ClubhouseTea #002: How To Get Away With Chaotic Subversion
This week's masterclass in subversion includes gaslighting, harassment, gamification, gentrification, false prophets, and a lot of money thru CashApp.
We rebranded as ClubhouseTea going fwd! Updates + Insights below!
Cultural snapshot weeklies and Clubhouse Town Hall coverage will now be on separate issues (our mainline coverage is on what happens weekly; our halfway issues will detail Clubhouse Town Halls with patch notes and Q+A, if applicable)
We are adding another primary writer onto ClubhouseTea! Please welcome Lauren Huttner (@Lauren_Huttner on twtr)! She is our new co-head!
E-Books are making a real impact as Clubhouse’s #1 product export this year!
Another year of the pandemic is slotted in; so is this year of Clubhouse.
“Live tweeting Clubhouse conversations is the new Sunday Brunch.”
- Anh Vu, user on Clubhouse
Throughout this week, we’ve seen a lot of Clubhouse chatter spill into different social media networks like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Thoughts get lost in translation and every social media network seems to echo out the same psychological game of Telephone when it comes to the ephemeral conversations hosted in audio social, due to the lack of in-app messaging.
On a positive note, the user experience on Clubhouse is brimming with interactive event programming as always like the #AntigoneCH production and The Wild’s Maya Angelou Reads Saweetie’s “Best Friend” performance. People are creating social rooms for more intimate conversations and to find their tribe on Clubhouse, in which these interactions could possibly be translated onto real-life instances and friendships once this pandemic is over.
The prospects of dating events and other related dating programming on Clubhouse continues to be popular as well, with inclusion of experiences as outlined with the “Dating Hijabi Trading Stories” room or the “From Clubhouse to babas house (halal matches w/ salams)” room hosted by the Muslim and Friends club.
Not that this phenomenon is uncommon, but we are seeing that the app is making further progression into the social fabric of culture and it feels almost schadenfreude. It’s all too familiar for us to immerse in the hot goss that we missed during the pandemic.
Tensions Arising: Diversity ≠ Inclusion, Social Valuation via Thought Leadership
There has been several tensions brewing within the platform as the app has experienced exponential growth with new users, more so in regards to inclusion and equity as well as the subversion of social valuation metrics clashing against the beliefs of having quality thought leadership. In a room earlier this week titled “why do men always come in and take over rooms?", an insight was echoed on the speaker stage of emphasizing that diversity hasn’t always meant inclusion in these spaces we occupy. Content creators are asking for equity as people on this platform like Meezy who created a room in his “Meezy-O Estates Club” titled “Culture Currency” in which celebrities, influencers, and executives discussed the importance of distributing governance via crypto as well as how people like Meezy could get a chance to invest in developing platforms like Clubhouse.
It also remains a resonant theme that there is a conflict on the subversion of social valuation metrics (i.e. following vs. followers) via engagement solicited in thought leadership, even if the thought leadership borders on sensationalizing too-good-to-be-true schemes. Monetization continues to be an amplifier in stressing this tension, as people still question what to prioritize.
Cultural Snapshot - Week Two (Primary Happenings)
Let’s start the dialogue very simply: it was a mess this week.
Here’s what we found:
How New Users Gamify Clubhouse Invite Chains
Our biggest story tonight is that new users are gamifying Clubhouse invite chains! Clubhouse invite chains along with follow chains are growing in popularity on Facebook, consisting of traffic being routed to Facebook Groups: one for invitations specific to Clubhouse and the other specific for networking and growth hacking followers. There are over a dozen groups promoting invites, some with nearly 3,000 members.
A group on Facebook “ClubHouse Invite Chain Party” describes itself as a place to “Keep the invite chain going!!!!!” After being accepted to the private group, we learned that most of the posts are people selling invites for $25-30. Commenting is not allowed in the group. As Clubhouse comes under fire for scam rooms, it is clear that this energy occurs tangential to the platform, too. These “invite chain groups” are private marketplaces equally as harmful as those in public.
With the Clubhouse internal chains, there are groups that are designated with Clubhouse invites and growth hacking in mind and there are Clubhouse invite chain threads that are started internally in a topic-based discussion Facebook group to onboard the majority of membership onto Clubhouse.
Chakabars, Harassment, and Clubhouse Bullying
Chakabars is no stranger to controversy as he landed himself in a Clubhouse room with several Black medical professionals, questioning the efficiency and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccination. He would try to discredit the advice given by the medical professionals and instead push an aggressive herbalist/holistic medicine agenda consisting of mixing blackseed oil and lemon and then rubbing the mixture on their chest. The efficacy of this holistic medicine routine was quickly debunked by medical professionals as false information related to COVID-19 therapeutic treatment. This transgression towards his credibility along with the suspension of his social channels due to similar incidents decrying COVID-19 vaccination quickly blew up the latent hostility in the room.
In front of 4,000+ people, he branded the Black medical professionals on stage as agents of white supremacy and urging any supporters of his to harass these medical professionals. Several celebrities like Tiffany Haddish, Jason Lee, and The Game voiced support for Chakabars and aided him in coordinated harassment and doxxing of public information such as name and social handles along with hashtags used such as #CHBullying and #bringbackchakabars. The escalation in social harassment even instigated one medical professional to commit a suicide attempt on her own life. As of now, Chakabars, Jason Lee, The Game, and Tiffany Haddish amongst others have not been banned or suspended from the platform.
“Future of SF” Panel
On Thursday evening, a room called “The Future of SF” was started by Mike Solana and Michelle Tandler, intended as an informal conversation about the future of San Francisco. It involved several people that work in Silicon Valley that were discussing about a future of a city they feel generally unsafe in and discussed crime in SF, divulging on certain magnitudes of crime including quality of life crimes. There was some drama in the room as well as some civic discourse between current DA of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, fielding questions about SF’s perceived problems of crime in the vicinity.
Unfortunately, the conversation was dominantly white with no marginalized voices to challenge the current viewpoint held by the speakers, in regards to working class people who are being priced out of their own locale. This lack of inclusion in the chat spurred several other chats including one titled “Future of SF” Really Means “Make SF More White” in response to some of the contrarian views; a hallmark conversation that emphasized the contrarian opinion of elites within whiteness in contrast to the more marginalized voices in the SF tech scene as well as those native to the city.
Kan and I AM WOW
Justin Kan recently signed a deal with CashApp to give away money on Clubhouse. Through the club I AM WOW $ (International Association of Members Who Win Only Money), Kan hosts a trivia game show open to any Clubhouse member. On stage, contestants are asked to name random items under certain topics. Josh Harris, an 18 year old VC scout and Clubhouse user, pitched the idea to Kan and co-hosts the room.
“The idea started in a room giving away random items,” Harris said. “I think Justin just texted Cashapps CEO when we got like 1k.”
Noah Lichtenstein, Alex Fox, Andrew Lee and Aaron Batalion are also leaders involved in the initiative. The club will be hosting giveaways sponsored by CashApp in the coming weeks.
Cultural Snapshot - Week Two (Ancillary Happenings)
Felicia Horowitz - Virtual Dinner Party (Ft. Mayors Gary Suarez [MIA], London Breed [SF], and Steve Adler [Austin]) -
Several mayors from SF, Austin, and Miami were invited to Felicia Horowitz’s latest rendition of the Virtual Dinner Party. According to Gary Suarez, Miami is building up to be risk taking and an avenue with big chances and opportunities; potentially the next crypto hub. SF’s London Breed discussed the huge migration out of the Bay Area due to COVID-19 and both mayors from SF and Austin discussed taking actions to better cities and infrastructure and jobs even with the pandemic at hand.
There was a huge Bali expats Twitter controversy with Clubhouse user Kristen Gray that spiraled into a live-chat room on Clubhouse. The Clubhouse room was intended on selling an e-book teaching expats how to skirt past local Indonesian laws and living in Bali during a pandemic.
TL;DR: They went to Bali and overstayed their visa by six months and decided to live there illegally due to COVID-19, and wrote an e-book about heightened QoL in Bali and admitted to not paying Indonesian taxes. Clubhouse conversation hinged on active denial for people of marginalized Black identity, believing they were not capable of exhibiting neocolonialist behavior and hence gentrification in Bali. Several Black Indigneous native speakers were gaslighted in the conversation and postured as contrarians, since they were going against the grain of the room’s opinion and mentioning that Westerners are capable of being harmful towards native inhabitants of the land. Honestly felt like this.
People started several rooms throughout this week live prank calling on Clubhouse (it got intense)
That should be all. Tune in every Sunday for more coverage!
I’m on this bird app, Twitter, so tweet at me: @choi_clint. You can also find me on clubhouse: @clint. Lauren Huttner is @lauren_huttner on Twitter and @lauren.hutt on Clubhouse.
Please share this with your friends! The hot goss is worth sharing with friends, so let them know that yes, Clubhouse is our beat. If there’s anything you think should be covered as a Clubhouse trendy/cultural topic for a given week, feel free to let me know!