This essay combines the experiences of teachers and students* in the turn to ‘blended learning’ during the Covid-19 pandemic, to build prefatory theories of new, emergent phenomena—from the exhaustion produced by constant ‘self-gazing’ and its role in ‘zoom fatigue’, to the anxieties and oppressions of the dominant interfaces (The Tyranny of the Rectangle) and their consequential resistance techniques (Camera On, Or Camera Off: That is the Question). Through anecdotes and personal accounts, we will enter a founding critique and examination that aims to walk these interactions and isolations with both compassion and criticality, towards a counter-politics reliant on exposure, as well as poesis. A counter-politics that finds and forms itself in the aural rather than the visual (Intimacy Out of the Void), one that is most present (and most potent) in the ‘awkward moments’ of lags, lapses, glitches, bandwidth failures and frozen frames (In Praise of Awkwardness).