I have tried to provide an alternative take on ClubHouse, but it seems that people are hyper-polarized when it comes to the application. Which is strange as it has provided me with the most authentic experiences I've ever had on the internet.
> Which brings me to the role of ClubHouse as a generator of profound experiences. Some nights ago, an ex-TLA (Three Letter Agency) officer walked into the room, sparking a conversation about strategic elicitation (brought up by me) and empathy for difficult people (brought up by him). Our conversation was interrupted by an admittedly troubled person angry about the “plandemic,” spoiling for a fight. In text, we would have ignored him – he had been banned from most social media platforms. Or, given in and argued with him, but it was clear that he was deeply upset. And so we talked.
> He was a struggling musician. Who had lost his living when the pandemic hit and the symphonies shut down. The world was a harsh place for him. He was also one of the few people in the world who had mastered a very particular instrument brought into prominence by Beethoven. And so we begged him to play. To share his gift with us. He obliged by playing a beautifully complex piece of music that demonstrated his mastery over the instrument. We thanked him. Said our goodbyes, and went to sleep.
> A charged situation was transmuted into the magical.
Yes, it's flawed, but I'm glad that it exists.
There's a unique energy in the air, when it comes to ClubHouse. There's something magical about it. I'm worried that it too will get lost to entropy and the casual cruelty of crowds. (it's harder to be cruel when people know each other)
This reads like a meme/copypasta about clubhouse, and thats why many people don't like the idea and are hyperpolarized. A subset of people like tedtalks and using words like "exegesis", and the rest of people, well, don't.
People aren't hyper-polarized about Clubhouse, they're polarized by the hype surrounding the product/service, partly cultivated by the people behind and on Clubhouse. Honestly, this sort of messianic blather only serves to make it sound even more pretentious and elitist. It's a solid audio platform, sure. What does it do that private chat groups- Slack, Discord, even Houseparty, doesn't do? Imagine if Yahoo Groups had offered voice chat. Or Facebook Groups- actually, Menlo Park is already building such a thing already.
You could have run all of the symposiums and Chautauquas you wanted through these preexisting platforms. But Clubhouse, like NFTs, openly flaunts its exclusivity. It advertises private conversations to the world to boost demand. Creating artificial scarcity to overvalue itself.
And your anecdote? I don't doubt it happened, even if it sounds dubious. How did a struggling musician even get onto this platform? And if he did, then what does it say about the exclusivity it promises? Plenty of services were invite only at the onset, from Gmail to Spotify. Will Clubhouse remain that way indefinitely? Or will eternal September come for you, too? At best, perhaps it will become another MasterClass, with hyped experts in their field hawking their wisdom in different rooms for pay (this, too, must monetize). This magic you describe, it is as fleeting as in any platform. The only way to preserve it is to embrace privacy and anonymity. Private Slack servers, private Discord servers. Telegram and Signal conversations. A platform that brags about exclusivity yet does not embrace anonymity is just begging for the masses to drop by.
It may not even have been that you would have ignored him if via text, but that they may not have been as engaged or been able to read your genuine concern or attention - reading your response in whatever projected tone he believed someone/everyone would treat him.
These tools can be used or wielded either as weapons or for healing-learning. I think we're just beginning to organize to understand after the clusterfuck of the experience of Facebook and the current mainstream status quo "social media." Likewise decoupling someone's reach by providing video services - whether live or recorded - and not being dependant on mainstream media to determine who's messages get out, and how long they can be, along with rehumanizing it, faces and voice being more engaging than simply test, is what we needed; where an individual like Joe Rogan acts a curator to expose interesting guests to share their story for 2-4 hours - essentially creating/expanding nodes of leadership - whether entertaining, educational, or role modelling.
I think whatever experience people have on Clubhouse will fully depend on the context, the curators, and so ultimately how Clubhouse or such platforms are governed; along with how access to the information is managed, if all the most popular people start putting their content behind walled gardens then that's arguably a problem - or then we allow privacy if anyone is trying to extract too much, whatever is considered unreasonable.
My feeling of Clubhouse was that it to some extent managed to recreate the kind of ad-hoc interactions that one experiences in real life at a university campus or in coffee-houses in intellectual cities. This was especially needed during the lockdown and with the switch towards remote-work.
This is a bit shameless, but here's an excerpt from my exegesis - https://areoform.wordpress.com/2021/04/18/on-clubhouse/,
> Which brings me to the role of ClubHouse as a generator of profound experiences. Some nights ago, an ex-TLA (Three Letter Agency) officer walked into the room, sparking a conversation about strategic elicitation (brought up by me) and empathy for difficult people (brought up by him). Our conversation was interrupted by an admittedly troubled person angry about the “plandemic,” spoiling for a fight. In text, we would have ignored him – he had been banned from most social media platforms. Or, given in and argued with him, but it was clear that he was deeply upset. And so we talked.
> He was a struggling musician. Who had lost his living when the pandemic hit and the symphonies shut down. The world was a harsh place for him. He was also one of the few people in the world who had mastered a very particular instrument brought into prominence by Beethoven. And so we begged him to play. To share his gift with us. He obliged by playing a beautifully complex piece of music that demonstrated his mastery over the instrument. We thanked him. Said our goodbyes, and went to sleep.
> A charged situation was transmuted into the magical.
Yes, it's flawed, but I'm glad that it exists.
There's a unique energy in the air, when it comes to ClubHouse. There's something magical about it. I'm worried that it too will get lost to entropy and the casual cruelty of crowds. (it's harder to be cruel when people know each other)