Bluesky

For anyone thinking that the notorious Signal chat organizing a bombing raid on the Houthis was a one-off lapse of judgment by the people at the center of American power (possibly because it involved Pete Hegseth), Semafor media scribe Ben Smith comes bearing the tale of a much larger, more influential mustering of Signal-ites. Smith’s piece concerns a cluster of ultra-wealthy and/or politically connected Silicon Valley plutocrats who, after several earlier forays into unbuckled opinion-shaping on secure chat platforms, now swap critiques and aperçus on a Signal group chat dubbed Chatham House, after a privacy-conscious international policy think tank based in London. 

Like all things involving Silicon Valley, the group name is a symptom of delusional collective self-regard. The original think tank, founded in the wake of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, has sought to chart new global accords on issues ranging from 20th-century decolonization to climate-change mitigation; its online LARPers include such luminaries as right-wing apparatchik-for-hire Chris Rufo and Sriram Krishnam, the Trump administration’s senior policy adviser for AI. The chat’s chief ringleader is Marc Andreessen, the erstwhile Netscape founder and present-day lord of venture capital, who, as Smith notes, has been instrumental in Silicon Valley’s fulsome embrace of Donald Trump. By distilling the ideological leanings of the Silicon Valley elite, Chatham House and its forerunner chats exert an outsize kind of cultural and political clout, Smith writes. In getting key influencers and business titans on the same page, “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.”

No doubt Andreessen and his fellow chatters are gratified to see themselves hymned in such heady terms, but what Smith has unearthed of the chat’s exchanges and thematic preoccupations bespeaks a much more mundane and inert boardroom-grade discourse of like-minded self-congratulation, with a heavy dose of culture-war persecution fantasies to keep things feeling edgy. It’s less dark matter than brain-dead matter.

That, by itself, isn’t an indictment of the Chatham House set—these are features endemic to e-mail listservs and group chats, which serve chiefly as a group-surveillance mechanism to ensure that participants don’t end up entertaining remotely original thoughts. Yet, to give credit to Smith’s scooplet, the Chatham chats do furnish valuable insight into the preferred mode of groupthink endorsed by our digital overlords. And not surprisingly, this brand of orthodoxy hinges on the grand conceit that they and their peers are the chosen prime movers of history—and that dissenters are, at best, misguided Luddites, and at worst, power-mad and puritanical censors.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Smith’s report on the group’s titanic sense of entitlement:

Many of the roughly 20 participants I spoke to…felt a genuine sentimental attachment to the spaces, and believed in their value. 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. The closed groups offered an alternative to the Twitter and Slack conversations once dominated by progressive social movements, when polarizing health debates swept through social media and society in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you think that feeling victimized by public health strictures and stray Twitter trolls is a good deal short of the spirit of Voltaire and Madame de Stael, just get a load of Andreessen’s own maunderings. Andreessen, it emerges, is a manic poster to Chatham House and an untold number of other plutocratic-friendly group chats; Smith recounts how one attendee at a conference sitting alongside Andreesen saw him frenetically posting to several chats at lightning speed on his phone. That level of passionate intensity corresponds to Andreessen’s rhetorical overkill in characterizing the role of these chats. They are, he pronounced in a February podcast appearance, “the equivalent of samizdat” offering bold freethinkers refuge in a regime of “soft authoritarian” conformity enforced by social media mobs and censorship-drunk administrators.

So what, exactly, are the big ideas bandied about in these chats that are simply too incendiary for the sclerotic custodians of the old Twitter politburo? Per Smith, the effects of Chatham House iconoclasm “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.” Take that, Enlightenment philosophes! You’d think that soi-disant liberators of humanity like Andreessen might pause to reflect that there’s nothing all that samizdat-ish about platforming a fucking monarchist—let alone unleashing a strategic alliance against an overdramatic tech reporter. But this combination of free-floating tetchiness and laser-focused pettiness is at the heart of what Andreesen is pleased to call his curation of the new national “vibe shift,” as the fortunes of one of his earlier group chats makes all too plain.

As Smith lays out in numbing detail, an embryonic version of the Chatham House thread was populated by a mixture of the professionally aggrieved Valley leadership caste and a number of the signatories of the 2020 “Harper’s Letter” that professed to divine a troubling new epidemic of PC censorship of American intellectual discourse. The chat, in a good example of what passes for humor among this crowd, was called “Everything’s Fine.” Yet a fatal schism occurred when two participants—Atlantic writer Thomas Chatterton Williams and podcast host Kmele Foster—collaborated with David French and Jason Stanley on a New York Times op-ed denouncing the moral panic over critical race theory as a betrayal of First Amendment principles. The right-wingers on the chat regarded that as a faithless act from people they regarded as “their allies in an all-out ideological battle,” Smith writes. One erstwhile member recalls that Andreesen in particular “went really ballistic in a quite personal way at Thomas,” and shortly afterward announced that he was bailing from the group, thereby denying it of its principal posting stream. It died out in short order—along with, presumably, the countless breakthroughs that surely would have emerged out of such a hotbed of intellectual activity.

Andresseen’s outburst was more than the classic hypocrisy and bad faith of the “free speech for me but not for thee” opportunist. It’s clear that, despite all his bluster about promoting open debate in a world ridden with small-minded and vengeful censors, Andreessen endorses only the kind of debate that ratifies his pre-existing prejudices. It was, indeed, in that spirit that he prevailed upon Richard Hanania—then an ardent white nationalist on the right—to launch a new group chat “of smart right-wing people.” The chat had no fixed name, but the rotating sobriquets Andreessen graced it with speak volumes about his preferred brand of samizdat discourse; they included “Last Men, apparently,” “James Burnham Fan Club,” “Matt Yglesias Fan Club” and “Journalism Deniers and Richard,” apparently in reference to Hanania. For his part, Hanania, who is now in the midst of a public defection from the hardcore anti-woke right, told Smith that he left the chat in 2023, after seeing it devolve into “a vehicle for groupthink.” He recalls breaking with many participants “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. There’s an idea that you don’t criticize, because what really matters is defeating the left.”