What Hernán Cortés did, you see, was more than just landfall on some foreign coast—it was a whole operation. Stranger King theory, they call it now. Marshall Sahlins, anthropologist, mapped it out: the colonial playbook, rubber-stamped, refined, perfected, executed to the letter.

It starts with smoke and mirrors, offering peace to warring tribes while the sun is setting on their entire world. Cortés wasn’t the first to pull this off. Hell, this whole hustle was being run in places like Indonesia, Oceania, long before swords met obsidian in Mesoamerica. Sahlins saw it everywhere—a kind of myth, a process. Europeans would slip in, quiet as death, wading through the endless feuds, the bloodlines and grievances like some blood-slick puppeteer of chaos.

They enter, they smile, they offer the deal: “We can mediate, broker peace, broker power.” And some tribes—well, they buy in. They think they’ve made a friend, they think they’ve ascended to the top of the heap. They can see it now, standing tall over their enemies, the world bent to their will. But the Stranger King knows the game. The peace-brokers are brokers of their own war—war by other means, more insidious. While they back one tribe, they pull the strings of another. Better guns, shiny gadgets, horses taller than any local’s dreams, firepower, and cash flow from some far-off empire that no one can even imagine.

Suddenly, the wars shift—the rivals become fuel for the European engine. It’s no longer about tribes, it’s about something bigger, but the tribes don’t know that yet. They just fight, clinging to the old animosities. They become pawns, each one stepping closer to the edge without seeing it. The game’s already won before the first shot was fired.

Colonization isn’t an invasion. It’s a trap, sprung slow. The Europeans use the fractures in the system, the tribal rivalries, and the myopia of conflict like a surgeon uses a scalpel, carving up entire continents until they’ve taken everything. The tribes think they’re being led to power, but they’re being led to the slaughterhouse.

It’s the same goddamn story, always. The tribes in Polynesia thought they could control the Stranger King, hold him at arm’s length, strike a bargain, stay on top. They’d seen it happen before, or maybe they hadn’t, but they felt that old rush—the new power, the foreign influence. They believed they could master it, ride it like some wave out of the deep unknown. But it never works that way, does it?

It’s like the first hit of dope—just a taste. That’s all they wanted. They think they can control it. They always do. They think the high’s a temporary thing, a thrill, something to boost them past their rivals, make them gods for a second. But the dope doesn’t work that way. It flips, it shifts. It doesn’t just creep into your veins; it rewires you. Makes you believe you’re in control even as it’s tightening the noose.

The tribes, they see the guns, the money, the foreign trade. They think it’s something they can use, some magic potion. But once they’re in, it’s over. They’re hooked, dependent. They don’t even see the strings anymore. They’re puppets and the hands pulling those strings are far, far away, out of sight, but never out of mind. And it’s not just the tribes. It’s us. It’s always been us. New mediums, new highs—television, radio, the internet, social media—it’s all the same.

We dive in thinking we’ve got the reins, like we’re controlling the beast. But the beast is controlling us. The clicks, the likes, the shares—it floods your system like junk. You think you’re feeding it, but it’s feeding on you. The medium becomes the message, and the message is this: You’re hooked. You can’t quit it. The dopamine rush is all you’re chasing now, and every hit is a little smaller, a little less satisfying, but you keep going. You keep scrolling.

Just like the tribes thought they were wielding the new power, we think we’re wielding this new world. But we’re the ones being wielded.