001 - About Time
why we begin here - and why now.
Every era believes it’s living through the peak of change.
Ours might be the first where it’s true.
In a single decade, we’ve redrawn the map of how ideas travel, how culture forms, and how influence works. What once took centuries now happens in seasons.
More platforms. More tools. More content. More ways in. There has never been a time in history with more opportunities than today. 1
On paper, that should mean more freedom. More creativity. More control.
But freedom isn’t endless choice - it’s knowing what to choose, and why.
And that’s where the cracks show.
When everything demands attention at once, the blur sets in. Fatigue follows. 2 Information, products, trends - all outpace our ability to process. We live in an attention economy where attention itself is collapsing. 3
In this age of abundance, clarity is not a luxury it’s a necessity.4
Without it, things spiral. Meaning breaks down. People lose direction - or worse, completely disconnect. Not from overload, but from uncertainty: where to place their trust, what to believe, what to hold onto.
In that vacuum, even reality becomes…negotiable.5
We all see the side effects everyday - the blur of feeds, the sameness of products, the sense that even choices don’t feel like choices anymore. I’ve been wrestling with this for more than a decade. Leading and working inside culture-defining industries taught me some hard truths. I’ve seen first-hand the brightest talents pushed past their limits, media start-ups rise and fall, and legacy brands turn into parodies of themselves. Different scales, same patterns: without clarity, momentum collapses under its own weight.
What I’ve gathered aren’t answers, but signals - earned in practice, tested in motion. They give me the confidence that there are better ways forward. Now it’s time to articulate and share them.
That’s the work I’ll unpack in the next essays:
002 – About Alignment → a compass and directional truth.
003 – About Maps → a practice, built and shaped on real terrain.
004 – About Scopes → a way of focusing, shifting from telescope to microscope.
The compass holds true. The map gains contour. The lens recalibrates.
And it starts here.
– Manuel
Appendix
What is For Future Reference?
The insight arm I built to distill noise into signals. A lens for clarity, resilience, and cultural relevance. Part essays, part field notes.
What is 27BUCKS?
The office for brand architecture I’ve founded. We worked with Apple, Mercedes-Benz and cultural pioneers like Billie Eilish and beyond. Helping brands find their essence and build worlds that last.
Who is writing this?
Manuel Steiner - based in Berlin, with over a decade shaping culture-defining work across the globe. Driven to turn complexity into clarity, and momentum into meaning.
Jason Hickel, “Progress and its Discontents,” New Internationalist (2019) https://newint.org/features/2019/07/01/long-read-progress-and-its-discontents#:~:text=that%20the%20most%20important%20gains,either%20downplayed%20or%20ignored%20altogether
Cognitive overload and stress from constant demands – Frontiers in Cognition (2023) https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cognition/articles/10.3389/fcogn.2023.1203077/full
Ine Beyens et al., “Screen media use and ADHD-related behaviors,” PNAS (2018) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30275318/#:~:text=The%20diagnosis%20of%20attention,the%20Differential%20Susceptibility%20to%20Media
Herbert A. Simon, Designing Organizations for an information-rich world (1971) https://gwern.net/doc/design/1971-simon.pdf
Charlie Warzel, “Kate Middleton and the End of Shared Reality,” The Atlantic (2024) https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/kate-middleton-mothers-day-photo-fake/677718/