Zooming the Demos: A Pandemic Update
Imagine assembling at work like this: You are ushered into a soundproof booth with a window on one side. In front of you is a stage, where one or more speakers are present. Thanks to a loudspeaker in your booth you can hear what the people on stage are saying, but you cannot respond in kind. Around you are an indeterminate number of other booths like yours, with other attendees like you, but you cannot see them, talk to them, or have any other way of knowing who else might be attending this event or knowing what their reactions are. You have a device in your booth that allows you to send messages via text, but only to one of the speakers on stage, who can opt to respond to your query or not. Nobody other than the people on stage can see your question. Your name is on the front of your booth, but you cannot change this name during this event, and none of your fellow attendees can see you are at this meeting. This array of black boxes with people inside being addressed by a power they cannot speak back to sounds like dystopian science fiction—perhaps a refinement of Orwell’s telescreens from 1984, with some elements of The Matrix added for good measure. This scenario is also an effort to imagine what it would look like to recreate a Zoom town hall meeting in an embodied space.
I published the original version of this Forerunner as Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation in Fall 2019. I was grateful for the opportunity to register my concern about a growing disjunction between the ideals of the town meeting as an actual deliberative form and the various corporate, political, and academic performances I saw sailing under the colors of the “town hall meeting,” which appropriated the quaint aesthetics of the town meeting but dispensed with actual democratic political agency. I put another writing project on hold to focus on writing this Forerunner in winter 2018, because I wanted to share my concerns about the harm caused by this mutation of the town hall meeting that I saw leading up to the momentous U.S. election of 2020. The blurb on the original edition refers to a concern about the “erosion of democratic norms.”
Two things I did not anticipate that fall were the imminent global pandemic that would soon change pretty much everything about our lives, especially what it meant to be in public or be a public. The other was an attempted coup on January 6, 2021, which made my concern about the “erosion of democratic norms” seem quaint and archaic. There is no shortage of reflections on or analyses of the attempted coup d’etat that Trump supporters perpetrated. At the same time, the ongoing degradation of public discourse related to the Covid-19 pandemic warrants some consideration of its own.
The abrupt move of many embodied events to Zoom has a variety of effects. This added chapter aims to detail the ways that Institutions can use Zoom to quash the democratic power of a crowd. It also builds on these specific concerns to offer some thoughts on how ideas about embodiment and civility intersect with contemporary thinking about the ways democracy does or does not work. For better or worse, Zoom has become a major part of U.S. culture during the Covid pandemic as classes, work meetings, and even happy hours have transitioned to the Zoom meeting platform. Without Zoom and technologies like it, the pandemic would have been very different. All of my class meetings in the 2020–21 academic year occurred on Zoom, and it’s hard to imagine what a synchronous online class would have looked like even a few years ago, before teleconferencing was both fairly accessible and fairly robust. For all of the many limitations of Zoom school, it permitted a level of educational continuity. Outside of academia, the new possibilities of remote work have even created so-called Zoom Towns, or rural communities suddenly flooded with telecommuters.1 The inclination to spend free time on Zoom varies widely, but anecdotally there are groups of friends and families who are in better touch than they were pre-pandemic because of scheduled Zoom gatherings.
All the above applications of Zoom are Zoom meetings, or what most of us probably think of as just Zoom. There are, as of December 2021, two distinct services Zoom offers—the Zoom meeting, familiar from professional, pedagogical, and social contexts, and the Zoom webinar, a premium service available at an additional fee. If you have encountered a Zoom webinar, it was likely a large work meeting, or a digital alternative to an in-person public event, such as a lecture or town hall meeting. More generally, a Zoom meeting is essentially private—limited to a preselected group of participants—a class, a family, or a group of coworkers. The Zoom webinar is akin to a public gathering, but one held in a private digital space. Typically, anyone can register and attend, usually by following a link from an announcement sent to some larger group of people. At the same time, you cannot really say that a group assembles for a Zoom webinar, because there is no way for attendees to see or hear one another absent the mediation of the Zoom host or panelists. Discursively speaking, the effect is something like the scene from The Matrix, where we see arrays of bodies, enclosed in pods, connected to a central armature but unaware of one another’s presence.
Over the long term, the Zoom webinar could replace many of the kinds of deliberative spaces we previously took for granted because they can work better than face-to-face meetings for the people who convene them. Many elected officials have moved to “Zoom town halls,” as have the leaders of colleges and universities. A defining characteristic of these events is their lack of newsworthiness. The various accounts of raucous town hall meetings I discussed earlier exist because journalists covered these events and reported on what happened there. The Zoom town hall meeting builds on the model of the meeting that could have been an email by offering a meeting that is the staged reading of a press release. At the risk of resorting to a declension narrative, the Zoom town hall meeting compounds the problems of the embodied town hall meeting and marks another step away from being part of the contested and contingent processes of democracy and toward a more autocratic future.
Unsurprisingly, CEOs have also taken advantage of the so-called Zoom town hall. In one recent and notorious instance, Vishal Garg, CEO of Better.com, summoned some two hundred employees to a virtual town hall and unceremoniously fired them in a meeting that lasted approximately three minutes.2 Better.com’s case is an extreme one, but it does point out the advantages of this format to bosses for delivering unhappy news. As CNN points out, it was a one-way webinar, and one imagines that a CEO would feel considerably safer and more comfortable delivering this kind of news in this manner, rather than in a face-to-face meeting space.
“Chat Has Been Disabled”: Deliberative Discourse in the Age of Zoom
Like Facebook and Twitter before it, Zoom has attained the dubious distinction of a privately owned business that operates in ways that are tantamount to a public utility. The issues that have ensued from this ambiguous status are well documented for these two social media giants, while the issues with Zoom are perhaps subtler. Zoom is a telecommunications software product that launched in 2011, and then saw demand for its service spike in early 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced people to communicate remotely. In April 2020, there were more than 300 million daily Zoom meeting participants, a thirty-fold increase over pre-pandemic usage.3
Their appearance is similar, but Zoom offers two distinct products, the Zoom Meeting and the Zoom Webinar. The differences are critical to understanding what is happening to public discourse during this pandemic, and what may continue to shape public discourse when we have decided the pandemic is over. Even for those lucky enough to escape the health impacts of Covid, the pandemic brought many of us a large number of changes very suddenly. The sudden ubiquity of the Zoom interface for so many of our interactions may have made it more difficult for users to be attuned to the difference between Zoom meetings and Zoom webinars.
Zoom’s webinar product debuted in August 2014, and Zoom’s own support documents offer a clear view of the differences.4 A document titled “Meetings versus Webinars” spells them out. “Zoom meetings are ideal for hosting more interactive sessions where you’ll want to have lots of audience participation or break your session into smaller groups.” On the other, we are asked to “Think of webinars like a virtual lecture hall or auditorium. Webinars are ideal for large audiences or events that are open to the public. Typically, webinar attendees do not interact with one another. Though Zoom provides options for you to get more social with your attendees, your average webinar has one or a few people speaking to an audience.” The table continues to detail that the webinar is best used for “Large events and public broadcasts (50+ attendees)” such as “Town halls, Quarterly updates, [and] Educational lectures,” and typically used by “event hosts and SVPs and C-Suite.”
Zoom’s suggestion that the webinar is good for town halls suggests what it understands its clients want from a town hall meeting. As my own employer’s Zoom documentation details, the webinar allows hosts to “further limit participant communication capabilities.”5 The Zoom webinar does this by adding a layer to the hierarchy that exists for Zoom meetings. In place of the host/participant distinction familiar from Zoom meetings, the Zoom webinar offers roles of Host/Panelist/Attendee. In the Zoom meeting, everyone present can unmute their own audio; in the Zoom webinar, only the hosts and panelists can unmute themselves, and the host has the additional power to unmute/mute attendees as they see fit. Theoretically, one can boot unruly guests out of a Zoom meeting, but the software defaults to a much more expansive presence and opportunities for participation. Notably, the Zoom webinar allows the host to disable the chat function, which allows attendees to communicate with other attendees by sending messages to selected individuals or to all other attendees.
Larger Zoom meetings can be unwieldy, when one has to scroll from screen to screen to see all of the attendees, but in a Zoom webinar, neither the faces nor the names of any participants are visible to attendees. The constraints built into Zoom webinars offer other ways to make the experience different from that of attending a Zoom meeting. As Zoom’s documentation puts it, “As the host, you can choose who the participants can chat with or to disable chat entirely.”6 In the same vein, in place of the various emoji-style meeting reactions available in Zoom meetings, in the webinar, participants can only raise their hands. If you have not experienced them, these distinctions may seem like quibbles over a user interface, but in practice it can be very disconcerting to be a Zoom webinar attendee if you are used to the affordances of the Zoom meeting. In the 1980s, stories circulated about how some Japanese companies would hire Yakuza members to attend their shareholder meetings and ensure that shareholders did not speak out of turn or become unruly. For an organization in 2021, one appeal of Zoom Webinars is that there are no Yakuza required.
In Jürgen Habermas’s famous theorization of the public sphere—“the bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public,” the phrase “come together” generally attracts less attention than other parts of this idea, but the Zoom webinar prevents publics from gathering in any meaningful sense.7 It would probably be a tough sell, but one could make the case that an elected official continuing to communicate with their constituents through a Zoom webinar once the threat of Covid is past is infringing on those citizens’ rights, as detailed in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” I would contend that a group of citizens participating in a “town hall” on a Zoom webinar are not assembled, any more than you can say that everyone watching a particular episode of The Bachelor is meaningfully assembled. The experience is unilateral and passive, rather than active and engaged. These kinds of virtual events are a necessary response to the unique threats of Covid, but it’s easy to imagine they may remain the norm indefinitely. This chapter treats the ways that events moving from real to virtual spaces because of Covid has changed the nature of those events. Considering these effects raises the question of whether some of these events will continue in their new, virtual form. I will offer these speculations with the proviso that “back to normal” is a deeply contested idea and is a status many of us may never attain.
It is worth noting that the word virtual has become so commonplace during the pandemic that its ubiquity makes it, well, virtually invisible. The pandemic appears to have changed the contours of what the word means. In the twentieth century, “virtual” meant something close to “almost”—“it is a virtual certainty that Walter Mondale will not win the presidential election,” for instance. More to the point, “the (vegan) Impossible Burger is virtually indistinguishable from ground beef.”
When the technology emerged in the 1970s, the phrase “virtual reality” emerged to describe the way that the experience of wearing a screen on your face could feel more immersive than staring at a screen on your desk, and as such almost reality. As it developed, the word virtual came to mean not so much computer experiences that felt like real life as it did an embodied experience that has been shifted to one mediated by a computer interface. The lingering sense of “virtual” as “almost the same” combined with its sense as “mediated by a computer” during the pandemic. If you are reading this, it is a virtual certainty that some film festival, half marathon, academic conference, class reunion, gala, or other traditionally embodied event’s representatives contacted you and informed you that the event “is going virtual.” Or worse, “is going virtual!”
What this means in practice is “we, who are in charge of this this event, which you had hoped to attend in person, is scrambling to offer some version of what it usually is and does, subject to the constraint that we cannot gather in person.” Covid made these alternate plans necessary, but the pandemic did not guarantee that these alternatives would be successful. At worst, a virtual iteration of an event intended to be live can leave participants more bereft than if the event had simply been canceled altogether. As such, the word virtual carries with it the waft of a broken promise, or a lie agreed upon—this thing that is presented as being almost as good at the real thing turns out to be no good at all. A virtual town hall meeting with affordances for the messy potentialities of a real town hall meeting would be something to witness, but as it stands, the realities of virtual technology fall far short of this standard, which may or may not be part of the intent.
On Zoom, No One Can Hear You Boo
For all the limitations of the embodied town hall meetings I discuss in various contexts in the first part of this book, these occasions do at least offer their constituents a chance to assemble, to see who is present, how they react, and, for lack of a better word, to mill around, and even gather with friends to conduct a postmortem of the meeting that just took place. These reflections on the problems with disembodied events like a Zoom webinar also reveal aspects of the embodied aspects of democracy that we might have taken for granted. As many have pointed out, one of the major affordances of Zoom is that it enables access to many kinds of events to people who would have been unable to travel to their face-to-face iterations. A business meeting for an organization that happens on a Zoom webinar is more accessible than the in-person iteration of that meeting, but it offers access to something that is not the same as the in-person iteration. We are accustomed to the idea that access and democracy go together, but the challenges of the pandemic have shown some significant fissures in that alliance.
A future where events are both accessible and democratic is hard to imagine in late 2021, but the idea that working from home would become a norm was hard to imagine in late 2019, so we can hope for better platforms and institutions and individuals with the courage to abandon the protections of the Zoom webinar. All of this is to say that, in democracy, embodiment matters, and it matters more than I realized in the pre-Covid times when I wrote Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation. The access afforded by Zoom webinars is better than nothing, but an acute attention to what it is, and what it is not, will be crucial in the years ahead. Virtual access is a boon for many, but there are contexts where there is no substitute for an embodied presence. Bodies have the potential to be unruly, or more specifically, bodies cannot be moderated away invisibly and silently in the way a virtual presence can. Indeed, disability activists have made some of the most powerful demonstrations of the distinct power of embodied protests. Famously, in 1990, as Congress debated the Americans with Disabilities Act, a group of activists staged the “Capitol Crawl,” where a group of sixty citizens with disabilities abandoned their mobility aids and crawled up the capitol steps. In part because of this protest, Congress passed the ADA.8
Moments like this emphasize the role that bodies, even if they do not have formal standing, can have an impact on the outcome of deliberations, and these moments are very difficult to conceive happening in a digital space effectively owned by the entity in power. By way of illustration, consider Jeannie C. Riley’s 1968 hit, “Harper Valley PTA.” Written by Tom T. Hall, the song tells the story of a single mother who moves to a small town. Her daughter brings her a note from the PTA criticizing her short skirts and active social life. The mother, a non–PTA member, simply shows up at the next PTA meeting and announces that she would like to address the members of the Harper Valley PTA. Her address points out that the PTA members, themselves, have many moral shortcomings, ranging from alcohol abuse to infidelity. She concludes by saying that “this is just another Peyton Place, and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites.” The daughter, who narrates the song, describes this as how her mom “socked it to the Harper Valley PTA.”9 If this PTA meeting had taken place on Zoom, this mother would not have been able to address the members of the Harper Valley PTA as she does in person, because on Zoom a member of the audience cannot simply stand up and speak.
To put it another way, the performances that Lauren Berlant calls “diva citizenship” are easy to prevent in Zoom webinars. In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant describes diva citizenship as “a moment of emergence that marks unrealized potentials for subaltern political activity.” “Diva Citizenship,” Berlant continues, “occurs when a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege. Flashing up and startling the public, she puts the dominant story into suspended animation; as though recording an estranging voice-over for a film we have all already seen.”10 The cases from Berlant’s 1997 book are Anita Hill, Harriet Jacobs, and the fictional Iola Leroy, but we can see more recent examples, notably with Bree Newsome’s audacious removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State House in 2015.
Diva citizenship also points to a larger question about how various kinds of public spectacle can be managed by those in power. The famous scene of the botched execution of Damiens that opens Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, when a poorly managed spectacle of public execution “turned the legal violence of the executioner into shame.”11 Absent a technical problem that shuts the whole thing down, it’s hard to botch a Zoom town hall as badly as Damiens’s executioners botched their event. Even when the stakes are lower, it’s not hard for this kind of inversion to happen. A moment in the third season of the popular HBO series Succession speaks to this volatile potential present even in the most corporate town hall meeting. As new president of domestic operations for Waystar Royko, a family-controlled media conglomerate modeled on Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Shiv Roy holds a town hall meeting in the atrium of their corporate office tower. At this moment in the program, Waystar is struggling to deal with allegations of sexual assault and harassment at its properties. As the name of the program suggests, the central issue of Succession is which child, if any, will take over for the patriarch/CEO. Kendall Roy, a rival sibling to Shiv, disrupts the meeting by blasting Nirvana’s 1993 song “Rape Me” on a portable speaker. Shiv, humiliated, retreats from her podium, her remarks undelivered. Had Shiv convened a Zoom webinar instead, Kendall would have no way to play Nirvana at the assembled Waystar employees.
Attending many virtual events during the pandemic has caused me to realize some of what I had failed to understand about the value of even the corniest live town hall meeting, which is the presence of an assembled and embodied audience. One of the hallmarks of the constituent service town meetings that I discuss is that they are frequently “raucous.” To choose an example close to home, when Senator Lindsey Graham held a town hall meeting on the campus where I work, people showed up, and they jeered him. This protest did not cause a change of heart for Senator Graham on any issue, but his opponents were visible and audible to the larger audience for the event. Even the most rigidly scripted in-person town hall meeting in business, government, or academia offers some opportunity for attendees to use their bodies to dissent, either through the means of the meeting or by being uncivil or unruly in some way. This space simply does not exist in a Zoom webinar. To paraphrase Alien, “on Zoom, nobody can hear you boo.” The result is that the space for the kind of unruly behavior that is crucial to democracy simply does not exist.
Acting Up
Coming up against the limitations of the Zoom webinar—either features or bugs, depending on your perspective—also sheds some light on the limitations of deliberative democracy as a space for social change. If history suggests that things change not because of motions and votes but because of crawling up stairs in Washington or boycotting buses in Birmingham, we return to the paradox that the health of democracy depends on things that are outside of its processes, and things that require an embodied presence. It is not an accident, perhaps, that one of the most prominent activist groups of the last half-century chose a name whose acronym is ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Their members’ actions, such as handcuffing themselves to a railing in the New York Stock Exchange to protest high AIDS prescription drug prices, depend explicitly on an embodied presence.
Bodies are tricky. So is civility. If politeness is a cousin of civility, it is worth noting, perhaps, that much of being polite consists of acting as if we do not have bodies. We wear deodorant, excuse ourselves to burp or fart, and the language and infrastructure around fucking, shitting, and pissing works to keep these universal activities as abstract as possible. Platforms like Zoom meetings or webinars, or Google spaces or Discord spaces, are online versions of what we might think of as discursive infrastructures. The stakes of these infrastructures are easier to see in the physical world. For example, consider a classroom with a Harkness table, a classroom with rows of tablet desks, and a lecture hall. Each of these spaces produces different discursive opportunities and discursive obstacles, which in turn produce a set of social norms that govern the space, more so than explicit rules.
Many kinds of live embodied events use physical spaces to indicate the roles of the people involved—beyond town hall meetings we have roundtables, plenary addresses, Speakers’ Corner, and so forth. The discursive space of the classroom in the opening minutes of The Blues Brothers, when Katheleen Freeman as Sister Mary Stigmata gives her charge from her desk as Jake and Elwood Blues struggle to fit into student tablet desks, is one familiar example of how powerfully furniture can communicate who has power and who does not.
In this regard, it is no surprise that the architects of digital discursive spaces have worked to create similar hierarchies. Simply put, Zoom webinars are a technology that amplifies the voices of those in power and silences those who are not in power. It would be difficult, though, to claim persuasively that this is a path that Zoom chose for its own ideological reasons. Online spaces with fewer constraints have consistently struggled with issues of harassment and disruption, as indicated by the furor over “Zoom bombing” in the early months of the pandemic. It is hard to imagine, however, that the only way to prevent harassment is to suppress public speech almost entirely, as the current iteration of the Zoom webinar does.
The various individuals I discuss in the earlier chapters of this book—politicians, CEOs, college presidents, and so forth, lead the same kinds of institutions that have responded to the challenges of this pandemic with a mixture of incompetence, cynicism, and incoherence. As such, the unilateral and undemocratic nature of the Zoom town hall meeting is a blessing in disguise for the people obliged to convene these gatherings. As we approach the third year of the pandemic, it is hard to say “the new normal” without laughing or weeping, but it is easy to imagine a future where Zoom town hall meetings remain a commonplace tool of people with something to fear from a genuinely democratic discourse.