Signal and the Chats of the Gods
American spies started it for "privacy" and reactionary Silicon Valley billionaires now control it because it protects them from the libs and the government, even if they are the government.
I’ve been developing a new theory about the Signal chat app. Well, not exactly a new theory, but an addition to my old theory that is now getting close to a decade old and has been begging for an update.
There’s a story by Ben Smith that helped crystallize my thinking on this. He gets into how a bunch of reactionary VCs and their parasitical buddies in the media and political class have been chatting it up on Signal, using it to plot the downfall of what’s left of limping, half-dead New Deal America. This Signal conspiracy started during the pandemic and then continued to grow, getting behind Trump in a major way and coordinating the VCs’ takeover of American politics, media, and culture…bringing in the Age of MAGA.
One of the central figures in all this — VC billionaire Marc Andreessen — described the various Signal chats that he helped organize as his samizdat, the self-typed books and zines that the dissident Soviet intelligentsia produced to get around official state censorship. Yeah, when one of the richest and most connected people in America starts seeing himself as powerless victim of state terror…you know trouble is gonna follow.
Here’s how Ben wrote about Andreessen’s view on it:
In February, he described the group chats to the podcaster Lex Fridman as “the equivalent of samizdat” — the self-published Soviet underground press — in a “soft authoritarian” age of social media shaming and censorship. “The combination of encryption and disappearing messages really unleashed it,” he said. The chats, he wrote recently, helped produce our national “vibe shift.”
(An aside: Lex Friendman, who we’ve talked about on the pod, seems like he was 3D printed by the Andreessen VC crowd, crafted to be their media guy. And, in fact, so was JD Vance, the Vice President of the United States of America. Vance went through Peter Thiel’s VC finishing school.)
For me, what’s interesting about Ben’s story is control. If Signal is now the main organizing platform of reactionary billionaires, who controls Signal? Who funds this app? My hunch, based on the limited data that Signal and its funders have made available publicly, is that the Silicon Valley oligarch Andreessen types don’t just use Signal, they bankroll it now. They control the money, so they control the app. Signal is theirs. It’s the neutral ground on which they meet to plot and scheme out of the public eye. And since they’re winning, they’re bragging about it openly now.
Long-term readers of my work know that I have been covering Signal and the spooky CIA-adjacent world that brought Signal and other “privacy” apps into existence. I wrote a chapter on this in my book Surveillance Valley. If you know this history of it, you can skip ahead a few paragraphs. Others, stay with me for a bit……1