What Comes After Zoom?

I feel video conferencing is a sidetrack. It is an approximation of a physical meeting that never captures the spirit of the real thing and prevents us from moving on to something better. The real power of digital communication is that it is searchable, remixable and that you don’t need to be at a specific place at a specific time to take part, and yet we now all have slots in our calendar requiring us to be in something that…

The thing is Skype had video calling but it didn’t have the “Hollywood squares” experience. Watching these things come and go over a long period of time the baseline scenario is a low-grade of “enshittification” in that there is a lot of expensive and boring detail work to keep the experience low friction and no vendor seems to want to do this work once it has gotten established — So inevitably it becomes a matter of “it just doesn’t work”…