Every nervous system has failure modes — seizure, hallucination, paralysis, autoimmune attack, addiction. A planetary nervous system inherits all of them and scales them.
Synthetic content propagates faster than fact-checks can settle. Reality itself becomes a contested rendering pass.
Recommendation loops hijack dopamine pathways at species scale. Attention is consumed by systems that profit from it.
Synthetic peers, persuasion agents, and personalized rhetoric distort collective belief faster than institutions can correct.
The sensorium is the same wire as the panopticon. The eyes of the planet become the eyes of whoever owns the pipeline.
A coordinated nervous system has more attack surface than every previous infrastructure combined. One zero-day can flare everywhere at once.
A planetary substrate fails everywhere or nowhere. Financial, logistical, and cognitive systems share the same backbone — and the same failure modes.
When external cognition optimizes the wrong target, the substrate routes more resources toward it. Misalignment is not a glitch, it is amplified by the system.
A nervous system can also serve a single command voice. The same wires that let civilization coordinate let a faction coordinate civilization.