I like the title of this post, the more I think about it, because with a cursory glance you could mistakenly read it as “Who Here Is Stuck In Zoom?” which is also apt.
I have a day job at the moment that requires me to be, for the first time since quarantine began, on Zoom conference calls every other day. These are interesting because they’re awful — not the content of the calls themselves, but the physical (digital?) act of performing existence for people I’ve never met in three-dimensional space. I’m constantly thinking about how I’m framed in the “shot,” the way my forehead and my neck and my shoulders take up space, assemblage as pastiche as commentary. I speak therefore I am, as long as the connection is stable.
I take the calls in bed because there’s nowhere else to sit in my bedroom and the living room gets no light. The one time I took a call out there it looked borderline illicit, the intense grain and harsh blue light on my face giving off major downloading-porn-off-Limewire-circa-2002 vibes.
Zoom calls are weird because they collapse our frames of reference, especially with those fun backgrounds they provide for users that, I’m assuming, are a lab-tested way to delay the onset of dementia. We could be anywhere, but instead we’re nowhere, together. This feeling, if you can call it that, is coolly synergistic with the larger flattening of our mediated experiences, every input reflective of a post-utopian acquiescence to a miserly broadness that’s nominally inclusive, but architected from data that can only confirm what we already know about ourselves.
We swap in new backgrounds to our same old bathrooms on TikTok, add filters to our algorithmically mediocre faces on Instagram, and strip it all away to get a little more personal (raw) on OnlyFans. Each channel is activated by the authority we give it over our lives as much as anything else, but all are united by the endless scroll complex.
It amazes me how quickly we’ve all acclimated to faking it, at least a little. Not just the enthusiasm we feel, but the fact of feeling itself. How long until our faces simply stop alternating expressions because they don’t really have to anymore? We’ll just graft a smile onto where a frown once was, or let our emoji do all the heavy emotional lifting, the way our phone cameras click distractingly, even though there’s no shutter. Nothing really needs to “function” anymore to get the point across. We take it for granted that things are happening, that things are being processed, because we see the end result and we like it. We want more.
Our identities are already fully hybridized, a little of who we are on Earth and a little of who we are on Instagram, which is just Facebook, which is just some megalomaniacal dickhead’s property. How long until we’re asked to get off the lawn? And then where will we go?
Anyway, it’s fucking weird to be looking at yourself as much as the other person when in conversation, and a very recent development in human interaction, I think. Also, I’m not sure it qualifies as human interaction?
Being on camera has made me want to wear makeup again, the one shopping vice that I felt truly, holistically, capable of giving up in lockdown because I really, truly, had no need for it. But Zoom feels made for concealer, or maybe concealer for Zoom — something to cover the occasional blemish, something to brighten around the eyes. Inevitably my camera chooses to white balance on the wrong part of the screen and my forehead gets completely blown out, anyway.
I’d forgotten to some degree how putting on makeup can be a process of legibility, a small act of self-creation that is, admittedly, in dialogue with oppressive beauty standards as much as self-love. But in its own weird way it is a nice reminder of the things that I like about myself, the things that I currently cover with a mask every day. Brows might be the new lips, but I still like my lips more. We’ll see how I feel when we get out of this place.
Also reading…
Scott Galloway on the GameStop stock thing.
Daisy Alioto on Fran Lebowitz.
Why I try to keep this newsletter clocking in at roughly 600 words.