contact made real is contact made unbearable · S3
you were actually commanding not one bit more attention than you were paying, here. The whole attention business was monstrously stressful, video callers found.
Context
The moment video made attention symmetric, connection collapsed: seeing your interfacee idly strip a shoelace while you talked shattered the fantasy that you commanded a focus you did not have to return, and the exposure of the truth, that you were getting exactly as much as you gave, was not a relief but "monstrously stressful." Genuine reciprocity turns out to be the thing the whole apparatus exists to avoid; the instant nobody could pretend, nobody could stand it.