When New Zealand, this year’s chair of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, decided to make it a “virtual” year , abandoning the usual gruelling regime of hundreds of face-to-face meetings spread across Apec’s 21 economies, many celebrated. No more long, exhausting flights across a region spread from St Petersburg in the West, to Atlanta, Santiago and Arequipa on the eastern side of the Pacific. So many millions of dollars saved. No more dislocation of family life or normal work routines. Some dreamt of enhanced efficiency and productivity as they avoided 15-20-hour air journeys, jet lag and millions of tonnes of carbon emissions. So it is perhaps brave of Thailand, next year’s Apec chair, to decide to restore physical meetings. Many members will undoubtedly protest at the Luddite technophobic reluctance to recognise and embrace the “tele-everything” world fast approaching. But are the Thais wrong? Can we not subsist satisfactorily on Zoom (or MS Teams) meetings, attended from the comfort and convenience of our homes and offices? Can we not submit, discuss and edit plans and reports remotely? Would this not ensure that items on long and detailed agendas are discussed only by those with an active interest or expertise, no longer wasting the time of those less interested? The past 18 months of pandemic lockdowns have provided a valuable Petri dish for discovering how a “tele-everything” world might work. It has provided practical, measurable evidence of the savings we might make, and insights into what would be lost and how harmful that might be. My takeaway is that virtual habits are here to stay, but that there are many circumstances where face-to-face remains indispensable and must return. Perhaps Board Intelligence chief executive Jennifer Sundberg is right to predict that smart boards will operate “hybrid calendars” – virtual meetings for tracking plans and targets, and in-person ones for brainstorming discussions about culture and strategy, for example. Why I will never love Zoom or any other virtual meeting platform As David Cote, former chair and chief executive of Honeywell International recently protested: “Anybody who says virtual is more efficient for a meeting is believing their own baloney. [In person, people] speak up and interact – all those things humans have been doing for 10,000 years to arrive at better decisions.” Many would accuse Cote of being a technophobe, and in denial. But many also recognise his concern, according to a Pew Research Centre study released in February. Take Gregory Shannon at Carnegie Mellon University: “Many modern efficiencies are based on getting many people physically close together [ …] Who and where do we each trust to get close to others? Can we get ‘close’ in a meaningful way via technology?” he said. Or Barry Chudakov, head of Sertain Research: “The more we disembody, the more virtual our realities become, the more we exhibit antisocial, even psychopathic behaviours. Alone together we lose empathy; we lose compassion; we lose focus.” Facebook’s recent controversies , following the leak of thousands of documents by whistle-blower Frances Haugen showing the harmful and “uncivilising” effects of the virtual worlds it has built, add heft to such concerns. But whatever the reservations about the “ metaverse ” enveloping us, data on the pandemic’s astonishing impact on our virtual habits has shown vividly how willingly we embrace the “virtual” and its advantages. How else could Zoom , founded in California by Eric Yuan only in 2011, today claim 350 million meeting participants daily, and 470,000 business customers. Students have used Zoom for remote learning in over 90,000 schools worldwide. Take the precipitous contraction of business travel . McKinsey reported in July that global business travel spending had fallen by more than half during the pandemic. While business travellers account for just 12 per cent of all travellers, they account for up to 75 per cent of airline revenues. So the collapse in business travel has had massive ripple effects worldwide – not least on the global trade fair, convention and exhibition businesses. A Deloitte survey found that, this year, two thirds of companies expect their business travel expenditure to be less than half of the 2019 budget; the rest expect to spend an even smaller fraction. It would be surprising if many executive teams are willing to give up at least some of the billions of dollars they have discovered can be saved. Amazon alone reported that it saved US$1 billion in travel costs last year. Airlines pivot away from Asia amid frustration with zero-Covid approach Despite such obvious savings, the Thais may have had good reasons to take Apec back into physical meetings. As a regular participant of Apec meetings, I would find it hard to underestimate the feverish importance of corridor negotiations that continue away from formal meeting tables, and which would be impossible in a virtual environment. Impossible too, the challenge of gauging the mood of a meeting as delegations go into huddles while formal presentations continue. Note the concern this week that Chinese President Xi Jinping will not be attending either the ongoing G20 meeting in Rome or the COP26 summit in Glasgow. Paola Subacchi, at the University of London’s Queen Mary Global Policy Institute, was not wrong to note in the Post that person-to-person relationships historically drive progress in organisations like G20 or Apec: “Virtual meetings [prevent] leaders from having the kinds of casual, personal interactions that cement such relationships. Political capital is now thin.” As American biologist Edward Wilson noted: We have “paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology”. Virtual meetings may be a powerful product of our godlike technologies, but it will be a long time before they sit comfortably with either our medieval institutions or paleolithic emotions. Meanwhile, the Thais are not wrong to revert in 2022 to real, flesh-and-blood meetings. David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view