The GiD Report#148 — A Ripple bombshell? Clubhouse and the rise of digital cults

Share sale: Coinbase last month launched a secondary share sale via Nasdaq Private Markets (f.k.a. Second Market), offering up to 1.8 million shares in weekly batches.

People are right to be focusing attention on Clubhouse’s meteoric rise. But almost everyone seems to misunderstand what is making the app so successful.

It isn’t, as people like Ben Thompson suggest, simply another iteration of the old story of lowering the barriers for production and consumption, shortening feedback loops and creating new “white space” for aspiring stars. If you think of it as being like Twitter, Stories or TikTok, you are missing the point.

The key to Clubhouse’s rapid accession is that its social design makes it an ideal platform for cults at a time when the social internet is rapidly evolving away from organizing around communities and toward cults. Clubhouse’s rise likely signals major strategic shifts that several legacy social platforms are going to have to consider.

The weakening of digital communities and rise of digital cults that we are seeing is inevitable. A similar pattern played out millennia ago in the physical world, as large cults and autocracies came to dominate small local communities. It is reasonable that the same cycle would repeat at warp speed in the digital space.

A coalition of business and tech trade groups sued the state of Maryland Thursday over its newly enacted tax on digital ads that are shown to state residents, Ashley reports.