Taylor Lorenz Is Essentially Wrong on Clubhouse

So, this is one of those things where, if you follow certain people (like, for instance, Taylor Lorenz or Balaji Srinivasan) then you'll have already heard a very detailed account of this from their specific perspectives. As you might imagine, I think Balaji is mostly correct, but way too high on his own supply of crypto-whatever, and his writing style is deeply off-putting to people who don't think about things the way he does. So here's my attempt to talk like a human being and discuss these ideas as fairly as I know how.

First, it's worth trying to explain what her objections are. They are... wide-ranging. For instance:

She has a specific view on what ought to be on that website:

And I guess this isn't it:

And, while I'm using her own tweets to give you a sense of her ideas here (and these are just a sampling from the most obvious thread I found), she doesn't seem to care about accurately conveying a point someone else makes before disagreeing with it. For instance:

Is it possible the people running this app don't agree with you about who ought to be allowed to use technology to communicate? These people aren't harassing or stalking others, so far as I am aware. They're just talking to whomever wants to listen. If they hear a complaint, and sincerely disagree with it's premise (that it's 'unsafe' to allow a horrible person to talk on a social media app to people that want to hear from them), they aren't choosing to 'scale without protections in favor of user growth over safety'. Their choice was that safety wasn't an issue! And they're correct. Surely the victims of violent assault, of all people, understand that someone talking on the internet isn't the same as violence or danger. They've seen danger! It's different!

I think this is bad journalism, and bad etiquette generically. If you disagree with someone, you should, if only to make your own point clear, be very specific about what their thinking is and how you differ. It's sloppy thinking to disagree with someone this way.

There's also this:

Is it racist to ask how the son of a prominent politician got into crack? I can't imagine how. I mean, maybe it's insensitive to the actual experience of drug addicts, but even then, I'm also curious. When rich trust fund idiots get drug addictions, it's usually not crack. There have been a couple politicians who've been addicted to crack – the Canadian one that got in a fistfight on the job a few years ago springs to mind – but those stories are more interesting because it's so surprising! Powder cocaine is almost assumed, for the hard-charging idiots. Amphetamines of any type, sure, whatever, that's their misguided way of being their hard-charging a-hole selves. Even opioids are pretty cross-class in terms of addiction risk, although there's a bit of a concern about overdoses being mostly poorer people. But in terms of class-coding, 'crack is for poor people' is the dominant meme. It's even used in an early season of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia to show the danger of being poor when Dennis and Dee (two white characters) get addicted shortly after losing their jobs.

Even taking an entire paragraph to address that made me feel dirty. These aren't good faith critiques, made after consideration and thought. She's calling people racist because she doesn't like them. She talks about how terrible people are allowed accounts because the most prominent members of Clubhouse have criticized her coverage of their industry as inaccurate. This is a weird vendetta, and I'm not sure how much she cares, but it's just bad reporting, and bad etiquette. She wouldn't say it's outrageous Kyle Kashuv has a twitter account (he does), because she doesn't actually care about "platforming racists" (although I'm pretty sure that doesn't even describe Kyle), or enabling predators. She was embarassed by people saying she reported things wrong. That's the whole thing. And it's embarassing – but maybe not the way she thinks.