1.

I’ve now spent a week teaching at Zoom University: it fucking sucks.

There’s a kind of phenomenological flattening that happens on Zoom, at least in my experience. Each and every interaction on that platform takes on the same character. It’s wrong to describe Zoom as a platform: it’s better to characterize it as a social form. As such, a wide array of content can fill it. Regardless of whether you are taking a class, teaching a class, attending a work meeting, having an “online happy hour,” or attending a Zoom-version of any given group activity, the social dynamics remain the same: you engage in a visually and technologically mediated social interaction with a squared image, the use of which is dictated by the software and hardware you are using. There’s an act of reduction and abstraction here. I encounter my students the same way I encounter my doctor in a telehealth visit. An array of spaces and social dynamics become one mode of interaction: the Zoom Conference. Of course, it doesn’t have to be Zoom: GoogleChat and Webex are the same in practice; Zoom™ is to the web conference as Xerox™ is to photocopying. In this context, each social interaction comes to experientially resemble every other.

This is what I mean when I say phenomenological flattening. I don’t know what the impact of this is or will be, either generally or in the particular context of the university, but I’m not optimistic. It’s something that goes beyond the exhaustion that accompanies long stretches of time performing for a camera and laptop screen. I’d say it’s closer to what Jameson called a “waning of affect,” a kind of depthlessness, though I don’t think it’s necessarily an aesthetic phenomena as Jameson would have it. This framing is helpful: it pushes me to think through the above as symptoms of structural phenomena. This is why I’m starting to think through this flattening in terms of exchangeability of the sort characteristic of the value-form and the fetishism that accompanies it. At a certain point, the experiential resemblance between Zoom interactions will feel, if not be, exchangeable in the same way that capital compels everything else to be. Is this an emergent form of capitalist sociality or the inexorable conclusion of prevailing logics? Yes.

I’m predisposed to Adornoesque pessimism (i.e. “we’re doomed, but there’s a slight chance for it to be otherwise”), but the historical necessity of Zoom University seems to suggest that it’s part of a new conjuncture that’s here to stay. Covid has rendered the Zoom Conference common sense. I’m lucky and privileged that I get to teach this way. Not teaching this way is a death sentence, either for myself or others. As noted above, it fucking sucks.