The fact is, this U.N. General Assembly was a
Really Boring Meeting, kind of like preparing
dinner by opening a can of steak. Sure, all the
right ingredients were in there — the world’s
leaders, a deeply urgent slate of problems, a
global forum to hash them out. But it didn’t taste
right, and that wasn’t just because it was virtual.
Even an American online classroom, circa Fall
2020, is livelier.
What if, say, the world’s leaders had been
required — or even encouraged — to deliver
their speeches live via satellite hookup? What
if other leaders had been listening in real time?
What if they could have responded? Riskier,
yes, and potentially glitchier, but also more real.
Something that had just happened might have
been discussed. A loose, albeit very electronic,
relationship between speaker and audience
might have been possible.
As the prerecorded speeches droned on, even
the most interesting of leaders appeared kind of
two-dimensional. The biggest signs of life came
in the “right of reply” section, where nations that
don’t like each other very much — Armenia and
Azerbaijan, Iran and the United Arab Emirates,
India and Pakistan — sent up lower-level
diplomats to deliver often overheated responses
in real time.
Overheated isn’t always productive; Tuesday
night’s U.S. presidential debate showed that. But
the distance of technology created something
new even for the United Nations, an organization
known for its procedural, bureaucratic nature:
a meeting almost entirely free of the natural
energy generated when human beings charting
the future of their planet get together to talk.