Max Reid
speaker
29 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Max Reid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, I mean, I have to say, you know, as a journalist and as somebody who writes about the future, making predictions, it felt extremely vindicating to go from a kind of trend piece about how me and a bunch of my friends seem to be turning to group chats to revelations that national security operations at the absolute highest and most top secret level were also being conducted on group chats.
I mean, not to the best of my knowledge, but there's a couple group chats where I don't know every single phone number in there. And like maybe Michael Waltz is somehow infiltrated and is just waiting to drop some emoji. It gets sucked in.
Well, you know, I'm a father and I would say most of my group chats these days are with other parents of similarly aged kids to coordinate play dates or to do the thing where, you know, it's 3 p.m. on a Sunday and you're going absolutely insane. And so you just have to throw a flag up and really hope that some other parent will meet you at the playground.
I mean, a group chat that's almost exclusively about the movie Hunt for Red October, though also sometimes about submarines and fighter jets if they appear in the news. Does it have a clever name? It's called Ramius's Boys after Captain Marco Ramius, who is Sean Connery's character in Hunt for Red October.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm also in a group chat dedicated to analyzing and reading Ross Douthat columns, the New York Times columnist.
It's called Douthat Chat Natalists Only. I want to be clear that's an ironic name. I'm not a political natalist or anything, though I have to admit this is one of two Ross Douthat group chats I'm even aware of. There's another one called The Falcon's Children, which is named after Ross's fantasy series. It sounds like I have a really disordered relationship to Ross Douthat.
I want to be clear, this is very common for millennials to have group chats about Ross Douthat.
I hope not.
I'm also in a group chat with three former co-workers called The Executive Team, where we just pretend to be hustle-minded entrepreneurs and send each other motivational memes and quotes. And I find this group a little upsetting because I know the other three members of this group are in a group called the Giggle Kids that I'm not allowed to be in.
So, you know, this is an example of the kind of social friction that group chats can create.
I think every group chat has an equal number of group chats. That is everybody in the group chat except for one person.
It's a good question. So for most of, I would say, the history of the kind of social internet that we all grew up on, starting with Facebook and before it, MySpace, most of the social networks and a lot of what you would do socially online was organized around the term of art as a social graph. It was organized around networks of connections that you made in real life.
And you maintained a profile where you also had all those other connections. And you would post things online.
say to a feed a la Twitter or Facebook or Instagram that would usually reach all of those people equally which meant you know early on I think that was sort of fun and new and strange to be you know posting photographs that your co-workers and your family and your close friends and your old college friends might all see but
Over the years, it also became clear that this came with some unpredictable externalities, let's say, that there was a lot of things that you might say to coworkers or to friends or to your family that you wouldn't want to say to one of those other groups.
And we began to sort of experience a phenomenon that the academic Dana Boyd called context collapse, where the different contexts where you might interact with a bunch of different people
are eliminated and all of a sudden you find yourself uh in hot water say for putting something on facebook that was really meant for your friends the kind of thing you would say like if you're out you know on a night on the town with your friends and then your aunt and your uncle and your grandparents and your parents all see it and you realize that actually maybe this was not this was not something that you wanted them to see
This sort of slow motion realization of the reality of context collapse is happening at the same time that Facebook and a bunch of other big tech companies are doing a lot of, I guess I would call it soul searching about their role in the 2016 election, in Brexit, in the general kind of populist backlash of the mid 2010s. So you have what was kind of termed at the time the tech lash.
You know, and there was a lot of writing and criticism. You know, all the tech CEOs had to go up in front of Congress and defend themselves. Senator, we run ads. I see. Everybody was really down on Facebook, Facebook in particular, but in general on all of these companies.
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