.
blitzar 1y ago
Signal chats are the new "clubhouse"?
doom2 1y ago
HN seems loathe to have any meaningful discussion about or reflection on how and why notable SV figures seemed primed to embrace the Trump/MAGA right (see, for example, quote in OP from Chris Rufo). I don't think it was simply being repelled by the left, as Andreesson has stated before, but an earnest rightward turn. Also, after articles like these, will calls for "viewpoint diversity" finally apply to conservatives who chase out even the moderates from their spheres? After years of the left being accused of suppressing opposing views, I haven't seen quite the same backlash against conservatives building up ideologically homogenous spaces like the group chats in the article.
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- ajross 1y ago
  > I don't think it was simply being repelled by the left, as Andreesson has stated before, but an earnest rightward turn. The clear contention in the linked article is that it's neither. It's just plain old group think fed by an echo chamber. You take a genuine-but-isolated affront or conflict[1], tie it to one or two other less important side issues[2], and then just line everyone up on the "good" or "bad" side of a line. Before you know it our community is cheering the return of a regime that literally tried to stage a coup and making tortuous excuses for why we need to be deporting four year old citizens with cancer. It's 4chan. It's just 4chan all over again. [1] Ex: the anti-elite current within the lefty political sphere that has never really loved the idea of making common cause with SV billionaires. [2] Middle aged dudes, demographically, tend to be a little squicked out by trans rights and pronouns and LGBTQ+ issues, think paper straws are dumb as fuck, and really hated seeing stuff burned down in protets.
- kenjackson 1y ago
  > After years of the left being accused of suppressing opposing views, I haven't seen quite the same backlash against conservatives building up ideologically homogenous spaces like the group chats in the article. The fundamental difference is that conservative viewpoints support the majority (or plurality), whereas the liberal viewpoints support the minority view. Backlash against the majority view is much harder to come by. And being in the majority and supporting minority perspectives is more uncomfortable, and frankly much easier to opt-out of if there is sufficient discomfort.
ajross 1y ago
This tracks with my experience here, watching tech thought leaders. Obviously Andreesen went very hard right, as did Musk, but just in general the tech elite suddenly and surprisingly turned Trumpy over the last few years; Ackman being a really good case study. Note that pg himself took a fairly surpising reactionary turn in right about the 2020/2021 timeframe this article describes. A guy who'd always been a left-center pragmatist suddenly was yelling in public tweets about the Campus Left's Desire for Cancellation and whatnot. Those of us closer to the trenches never really did get the ire here: I mean, yeah, kids are intemperate jerks, but they've always been intemperate jerks. And the tech community... has always celebrated the idea behind the intemperate jerk and an engine for change and disruption. Let the ideas fight it out and pick winners and all, right? Suddenly these billionaires were all snowflakes looking to a political realignment to save them? This article goes a long way to explaining why.
- pbiggar 1y ago
  pg has been yelling about the Campus Left's Desire for Cancellation for years and years (I want to say since 2011?). It's been very frustrating to watch because lots of us identified this as right wing propaganda that (imo) pg was unwittingly participating in.
- dist-epoch 1y ago
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  - Apocryphon 1y ago
    The idea of shutting down ideas is itself an idea that can be fought by other ideas. Those kids do not actually control institutions that can enforce the shutting down of ideas, even if cultural mores might have temporarily aligned with their positions from time to time.
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    Well, they're learning from the adults. Soon as Trump's term started he started removing any mention of slavery from the Smithsonian cuz 'merica. That's really the concerning thing. Liberals and conservatives not only dislike ideas, they dislike history and facts. That's what makes them dangerous. On the left it seems you at least had a few moderates who had the good sense to keep the wing nuts in line. We tried the right, thinking we might get better governance, and have discovered, to our collective horror, that the right is wing nuts the whole way down. So you get things like tariffs, and purges, and wild 4$$ ravings about plane crashes being caused by too many blacks. In the US we need to take things back in hand or it really will be way too late to do anything. These extremists will run the nation right into the ground.
cptroot 1y ago
As always, Chris Rufo lays the game out in plain terms: > Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”
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- throw0101c 1y ago
  > Christopher Ferguson Rufo (born August 26, 1984) is an American conservative activist,[1][2] New College of Florida board member, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.[3] He is an opponent of critical race theory. He is a former documentary filmmaker and former fellow at the Discovery Institute, the Claremont Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.[4][5][6] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Rufo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Rufo
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
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pbiggar 1y ago
The fact that these group chats were behind the Chesa Boudin recall campaign should surprise no-one.
pbiggar 1y ago
Two other sets of powerful people in group chats doing bad things: - https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information - https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/16/business-leaders-chat-group-eric-adams-columbia-protesters/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/16/business-le...
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philipwhiuk 1y ago
Turns out the Swamp is Signal group chats.
ivape 1y ago
GWB didn't strike me as someone who could come up with the idea of prolonged Mideast conflict on his own. The think tanks that infiltrated his mind like the movie Inception is not unlike what is being described in the article. It's tough to accept how impressionable we are regardless of age. Just in tech companies we know salesman get into the ears of leadership and sell them on all sorts of ideas. Even though Gen Z is under constant assault by Influencers, I think they are probably sharper about spotting it similar to how GenX/Millennials were to crude marketing. They are the generation that can combat this, but at the same time they are also the generation that most likely will perpetuate it. During the Roman republic the thing that made something like a Ceasar was a standing army. If you had a standing army you had power. Some of these powerful people have standing armies on social media and thus have power over the narrative. It's a few times removed from having men with guns, but it is the same abstraction.
- pjc50 1y ago
  > GWB didn't strike me as someone who could come up with the idea of prolonged Mideast conflict on his own. This was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C... , the "Project 2025" of its time. They're the ones really responsible for the Iraq war, but they never got the Iran War they really wanted.
hsuduebc2 1y ago
I have some hot take for this phenomena. As tech elites lost their untouchable image of being pure prodigies and visionaries, it became clearer — especially after scandals like Cambridge Analytica — that many of them operate like ordinary, ruthless capitalists. Public trust declined as more people moved online and more abuses came to light. Instead of fully acknowledging this shift, many of these elites seem to interpret the criticism — much of which comes from media and universities, which do lean left — as purely ideological attacks. From my perspective, it’s a textbook case of cognitive dissonance: their self-image as bold innovators clashes with how they are increasingly seen from the outside, and the natural human reaction is to blame the critics rather than adjust the self-image.
- roguecoder 1y ago
  It's also clear that the big players always thought these things. In this article, Andreessen got mad and founded right-wing echo chambers because left-wing thinkers though censoring anti-racists was bad. Musk has been an egregiously racist person in an egregiously racist family and has never respected the rule of law. For a while these people felt like they had to pretend to be decent, pro-social humans so they could keep making money: that seems great. More people should pretend not to be racist assholes. I wonder how much of this is that they got so rich "you can't make more money" stopped being a meaningful threat.
  - hsuduebc2 1y ago
    I would say they really believed it all and weren't "bad" at the start because they perceived themselves as enlighted individuals. Then first scandals appeared and they got stuck in echo chambers and endless cope driven circle jerk. For me the cringiest part of all is sudden strong urge to appear strong and masculine. It is always full package.
- Apocryphon 1y ago
  It's funny that the "economic anxiety" thesis for the rise in populism might also apply to tech elites. They hardly cared a few years back when the NYT and other liberal media organs started bashing tech nonstop while the boom was in full swing. Then they started swinging to the right just as the previous administration started unwinding ZIRP.
shkkmo 1y ago
I hope all the partisans take a lesson from this. When you try to force ideological conformity with censorship, you end up creating even tighter echo chambers that amplify groupthink and entrench the very ideas you are trying to combat. The best way to defeat an idea is to publicly tolerate and dispute it.
- roguecoder 1y ago
  That does not seem to be supported by the evidence. Twitter becoming a fascist cess pit has not reduced the power of fascists. Hearing even a completely ridiculous idea (like "the moon is made of cheese") told in a joking manner leads people to think it is more plausible than they otherwise would: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect Deplatforming is effective at reducing radicalization: https://www-cs.stanford.edu/~diyiy/docs/jhaver-2021-deplatforming.pdf https://www-cs.stanford.edu/~diyiy/docs/jhaver-2021-deplatfo... Note that the thing that drove Andreessen to the right was left-wing thinkers who thought censoring anti-racism was bad: he was already pro-racism and pro-censorship before he created the group chats. The problem here seems to be the income inequality & the power of money to win elections that give the uber-rich their disproportionate power.
  - cloverich 1y ago
    I wonder if this accounts for counter cultural movements in response? i.e. Deplatforming might be effective tactically but risks strengthening ideological resistance when used broadly or visibly.
- pvg 1y ago
  Andreesen has had and still has a massive public platform. People disliking your ideas is not 'censorship', it's just people disliking your ideas.
cloverich 1y ago
Here's a fun project idea. Take as input tweets, articles, etc, from various politicians and think tanks. Then generate a mapping of who is probably in a Signal chat with one another, and at what point in time. I could imagine if the model was very good and well done, to even generate names for the chats, in a UI where clicking into it could show a graph of involvement, ideas likely shared, and approximate timelines. Perhaps clicking into the ideas could lead to details on the history / corruption of the idea, etc.
- ajross 1y ago
  People do this already, but the signal (heh) detected by that kind of analysis isn't consumption of shared media. That's weak‚ and near the noise floor. The much stronger component is just dissemination of deliberate talking points, which happens all the time. What you need to add is the ability to discriminate the spinsters from the "real people", which is basically impossible.
freshfunk 1y ago
Whether you align or don't align with these politics, I find it generally distasteful when private chats are leaked. There's clearly some expectations of privacy (using Signal with expiring messages) and someone leaking this really destroys trust and open communication. It causes people to not engage in open dialog and to move to even smaller and smaller circles. This ends up stifling open and honest debate and results in more narrow, provincial views of the world. And for what? For clicks? To tell on someone? To smear someone? What "good" was accomplished from this leak and this article? Some advertiser dollars were made -- probably a trivial amount compared to the value of honest debate among the most powerful in tech.
- cptroot 1y ago
  For what it's worth, nothing was leaked in this article except for the existence of these chats. There are no screenshots, and very few concrete details other than some information about membership timelines. This article contains genuine reporting about the right-wing influencers working to shift the opinions of the richest people in the USA. That seems like a large amount of good to me.
- brendoelfrendo 1y ago
  Nah, screw these people. Right wing billionaires actively courting and trying to influence their peers in business and media? This is the smoke-filled room as a group chat with disappearing messages. What good was done here? Well, hopefully, people realize that Marc Andreessen is neglecting his responsibilities to post all day and David Sacks whines when people challenge him. I want to know who's hanging out with Chris Rufo and Tucker Carlson, or introducing oped columnists to Curtis Yarvin, and I want it to be abundantly clear that they suck.
- swatcoder 1y ago
  It's not unreasonable to say that the more outsized influence you have over others, the less privacy you can expect to preserve against them (or the harder you have to work to maintain it), both ethically and practically. There's pretty wide intolerance for leaking everyday discussion by everyday people, but some people are in a position where their actions can very greatly impact others and some of their relationships and discussions have bearing on that. You can't be surprised if the potentially-impacted seek to seize transparency even where it's not handed to them.
archagon 1y ago
> One participant in the groups described them as a “Republic of Letters,” a reference to the long-distance intellectual correspondence of the 17th century. Others often invoked European salon culture. It genuinely baffles and disturbs me that these corpos seem to think of themselves as the intellectual elite. History will remember them as little more than greedy idiots falling over each other to manifest a new age of violent and repressive authoritarianism.

154 points by necubi 1y ago

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So like, is knowing someone who knows someone in these chats the key to getting your family out of the concentration camp, just like knowing someone who knows someone who works at Google is the key to getting your account unlocked? Post facto, it seems given the monster that these people have actually unleashed and empowered, the preemptive negative reactions to what they had been saying in public were actually pretty fucking justified. And I say this with the perspective of someone who generally believes in open debate, hates cancel culture, and who was reading Yarvin as he was writing under the Moldbug nym and found much of his analysis compelling. But it always struck me that Yarvin came to the exact wrong conclusion wanting to run thermodynamics backwards. Even Urbit, I had thought there was something novel and universal there, until I realized it was actually just describing another Java 1.0 dressed up in fancy equations and four-letter words. Like sure, if you could travel back in time and make all computing equipment run Urbit, Java, or Rust that sure would make a lot of things easy. Except in the real world, other languages already exist and have anchoring utility that is likely to keep them existing. I keep pondering a steelmanning of this idea of the Elite Jewish Conspiracy, pushing this radical acceptance of non-traditional lifestyles onto our society through various distributed leadership positions. I think that needed to get more mainstream treatment - stepping back and looking at it impartially, does this not seem an awful lot like what one would expect as counterbalance to the cultural memory of the Shoah? An attempt to prevent such an utter industrial-scale waste of human life and potential in the name of uniformity from ever happening again? And maybe the right answer is that we needed to get past its cloying overreactions, incorporate it into our baseline society, and move forward - instead of giving in to the simpleheaded authoritarian powermongers promising to simplify the world for us if only we hand them the power with a mandate to destroy.

dang 1y ago
Edit: I think I misread the comment somewhat—sorry. I've restored it, and will autocollapse this moderation bit. --- > getting your family out of the concentration camp Could you please not take HN threads straight into flamewar hell like this? We're trying for something quite different here, and it's way too aggressive to kick off a thread with rhetoric like that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- mindslight 1y ago
  It's a straightforward reference that shouldn't be controversial to anyone looking to substantively discuss what is happening to our society. I know there are a lot of true believers and bots that want to shout down uncomfortable truths which makes for flamewar, but if we let that prevent good faith discussion then we might as well throw in the towel because that reality distortion field isn't going away. I thought the rest of my comment was insightful as well, despite having to trade in some inflammatory terms. We're apparently at a time of pulling on these threads that had remained unpulled. The only way forward is to hash these uncomfortable ideas out in the open. Because as the article describes, they're certainly getting pulled on in less public forums where other uncomfortable truths have an easier time remaining unvisited.
  - dang 1y ago
    Looking it at again the next morning, I think I just misread your opening sentence. Sorry! (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823347) On the other hand, other people would probably have misread it in the same way, so the point still applies, just not as much, and probably not enough to justify my mod response. This may be a little embarrassing, but I don't read people's comments very closely. There isn't time, and it isn't necessary. It does mean I sometimes guess things wrong, though, (moderation is guesswork*) and that sucks. * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20guesswork&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

dang 1y ago

HN thread about the 2024 post referenced in the OP: Group chats rule the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660867 - June 2024 (184 comments)

neilv 1y ago

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watwut 1y ago
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- handoflixue 1y ago
  > Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those. Do you know OP personally? Do you really think it's reasonable to assume that everyone in the universe (except for you, perhaps) is a hypocrite like this? There's plenty of people that feel the administrative force of the university shouldn't be used to suppress either side. Let the gun club invite Luigi. Let the trans club invite the Stonewall rioters. You're welcome to say you dislike the speaker. You don't have to attend. But you shouldn't have the authority to stop other people from inviting them to speak, or to stop other people from listening.
  - aaomidi 1y ago
    So, you’re saying basic protesting and sitins shouldn’t be allowed? Nah I’m sorry disrupting other events is a cornerstone of freedom of speech.
  - watwut 1y ago
    I don't need to know OP personally. The knee jerk "right is the way they are because of the left" gives the game away. Left is responsible for ehat they so and never ever excused with "right made them do it". Not even when they were 100% right in the hindsight. Right is not responsible for what they do. They are victims of circumstances even when they caused the circumstances.
    - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      I see it not as 'right is the way they are because' but 'this is what the right exploited, and I too allowed myself to go down a crappy path'. It's a pretty brave, honest, and self reflective post.

blitzar 1y ago

Signal chats are the new "clubhouse"?

doom2 1y ago

HN seems loathe to have any meaningful discussion about or reflection on how and why notable SV figures seemed primed to embrace the Trump/MAGA right (see, for example, quote in OP from Chris Rufo). I don't think it was simply being repelled by the left, as Andreesson has stated before, but an earnest rightward turn. Also, after articles like these, will calls for "viewpoint diversity" finally apply to conservatives who chase out even the moderates from their spheres? After years of the left being accused of suppressing opposing views, I haven't seen quite the same backlash against conservatives building up ideologically homogenous spaces like the group chats in the article.

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ajross 1y ago
> I don't think it was simply being repelled by the left, as Andreesson has stated before, but an earnest rightward turn. The clear contention in the linked article is that it's neither. It's just plain old group think fed by an echo chamber. You take a genuine-but-isolated affront or conflict[1], tie it to one or two other less important side issues[2], and then just line everyone up on the "good" or "bad" side of a line. Before you know it our community is cheering the return of a regime that literally tried to stage a coup and making tortuous excuses for why we need to be deporting four year old citizens with cancer. It's 4chan. It's just 4chan all over again. [1] Ex: the anti-elite current within the lefty political sphere that has never really loved the idea of making common cause with SV billionaires. [2] Middle aged dudes, demographically, tend to be a little squicked out by trans rights and pronouns and LGBTQ+ issues, think paper straws are dumb as fuck, and really hated seeing stuff burned down in protets.
kenjackson 1y ago
> After years of the left being accused of suppressing opposing views, I haven't seen quite the same backlash against conservatives building up ideologically homogenous spaces like the group chats in the article. The fundamental difference is that conservative viewpoints support the majority (or plurality), whereas the liberal viewpoints support the minority view. Backlash against the majority view is much harder to come by. And being in the majority and supporting minority perspectives is more uncomfortable, and frankly much easier to opt-out of if there is sufficient discomfort.

ajross 1y ago

This tracks with my experience here, watching tech thought leaders. Obviously Andreesen went very hard right, as did Musk, but just in general the tech elite suddenly and surprisingly turned Trumpy over the last few years; Ackman being a really good case study. Note that pg himself took a fairly surpising reactionary turn in right about the 2020/2021 timeframe this article describes. A guy who'd always been a left-center pragmatist suddenly was yelling in public tweets about the Campus Left's Desire for Cancellation and whatnot. Those of us closer to the trenches never really did get the ire here: I mean, yeah, kids are intemperate jerks, but they've always been intemperate jerks. And the tech community... has always celebrated the idea behind the intemperate jerk and an engine for change and disruption. Let the ideas fight it out and pick winners and all, right? Suddenly these billionaires were all snowflakes looking to a political realignment to save them? This article goes a long way to explaining why.

pbiggar 1y ago
pg has been yelling about the Campus Left's Desire for Cancellation for years and years (I want to say since 2011?). It's been very frustrating to watch because lots of us identified this as right wing propaganda that (imo) pg was unwittingly participating in.
dist-epoch 1y ago
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- Apocryphon 1y ago
  The idea of shutting down ideas is itself an idea that can be fought by other ideas. Those kids do not actually control institutions that can enforce the shutting down of ideas, even if cultural mores might have temporarily aligned with their positions from time to time.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  Well, they're learning from the adults. Soon as Trump's term started he started removing any mention of slavery from the Smithsonian cuz 'merica. That's really the concerning thing. Liberals and conservatives not only dislike ideas, they dislike history and facts. That's what makes them dangerous. On the left it seems you at least had a few moderates who had the good sense to keep the wing nuts in line. We tried the right, thinking we might get better governance, and have discovered, to our collective horror, that the right is wing nuts the whole way down. So you get things like tariffs, and purges, and wild 4$$ ravings about plane crashes being caused by too many blacks. In the US we need to take things back in hand or it really will be way too late to do anything. These extremists will run the nation right into the ground.

cptroot 1y ago

As always, Chris Rufo lays the game out in plain terms: > Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”

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throw0101c 1y ago
> Christopher Ferguson Rufo (born August 26, 1984) is an American conservative activist,[1][2] New College of Florida board member, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.[3] He is an opponent of critical race theory. He is a former documentary filmmaker and former fellow at the Discovery Institute, the Claremont Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.[4][5][6] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Rufo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Rufo

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

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pbiggar 1y ago

The fact that these group chats were behind the Chesa Boudin recall campaign should surprise no-one.

pbiggar 1y ago

Two other sets of powerful people in group chats doing bad things: - https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information - https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/16/business-leaders-chat-group-eric-adams-columbia-protesters/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/16/business-le...

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philipwhiuk 1y ago

Turns out the Swamp is Signal group chats.

ivape 1y ago

GWB didn't strike me as someone who could come up with the idea of prolonged Mideast conflict on his own. The think tanks that infiltrated his mind like the movie Inception is not unlike what is being described in the article. It's tough to accept how impressionable we are regardless of age. Just in tech companies we know salesman get into the ears of leadership and sell them on all sorts of ideas. Even though Gen Z is under constant assault by Influencers, I think they are probably sharper about spotting it similar to how GenX/Millennials were to crude marketing. They are the generation that can combat this, but at the same time they are also the generation that most likely will perpetuate it. During the Roman republic the thing that made something like a Ceasar was a standing army. If you had a standing army you had power. Some of these powerful people have standing armies on social media and thus have power over the narrative. It's a few times removed from having men with guns, but it is the same abstraction.

pjc50 1y ago
> GWB didn't strike me as someone who could come up with the idea of prolonged Mideast conflict on his own. This was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C... , the "Project 2025" of its time. They're the ones really responsible for the Iraq war, but they never got the Iran War they really wanted.

hsuduebc2 1y ago

I have some hot take for this phenomena. As tech elites lost their untouchable image of being pure prodigies and visionaries, it became clearer — especially after scandals like Cambridge Analytica — that many of them operate like ordinary, ruthless capitalists. Public trust declined as more people moved online and more abuses came to light. Instead of fully acknowledging this shift, many of these elites seem to interpret the criticism — much of which comes from media and universities, which do lean left — as purely ideological attacks. From my perspective, it’s a textbook case of cognitive dissonance: their self-image as bold innovators clashes with how they are increasingly seen from the outside, and the natural human reaction is to blame the critics rather than adjust the self-image.

roguecoder 1y ago
It's also clear that the big players always thought these things. In this article, Andreessen got mad and founded right-wing echo chambers because left-wing thinkers though censoring anti-racists was bad. Musk has been an egregiously racist person in an egregiously racist family and has never respected the rule of law. For a while these people felt like they had to pretend to be decent, pro-social humans so they could keep making money: that seems great. More people should pretend not to be racist assholes. I wonder how much of this is that they got so rich "you can't make more money" stopped being a meaningful threat.
- hsuduebc2 1y ago
  I would say they really believed it all and weren't "bad" at the start because they perceived themselves as enlighted individuals. Then first scandals appeared and they got stuck in echo chambers and endless cope driven circle jerk. For me the cringiest part of all is sudden strong urge to appear strong and masculine. It is always full package.
Apocryphon 1y ago
It's funny that the "economic anxiety" thesis for the rise in populism might also apply to tech elites. They hardly cared a few years back when the NYT and other liberal media organs started bashing tech nonstop while the boom was in full swing. Then they started swinging to the right just as the previous administration started unwinding ZIRP.

shkkmo 1y ago

I hope all the partisans take a lesson from this. When you try to force ideological conformity with censorship, you end up creating even tighter echo chambers that amplify groupthink and entrench the very ideas you are trying to combat. The best way to defeat an idea is to publicly tolerate and dispute it.

roguecoder 1y ago
That does not seem to be supported by the evidence. Twitter becoming a fascist cess pit has not reduced the power of fascists. Hearing even a completely ridiculous idea (like "the moon is made of cheese") told in a joking manner leads people to think it is more plausible than they otherwise would: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect Deplatforming is effective at reducing radicalization: https://www-cs.stanford.edu/~diyiy/docs/jhaver-2021-deplatforming.pdf https://www-cs.stanford.edu/~diyiy/docs/jhaver-2021-deplatfo... Note that the thing that drove Andreessen to the right was left-wing thinkers who thought censoring anti-racism was bad: he was already pro-racism and pro-censorship before he created the group chats. The problem here seems to be the income inequality & the power of money to win elections that give the uber-rich their disproportionate power.
- cloverich 1y ago
  I wonder if this accounts for counter cultural movements in response? i.e. Deplatforming might be effective tactically but risks strengthening ideological resistance when used broadly or visibly.
pvg 1y ago
Andreesen has had and still has a massive public platform. People disliking your ideas is not 'censorship', it's just people disliking your ideas.

cloverich 1y ago

Here's a fun project idea. Take as input tweets, articles, etc, from various politicians and think tanks. Then generate a mapping of who is probably in a Signal chat with one another, and at what point in time. I could imagine if the model was very good and well done, to even generate names for the chats, in a UI where clicking into it could show a graph of involvement, ideas likely shared, and approximate timelines. Perhaps clicking into the ideas could lead to details on the history / corruption of the idea, etc.

ajross 1y ago
People do this already, but the signal (heh) detected by that kind of analysis isn't consumption of shared media. That's weak‚ and near the noise floor. The much stronger component is just dissemination of deliberate talking points, which happens all the time. What you need to add is the ability to discriminate the spinsters from the "real people", which is basically impossible.

freshfunk 1y ago

Whether you align or don't align with these politics, I find it generally distasteful when private chats are leaked. There's clearly some expectations of privacy (using Signal with expiring messages) and someone leaking this really destroys trust and open communication. It causes people to not engage in open dialog and to move to even smaller and smaller circles. This ends up stifling open and honest debate and results in more narrow, provincial views of the world. And for what? For clicks? To tell on someone? To smear someone? What "good" was accomplished from this leak and this article? Some advertiser dollars were made -- probably a trivial amount compared to the value of honest debate among the most powerful in tech.

cptroot 1y ago
For what it's worth, nothing was leaked in this article except for the existence of these chats. There are no screenshots, and very few concrete details other than some information about membership timelines. This article contains genuine reporting about the right-wing influencers working to shift the opinions of the richest people in the USA. That seems like a large amount of good to me.
brendoelfrendo 1y ago
Nah, screw these people. Right wing billionaires actively courting and trying to influence their peers in business and media? This is the smoke-filled room as a group chat with disappearing messages. What good was done here? Well, hopefully, people realize that Marc Andreessen is neglecting his responsibilities to post all day and David Sacks whines when people challenge him. I want to know who's hanging out with Chris Rufo and Tucker Carlson, or introducing oped columnists to Curtis Yarvin, and I want it to be abundantly clear that they suck.
swatcoder 1y ago
It's not unreasonable to say that the more outsized influence you have over others, the less privacy you can expect to preserve against them (or the harder you have to work to maintain it), both ethically and practically. There's pretty wide intolerance for leaking everyday discussion by everyday people, but some people are in a position where their actions can very greatly impact others and some of their relationships and discussions have bearing on that. You can't be surprised if the potentially-impacted seek to seize transparency even where it's not handed to them.

archagon 1y ago

> One participant in the groups described them as a “Republic of Letters,” a reference to the long-distance intellectual correspondence of the 17th century. Others often invoked European salon culture. It genuinely baffles and disturbs me that these corpos seem to think of themselves as the intellectual elite. History will remember them as little more than greedy idiots falling over each other to manifest a new age of violent and repressive authoritarianism.