The Insatiable Desperation of Zoom
It's over.
This is just to say that I am sick of the emails from Zoom.
The video-call software that somehow overtook the sickos at Skype as our defacto form of communication has tossed and turned in a death roll for some time now, as if the rolling was the point of getting free and not what actually kills you in the end.
How did that happen, eh? Some freak victim of circumstance, involving a few American schools choosing Zoom ahead of all else. And still – all that’s left to smell is desperation and angst.
It is not their fault. I understand. To consider that you would be the CEO of a platform with the gracious and understandable mission of helping people to communicate by using technology that would have been considered — when you step back even a yard or so — on the borderline of psychedelic once upon a time, and then a once in a Century pandemic infiltrates the collective bones of society, somehow placing you at the core of communication ahead of a range of larger and more profitable and more understood versions of the exact thing you do… That’s something I wouldn’t dream of. No thanks.
And then to consider that years would go by where every journalist is calling you and every business is using you and every Individual Citizen is turning on their television to see Saturday Night Live — or something equally passive and mindmelting — reference you nonstop, constantly reminding the world of the fact that Zoom, or to Zoom, is now part of the lexicon and part of their vocabulary. A verb by any other term. In that situation you would try to make the best of things.
But eventually those competitors from before — the ones who are richer and larger and faster than you — would catch up. And the rest of the world would move on, too. The golden ticket you thought you’d won didn’t even get you access into the factory, and you barely stepped into the glass elevator before it all started to melt away like chocolate in the sun. Soon, you become synonymous with a certain kind of feeling; a certain kind of living; a certain kind of depressive lifestyle that even the best of us want to avoid. The pandemic is not over but large chunks of the world have agreed, passively, to pretend like it is. And none of this, of course, is your fault. Because it was never planned in the first place.
And I am sure the business is fine now, even good, and certainly better than before. And that is a truly American story or at least a story of Great Capitalism. So congratulations for that. A billion dollar valuation even before this all sparked off. At the very least, you’re in the right crowd. It’s who you know that counts.
But please. Stop emailing me. Stop asking me to try. In my feed, on my algorithm. Somehow everywhere all at once. It was a nice couple of years. We had fun. But I logged off for the last time a while ago, now.
Adios. Farewell. Cheers.
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