How Power Shapes Writing [Part 3]
How Technology Colonizes Time and Outsources Meaning at Scale
In the first two parts of this series, we examined how power embeds itself in culture, and how media, fiction, and propaganda help organize attention, shape imagination, and influence belief.
But none of this unfolds in isolation.
It takes place within a larger environment — one that shapes the structure of time itself, and with it, the conditions under which meaning forms.
The Colonization of Time
In the late ’90s and early 2000s, I was a teenager learning to navigate a new technology called the internet.
I still remember my mom asking me to get offline whenever she needed to use the landline. There was no instant access back then. You couldn’t just reach into your pocket and see how a friend on the other side of the world was doing. You had to wait for the computer to dial, listen to the static hum of the connection, and only then — when the signal finally held — could you begin to browse.
Once in, everything moved slowly. If I managed to visit a couple of websites in an hour, that already felt like an accomplishment. Downloading a new song could take as long as forty-eight hours. And even after all that waiting, you still risked ending up with something completely different from what you thought you were getting.
Back then, if you wanted to keep up with the news, watch a series, or buy something new, you depended on set times and physical places.
You watched your favorite show at the exact hour it aired and waited an entire week for the next episode. You picked up the newspaper in the morning, and whatever happened after it went to print would have to wait for the next edition. You went to a store to buy the shoes you wanted. The idea of pressing a button and having food appear at your door belonged to science fiction.
Life operated at a different pace.
But as the internet evolved, that pace began to change.
What once required a desk, a dial tone, and patience is now never more than a tap away.
Now, instead of visiting a couple of websites and waiting days for updates, I face the possibility of endless consumption. Infinite feeds stretch across every social platform, accessible anytime, anywhere.
I’m also always available. My boss no longer needs to wait until the next day at the office to ask a question. An email can arrive at 10 p.m., because everyone knows I’ll see it. Sometimes, my worth even feels measured by how quickly I respond.
Nearly every facet of my life now has its own app to track progress. My health, my sleep, even my reading can be measured on a screen. If I choose, technology allows me to optimize almost every minute.
The internet stopped being a place I visited. It became the environment I inhabit.
Nothing in the world physically moves faster. Days still have twenty-four hours. Yet our experience of those hours doesn’t feel the same.
In the early internet, events had time to settle before the next one appeared. There was space to absorb, remember, and interpret before moving on. Those intervals mattered more than I realized.
When nothing requires waiting, moments lose the chance to deepen through reflection. Each encounter is immediately replaced by the next. Attention never pauses long enough to mark transitions. News appears beside memes, old stories resurface without context, and unrelated moments demand attention all at once. More stimuli fit into the same span of time, forcing us to react without thinking.
Experience begins to break into fragments that keep piling up, creating the sensation that we are always slightly behind — always catching up to something already in motion.
To restore order, we try to assemble these fragments into meaning. But when experience moves faster than understanding, something else begins organizing reality for us.
The Outsourcing of Meaning
The human mind is constantly assembling a frame that helps us make sense of the world, connecting what happens around us to a broader sense of continuity and meaning.
When we no longer have the time or space to interpret our experiences and form our own understanding, that frame begins to lose its stability. We start to feel disoriented — unsure what deserves attention, what to do next, or how to situate ourselves in relation to others.
The discomfort of that state creates pressure. Something must restore order.
Media, fiction, and propaganda grow more potent under these conditions.
The article no longer needs historical context, alternative perspectives, or an examination of underlying structures. It only needs to strike the right emotional tone — enough to provoke a reaction — and then guide readers toward how the event should be understood.
Fiction operates in a similar way. A series or a movie does not need to expand the viewer’s perception of reality; it only needs to present a narrative that feels coherent and emotionally satisfying. Characters are arranged into familiar moral arcs that frame complexity in ways that feel manageable.
Propaganda moves one step further. With access to vast amounts of behavioral data, it no longer needs to persuade broadly when it can whisper precisely. It learns which fears move us, which hopes soften us, which language feels familiar enough to trust. Its message arrives already shaped to fit the frame we are most likely to accept.
As resistance weakens and we continue engaging with these interpretations, the systems that curate what we see begin narrowing the range of what we encounter. Our feeds stop reflecting the world in its complexity and instead present a version filtered by our previous clicks and lingering pauses.
Gradually, these interpretations start to feel less like perspectives and more like reflections of who we are. Through repetition, identities form and harden. Truth matters less than consistency with who we believe ourselves to be. The stories shaped by power no longer feel imposed from above — they begin to feel like extensions of ourselves.
Once those stories feel personal, participation becomes almost inevitable. We no longer want to remain mere spectators; we want to help carry them forward. Through reactions, posts, tweets, memes, videos, reviews, podcasts, and countless other formats, we reproduce the very interpretations that shaped us.
As a writer, I’ve taken part in this dynamic myself.
I helped build personal brands that promoted a particular image of what a successful entrepreneur should look like. In doing so, I reinforced familiar narratives — that growth is the ultimate measure of success, that visibility equals value — and showed others how the right words can push people to click, sign up, buy, or believe.
What I didn’t realize then was that the moment I called it a “personal brand,” I had already accepted a structure that defined the terms of interpretation.
Strategy revolved around positioning, niche, consistency. Persuasion was the only vocabulary available. The format was dictated by the platforms. The direction came from dashboards and their demands for more growth, more engagement, more reach.
I believed I was sharp enough to move within that structure without being shaped by it. But in practice, I wasn’t resisting the structure — I was refining it, finding more elegant ways to package the same narratives in language that felt authentic.
The Return of Interpretation
As technology evolved, it provided power with more efficient ways to filter what we see, interpret events on our behalf, redirect our emotions, and shape identities at scale.
That’s the aquarium we swim in today.
We can change our swimsuits or drift in a different direction. The glass walls remain.
These structures, however, are not natural laws. What feels inevitable today was once only an idea, proposed, repeated, normalized, and eventually accepted.
What is constructed can always be questioned — or at the very least, made visible so we can examine it together.
Doing so requires the very thing we have surrendered:
Our time.
If our time remains colonized, interpretation will remain outsourced. Reclaiming time is not simply nostalgic; it is the precondition for independent thinking.
For years, I gave the power of my writing to systems whose incentives I rarely examined. I learned how to optimize within them: how to position, package, and persuade, without asking what those incentives were training me to value.
Seeing how thoroughly I had absorbed that logic was painful. It was also unexpectedly freeing.
This past year, I decided to take a different step, one that meant reclaiming some of that time.
I stepped away from my role as CMO to devote myself fully to this newsletter.
That shift didn’t hand me answers. It gave me enough distance to start wrestling with a different set of questions:
How can I turn writing into a practice that helps me see more clearly?
How can I refuse manufactured identities and remain an independent thinker?
How can I encourage people to think instead of deliver packaged narratives?
How can I generate new ideas and invite others to help develop them?
How can I do my small part to help build the structures we actually need?
I don’t expect perfect answers. I may never find them.
These questions, though, have begun reshaping the way I think about writing.
Now I’d like to share what I’m discovering, and invite you to slow down and think with me.
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