If you mean what happened to the world's ability to prevent future problems? It's probably about the same. There's a huge monetary incentive for businesses to maintain the functionality of their critical information systems. There's a monetary disincentive to reduce your own pollution or for society to reduce its consumption for example.

Considering "language" is an abstract concept, I don't think there is such a thing as a "speed of language". If anything, language is merely information; thus, it travels at whatever the speed of its encoding medium, up to C.