Democracy dies in billionaire group chats

Before we get into today’s issue, a bit of housekeeping. I’m on the road this week, so there won’t be a Friday issue. We’ll be back to our regular schedule next week!

Networked Oligarchy

Semafor’s Ben Smith published a bomb shell piece this morning titled, “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 (groan), includes figures like Mark Cuban, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and Democratic analyst David Shor. That last one feels like it’s worth asking some questions about!

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. 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. Invite me to some group chats!

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Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova

Why do some ideas stay hidden despite their importance? 

In the breakout new book Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, author Nadia Asparouhova (Working in Public, Stripe Press) delves into the unseen world of antimemetics where taboos, uncomfortable truths, and important ideas go to hide. The first-ever nonfiction book mapping this territory, Antimemetics explores how ideas stay hidden, how to see them, and where they might take us. 

Preorder a first edition paperback and digital edition here, only on Metalabel. 

Published with the Dark Forest Collective.

A Very Relevant Post

60 Minutes Has Fallen

—by Adam Bumas

Last week, Bill Owens, the executive producer of CBS’ 60 Minutes, resigned. In a memo quoted by CNN, he said he was facing encroaching pressure from the network’s parent company Paramount, which is knee-deep in both an enormous merger that needs federal approval, and a lawsuit from Trump himself over a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Last night, though, it became a much more serious piece of news — after all, it was on 60 Minutes. Context collapse hasn’t progressed far enough to erase the gravity and effect of a show that’s delivered serious journalism since the LBJ administration. And anchor Scott Pelley directly criticizing Paramount on the air is something that’s slowly becoming more common as these media conglomerates bow and scrape to try and get on the good side of a man who thinks the entire economy is made out of Deals. Refusing to follow the party line, the way Owens or the LA Times’ editorial board have, is meaningful. Even if there’s a long way to go before we see some kind of structural effect, as this weekend’s listless and hostless White House Correspondents’ Dinner showed.

Uh Oh, AI Is Slowly Overtaking Search

First, an update to ChatGPT rolled out recently that has changed the way it communicates in a huge way. It’s now way more aggressively enthusiastic and will basically agree with everything you say. OpenAI’s Sam Altman acknowledged the issue and says the company is rolling out a fix. Though, I think this is pretty good evidence that companies like OpenAI are starting to realize how addictive generative-AI chatbots are and are making tweaks to keep people talking to them.

Speaking of overuse…

We’re finally seeing the impact of AI on search and it’s not pretty. According to a study conducted in February by Bain & Company, “about 60% of searches now end without the user progressing to another destination site.” Which is a startling figure. Even more startling, they estimate that the rise of what they’re calling “zero-click” searches, is reducing web traffic by about 25% across the board.

Bain & Company’s research is primarily focused on how brands can maneuver in a world without search, which, you know, no real person needs to actually care about. But we probably should be very concerned that more than half of all searches don’t actually generate any kind of web traffic for the website that produced the search results.
It’s an apocalyptic scenario with no real fix in sight.

Weird Men On X Are Very Confused About What Women Find Attractive

The guys on X who follow extreme manosphere content, like Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan, are having a bit of a crisis right now, as they learn that the weird hyper-masculine behavior their favorite influencers advocate for is not actually a great way to attract women. A user named @CostelloWilliam asked his followers which picture of British singer Olly Murs was more attractive, one where he’s athletic and toned or one where he’s shredded. And, obviously, women responded that they liked the before photo better and men said they liked the after picture photo better.

This breakdown in manosphere content — between what men want and what they think women want — actually came up during a podcast interview I was on recently. Matt Bernstein, the host of A Bit Fruity, asked me why a lot of straight male influencers don’t focus on attracting women anymore, like the pickup artists of yore. And it’s an important shift in how that world works now.

The manosphere is, first and foremost, a digital media operation, so it requires engagement to make money. Whether we’re talking YouTubers, Instagram influencers, or podcasters, they’re all effectively selling masculinity to users via algorithm. So they could make content about how to actually attract women, but it’s actually much easier and much more profitable to sell body dysmorphia, disordered eating, steroid-built muscles, and seething incel entitlement. And so, now, after years and years of this stuff leaking out on to pretty much every major platform without exception, there are a lot of straight men who do not understand that they basically don’t know a single thing about women, sex, love, relationships, or companionship. Whoops! You ruined your life. Sucks to be you lol.

Fascism Is Not Passing Me The Aux

—by Adam Bumas

Just checking in here for a second, everyone: What’s fascism? Because there’s been some real bottom-of-the-iceberg discourse this weekend which proposes that it’s “when you either do or don’t use headphones in public.”

It all started with a post on X by mathematician Sridhar Ramesh, who was on a plane and wondered why it was so hard to find wired noise-cancelling headphones, to plug into the plane’s audio jack. The post got a reply from an account named @launderess, who said, “pro-noise cancellation […] is surely a fascist cultural victory. A sign of dark times ahead”. @landeress, as far as we can tell, had never gotten more than 20 likes on a post before, but this one had enough rocket fuel for over 3,000 shares and hundreds of furious posts. You can find every possible take on the situation, from, “actually, cranking the volume up is fascist” to, “politeness is not fascism,” to a whole tributary stream over on Bluesky after someone said, “we should just talk to each other on airplanes”.

It would be simple to say absolutely nothing of value has come out of this, but at least Ramesh got some headphone buying advice.

A Good Oblivion Build

Some Stray Links

• “Hasan Piker: A Progressive Mind in a MAGA Body”

• “"Sinners" is a smash. So why is Hollywood putting an asterisk on its success?”

• “Meta’s ‘Digital Companions’ Will Talk Sex With Users — Even Children”

P.S. here’s a very rare double German bollarding.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***