What was everyone talking about? Sometime last spring, in the early weeks of the pandemic, people in and around the tech industry began to chatter about a new mobile app called Clubhouse—a “drop-in audio” social network that enabled the creation of voice-only chat rooms. The conversation about Clubhouse was incessant and vaguely annoying, yet somehow alluring. The app had an air of exclusivity. It was still in beta and available solely on iOS; only a few thousand people had accounts, and there was a waiting list. Some Silicon Valley figures with significant Twitter followings—venture capitalists, startup founders—signed up, and “went live,” then tweeted about the experience with an air of mystery and intrigue. The app’s name evoked semi-exclusive gathering places, such as airport lounges and golf-course restaurants, but also brought childhood to mind. The community guidelines prohibited recording and transcription, and so conversations were available in real time only, and ephemeral. Those with accounts could invite friends, but the number of invitations allowed per person was limited. Invitation codes began to appear on eBay.
By February of this year, Clubhouse had raised more than a hundred million dollars in venture capital. Despite its invitation-only membership model, it had acquired nearly ten million users. This was a small audience compared with Twitter or TikTok—they have about three hundred million and a billion users, respectively—but it was still significant. (The invitation codes on eBay were now up to four hundred dollars apiece.) Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg had made surprise appearances on the app. The Chinese government blocked it, after citizens of mainland China joined the service and spoke openly about their personal lives, censorship, and the Xinjiang internment camps. Like most social-media platforms, Clubhouse was demonstrating its dual potential: it could lend a voice to those who are rarely given the opportunity to speak freely, while also elevating some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people.
Upon opening Clubhouse, one is presented with a menu of “rooms,” or live conversations. Each room has a topic: “Women in Payments Power Hour,” or “If you were an(other) animal, what would you think of humans?,” or “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit: Rise of the Network State.” Tap one, and audio starts streaming. The screen fills with the avatars of those in attendance, each in its own small orb; speaking privileges are limited to moderators and selected participants, shown at the top of the screen. Attendees who wish to speak can tap a button to raise their virtual hands.
The app requests that people use their real names, and many do. Users who link the app to their Twitter accounts or address books are given lists of friends to follow; do this when you sign up, and the app notifies your contacts right then, encouraging them to welcome you to a private Clubhouse room. (For the new participant, this can be a bit like arriving at a surprise party where the only other attendees are an ex, a co-worker, and a distant friend.) On Clubhouse, anyone can create public or private rooms, and highly active users can start “clubs”—interest groups, essentially—of their own. Clubs are like ongoing conversation series, and the offerings vary: “Van Life and Tiny Homes” (eight thousand participants), “Therapy for Black Girls” (seventy thousand participants), “Quran Recitations” (twenty-three thousand members), “Olympic Weightlifting” (two hundred participants), “The Dacha” (a hundred thousand participants), and “Parent Confessions” (thirteen thousand participants). Wellness-oriented clubs abound: “Divine Feminine Awakening,” with a hundred and ten thousand participants, is a “safe space for us to reflect on, re-imagine, and redefine the awakening of feminine energy”; “Meditation Room,” with a hundred and five thousand participants, hosts a daily, scheduled meditation session. There are clubs dedicated to veganism, sustainability, finding love, Nigeria, U.K. club music, investing, basketball, psychedelics, outer space, neuroplasticity, dog-lovers, astrology, and Tesla. One category of club in particular—what Clubhouse labels “🔥Hustle”—has proved particularly generative.
On a recent afternoon, I sat down on the couch, placed my iPhone on the coffee table, opened Clubhouse, and let strangers’ voices fill my apartment. A room titled “💰Boss Babes Secrets to Make 7 Figures from Marketing Online” was moderated by twenty-six women and one man, who, when I dropped in, was holding the floor and speaking reverently about his mother. Women ruled the world, he reminded the audience of more than nine hundred people, and women needed to reclaim it. Several rooms were dedicated to the topic of non-fungible tokens, or N.F.T.s—digital assets that can be bought, sold, and tracked on the blockchain—and whether they were the future or a bust. Sixty-two people were in a room with the topic “How would you rob a bank?”; sixty-seven were in a room hosted by the “Rock Your Gift” club—“This club is a collection of Game-Changing Business Owners and Multi-Passionate Coaches, Speakers and Course Creators who are committed to building a unique STAND OUT business around their core gifts”—role-playing client calls; and thirty-two were listening to a talk titled “How to Spot a Liar ADVANCED (1 Hour Only).” Elsewhere, people discussed Cuba and U.S. relations under the Biden Administration, how diverse founders could drive change, mental health for influencers, marketing, the future of creators as entrepreneurs, the experience of being an Asian-American woman, and how to “use COVID as a WIN!” There was something pleasant about meandering from conversation to conversation, as if I had walked into my own home to find a conference in full swing. But I also wondered, Why did I let all of these people into my house?
Much like podcasts and radio, Clubhouse is synchronous media, best consumed while otherwise engaged. Unlike message boards, text-based social-media feeds, and video- and photo-heavy apps, it suits the multitasker life style. Over the next few weeks, whenever I tried to listen to conversations as an exclusive activity, I inevitably found myself in a horizontal position—lying prone on the couch, or the bed, or the floor, my phone resting a few inches away from my head. I preferred dropping into Clubhouse rooms while folding laundry, cleaning, and running errands; the conversations were more diffuse than radio, less focussed than a podcast, and practically served as white noise—a way to crowd my own voice out of my head. In one room, Representative Sara Jacobs, of California, answered questions about being a millennial congresswoman; in another, Katie Couric and Guy Raz chatted about current events and the paleo diet. In a room titled “🚨What do MODELS want? Advice from Celebrity Matchmakers,” models discussed their desire for romantic partners who could connect on a deeper level; the conversation vibrated on a similar frequency in a room titled “Are YOU worthy of a SIX+ 💰figure man!? 💳💸 Let’s talk 👀❤️🎯.” In a comedy workshop, people offered feedback on how to punch up a routine about living with a life-threatening chronic condition, and, in what felt like another universe entirely, the young son of a prominent and controversial art collector, using his father’s account, took questions from adults about N.F.T.s.
On any given evening, journalists could be found talking about journalism, angel investors could be found talking about angel investing, and an untold number of self-identified millionaires and coaches offered tips and guidance that evoked multilevel marketing schemes. A panel of prominent people fretted about campus politics. A Zen Buddhist monk performed meditative sound loops. One morning, over coffee, I tuned in to a conversation hosted by the “Entrepreneur Millionaire Secrets” club, in which people discussed whether it was preferable to have a million dollars or a million followers, and how long it would take to make a million dollars off a million followers.
There is a heavy tech presence on Clubhouse: Bitcoin enthusiasts, Elon Musk enthusiasts, startup founders interviewing investors, investors interviewing startup founders, venture capitalists talking about their books. When I signed up for an account, I declined to share my contacts with Clubhouse, for privacy reasons. Instead of telling me which of my friends were also on the app, the service offered a default list of people to follow: these included Jared Leto, Shaka Senghor, and Tiffany Haddish; Rohan Seth and Paul Davison, the co-founders of Clubhouse; and Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, venture capitalists whose firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is Clubhouse’s primary investor. Some Clubhouse users now have regularly scheduled talk shows, and popular ones among the Silicon Valley set include “One On One with A & Z,” hosted by Andreessen and Horowitz; and “The Good Time Show,” hosted by a director at Facebook and her husband, also a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
One night, while brushing my teeth, I listened to a different venture capitalist speak earnestly about the need for a more vulnerable conversation about tech. The venture capitalist suggested that the industry needed to normalize founders who cry; another speaker responded, vulnerably, that this sentiment was very powerful. Another day, I opened the app and saw that twelve hundred people were in a room co-hosted by Lindsay Lohan and Perez Hilton. Lohan, in her new identity as an investor, and with her unmistakable rasp, was talking about N.F.T.s. Later, I dropped into a Clubhouse on “FBI Negotiation Tactics”; somehow, even there, people were talking about how to invest in startups. It reminded me of the time, in my final semester of college, when I was invited to a dance party hosted by a secret society. For four years, I had walked past the society’s “tomb,” wondering about the activities of people who I assumed were more élite and enlightened than I was—who knew something about socializing that I never would. But it was just an undergraduate party: people I already knew, packed into a windowless room. What had I expected?
I dropped in, I dropped out; I dropped in again. Earlier this month, on CBS, Oprah Winfrey interviewed Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. On Clubhouse, several hundred people listened to the interview, which was being ported off an ad-hoc stream on Facebook, in a “watch party” room, hosted by a group of women with English accents—a sort of twenty-first-century, platform-mediated version of pirate radio. During commercial breaks, the hosts offered bland commentary and interpretation, then shushed one another as soon as the program resumed. There was something subversive and intimate about the listening party—it was like sneaking into the back row of a movie theatre, or listening to a band play from outside the venue. Most striking, though, was the quality of the interview. The two-hour special, conducted by one of the great contemporary television personalities, was the most engaging, well-paced, and structured conversation I had heard on Clubhouse.
Here would be the place to speak of the history of mass communication; to produce historical analogues for Clubhouse, such as call-in radio shows, the teen party lines of the nineteen-eighties, and the Agora; to cite Habermas or Gramsci and nod to Marshall McLuhan. I kept thinking of a minor section in Don DeLillo’s “White Noise,” from 1985, in which the narrator completes an A.T.M. transaction and experiences a sparkling moment of integration with the global financial apparatus: “The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies.”
This was basically how it felt to be on Clubhouse. With each new experience—a lullaby room, in which most avatars wore the same cartoon, baby-blue nightcap; a beatboxing and freestyle session between musical-theatre performers; a “dopamine reset” silent meditation, which was actually silent—I felt increasingly as if the app, whose creators have not articulated any particular theory of technology or media, belonged to a great, surging lineage.
In 1999, John Durham Peters, who is now a professor of English and film and media studies at Yale, published “Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication.” “In richer societies, much of our interaction is enabled by interpersonal media such as email and telephone,” he wrote—forums “in which the broadcast and the interactive are hard to tell apart.” In such a society, where the boundary between mass communication and in-person conversation is more porous, everyday talk can assume the tones and tics of media. “In private life, many of us talk like Beckett characters,” Peters wrote, while “in public discourse, celebrities present themselves as if they are our friends.” When we spoke, over the phone, he had not yet used Clubhouse. Still, he considered parallels to the use of CB radio among truckers in the nineteen-seventies, to the Sandinistas’ experimental shows in the eighties, and to French salons. He contemplated feminist scholarship on the synchronization of soap operas and domestic labor, and described the inside-out dynamic of advice columnists—the “structural inversion of the single voice crying out, and the advice columnist crying out to everyone all at once.”
“In the nineties, you were stigmatized if you were a lurker, but this legitimates the listener,” Peters said, of Clubhouse. “Listening is a democratic thing. It’s not passive. It’s one of the hardest things we do.” The concept also reminded him of shortwave radio. “Very early on, you had amateurs talking back and forth to each other, first in Morse code, then in voice,” he said. “You could presume intimacy because very few people had the receiving equipment. That’s sort of the same idea as Clubhouse. Not everybody has the receiving equipment. They don’t have access.”
Peters asked about the audio aesthetic of the app, and whether silence was discouraged, as on AM radio, or stylized, as on NPR; he riffed a bit on Raymond Williams’s concept of “flow,” the seamless sequence of television programming and advertising that holds viewers’ attention. The rhetoric of “rooms” was particularly intriguing, he said; the room had been a “fundamental horror in late-nineteenth-century thinking about communication—that we’re all ensconced in our rooms and can’t get out.” Probably, the nomenclature was meant to suggest rooms in the eponymous clubhouse, but it also evoked Erving Goffman’s description of private places as “soundproof regions where only members or invitees gather.”
After we hung up, I felt expansive, and weirdly joyful. Oh, yes, I thought—this is the feeling of a good conversation. Over the next few days, as I dipped in and out of Clubhouse, I harbored a renewed appreciation for the effort. Conversation did feel different with other people listening in; perhaps there could be something dignified and democratic about a group of strangers dedicated to the collective challenge of making a beautiful woman laugh. I thought, It will be fun, in a few years, to read the theorists go to town on audio apps. (“Its chief affordance is to dangle the promise of Davos pixie dust in an online platform,” Peters later wrote, over e-mail, after trying out the app. “It gives you the fantasy of hobnobbing with the movers and shakers.”) Still, it was hard to ignore the obvious. Talking about Clubhouse, for me, was more interesting than listening to it.
Social networks evolve over time. Their early days are often a little experimental, as everyone figures out how to maximize delight or utility; their later shifts might look like maturation (the minimization of Facebook’s “Poke” feature), monetization (YouTube’s Partner Program), a misfire (Twitter “Fleets”), or a total, unmitigated identity crisis (Tumblr’s ban on “adult content”). But Clubhouse seems to have emerged fully formed. It launched with a savvy, FOMO-based marketing strategy, and a band of prominent users who were eager to have another channel through which to feel heard. While there are people using the app in imaginative, social, and subversive ways, something about its over-all tone seems predetermined—a natural outgrowth of the “creator economy,” the performative intimacy of influencer culture, and the Silicon Valley hype cycle. (Some of the loudest hype men are those best positioned to profit from the hype.) It is hard to shake the feeling that everyone on Clubhouse is selling something: a company, a workshop, a show, a book, a brand.
Despite being a social network, Clubhouse has been framed by some as a reaction to social media, especially Twitter. Because the app’s community guidelines prohibit its users from recording or transcribing conversations without prior permission, many see it as a place where people can speak their minds, candidly and with some expectation of privacy. (As for how to define privacy on a platform with ten million users, reasonable minds can disagree.) Meanwhile, Clubhouse’s Snapchat-like ephemerality raises questions about content moderation—some users have already reported instances of flagrant racism, harassment, bullying, misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech—and the business model. An emphasis on impermanence seems like a turn away from the data collection and retention that have been essential to the online advertising on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. In its place, Clubhouse could eventually offer a subscription model, or charge for live events, or integrate a tipping function. It might add podcasts, following Spotify’s example. If Clubhouse sticks around, its success will be bound to the quality of its content, which is still very much in flux.
It has been suggested that Clubhouse has benefitted from the pandemic—a time of increased loneliness and diminished social activity. Whether or not that’s true, it has competitors: Twitter is launching Spaces, an audio-chat feature; Quilt is an audio-only app focussed on self-care; Spoon is a live audio-streaming app, offering a sort of private radio station; and Facebook is said to be developing its own group-audio product. If these services succeed, they may develop their own identities. Clubhouse itself is still changing, as new groups join and make it their own. The company has been proactive about inviting Black artists, executives, celebrities, and influencers to join the platform—“Black Bitcoin Billionaires” is the platform’s largest cryptocurrency club—and Black users have been credited with finding creative and expansive ways of using the app. (Earlier this year, CNBC published an article titled “How Black Users Are Saving Clubhouse from Becoming a Drab Hangout for Tech Bros,” and a segment on Marketplace asked, “Does Clubhouse owe its Black users for the platform’s success?”) Already, the app is large enough that there is no coherent or universal experience, no pervasive conversational logic, as one might find on Twitter; time zones, languages, interests, and networks shape any given perspective.
Over time, I found myself moving quickly from room to room on Clubhouse, restive and unsatisfied, as if at a party that hadn’t yet found its groove—staying home with a book would have been more nurturing, but maybe my friends would show up. For a while, I was content to eavesdrop. There were strangers telling stories, and discussing optimistic science fiction, and practicing second languages, and engaging in wild financial speculation. There were occasional flashes of revelation and inspiration. It seemed plausible that somewhere on the app people were falling in love, or at least meeting future business partners. It was nice to stumble across friends’ avatars in rooms where I was also a listener—like spotting a familiar face at a lecture, or the bar—and exciting to see the names of people I admired from afar, their avatars flickering with the potential for a serendipitous encounter, a shared stage. Yet I was always dropping in, swinging by. In so many rooms, I couldn’t remember what had drawn me inside; I knew only that I was just passing through, and wouldn’t stay for long.
