Chat Groups of the Rich and Famous

Billionaires: Their group chats are just like ours! Except...

The Washington Post reports (gift link) on a group chat hosted on messaging app WhatsApp that was used to coordinate influence efforts on behalf of Israel and against pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University. The boldface names include:

Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt [founder of the retail chain Ashley Stewart and the global real estate company Thor Equities]…former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital and brother of Jared Kushner, former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law….a staffer for billionaire and real estate magnate Barry Sternlicht

The chat lasted until early May, when it was shut down after the chat began to drift from its initial purpose. In the meantime, it recorded private outreach efforts to and from Naftali Bennett (an Israeli politician and former prime minister); Benny Gantz, a current Cabinet minister; and the Israeli ambassador to the United States. It also more prominently included discussions of how to reach Mayor Eric Adams and influence the NYPD’s response to campus protests at Columbia.

On the one hand, this is very relatable content. Sorry, Bernie: it turns out that millionaires and billionaires are just like us. They gossip, share links, and have group conversations on WhatsApp that should probably be deleted after a set interval. If all DMs and chats were made public, who among us would escape hanging?

On the other hand, the story carries obviously disturbing implications. Unaccountable oligarchs conspiring against the powerless! Nefarious schemes! Campaign contributions! The chat logs have it all. The New York Times published an article headlined “How Group Chats Rule the World” (gift link), but this is a little on the nose. Most of our group chats don’t plan briefings by members of the War Cabinet between shitposts.

Yet on further reflection there isn’t all that much that’s particularly new in the substance of what the chat logs reveal. The whole point of being an unaccountable oligarch is to conspire against the powerless. Doing so on WhatsApp is just a novel manifestation of what would have once happened at a club on Pall Mall, over drinks at the Beverly Hills Hotel bar, or at a nice, innocent party hosted by Silvio Berlusconi. And the minutes of any serious attempt to change the course of events are going to be ripe for the plucking of embarrassing bits, especially when (as on any group chat) they include every word typed out instead of being edited for decorum as formal minutes would have been.

I don’t mean to downplay the substance of the Post’s reporting, but rather to just remind us all to skip the next stage or two in the hype cycle of stories that involve the Internet changing familiar behaviors to a tech-enabled superficial novelty. The rich and powerful have always had ways to coordinate their behaviors; if anything, doing so on a group chat is a big step backward for them, given that these chats can be leaked—or infiltrated—pretty easily. (How good do you think the group’s cybersecurity is? Do you think it’s better than the Hillary campaign’s?)

But I also want to be clear that there is a there there.

First, I mean my earlier observation literally: millionaires and billionaires are just like us in a very relevant and direct sense. Beyond a) possessing a lot of money and contacts and b) some very narrow and particular skills, it turns out that the very rich and very powerful are not astonishing super-beings but more or less the same people that most readers of this newsletter will recognize. Their chat dynamics appear recognizable because even elites are pretty much the same as us—except, of course, for those resources, which are considerable. Yet those resources don’t mean that they conduct conversations on a plane inaccessible to mortals; if anything, their discussions appear to have been less challenging and less interesting than the conversations my group chats entertain.

If anything, the rich and powerful’s group chats appear to have been less challenging and less interesting than the conversations my group chats entertain.

This matters. Back in the day, WhatsApp chats were blamed for radicalizing the masses of Brazil into electing Jair Bolsanaro. This era of misinformation/disinformation research always had the whiff of believing that there was a cognitive/information elite that could escape such pollution, but the unwashed could not. Yet the more we learn about the Internet habits of the rich and famous the less likely this seems. If Sam Alito has a group chat, then I guarantee you its contents are indistinguishable from hundreds of thousands of Fox News-pilled chats around the country. It’s not just the mass but the elites who can be radicalized and endumbened, in other words. And the effects of those information environments might not even be similar to the effects on less sophisticated observers—they might be more radicalizing or totalizing for people who are motivated to believe and act in certain ways. Back in the day, politicians more or less learned about the world from the same newspapers and networks any voter did. Now imagine the reinforcing doom loop of politicos sending the same misinformation to each other that you can see on any Facebook politics page (well, that you used to).

Second, we should not expect that the dynamics that we observe in these chat logs to be limited only to any particular interest or affinity group. There are publicly acknowledged group chats for lots of elites, like the Democratic women governors’ group chat or a House Republican leadership group chat. I would very strongly suspect that many more group chats link different members of Congress—to each other, to donors, and to outside advisers. (If we were inventing the term “Kitchen Cabinet” today, wouldn’t we call it “Group Chat One”?)

For academic researchers, these are tantalizing. Just imagine how group chats for state officials, for instance, could be transforming the diffusion of policy ideas! Similarly, one wonders about the means by which group chats could foster differential representation of the wealthy and privileged—and how they could form pathways for influence beyond easy accountability, or any accountability at all.

Of course, if all of this would have still happened but more slowly via phone, fax, and in-person conferences, the effects of moving into the smartphone are less than they appear—but then again, speed has a quality all its own, and the direct manner in which such messages bypass staff and advisers can transform the dynamics of policymaking. The nature of the group chat, after all, is that it is an intimate and trusted circle, and maintenance of the group chat community forms a goal all its own, tamping down debate and promoting at least some measure of conformity to new group norms.

Moreover, group chats are inherently exclusive places that reinforce membership and privilege to an arguably greater degree than even private clubs simply because they represent a persistent, ongoing conversation unchained to any physical location. It is not hard to find evidence of similar elite group chat networks mattering. The (expensive) fall of Silicon Valley Bank was precipitated by a Silicon Valley group chat that served the interests of its members (who could run on the bank) against that of the bank, other account holders, and the FDIC. Lesser examples abound: on the high school forensics circuit, for instance, some events may be quasi-rigged even before they begin by group chat-facilitated politicking. And Discord and other services constitute a parallel dimension of engagement with college courses, including facilitating organized (and occasionally justified) course protests.

There are, in other words, two big reasons to worry about group chats. The rich and powerful are just like us—dumb, panicky, dangerous animals—but they are also unlike us because they are, well, rich and powerful. Radicalizing them and facilitating their dumb, panicky, dangerous actions in spaces beyond accountability or debate—well, that’s not a great portent for the future of deliberation or of action.