Earlier this week, Semafor published an incredibly in-depth report looking at the specific role private groupchats played in shaping the modern right-wing consensus among American elites. These group chats connected tech CEOs, media commentators, and politicians, bringing them all into the same room to discuss various political subjects and express their grievances regarding the surrounding left-wing culture of the time.

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.

These groupchats would also end up acting as spaces in which various cultural and business elites consolidated their support behind the Trump campaign and collaborated to spread that support to the rest of the country. Given how divisive the election (and current administration) has been, it should come as no surprise that finding out about these secret chats has sparked some outrage:

The critics decry the lack of transparency in these backroom discussions, saying that these chats are too closed to facilitate any real discussion or disagreement, and see the whole thing as a propaganda exercise. But, I think a lot of the knee-jerk responses here are coming from people who don’t understand these spaces.

Now, I was never in these specific chats. I’m not an elite, I’m just a regular person, after all. But I am also someone who grew up on the internet. I’ve been in all sorts of political discussion rooms like these over the years: private, semi-private, public, you name it. So, I’d like to pull back the curtain a bit and talk about my own experience in these kinds of spaces, and what makes them so valuable.

Smoke-filled rooms have always existed. Sometimes among elites, sometimes among insurgents, sometimes among persecuted groups, sometimes among friends. In a culture that reveres democracy, the idea of these elites coming together to make their decisions outside of the public eye can often sound rather icky. After all, since pretty early on in our nation’s history, we’ve held transparency to be this prime political virtue.

But we shouldn’t neglect another political virtue: privacy. Elites, ideologues, and politicians are private citizens too. The same way we, as ordinary people, congregate in cliques and circles with their own inside jokes and boundaries, the same holds true for decisionmakers. In the past, elites had gentlemen’s associations, house parties, and private clubs whereby they debated and coordinated on the causes they cared about. This is simply that principle translated into the digital age.

Whenever we talk about how the internet has democratized the information landscape, we often tend to turn all of our focus to social media: this universal public square whereby everyone is constantly seeing and commenting on the same set of issues. But this is really only the tip of the iceberg: by the time you see it on your feed, everything’s already been filtered and preprocessed for you. What the algorithm serves you is downstream from whichever topics and whichever power-users it determines should have the largest voice. Because it’s fundamentally designed in a way that’s constantly selecting for broad appeal and weighing voices based on social status, all voices are not equal. The most viral voices and narratives often require institutional backing to get their legs off the ground. By the time the discussion reaches you, your only role is to act as a simple signal-booster.

If you’re looking to actually “do your own research” or trying to form original ideas, the front-page of Google and whatever your Facebook feed serves you isn’t going to cut it. The voices and narratives that pop up to the front of these often can only do so with institutional backing: the media networks that prop them up often end up pulling from the same sources of information, ideologies, and personnel. You end up with a machine that’s very good at spreading ideas, but not one that’s designed for the development and refinement of new ideas.

Group chats are different: the apps are designed for discussion rather than virality. When you fight, you fight against real people, not an algorithm. Your social status, connections, or credentials doesn’t determine your voice, the quality of your arguments do. The privacy means you argue points not to curate your image, but because you genuinely believe in what you’re saying: you’re allowed much more freedom to openly risk being wrong. Rather than having to rely on checkmarks to know who to trust, you can directly challenge people on the claims they’re making to see if they hold up to scrutiny. Because these chats tend to be relatively small, you, as an individual, have the power to not just boost what someone else says, but actually change the terms of the discussion with original contributions.

There’s an absolute wealth of citations, ideas, and arguments trapped in 600-page books, niche blogposts, and the minds of major industrial and political players: stuff that never makes it to the surface. Group chats allow for the pooling of this information. You might have a specific subject of interest you’re knowledgeable on, and someone else there might have a different topic of interest they’re able to supply insight and specialized knowledge on. You don’t have to be a well-rounded influencer whose mastered the court of public opinion: this side of the internet creates an environment in which even regular nerds would have something to contribute.

Most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats: Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, small invite-only Discord groups. Being part of the right group chat can feel like having a peek at the kitchen of a restaurant but instead of food, messy ideas and gossip fly about in real time, get mixed, remixed, discarded, polished before they show up in a prepared fashion in public…

…Time and time again I’ve seen group chat conversations act as the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion. Like a standup comic workshopping his set in a small club before a big Netflix special, people trial content and ideas, find bonds and you’ll often see narratives and ideas discussed make the jump to X/Twitter and then mainstream discourse.¹

Nearly everything I know and the ideas I’ve been able to showcase on this blog has been possible in large part thanks to group chats. Not places like Chatham House, obviously — but various communities you can find dedicated to bringing togehter people of specific niche worldviews, reading backgrounds, and areas of professional experience to the table.

Over the years, I fell into a bit of a rhythm for developing myself as a writer: I’d read books to gather ideas, test those ideas against other people in the chatrooms, see what does/doesn’t work, and then mentally distill down what seems to work into a fully-fleshed out blogpost. That in turn could be shared for future feedback. Where I see I’m missing knowledge, I’d then go back to reading books and the cycle would repeat. It took time but the results paid off.

Critics will argue that these spaces create “echo chambers” but does every space need to be a neutral forum? The Semafor article compares these chats to debate clubs, but why is that a bad thing?

But I’ve come to think JournoList’s critics were partly right in noticing that these spaces could encourage conformity, and then transform public fora — blogs then, social media now — into pitched battles between well-prepared debate clubs, rather than open conversations.

Sometimes it’s in those more curated spaces that you’ll get more specific information and being able to dig into the weeds of debates that are internal to a specific side/sect. The higher concentration of people with a common interest means you’ll often find people who are more well-read in the nuts-and-bolts of those frameworks and accustomed to conversing at a level beyond just defending the basics to outsiders. These places can act as workshops: of course there’s often boundaries on norms, but circlejerks can emerge in any human community.

Looking at the “public squares” of social media, I’m not particularly convinced they’re any less spaces of radicalization. Literally just spend a couple minutes on Reddit and you can see pretty quickly how the feeds can radicalize brains into quite literally anything from supporting mass suicide to hating dogs. Even on places like Twitter/Bluesky the “open” design can often trap everyone in the same homogenous, platform-wide discourse.

If anything, from my experience these groupchats have acted as a deradicalizing force: you have the ability to see people face-to-face and talk to them. I’ve been able to openly push back against arguments and have a level of control over the spread of communities I’m in that just wasn’t the case with social media. What were previously abstract figures and positions in the media become humanized, as I’m able to engage with these stances one-on-one and see what brings people to believe what they believe. Algorithms don’t provide this.

I think to an extent, the hostility towards these alternative communities comes from those whose profile is most suited to the “open” platforms: those with strong institutional affiliations or those who are comfortable getting their views and talking-points prepackaged for them. There’s an element of status threat from having discussion move to platforms whose logic and incentives exist outside of your sphere of influence. And I think that’s a large part of why we continue to see politicians go after not just social media, but the internet as a whole.

We’re in a political environment where free speech is constantly under attack yet our politicians continue to (on a bipartisan basis) prioritize regulating the internet into submission over every other political issue. The elites in that groupchat came together over their shared hatred of censorship, but now they weaponize it against their opponents. If you don’t like these people, don’t let them be the only ones who get privacy: secure it for yourself.

Of course, these are hardly the only power group chats. Anti-Trump liberals are now coordinating their responses on Signal. There are group chats for Black political elites and morning show producers. A vast and influential parallel set of tech conversations take place on WhatsApp. There’s a big China-friendly group over on WeChat. Elite podcasters have one.

“It’s the same thing happening on both sides, and I’ve been amazed at how much this is coordinating our reality,” said the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who was for a time a member of a group chat with Andreessen. “If you weren’t in the business at all, you’d think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently — and [they’re] not. It’s a small group of people who talk to each other and overlap between politics and journalism and a few industries.”

But there is no equivalent to the intellectual counterculture that grew up over the last five years on the tech right, and no figure remotely like Andreessen, the towering, enthusiastic 53-year old who co-founded a16z and, before that, invented the modern web browser.

All the benefits these elites get from groupchats, you can get too. It doesn’t have to be restricted to one political faction or one class. It takes time and work, but it’s just one way we can decouple the political process from social media.