@kevinsbacon@lemmy.today, can you change the title to something like "TIL about the 300 member signal groups that ..."
Chatham House is an unrelated think tank with a completely separate history, and your post makes it sound like they're behind this. If I understand it correctly, the tech bros named their signal group "Chatham House" because that's what they wanted it to resemble.
This particular group chat is only notable because the author accidentally got added to it.
And it was just another day in Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right.
But their influence flows through X, Substack, and podcasts, and constitutes a kind of dark matter of American politics and media. The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed. The group chats are “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion,” wrote one of their key organizers, Sriram Krishnan, a former partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (typically styled a16z) who is now the White House senior policy adviser for AI.
Of course, these are hardly the only power group chats. Anti-Trump liberals are now coordinating their responses on Signal. There are group chats for Black political elites and morning show producers. A vast and influential parallel set of tech conversations take place on WhatsApp. There’s a big China-friendly group over on WeChat. Elite podcasters have one.
The article is interesting and worth reading, thanks for sharing it