In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, two technicians started a new social network built around an increasingly rejected feature of people’s iPhones: really talking about it. The app, called Clubhouse, was initially a niche. No posts, no photos, no videos. As if to underline how little time you need to look at it, the home screen is an endless white on beige scroll of conference calls, called “rooms”, filled with people you may not know organized around topics like police brutality, music, sex or whatever was on people’s minds. Users can be moderators, hosting their own conversations and controlling who speaks. A digital audience can listen or ask to participate if they have something to say. The action all happened on your headphones.
The app, started by Paul Davison, a businessman who had already sold a company to Pinterest, and Rohan Seth, a former Google engineer, was a way to get people talking and exchanging ideas spontaneously, without filters or the need to to wear clothes. , they later wrote. At first, it was open to just a few thousand users – although they were the right users, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and others who controlled the flow of money and influence. And, true to their name, they prioritized a crowd demanding invitations (they said this was not to grow too fast). Then the big money came in. Venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz pumped $ 12 million weeks after launch. In its ninth month of existence, it was worth $ 1 billion.
Now, with more than two million users and the app at the precipice of the mainstream, the Clubhouse has become a hot spot in the broader cultural wars over censorship, online harassment and the far-reaching powers of Big Tech. Its growth is undeniable thanks to numbers as disparate as Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk and Trump’s consigliere Roger Stone – not to mention ordinary people who want to talk after almost a year of isolation. Now, tech giants like Facebook and Twitter are actively copying the Clubhouse and distributing new speech resources to their billions of users, giving a preview of what the future of online life will be like.
Many of the rooms are geared towards business, investment, entrepreneurship and, of course, bitcoin. But they vary. There are many dedicated to black issues, discussions about music and art, LGBTQ + rights and politics. A group of black signatories organized a musical around the rooms. And while the number of users is being tightly controlled by the company, it may not be long before someone can join. Existing users can invite friends, and invitations cost as much as $ 97 per pop on Ebay.
Not everything is Kumbaya. There have been many troll behaviors and accusations of harassment, racism and sexism. Each room has a moderator, and users can report others for abuse, chats take place in real time and tend to fall into horrible territory. Black women in technology said the atmosphere of the rich white man is excluding. Anti-Semitism has been a problem, with a CEO disconnecting the app after listening to a room “this is literally just a lot of people talking about why it’s okay to hate Jews. “ A woman complained that she was targeted by men after talking about misogyny in a room, she said The New York Times.
Clubhouse harassment did not happen in a vacuum – and in some cases it was amplified on other social networks until it got out of hand. New York Times technology reporter Taylor Lorenz faced a flurry of Twitter and Substack trolls for her coverage of the app and what people say in it, which in one case included a tweet with an error she later corrected. Spontaneity seems to have limits on the internet, where everything is recorded.
Clearly, however, it is catching on. Some users report spending four to five hours a day at Clubhouse Rooms it can sometimes feel like TED Talks or morning radio shows, without the filter or hesitation that can come from hosts who have corporate sponsors to please. And it can lead to unexpected collaborations, like after former Boogie Down Productions DJ D-Nice and comedian Tom Green made unpredictable plans to collaborate on new music, as they did this morning. Like much of what happens at the Clubhouse, it can be great or terrible. People will probably hear it anyway.