FORGET ZOOM, IT’S ALL ABOUT CLUBHOUSE NOW
BUT THE CATCH IS YOU HAVE TO BE INVITED TO JOIN THIS ELITE AUDIO-ONLY APP
TO JOIN THE APP, YOU NEED TO KNOW SOMEONE ALREADY IN, WHO CAN SEND YOU AN INVITATION. EXISTING USERS ARE GIVEN ONLY TWO INVITATIONS TO DOLE OUT AND ARE RECOMMENDED TO DO SO JUDICIOUSLY. — CHRIS STOKEL-WALKER
Shorn of their ability to socialize at Silicon Valley’s exclusive bars by the pandemic, the tech set have taken to an elite digital meeting space. The problem? The word is out now.
you’ve probably heard of clubhouse. Originally ordained as a place for Silicon Valley’s one-percenters to meet and greet, it’s now Tech’s hottest ticket.
Launched in March 2020, clubhouse is an app anyone can download from the Apple App Store — which rules out the 72 per cent of people worldwide who don’t own an iphone or ipad — but few people are able to access it.
Think of it as talk radio for tech bros, an audio-only app that harnesses your social network.
Not content with shutting out anyone unable to fork out for the latest Apple device, clubhouse has also implemented an invite-only system for new users.
To join the app, you need to know someone already in, who can send you an invitation. Existing users are given only two invitations to dole out and are recommended to do so judiciously.
We’ve become fascinated with it because it’s a corner of the internet many of us can’t get access to. As the Groucho Marx witticism goes: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.”
clubhouse has attracted some of the biggest names in hollywood and business.
As well as Tesla founder Elon Musk talking about controlling monkeys through wires to their brains and making them able to play video games, clubhouse users can encounter the likes of actors Jared Leto and Ashton Kutcher chatting about life on the big screen.
One person who hasn’t joined is Kanye West, though thousands of gullible users recently sat through someone playing a 2019 interview with the rapper, thinking it was a live conversation.
The exclusivity of it all has driven people wild.
More than 5.3 million have downloaded the app worldwide, according to analysts App Annie. The company says two million people use it every week.
“It scratches the itches of loneliness during COVID and the silence we’re all going through,” says Adriana Freitas, partner at venture capital company Muster Ventures, who is a dedicated clubhouse user, spending up to eight hours a day on it.
“I like the ability to listen to different voices. The fact that it’s a smaller, invitation-only social network makes it easier to interact.”
As you’d expect with any kind of exclusivity, a parallel economy of invitation buying, selling and bartering has already appeared, with chinese equivalents of ebay offering the ability to purchase an invite.
Any chinese buyers who have forked out will be ruing their decision, as the app was banned in the country on Feb. 8 after app users held discussions about chinese-taiwan relations and the genocide of Uighur Muslims.
On ebay, invites are available for US$125.
Once you’re in, you’re asked about your interests and invited to scan your contacts to see which of your friends are already in the club. Then you can dip in and out of “rooms,” which is basically like wandering through the world’s most exclusive conference.
“I use it like a radio,” says Freitas.
In most rooms, you’re placed on mute and encouraged to listen and can raise your hand to ask a question if the session moderators want.
Journalists have noted that users are too willing to allow hate speech, racism and sexism among participants and too quick to tamp down dissenting voices.
clubhouse’s coterie of Silicon Valley executives has launched hate campaigns against critical female technology journalists such as The New york Times’s Taylor Lorenz, while other reporters have complained of being banned from listening in rooms featuring clubhouse’s biggest investor, Marc Andreessen.
It all goes against the founding principle of the app, as expressed by its creators in a blog post: “Our north star was to create something where you could close the app at the end of the session feeling better than you did when you opened it, because you had deepened friendships, met new people and learned.”
While getting an invitation is difficult enough, getting the right to speak can be tough, too. Although you may be close to some of the biggest names in technology and celebrity, the conversation is almost resolutely oneway.
room hosts call on speakers at will, meaning most people remain silenced. you can queue up to take the digital microphone at some events, but it’s a little like waiting hours for the most disappointing ride in the theme park.
handily, there’s a solution: One concierge service monitors your spot in the digital queue, telling you when your time to speak arrives.
“We have seen our clients wasting hours waiting for a turn to speak for 30 seconds,” said rune Sovndahl, the owner of the company offering the concierge service.
“We want to help people save time. really it’s no different than hiring a cleaner to tidy your home, so you can focus on the more important things happening in your life.”
clubhouse’s rocket-fuelled popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed. Twitter has rolled out Twitter Spaces, which seems to be eerily similar to clubhouse’s rooms, while Facebook is rumoured to be developing its own version.
The app has spent the past year building its reputation as an exclusive bolthole for the elite, which is why its expansion plans have made people scratch their heads.
As well as developing an Android version for nonapple phones, the creators have said they want to “build clubhouse for everyone” — opening up the floodgates.
Whether the moneyed elite stick around when ordinary people storm the gates and grab the microphone is yet to be seen.
EVEN BUILDING OWNERS AND MANAGERS DON’T OFTEN KNOW VERY MUCH ABOUT THE VENTILATION IN THEIR BUILDINGS. THE PERSON WHO KNOWS IS THE PERSON WHO INSTALLED IT, AND THEY ARE USUALLY LONG GONE. — LINSEY MARR
With its five wall-length windows, Nick crandall’s restaurant, railroad Pub & Pizza, can bring in a lot of outside air. But in late december, Washington state regulators said the restaurant could not qualify as “outdoor” dining, and would have to close because of heightened coronavirus restrictions.
So crandall went to Facebook to protest, giving a video tour of his Burlington, Wash., pub and its vast, garage-door-style windows. “I’m just kind of curious what the science is for outdoor dining, how much airflow you need to do,” he said. he took aim at the state’s democratic governor, Jay Inslee, suggesting he use “common sense.” The video was viewed more than 73,000 times.
It may sound like yet another politicized, Trumpera battle over coronavirus restrictions — yet this one ended in something that looks less like polarization and more like compromise. After crandall and others complained and took to the media, state regulators introduced a new policy, which appears to be one of the first of its kind in the U.S., allowing certain restaurants to count as “open air” dining even if they have four walls.
In a new pandemic trend, these establishments can open up large windows or doors and actively measure levels of carbon dioxide, the gas we all exhale when breathing, as a key indicator of how much fresh air is circulating.
Now crandall’s restaurant is open again — with a co2 monitor whose reading he tries to keep under 450 parts per million, only slightly higher than levels in the outside air, per state policy. Thanks to the human burning of fossil fuels, outdoor levels currently average around 415 parts per million, and are steadily rising.
It’s part of a new wave as scientists, citizens and businesses including gyms, restaurants and bars try to quantify the airborne coronavirus risk in hopes of staying open. Sales of handheld carbon dioxide monitors have boomed, so much that one popular model, the US$250 Aranet4, sold out rapidly, requiring its Latvia-based manufacturer, SAF Tehnika, to dramatically ramp up production.
The trend is also catching on quickly with a number of coronavirus activists — or citizen scientists — who tweet out their readings in different locations and use the hashtag #covidco2. In Australia, a group of “co2guerillas” has been documenting measurements in grocery stores, doctor’s offices and businesses, often displaying very high levels of carbon dioxide. In Japan, the use of monitors is also catching on, including on a massive screen recently at a concert venue.
The impetus for measuring carbon dioxide is simple: An increasingly powerful body of evidence suggests the coronavirus is airborne, capable of travelling distances well beyond two metres in tiny aerosols released when infected people talk, shout, sing or just breathe. But there’s currently no sensor that can monitor, in real time, whether these infectious aerosols are floating around us when we’re indoors.
But carbon dioxide can act as a proxy. People exhale it when they breathe, and the gas builds up in indoor spaces that aren’t well ventilated, reaching concentrations far above the baseline level of outside air.
“It gives you some insight into ventilation, which is really hard to figure out otherwise,” says Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech. “Even building owners and managers don’t often know very much about the ventilation in their buildings. The person who knows is the person who installed it, and they are usually long gone.” Marr is a medical adviser to crossfit gyms — installing indoor monitors is now part of their coronavirus guidelines, at her urging.
Longtime experts on indoor air say the heightened attention to ventilation is very valuable, and that carbon dioxide measurements can definitely be useful. yet amid the grassroots frenzy to find the next gadget that can confer a safety edge during the pandemic, some worry about misunderstandings.
“It is a piece of information, not a smoking gun,” said indoor air expert Jeffrey Siegel of the University of Toronto. “If you have a long period of measurement in a space with a sensor that you know how to interpret, then it means something different than if you bring a sensor inside and read a few minutes of data.”
When scientists want to measure carbon dioxide to a very high level of accuracy, they use sophisticated lab equipment. It can cost thousands of dollars. That is not what citizen activists are generally using during the pandemic.
rather, a variety of handheld or mountable sensors, costing around US$100 and up, have become popular. Experts recommend devices that use a technology called non-dispersive infrared sensing (Ndir), a technique based on the same basic physical principles that drive the so-called greenhouse effect. Whether in the atmosphere or a small chamber within your sensor, carbon dioxide absorbs a type of radiation with a wavelength longer than that of visible light, often dubbed infrared or heat radiation.
At the scale of the Earth, greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide not only absorb this type of radiation but also reemit it, keeping some of the heat within the planet’s system, rather than letting it escape to space. Within the far smaller sensor, infrared gets beamed from one side of a chamber to the other, and carbon dioxide concentrations are calculated based on how much radiation arrives at the other end without being absorbed by the gas.
In theory, at least, such measurements can give a good sense of how many humans have been exhaling into a space, and how much their breath is lingering.
“The reason co2 measurements are important is that they can give an indication of how much air you are breathing that is coming out of other people’s respiratory systems,” says richard corsi, an indoor air quality expert at Portland State University who has been taking co2 measurements for years with many different instruments.
A critical figure, corsi says, is the “rebreathe fraction,” which refers to the percentage of air you breathe in that others in the same indoor space recently breathed out.
For instance, he has calculated that when the indoor concentration of carbon dioxide reaches 800 parts per million, then each time you breathe in, one per cent of the air you inhale has come from the exhalations of others. during a pandemic, that’s an alarming thought.
But carbon dioxide concentrations of 1,000, 2,000, or even 4,000 ppm can be found in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, where people simply aren’t aware how much of the gas has built up.
“Many teachers are reporting, they say they have 2,000, 5,000, and then curves of it going up in classes,” said Jose-luis Jimenez, an aerosol science expert at the University of colorado at Boulder who has promoted the use of the sensors and has been involved in testing a number of them for accuracy.
It is very good news that the pandemic has raised our consciousness about the quality of air within buildings, a subject that has been neglected for decades, say longtime experts such as corsi and the University of Toronto’s Siegel. And in their field, carbon dioxide has long been used as a proxy for how well ventilated a space is by outside air.
But at the same time, these scientists worry that co2 measurements can be misinterpreted or even, in some cases, give a false sense of security.
Siegel warns, for instance, that hand-held devices can require calibration, can sometimes be confounded by other greenhouse gases (such as water vapour), and can drift in their measurements as time passes. That doesn’t make measurements useless, he said — but it does mean that you have to have some experience with your instrument, and should be measuring consistently over time.
“The more engagement with indoor air, the better everything is,” he said. “But the problem is, good indoor air or bad indoor air is not defined by a spot measurement of co2 with a low-cost sensor, without appropriate interpretation.”
corsi, meanwhile, cautions that even if very low or very high co2 concentrations may appear easy to interpret, many readings will fall into more of a grey area, somewhere between around 700 to 1,000 parts per million.
Are you safe in such a space? The answer is, it depends. For instance, corsi notes, a space with 25 people in it and a co2 measurement of 700 parts per million is far better ventilated than one with three people in it and the same measurement.
Moreover, he adds, if a room has a portable HEPA air filter, or a good hvac system with similarly strong filters (properly installed), then your risk will be lower even though carbon dioxide levels may seem a tad high. carbon dioxide, a tiny molecule, passes right through these filters, even though the larger aerosols containing viruses can be caught by them.
“I think a single-point measurement of co2 can tell you something in the extremes, but when you get into this middle, typical area, there’s a lot of nuance,” corsi said.
Ideally, he thinks, there should be an app that would help people interpret co2 levels by inputting other information, such as the number of people in a space and how much time they plan on spending there.