This isn't only true of, say, "developed" versus "developing" countries. In the United States itself coexist a late XVIII-th century governmental framework with high frequency trading markets, significant theologically-driven voting blocks with cutting-edge genetics research, and decades-old transport infrastructure for atoms with areas of implausibly fast transport infrastructures for bits (although, as nearly everything else, this is far from being evenly distributed across the country).

As iconic contemporary writers like J. G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Warren Ellis have explicitly shown, most of the fault lines in our so-called present, and most of its creative power, lie on the interfaces between different times. This isn't new: WWII saw the Russians defeat the Germans with tactics Napoleon would have recognized, while the Allies, by the end of the war, had created the twin promethean forces of nuclear weapons and computing, which would come to define the next of the century and beyond.

What feels different this time is the huge range of technologies and ways of life that not only coexist in time and often in space, but also actively engage each other. When the FBI has computer systems that look decades older than those of the white collar criminals they chase, advanced scanners are used to hunt for blades and crude explosives in airports, and conservative religious movements use the internet to call out against technology, the concept of anachronism seems no longer to be applicable to the present. Fashions and fads die, efficiently buried by the same novelty-driven industries that created them in the first place, but the underlying structures seem to simply deposit one over the other, Wall Street over Silicon Valley over Detroit over the Corn Belt over, somewhere deep in the American psyche if not in reality, the economy and society of the Thirteen Colonies.

Barring some abrupt stopping in the speed of technological advance, things can only get weirder as time goes on and every group applying cutting-edge technology and science keeps moving further away from each other and from the rest of us. The puzzled, unsettled background feeling of displacement that characterises the century so far is unlikely to go away, because it's not a result of how fast the world is changing, but of how unevenly it changes. More and more, the task of politics — understood in its most broads and perhaps most useful sense — is to figure out how to make workable this patchwork of a planet.