Zoom Escaper helps you get out of boring video calls

Ever wished for an epic Zoom fail to get you out of an online meeting? Well, an app developer has come up with a nifty and rather devious solution to help people duck out of boring Zoom meetings.

Zoom Escaper is a free web app that allows you to sabotage your Zoom audio with excessive echo or a (fake) bad connection, or by adding sound effects of an upset baby, a man weeping, construction sounds, or dogs barking. Because it’s a web app, you don’t need to download Zoom Escaper, but you will need to download a free virtual audio cable to hook into Zoom.

According to an article by The Guardian, the widget was created by an artist named Sam Lavigne, who hoped Zoom Escaper would allow people to “use it to escape Zoom calls and do less work.”

“I’ve been thinking about how sabotage might work in a digital context, especially one where the means of production are also personal devices that mediate your social life,” he continued.

According to The Verge, Lavigne said he had worked on other projects with the ethos of what he calls “deliberate slowdown, reducing productivity and output, self-sabotage, etc.”

In 2017, he released “The Good Life,” which let people sign up to clog their inboxes with some 225,000 emails confiscated from Enron during its 2001 scandal. In 2016, he released another project called “Slow Hot Computer,” which was a website that made a computer – you guessed it – run slow and hot.

“Use it at work to decrease your productivity,” Lavigne told The Verge.

Lavigne has released a video tutorial on YouTube where you can learn how to set up Zoom Escaper and listen to samples of the available sound effects.

Read the original article on Insider