2020 — The Year Our Digital Spaces Became More Real Than our Physical Ones

A perfect storm of forces came together in 2020 to propel much of the world into a digital space that became more real than the physical ones.

Of course, the catalyst behind this phenomenon was and is the COVID-19 pandemic. It is and has been a worldwide, omnipresent, force that spurred remote learning for K-12 and college students, remote work for white collar workers, and friendships connected through fiber optic cables, satellite signals, high-definition pixels and bobbing heads rather than tables, fire pits, patios, and entertainment venues. It is perhaps the first time in human history where the world’s population had a global experience simultaneously.

We have certainly come close.

Hundreds of millions watch the World Cup, Olympic Games, and Super Bowl to glory at the limits of humanity’s physical potential (and ironically our exorbitant gluttony and escapism are included in that potential). Underground cables and ethereal satellite dishes bring the experience to households across the world at the same time. The advent of social media provided a relational element to human experience. Now global events are experienced in real-time with people across the world. Ads of the Super Bowl are instantly critiqued, praised and experienced not just on the initial level of seeing it on broadcast, but also in the reaction the world has many times over. Nip slips and left sharks become etched in human history (and perhaps our traumatic memories) simply because of the scale of these events.

Memes are generated within seconds, parody accounts are stood up across every imaginable platform, and a reference point in culture is established, only to be swept away by the next iteration, until perhaps it becomes just another ritual of our lives that simultaneously loses meaning through its repetition but also solidifies its meaning through repetition.

But COVID-19 has transcended any historical moment to date. It is even a word that has transcended its reference point altogether because of its omnipresence at a global scale. It is a word describing a disease, but ultimately it has nothing to do with epidemiology. It started as its own cultural phenomenon with jokes of Mexican beer and abbreviations about “the Rona” partnered with Stay-at-Home social media influencer campaigns. It then morphed into its own economic paradigm of WFH, empty streets, record unemployment claims and global brands telling us we are all in this together. It transformed again into a political discourse over the efficacy of masks, lockdowns, remote learning, and vaccines (just to name a few pressure points). And eventually, it has taken its final form as its own historical era.

It is as if we live in a new world, no longer marked by BCE and AD but marked by a fog of pre-COVID that I can’t ever quite grasp, and the era full of distorted time that we now live in that has been the past 10 months.

Through a disease that is spread through extended, close contact, it has transformed perhaps the greatest revelation of truth to mankind. That of our shared physical spaces.

You see, our shared physical space is the unseen bond that connects one another to reality. Our physical environment tethers us to foundational elements of truth. From the most ancient of times, our physical spaces not only provided enough meaning to categorize them (land vs. sea), name them (Colorado), personify them (ColoRADo), and sanctify them (Garden of the Gods), but they also provided a shared reference to truth. Our physical senses provide the backbone of all truth and reality. We can refute the fool who says Pikes Peak does not exist, simply because our tools of fact-finding collectively refute it. It is there with our eyes, it is there when the sun disappears behind the summit, and it is there with our trek up the rugged terrain to the top.

Our journey to knowledge begins with the physical space and the physical laws of nature. It begins with a child touching a hot stove, with gravity crunching our bones on a long fall, and as one man experiencing homelessness once said to me, “a wind so cold it whips at the very soul of a man.”

For the most part, our physical space is self-evident. It does not need analysis, debate or experimentation to determine its truthfulness. Only magicians can manipulate reality yet they too are only using laws of nature to get to that point.

Yet this is not the case for our digital spaces. Digital spaces are inherently created spaces, and lend themselves to curation, concealing, and manipulation. These spaces are merely shadows of reality. Yes, there are real people behind Facebook comments. Real places behind the megapixels of digital landscapes. Real events happening on livestreams.

But it is all through a medium that loses a shared reference point of truth. Nearly every photo on the Internet goes through some form of manipulation; it only changes in degree. Some apply an aesthetic filter. Some are cropped. And some are created and manufactured, exploiting reality with symbols and color theory and fantasy. Videos are cut to sound bites that lose context. News articles choose the scope of activity through what is reported and what is not, who is interviewed and who is not. And we all continue to clone — or perhaps fragment — ourselves over and over again with selfies, stories and unverifiable posts.

In 2020, for the first time in our lives, our digital spaces became more important than our physical ones. We now experience life online. Whether that is our learning, our work, our current events, our entertainment, our relationships, our banking, or our shopping, our human experience is primarily dictated by and conducted through screens.

E-commerce experienced 10 years of growth in less than two months. Social media platforms and streaming services saw record numbers of users and subscribers. And Zoom, Teams, Hangout, Skype and WebEx are just as familiar interfaces as Messages, Phone, and Photos.

However, within those screens and those worlds we are transported to, we lose track of all shared references of truth. There are no self-evident features of the Internet. You can now find a YouTube video, a news article, and fellow zealots, revolutionaries, dissenters, doubters, and evangels on the Internet, with completely made-up realities that have no grounding in the physical world.

It is no coincidence QAnon, an entirely digital conspiracy theory, broke into the public conscience in 2020 after living on the fringes of the Internet. Or that an American election has quite literally almost been toppled by unverifiable evidence of voter fraud through doctored videos, context, graphics, maps, and memes. Or that the largest civil rights movement in the modern era was organized, and in many ways participated in, online.

It is no coincidence, because our lives are now tethered to screens, and the truth pulsating from LED is more real than the truth within our physical spaces. Like a portal pulling at our will, our heart and our mind, we almost feel compelled to our screens. It is certainly an addiction that has embedded itself into every facet of our lives.

It used to be in living rooms, watching Walter Cronkite and Leave it to Beaver. But it is now wherever we go. In every new car. In every classroom. In every office. In every grocery store. In every bedroom. In every bathroom. In every pocket.

And wherever we go, we go with spaces devoid of the self-evident nature of reality. Without this component, the fabric of some of our most long-held traditions are in jeopardy. This is not supposed to be alarmist, and this is not a defense of those traditions and institutions, it is simply describing the current state of affairs.

What do future democratic elections look like in a world where we have lost the primacy of the physical space? Where the public’s acceptance of democratic elections is won over the internet and not in ballot boxes? How is work, one of the most ancient drives of humankind, impacted in a world that is digital? Can we see the work of our hands? Can we continue to see a continuous thread from our hands to a creation? The farmer sees the crops, the woodworker the table, the writer their words flowing from the tip of a pen. Is the digital space adequate in satisfying that drive? What does truth look like in a climate where truth has no shared reference point? If our reference points for truth are only the journalists or commentators of partisan platforms and pages we subscribe to, how can there be any self-evident ingredient to discourse when it happens digitally?

Perhaps I am the only one who has had this experience (but I am guessing not), of staring into the great abyss of infinite content, bouncing between apps and articles, posts and pictures, and lift my head up only to feel as if I have regained consciousness. I am hungry. My back hurts from slouching over my screen. The weather outside has shifted. It is as if I have transported from one world to another. But more essentially, it is as if the digital space has superseded the physical one. The digital space has concealed the facts of the present physical moment. It is both a testament to the addictive nature of our modern technology and to the power of our digital spaces.

And a global pandemic ushered in that tremendous power through our front door, and I am curious (and a tad fearful) to see if it continues to emanate like the sun — both blinding us yet also revealing something foundational to being human.

The term “connected” is often used by tech elites to describe primary motivators and benefits of their endeavors. But the word connected is a misnomer that at this point purposely conceals. It is accurate in the fact that it connects us to a digital space that is shared by billions of other people. Within those digital spaces are Facebook Groups and Subreddits of people across the globe sharing similar interests. But it is a misnomer in that by connecting us to that shared digital space, we are disconnected from some of the foundational elements of human history that have dictated the very fabric of our reality, that of our physical spaces.

Tech companies work endlessly to make sure content is real, that accounts are actual people (am I the only one who has stalked the profile of a social account to see if they are a bot?), and have now even taken on the novel role of arbiter of truth, despite holding no responsibility (other than perhaps to shareholders) for their content under Section 230. So, we may be more “connected” in one sense to people, current events, and debates, but in another sense, we are more disconnected to a reality in which refutation is much more attainable, verifiability is much more present, and a truth that is much less likely to be distorted and manipulated.

All signs point towards technology becoming more immersive. VR aims to conceal our ancient tools of eyes that we use on our fact-finding missions. Wearable tech and cybernetics are starting to overlap. Self-driving cars that will allow us to constantly be connected to our phones on our commutes are within a generation of widespread adoption. And the spaces of human experience are becoming increasingly digital.

If history is truly contingent — always dependent on forces within the present such as the spread of a highly contagious and moderately deadly disease that forced us all inside and all online — then 2020 is a point along our timeline where we must now see if we can survive a world in which our digital spaces reign supreme.