Prior to our yearlong dystopia of the “experts” warning us that grabbing a drink outdoors could kill grandma, attending private talks was a standard Thursday evening. Yet, some have clearly taken the anti-social browbeating of coronavirus Karens to heart, and no moral panic exemplifies the pathologizing of normal human behavior than that over Clubhouse.
Tim Carney outlines a bevy of the media’s hand-wringing over the invitation-only audio-chat social media platform, but to diagnose the anti-social insanity of tattletale journalism, let’s look at the latest from the biggest bully at the New York Times, Taylor Lorenz.
Lorenz, the paper of record’s resident fan of the Chinese Communist Party’s social media platform of choice, TikTok, claimed to use a burner account to get onto the app, an express violation of the New York Times’s editorial standards. After a half-year of waging war on Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm that won the chance to invest in Clubhouse, Lorenz was explicit on Twitter about subverting founder Marc Andreessen’s block of her from the program. After lying that Andreessen pejoratively used the “r-slur” during a Clubhouse conversation and finally being forced to correct the record (though not apologize to Andreessen), the product of Lorenz’s efforts is a stunning exercise in H.L. Mencken’s succinct definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
“Public figures as various as Elon Musk, Ai Weiwei, Lindsay Lohan and Roger Stone have joined it, and the unconstrained conversations it has enabled have incurred the wrath of China, which banned Clubhouse last week,” write Lorenz and fellow New York Times reporter Erin Griffith, claiming that the app is reckoning with “rising complaints about harassment, misinformation and privacy.”
“The growth has been accompanied by criticism that women and people of color are frequent targets of abuse and that discussions involving anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism and misogyny are on the rise,” Lorenz and Griffith write. Such complainers include Porsha Belle, a Clubhouse “influencer” who alleges that after whining about “misogyny,” her account was suspended after multiple reports from others against her. Another one is Rachelle Dooley, a deaf woman who complains that she has been “kicked out” of some rooms.
So, in other words, Clubhouse is like real life. For all of the incessant apoplexy from Lorenz and her ilk over harassment on Twitter, Clubhouse seems uniquely designed to ensure that nobody has to interact with anyone they don’t want to. As with real, pre-pandemic life, either you’re invited to the party or you’re not, and if you start acting like the police, you get the boot from everyone there for a good time. As long as we’re in pandemic purgatory, that seems like a necessity.
But to Lorenz and company, the fear isn’t that some unlucky few will take corona Karens seriously and continue to isolate themselves from all socialization other than the livid narcs of Twitter. It’s that someone, somewhere, will have “unconstrained conversations” without the fear of tattletales trying to cancel them for their unfettered thoughts.
My advice: If you’re more scared of the “unconstrained conversations” than the professional bullies who have nothing better to do than police speech, you need help. From a professional.
