Clubhouse

The voice-only app's rooms range from innocuous to substantive to deliberately inflammatory.

Clubhouse, a voice-only chatroom app, keeps no permanent record of what is said there. Its rooms range from innocuous to substantive to deliberately inflammatory. At its best, it's like being at a lively dinner party—the sort that were common in the Before Times.

Though its critics say otherwise, it's wrong to think of Clubhouse as just a contrarian playground for the tech-adjacent. I've used it to understand everything from Beijing's expulsion of foreign journalists to anti-vaccination attitudes among the French, from the Torah's views on proselytizing to how to host better actual dinner parties.

The intimacy of hearing people's voices often leads to a culture of civility not found on Twitter. The fact that it all happens in real time makes it raw and unfiltered. And the conversations themselves remain—for now—thrillingly unregulated, unrecorded, and unfettered.