We’ve mentioned Clubhouse before and attention must be paid: it proved to be a game-changer – big time – the likes of which we haven’t seen in a while. Clubhouse has taken social media into a different direction. While Twitter and even Facebook have been something of town squares, CH is not that: it’s the corner pub or sort of unconference  or coffee klatch, where people can wander in and out of ‘rooms,’ at will, and participate, or simply listen and learn.

Although, CH members, take note: Clubhouse Users’ Raw Audio May Be Exposed to Chinese Partner.

So, what’s next? Well, the Twitter and Facebook knock offs, of course. Considering that both platforms are losing users and revenue (Twitter reports $1.14B net loss for 2020 – and that was before CH hit the zeitgeist in a significant way, and Facebook has been hemorrhaging users in its most valuable markets for some time now, what to speak of the face that Apple Privacy Change May Cost Facebook, Google $25 Billion Over Next 12 Months), they still believe that they will forever hold sway as the Masters of the Universe, so why innovate when you can appropriate?

As we’ve said before, there does come a point where tech – and users – and even tech hubs – move on. We may well be witnessing the waning days of parts of the tech cabal. It won’t happen suddenly, but remember Yahoo!? The industry laughed when upstart Google came along. And what the hell was a google, anyway? A competing search engine??? Yahoo! ruled, baby – game over.

Until someone moves the cheese.

Tech has a long history of pushing the envelope, and the world has made great strides, on some levels, as a result. Still, there is a world of difference between pushing the envelope, and stepping over the line. So along comes CH, along with other technologies and platforms that we may or may not yet be aware of or are just starting to emerge from the basements and bedrooms and garages of the world – which spawned much of the tech that came before it, and – they’re moving the cheese!

Lest you’re under any illusions, self-selected moderators may run the rooms, but CH is always listening in. So far, keeping an eye on things, rather than censoring, which Facebook, Google and Twitter do with abandon. That, or worse (YouTube Bug ‘Cutting’ Creator Pay 50% Or More)

At this point, we know that our privacy is history, and although many shrug this off – at least for now – maybe we’ve lived and learned, and given tech’s next iteration, we’ve drawn something of a line of our own when it comes to the ability to express our opinions. And even freely surrender our personal information (we are aware that CH scrapes data from your phone contacts).

Maybe that next wave of tech that’s currently being developed in those bedrooms and basements and garages across the country and the world – what to speak of the blockchain and the pods that are internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee’s current focus – will address that, too, and we will build back different.

The Mighty Do Fall

It can be done. It only took a few short months for the mighty tech hubs like Silicon Valley and New York and Boston to lose their appeal – and primarily for no other reason than people moved on to where they could literally breathe free. And maybe they will be bringing a bit of it to the industry itself.

It’s a new day, so remember: if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten, or as Edward Snowden put it: Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

To quote Steve Jobs, time once again to think different as we move onward and forward.