Clubhouse, Politics, and Demagogues

March, 2021

Blumenthal's Law: Every clubhouse room will, within 30 minutes, devolve to a discussion on race relations, regardless of the starting conversation. 

Clubhouse is such a wildly interesting social network. If I understand it's functionality correctly, you basically go online and just talk into the void, in an empty room, and people who follow you and who happen to be online at the right time are notified whenever you are doing this and can come listen to you speak. Except, obviously that's not quite right. Because that would never work. Clubhouse is actually structured around public rooms. People get on 'stage' and talk, and when someone from the audience has something they want to share they can jump in too. Now you have a mechanism for pulling in more people — as long as there are interesting people having a public conversation somewhere, there is room for the average Clubhouse user to go online and speak. I think the underlying motivation behind Clubhouse is actually really similar to a startup idea I had tossing around in my head for a while. Interesting people's conversations are interesting. Podcasts have taken off in a big way, both in terms of creation and following, for precisely this reason. Why not create a platform that was just a means for people to quickly create podcasts on the fly with each other? But my mindset was much more as a creative tool; I never imagined the possibility of a social network. Silly me. 

So Clubhouse aims to provide a meeting of the minds, where interesting people can build followings through their public interactions with other interesting people. What could possibly go wrong? Well, a few things. 

The core mechanism by which Clubhouse is supposed to be useful is fundamentally flawed. Interesting people aren't going to be on Clubhouse talking to other interesting people, because if they were actually interesting they would be going out in the world and doing interesting things instead of sitting around on Clubhouse. Interesting conversations happen in real life because they are organic, and often serve an external purpose — namely, helping interesting people do interesting things. In Clubhouse, this occurs entirely artificially in a vacuum. The easiest way to get followers on Clubhouse is to be interesting outside of Clubhouse first. And, of course, there just isn't a great reason for interesting people to then speak on Clubhouse. The only thing Clubhouse offers over a phone call is that it's public. Which, in turn, means that the only reason to prefer Clubhouse over a phone call is if you want to have a public reaction. 

This motivation changes the nature of the types of conversations that can happen in Clubhouse. Knowledge of publicity means everyone acts differently. Interesting people on Clubhouse will not have the same kinds of interesting conversations as they would behind closed doors. The motivations are wrong — they aren't on Clubhouse to actually progress interesting tasks or problems, rather they are there to craft a certain kind of brand. Clubhouse ends up becoming a means of projecting or marking one's own social cachet (not unlike Twitter). But brand crafting doesn't lead to interesting conversations, it leads to outward displays of conforming non-conformity. You know, being just off-brand enough in ways that are totally safe and expected for someone who is 'cool'. In other words, a circle jerk.

There is another kind of person who benefits from the publicity of Clubhouse: people who are not interesting, but who have an axe to grind. These people have a message that they want to get out, and want to use Clubhouse as a platform for doing so. But you can't project a message without a platform, and Clubhouse doesn't inherently give you a platform unless you are interesting enough offline to warrant one online. What's an axe grinder to do? Find a room full of interesting people, with a captive audience there to listen to those interesting people, and then start swinging. 

And this is why Blumenthal's law is fundamentally true. Every conversation in Clubhouse is going to turn into a political one, because political people are loud, they have an axe to grind, and they are not necessarily interesting enough to have their own platforms; and interesting people have no choice but to passively agree because they are on Clubhouse explicitly to build a positive brand.

But why race relations? 

The language of a public square is going to reflect the makeup of the audience. Clubhouse is a Silicon Valley startup that is composed of people who, at minimum, must have an Apple device and an invite. This is an incredibly elite socioeconomic filter. The people on Clubhouse are already in the top 1%, they share nearly everything from reading preferences to food tastes to travel destinations to, of course, political leanings. And, of course, the political lean of the average (uninteresting) highly affluent Silicon Valley-ite is far left. Not communist left, though, because that would be threatening to the position of being an elite — as a rule of thumb, people don't choose political views that run the risk of meaningfully hurting them. Rather, you get a flavor of identity politics left, because race and gender are the only meaningful differences left between the people in this hyper-elite group. 

Clubhouse is inherently a mechanism for generating echo chambers — much more literally than previously defined in fact, because the average Clubhouse room (chamber) will have twenty-odd people literally echoing the same sentiments to each other without getting anywhere interesting. And if there's anything we've learned in the last four to eight years, it's that echo chambers are prime ground for polarization and demagoguery. That is the last thing this country, and the world needs. 

So personally, I'm against Clubhouse. I don't plan on using it unless I have to. 

(There is a caveat, which is Clubhouse is ostensibly useful for presentations and Q&A panels and performances and the like. But these are not organic discussions, so it's not clear that Clubhouse is meaningfully better than streaming a panel on Youtube or Hangouts or anything else)