The group chats that changed America
The group chats that changed America by timdaub.eth12379 🥝 • 1y • 0 views • 0 clicks | |
AI summary of the linked articlePrivate group chats centered on venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Silicon Valley figures are described as having shaped a realignment toward Donald Trump and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right. The chats began bubbling up in 2018 and 2019 and accelerated in spring 2020, when Sriram Krishnan launched a WhatsApp group called "Build" with about a dozen elite figures, followed by dozens more within a year. Krishnan wrote that the chats are "the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion." | |
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 The group chats are “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion +1. I read about EF criticism on groupchats months before the Twitter backlash. Kiwi groupchat and comments section have been weeks, months, and sometimes years ahead of mainstream Ethereum conversations: from shit UX on mobile wallets, through problems with Wallet-as-a-Service providers, up to bad devs experience on Ethereum. That spring, Krishnan, working as a consultant, launched a group called “Build” on WhatsApp with a dozen of Silicon Valley’s elite figures. Andreessen loved it, and Krishnan began launching more — dozens, within a year, on topics from engineering to design to project management to artificial intelligence. Makes me think if that’s not a good growth tactics for Kiwi. Set up many groupchats about pain points we see and then look for a way to unite these people in one place (Kiwi) to discuss these things more openly. 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. Good protip for running groupchat. Since Elon Musk turned X to the right and an alternative media ecosystem emerged on Substack, “a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view,” Andreessen told Fridman. “It’s much healthier to live in a society in which people are literally not scared of what they’re saying.” I think it’s true, but at the same time some of these conversations will remain on groupchats anyway. There are some things I’d never feel comfortable sharing in public - ideas, opinions or even memes. BTW I think using groupchats to form an opinion, and then converting it to a blogpost, is a good content pipeline | |
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