Chuck Darwin
@cdarwin@c.im  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

In February, #Marc#Andreessen described the #Chatham#House group chats to the podcaster #Lex #Fridman as “the equivalent of [Soviet era] #samizdat”
“The combination of encryption and disappearing messages really unleashed it,” he said. The chats, he wrote recently, helped produce our national “vibe shift.”
They have rarely been discussed in public, though you can catch the occasional mention in, for instance, a podcast debate between #Mark#Cuban and the Republican entrepreneur #Vivek#Ramaswamy, which started in a chat.

But they are made visible through a group consensus on social media.
Their effects have ranged from the mainstreaming of the monarchist pundit #Curtis#Yarvin to a particularly focused and developed dislike of the former Washington Post writer #Taylor#Lorenz.

They succeeded at avoiding leaks (until, to a modest extent, this article) in part because of Signal’s and WhatsApp’s #disappearing #message features,
and in part because the groups had formed out of a mix of fear and disdain for journalists they believed were “out to get us,” as one member put it.
“People during 2020 felt that there was a monoculture on social media, 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,”
said #Erik#Torenberg, an entrepreneur who was the first employee of the tech community hub Product Hunt.
As #Krishnan was setting up a set of tech group WhatsApp chats at a16z, #Torenberg independently founded a group of tech chats on WhatsApp and some more political Signal chats.

“They’re having all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” Andreessen told Torenberg on a recent podcast,
after claiming in the name of secrecy that he’d never heard of such groups.
“If it wasn’t for the censorship all of these conversations would have happened in public, which would have been much better.”
Their creations took off:
“It might not seem like it, because of all the sh*t that people still post on X, but the internet has fragmented,”
the Substack author #Noah#Smith wrote after my inquiries for this story spilled into public Saturday.
“Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.”

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america
Chuck Darwin
@cdarwin@c.im  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

Along with the tech-centric WhatsApp groups Krishnan had organized out of a16z,
Andreessen joined a slew of others,
including ones that Torenberg set up for tech founders and for more political discussions.

The tech chats tended to be on WhatsApp and the political ones on Signal, which is more fully encrypted,
and they had different settings.

(“Every group chat ends up being about memes and humor and the goal of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable without tripping it,” Andreessen told Fridman.

“People will set to 5 minutes before they send something particularly inflammatory.“)

After a group of liberal intellectuals published a letter in Harper’s on July 7, 2020, some of its signers were invited to join a Signal group called “Everything Is Fine.”

There, writers including #Kmele#Foster, who co-hosts the podcast
"The Fifth Column", Persuasion founder #Yascha#Mounk, and the Harper’s letter contributor Williams joined Andreessen and a group that also included the anti-woke conservative activist #Chris#Rufo.

The new participants were charmed by Andreessen’s engagement:
“He was the most available, the most present, the most texting of anybody in the group
— which shocked me because it seemed like he was the most important person in the group,” one said.

But the center didn’t hold.

The liberal Harper’s types were surprised to find what one described an
“illiberal worldview” among tech figures more concerned with power than speech.

The conservatives found the liberal intellectuals tiresome, committed to what Rufo described to me as “infinite discourse” over action.

The breaking point came on July 5, 2021, when Foster and Williams,
along with the never-Trump conservative #David#French and the liberal academic #Jason #Stanley,
wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing new laws against teaching “critical race theory.”

“Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education,
it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression,”
they wrote.

The conservatives had thought the Harper’s letter writers were their allies in an all-out ideological battle,
and considered their position a betrayal.

Andreessen “went really ballistic in a quite personal way at Thomas,”
a participant recalled.

The group ended after Andreessen “wrote something along the lines of
‘thank you everybody, I think it’s time to take a Signal break,’” another said.

The meltdown of this liberal-tech alliance was, to #Rufo, a healthy development.

“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,”
he said.

“By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end
— so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”

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.”

#MarcAndreessen#LexFridman
#ChrisRufo
#VivekRamaswamy#ErikTorenberg#Krishnan
#NoahSmith

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america
Chuck Darwin
@cdarwin@c.im  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

‘What really matters is defeating the left’

The messages in “Everything Is Fine” are all long gone from the chats. So are many of the liberals.

By then, Silicon Valley was moving right.

In May of 2022, Andreessen asked the conservative academic #Richard#Hanania to
“make me a chat of smart right-wing people,”
Hanania recalled.

As requested, he assembled eight or ten people
— elite law students and federal court clerks,
as well as Torenberg and Katherine Boyle,
a former Washington Post reporter then at a16z and focused on investing in “American Dynamism.”

Later, Hanania added the broadcaster Tucker Carlson.

The substance of the chats no longer exists, but Signal preserved the group’s rotating names, which Andreessen enjoyed changing.

The tone was jesting, but “Marc radicalized over time,”
Hanania recalled.

Hanania said he found himself increasingly alienated from the group and the shift toward partisan pro-Trump politics,
and he came to see the chat he’d established as a “vehicle for groupthink.”

(A friend of Andreessen’s said it was Hanania, not Andreessen, who had shifted his politics.)

The group continues without him.

Hanania argued with the other members “about whether it’s a good idea to buy into Trump’s election denial stuff.
I’d say, ‘That’s not true and that actually matters.’

I got the sense these guys didn’t want to hear it,” he said.

“There’s an idea that you don’t criticize, because what really matters is defeating the left.”

He left the group in June of 2023.

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america
Chuck Darwin
@cdarwin@c.im  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

'Chatham House Rule'

Torenberg launched Chatham House the summer of 2024,
naming it after a British think tank that formalized the insight that
trusted conversations require a degree of privacy.

Two of its conservative participants said they see the group as a way to shift centrist Trump-curious figures to the Republican side,
but its founder said he’d begun it to have “a left-right exchange where we could have real conversations because of filter bubble group chats.”

Chatham House includes high-profile figures like the economist
#Larry#Summers and the historian #Niall#Ferguson,
and more partisan figures like #Shapiro and the Democratic analyst #David #Shor.

#Andreessen lurks.

But several participants described it to me as something like a gladiatorial arena with #Cuban most often in the center,
sparring with conservatives.

(“no idea what you are talking about :)” Cuban emailed in response to an inquiry about his arguments on Chatham House.)

The Group Chat Era depended on part of the American elite feeling shut out from public spaces,
and on the formation of a new conservative consensus.

Both of those are now fading
(though Torenberg has invested in a company called #ChatBCC that wants to commercialize the heady experience of sitting in on texts among the power elite).

Since Elon Musk turned X to the right
and an alternative media ecosystem emerged on Substack,
“a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view,” Andreessen told Fridman.

“It’s much healthier to live in a society in which people are literally not scared of what they’re saying.”

And Trump’s destabilizing “Liberation Day” has taken its toll on the coalition Andreessen helped shape.

You can see it on X,
where investors joke that they’ll put pronouns back in their bios in exchange for a return to the 2024 stock prices,
and where #Srinivasan has been a leading critic of Trump’s tariffs.

“Group chats have changed on the economy in the last few weeks,”
said #Rufo.
“There’s a big split on the tech right.”

The polarity of social media has also reversed,
and while participants used to keep their conservative ideas off social media,
“now the anti-Trump sentiment is what you’re afraid to say on X,” one said.

By mid-April, #Sacks had had enough with Chatham House:
“This group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS,”
he wrote, shorthanding
“Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Then he addressed Torenberg:
“You should create a new one with just smart people.”

Signal soon showed that three men had left the group:
The Sequoia partner #Shaun #Maguire,
the bitcoin billionaire #Tyler#Winklevoss, and #Tucker #Carlson.

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america