Zoom and its kind are an almighty pain, with rules and pitfalls we are only just beginning to understand
The bit people always remember best about David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which was published in 1996, is the futuristic imagining about the videophone: people would hate them, he predicted. They would hate to lose the liberty of the regular phone, where you could pretend you were listening and pretend to yourself that the other person was listening to you. They would hate having to get dressed and having to dress their flat; they would loathe so much the sight of their own face that, shortly before they gave up on the enterprise altogether, they would start to experiment with what Wallace called “form-fitting polybutylene masks”: I don’t know what that is, but I want one.
It is an almighty pain, Zoom, with rules and pitfalls we are only beginning to piece together now. I had spent a week doing Zoom dinners before anyone told me it was better to eat before you started. Chewing may be uniquely unphotogenic: it turns out, all those times we went out to dinner before, we were just putting up with each other’s mastication as the price of companionship. I had also tried out all these elaborately cute plans, that we would send out a menu first and all eat the same thing, only to discover that what I really wanted was some Chilli Doritos. After completely fruitless tidying – there is no amount of housekeeping that gives me a backdrop fit for an adult – someone said you could import a background (maybe a beach?) and I probably spent two or three calls not listening to anyone at all, just figuring out how to do that.