Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
After reading about “Houthi PC small group” — the Yemen-air-strike-planning Signal group that included the secretary of Defense, the director of national intelligence, the vice-president, and, accidentally, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic — there are a few images I can neither separate nor get out of my head. There are the emojis — fist, flag, flame — celebrating the first strikes in Yemen outlined earlier in the conversation. There is the Reuters photo of a girl in Saada allegedly injured in the strikes, which targeted Houthi leaders across Yemen but which officials claim killed civilians, too. Emoji, airstrike.
And there are aces craned over phones, gently illuminated, while thumbs tap away, hashing out the cases for and against a life-and-death bombing campaign, a situation room reduced to the size of a chat window. J.D. Vance making a J.D. Vance face at his screen as he types, tagging Pete Hegseth, “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” Pete Hegseth in phone-mantis posture considering how to respond before settling on “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC,” then spamming everyone with official-sounding logs about OPSEC. Maybe between messages they yank their X feeds for a fresh batch of notifications, start crafting their next tweets, or Google their own names. At some point, their phones go back into their pockets. In a narrow but undeniable way, the government is a bunch of people in a group chat now, just like everything else.
Peace Through Strength, every single day. pic.twitter.com/3HmVZv2HSb
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) March 15, 2025
Chatting is as old as networked computing, but the total dominance of the group text is a product of the smartphone era. In 2009, WhatsApp was a cheaper alternative to SMS; by 2014, it was worth $16 billion to Facebook. Now, the chat, rather than the feed, is the standard structure of internet sociality. In the mid-aughts, work-chat platforms like Campfire were a niche product for software developers and early remote workers. Today, hundreds of millions of people work, and modulate their performance of work, in chat windows. Bartenders are being asked to keep up with their Slack messages. A lot of cultural and media phenomena are chat stories in disguise, smuggling side channels that are sometimes more significant than their subjects: Streaming is chat; podcasts can be chat; Substack is sort of chat; “influencers” are chat; porn is chat; “Reddit is back” is also a story about Discord. Zoomers chat one way while boomers WhatsApp another. The tech industry’s next big thing is automated chat.
The rise of chat — and, specifically, the group chat – was a ground-up phenomenon. In the context of social media, it was a way to reestablish privacy and control as well as a way to reassert human group dynamics, good and bad, collaborative and exclusionary, but more familiar than algorithmic. In workplaces, it was an obvious, if ultimately sort of complicated, progression from email. That backchannel culture would seep into the broader culture was inevitable. Still, it’s something to behold.
What’s somewhat newer is the arrival of the group chat as a site of elite coordination. Once you start looking for it, though, you see it everywhere. Last year, in the New York Times, Sophie Haigney noted their frequent appearances in major news stories, including the Dominion lawsuits in which Fox News hosts talked election denial, the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. More recently, they’ve been implicated in Tulsi Gabbard’s trans purge at the NSA (Gabbard was also a member of “Houthi PC small group”), the successful campaign to punish Columbia student protesters organized in part by influential group-chatting alums, and, more recently, Elon Musk’s government-dismantling task force. According to The Wall Street Journal, an early staffer claimed, “Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, [I was asked] if I wanted to join. I said ‘yes.’ Then he said ‘cool’ and I was in multiple Signal groups.” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff bragged in January that the “DOGE team is using Slack, which is very exciting.”
The main story here is obviously what Trump officials were talking about (conducting lethal military operations) and how they were talking about it (just as they do in public, with maximum focus on and deference to Trump). But seeing them chat is still wild. It also makes Trump-administration dynamics extremely legible to chat-brained civilians, as John Ganz points out at Unpopular Front. “Stephen Miller is the voice of the president in this chat and everyone immediately defers to him,” he writes, while Pete Hegseth is “clearly the least respected member of the chat.” I’d add that Vance — the person in the group most likely to be simmering in a bunch of weird group chats of his own and probably the only one here to have seen the inside of a Discord channel — is a recognizable type as well: the tedious and insecure debater that everyone knows how to humor and ignore.
I was admin of this gc. There were no high schoolers lol. Most of the participants were 20-somethings who worked in politics or media and Vance would occasionally pop in to update us on his campaign, thank us for our support, answer questions, or clown one of us, like in the…
— Michael Foster (@realmfoster) April 4, 2024
2011’s Osama bin Laden Situation Room photo was instantly iconic. But it was also, with a bit of distance, sort of deflating, all the legitimizing ceremony and process of the state, the might of the military, and the dark alluring myths of the special forces rendered as a bunch of officials, including the president, crowded into a too-small room to watch TV. In 2025, we once again encounter the American empire in all its majesty: a bunch of Fox News personalities giving themselves text neck — and giving one another emoji props — as they repeat talking points in a group text in front of a person they hate.
