Resisting the all-consuming machine

All I want today is to not be an avatar. Is that so much to ask?

My building is quiet and empty this morning, even moreso than usual, and I've got a little time on my hands so I decide to pop in on All Scholars Week.

Now I love All Scholars Day--the day each spring semester devoted to celebrating students' research and creative work, when classes are cancelled so we can attend poster sessions or oral presentations or art shows and see all the neat stuff our students have been doing. Normally, All Scholars Day is my favorite day of the spring semester, and I generally offer extra credit to my own students if they attend sessions and write about them.

But this year is different, because of course it is--Covid-19 couldn't keep its nasty dirty claws off of All Scholars Day, which can't be held in person because of the need for social distancing and so has been spread out over an entire week and moved entirely online.

Fine, whatever, we've been doing things online all year so I ought to be able to handle an online poster session, so I go to the link, which is not Zoom but an entirely different site that requires me to create an account, just one more in a long line of online accounts with so many different passwords that I've lost hope of ever remembering any of them, and then I think all I have to do is click on the name of the poster session and I'll be able to view whatever wonderful things my students have been doing.

But no. I have to allow the program access to my computer's camera and microphone and I have to create an avatar. After a year in which all the joy of teaching has been eaten alive by horrible Zoom meetings, this just feels like too much.

I don't want to create another password and start another account, and I really don't want to give another program access to my microphone and camera, and I can't even begin to express the loathing I feel for the concept of becoming an avatar.

I heard a respected colleague talking about how neat this system is--You get to make a little avatar and everything--and I realized that I come from a whole different planet from people who think it's cool to exist online in avatar form. I don't even want to exist online in picture form--I hate being photographed, I hate seeing my own face on Zoom, I get sick to my stomach when I sense the presence of video cameras, and I nearly puked while reading an article in a recent New Yorker that casually mentioned the presence of surveillance cameras in certain public rest rooms in China that allow the Powers That Be to make sure people don't use too much toilet paper. Video surveillance of toilet-paper use is the kind of nightmare that makes me want to assume the fetal position in a dark closet and not come out until--well, ever.

I don't want to be on camera today. In fact, I don't want to spend one more millisecond swallowed up by the technology that has poisoned this entire year of teaching. I don't want to give any more programs permission to access my microphone and camera. And I don't want to transform myself into some cutesy, smiley, Disneyfied cartoon.

(But what if they offer avatars that look like cranky  middle-aged curmudgeons? Don't tempt me...)  

So just for today I'm opting out of All Scholars Week. Maybe some yard work and a good night's sleep will make me more willing to step inside the all-consuming machine, but right now I can't even rationally explain why I find the concept so repellent. Let the avatars go play online all they want; I prefer to mow the lawn.