Group non-think
By 
Ben Smith has a story about a Signal group chat among America’s worst and least bright:
Last Thursday morning, a bit before 10 am in Austin and nearly 11 pm in Singapore, Joe Lonsdale had enough of Balaji Srinivasan’s views on China.
“This is insane CCP thinking,” Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, wrote to a 300-member Signal group. “Not sure what leaders hang out w you in Singapore but on this you have been taken over by a crazy China mind virus.”
Srinivasan, a former Coinbase chief technology officer and influential tech figure who now lives in the city-state, responded that China “executed extremely well over 45 years. Any analysis that doesn’t take that into account makes it seem like the US could have held it back.”
It was a normal, robust disagreement among friends in a friendly space (as both raced to X to declare, after I emailed them about it).
And it was just another day in Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right. That same week in Chatham House, Lonsdale and the Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban sparred over affirmative action, and Cuban and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro discussed questions of culture and work ethic.
This constellation of rolling elite political conversations revolve primarily around the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and a circle of Silicon Valley figures. None of their participants was surprised to see Trump administration officials firing off secrets and emojis on the platform last month. I did not have the good fortune to be accidentally added to one of the chats, which can be set to make messages disappear after just 30 seconds.
But their influence flows through X, Substack, and podcasts, and constitutes a kind of dark matter of American politics and media. The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed. The group chats are “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion,” wrote one of their key organizers, Sriram Krishnan, a former partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (typically styled a16z) who is now the White House senior policy adviser for AI.
One takeaway here is that this group of extremely rich people, who are fanatically devoted to reducing their own tax burden while piling as many budens as possible upon the less fortunate, seem to do nothing that could reasonably be called “work.”
Needless to say, there have been recent flounces from people upset to find anyone less than uncritically devoted to the worship of Donald Trump:
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 Carlson.
Sacks leaving does not mean that the resulting group will have only smart people, but it is at least one step closer in that direction.
Amazing how David Sacks is clearly and reliably always the worst guy in a collection of the most terrible guys in the world, it’s like watching Usain Bolt run the 100 but for Being an Asshole
[image or embed]— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 5:02 AM
Hell, he might be the Secretariat of being an asshole.
Speaking of Andreessen, always worth revisiting this classic:
I KNEW FROM THE NEW YORKER THAT ANDREESSEN had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it. But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject. He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered.
It’s a libertarian commonplace, a version of their pinched vision of why the market and only the market is the truly legitimate response to oppressive conditions on the job: If you don’t like it, you can leave. If you don’t, what you suffer is your own fault.
I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide: things that make human beings human beings. I pointed out that there must be something in the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving. I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth; that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life …
And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
This, of course, is one of the actual messages of Hillbilly Elegy, no many how many pundits missed it entirely, and here we are.