Nothing screams “Look at me, I’m rich!” like a membership to an exclusive club. In modern times, the equivalent of that is being an user of Netropolitan, a social network that asks $9,000 for each new member.
Dubbed Facebook for the rich, Netropolitan is a place where you can brag about your latest Bugatti or Lamborghini without having to endure the raised eyebrows of the plebes. After all, most people that are part of the 99% can’t stomach very well the pictures made by the wealthiest kids around.
Launched by former Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra conductor James Touchi-Peters, this “online country club for people with more money than time” came into existence because rich people are persecuted for having a good time. Messaging specialist Michelle Lawless at Media Minefield told the Los Angeles Times: “James and others have mentioned feeling judged for talking about certain topics on other social media outlets. Like they were bragging and met with a little ill will. Netropolitan is designed to be the place to talk about your last European vacation or new car without the backlash.”
Netropolitan explained just how important the privacy of their clients is to them: “We simply cannot stress enough how important preserving our members’ privacy is to us. Other than announcing that at our launch we already had several hundred members, we will never publicly state the exact number of members in the club. And especially, we will NEVER release or verify the identity of any of our members – ever.”
Anyone over 21 and with that kind of dough in their bank account is free to join Netropolitan. The $9,000 admission fee includes a $6,000 initiation fee and a $3,000 annual fee. For all this, people get a Facebook rip-off (not that Facebook is that original, as Selena Larson rightfully pointed out in her latest post on ReadWrite), but their experience is entirely ad-free. I should hope so, cause if I paid $9K to join a social network, I would get pretty angry when seeing any ads.
As long as there are people on the planet who starve to death, I find such proofs of opulence very disturbing, especially since most people think only of themselves and their families, and pretend that charities are not for them. And they wonder why there’s backlash when they talk about their latest deeds…
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