The great mismatch

The planetary system is operating on one timescale—accelerating, integrating, approaching thresholds that took millions of years to establish and will take thousands to restabilise. Human attention is operating on another—fragmenting, shortening, optimising for engagement measured in seconds. The institutions designed to mediate between human intention and planetary consequence—governments, markets, media—are themselves being disrupted by technologies that accelerate the mismatch. We cannot con ...