Apps

Education at my Jewish private school was chock-full of religious instruction. Precisely half of our lessons were dedicated to Jewish studies. We had Bible classes (Chumash, we called it) every single day. As a child, I wasn’t particularly excited about most of the miracles. Sure, the staff turning into a snake was cool, but it felt like a parlor trick. The sea splitting felt too huge to even contemplate. The one miracle that seemed to get everyone in class thoroughly enamored with God’s power was the concept of manna from Heaven. The idea that you could just dream up what you wanted to eat — and for eight-year-old me that was infinite donuts, pizza and Dunkaroos — and it would just fall from the sky? Well, that was truly miraculous.

Apps are the 21st century’s answer to everything, it seems to Cockburn. Faced with a problem, sooner or later some wiseacre will show up with one that will not only provide a solution but also vastly improve the lives of all that use it. The miracles of smartphone tech are now being used to deal with the poor, huddled masses who have fetched up in one of the many refugee areas along the US-Mexico border. With tens of thousands of asylum seekers caught up in a vast tangle of bureaucratic delays and no short-term fix in sight, everyone is getting understandably vexed. Enter technology.

Have you any Clubhouse invites going? I have five, if anyone wants one. Or is it six? I have to admit I’m not sure — like many people I know, I haven’t looked at the app for some weeks now. Clubhouse seems painfully aware of the fact that decreasing numbers of people do. The wild party that is — was — Clubhouse is winding down. The iOS app, that opened up a members-only world of virtual real-time audio chatrooms is now struggling against falling audiences, increased fuss over mediocre, unmoderated, unpleasant content and the fact that companies such as Twitter and Facebook have neatly purloined the audio concept at its heart and refashioned it for themselves.