Taylor Lorenz was among Clubhouse’s earliest adopters. As far back as April 2020, when the invite-only, audio-only, real-time social media app launched, the New York Times tech reporter got hooked, hard, spending three hours a day listening in on meetings between other Clubhousers (who talk in “rooms”, with “moderators” — imagine it as a live panel podcast, with an audience who can chip in). Since then, the company’s valuation has bloomed, from a paltry $100 million back in May 2020, to an almighty $1 billion now — unicorn status.
So it’s perhaps fitting that it was Lorenz who finally got to christen the ship last Saturday, by inducting the world of Clubhouse into the world of drive-by cancellation attempts. “[Marc Andressen] just used the r-slur on Clubhouse,” Lorenz wrote, safely back on Twitter. “And not one other person in the room said anything”.
Unfortunately for her, “the r-slur”, was disputed by everyone else in the room. Lorenz has since locked her own Twitter account. Clubhouse has had its first assassination attempt. It will have to wait a bit longer for a confirmed kill.
It’s poignant, because Clubhouse often feels as though it has been designed as a sophisticated response to just that kind of cancel culture; but, like many a social media redesign before it, it has mostly just exposed a paradox: an inevitable tension between what we want and what’s good for us. We all know the problem. More and more, those with something to say wouldn’t be caught dead saying it on social media. The professional blowhards have won; increasingly, the very best Twitter accounts are anonymous.
Would-be Zuckerbergs are hardly blind to this phenomenon. In purely commercial terms, ugly, fractious environments are lousy for business. Everyone would like to create the next Instagram. Filtered pictures of clean-eating Zoomers in yoga pants equals a place to advertise $1,000 handbags. No one wants to create the next reddit. Incels looking to hive-mind some new social Darwinism equals a space to advertise brain pills and male sex toys.
Clubhouse, then, seeks to address the main issues of the last decade’s social technology. For starters, it responds to what Twitter does badly: allowing aggression, of the “you’d never actually say that to someone’s face” variety, and tames it, by forcing you to actually say that to someone’s… voice, at least. The rooms are moderated, and at this stage moderators hold the power of life and death: not only can they boot you out, they are entitled to delete your entire profile.
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