Digital World First, Physical World Second

Recognizing this New World Order

The focus of my work – including this substack, is on transforming the physical environment. I often say, my overarching goal in life is to create a more beautiful world. It’s not easy. There is a lot one must do to change the world around us. The real world is political. It's expensive. Gravity exists. But I find it to be worth it. And yet, I often wonder why it is so challenging. There are many reasons for this, but one that I am realizing is increasingly impactful, even though I feel like I've known intuitively for a long time is this.

We live in two worlds.

For me, and others of my millennial generation, the physical world was the one we were born into. But the digital world is the one we grew up in. We are the bridge generation—caught between Baby Boomers, who mastered physical spaces but struggle with digital ones, and Gen Z, who navigate digital realms effortlessly while sometimes feeling lost in physical spaces.

The Internet and its infinite offshoot products emerged as tools to connect us across geography and then evolved into a whole new ecosystem. While not openly at odds, our two worlds, physical and digital, are in cold competition for resources, attention, and significance. Every time we scroll instead of stroll, stream instead of attend, or Zoom instead of show up, we choose one world over the other. Every dollar invested in digital places is one less invested in the physical places.

It's time to acknowledge that energy toward transforming the physical environment is in competition with a focus from governments, organizations, and consumers on the digital environment. Both are made up of actors inhabiting spaces, but it's important to understand the similarities and differences in the rules that govern how these different spaces are formed. This matters for anyone working to improve the physical world – politicians, architects, urban designers, community groups, and everyday citizens.

And right now, the digital world is winning the competition for our focus. What we're experiencing goes beyond a gradual shift—it’s a fundamental transformation of how humans relate to space itself.

Why Digital is Ahead

The digital world offers what the physical world cannot in our high-friction, high-inflation, high-competition reality:

1. Frictionless expansion: No permits, no construction delays, no physical constraints

2. New frontier opportunities: Unclaimed territory where newcomers can still stake ground. The 21st centuryWest.

3. Immediate feedback: Build, test, fail, rebuild in hours or days, not years. Agency is at your fingertips

4. Exponential rather than linear growth: Digital products can reach millions without physical manufacturing

5. Controlled interaction environments: You choose who you interact with in spaces that are broadly safer and cleaner than their physical counterparts

6. Upward mobility: The ability to improve our lives with far more individual freedom than the physical world offers. The digital world offers the opportunity for self-reinvention that can feel impossible in a physical world bogged down by various modern caste systems.

7. Infinite density: As population increases, the area needed to accommodate it remains constant - 0

In the physical world, making change requires permission. In the digital, act first and then ask for forgiveness.

A decade ago, Peter Thiel observed that we lived in a world where "bits were unregulated and atoms were regulated." This division has only deepened, creating compounding effects as the physical environment grows increasingly burdened by friction while the digital world remains nearly frictionless.

A Typological Inventory of Physical and Digital Place

With the advent of digital places, it's helpful to catalog and compare the types of spaces in both worlds. Interestingly, both physical and digital realms contain similar categories of space. They serve the same fundamental human functions – connect, gather, compete, and trade.

Infrastructure (connect)

Physical: Roads, airports, train stations, utility grids, urban grids
Digital: Social platforms, email, cloud networks, search engines

Physical infrastructure moves objects through space. Digital infrastructure moves data across networks.

The physical version is constrained by geography, materials, and physics. Building a highway requires land acquisition, environmental impact studies, materials, machinery, and years of construction. The digital version scales to billions of users overnight with negligible marginal cost.

Physical infrastructure deteriorates over time, requiring constant maintenance. Fixing something usually means shutting down a place to conduct work on it. Digital infrastructure decays too, but its obsolescence doesn't become blight. If a website goes offline and no one is there to notice, does it make a difference? Digital infrastructure can be updated instantly, globally, and often invisibly to users.

What's startling is how much we've come to rely on digital infrastructure over physical infrastructure. The A train being rerouted feels inconvenient. Instagram going down feels like the apocalypse. And now when digital infrastructure fails, the physical world grinds to a halt—as we saw with the July 2024 CrowdStrike outage that paralyzed global airports, grounded thousands of flights, and affected everything from hospitals to banks.

Commons (gather)

Physical: Parks, cafés, libraries, plazas
Digital: Discord servers, WhatsApp groups, Clubhouse rooms, multiplayer games, Substack

We are social animals drawn to third spaces for mingling and connection. Physical commons still attract us, but they come with friction – they're hard to get to, too expensive, too noisy, or too crowded.

The digital world, by contrast, can accommodate unnatural density. Spaces can scale from a few people to thousands through connectivity. We can share experiences and live vicariously through others, traveling to far-off locations in the real world with the swipe of a thumb.

Even approaching strangers has changed. The spontaneous connections that once defined urban life have been outsourced to apps and platforms, making our physical spaces more inert. As this shift continues, we're witnessing a profound alteration in the DNA of our communities and how we form connections within them.

Arenas (compete)

Physical: Courts, stadiums, debate halls, protest grounds
Digital: Twitter threads, Reddit forums, Twitch streams, online gambling, podcasts

Humans need space to compete. We need to be able to see where ideas diverge and which ones can emerge. We are inspired by victory and resilience.

The digital world is where ideas are largely contested now. The physical world is still where we witness sport, but it is being consumed ever more rapidly on digital platforms. I can’t remember when I last witnessed a real, live debate, but there’s always someone arguing in the comment section.

Physical competition comes with natural constraints that test the limits of the human body. The arena itself has boundaries, creating scarcity that adds value for those present. Proximity matters – being courtside at a championship game provides an experience that can't be replicated on television. The physical presence of opponents and spectators adds weight to the competition itself.

Digital competition removes these boundaries to focus on the limits of human thought. The always-on nature of these spaces leads to argument fatigue. Algorithms amplify the most divisive voices, while the absence of human cues enables a toxicity few would display face-to-face.

Markets (trade)

Physical: Stores, malls, restaurants, service providers
Digital: Amazon, UberEats, Tinder

Physical markets have operating hours. They close sometimes. People working there go home to sleep. Digital markets run 24/7 (except B&H's website on Saturdays – charming, if not sometimes minorly frustrating counterpoint to some traditions surviving across worlds).

The internet's growth accelerated dramatically when it became a way to sell things. Digital real estate on social media platforms is now as valuable as its ability to sell to the user.

The most profound and impactful shift might be in the mating market. Dating apps have largely replaced chance meetings. The mating dance has moved from bars and bookstores to swiping sessions on couches. When people are less inclined to venture out into the physical world to find a partner, we've eliminated the orginial reason for human collectivity and the spaces that support it. The consequences of digital alternatives to in-person sexual experiences are profound, not just for society but for human development itself.

Time and Space

Perhaps the starkest distinction between the two worlds is the role that time plays in each one.

The physical world enables permanence. We cherish thousand-year-old cathedrals and million-year-old mountains. We admire buildings that have withstood generations. The physical realm accumulates meaning through endurance.

The digital world valorizes novelty. Obsolescence is a constant possibility in a world optimizing for faster, newer, and more engrossing experiences. Moore's Law reminds us that the next technological advancement is just a few months away. Trends rise and dissolve within days (how much can we Ghibli?). The digital realm celebrates speed and reinvention.

The digital world also encourages experimentation. The lack of friction means you can try, fail, and try again with minimal consequences. You can't Ctrl+Z the physical world.

The Great Inversion

After the pandemic, I’ve noticed a strange reversal. Physical spaces now compete for relevance by proving their digital worth. To establish value in the physical world, we must first demonstrate value in the digital one.

San Francisco recently unveiled a statue designed specifically to be "instagrammable." The hope is that it can serve as a beacon for digital engagement and that the city's physical profile will, in turn, grow.

Chicago's Cloud Gate (the Bean) tells a different story. Built before Instagram existed, its reflective surface captured our natural tendency to admire our own image while conveniently framing us against the city skyline. It transformed how we viewed physical space.

The Uncertain Value of the Physical World

We already have a term that recognizes our two-world existence – screen time. The average American now spends over 7 hours daily on screens—that's 30% of our waking hours devoted to digital rather than physical experiences. For teens, it's even more dramatic, with many approaching 9 hours daily. We're literally measuring our lives by how much time we spend in each world, and the digital world is winning.

As more activity shifts online, irreducibly physical experiences are becoming more prized:

• Nature: The feeling of wind, water, trees cannot be rendered in pixels
• Food: We eat with our eyes, but you still can't get calories from an Instagram reel
• Live events: Being amongst people all focused on the same song, ball, or sermon still hits differently from a live stream
• Physical intimacy: The most human experiences remain embodied
• Wellness: Look at the explosion of gyms, pilates studios, and spas taking over retail storefronts. People realize that you can’t improve your physical health in the digital world.

The above are essentially anything that fulfills the needs of the human body – the irreducibly physical things we need to live. As this divide deepens, the "real thing" increasingly becomes something you need to be able to afford. For those who can't, digital life will serve as a suitable substitute.

My concern, however, is that we're collectively losing our ability to create, appreciate, and transform physical space. Each year I see architecture students migrate to tech because the barriers are lower and the impact seems higher – which have a direct correlation to securing economic security for oneself. Building digital products requires less capital, fewer approvals, and reaches more people faster than building physical structures. The financial upside is exponentially greater in the digital world.

Fellow substacker,

Diana Lind

, who writes the deeply insightful,

The New Urban Order

, has described this phenomenon as the "human doom loop" – a cycle in which people stop connecting in real life, reducing the quality of in-person activities and the physical realm itself, further discouraging in-person activities, and so on. While Diana focuses on the social dimensions of this loop, I'm equally concerned about the downstream implications for physical space. As we invest less in real places, they degrade, further accelerating the migration to digital spaces.

The existence of parallel worlds is revealing a new social divide. We're seeing the emergence of two types of people – those who prefer the digital world and those who prefer the physical world. Call them digiverts and physoverts. Shapers of both physical and digital space should be aware of these distinct user groups.

Some people thrive in digital environments. They feel more comfortable, more authentic, more capable there. Others feel alive only in physical space, craving the sensory richness and embodied experiences that screens can't provide. This division often aligns with our generational bridge—Boomers and older Gen X tend toward physovert tendencies, while Gen Z leans digivert. Millennials straddle both worlds, often experiencing the tension between them most acutely.

What This Means for Those Who Shape Physical Space

If you design, build, or regulate the physical world, you compete with an entirely different reality than just half a generation ago. The playing field is far from level, and acknowledging this imbalance is essential for developing effective strategies moving forward.

This demands an urgent reprioritization of what matters for physical spaces in a digital age:

1. Design for what digital can't replicate: Sensory richness, unexpected encounters, sounds, smells, serendipity

2. Reduce friction: The physical world must learn from digital's accessibility without sacrificing what makes it authentic. Highlight accesibility.

3. Embrace nature and movement: Create spaces that use natural beauty to amplify built harmony

4. Build for both worlds simultaneously: The most successful physical spaces will have digital components that enhance rather than replace them

We need both worlds to thrive, each doing what it does best. The physical world offers presence, weight, and consequence, the ineffable feeling of being somewhere real. The digital world offers reach, efficiency, and possibility, the freedom to transcend physical limitations.

Understanding this competition is the first step toward a better balance. The second is designing physical environments that compete not by mimicking digital conveniences, but by doubling down on irreducibly physical experiences and making them more attractive and attainable than ever.