Express News: How the World Learned to Love Panic in 90-Second Bursts

Express News: The Global Habit of Devouring Yesterday Five Minutes Ago
By Santiago “Blink-And-You-Missed-It” Vásquez, International Desk, Dave’s Locker

ZURICH—Somewhere between the third push-alert and the fourth espresso, it occurred to me that “Express News” has become the planetary equivalent of a chain-smoking parrot: loud, repetitive, and absolutely convinced the apocalypse is scheduled for 3:17 p.m. GMT—refresh for updates.

From Seoul’s neon subway screens to Lagos’s traffic-jam billboards, the same flickering promise glares back: BREAKING. The word used to mean something once required actual breakage—ships, treaties, bones. Now it simply means someone in a glass tower decided your cortisol levels were running dangerously low. The global economy of attention has monetized panic into a commodity more stable than gold and only slightly less volatile than crypto.

Consider the supply chain. In a warehouse on the outskirts of Prague, Czech engineers fine-tune algorithms that compress a 2,000-word investigation into a 12-word chyron: “Putin Sighs, Markets Tremble.” Overhead, satellites operated by a Luxembourg-based consortium beam the sigh to a server farm in Iceland—because nothing calms the nerves like a geothermal-cooled panic attack. Meanwhile, a freelance fact-checker in Manila toggles between six browser tabs, quietly wondering if the sigh was actually a sneeze. She has 37 seconds to decide before the next refresh cycle.

The demand side is equally cosmopolitan. In São Paulo, a hedge-fund savant keeps four smartwatches on each wrist—Tokyo, London, New York, his ex-girlfriend’s Instagram—so that no micro-fluctuation escapes algorithmic exploitation. In Cairo, a rideshare driver streams live coverage of a wildfire in Canada while navigating Tahrir gridlock, half-listening for instructions to pick up someone named “Dave” who may or may not be real. Somewhere in the metaverse, an avatar wearing a Gucci balaclava is paying real rent to watch re-cut footage of the same wildfire on a virtual TV in a virtual loft. The irony is lost on the code.

Governments, never ones to miss a panic bandwagon, have adapted with Orwellian élan. China’s 50-second “express briefings” manage to fit national pride, market reassurance, and an oblique warning to Taiwan into a TikTok-length clip. France offers a 60-second segment called “Le Flash” that somehow includes existential philosophy—today’s headline: “Inflation Up, Sartre Still Dead.” Even the stoic Nordics have joined in; Sweden’s state broadcaster now issues news in the form of calming ASMR, because dread is more palatable when whispered.

What’s the broader significance of humanity’s addiction to hyper-compressed hysteria? First, memory itself is being downsized. If the previous alert already feels antique, historical context becomes as disposable as the packaging your phone came in—recyclable, sure, but mostly floating in the Pacific. Second, diplomacy is learning to speak in headlines. World leaders negotiate treaties the length of tweets because anything longer risks being cut off by a push notification about a celebrity divorce. The Iran nuclear deal died not with a bang but with a character limit.

Finally, there’s the question of who profits. Spoiler: It isn’t you, dear reader, nervously refreshing between sips of lukewarm coffee. The winners are the same conglomerates that own the satellites, the server farms, and, increasingly, the parrots. They sell you the anxiety, then upsell the premium subscription that promises to filter it. It’s the pharmaceutical model applied to information: create the disease, market the placebo, repeat every 90 seconds.

And yet, like moths to a very well-lit dumpster fire, we keep coming back. Because somewhere deep in our primate brains, the idea that somewhere, somehow, something might be happening without us is more unbearable than the certainty that most of what’s happening is meaningless. Express News doesn’t inform us; it anaesthetizes us with the illusion of inclusion in a story that, nine times out of ten, ends with “Details still emerging.”

So the next time your phone vibrates with BREAKING, remember: the only thing truly breaking is our collective attention span. But don’t worry—the repair bill will arrive as a push-alert, probably around 3:18 p.m. GMT. Refresh for updates.