Perspective: discord 👾 meet clubhouse 👋

Clubhouse contains within its exclusive meeting rooms the nuanced conversations that are required for societal advancement. Various members of an elite class discussing the elite class in multiple different conference-style, voice-chat rooms. Here I sat thinking they were all the same; anyone in California pretty much seemed plastic to me. I loathe Hollywood in the way hipsters popularized it. Even the thought-leaders I felt were inauthentic so I tuned out a long time ago, thinking they’d done the same for most of the world’s problems. Turns out, and I am very happy to report: I was wrong.

Darlene Alderson, Mr. Robot

Kind of, they are still plastic. But they have plastic hearts that seem to beat real blood. There are wealthy individuals that are fed up with watching the people get shafted by stocks. Intellectuals from all over the world discuss, debate, and iron out hypotheses for potential solutions. The magic that is happening is a part of the scientific process; this is called building the hypothesis or forming a question which is the step after the observation. From what I have gathered after only six days on the platform, there is a lot of knowledge, a lot of excitement, and a lot of potential but everyone is wondering how to implement any of the brilliant ideas they are discussing, and for me… this story is all too familiar.

When I joined the Articles of Unity Movement last year, I was literally pacing on the phone in excitement with anyone that I knew in communications, journalism, and broadcast. I’d been a Bernie Bro turned Tulsicrat and without even the slightest inkling of an idea that she’d be one of the candidates we would vote to draft, I went into Unity feeling like I could finally whole-heartedly get on board with an idea. The passion in my voice was palpable and there were no flaws in my arguments. As you can see, my natural response to a problem is to get a lot of minds working on it… not just talking about it. So you can imagine the dismay I experienced when I realized how incomplete the whole operation was. Bret…? Heather…?

“Can someone tell us what to do here?”

Just as we were taught in classroom etiquette, “wait for me to tell you when to start”, “follow instructions”, “don’t speak out of turn”. Is it any wonder then why a large majority of the folks in the Unity2020 Slack seemed to lack any sort of initiative? This very fact is the reason I went the music route instead of trying to do anything with social media influencers and the outreach group, though that was my initial plan. For one, I was a little repulsed by the idea of groveling to Insta-stars and allowing them to be the voice of our movement. I wasn’t recognizing the humanity in those influencers. It takes guts to put yourself out there and it also takes a driven individual. Someone who takes life by the horns. My perspective has changed from fighting the system to working with the algorithms to meet people where they are, first. The habits of doing just the opposite are so engrained in order to make us fall in line and be obedient.

Decentralization is becoming the answer to how we can all coexist, in lieu of a standard prescription for how we should all behave. Rather than entering a global supply chain with your content, it’s best to enter with support directly from your fans. We have to level with one another and recognize the necessity of humilty; most importantly we have to support each other. Now that I have made a real-life business connection with arguably one of the most influential people I’ve met in my life on ClubHouse, I am certainly still a fan. However, I know that it is doomed to the future that every social media platform assumes when it becomes widely available. It is the same thing that happens in free-government-funded institutions. They become ghettoized. Poorly maintained. Left to the trolls and people who like to complain about trolls. If only there were a way to decentralize the social media platforms. Now, I don’t have the answers, but my partner and I are developing a way to make instant access to fans a plug-and-play process for content creators using Discord.

Discord is easily becoming one of my absolute favorite tools for networking and project management. After going out to scout from my original guild in the DarkHorse Podcast Discord, I’ve been entering new dimensions all over the place in the same way you may have seen on Stargate SG-1. By simply using my keyboard as a megaphone, I’ve attracted the interest of several collaborators. I may be naive, only time will tell, but it does seem as though alot of the ideas I’ve developed over the years can be accomplished. What’s really wonderful is that, in return, I am often times petitioned for a small favor in a future project. Sounds thrilling to me, and I mean that sincerely. We have lost connection with what it means to be human and to have the shared experience of existence and how peculiar that is. Discord has provided a space for me to discuss deep philosophical, biological, geological…. I mean you get the idea. Ahem, the nerds are on Discord.

The nuanced conversations suggested in my Essay on Discord happening in ClubHouse, but the exclusive nature is a bit pretentious. Instead, your biggest supporters can, not only pay their favorite content creator, they can interact with them directly. There is no need for the visionary to fill their time with technological how-to tutorials, they can simply upload to YouTube as they normally would and we will take care of the rest. Now a walk through of Discord is going to help, and I’m happy to take time out for guided tours.

Here I go building bridges again… There is magic going on behind the exclusive closed doors of the Clubhouse App let’s bring it out to the Discord App.