And then the Russian Apologists Left, Complaining about TDS
Ben Smith has a much-discussed story about what he admits is just one of innumerable online chat threads that create unseen but powerful nodes of opinion formation. The Signal chat Ben writes about is, he says,
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.
He says that, in part, based on the centrality of Marc Andreessen, even though the piece also describes Andreessen participating on multiple different chats at once (indeed, doing little else with his life).
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.
[snip]
he flipped on his phone from group chat to group chat, responding and engaging with manic speed.
And while, especially as someone who wrote a dissertation on some of these historical practices, it is amusing to hear the various words — samizdat, Republic of Letters, salons — self-indulgent billionaires use to describe the very male public sphere in which they participate, the existence of networks of chats as a powerful influence on politics is not the breaking news Ben sells it as.
Crazier still, Ben dates the beginning of the group chat to 2018, when an entire criminal case was built around a series of such chats started in 2015 and professionalized by Daily Stormer webmaster Andrew Auernheimer, one which Donald Trump’s failson appears to have used to make stolen John Podesta files go viral. Ben seems to think the billionaires — the Silicon Valley ones, not the scions of Queens real estate and reality TV wealth — invented Signal chats, when one thing we know to have happened is that the white nationalists and other far right activists cultivated certain billionaires into them.
That omission is pretty important given the way Ben allows Rufo to serve as the triumphalist tour guide of this story.
“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,” he said. “By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end — so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”
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.”
As far as we know, the Silicon Valley billionaires were not in those earlier far right chats, but there have been plenty of public breadcrumbs showing the Nazis and the billionaires joining together.
So the existence of the chat, which Ben brags he has discovered, is useful information, but not earthshaking news. The mapping of the Chatham House chat he treats as his reporting subject (Ben is undoubtedly a participant in similar networks incorporating self-indulgent billionaires, but one does not treat those chats as a reporting subject) is useful, but a topic that other journalists also cover, and cover well.
It’s in that mapping, though, that provides the main newsworthy thing about this piece.
The split we’re seeing in public extends into these private chats.
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.”
Billionaires, it turns out, react badly to innumerate destruction of the world economy. Who knew?
Ben ends the piece with this narrative, with no further comment.
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.
Ben includes a screen cap — presumably an egregious violation of the rules of the chat — showing not just Maguire and Wink taking their toys and going home, but (as Ben noted) Tucker Carlson and David Sacks, whose influence on these networks merit at least as much focus as Andreessen’s.
David Sacks, who is probably not even a billionaire, does have tolerance for innumerate destruction of key economies, as he showed when he helped crash Silicon Valley Bank and subsequently begged for taxpayer help to reverse his work. But he is also, along with Carlson, one of the people in this network who most stupidly parrots Russian propaganda (though both men are being challenged on that front by Steve Witkoff).
Which is to say that one of the consequences for Trump’s decision to destroy the global economy is not just that one of Marc Andreessen’s chat groups is getting a divorce, but that in the divorce, two critically important Russian useful idiots are leaving.
In the weeks ahead, both those timelines — the destruction of the global economy and Trump’s attempts to capitulate to Vladimir Putin — will reach a head at the same time.
And it is genuinely useful to know that the Russian apologists have decided to start their own network of influence with “just the smart people” who applaud both destruction of the global economy and also obeisance to Russia.
What happened in those threads was followed by money — specifically, Andreesen’s a16z money.
• a16z is one of the financers behind Musk’s acquisition of the former Twitter which transformed into a Nazi bar;
• a16z is one of the financers behind Substack, which still has an ongoing problem with platforming Nazis.
Americans need to stop thinking techbros are smart people; they can be and in very narrow niches, but they can also be incredibly stupid. Ex: a16z was exposed in the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysis-regulatory-filings-reveals-1-215459942.html
You’d think the techbros would have discussed *that* in their little private clubhouse before SVB got over its head but no.
ADDER: If you’re a journalist, get out of Substack. Your work is being used as bait to attract readers to the Nazi content. You have no excuses when Molly White has done all the work and proven self-hosted Ghost is a better platform.
https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost/
Need an example of a journalist besides White who migrated?
Wow, thank you. Incredibly enlightening post and response.
For a long time I have wondered if any of these techbros communicate with any women around them, that is… if there are any.
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From Ben Smith’s Semafor article:
Emphasis mine. Now look at the gender of folks I’d call whistleblowers, like Sarah Wynn-Williams who wrote Careless People about Meta, or Frances Haugen who also disclosed uncomfortable facts about Meta in 2021. They’re not all women but there are far more women as a percentage than there are in the techbro treehouse.
My apologies, a typo.
I hadn’t known about any of this (post and comment). I feel like I need a high-flow shower to wash off the MAGA filth. I am so sick of entitled rich overconfident assholes thinking they can and should secretly shape how the rest of us live our lives. The fact that they’re doing it with their thumbs on a phone is even more enraging. Still, I am grateful for EW for exposing the filth to sunshine.
I know I wrote about the investors in the dead bird app, perhaps you missed it, and perhaps I was too focused on the 30-35% funded by Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed and Qatar’s sovereign fund — on the tail of prosecution of Saudi spies who worked at Twitter.
These guys are fucking tools of hostile foreign entities and they just don’t give a shit because they have zero loyalty to the US, just their own asses and their little boys-only-treehouse.
I missed it. I was surprised to learn he had investors to buy the dead bird. I guess he wasn’t rich enough.
I was in the ER getting a catheter put in when I saw the news he wanted to buy it. That should’ve been a warning it was gonna be painful.
My favorite part is that this group chat is responsible for mianstreaming the “monarchist Curtis Yarvin”. Either none of them ever read his stuff, or the billionaires and pundits are as half-assed as he is.
Ed, I swear they don’t read anything; they certainly haven’t read history. They operate based on what is shared in bite-sized portions in their private boys-only-treehouse chats and on podcast material.
I can hear them now: “We don’t read history – we make history.”
*eyeroll*
The Jacobins made history, too.
*chop-chop*
ADDER: in hindsight, I wonder if whoever was sawing through fiber optic cables outside Silicon Valley circa 2015-2016 was onto something.
The ole saw “follow the money” would seem to have some applicability.
But, geez how many of these tech bros started out as immature little socially awkward nobodies – smart perhaps, maybe brilliant even – that created some tech that money got mainlined into. I am thinking Zack’s ignominious start before FB, but probably equally applicable to Musk, Andreessen, Thiel, etc.
It’s just an observation. It is not root cause analysis, but the (venture) capital injection of obscene amounts of money to secure liftoff and then the obscene amounts of naked capitalism at work once there is a shred of “success”.
That, to me, is broken, but probably not fixable.
Tech bro = incel who became obscenely wealthy.
Yarvin is not a monarchist. He is a sociopath.
These are spoiled children who have serious problems with self regulation. They alone have decided they are masters of the universe, who can move public opinion with the toys they created.
Excellent analysis, as always.
A bit OT, but given recent events at NSF, I can’t refrain from saying: Ben Smith writes,
“Andreessen … who … invented the modern web browser.”
The irony/hypocrisy that Andreessen, who in 2025 would otherwise be yelling at immigrants to milk his cows faster,
had the opportunity as an undergraduate at UIUC from East Cheesehead, Wisconsin,
to have the job at the NSF-supported National Center for Supercomputer Applications
that launched his career, and now is totally OK with destroying NSF, is breathtaking.
Thank you, Marcy. My new favorite word: “innumerate”.
I wonder if any of those apparently even more diehard than diehard Russian apologists have actually looked at Russia. The somewhat wealthy, if they aren’t one of the “lucky” few oligarchs, are in danger of mafia from below and autocracy from above. And Russians have notably less purchasing capacity, requiring many of the wealthy to use European and backdoor American markets, which will continue to collapse as mainstream economy does. These idiots won’t even be lords of ashes, barely middle managers.
They could have seen Russia, but what they would have seen isn’t the average Russian citizen’s lived experience — like that stupid fuck Tucker Carlson’s trip where he marveled all the cool things in Russia which don’t exist in US *but don’t also exist for the average Russian citizen living outside Moscow.*
These rich snots are completely out of touch with the rest of this country. They have zero idea what basic expenses like health care are doing to this country but they insist everything must be privatized as just one key example.
They’ll never have to live in the conditions they’re busy creating for the rest of us. And they should have to do that.
Sure would be nice to force them to live on Social Security and Medicare.
Parasites having a chat group is interesting. It seems that some members are getting a little nervous that the uber parasite they helped persuade their host to ingest is threatening to kill it with his unbridled appetites. The ones who left the chat, supposedly over disloyal thoughts being shared, may be concealing that they have secretly adapted to thrive off dead things.