In the space of a few minutes, on a prerecorded
video filmed thousands of miles from where
it was shown, the tech-savvy president of El
Salvador captured the two strikingly different
sides of this year’s unprecedented — and virtual
— “gathering” of world leaders “at” the U.N.
General Assembly in 2020.
On one hand, Nayib Bukele said, humanity
holds in its smartphone-clutching hands a
21st-century miracle: “In a world which is
almost completely connected, I can say a few
words here and be heard in the farthest corners
of the world.”
And yet, in the same speech Tuesday, he raised
this ever-present doubt: When the people who
govern the world were delivering sequestered
addresses to the United Nations this past week,
was anybody actually listening? “If you don’t
believe me,” he said, “ask the first person you see.”
So goes the planet. And so too, it seems, goes
the United Nations.
The same dissonance that technology hands
us in our daily lives — closer but farther apart,
more intimate yet somehow colder — revealed
to a COVID-era world over the past week that
even the people who collectively govern all of us
can’t necessarily transcend the pixels and bits of
data that have become foundational to the way
human civilization operates.
“It is obvious that technology is the future,” said
the president of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo. “How
else would we all have maintained a semblance
of keeping in touch in the past six months, but
for technology?”
He’s not wrong. And yet.