Solarpunk

I love reading, but the moment an author tries to guilt me into reading their particular viewpoint as though I'm just a slave of the system if I don't, I check out. I have better things to do, and this person doesn't have any right to my time.

In one breath the author tells us that people who don't want to read the article are the target demographic.

And then in the next 8000 breaths they proceed to use some of the most dense, obtuse, wandering, inappropriately poetic language for an essay I've seen outside of academia

I agree with nearly everything the author has to say and yet I think the essay is a complete and utter failure at even approaching the goals it claims to have.

Nobody who needs to read this will. Not because it's too long (though some will have that reason) but because anyone with moderate to poor literacy - the people explicitly called out as the target of the piece - won't be able to grok half the sentences, let alone an entire paragraph, without re-reading it 2, 3, maybe 4 times.

Unfortunate, because the message, and the information contained within the essay, is incredibly important for those people

Nice wordsmithing, quite self indulgent while presenting to be benevolent. I do agree with a lot of points but conclusions are a miss. I would say that the biggest issue here is that the world is accelerating more and more. Information barrage is intense and squeezing books for entertainment is a non-trivial task. While author talks about US, similar trends are present globally without the force of spooky "imperialistic hand".

From my maths degree, I can tell you that the intensity or importancy of something does at no point correlate with the length of the article.

Quite the opposite, in fact: If you truly have something to say, you can get it straight and to the point.