What You’ll Learn from a Week on Clubhouse
That you’ll be welcomed by a hodgepodge of users who’ve accidentally clicked on the Free To Welcome Your Friend? pop-up that happens every time a new person in their contact list successfully registers for Clubhouse — leading to a confused chorus of background noise, hellos, and people disappearing from the room quite suddenly.
That you will find yourself slightly disturbed for a few days thanks to the algorithm suggesting rooms like ‘Mandarin Learners Club’, “Why did Daft Punk Split??? Discuss’, and ‘Too Broke for Therapy: Kids Can Be So Stupid’, based on its AI assessment of your personality.
That the shy boy from your primary two class is now, like, mega-opinionated and holds weekly roundtable discussions on various current affairs. That you’ll be impressed, but not for long.
That Zendaya is never online at the same time as you.
That you’ll feel, very briefly, like you’ve finally found your people, when you stumble into a room where kids all over the world enthuse about the latest chapter of the manga you all read.
That you’ll be surprised at how disappointed you are when it rapidly devolves into mud-slinging between fans; that the disappointment is mainly self-directed, for once again you’ve invested trust in confident, faceless voices on the Internet, a rookie mistake.
That the fact that everyone uses real names, as opposed to usernames, creates a false sense of security, fast.
That, after hopping from ‘Crypto Strategy 101’ to ‘How Dungeons And Dragons Changed My Life!!’ to ‘All Your Questions about the Covid Vaccine Answered’ to ‘Women Of Color In STEM’, you’ll know a lot of buzzwords about everything but have concrete knowledge of nothing.
That, despite this, you are having fun.
That, if you’re honest, you’ve missed the gaffes, the mistakes, and the awkward laughter of coffeehouse conversations, all of which gets edited out of the professionally polished podcasts you listened to throughout the pandemic-induced isolation. That you can literally hear the blush in a person’s voice. That the first time it happens in a Clubhouse room, it is so human, so vulnerable, so present, that your heart will fizzle, expand, and lift.
That there are lullaby nightclubs for the lonely, and that they are surprisingly intimate, like being on the phone with someone across the world. That the best rest you’ll have that week is when an older woman from Seattle croons a whole room to sleep. You didn’t expect to nod off, and so when you wake in the morning, your phone battery is flat, but it’s worth it. It’s not like you’re going anywhere.
That, on the other hand, during your waking hours, everything has a kind of a low-commitment intensity. Even the silent rooms, even the meditation groups, even the quiet co-working clubs guided only by the constant 24/7 broadcast of white noise. Initially, you tune in to a room that promises to replicate the background bustle of a cafe while you work, thinking it’ll make for an interesting experience, but for some reason, it ends up stressing you out. You can drop out anytime without anyone realizing, and you do.
That you hadn’t realized shark tanks were quite so brutal in reality. You’d assumed the hot takes and shutdowns on television were all in the name of entertainment, but it turns out people don’t need much encouragement to be cruel to the hopeful.
That you derive a perverse satisfaction from quitting rooms whenever certain types come on. The kind of pleasure, you imagine, that’s akin to hanging up on a particularly persistent mansplainer.
That the fact that you can see who’s online at any one time, what rooms they’re in, and what they’re doing - listening, moderating, hosting, speaking - makes Clubhouse feel like a grown-up version of Club Penguin, the massive multiplayer online game of your childhood, where players could proselytise or boogie with other cartoon penguin-avatars in a year-long winter wonderland.
That this also makes Clubhouse a little bit like being on MSN back in the early 2000s, when you could send a message to someone by not sending them a message at all.
That consequently, between ‘Girlboss CEO Hustler’s Club’ and ‘Celebs Spill the Tea Southeast Asian Edition’, you will pick the former, purely because your girl crush is online. You wonder if she notices. You don’t learn anything from the girlbosses of the world. Except that they all wake at 4am and do yoga before the day begins. Still? you think. That sounds like pre-pandemic behaviour.
That everyone has their life more together than you do. I mean, you’d suspected so. But getting confirmation of it still stings, a little.
That this app, like the rest, won’t change your life. Won’t make you a better person. That you’ll hope, anyway.
And that the best parts of Clubhouse are the parts that you’d have had even without it. Your friend drunk-pings you from across the world, out of the blue, pulling you into a private room. LET’S START A PODCAST, he screams, and you both agree that it’s a good idea, the best idea ever, because when you’re together, you have fun - the good, wholesome kind of fun, born of mutual affection and familiarity and just generally thinking the world of each other. And the both of you, inebriated by now, cannot imagine why anyone else would not want to be a part of that, why anyone else might fail to be as charmed by the other as you are, why anyone else might not be quite as enamored by the idea of tuning in to you both chattering away for an hour a week, despite the fact that you have absolutely nothing of interest to say to the rest of the world, nothing at all.
