You’re absolutely right that private conversations among political actors have always existed. Backchannels, closed-door meetings, coordination outside the public eye—none of that is new.
What’s changed isn’t that private communication exists.
What’s changed is the infrastructure of governance itself is being privatized.
You’re absolutely right that private conversations among political actors have always existed. Backchannels, closed-door meetings, coordination outside the public eye—none of that is new.
What’s changed isn’t that private communication exists.
What’s changed is the infrastructure of governance itself is being privatized.
Signal chats aren’t just digital versions of closed-door meetings. They’re part of a systemic retreat from public accountability into deliberately unaccountable, encrypted coordination networks—where strategic decisions that shape the public square are formed with the intention of being undetectable and undebatable.
In the past, private meetings still fed into public processes—hearings, party platforms, press conferences, negotiated legislation. Now, Signal chats often aim to replace those processes entirely, substituting manufactured memetic consensus for democratic deliberation.
This is not just secrecy. It’s a theory of politics:
Let the elites coordinate in private, then flood the zone with “organic” opinion in public.
It collapses the boundary between influence and manipulation.
And when the people doing it also control the infrastructure (platforms, media, funding, narrative injection points), it becomes a new mode of sovereignty—technocratic, unaccountable, upstream from consent.
So yes, politicians have always had side conversations.
But they weren’t replacing the public square with vanishing messages and meme drops coordinated by billionaires who openly disdain democracy.
That’s the shift.
That’s the danger.
And that’s why I’m calling it Dark Matter. Not because it’s secret—but because its gravitational pull reshapes everything, even if you can’t see it.
You’re absolutely right that private conversations among political actors have always existed. Backchannels, closed-door meetings, coordination outside the public eye—none of that is new.
What’s changed isn’t that private communication exists.
What’s changed is the infrastructure of governance itself is being privatized.
Signal chats aren’t just digital versions of closed-door meetings. They’re part of a systemic retreat from public accountability into deliberately unaccountable, encrypted coordination networks—where strategic decisions that shape the public square are formed with the intention of being undetectable and undebatable.
In the past, private meetings still fed into public processes—hearings, party platforms, press conferences, negotiated legislation. Now, Signal chats often aim to replace those processes entirely, substituting manufactured memetic consensus for democratic deliberation.
This is not just secrecy. It’s a theory of politics:
Let the elites coordinate in private, then flood the zone with “organic” opinion in public.
It collapses the boundary between influence and manipulation.
And when the people doing it also control the infrastructure (platforms, media, funding, narrative injection points), it becomes a new mode of sovereignty—technocratic, unaccountable, upstream from consent.
So yes, politicians have always had side conversations.
But they weren’t replacing the public square with vanishing messages and meme drops coordinated by billionaires who openly disdain democracy.
That’s the shift.
That’s the danger.
And that’s why I’m calling it Dark Matter. Not because it’s secret—but because its gravitational pull reshapes everything, even if you can’t see it.
Cheers Mike! Thats brilliant. I really appreciate your time to explain it to me.