HN thread about the 2024 post referenced in the OP:<p><i>Group chats rule the world</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660867">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660867</a> - June 2024 (184 comments)
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.<p>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.
As always, Chris Rufo lays the game out in plain terms:<p>> 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.”
> <i>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.</i><p>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.
I have some hot take for this phenomena.<p>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.
This tracks with my experience here, watching tech thought leaders. Obviously Andreesen went <i>very</i> 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.<p>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.<p>Those of us closer to the trenches never really did get the ire here: I mean, yeah, kids are intemperate jerks, but they've <i>always</i> 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?<p>This article goes a long way to explaining why.
Two other sets of powerful people in group chats doing bad things:<p>- <a href="https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information" rel="nofollow">https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information</a>
- <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/16/business-leaders-chat-group-eric-adams-columbia-protesters/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/16/business-le...</a>
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.<p>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.
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?<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
I hope all the partisans take a lesson from this.<p>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.<p>The best way to defeat an idea is to publicly tolerate and dispute it.
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.<p>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.<p>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.