I experienced an odd juxtaposition late last month. I started reading Shelby Steele’s White Guilt, and I used the hip new audio-only social media app Clubhouse for the first time.
Steele writes about going to hear Dick Gregory in 1967. The young Steele was totally captivated by Gregory’s hip, Marxist black power rhetoric. But years later Steele came to view as harmful what he saw as the exploitation of white guilt over slavery and segregation.
The first “room” I went into in Clubhouse had at least 100 listeners in it, mostly African-American. The speaker was a soft-spoken but supremely self-confident black woman, who resembled an updated version of Dick Gregory. Her theme was that after the Civil War, Reconstruction failed to transform the former Confederacy, and that after the election and the Capitol riot we must not make the same mistake again. I assume that the audience found her captivating, while I found her quite frightening. She showed no recognition of anyone’s humanity. Instead her world view seems to be that it is imperative for the Woke to stifle the un-Woke. Probably if she could have her way, everyone who is to the right of Ibram X. Kendi on race would be treated as a domestic terrorist.
I remember when Medium was the hip new platform a few years ago. I saw it degenerate into an echo chamber for narrow-minded, self-righteous young progressives. I get the sense that Clubhouse is starting out even more left-dominant than Medium or Twitter.
The timing for launching Clubhouse is perfect. With the pandemic, people need something to do. And young people are particularly restless and in need of social interaction. A lot of profile photos show generous cleavage.
The question for Zoom or Clubhouse is what happens to demand once the pandemic is behind us. In six months, even though there will be more people receptive to video conferencing than there were before the pandemic, a lot of folks will be happy if they never look at heads in squares again. Clubhouse will have less time to establish its value before we are back to meeting in person. It may have difficulty expanding beyond its current user base.
Fear makes conversation impossible. It’s conversation, or chorus. Either one can benefit from active or passive selective filters applied to one’s interlocutors to ensure one’s own safety, or rapid Medium-like degeneration is inevitable. So, short Clubhouse.
Instead of conversations, you get lectures, sermons, harangues, hectoring or, at best, the verbal equivalent of hollow and bland boilerplate disclaimers. Hence the joke that “We need to have a conversation” translates into English as ” ‘Shut Up!’ she explained.”
A while back, people found out about “The Pence Rule”, where he never lets himself be alone with a woman not his wife, and of course, the left mocked him for it as if there was no possible argument to made in favor of it.
Then #MeToo happened, and it was discovered that many other men in leadership positions had their own variation of the rule, and would never meet privately with one woman. Women complained that because these days things in many organizations depend on private, off-the-record, face-to-face conversations between the minimum number of insiders, this rule put them at an unfair professional disability. And they are totally correct about that.
However, when a single complaint is all it takes to ruin an entire career – even an entire life – and without presumption of innocence and due process, there are unfortunately no other chess moves left but to shift burdens onto other people, which is a way we get trapped into situations that nobody likes but also that nobody is able or willing to change.
More abstractly and generally, this is what has happened to the possibility of “conversations” too. Without freedom from fear of unjust consequences of association, there is no freedom of association. Without freedom from fear of unjust consequences of speech, there is no freedom of speech, and the space of possible conversations collapses.
+1
Glenn Greenwald relates the omnipresent threat of lies by the oppressor class infiltrators being used to destroy the opposition. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale-and-censorship
And you pretty much have to assume that FBI agents are participating and attempting to goad the political opposition into making some kind of statement that can be misconstrued and prosecuted.
On the market demand side, I find podcasts and videos to take too my time away from books. There must be others attempting to limit their time spent on media consumption and cutting back on those seems easy. When spring finally rolls around and the ice is gone, it will be much easier to forego media altogether.
Moldbug recently coined the word ‘delatocracy‘ to describe the Soviet-like or Cultural Revolution-like state of affairs in which the de-facto primary coercive pressure in people’s lives – what is effectively the true sovereign – is the Social Failure Mode in which there is runaway accusation hysteria, malicious tattle-tales and snitches and informants and mosers are everywhere and rule the roost, and everyone is trying to denounce everyone else as fervently and aggressively as possible, terrified of not being seen as sufficiently enthusiastic, eager to reap the rewards of fame and glory for being recognized as having started a particular species of fad of extirpating heresy and rooting out blasphemers.
Both Arnold and you are describing expressions of fear to frame this discussion, one that is only defined as vaguely about white guilt by black speakers with a particular confident and charismatic style. We know almost nothing else about what the arguments were. The point of the post is about that tone, its application on discussions of race, and the resulting fear and harmfulness of it, and little else.
It is the view of those who disagree that this fear, and the weight of its indulgence, is the very root of the race problem.
Perhaps, but the fear is reasonable. Many people have lost their livelihoods from cancellation in a visible manner. Visible dangers cause fear in sane people. Eventually fear festers into resentment, then hatred. How could we change the dynamic to make it less toxic?
Fear is reasonable if it makes you safer. Fear is unreasonable if it makes you more vulnerable. Which do you think this is?
I think this is the normal kind of fear that makes people want to avoid dangers. In this particular case, that probably looks a lot like wanting to avoid black people. If you’re looking for a solution to racism, this isn’t it.
“A lot of profile photos show generous cleavage.”
By chance does anyone have a spare invite available? Oh wait, upon further review, it’s an audio only app. I’m ok for now.
On a serious note, any plans for Arnold to review “White Guilt”? I downloaded it shortly after watching “What Killed Michael Brown,” which I highly recommend.
I think Clubhouse is more heterogeneous than you are giving it credit for. I’m not on there so can only relate secondhand impressions, but apparently there are a lot of conversations there that involve techies who disagree with the establishment left organizing to challenge establishment left spokespeople and talking points. Mike Solana (@micsolana on Twitter, piratewires.com) is a good pro-Clubhouse, anti-establishment-left person to follow for news of this sort of thing.
Exposure to different arguments and points of view is good. But heterogeneity in conversations is a double-edged sword.
It increases the likelihood that people will inadvertently say things that lead to claims of offense.
There are no universal rules posted on what will or will not cause people to claim they are offended, so it’s hard to avoid offending different people until you’ve gotten a change to get to know them first. But to get to know someone, the natural process is one of light, free, and easy exchange.
Without something like a ‘grace period’, however, there is no possibility of a free and easy exchange if one is terrified of stepping on a hidden land mine and watching someone claim they were offended resulting in severe and personal negative consequences.
This is a major social problem that things like classically-liberal social norms helped to address. Without those norms – which now have a ‘conservation status’ at least as bad as the “critically endangered” level – to deal with this problem you would need something like strong pseudonymity to insulate one’s real life from such personal consequences, or at the very least something like reliable non-attribution policies such as with the Chatham House Rule or de-personalized “summaries of discussion / conclusions” coming out of top-level government meetings.
I’m not claiming this is an easy problem, quite the contrary, it is an *extremely hard* one. But I don’t see how Clubhouse even gets close to trying to deal with it. Which means it is going to quickly suffer the same fate as all the other attempts to not solve the problem.
“The question for Zoom or Clubhouse is what happens to demand once the pandemic is behind us.”
It amazes me that, even as we near the one year anniversary of “15 days to flatten the curve”, people still continue to speak about “the pandemic” in these kinds of terms.
Do you seriously believe that we are actually ever going to reach a point where the pandemic is “behind us”? What do you imagine that would look like, exactly?
What are the conditions that would have to be met before the pandemic could safely be declared “over” and we can all go “back to meeting in person”? Zero new deaths? Zero new cases? 100% vaccine coverage?
And what about “new strains”? What do we do if the virus “mutates”? What if immunity diminishes over time? Can we really afford to risk going back to “normal” when we still have these great threats looming over us?
If people continue to be of the mindset that things like “meeting in person” are still too dangerous, then I just cannot imagine a scenario under which this should ever stop being the case. I simply cannot conceive of any even quasi-consistent risk-assessment framework under which one could determine that the threat posed by COVID justifies taking all of these precautionary measures without also determining that the threat posed by influenza each year justifies taking all of the same precautions as well.
I have two words for you: Tampa Bay.
Thank you for the link. It warms my heart greatly to see that there are still people out there who aren’t afraid to behave like human beings.
In case it wasn’t clear from my original comment, my point is NOT that I think the virus will continue being a uniquely serious threat indefinitely and therefore we will never be able to safely put it behind us; my point is that the virus has never actually been a uniquely serious threat at all and that interacting with other people (even in large crowds of people with their naked faces exposed like the ones depicted in your linked video) is no more dangerous to your health today than it was in 2019, and so anyone who is still waiting for something to change that makes the world “safe” once more, or for someone to give them permission to start behaving like an actual human being again is going to be waiting for a lot longer than they realize.
“for someone to give them permission to start behaving like an actual human being again is going to be waiting for a lot longer than they realize.”
Permission is going to be far more difficult than private action. I think this year certainly proved that riotous crowds can do what they want! But can businesses open? Schools? If they are open, what impositions are they open under (masks forever!, attendance limits, closures every time someone two steps removed gets a positive PCR, etc).
Many regular people already ignore what they can and hopefully the summer will bring even more, but the gatekeepers may never release their power.
“but the gatekeepers may never release their power.”
Exactly, and those who fail to recognize this do so at their own peril.
I feel like it has been so blindingly obvious from the moment we allowed this delusional war against an “invisible enemy” to proceed that there was no way this mess would ever be neatly resolved, but I continue to be amazed by how unwilling most people I encounter seem to be to acknowledge this.
It is quite unsettling at this point to hear people say things like “when this is all over” or “once we’re back to normal”, as though it’s just inevitable that eventually this problem will be decisively solved, this chapter will be wrapped up and put behind us, and then we’ll just hop back on the same path we were following prior to COVID and continue chugging on through history. It’s as though most people are under the impression that this is just kind of like the world’s longest snow day, and all we need to do is wait for them to finish plowing all the streets and shoveling all the sidewalks and then we’ll be able to go back about our business as usual.
People need to accept that the old world is long gone and that “the pandemic” is not just some detour we’re currently taking that will eventually lead us back to the main road of “normalcy” we were following prior to March of 2020, but rather a complete and total divergence that leads to an entirely different destination. Life as you knew it before COVID is never going to just be returned to you free of charge, no matter how long you wait or how obediently you follow the rules. If there are any aspects of the old world that you’re not comfortable saying goodbye to forever then you’re going to have to take them back for yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you.
I do not think I will be waiting much past June. In fact, I expect to fly to see the grandkids before then.
There are certainly people who would like to keep things from going back to normal for a long time, maybe not ever. But at some point, a tipping point will be reached when people think, “So many people have been vaccinated and the spread is so down and the deaths are so down, and I’m so sick of this that I’m not going to accept these restrictions.” Kind of like when WW II was over and people wanted to get rid of the rationing and price controls and all the other restrictions they’d been accepting for three and a half years.
If President Joe tries to keep things going at that point, he and his party will suffer in the next election.
I don’t know about Clubhouse, but I think Zoom is here to stay, at least as a replacement for much (not all, obviously) out-of-town business travel. Post-pandemic usage may drop as people return to the office, but usage will be much higher than pre-pandemic. Obviously, Zoom is much cheaper both in dollars and time than flying to meet someone in-person in another town. The gap in experience between Zoom and in-person meetings is much smaller than the pre-pandemic gap between audio-only phone calls and in-person meetings. Some business trips, of course, will still make economic sense. But, it’s going to be hard to justify the cost of many of them. That also means that the total number of inter-city meetings (Zoom + in-person) will be much higher than pre-pandemic (mostly in-person only). In turn, that will also enable many people (though not necessarily a majority) to work and live in different cities, which some have already started to do during pandemic.
I also think Zoom will replace most scheduled audio-only phone calls and conference calls. Our company defaults to Zoom when scheduling calls now, using audio-only phone only with technophobes that have trouble signing into Zoom calls. (Yes, there are a few out there.) Phone is reserved for spur-of-the-moment calls, just because it’s still somewhat inconvenient to send someone a Zoom link in real-time.
Think of Zoom as a competitor to audio-only phone rather than to in-person meetings to understand its post-pandemic utility. Zoom is far superior to phone, so it should capture much of Zoom-phone market share. In addition, it’s so much better than phone that it should also expand Zoom-phone market size at the expense of in-person market size.
Even though I have not used Clubhouse, from what I have heard, I imagine the comparison is not necessarily Clubhouse vs. in-person meetings. Rather, the question is, “How would you like to interact with people in other cities? Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or Clubhouse?” All of those alternatives captured some audience share before the pandemic.