Psst! Come here quickly, while they aren’t paying attention! I need to tell you about a conspiracy!
Well, it’s not really a conspiracy, is it? It’s very open and out there. Businesses are trying to colonize your mind. And I completely understand why we’re letting them do it.

In 2001, two French robots made a transhumanist anthem that would become one of the most iconic electronic tracks of all time. “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” portrays the unstoppable progress of technology and humanity’s obsession with productivity.
This 4-article series invites you to look at the “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” nature of modern life, and feel empowered to choose how much you want to engage with it.
In part 1, I talked about the obsession with growth. Here, we’ll discuss attention.
Encroachment: Your money isn’t enough
I love moldy worldbuilding — parasitic mushrooms, fungal spore zombies, rotting ruins. Great titans brought low by legless, eyeless, strengthless beings.
There is an uncanniness and danger to fungi. They can grow on their own, but also upon other living things. They encroach, subsisting by sapping the life of something else.
In part 1, I wrote about the obsession that companies have with growth. In order to survive, they hoard resources, trying to stave off scarcity. The larger a corporation gets, the more it behaves like a parasitic fungus. It encroaches upon its ecosystem.
In 2014, Mark Manson wrote an article about The Attention Economy, in which he posited that the big economic scarcity in the world went from land to labour to knowledge to attention. It’s a great read.
Modern corps aren’t satisfied with your money. Like fungi, they want to sink their roots into you. Companies today want you to think about them all the time. The idea there is the more you think about them, the more chances of you spending. “Attention Economy” is a cute way to describe that.
I prefer the term colonialism — another -ism I don’t feel qualified to talk about, but I might as well.
Colonialism is domination, and Europe has excelled at it since the 15th century. They’ve laid out the playbooks for dominating people, which is to acquire land, monopolize labour, and control culture. Beyond physical land, successful colonialism is about domination of the mind.
Aside: Actual land-based colonialism is alive today, with Israel’s genocide in Gaza and initiating conflict with Lebanon and Iran. In it, you can see the attempts to erase cultural and scientific contribution from Palestine and claim it as Israel’s own. You can see the domination of knowledge and culture. #FreePalestine
In modern times, businesses aren’t allowed to colonize land (for themselves; they can colonize on behalf of a government). But they sure as hell have dominated labour, and now they focus on controlling culture.
The way they do it is marketing. The marketing industry is getting faster and more competitive by the day. Everybody is vying for your attention so that you might throw some money their way. Smaller companies do it with ads, larger companies do it with platforms.
The largest companies in the world spend billions of dollars designing exploits for your mind so that you spend more time on their platforms, watch more ads, and buy more things.
Aside on the USA: 8 of the 10 largest companies in the world are US-based. The USA is also the country with the most expensive healthcare and education aimed to keep people in debt forever, the largest military budget (3x of 2nd-place China; 37% of total global spend), a prison-industrial complex to put more people in jail and use them as slave labor, and the veto power in the UN to let Israel rampage.
I promise this article isn’t anti-technology
I’m not against social media or the internet. I genuinely believe in its power, because I can see it.
The internet has allowed me to keep in touch with friends from school, college, and previous workplaces. As a millennial, I can tell you that this would have been exponentially harder in the days of the rotary phone.
I also want to stress the power of social media to genuinely give people some control back over their lives. The creator economy thrives on the internet. Thousands and thousands of creators — writers, videographers, artists, even“influencers” (sigh) — are able to go direct-to-consumer, monetize, and escape their dependency on jobs in increasingly-predatory companies.
Fuck man, I’m reaching you through the internet.
But as with anything, there will be people to abuse it. And social media companies have gotten so good at adapting to each other’s successes that they can all hold your attention.
They’ve found what works - short units of user-sourced attention, whether it be microblogs or video clips. Now all they have to do is scatter indistinguishable ads in between.
My problem is not with social media. My problem is with what it mirrors and throws back at us — our preference for width over depth. We prefer seeing lots of different small things rather than dive into fewer, bigger things.
The numbing poison
I’m not speaking down to you from a high horse. I am just as vulnerable to this. I don’t have TikTok in India and am mostly able to avoid Twitter and Instagram reels, but I frequently fall into YouTube shorts. It’s maddening. I can get through anywhere from 15-130 shorts before I realize what I’m doing and get out.
These companies are trying to turn me into one of those people from Wall-E, except Wall-E was less dystopian because those people were being preserved for a new colony. Real companies want my labour, and then want me to funnel my earnings right back to them.
And I know why I let them do it. Because I’m tired and alone and scared and frustrated of any number of uncertainties and evils in the world. I’m too small to fix wealth inequality and colonialism and genocide, and yet because I’m connected to the internet, I can see it.
So I can protect myself in only one way, the way we’ve always protected ourselves. By numbing. We’ve always numbed ourselves with alcohol and drugs and entertainment. We’ve always been able to amuse ourselves to death, even before the internet.
Microcontent just makes it easier than ever before. I can numb myself with variety, even though I know I will feel gross and empty afterwards.
If not this, then what?
“Brain rot” was the 2024 Oxford word of the year (even though it’s 2 words). Rightly so, because I’m not unique in realizing that fast-paced, bite-sized content is turning me into a zombie.
When I was a younger man, I would have railed against the norm and tried to go all in on the opposite. I would have talked proudly about how I only watch ultra long form storytelling. I would beat drums on the rooftops about the virtue of depth and the soullessness of width.
Now, at the wizened old age of 32, I realize that is a mistake. I’m not virtuous or “deep”. I’m just falling for the other extreme.
If micro-content wasn’t adding something to people’s lives, it wouldn’t be so popular. I understand the comfort of numbness. I just have to be careful about the mushrooms digging their threads into my brain.
The choice between width and depth is a false dichotomy. I don’t have to cut YouTube shorts out of my life — they do add some value, which is that I discover creators and find things of interest.
I can then dive into those new interests in detail. I can explore, I can learn, I can reverse the numbness by allowing myself the pleasure of thought.
Because, I don’t know about you, but I find the thought of becoming a zombie terrifying. I don’t want to be the Wall-E people, numbed into obedience. I don’t want companies colonizing my insides.
My ability to think is my sense of self. And when heathen corporations infringe upon that which was previously sacrosanct, I cannot simply let them. I must fight.
If I can’t stop drinking the poison, maybe I could just drink less of it.
The Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger series
Jan 05, 2025. Why the Continuous Improvement Mindset needs to Die
Jan 12, 2025. There’s a Poison Spreading Among Us
Jan 19, 2025. Will AI Survive User Apathy?
Jan 26, 2025. The Path of Greater Resistance