Let’s hope your boss isn’t reading this.
A Brooklyn developer and artist has created a digital tool called the Zoom Escaper, which allows users to get out of boring work-related video calls.
“Zoom Escaper is a tool to help you escape Zoom meetings and other telecommunications scenarios”, creator Sam Lavigne wrote on Twitter on Monday, launch of the project. “It allows you to sabotage your audio broadcast, making your presence unbearable for others.”
Among other things, it mimics digital interference and disturbing outside noise.
And it has touched the participants of the meeting: the ad has more than 3,000 likes.
The digital destroyer is the perfect antidote to Zoom’s fatigue, a term for the overwhelming feelings of deflation and exhaustion caused by a year of working and learning remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“At Zoom, the behavior normally reserved for intimate relationships – like long periods of staring and faces close up – has suddenly become the way we interact with casual acquaintances, coworkers and even strangers,” wrote Jeremy N. Bailenson , in an article he recently published about the new phenomenon in the magazine Technology, Mind and Behavior.
Despite its name, Zoom Escaper can be used “in any program that uses your microphone”, including Google Meet, Lavigne said.
Users can download the program at ZoomEscaper.com for free. Lavigne has detailed instructions for use available there.
The effects include technical difficulties, such as delays, echoes and unstable audio. They also include some external interference, such as the sounds of a man crying, a strong wind blowing, a baby crying, constructions and barking of dogs.
You can also upload your own disturbing sounds to the website.
Just be sure to test it out with a friend before trying to escape a business call: users cannot hear the sound effects during a meeting – only the other participants.