A Facebook for the rich tries its best to “keep out the average guy”. Our intrepid reporter peers through the cybergates of wealth.
Jann Wenner, the founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, wants to be my friend. I know this because he listed me as a friend on Affluence, the online social network for millionaires, a Facebook for elitists that launched late last year with the aim of becoming “the exclusive organisation of the world’s wealthiest people.”
It was an unexpected invitation. I’m neither wealthy nor a member in good standing of the global media elite. I’ve never met Jann Wenner, and I’ve certainly never visited Affluence.org.
But how could I resist a friendly invitation from the man who bankrolled Gonzo journalism? After I applied to join the website, friend requests from the rich kept on rolling in (though many of my would-be friends had names that screamed “I have money” in an email scammer’s accent: Jennifer Lewis-Carnegie, Kaitlyn Cohen, John Paulson). Only one catch remained: before I could actually consummate my friendship with these millionaires (supposed and otherwise), my application had to be approved.
I’m still waiting.
“Everybody wants to be able to rub shoulders with the elite,” says Scott Mitchell, who founded Affluence while experiencing what he calls “sudden wealth syndrome” after selling tunes.com, his internet music start-up, for $180 million.
Mitchell believes the problem with sites like Facebook is that “there’s no mechanism to keep out the average guy,” nothing to stop a small, selective grouping from becoming a free-for-all made impure by people like ... me.
To join this digital country club, you need to demonstrate a household net worth of more than $3 million, or an annual income of over $300,000. In countries like the US and Australia, where public records like housing registers provide indications of wealth, the site’s monitors check these sources first. Then comes a more detailed search of newspapers, corporate websites and blogs. If all else fails, you can resort, as approximately 20 per cent of applicants do, to sending in scans or faxes of tax returns, payslips and bank statements.
A whole segment of internet entrepreneurs are working hard at building exclusive communities like this, online worlds that strike a balance between openness to new members and a hostility to the great unwashed.
A prime example is the social network A Small World, known by those outside its gates as Snobster. The network (which received a large start-up investment from the film producer Harvey Weinstein) relies on cool rather than cash as the determining factor for membership, in an attempt to create that magical mix that keeps many a nightclub in business: brilliant and beautiful side by side with the rich and clueless. A Small World allows only its best connected members – those with 50 or more friends on the network – to send new invites, keeping numbers down and quality up.
If you behave badly on A Small World – if you use its forums to promote your business, or try a little too hard, as one member did, to become friends with Paris Hilton – you are banished to an area of the site called A Big World. From this purgatory you are either exiledforever or eventually allowed to return to paradise.
For Mitchell, A Small World’s model just isn’t snobby enough. “A very large percentage of their member base are hospitality workers: waitresses, hostesses, concierges at hotels. I’m sure they are interesting people, but they don’t exactly fit our niche.”
Affluence hopes to avoid the swelling middle class of A Small World by going directly for the money, or at least people who know people with money. The only way you can join without sending documentary evidence of your wealth is by inviting five other documented millionaires who successfully join.
“The theory is that if you are an influencer, you will know five people that qualify,” Mitchell says. A combination of wealth and connections has helped the UAE become the largest source of Affluence members outside of the West, with three per cent of the total user base.
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090130/REVIEW/673671543/-1/ART
