Times Now: How the World Learned to Panic in Perfect Sync—and Then Scroll Past It
Times Now, or the Art of Watching the Planet Burn in Real Time
By Our Man in Everywhere at Once
PARIS—The phrase “times now” used to belong to poets and prophets, those gentle souls who warned that the end was nigh but still had the courtesy to schedule it for next Thursday. These days the poets have been replaced by push notifications, and the prophets have day jobs as algorithm engineers in Mountain View. The result is a planetary 24-hour news drip in which the apocalypse arrives hourly, politely labeled “Breaking,” and disappears just in time for the sports segment.
From Lagos to Lima, the shared hallucination is identical: a screen, a scroll, a sense that reality has become a badly subtitled telenovela written by caffeinated interns. In Hong Kong, traders watch live drone footage of wildfires in Canada the way their grandparents once tuned in to the BBC World Service—except the BBC never let you click a flame emoji. Meanwhile, in Toronto, commuters doom-scroll images of Hong Kong’s latest typhoon while their own streetcars stall in a heat dome. The feedback loop is so tight it could qualify for a mortgage.
Global supply chains, those Rube Goldberg contraptions that deliver baby formula from Denmark to Des Moines, now depend on the same fiber-optic cables that transmit footage of Danish mink being culled. When a ship wedges itself sideways in the Suez Canal, the world economy seizes, but the memes arrive instantly, tastefully watermarked. The incident becomes both crisis and entertainment, like Schrödinger’s container ship but with more TikTok dances.
Politicians, never ones to waste a good panic, have discovered that “times now” is the perfect alibi. Why craft policy for 2030 when you can hold press conferences about whatever is trending at 3 p.m.? In Brussels, EU commissioners draft sanctions between tweets; in Brasília, cabinet meetings pause so everyone can watch the latest celebrity slap. The pace is so frantic that yesterday’s coup attempt is today’s background noise while you wait for oat-milk lattes.
Financial markets, always early adopters of existential dread, have gamified the moment. Futures on wheat fluctuate as much from grain futures as from a viral video of a Ukrainian farmer towing a Russian tank. Cryptocurrencies, those digital tulips for the Wi-Fi age, promise refuge from inflation and tyranny, then evaporate faster than a central banker’s promise. Analysts in London now price in “headline volatility” the way they once priced in “weather risk,” which is ironic because the weather itself has become a headline.
The climate, poor thing, has had to hire a PR firm. Record temperatures in Delhi and unprecedented snowfall in Rome compete for the same push alert. Each disaster is historic until the next one, like Olympic medals for catastrophe. Activists chain themselves to oil tankers while streaming on Twitch; viewers applaud with digital hearts and then book weekend flights to Mykonos. The contradiction is so pure it could be distilled into artisanal gin.
Refugees, the ultimate real-time data point, float across the Mediterranean in vessels that may or may not merit a livestream. Their journeys are tracked by NGOs, coast guards, and private satellites operated by hedge funds betting on border-fence stocks. Somewhere a Syrian teenager uploads a selfie from a sinking dinghy; the signal hops through five jurisdictions before it becomes a CNN chyron: “BOAT CRISIS DEEPENS. STAY TUNED FOR AN ALL-NEW COOKING SEGMENT.”
Even war has embraced the tempo. Drones live-tweet their own missile strikes; generals hold pressers on Telegram; war-crime evidence is timestamped to the millisecond, then monetized by YouTube’s partner program. History used to be written by the victors. Now it’s written in real time, spell-checked by AI, and contested in the comments section under a Gucci ad.
The human brain, that obsolete meat computer, was never designed for this refresh rate. We compensate with dark jokes and premium meditation apps. Therapists in Stockholm report clients who fear missing out on the next disaster; in Los Angeles, burnout coaches recommend “scheduled panic attacks” between Zoom calls. The zeitgeist tastes like cold brew mixed with low-grade dread.
And yet—because irony enjoys a long encore—humanity clings to the same fragile consolations: a stranger’s meme, a shared playlist, the delusion that tomorrow’s feed might finally contain the answer. Until then we lean into the glow, watching the planet burn in pixelated high definition, one push alert at a time. Times now, indeed. Just don’t blink; the next catastrophe is loading.
