Along with the tech-centric WhatsApp groups Krishnan had organized out of a16z,
Andreessen joined a slew of others,
including ones that Torenberg set up for tech founders and for more political discussions.
The tech chats tended to be on WhatsApp and the political ones on Signal, which is more fully encrypted,
and they had different settings.
(“Every group chat ends up being about memes and humor and the goal of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable without tripping it,” Andreessen told Fridman.
“People will set to 5 minutes before they send something particularly inflammatory.“)
After a group of liberal intellectuals published a letter in Harper’s on July 7, 2020, some of its signers were invited to join a Signal group called “Everything Is Fine.”
There, writers including #Kmele #Foster, who co-hosts the podcast
"The Fifth Column", Persuasion founder #Yascha #Mounk, and the Harper’s letter contributor Williams joined Andreessen and a group that also included the anti-woke conservative activist #Chris #Rufo.
The new participants were charmed by Andreessen’s engagement:
“He was the most available, the most present, the most texting of anybody in the group
— which shocked me because it seemed like he was the most important person in the group,” one said.
But the center didn’t hold.
The liberal Harper’s types were surprised to find what one described an
“illiberal worldview” among tech figures more concerned with power than speech.
The conservatives found the liberal intellectuals tiresome, committed to what Rufo described to me as “infinite discourse” over action.
The breaking point came on July 5, 2021, when Foster and Williams,
along with the never-Trump conservative #David #French and the liberal academic #Jason #Stanley,
wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing new laws against teaching “critical race theory.”
“Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education,
it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression,”
they wrote.
The conservatives had thought the Harper’s letter writers were their allies in an all-out ideological battle,
and considered their position a betrayal.
Andreessen “went really ballistic in a quite personal way at Thomas,”
a participant recalled.
The group ended after Andreessen “wrote something along the lines of
‘thank you everybody, I think it’s time to take a Signal break,’” another said.
The meltdown of this liberal-tech alliance was, to #Rufo, a healthy development.
“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.”
#MarcAndreessen #LexFridman
#ChrisRufo
#VivekRamaswamy #ErikTorenberg #Krishnan
#NoahSmith
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america
#Politologe zu #Demokratiekrise:
#USA steuern auf "ernste #Verfassungskrise zu"
Der #Politologe Yascha #Mounk warnt vor der Gefährdung demokratischer Errungenschaften. Demokratien müssten sich auf ihre Stärken besinnen. Populisten sähen dann alt aus.
Since the start of this year, Danielle Allen has been making the case that it’s time to renovate our democracy.
But the very idea presumes several things. These include:
(1) that constitutional democracy is good for human beings;
(2) that we should want to keep and improve the one we’ve got;
(3) that long-term work on the health of our democracy is worthwhile even as we face the near-term stress of a pretty unpalatable upcoming presidential election; and
(4) that change is possible.
Several questions have cropped up repeatedly that touch on those underlying propositions.
Here are some answers to frequently asked questions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/23/democracy-renovation-faq-danielle-allen/
#DanielleAllen
#supermajority #Mounk #Foa #supermajority #initiatives #fairness #inclusion
For me, the single bleakest data point about the health of our society concerns a difference across generations in that sense of attachment to democracy.
As political scientists Yascha #Mounk and Roberto #Foa have reported in a few different guises, there has been significant 🔸generational decline in 🔸how people value democracy.
In the starkest formulation, made in 2016, roughly 70 percent of Americans in the generation born before World War II consider it very essential, while not quite 30 percent of Americans who are now about 40 and younger do so.
This finding occasioned controversy, but the points about decline of young people’s attachment to democracy are robust.
Among those of us who have not been radicalized, on both sides of the aisle, there is work to do to forge a cross-ideological #supermajority.
First of all, people have to believe such a supermajority is possible.
Happily, the evidence abounds, especially in the results of state ballot #initiatives.
These are decided with cross-ideological supermajorities or near supermajorities voting in favor with surprising frequency.
Here are some examples:
🔹Legalization of recreational marijuana (2020): New Jersey, 67 percent;
🔹legalization of recreational marijuana (2022): Maryland, 67 percent;
🔹legalization of medical marijuana (2020): Mississippi, 74 percent;
🔹restoring voting rights to those who have completed felony conviction (2018): Florida, 65 percent;
🔹new state flag without Confederate emblems (2020): Mississippi, 71 percent;
🔹right to repair in support of small auto shops (2020): Massachusetts, 75 percent.
Look at these decisions and you’ll see American supermajorities voting over and over again for #fairness, #inclusion and the person getting the short end of the stick.
This is not only a ♦️cross-ideological supermajority ♦️in the making; it’s one with good, salt-of-the-earth values.
This potential American supermajority for constitutional democracy is what we need to forge.
No democracy can be stable without a supermajority supporting the basic rules of the game.
Inside the bounds of those rules, we can fight like the dickens over specific policy questions. But the rules themselves require supermajority support for stability.
In einem Monat feiern wir die Publikation unseres neuen Magazins mit einem Podiumsgespräch über #Toleranz – mit Richard David #Precht und Yascha #Mounk
🗓️18.3.2024
🕡18.30 Uhr
📍Glockenhof, Zürich
Weitere Infos & Anmeldung: https://www.eventbrite.ch/e/wie-viel-toleranz-tolerieren-wir-tickets-830135406347
Leset/Read Yascha #Mounk!
https://www.persuasion.community/p/yascha-the-deep-roots-of-the-lefts
Chuck Darwin
Lukas Leuzinger
Ecologia Digital
Michael Eisenriegler