Clubhouse is Awesome

Why is Clubhouse so awesome? Because you’re not there. And by “you”, I mean me, the normies and the riffraff, and most importantly, the journalists.

I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member. –Groucho Marx

Here’s a former attorney who’s made it her mission to invite as many journalists as possible to Clubhouse. For “accountability”.

It reminds me of 15 years ago, when some Facebook exec said, “Hey, TheFacebook is fun and awesome, but you know what would make it even better? If we invited all our Moms to sign up!”

Clubhouse is an invitation-only voice app where Silicon Valley people talk about tech trends, and journalists are mad because they aren’t in charge of the conversation.

Why is there so much animosity between journalists and VCs? Because both groups fancy themselves the arbiters of new trends.

VCs talk about picking successful startups like it’s a passive exercise, but the biggest determinant of success is a lead investor from Sand Hill Road. It’s not just the money, it’s the network. Anyone can make a social iPhone app, but only an a16z portfolio company can seed the app with Marc Andreessen and Felicia Horowitz.

Here’s NYTimes tech reporter Taylor Lorenz:

VCs dismiss this comment as self-important hogwash, but Lorenz is not completely wrong. Except that journalists don’t identify emerging trends, they create them.

Everyone in MSM knows that endless bleating is a sure way to shape public opinion: “Mostly peaceful protests! White supremacist armed insurrection! Clubhouse is full of Nazis!” They want to get more journalists on the Clubhouse app to amplify their own opinions.

Would we have had all those BLM protests if NYT hadn’t spent a whole year pounding the 1619 Project into our brains? (Speaking of which, has the NYT been charged with inciting a riot?) I mean, we were all a little stir-crazy from the lockdowns, but maybe we could have protested something more productive, like Universal Healthcare.

It’s the new Eternal September. An internet community does not die when the college freshmen show up, but when the Karens do.

Aside: This investor offered to donate $1000 to St. Jude for every VC that boycotts Forbes’ Midas List, but it looks like he got zero takers?

One thought on “Clubhouse is Awesome”

  1. You could say that the “mostly peaceful” protests of the summer of 2020 were ignited by the death of George Floyd and you would be correct. But a singular set of circumstances led to the conflagration. May 25 was the first warm, sunny day in a cold, rainy, unpleasant spring in Minneapolis. This, and a response to the insane lock downs, put thousands out on the streets. The arrest of Floyd took place on a street corner in a neighborhood with a significant black population and black businesses among many witnesses. The technique used to subdue Floyd was obviously cruel and shocking to the bystanders, many of whom made videos of the event distributed them over social media.

    It’s highly likely that if it had been raining that day or uncomfortably cold the response to the Floyd event would never have happened. A general feeling of disquiet wouldn’t have filled the neighborhood without having been locked down for weeks. A similar arrest of anyone else wouldn’t have created a national crisis. If the suspect would have been white, Mexican or Native American we wouldn’t know his name to this day.

    The fact is that the Minneapolis Police Department, like many other urban departments, has a long history of brutality and lawlessness. It was a specific set of circumstances that led to this particular incident.

    Reply

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