How group chats rule the world
I'm not particularly powerful; it doesn't matter what pranks I'm involved in and what dinners I'm invited to. But it's instructive to think of the digital rooms being built by those who are. We often get glimpses of such group chats in court cases, with iMessage's familiar blue and white bubbles appearing in screenshots and presented as evidence. For example, a series of messages between Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson was one of several chats at issue in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The tone is amusingly familiar; they complain, gossip, and help process the news. Carlson admits something he would never say on the air: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I really can't wait.” (He sounds like an MSNBC-addicted liberal in 2019!) They whine about Fox colleagues. “My anger at the news channel,” Ingraham writes, “is expressed. Lol.” (Soothing the sentiment with an awkward digital laugh – she's just like me!) But she also acknowledges the group's potential influence. “I think all three of us have enormous power,” she writes, and later: “We all need to think about how we can force change together.”
That 'thinking together', pinging back and forth in real time, towards something non-specific but still very tangible – that is the essence of a group chat. There have always been backroom meetings between powerful media figures, but such things no longer happen in the proverbial smoke-filled room; they happen constantly and more diffusely. I know of a group chat in which, among other things, a group of successful men exchange investment tips and sometimes even act as a de facto investment group. (I'm not in that chat – would I have more money if I were?) There are others in which people's collective processing ultimately causes them to push each other to break the law – as in the January 6 uprising , which also dumped large numbers of group chats in lawsuits. Sam Bankman-Fried had a group chat called 'Wirefraud', according to The Australian Financial Review. He has denied this, but it's funny how easy it is to imagine this being true: where else would a group of techies coordinate the fraud than in chat?
Such chats do not have to be explicitly nefarious. Often their power is an indirect result of weak social ties, with people digitally bumping into each other all day long. Silicon Valley Bank's launch last March is said to be at least partially traceable to a group chat involving, as described by a member on Twitter, “over 200 tech founders.” The man who tweeted this was describing the familiar experience of seeing stressful messages during a bathroom break at work; When he saw alarming talk about the bank, he canceled a meeting and immediately urged his wife to withdraw their money. Others followed suit. You have to wonder what was said in this group chat of '200+ tech founders' before the bank run. If I had to guess, the basic content wouldn't be much different than my own chats: a jumble of links, a jumble of different conversations starting and stopping. I imagine people complaining about housing policies in the Bay Area or trade recommendations for the latest mushroom-based coffee substitute. Without realizing it, they might have built something together, however undefined: a community based on shared values, interests and hobbies, affirmed daily by the little things, down to the restaurants they like in Hayes Valley. Then someone questions the solvency of a bank, others latch onto it and all hell breaks loose.
People act irrationally all the time, based on limited information, but there is something specific and perhaps even unprecedented about this number of influential people working at this speed, their reactions all flowing from one another in one digital place and then bouncing back to the real world. world to somehow send millions of dollars. The dynamics of group chats—who's in, who's not—may seem like the grown-up version of jockeying kids for a lunch table. But those dynamics can determine not only who eats where, but also financial events, political events and news of real importance. None of these things can be completely undone, and it's all happening at high speed now.
One of my favorite group chats, which no longer exists, was between me and two friends with whom I suddenly became closer. It was called “Recently Single Club,” a name chosen as a kind of joke, despite circumstances that didn't feel like a joke to us at all—to me, the painful end of a nearly five-year relationship that defined my adult life. We didn't discuss the reality of our new circumstances in the group chat, although we did a lot of this in person, sometimes as a threesome over drinks. Looking back on our texts – sent at a rapid pace during a strange, slightly manic spring and summer – I see us doing other things: providing each other with a kind of vain and sometimes distracting presence that in some ways meant very little, a form of a consistently low-quality business that was both intermittent and reliable. It was what I could tolerate: giving each other “Top Gun” nicknames, exchanging gossip and bad music recommendations, arranging a joint listening session on Spotify while getting ready for a party – the virtual version of someone just sitting next to you in the middle of illness or sadness, doing nothing but being there. Eventually the chat was renamed to reflect that we hadn't been single lately – some of us weren't single at all – and then the chat mostly disappeared, replaced by other, bigger chats, different friend combinations.