Thread by @touchfaith

quick thread on why i stopped using my university-licensed zoom account.

first, frankly, just bite the bullet and take eight minutes to watch this video, which was uploaded BY ZOOM ITSELF, which shows you the information an organization's—for instance, your university's—administrators have access to via zoom. /2

here are the features that ZOOM ITSELF advertises to organizations

1) immediate access to view "a snapshot in real time" of whatever is occurring.

2) analytics capable of quickly RANKing users based on various categories of use (number of meetings, users, etc.

3) analytics that show where people are logging into an org's zoom meetings from by location, with information about phone numbers, IP addresses, type of device logged in from, operating system, etc.

4) info about the quality/bitrate/features being used by users

5) admin tools that allow administrators to view any meeting currently going on under the org's license, as well as to LOG DIRECTLY INTO ANY MEETING BEING CONDUCTED. (it's not clear whether admins logging in makes them visible or not)

6) various ways of categorizing & analyzing users intended to scrutinize and evaluate workers' performance.

7) the general presentation of surveillance, ranking, competition, and information accumulation as positive features of the product not just for IT but for executives.

my university has a zoom license that makes zoom easy to access via my university e-mail. if you download zoom, you don't even need to make an account! you just sign in with google, then click your university e-mail address, which is integrated w/google, and you're signed in.

it all seems easy and automatic, and that's kinda the point. the seamless integration makes it quite easy to turn zoom into a means of funneling data so that you don't imagine that you're using university infrastructure when having a face-to-face meeting.

part of the point of zoom is to allow you to conduct business in such a way that the university infrastructure appears to become inessential to its operations, so that homes and cafes and cubicles and cars and the movements between become labor-extractive spaces.

the point of the tech is to make it so that crises are less disruptive to the extraction of labor power. so that we know to expect work to continue unabated through crisis even as our employers and institutions ensure us that they're looking out for our collective wellbeing.

with zoom's support, universities see COVID-19 the same way they do a picket line: as an obstacle that, if properly worked around, turns habits used to navigate crisis into opportunities for remaking the texture of the normal. as with the picket, they turn to enhanced policing.

your university's zoom license, & the accounts attached to it, are designed to funnel affirmation to its admin that their experiment's working. that and future leverage against labor. if orgs, depts and classes meet through it, we risk giving them a direct means of surveilling us

and in spite of this all, zoom remains a resource for building movements and nourishing sociality. my provisional strategy, using the fact that i can afford to pay for a zoom acct to hold open space in this crisis moment, tho? it is not going to solve any of these problems.

what it CAN potentially do is some harm reduction work. it can stop the accumulation of data that enable surveillance and offer university administrations confidence that disaster can extend the reach of their authority, that work will continue as usual.

it can lessen confidence that the sociality of the university must be conducted under the watchful eye of managm't. perhaps it could be a site to build, in this fucked-up moment, new experiments in interdependency, & with them a better sense of the power that's ours to wield.