Netropolitan Club

» see netropolitan.club as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The interesting number in this one is not nine thousand. In 2014 I was thirty and writing software in Ankara, and the fee was never going to be the thing that kept me out of an American club for rich people. What I can actually check, eleven years later, is what it was made of. The archive has the login page from September 2014 and it answers that question in the first twenty lines of source.

James Touchi-Peters was a composer and a conductor. He launched netropolitan.club on 15 September 2014 with a joining fee of nine thousand dollars and an annual renewal of three thousand, and he was open about why: the fee was the filter. Anyone who could pay it belonged, anyone who could not was already excluded before the sign-up form loaded. He described the point as somewhere wealthy people could discuss their lives without provoking a reaction from people who did not have those lives.

The rules were tight. Members had to be over twenty-one and to use their real names, and no third-party advertising ran anywhere on the service. Members were forbidden from soliciting each other in private messages, with a classified ads system promised for later so that business could happen in a room set aside for it. The whole club sat behind a login and was invisible from the outside, so no member's name ever appeared in public.

~ the record ~

~ the week of coverage ~

It launched into an extraordinary amount of press for something nobody could see. The Los Angeles Times and NPR and Inc. and the Huffington Post all ran it inside four days, and it made the Express Tribune in Pakistan by 22 September. The framing was identical everywhere: Facebook for rich people, with the number in the headline.

CNN got closest to the actual problem, calling it an elaborate ruse in an age when the alternatives were free. That is not quite a criticism of the price. It is a criticism of the product, because a social network is worth what its membership is worth, and a membership that has to be assembled from scratch at nine thousand dollars a head starts at zero and stays there while everybody waits to see who else joins.

~ what the login page says ~

The capture from 18 September 2014 is a WordPress login screen. Version 3.9.2, with the standard admin stylesheet and the standard dashicons font loading off the club's own domain. The scripts underneath it name BuddyPress 2.0.2 for the social layer and Paid Memberships Pro for the money. There is a third plugin in the list whose only job is adding tags to BuddyPress groups. The custom logo is set by a single inline style rule overriding the WordPress default.

None of that is an accusation. Those were sensible tools and a small team building a members-only community in 2014 had no reason to write its own. But it is worth putting next to the fee, because the nine thousand dollars was sold as exclusivity and what it actually bought was a hosted forum any competent freelancer could have stood up in a weekend for a few hundred. The scarcity was real. The software was not scarce at all.

~ how it ended ~

There was no announcement anybody preserved. USA Today's end-of-year piece in December 2014 was already writing about it in the past tense, and the Wikipedia record puts the close in November, roughly two months after the launch. Nobody published a member count while it ran, and nobody published one afterward either, which is its own kind of answer.

The domain went on to be a redirect. netropolitan.club today sends you to an online shop, which is what happens to any short name on a novelty top-level domain once the original occupant stops paying. The thing it was built to keep out is now the only thing at the address.

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