The essay is a brief set of reflections by the author on his book 24/7 five years after its publication and on its possible continuing relevance for artists. It notes the worsening of what the book identified as features of the non-stop operations of global capitalism, including intensifying environmental devastation, widening economic inequality, the deathliness of billionaire culture, and the collapse of longstanding forms of social solidarity and mutual support.

In this brief text written on the occasion of the Whitney Independent Study Program's fiftieth anniversar, Jonathan Crary discusses how the many media portrayals of climate change and global warming effectively reabsorb environmental catastrophe into spectacle and affirm the ability of dominant institutions to solve or ameliorate any crisis. Noting the marginalization of Guy Debord's 1971 text A Sick Planet , Crary argues that a unique historical opportunity was lost in the late 1960s and early 1970s when there was a broad failure to align an eco-socialist critique of capitalism with the energies of anti-war and anti-imperialist mass movements.