About What Time Binds
What Time Binds is a weekly Substack about the drift of institutional language and the repair of the checks that language covers for. Every piece here defines a word to an institution that is making that word do work it should not do. I name the mechanism behind the drift. I put a tool in your hand you can use in your own life, your own team, or your own family.
This Substack is currently free, publishes weekly, and has open comments. Any corrections are published publicly.
What you get
Four series across the week.
Monday: the essay. Long-form editorial. One case, one mechanism, one repair.
Wednesday: What Do You Mean? Field Guide. A shorter piece on one magnet word. Plain testable definition, includes list, excludes list, example, non-example.
Friday: the Binding. A working document you can send someone. Five reads across Substack and other literature, one institution, one failure of check, one thing that would restore the check.
Saturday: Pinned Terms. A single card. One term, one plain definition, one visual. Meant to travel. (This content is currently paused.)
Every claim is sourced against a primary document, so you can read it yourself. Every quote is verified. When a piece is wrong, the correction runs as soon as it is verified.
Who writes it
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D. United States Marine Corps, retired Master Sergeant. Twenty-three years in uniform. Combat Engineer, MOS 1371. Four countries, from Camp Pendleton to Yuma to Okinawa to Camp Fallujah to Camp Leatherneck in Helmand. Doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier. Instructor at the UC Irvine Division of Continuing Education. Independent advisor on meaning repair and AI readiness at jerrywwashington.com.
Author of Simulated Realities: Generative AI and the Remanufacture of Professionalism (2023). Presenter, “Technological Stewardship,” University of Oxford Research Ethics Colloquium, 2025. Research record on SSRN, including the March 2026 scoping review across eight disciplines. Adulthood of Humanity, the book this Substack is the working notebook for, is planned for 2026/2027.
Co-founder of Betweenward, a Substack for adults building meaningful next chapters, at Betweenward.substack.com.
A Marine combat engineer is careful. Before anyone breaks ground, somebody walks the site. Somebody pulls the soil data. Somebody marks the lane. I write the same way.
Who this is for
If you work inside an institution and can feel its language slipping, a policy that keeps changing what it “really” means, a metric that used to measure one thing and now measures another, a program defined by its purpose that is being redefined by its detractors, this Substack is written for you.
If you are trying to make sense of AI, of institutional change, of the words being put in front of us to accept in place of the ones we used to trust, without surrendering to panic or cynicism, it is written for you too.
WTB names systems and the logic that keeps them running. It does not go after people. This is not a newsletter for daily outrage, partisan talking points dressed up as insight, or clean villain stories with easy heroes.
What it costs
Nothing, currently. Enter an email address, and the next piece arrives.
The full archive stays open. The comment sections carry names and evidence, not team colors. If a piece changes how you see something, send it to the person you were arguing with about that thing. If a piece is wrong, tell me, share your evidence, and if valid, I will run the correction.
—JWW
