The group chats that changed America

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.

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.

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.

I think you’re right but would also add the nascent tech worker organization during the same period. I think many of these guys were bitterly resentful of the idea of workers trying to unionize or otherwise negotiate on a more even level, and that made the general political concerns very personal.

Maybe Paul Graham was simply protecting his station within the oligarchy all along. The turn toward appeasing fascism is nothing more than the path of least resistance. But I'm sure he'll write some blogs warning of complacency and send some tweets on Musk's nazi propaganda site. He's one of the good ones.

I've looked at pg:s tweets recently and was surprised that he takes issue with both the genocide in Palestine and the university related disappearings. I had expected him to be more radical and aligned with the current regime.

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.

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Complaining about wokeness doesn't make you right-wing, much less reactionary.

Today, virtually everyone is anti-woke. I give the Trump admin credit for dismantling DEI. It's just unfortunately the only good thing they've done.

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.

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.

> And for what? For clicks? To tell on someone? To smear someone?

To stop them from doing what they are trying to do. The goals they are working towards are malign & repugnant and this makes them my adversaries. I'm not interested in a fair fight with a neosegregationist billionaires' coup. They certainly aren't going to give me a sporting chance.

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.

There was lots of resentment against unionization efforts from tech workers -- workers who were increasingly seen as ungrateful insurgents trying to mess up a good thing -- and tech oligarchs decided that everyone left of center was exactly like tech workers in Silicon Valley. For them, leftists are infected with a "mind virus", and needing some enlightened elites to save them from themselves. Of course there's no self-reflection about the mind virus that causes folks like Andreesen to use the philosophy of meth addicted neo-Nazis[1] as the ideological basis for their new political order.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land

> 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.

Like all other forums, public and private, HN has an ideological filter. I'm as surprised as the next person that the HN ideological filter turned out not to be permissive enough to discuss the downfall of the free society that fostered its creation.

The oligarchs will not lose their freedom or power and they won't fight (or even inconvenience themselves) to preserve yours. Next time you're reading a blog or a biography of a tech billionaire, remember that they got their wealth from wage theft and they will keep their power by destroying yours.

The only law tech companies -- and the oligarchs that own and control them -- have to obey is allegiance to Trump. No other law will be enforced.

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> 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.