Seeing Voices
People try to forget the pandemic but it’s important to remember the weird things that happened, like the craze for digital seances. A few teams at work tried it, a zoom call by candlelight, playing a recording meant to summon spirits. The first I knew of this was when the support tickets started arriving. Company zoom meetings were disrupted by whispering. The social media team begged for help because every photo ever taken of company events showed a sombre old man in the background. The Digital Sales Director heard screams and sobbing over the top of his calls and had gone two weeks without a sale for the first time in his career. Two PAs woke to find their computer mice hanging from their bedroom light fittings in nooses.
Everyone has heard stories like these - with so many people saying their last words on video calls and dying over iPads, trying to contact ghosts on zoom was a fucking stupid idea. Dell refused to repair or replace the tainted laptops, and our company spent tens of thousands of pounds on new equipment. This wasn’t even the weirdest thing I’ve heard of from the pandemic - but everyone carries on as if we weren’t locked all inside our homes going mad. As soon as that first lockdown ended, we pretended that everything had always been fine.
Background
I was sure I’d already shared this one on the list, but apparently not - I only shared the audio on my blog a couple of months before this list started.
The idea of zoom seances also appears in Rob Savage’s pandemic horror movie Host. This is a truly impressive horror movie, filmed via zoom under covid regulations, with live special effects. I didn’t write this with Host in mind, and I think this story does something very different with the concept.
That last line is something I’ve struggled with for years: how much about the pandemic has been suppressed rather than discussed. But, understandably, people aren’t eager to think back to that era.
I have a lot of strong opinions about covid and what happened back then. I’m probably better writing stories than long political screeds.
Love it! Especially that last line. So true. And at the time it felt as though we'd never forget it. But we're so good at forgetting. Witness yet another genocide in plain sight by the same people who suffered one within living memory.
The odd thing was James, after reading John Dee and the ideal that political decisions could be made b6 a meeting of minds set in different places, (without technology) for example politicians in say Rome and Germany could commune without physically meeting.
Then an odd thing happened to me, Hunter S Thompson died, I had a flash sideways glance of a ghost in my writing chair one night by candlelight, it looked like Hunter, he then jumped into the modem.
So you never know, disembodied ghosts may be in the fibre of the Internet. already.