The Hegemony doesn't force time dilation on anyone.
That's the trap Simmons sets — the wealthy *choose* to experience centuries in what the poor live as decades because subjective time becomes the final status marker, the only resource that can't be faked or redistributed.
You have more *of yourself* than other people. More internal experience.
The asymmetry becomes desirable because it signals membership in a smarter, faster class, and the actual mechanism—algorithms deciding whose subjective moment stretches and whose compresses—disappears behind the promise of personalization. You get *your* time. Customized.
The book's genius isn't predicting time dilation — it's showing that the technology was never the point. The point was making acceleration feel like meritocracy.
Spend one full day logging every algorithmic choice made *for* you (feeds, recommendations, autocomplete, search results) and notice which fragments feel like personalization versus control—then ask which distinction you still believe matters.
Read Shoshana Zuboff's *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism* Chapter 5 on 'The Prediction Imperative' for her argument about how algorithmic systems don't predict behavior—they *shape* it while creating the illusion of discovery, which is exactly Simmons's vision of the Hegemony rendered in real economics.