Click Farm

Do you ever think about the word digital? It sounds modern, and it’s usage has exploded since the invention of the computer. But it’s actually quite an old term, from the Latin digitalis, or digitus, meaning finger or toe.

It was once used to refer to a number less than 10, a unit of measure you could count one your fingers, in other words.

Over the last few decades it has come to embody the relentless power, speed, and progress of technology. It’s usually contrasted with the physical or analog. People will say they prefer the warmth of a vinyl record to the sound of a digital music file.

The pandemic upended my reality, as it did for so many others. I used to live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan. I was surrounded by concrete, metal, and glass. I had a small apartment and rode to work in an enclosed metal tube with strangers pressed in against my face.

Now I live on a rural road surrounded by grass and trees. The site where my house is located used to be a horse farm, and an orchard before that. There is still old manure composting in the barn. There are old apple trees that give fruit, decades after they were first planted.

Rabbit and deer graze on the clover in my back fields. Wild turkeys gather in the early morning to perform their mating rituals. I spend a lot o time working with my hands. I pick fruit and plant seeds. I plow soil and hunt game. I butcher meat and tan hides.

All the while, I stay connected to the digital realm. I relax in a hunting blind and make turkey calls. I broadcast the sound on Twitter spaces and add comments to a Google Doc. I walk my dog through the woods to forage mushrooms while listening to an edit of the latest podcast. I reply to Slack messages and update Wordpress while feeding chickens and collecting eggs.

My office isn’t going to reopen anytime soon, and even when it does, there will be no pressure to return on a regular basis. For knowledge workers like me, a new era has begun. It existed before the pandemic, but it wasn’t as common or accepted or robust.

I like this collision of two worlds, where you can work with atoms and bits, with your hands and your mind, with your reality and with the virtual, all at once. Digital has two very different meanings, and now it can encompass both of them at once.

Photo credit: Nenad Stojkovic