World leaders, virtual meeting 1.0: Was anybody listening?

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.

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...