Zoom is No Substitute for In-Person Interactions

Victor Rotariu makes grandiose claims to justify always having your camera on in Zoom. I think his claims are arrant bullshit.

I saw Victor Rotariu’s post on Zoom and remote work while doomscrolling a groupthink incubator’s feed in the toilet. Here’s my take. Unlike him, I don’t speak for anybody but myself.

I will ask you this: how do you think people engaged in cooperative work and social interaction on the network before Zoom became ubiquitous enough for “Zoom fatigue” to become a thing?

Here’s a short list of software applications and operating systems built without Zoom:

My understanding is that the people developing these systems and applications (among many others) managed reasonably well with written communication when face-to-face interaction wasn’t an option.

Please consider that while reading the rest of this post as I attempt to address Mr. Rotariu’s points.

“Do you want to continue remote work?”

No, because I’d rather end work entirely. But since fully-automated luxury space communism isn’t likely to happen in my lifetime I’ll make do with remote work.

If you try to threaten me with mandatory in-office work if I don’t do WFH your way, you’re going to find out the hard way that I do not respond well to bullying.

My mother thinks I told her to fuck off; do you really think I’ll go any easier on you? You wouldn’t be the first boss I fired without notice.

“Do you dread Zoom calls?”

No, I don’t dread Zoom calls. I might find unnecessary meetings annoying and think that 99.999% of all meetings are unnecessary, but I understand that Zoom has no more to do with that than Skype does. Instead of complaining about unnecessary meetings, I toughen up, decline all afternoon meetings that don’t directly pertain to my current assignment, and accept morning meetings on a case-by-case basis since daily standups and admin work already screw over my focus.

Why do I decline meetings instead of demanding that meeting requests be curtailed? Because the meeting might not be relevant to me, but the person sending the invite might think or feel differently. It’s hard to justify doing my own thing if I’m not willing to let others do the same. Admittedly, my attitude toward meetings might make it harder for me to get promoted, but let’s be honest here: if I wanted to get promoted that badly I’d just get another job.

That’s the way you do it in my trade.

“The solution to Zoom fatigue: everyone turn on the camera at all times.”

Mr. Rotariu thinks this is “counter-intuitive”.

I disagree: I think it’s arrant nonsense, and his arguments to support this ‘solution’ didn’t convince me to change my mind.

“In the long term, lack of video amplifies Zoom fatigue”

Really? What if the vast majority of workers never liked or wanted Zoom in the first place? What if Zoom wasn’t something we chose, but something our bosses imposed on us (like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Outlook, and daily commutes to toil in an open-plan office)? There must be better videoconferencing apps out there; when was the last time you heard Apple owners complaining about “FaceTime fatigue”?

To understand why, we need to go to the root cause of Zoom fatigue. It comes from the insufficient nonverbal information conveyed through videoconferencing.

I agree, but I don’t think that compelling all participants in a Zoom call keep their cameras on will fix this. I’ll get to that later, though. First, I want to talk about the following:

We evolved for physical face to face social interaction. We crave it. And we crave to belong to a tribe, group, community. Put these two together and you get our incessant need for validation in every social interaction.

Always with the “we”, and I don’t think Mr. Rotariu is using the royal we; that would be excusable in this context since it would mean he was speaking for himself. Instead, he’s presuming to speak for the entire human race, and does not appear to have given any thought to neurodiversity, culture, or individual preference.

I don’t buy his claim because of my own experience. Instead of seeking the company of others, I have always sought to keep my distance. I learned as a child that solitude was the price of freedom, and was glad to pay it. What good are friends who offer nothing but constraints? What good is a community with nothing to offer but tyranny?

When I first became a man I wanted my own apartment. Once I had my own apartment, the thought of neighbors a mere wall or floor away from me eventually became so intolerable that I bought a house. If I had the means to do so, I’d buy a house on such a large plot of land that my nearest neighbors would be at least a quarter mile away.

Healthy neurotypical people have boundaries. I have The Wall. In fact, as a misanthrope I find this quote from Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo particularly relevant:

Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, humanitarians as you are, but I never worry about my neighbor, I never try to protect society which does not protect me — indeed, I might add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm — and, since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral towards them, I believe that society and my neighbor are in my debt.

Like Dumas’ enigmatic Count, I am not overly fond of society or of humanity as a whole. I’m not Jesus; I can’t love all people. I can only love specific individuals. As for the rest, I am content to live and let live.

Nor am I the only one who feels this way and acts accordingly within the limits of my means. The richest among us do everything they can to isolate themselves from the vast majority of people. Based on this observation, I would suggest that sociability is mainly a survival strategy. In a hunter-gatherer society, loners tend to die young. However, if you’re reading this on the internet you do not live in such a society.

Though I cannot prove it, I suspect that we tolerate the company of others out of necessity; once an individual is wealthy enough that they no longer need other people to meet basic needs, they soon find that they do not enjoy the company of most people. One need not be shy or afraid to avoid social interaction. One need only be unsocial.

However, let’s give Mr. Rotariu the benefit of the doubt and assume that this premise of his is correct. Suppose that the vast majority of people do prefer physical face-to-face social interaction, and do in fact yearn to be part of a tribe, a group, or a community.

Is Zoom with your camera on the way to get what you need? I don’t think so. Because of the compression Zoom uses to make videoconferencing viable on crappy US broadband and the way Zoom tends to cram the feeds of dozens of people into a screen, a more charitable person than me would suggest that Zoom is a poor substitute at best.

However, Zoom isn’t paying me to be charitable. I think Zoom introduces so much noise to the non-verbal signal that the signal becomes worthless. What good are your facial expressions and body language to me if I’m only getting them at 15 frames per second? I think people get Zoom fatigue because our primitive hairless ape brains are going into overdrive trying to compensate for the noise Zoom introduces to the signal.

Furthermore, I’m convinced the issue is Zoom’s alone. Audio-only calls — whether they’re made with Zoom, Skype, Facetime, or your phone’s dialer app — suffer from the same flaw to a lesser extent. High-quality voice calls and video-conferencing are not as high a priority for device manufacturers and service providers as they pretend. The compression algorithms that videoconferencing and voice-over-IP applications use are lossy and subtly distort both vocal communication and non-verbal communication.

You might not be able to hear it, but the way you sound on a phone is not the way you sound in person. You can prove this by experiment: get a friend to record you to an uncompressed WAV file on their phone as you call them, and then have your friend record you in person. Say the same thing in both tests, and try to use the same tone of voice. Compare the two samples and see the results.

The way you sound on Zoom isn’t good enough. Neither is the way you look.

This need is ubiquitous and continuous. It manifest with your spouse, but also with your colleagues, neighbors, acquaintances and total strangers. One famous researcher in rejection was famously inspired by feeling ostracized when two strangers stopped throwing him a frisbee.

What Mr. Rotariu leaves unsaid here is that even if the need to belong is ubiquitous, it’s also variable. The intensity of rejection and the harm it does depends on how close somebody was to you in the first place.

Zoom calls are the core of social interaction in remote work. They are similar to face to face interaction. But they are not the same. The difference between ‘similar’ and ‘the same’ is enough to harm us.

Face to face interaction is incredibly complex. Significant regions of our brain are dedicated to decode facial expressions. Our unconscious uses more cognitive power to decode body language and tone, than our conscious does to understand the words spoken. The consensus is that 70%-93% of communication is non-verbal.

Zoom calls cannot convey this non-verbal communication well. You see the participants faces on video, and hear their tone of voice. But it’s far from the richness of physical interaction.

Here’s something I can agree with, but again I don’t agree with the conclusion Mr. Rotariu reaches. Videoconferences are relatively new technology. When people could not meet in person before Zoom, they made do with email, phone calls, telegrams, or handwritten letters. Illiterate people of sufficient means would entrust their words to messengers, who would run or ride to the recipient to convey a message. If they ran far enough, fast enough, they might drop dead after delivering their news like that poor bastard Philippides, who ran from Marathon to Athens to get his Paul Revere on and say, “The Persians are coming!”

Mr. Rotariu seems to think that we should suffer through video during Zoom calls and burn outselves out trying to extract meaning from non-verbal cues made unnaturally noisy by Zoom’s algorithms and America’s crappy internet service providers. Why?

“This lack of information creates anxiety.”

In whom? For a lot of people even the uncompressed non-verbal information conveyed by face-to-face interaction is not a signal, but overwhelming noise. One need not be autistic to be exhausted by in-person interactions with people. One need not even be introverted, but I suppose it helps.

We evolved to continuously give and receive signals non-verbally. When you say something, you look at the other person’s expression. Are they nodding or frowning? Are they paying attention or thinking about something else? Scientists estimate 55% of communication is body language, and another 38% tone of voice.

Again with the we claims. First, I don’t believe we evolved to continuously give and receive non-verbal signals. Though I’m no more a biologist than Mr. Rotariu, I think that non-verbal communication is something homo sapiens inherited from our primate ancestors. I think that other primates communicate through gestures, facial expressions, and body language precisely because they cannot speak. Furthermore, I think that non-verbal communication in humans is unconscious, unintentional, and often irrelevant unless you’re playing poker and trying to determine if the guy who just went all in actually has a strong hand or is just bluffing.

Incidentally, the way to spot a liar isn’t to depend on body language or unconscious tells, but to question them and pay close attention to what they say. The more a liar talks, the harder it is for them to keep their story straight. If you give them enough rope, they’ll hang themselves.

We need this information to know if we are validated or not from the others.

This may be the case, but I think this raises a question Mr. Rotariu may not have thought to ask himself: why are you looking for validation from your coworkers, let alone your underlingsdirect reports? They’re here to do a job. It’s not their job to validate you just because you’re self-important enough to pontificate with a PowerPoint deck during a Zoom meeting that nobody actually wanted to attend in the first place.

In Zoom calls with video you get some of this feedback. You can see people’s expressions. You hear their tone of voice.

So what? It’s still useless, because it’s distorted. It’s not enough, and if you have enough people on the call, all with their cameras on, you no longer have a conversation, let alone a meeting. You have Babel. Nobody can understand anybody else because the technology just isn’t there yet. Staring at a screen full of thumbnail-sized videos is not a substitute for addressing an audience in person.

It is for this reason that people at my workplace turn off their cameras and mute their microphones unless they are speaking. If everybody on a call has their mic active, you get echoes. If everybody on a call has their camera active, the framerate drops into the single digit range and you might as well just be staring at something like this:

How people at NERV do Zoom calls
How people at NERV do Zoom calls

Sure, SEELE in Neon Genesis Evangelion was a shadowy conspiracy, but I suspect that even NERV — an organization capable of creating strong AI and giant suits of powered armor — couldn’t come up with a video streaming algorithm that didn’t make videoconferencing an unpleasant experience.

If it can’t be done in science fiction, do you really think it’s gonna work in real life, especially when real-life technology tends to work more like this?

clip from Spaceballs (1987) courtesy of Giphy

If you take away video, too little information remains and your Paleo Robot feels anxious

My “Paleo Robot”? Is this guy serious? This reminds me of when my wife was listening to the audiobooks of E. L. James’ Fifty Shades novels and the protagonist/narrator mentioned her “inner goddess” in what felt like every other paragraph.

Mr. Rotariu needs to learn to speak for himself. He might find the lack of video nerve-wracking, but I don’t. I think it’s just one less distraction.

You have some tone of voice, but it’s incomplete. You are missing out on most of communication. This makes your monkey brain anxious. You don’t know if you are being rejected or validated. This uncertainty remains almost regardless of what the other participants say. We evolved to seek out validation from non-verbal communication.

I’m going to tell you something personal. My spouse and I were in a long-distance relationship before we got married. We kept it going over four years using emails, instant messages, and phone calls. We only had the chance to meet once, for about a week. When we talked on the phone, I didn’t feel this anxiety Mr. Rotariu keeps going on about. I could tell I was being validated because she was there, talking to me when she could have been doing any of a dozen other things. My “monkey brain” wasn’t anxious. My monkey brain wanted her there with me, instead of on the other side of the demon-ridden planet, so I could feel her lips and breath on my ear as she whispered into it. I wanted to bury my face in her hair, and I wanted kiss her senseless.

Now there is some non-verbal communication for you. Zoom can’t convey touch, smell, or taste.

Our need for social belonging is almost as strong as our need for food and shelter.

I agree, which is why I think social needs are too important to try to fulfill at work. I’ve seen people try to get their emotional needs met at work. Once they get laid off or fired, they’re a complete mess. The coworkers they mistook for friends forget about them within a week. Hell, you can drop dead of a heart attack in some workplaces and people will just sidestep your corpse for twenty minutes or so.

Besides, I’m not in the office for your sake. It’s not my job to validate you or soothe your anxious monkey brain. That kind of emotional labor isn’t in my job description as a software developer and I’m not getting paid extra to do it, and I don’t think I’m the only one who resents the expectation that I should give a damn about your feelings when you probably don’t give a damn about mine.

Humans in the Stone Age died if they were exiled. Our unconscious evolved to prioritize social validation above everything else.

I think I already addressed this. We don’t live in the Paleolithic any longer. We’re about this close to having a post-scarcity society, and we probably could have gotten there already if our elites (and their bootlickers) weren’t hellbent on treating the economy as a pay-to-win live-action MMORPG where money is used to keep score and whoever dies with the most toys wins.

When people don’t need other people to survive, they become a lot more selective in who they allow into their lives. It’s one reason why many young men are dateless; women have options nowadays, don’t necessarily need men, and aren’t going to settle for a relationship (let alone marriage) to man whose company they don’t enjoy.

If you don’t have video, then you lack this social validation.

External validation is a trap. If you grow too dependent on what others think of you and how they feel about you, you risk becoming a doormat or a tyrant. You may bend over backwards for others, trying to please them so that they’ll love you, or seek power over them so that they have no choice but to please you.

Instead, I prefer to cultivate an old-fashioned virtue called self-reliance. Rather than needing people, I would prefer to be able to enjoy their company without being dependent on them.

You might have the best presentation in the world. It will feel like a failure.

Your presentation doesn’t feel like a failure. It is a failure. I refuse to believe I’m the only one who loathes PowerPoint. Chances are you could do a better job of conveying the information you need to impart to your coworkers by writing a memo, sending it out before the meeting, and then discussing it. Some of us can read faster than you can talk, especially if you’re the sort who talks too much and says too little.

Better yet, just send the memo and skip the meeting. Are you here to do a job, or to get your ego stroked?

“One camera off leads to everyone turning the camera off”

What the hell is this crap? People turn off their cameras because they don’t want to be on camera. Chances are they don’t even want to be in the meeting in the first place.

Hasn’t Mr. Rotariu ever heard of Occam’s Razor?

“No video makes you disengaged which leads to multitasking”

Again, what the hell is this crap? I can have video on and still not be engaged. I have a lot of experience in looking like I give a shit about what somebody is saying even though my mind is elsewhere. It’s one of the few useful skills I learned in K-12 education.

Of course I’m going to try to work through a “meeting” that is just some self-important schmuck with a PowerPoint deck delivering a half-assed lecture. After all, the information that actually matters is in the deck, and if the person who called the meeting had the basic human decency to email the deck in advance then I’ve already read it and know most of what I need to know. I’m only really there on the off-chance that the person who called the meeting has some additional insight to convey that they didn’t think to include in the deck.

This has happened exactly once in my twenty-plus-year career as a full-stack thaumaturge. Hardly an impressive record.

Context switching is one of the most tiring activities for your mind. When you turn camera off, you put yourself in the position to context switch, which then makes you tired and stressed.

Yes, which is why I try to decline as many meetings as possible in the first place. If it’s just some suit yakking in a vain search for external validation, then it’s just a distraction from the work I’m actually getting paid to do.

My workplace doesn’t bill clients for time I spend in unrelated meetings, which means that for every hour I spend in a meeting that isn’t germane to my assigned project, I need to work an hour of unpaid overtime to compensate and meet utilization targets.

I have no incentive whatsoever to work unpaid overtime. Since I’m paid a salary instead of an hourly wage, working more than 40 hours a week means the amount of money I make per hour goes down for every hour over 40 I put in. I might not be the mathematician Mr. Rotariu is, but even I know when I’m getting shafted.

Solution: insist that everyone keep the camera on all the time

I have a better idea — or, rather, I have three better ideas:

  1. Learn to write effectively.
  2. Learn to stroke your own ego.
  3. Learn to respect other people’s time.

There is no such thing as a “necessary Zoom call”. You might think your Zoom call is necessary, but so does everybody else competing for my attention.

If I wanted to watch jittery, constantly-buffering video of some self-important white dude pontificating there is a surfeit of alt-right propaganda on YouTube.

PS: If you try to use my dislike of Zoom to force me to return to the office, you’ll have my letter of resignation by the end of the business day. I don’t give a damn who you are; you’re not such a great boss that I can’t replace you before my fuck-you money runs out.