Last weekend I went out. I know—crazy. It was one of the first times in a year that I’ve done that. The gathering consisted of about 15 people and was held outdoors at a friend’s house. We all took COVID tests beforehand and, yes, practiced social distancing. But the most unusual part of the evening was not being surrounded by other human beings. There was a point, about two hours in, when I looked around and noticed the most peculiar thing I’ve seen in more than a year. Everyone—and I mean everyone—was talking to someone else or in a small group. They were all engaged, eyes connected, laughing, enthralled, interested. And no one—no one—was on their phone. They weren’t on Twitter talking about what they were doing. They weren’t scrolling on Instagram or texting. And they certainly weren’t on the hot new app Clubhouse—a pseudo-exclusive, invite-only platform for holding real-time conversations in virtual “rooms” that boasts users like Elon Musk, Tiffany Haddish, and Meek Mill, and that has skyrocketed in popularity since the onset of the pandemic last year.
Some people liken Clubhouse to an audio-only form of social media, others to an audio-only virtual conference or an audio-only virtual concert (the common denominator being the “audio-only” aspect). Some ways I’ve heard it described to me: “It’s the future of podcasting!” “It’s the next iteration of radio!” “It’s like a giant house party!” And my personal favorite, said to me by one entrepreneur with emphatic excitement: “It’s like a giant conference call!” Whatever it is, everyone seems to be talking about it (no place more than on Clubhouse itself, but we’ll get to that later). In truth, Clubhouse is all of the above. The rooms happening at any given time run the gamut of topic, language, and dialect. Just now I opened the app on a whim, and the first three English-speaking rooms that popped up on my feed were: “Robots vs. Humans?”; “Find Your Soul Purpose Workshop”; and “Fighting Disinformation on Clubhouse.” (There is always a Clubhouse room about something related to Clubhouse.) There were rooms in Italian, Russian, and Siamese. Some rooms were only a few minutes old, others had been going for hours. At any moment there are seemingly countless rooms happening, and countless people listening.
The app was essentially born popular. Back in May, not too long after it launched, it was valued at $100 million with only about 1,500 users (each user being valued at around $66,666). By January 2021, the company was worth $1 billion and had raised a $100 million round. There’s so much fervor around the start-up that Facebook is reportedly building a copycat version (what else is new), and Twitter announced the launch of its own competing version of Clubhouse this week, called Spaces. And yet, describing what Clubhouse is, justifying its infantile yet vertiginous valuation, and deducing why everyone wants to imitate it might be easier than determining whether Clubhouse is actually the Next Big Thing, or—as some people, myself included, believe—if it’s only taking off because of the global pandemic.
It’s rare that a new technology emerges from nothing. We wanted to fly because we saw birds do it. Our voices were extended and our ears made more powerful by the megaphone, which was extended further still by the telephone, which was then bottled up with the invention of the phonograph, and so on. The same extensions have taken place on the internet, where email was an iteration of handwritten letters that once arrived in our mailboxes. Fast-forward 30 years, and we’re texting, tweeting, WhatsApping, and Whatnotting, each a form of communication that hearkens back to its predecessor. Now it’s audio’s turn to go through the same incubation process. For the past few years, podcasts were the hot new medium (a better version of radio!), and now Clubhouse and its audio copycats are trying to one-up that experience too.
While I admire Clubhouse as a clever iteration on audio communication, and while I can understand the excitement (yay!) in certain circles (tech!), I find it to be an incredibly boring platform. Most Clubhouse rooms are moderated by people who love to hear themselves speak, but shouldn’t be speaking in front of a live audience. Others lack substance, as though you’ve dialed in to the wrong conference call number at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. And much of Clubhouse consists of people talking about Clubhouse; in the same way that early Twitter was mostly people talking about Twitter, Clubhouse is an anamnesis of the social media days of yore, when people went to Twitter to discuss what gumption you could fit into 140 characters. Then there are the tech founders and investors—the Marc Andreessens of the world—who host nightly shows where they stroke their own egos before thousands of listeners, tempting me to follow in Vincent van Gogh’s footsteps, but with a sharper knife. (Andreessen, who has skin as thick as microfiber, routinely blocks people he doesn’t like on Clubhouse.)
This isn’t to say there aren’t incredible aspects of the platform; the hoopla isn’t for naught. I’ve heard of people listening to groups of musicians as they jam together while stuck in different locations. I’ve heard of fascinating debates about the future of Bitcoin, or art dealers explaining the pros and cons of NFTs, or alien experts (yes, they’re a thing) discussing whether extraterrestrials are real and living among us. I’ve listened to a wonderful live reading of The Lion King by a group of Black actors and producers. There are comedy shows and other esoteric rooms that, while novelties, are actually quite fun. Who wouldn’t want to spend some time in the “Moan Room,” where people take turns moaning aloud? And then there are the book clubs, and the clubs to practice speaking other languages.
But if you’ve noticed a pattern with this list, it’s that much of what Clubhouse replaces are things we did in real life before the pandemic began. Which, to me, is the crux of the problem. We’ve been cooped up at home for a year now. Concerts have been canceled; conferences shuttered. You can’t go to a poetry reading at your local bookstore or listen to musicians riff on their instruments across from one another at a small venue. When people can finally go outside again—something that is starting to happen already—the last thing they’ll want to do is stare at the same phone they’ve been forced to cozy up to for the past year. I truly believe we’ll see a Cambrian explosion of activities involving human interaction; we’re going to want to get on airplanes and go to theaters and conferences and concerts with as many people as can be squeezed inside. The last thing we’ll want to do is sit in a corner by ourselves staring at our phones as we listen to a couple of tech investors talk about how wonderful Clubhouse is—on Clubhouse.
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