Guestiquette

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Daisy Alioto on being a good guest online and off.

I just finished The Guest by Emma Cline, a suspenseful, summer read that came out earlier this month just in time to plug the Succession-sized hole in your life (if you can hold off that long). The book follows a woman named Alex from beach to beach and mansion to mansion out East (Hampton or Egg, it’s never specified) as she exists in the weird space between girlfriend and escort. Alex isn’t always an unwanted guest, rather, she is wanted until she is not.

The word “guest” was still knocking around in my head when Maya sent me the link to a new social app called Airchat, which promises to be “a dinner party in your pocket.” Much like Clubhouse, the app is launching with a waitlist and early users are from the tech community. “I've had multi-day multi-party nuanced conversations on AirChat, and it feels really different as a format from anything else out there. It unlocks something new,” tweeted entrepreneur Amjad Masad. And like Clubhouse, it requires a host—and by extension, guests. But instead of using the pure audio format of Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces it pairs audio and video conversation threads (added to over time, like stories you can swipe through) with AI-generated transcripts and artwork.

Clubhouse was a lockdown phenomenon. As soon as people could host and guest IRL, they did so. But I’m not the only one to feel like people’s social skills had atrophied. I wrote my essay Against Scenes after attending one too many parties where the guests—and even the hosts—were more interested in social signaling than making sure everyone was having a good time. I have three simple rules for hosting and guesting and they have served me very well!

For hosts:

1. Greet each person as they come in.

2. Offer them food and beverages.

3. If they are alone, unless they know others at the party, help insert them into a conversation by pointing out something they have in common with another guest. If you don’t know them well enough to do this, deliver them to a trusted extrovert who can engage them while you go back to hosting.

For guests:

1. Never come empty handed.

2. Always send a “thank you” follow up.

3. Make it your mission to make sure other people at the party are having a good time.

For the last decade, online spaces have been open by default. Now, as there is a push to make spaces intimate again, I believe we will see more writing about how to be a good guest online as well as the qualities that make a good online person. I’m glad that people are publishing obituaries for the metaverse, because the metaverse is and was only ever a mindset to use online experiences to improve offline ones and vice versa. Bluesky underscored this return to the hosting/guesting mindset recently when they announced that they are tracking invite codes back to their source. If the guy you brought is acting weird, you might get asked to leave too. Whether any of these new platforms actually have staying power, well that’s another story.

FURTHER READING 👙

Emma Cline’s novel of pool parties and class conflict (The Nation)

“A scene starts out as a subculture interested in cultural production and becomes a scene when social access to the performance of cultural production becomes more important than production itself.” (Dirt)

An app wants to be your neighborhood's third space (Dirt)

A New Restaurant Platform Wants Every Customer to Get VIP Access (Bloomberg)

RIP Metaverse (Business Insider) ⚰️