ZIMWATCH Editorial We Were Taught To Stay Apart To Stay Apart
ZIMWATCH
Integrity's Factor · May 2026
Analysis
We Were Taught To Stay Apart — ZIMWATCH poster
Brexit drew the lines. COVID-19 enforced the distance. The smartphone finished the job. This is how the world learned to close its doors — and forgot why it ever opened them.
· Global Affairs · May 2026
There is a photograph that captures the modern condition better than any statistic. It shows five people in a public square — different ages, different backgrounds — each staring at a phone, each alone in a crowd. Nobody is looking at each other. Nobody is looking at the world. They are all, in their separate ways, perfectly isolated in plain sight.
This is not an accident. It is the cumulative product of a decade of political choices, public health emergencies, and technological conditioning that have, step by step, rewired the way human beings relate to one another — and to the world beyond their immediate tribe. The process began with a vote. It was accelerated by a virus. It was completed by an algorithm.
Understanding how we got here is not an academic exercise. It is the first step toward refusing to stay here.
The Escalation Timeline
2016
Brexit — The Vote
On 23 June 2016, 52% of British voters chose to leave the European Union — 43 years of political, economic, and cultural integration, undone by a margin of 3.8 percentage points. The official campaign slogan was "Take Back Control." What it really meant was: we would rather be alone than be together on terms we didn't choose.
The effect radiated outward immediately. Across Europe and America, populist movements that had seemed like fringe phenomena suddenly had a proof of concept. The message was simple and viral: sovereignty over solidarity. Borders over bridges. Us over them.
"We chose them over us." — The wall had a slogan before it had a brick.
2020
COVID-19 — The Distance
When COVID-19 reached pandemic status in March 2020, governments around the world did something that would have seemed unthinkable four years earlier: they made isolation the law. Six feet of social distance. Stay home orders. Border closures. The suspension of touch, assembly, and shared physical space as a public health emergency measure.
It worked — in the immediate epidemiological sense. But it also did something else. It gave two billion people two years of daily practice at not being together. At keeping distance. At conducting their entire social and professional lives through a screen.
"We stayed apart to stay safe." — And then the emergency ended. The habits didn't.
2022+
The Algorithm — The Habit
By 2022, the average person was spending 6.5 hours per day on screens. Social media, which had promised connection, delivered tribalism at industrial scale. Every platform's algorithm was optimised for the same thing: engagement — and the most reliable engine of engagement is not joy, curiosity, or solidarity. It is outrage and confirmation.
You followed your tribe. You blocked the challenge. The algorithm learned your preferences and fed them back to you, amplified. The result was not a connected world — it was seven billion personalised bubbles, each one slightly more sealed than the last.
"The loneliest generation in history is also the most connected." — US Surgeon General, 2023
We aren't losing the world.
We're just losing the ability to see anyone else in it.
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