The Group Chat Theory of Everything

A short essay on how group chats run the world

The Group Chat Theory of Everything

The group chat theory of everything is the idea that group chats are a new social unit alongside the individual, family, city, and country and their existence (and coordination power) has implications across all layers of society.

I should say, “new” in the grand scheme of history i.e. it’s really only a ~20 year old phenomenon that’s connected to the rise of phones, which are the core infrastructure that facilitates The Chat as a crystallization of a group of people that transcends space and time.

>If you want to nitpick, yes email was a forerunner to this, and it let people have distributed social interaction as well, but I think phones are the real unlock for group chat adoption in the persistent, hivemind, always on sense.

Anyway, everyone has group chats with their friends and family. Plenty of people smarter than me have pointed this out. I just think it’s underdiscussed, so here’s a quick riff on how I think about this stuff.

First, group chats shape who we are as people. The adage used to be that you’re the average of the five people you spend most of your time around. I think we can remix that now to be more like: you’re the average of the five group chats that you spend most of your time in. Group chats are how we consume, process, and participate in The Current Thing. They act as a filter on reality, and every chat has a story, a collective energy, and a set of values that inform how its members see the world.

Second, group chats have hard power. Over time you start to take your people’s opinions on different things more seriously. Trust forms. And that trust has downstream impacts on politics, on commerce, and on culture because we take recommendations and cues from people we trust. This often leads to direct action: investing in stocks together, voting for the same politicians, making donations to the same charities, and buying the same goods or having the same experiences.

Third, group chats are superspreaders of ideas. So much of what becomes popular across art, music, fashion, gaming, markets, and really everything is downstream of group chats. Information and opinions definitely ricochet around on social media in the breadth sense, but they simmer in group chats. That’s where the depth is… that’s where people’s consideration spans are longer, where they’re more likely to take action or change their beliefs based on new information.

Now, I don’t have a prescription of what to do with these thoughts exactly, but I do want to throw out a question, which is: what would it look like to acknowledge how important group chats have become to the social fabric? My sense is there’s a lot of low hanging fruit in orienting more of what we do around group chats, both personally and professionally.

For example, some ideas off the dome:

If you’re writing an essay, can you bend your writing in a direction that will make people want to share it with their group chats? In my experience, people share things for few reasons: to make other people laugh, to signal they’re early to a new idea, to express their taste, to offer friends an opportunity to make money or get access to something, and finally to align with a point of view. In a fundamental way, every essay I’ve published that has done well did so because it was group chat friendly (and shareable) for one of those reasons.

If you’re selling software or other goods or services, could you offer deals that are relevant to the size of most chats i.e. 3-8 people? Most companies cater to an individual freemium user or a corporate group, but I know I’ve been in chats where we all want to test something out together. Help us out.

If you’re hosting an event, could you let people in who are one degree removed if a verified guest vouches for them (with some limits)? So instead of just a +1 this would let guests bring their people last minute. And as long as you’re curating the initial list well things wouldn’t bloat that much, and the people who do come wouldn’t be randoms either, they’d already be vibenomically aligned. Something to think about.

Ultimately, group chats have become a driving unit of power and coordination for humanity. They’re a new sort of social operating system that shapes how people spend their time, money, and energy. What that means for the world is an open question, but the group chat theory of everything is just the realization that group chats are everywhere. They’re implicated in everything. And there is a lot of opportunity up for grabs if you take them seriously.

5 people are typing ...