Adam Conover notices that an awful lot of far-right weirdos and fanatics are addicted to group chats, and speculates that maybe the group chats themselves are responsible for the increasing insanity of our government. It’s clear that some people seem to be literally addicted to their phone chats — Mike Waltz was caught chatting under the table at a cabinet meeting, Pete Hegseth seems to have replaced alcohol with his phone, and Marc Andreesen has a reputation for non-stop chatting with multiple groups at all times.
It’s an interesting suggestion that group chats are wrecking the brains of all the participants, but it sounds a bit like the accusation that video games are damaging the youth. I am quite willing to consider an alternative, that all of these horrible people were fucked up in the head before they picked up an iPhone. Maybe certain kinds of personalities are simultaneously authoritarian and demanding a constant feed of approval and dominance?
The experiment is straightforward: enroll typical, normal people in one of these group chat thingies, and see if they turn into raging stupid assholes under their influence. I’d be a candidate, because I’m not involved in any of these real-time kinds of online conversations, and never have been. I’ve got a couple of email groups that are closed and confidential, but those tend to be low-key and focused on business. My biology discipline at the university has one — it’s all boring announcements and questions about classes and that sort of thing, there’s absolutely nothing particularly juicy about it, and if anyone tried to salt it with digressions and abuse they would be shut down with a face-to-face complaint.
I wonder if Facebook might have suffered from this phenomenon. It’s not quite real-time, but some people do have their strange little subgroups that they hover over, constantly refreshing, and they do get quite nasty and personal…and also some of them are annoyingly obsessed with their status. I left Facebook because of that ingrown stupidity having free reign.
Maybe the real problem is obsession with social dynamics, which is a real problem when the online tool’s purpose is to facilitate a real, practical project, like bombing Houthis or discussing classroom assignments.
No, don’t put me into your group chat. I might turn into a monster.
My guess is that the intent of group chats is to make the written word mimic the spoken word; but all you wind up with is writing without proofreading, or indeed any care taken at all. It’s a dope’s dream.
I agree with PZ: please don’t include me in any chats.
Conversation I had in high school with a friend who said drugs turned his brother into an asshole. I asked if maybe he would have been one anyway.
The one chat I’m in is pretty low-key. We used to have more folks in it back in the 90s, but for the last couple of decades, it’s usually two or three of us, and for much of that time, it was my main social interaction of the week.
Isn’t this kind of a group chat?
I think some group chats reinforce certain ways of thinking, or perhaps better, not thinking. Unlike Pharyngula which requires some deliberate cognitive process to engage, not to mention the inevitable pushback, I gather a lot of platforms are almost instantaneous: crazy idea comes to mind, tap tap tap post, then a few minutes later hundreds…if not thousands…of “yeah dude” and up votes. I see this on FuckBook fairly regularly.
Plus some of those chat platforms are probably preyed on by bots. I’ve gotten into some back and forth discussions with some numbskull when I realized that the responses could be canned or AI generated provocations, it’s difficult to know. In any case, I disengaged.
In fact I saw this kind of behavior when I first tried to engage with some UseNet group back in the day. After a couple of thousand word screeds in response to my post, I bailed.
I think the difference is in the immediacy of group chat. Throw a comment on here, and usually it’s going to simmer and not get a response for many minutes to hours, and in the meantime it’s going to stew in the midst of other people’s comments.
PZ, surely you’ve seen cranks pop up in letters to the editor, e-mail, Usenet, IRC, blogs, web forums, Youtube comments (oh Youtube comments!), and social media. People are noticing them on group chats because more people are using group chats now, that’s all there is to it.
Yep, immediacy is significant part of the difference. Another difference is moderation. If some goofball gets on here and starts spewing crazy stuff, which happens now and then, you notice and stop it. A lot of the commercial group chats and the platforms they run on are not moderated. No one is blocking the person…or AI-drive bot…spewing crazy ideas.
mmmm. there is a self-reinforcing local culture element, which can easily be used by an antisocial person to get everybody approving of some bad aims. i’d argue political conservative group chats were established by antisocial people for antisocial ends, so surely the problem is worse there than in a brony discord, but there have by now been multiple instances in the writing community of “mean girl” discords organizing abuse of other authors they don’t like. One could wonder.
A lot of things he says strike me as missing how bad cliqueish behavior can get in real life. Adam’s gotten very into “put down your damn phone” in general, though, so I don’t think this is a surprising take from him.
I’ve been in a few group texts with friends. One is ongoing and usually about where to go eat or wishing happy birthday. Years ago a friend asked a group of us our opinions on buying a certain pinball machine. I’m not into pinball. The discussion went well until one of the members started making derogatory comments about the rest of us being liberals. It came out of the blue from someone only pinball guy knew. All hell broke loose on the derogatory MAGA fueled commenter. We started blocking his number.
I have witnessed awkward moments when one member of a texting group made a comment to another that perhaps wasn’t meant for me to read. Happened with my brother and nephew during a Super Bowl I think.
As far as being a member of a group chat, there’s those times when “[person’s name] has left the chat” for whatever reason.
I haven’t yet watched the Conover video. I miss Adam Ruins…
Group chats will never replace Bohemian Grove. I do wonder how many of these clowns attend that midsummer frat party in the woods. Most seem not sophisticated enough.
Hemidactylus @ #10 — Using the wizardry of the Internets, I found that there is no record of Don the Con ever attending the midsummer frat party. I didn’t do an exhaustive search, but none of the key players are on the public list of known members. I think The Grove camp is kind of passé these days. Some years ago I briefly knew someone (ex-husband of a girl friend) who was an opera singer and performed at The Grove. At the time, it was basically a place for very serious people to get together to talk serious business in secret, watch some entertainment, act silly for a moment in a skit, and pick up prostitutes. Things have changed under Trump. Rich white men don’t need to hide in the woods to have extramarital sex.
Related article by Amanda Marcotte, who has written really perceptively on MAGA: https://www.salon.com/2025/04/28/maga-loves-a-tantrum-how-public-meltdowns-became-the-preferred-method-of-communication/
“The goal of the bombastic MAGA aesthetic is to flood the brain with emotions, so that no rational thought can penetrate. This strategy dates back to Roger Ailes founding Fox News in the 90s. The network dispensed with the staid conservative aesthetic for the 2×4-to-the-face vibe. The loud graphics, busy screens, and sexed-up appearances of the hosts have become ubiquitous on cable television. At the time, it stood out, setting the foundation for how the entire Republican world would look under Trump’s leadership. It’s tempting to call it “camp,” but camp requires pleasure. Even for its fans, the Fox overkill keeps audiences in a state of constant agitation, unable to think clearly — much less question the nonsense they’re consuming. “
I’d think there are a couple of things involved here…
First, as both PZ and Kip T.W. mention, there’s almost certainly an amount of pre-existing condition. With alcohol, for example, the usual line is that alcohol doesn’t really make you say or do anything: it just keeps you from realizing that what you’re about to say or do is a really stupid idea and stopping yourself.
And second, there’s an old line of ‘practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent‘. If you practice being angry a lot, that makes it easier to be angry all the time.
Social media, as noted above, shortens the feedback loop on all that so there’s no relaxation time between events. People end up high on the supply of outrage marketing and constantly seeking their next fix so they don’t have to calm down and start thinking about what they’re actually doing with their life.