The Age of Permacrisis

Oct 13, 2025

You feel it when you wake up.

That low hum of quiet dread before you check the news, wondering which institution crumbled overnight, which new technology just made your skills obsolete, which viral lie will dominate the day.

You feel it at work, where the tools change faster than you can master them and the goal posts move before you reach them.

You feel it in your body, the exhaustion no amount of sleep can fix, because the world itself won’t stop accelerating.

For twenty-five years, we optimized every system for speed. We got speed and lost the stability that made civilization possible.

We are in permacrisis.

How We Built the Machine

The past quarter-century has been a single, cascading experiment in removing friction from systems.

Buffers once slowed information, commerce, and decision-making. Friction gave us time to think, to verify, to course-correct.

In our quest for efficiency, growth, and scale, we built a world that moves faster than human judgment can follow.

Social media removed editorial friction. The “Share” and “Retweet” buttons turned virality into the central dynamic of information flow, bypassing editors and fact-checkers who once acted as quality controls.

We longed for democratization and got an outrage machine, where algorithms learned fury generates engagement and sorted citizens into warring tribes.

By 2016, trust in institutions had collapsed, and “fake news” was a household term.

The buffer between rumor and broadcast was gone.

Instant global communication removed diplomatic friction. When tweets became tools of statecraft, the careful choreography of international relations—the buffer of bureaucracy that prevented impulsive decisions from becoming policy—evaporated.

Allies are blindsided. Treaties feel fragile. The space between impulse and consequence is suffocating any memory of deliberation.

When the Shocks Collide

While we marvel at the advent of generative AI, our future is held captive by the death of skill-acquisition.

ChatGPT offers “good enough” output for what once required years of training, depth, and understanding.

Companies have reduced hiring. The gap between novice and expert is no longer years of dedication, but an OpenAI subscription.

Everyone seems committed to building teams of AI agents and robots, because when you’re in a race for dominance, you can’t wait for slow humans to learn and grow. AI is instantaneous, and capital is hungry.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, our fractured information ecosystem turned a public health emergency into an epistemological war. Conspiracies about the virus spread faster than the virus itself, undermining scientific authority and costing lives.

Trust in science fell from 87% to 73% in two years. Science didn’t fail—it showed incredible progress in limited time. But instead of celebrating our triumph, Joe Rogan became the authority on health: zero expertise, media dominance with millions of followers, in an environment where we lack any shared mechanism for establishing truth.

When a mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, it was the logical endpoint of an information system built for engagement, not accuracy. The peaceful transfer of power—bedrock of democracy—was nearly derailed by social media-fueled rage.

A year later, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered Europe’s postwar peace, fought with tanks on the ground and disinformation online.

We are living through simultaneous, interconnected, self-reinforcing shocks to every aspect of our existence. A technological shift fuels a political crisis, compounded by a biological crisis, with every feedback loop broadcast globally in real time.

This is the world we now inhabit. Elections are fought over the nature of reality itself. Trust in institutions—courts, schools, media—is fractured along partisan lines. Two-thirds of workers report being overwhelmed or exhausted, navigating systems not designed for humans.

Why This Time Is Different

Some will say this is nothing new. History has always been disruptive. We survived the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, and the Cold War. This is merely an acceleration.

There is a fundamental difference. Past disruptions were sequential and often localized. A generation had time to adapt before the next wave hit.

Today’s disruptions are simultaneous, interconnected, and global. There is no time to adapt because the next shock arrives before we process the last one.

We are not living through a series of storms. We are living inside a storm system that generates its own weather.

Permacrisis can’t be solved. It’s the nature of our existence now, a condition we must navigate. No matter what your favorite authoritarian or democratically elected leader tells you, there is no return to stability—that world is gone.

We must build resilience in an uncertain world where crisis never ends.

This requires a fundamental reorientation. We must be intentional about reintroducing friction where it matters.

Slower information consumption. Deeper verification before sharing. Longer timelines for decisions that matter.

We must rebuild the safeguards we destroyed: local communities that provide stability when national institutions fail, skills that cannot be automated, relationships not mediated by algorithms.

We can’t navigate permacrisis with more technology. We must ensure, now more than ever, that we intentionally infuse humanity at the heart of everything we do.

We need to step up in our lives and communities, and regulate our systems to restore the ability to distinguish signal from noise, enforce protections against the pull of outrage, and teach the wisdom to know which changes to embrace and which to resist.

It requires courage to build slowly in a world that rewards speed.

As the world spins out of control, those who work to provide choice and regain control of direction will ultimately build a better world.

Image: AI Generated

The Age of Permacrisis

How We Built the Machine

When the Shocks Collide

Why This Time Is Different

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