The Quest for Exclusivity

Lately, we’ve noticed a flood of websites, services, and social networks touting themselves as exclusive, invite-only communities, catering to the luxury market and revolving around the luxury lifestyle. In stark contrast to the idea of the internet as a level playing field with open-source code, anonymous commenting, crowdsourcing and wikis, these exclusive sites aim to reestablish the caste system that was all but blown away during the free-for-all that characterized the internet’s first decade.

It’s no surprise that people of a certain means feel entitled to their own sandbox. Inequality (both financial and social) seems an inescapable human condition. Pointing to a recent study by the World Bank and Harvard University, an article in the NYT this past Saturday noted:

[The] level of wealth inequality has remained remarkably consistent over the last 2,000 years…While “human civilization has advanced by leaps and bounds over the past two millennia, income inequality has stayed relatively the same,” Zubin Jelveh of Portfolio.com wrote about the study.

So it makes a lot of sense that sites like Gilt Groupe (”a private online community, which is dedicated to providing its members with access to coveted fashion and luxury lifestyle brands at sample sale prices”), Metrofunk (a “metropolitan based ‘invite only’ online mobile and social network focused exclusively on anything trendy and funky in the fabulous worlds of nightlife, fashion, music, and film”), and SQUA.RE (”the first ‘TV 2.0′ community, designed to cater for those who are living a luxury lifestyle and want to share it with their friends”) are exploding in popularity. Just because the internet could in theory be the “great equalizer,” doesn’t mean that everyone wants it to be.