I’ve been putting out a lot of strategy lately. Frameworks. Indexes. Operating systems. So this week, something lighter: an old internet story I remember us watching unfold in the office, back when Facebook likes still seemed like a reasonable foundation for a marketing campaign.

In 2012, Walmart and Energy Sheets announced a simple promotion: Pitbull would visit whichever local Walmart collected the most new likes on Facebook.

Fans were supposed to compete to bring Mr. Worldwide to their town.

The internet had a different idea.

It decided to send him to Kodiak, Alaska.

Not because Kodiak had the most Pitbull fans. Because it was one of the most remote Walmart stores anyone could find.

The campaign asked the audience to choose a destination. The audience chose a joke.

And then Pitbull did something unusual.

He went.

A very ordinary promotion

Strip the story back, and the original mechanism is about as unremarkable as marketing gets. “Like” a local Walmart’s Facebook page. The store that gains the most new likes wins a visit from a global pop star. It’s the kind of engagement play that launched, and quietly died, a thousand times over that decade: give us a cheap action, we’ll dangle a prize, everyone competes politely, someone wins, nobody remembers.

The ordinariness is the setup for the joke. The more forgettable the brief, the funnier it is when the crowd hijacks it. Nobody remembers the campaigns that worked as designed. This one is remembered precisely because it didn’t.

The internet accepts the rules and rejects the assignment

Enter David Thorpe, then writing for the Boston Phoenix, who went looking for the single most remote Walmart he could find, landed on Kodiak, Alaska, and pointed the internet at it under a hashtag: #ExilePitbull.

The goal was not to bring Mr. Worldwide somewhere he’d be adored. The goal was to send him somewhere very … worldwide.

And the number started to climb. Past a few thousand. Past the point where any of it could plausibly be the work of Kodiak’s actual residents. It finished north of 70,000 likes, for a town of roughly 6,000 people. More than eleven times the population had voted to exile a rapper to their local Walmart.

The crowd didn’t cheat. It didn’t stuff ballots through a security hole or counterfeit anything. It used the mechanism exactly as designed and supplied its own reason for pulling the lever.

The contest gave people an action. The hijack gave them a purpose.

That’s the moment the participation became interesting. Not when Walmart posted the rules, but when the internet decided the rules could be pointed at something better than the thing they were built for.

Mr. Worldwide makes a decision

At this point, there’s a well-worn playbook, and every brand in the world knows it. Disqualify Kodiak on a technicality. Declare that “spirit of the contest” language nobody reads until they need it. Find a reason the result doesn’t count.

There’s a name for this move now — the Boaty McBoatface treatment. Let the public vote, watch them pick the joke, then let the adults quietly win. Pitbull did the opposite.

Pitbull could have treated the whole thing as mockery. To be fair, it was. He was the punchline. The joke was aimed squarely at him.

Instead, he said:

“I will go anywhere in the world for my fans.”

He confirmed he’d go. Then he did the thing that turned a viral gag into a genuinely good story: he invited David Thorpe, the man who started the joke at his expense, to come along. When the promotional companies initially seemed unwilling to cover Thorpe’s travel, Pitbull’s own team paid for it. His manager’s explanation is still the best line in the whole affair: you don’t invite someone to dinner and then make them pay.

The crowd had cast Pitbull as the object of the joke. Two decisions - to go and to bring along the joke’s instigator - made Pitbull its co-author instead.

Exile becomes arrival

On July 30, 2012, Pitbull landed in Kodiak.

He visited the Walmart. He attended a community event at the Coast Guard base. The mayor handed him a key to the city. He left with a survival kit that reportedly included bear repellent, which is either the most or least practical parting gift a pop star has ever received. A few hours later, he was gone, back on tour.

And somewhere in those few hours, the word “exile” quietly changed meaning. It had started as a hostile joke: banish him, strand him, put him as far from relevance as the map allows. By the time he was posing for photos and thanking the town, it had become something communal and, honestly, kind of joyful. Kodiak didn’t get a punishment. Kodiak got a party it hadn’t planned, built out of a joke it hadn’t started.

The internet tried to make the destination an insult. Pitbull showed up and made it a welcome.

The audience’s agenda

This story isn’t really about how to run a public vote. It’s about what happens when the public decides your neat little promotion is actually raw material for something more alive.

The campaign offered a simple transaction: give us a Facebook like, and your town might get Pitbull. The crowd wrote a different offer: join us in exiling a publicly pompous musician to the edge of the map, and together we’ll turn a throwaway contest into a legend. One was a marketing brief; the other was a mission with a destination, a scoreboard, an underdog city, and a joke everyone could help land.

The mechanism was the structure, but not the story. The story arrived the moment people supplied their own reason for playing. That’s the quiet tension inside every participatory campaign: you can design the levers, but you don’t get to control the meaning people attach to pulling them.

And the part that’s easy to miss? The crowd didn’t just hijack the campaign; it set a test. Every party the joke touched got a chance to be a spoilsport, and every one of them declined. Walmart could have voided Kodiak on a technicality and didn’t. The promoters could have quietly found a more camera-friendly winner and didn’t — they even paid Thorpe’s way when the sponsors balked. Pitbull could have treated the whole thing as an insult, because it was one, and instead said he’d go anywhere for his fans. Even David Thorpe, who built the joke specifically to strand Pitbull at the edge of the map, got on the plane and stood in the Kodiak Walmart next to the man he’d tried to exile.

The internet set out to humiliate. Instead, it left impressed. Not because the joke failed — it worked perfectly — but because the people on the receiving end met it with generosity instead of defensiveness. That’s the thing no brief can manufacture, and no budget can buy: the crowd’s respect, earned by being a good sport about being the punchline.

The crowd authored the campaign. Everyone else authored the ending. That’s the whole trick of participation. You can hand people the levers, but the story only turns out well if, when they pull them somewhere you never planned, you’re gracious enough to follow them there.

And you’re still willing to show up when the answer is a trip to Kodiak, Alaska.

Target, customer, audience, community, tribe. Marketers use them as synonyms. They’re really five distances between a brand and a person, and read in order, they tell a single story about a brand learning to give up the center of the room.

Walk into any planning meeting, and you’ll hear five words used as if they mean the same thing. The target for the campaign. The customer we’re after. The audience we’re building. The community we want. The tribe we’re stewarding. They get swapped mid-sentence, each one a slightly warmer way of saying the last. But they aren’t synonyms. Each name names a different relationship between a brand and a person, and the distance between them is definitive.

Read them linearly, and they become one long move: a brand slowly stepping back from the center of the room.

Imagine drawing it

Here’s the simplest way to see the difference. Imagine sketching each of these five words as a small picture — the brand, the people it’s trying to reach, and where each one is standing in the room.

In the early words, the brand stands in the center, and everyone faces it. An audience is the clearest version: a crowd of people all turned inward, looking at the brand, and not one of them looking at anyone else. The room is full, but every face is pointed the same way.

Then the picture changes. People stop facing the brand and start turning to face each other. The brand is still in the room, but it’s no longer what everyone came to see, and by the last word it has stepped all the way out to the edge, while the people gather around something they share.

That move, from the center to the edge, is the whole story. The near end is attention: the brand in the middle with every face turned toward it. The far end is belonging: the people turned toward each other, holding together around something that would survive even if the brand walked out. Belonging is the only part that doesn’t disappear the moment the brand stops paying for it.

Now, one word at a time.

Where the arc forks

That’s the arc. Five distances, one direction, the brand letting go of the center an inch at a time. But community isn’t a single thing. It’s where the arc forks, and that fork is the most useful distinction here. There are two ways to have a community: you can join one that already exists, or build one that doesn’t.

Joining means the fire was already burning before you arrived. Red Bull didn’t invent action sports. Yeti didn’t invent hunting and fishing culture. Each found a passion that already had its people and earned a place near the fire. The work is service. The link belongs to the tribe, and the brand’s job is to be useful without trying to own it. You can’t walk into a fire someone else built and install yourself at the center without putting it out, so joining pushes you toward the edge by definition.

Building means no fire exists yet, so you light one. Harley-Davidson built the Owners Group. Peloton built the ride, the leaderboard, the shared 6 a.m. habit. And when you build, you can sit close to the center, because you lit the fire yourself. The brand doesn’t always have to give up the middle. Sometimes it earns the right to stand there.

But the center you get to keep isn’t the obvious one. A built community only becomes a community when its true center is the members’ shared identity (the rider they become at 6 a.m., the open road, the club), with the brand as host and badge rather than the sun everyone orbits. Keep the center on the logo, keep people facing you, and what you’ve built is an audience wearing a community badge, not a community. It’s the most common way this goes wrong.

Every fire has a cost

The two paths carry opposite costs. Borrow a fire and you warm yourself on energy you don’t control. It can carry a brand for years, and it can turn. Cova called that failure the counter-brand community, the tribe that organizes against the company that came courting. Light your own, and it’s yours, which sounds safer than it is. A built community runs on meaning the brand has to keep generating, and the day it stops feeding the fire, the fire goes cold. Control on one side, freedom from upkeep on the other.

Where it all leads

The whole arc points one way. Target is the brand alone with its intentions. Tribe is the brand at the edge of a fire full of people who’d still be there if the logo vanished. Everything between measures how much of the center the brand was willing to give away.

Every brand is built to be at the center of the room. The ones that build something lasting spend their whole lives earning their way out of it.

Attention is easy to buy and quick to leave. Belonging is what’s left in the room once the brand steps back.

We just watched a crowd turn itself into a boat. Norway’s Viking Row is barely a year old, and it works for one reason: It gives every person in the stands a way in.

The Viking Row belongs to a larger, stranger family. If athletes’ pregame rituals are private machines for control, the ones a crowd builds together are public machines for belonging. And a crowd has more than one way in.

Myth and ritual sit at either end. A myth is a story a crowd shares and keeps retelling, a goat at Wrigley or a birthright sold to New York. A ritual is a thing a crowd does in unison and keeps repeating, a song in the stands or an octopus on the ice. Superstition lives in the space between them, a belief that some small act bends the outcome, story and gesture fused into one. The three blur constantly, and they still aren’t the same thing.

What ties them together is how they move. They get passed around, from one crowd to the next and from one country to another. And they get passed down, from parents to kids who inherit a grief or a chant they had no hand in starting. Some arrived fully formed. Most didn’t. A few were borrowed, a few were accidents the stands refused to let die. All of them are ways of refusing to watch from the outside.

The Curse Everyone Agrees To

Begin with a goat. In 1945, a tavern owner named William Sianis arrived at Wrigley Field for a World Series game with a ticket for himself and a ticket for his pet goat, Murphy. The goat, by all accounts, smelled, and Sianis was asked to remove it. Insulted, he declared that the Chicago Cubs would never win another World Series. They didn’t win one for the next seventy-one years, a championship drought stretching to 108 years total, and an entire fanbase organized its grief around a bad-tempered man and his odorous goat (USA Today, ESPN). When the Cubs finally won in 2016, fans insisted they weren’t just winning a trophy. They were lifting a hex.

The Cubs weren’t alone in their cursedness. Across the country, the Boston Red Sox spent eighty-six years convinced they’d doomed themselves by selling Babe Ruth, “the Bambino,” to the New York Yankees in 1919. The curse didn’t actually exist in the public mind for most of those decades. It was largely invented by the Boston sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy, whose 1990 book, Curse of the Bambino, gave the drought a name and a villain. The idea caught because the fans needed it to. As one historian put it, the curse “gives the fanbase another identity and a unifying aspect to rally around” (ESPN). Boston broke it in 2004 with one of the greatest comebacks in sports history, against, fittingly, the Yankees.

This is the first secret of the communal myth: it doesn’t need to be true. It only needs to be shared. The curse is a way for thousands of strangers to feel the same thing at the same time, to convert decades of random misfortune into a single coherent narrative with a beginning and, eventually, a cathartic end. It is the purest kind of passing down, a grief handed to kids who weren’t alive when it started.

Rituals Made from Nothing

The same impulse runs through the rituals fans invent out of thin air. Consider baseball’s rally cap, a superstition that hardened into a ritual: the act of flipping your hat inside out or backward to summon a late-inning comeback. There’s no mechanism here, no theory of how a turned cap moves a baseball. Its origin is genuinely murky. Some trace it to the 1945 Detroit Tigers, but the version we know didn’t take hold until Mets fans started flipping their caps inside out at Shea Stadium in the mid-1980s. It got seared into the national memory during the frantic Game 6 comeback of the 1986 World Series (Wikipedia). The rally cap survives on decades of fans insisting they’ve seen it work too many times to stop now.

Superstition with a Body Count

And then there’s the gloriously morbid logic of NASCAR, where superstition has a body count. Green cars are bad luck, a belief traced to the 1920 death of Indianapolis 500 champion Gaston Chevrolet in a crash while driving one. And peanut shells are banned outright from the pits, supposedly because shells were found in the wreckage of fatal 1937 crashes, even though contemporary reports never actually mentioned them (Sports Illustrated, NASCAR Hall of Fame). The facts barely matter. The taboo persists because in a sport where the worst can genuinely happen, forbidding a rumored talisman of bad luck feels like armor.

The Songs a Crowd Borrows

Some of the most powerful crowd rituals are not gestures at all. They are songs, and the strange part is how few of them were ever written for the terraces. They were borrowed from somewhere else entirely and made sacred by repetition.

Before every home match at Anfield, tens of thousands of Liverpool supporters raise their scarves and sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The song has been sung by fans for so many decades that it’s been literally carved into the stadium, with the words sitting in wrought iron over the Shankly Gates. But the song is a show tune from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, written to comfort a grieving woman on stage. It reached the Kop only because a local band, Gerry and the Pacemakers, took it to number one in 1963, and fans who sang along to the day’s hit records simply never stopped (Liverpool FC, FIFA). It has since traveled to Celtic, Borussia Dortmund, Feyenoord, and clubs as far away as Tokyo. A song of consolation turned into a wall of sound unifying football fans. It’s a notoriously difficult melody too, wide and slow and unforgiving without a band behind you, which makes a full Kop carrying it in unison all the more improbable.

Across London, West Ham fans sing something even stranger. “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” began as a number in a 1918 Broadway revue, a wistful little waltz about dreams that rise and burst. A working-class club in East London adopted it, and today machines around the stadium pump thousands of real soap bubbles into the air while grown adults sing about fragile hope drifting away (West Ham United, FourFourTwo). It should be ridiculous. Instead, it is one of the most moving sights in English football, a whole crowd agreeing to believe in bubbles.

How a Ritual Travels

The strangest thing about these crowd rituals is how they travel, leaping from one fanbase to another. In Detroit, the tradition of throwing an octopus onto the ice was born on April 15, 1952, when two fish-market-owning brothers, Pete and Jerry Cusimano, hurled a cephalopod from the stands, its eight tentacles representing the eight wins then needed for a Stanley Cup. The Red Wings swept to the title that night, and seventy years later, fans are still flinging octopuses. The team has even created a building-sized octopus mascot named “Al.” This ritual proved so infectious that it spawned imitators. When the Nashville Predators wanted their own totem, they began throwing catfish (NHL, VICE).

Iceland’s mesmerizing “Viking Thunderclap,” the slow, building, synchronized clap punctuated by a guttural “HUH” that stunned the world at Euro 2016, wasn’t drawn from ancient Scandinavian heritage at all. Icelandic supporters appear to have adapted it from existing European fan culture. The Scottish football club Motherwell is often cited as one influence. Iceland may have picked up the chant after a 2014 match against Motherwell, then carried it home and made it their own (SPORF, InnerDrive).

The Poznań traveled even further. It began with supporters of the Polish club Lech Poznań, who turned their backs to the pitch, linked arms, and bounced in unison. When six thousand of them did it inside Manchester City’s stadium in 2010, the home fans were baffled at first, then hooked, and made it their own (Manchester City, The Independent). From there, it kept jumping. Charlotte FC opens every home match with it; Western Sydney’s supporters claimed it for the eightieth minute, and by 2025 the band Oasis had whole concert crowds doing it between songs. A dance from one Polish terrace had become a global reflex.

The Accidents That Stuck

Some of the most enduring rituals were never planned at all. They were accidents the crowd refused to let die. On December 26, 1993, in sub-zero cold at Lambeau Field, Green Bay safety LeRoy Butler scooped up a lateral and scored, then, on pure impulse, launched himself into the arms of the fans behind the end zone. “He stuck to the wall like Velcro,” teammate Robert Brooks marveled. The “Lambeau Leap” was born in that instant, popularized by Brooks the following season, and is still performed more than thirty years later (ESPN, Packers.com).

A continent away, Cristiano Ronaldo did something similar by accident. After a goal at a 2013 friendly in Miami, he leapt, spun in the air, landed in a wide stance, and shouted “Sí,” Spanish for “yes.” He hadn’t planned to repeat it. The crowd’s roar of “Siuuu” decided otherwise, and the yelp became the most imitated celebration on Earth, copied by athletes in every sport and kids in every schoolyard (ESPN).

Calculated Rituals

Most of these rituals were accidents or borrowings. In Los Angeles, one was engineered on purpose, and the fans built it into the architecture. LAFC’s supporters section is called the 3252, named for the exact number of standing spots in the North End behind the goal. Add up the digits, and you get twelve, the number that the sport of soccer reserves for the fans themselves, considering them to be the twelfth player on an eleven-man team (MLSsoccer.com, The 3252).

Everything about the section is designed for participation. Capos stand on raised platforms and lead the chants by hand. Drummers hold the whole end on one beat, and flags move down the rows so even a first-timer gets a turn waving one. The signature chant, “Jump for LAFC,” was borrowed from supporters in Australia, who had borrowed it themselves from South America and Europe, and it has since bounced back out to clubs as far away as the Norwegian First Division. After every win, the players walk to the North End, take a megaphone, and lead a slow call-and-response with the crowd until the two sides are singing as one voice. Even the club’s co-owner, Will Ferrell, has been known to grab the megaphone and start the chant himself.

Beautiful Nonsense

These traditions endure because they do something the scoreboard can’t. They bind a crowd into a congregation. They turn private hope into a shared language of belief. In the most affectionate sense, this is beautiful nonsense, and that is exactly why it lasts.

Athletes tighten their laces in the same order before every match, reaching for control. A Norwegian crowd pulls imaginary oars in unison, reaching for each other. Cursed fans wait decades for release. The faithful raise borrowed songs over the beat of a drum.

Underneath all of it runs one instinct, older than any tradition it produces.

We are never satisfied to watch the story from the outside.

We always want a way in.

A fan chant is barely a year old, and proof of how fast spectators become participants when a ritual is simple enough to join in a second.

Imagine you’re standing on a cold beach in Northern Europe, more than a thousand years ago. There’s fog on the water, and you can’t see far. Then you hear it. A low drumbeat, slow and steady, and under it the sound of many rowers pulling on something heavy and calling out on the beat. The sound gets louder. The fog doesn’t lift, but the rhythm keeps coming, closer and closer, until you understand what’s underneath it. Oars. A lot of them. The Vikings are almost ashore, and they want you to hear them coming.

Now, stand in a football stadium in New Jersey this summer. You’ll hear nearly the same thing.

Thousands of Norwegians are packed shoulder to shoulder in the stands, leaning back and forward in unison, pulling invisible oars through imaginary water while a drum keeps time. They chant one word, over and over. Ro. Row. From across the stadium, it looks like a single living machine, a longship made of people, hauling itself toward the final whistle.

It’s called the Viking Row, and the surprising part is how new it is. This isn’t an old tradition carried down from the fjords. In its current World Cup form, it’s barely a year old.

I’ve been following Norway through this tournament partly out of bloodline, partly because the whole thing lines up with everything I’ve been writing about participation. The row is the cleanest example I’ve seen in a long time of how little a ritual needs in order to work, as long as it hands everyone an oar.

What It Actually Is

The mechanic is almost insultingly simple. You sit close to the people around you, move your arms back and forth to a drumbeat, and chant ro, the Norwegian word for row, until the sound swells into a roar. That’s the whole thing. No equipment, nothing to memorize. You sit down, take an imaginary oar, and you’re part of the crew (The Local, NPR).

It even comes with a soundtrack. The row rides on a track called Vikingblod, “Viking Blood,” which reportedly climbed to No. 1 on Spotify in Norway during the run (FourFourTwo). So the gesture has a pulse behind it, a tempo anyone can fall into on the first try.

Who Started It, And Where

Here’s the twist. This very Viking thing didn’t come down from the Viking age. It came from a guy. Ole Frøystad, a supporter from Sunnmøre and a coordinator with Oljeberget, Norway’s official supporters’ group, put it together in 2025 to give the team a distinct identity for its first World Cup since 1998 (The Local, FourFourTwo). One fan with one idea, a year before the rest of the world started copying it.

The meaning he reached for is one of Norway’s oldest and most available stories. He’s tied the row back to Viking crews taking in their sails and pulling out the oars to reach shore right before battle. A nation of 5.6 million, back on the biggest stage after 28 years in the wilderness, rowing itself into a fight. Whether that’s airtight history matters less than how instantly it reads. You get it in a second, the way you understood the fog.

There’s a split underneath all of this, and it’s the bridge to the other rituals I’ve been writing about. The athlete’s ritual is usually a private machine for control. The lucky socks, the pregame meal eaten in the same order, the breath held before a penalty kick, small spells one person casts to feel steadier inside a moment they can’t command.

The fan’s ritual runs the other way. It’s a public machine for belonging. It takes the lone spectator and folds them into something bigger and more synchronized than the self.

That’s what the row does. It doesn’t ask Norwegian fans to cheer louder or believe harder. It hands them a job. They sit, take the oar, pull in time with the people beside them, and in a few seconds, a crowd stops being a crowd and becomes a crew.

Simplicity Wins Participation

Here’s what I find genuinely instructive about it, with my strategist hat on. Most attempts to manufacture fan culture die of complexity. They need a chant with specific lyrics, or a card display, or an app, or a guy with a megaphone telling everyone what to do. The Viking Row needs none of that. It needs a body and a neighbor.

That’s the whole design lesson. A participatory ritual doesn’t scale because it’s clever. It scales because the barrier to joining is almost zero. A nine-year-old can do it. So can a grandmother who has never watched a match. A stranger two rows over is fully inside the ritual one second after deciding to try. It works at the scale of a stadium and at the scale of four friends on an escalator, which means it can be as big or as small as the moment needs it to be.

Built To Be Shared

The other reason it traveled is that it was, almost by accident, built for the feed.

Think about what a phone camera loves. Motion, rhythm, a crowd moving as one, a clean repeatable gesture, a myth you recognize on sight, a one-word name. The row has all of it. It’s multi-sensory in a way that survives compression. You see the bodies, you hear the drum, and the tempo carries even through a muted screen. It reads in three seconds, and it begs to be copied.

So it jumped the stadium walls. There’s a clip of Norwegian fans in Viking helmets rowing up an escalator in a Boston train station, dead serious, perfectly in time. There’s another of them filling the red steps of Times Square (NPR). Every one of those clips is an instruction manual. Watch it once, and you already know how to do it, which makes each video a recruiting poster. The ritual is the content and the call to action at the same time.

Then it climbed somewhere stranger. On the floor of Norway’s parliament, the speaker, Masud Gharahkhani, brought lawmakers to order with his gavel and led them through the row, a salute he described as coming from the heart of the country’s democracy (NPR). A fan’s idea from the year before had become a national gesture, then a global one, in a matter of weeks.

On Brand

Part of why it caught on so fast is that it never felt like an invention. It dropped into a Viking identity that Norway had already built around this team. The 2026 kit carries a typeface drawn from Elder Futhark, the old Norse runic alphabet, so Haaland’s and Ødegaard’s names run down their backs in runes (Footy Headlines). Before the tournament, the federation shot a campaign called “The Vikings Are Coming,” players in full Viking dress beside real longships.

So the symbol was already sitting there, fully loaded. The fans just picked it up and turned it into something you do with your body. That’s the line between a gimmick and a ritual that feels true. A gimmick sits on top of an identity. This one grew straight out of it.

A ritual doesn’t always earn its power by being old. Sometimes it earns it by feeling instantly remembered.

The Drum Beats Back

Then came the moment that turned a fan ritual into a shared one. After Norway beat Senegal 3-2 to reach the knockout round, the players didn’t wave and jog down the tunnel. They walked over and sat down on the grass in front of the supporters’ end. Ødegaard picked up a drum and set the beat. Haaland led the team in rowing along with the stands, the whole squad pulling imaginary oars in the dirt while the crowd pulled back (ESPN, Reuters). Haaland said afterward that Ødegaard had asked him before kickoff whether they should join in if they won. So it wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. Ødegaard had imagined it before kickoff, a handshake between the pitch and the people who came to watch.

Now the ritual runs both directions. The fans row for the players. The players drum for the fans. It stopped belonging to either side, which is usually the moment a piece of culture quits being a trend and starts being a tradition.

A Way In

Strip away the runes and the drum and the chart-topping track, and here’s what’s left. The Viking Row hands everyone in the building, and everyone watching the clip, a simple physical way to stop being a spectator. That’s why it belongs in any honest conversation about participation. The rowing itself is almost beside the point.

A country waited 28 years to get back to this stage. When it finally arrived, its fans didn’t settle for wearing the flag and singing the anthem. They sat down together, grabbed imaginary oars, and built themselves a boat. For ninety minutes at a time, a scattered fanbase becomes one crew, all facing the same way, all pulling.

Go back to the fog. What made that sound on the water so frightening was the unity inside it. Every oar pulling in time. One boat, one purpose, before the keel ever touched sand. That’s what these fans have found a thousand years later, in a stadium parking lot in New Jersey. They’re not cheering from the shore. They’re rowing the boat. And the genius of it is that anyone, from any seat or any screen, can pick up an oar and climb in.

Row on, Norway.

I’ve slapped hands and bumped fists at the start of a roll more times than I can count. Every grappler has. You reach out, slap palms, tap knuckles, and the round begins. The gesture is older than anyone in the room, and it carries a single meaning. We’re both ready. The whole point is the agreement, made with your hands, that the two of you are about to start.

Combat sports are full of these openings, the bow that begins a judo match, the ceremony a Muay Thai fighter performs before the bell. None of them moves the fight. What they do is mark the seam between the room you were standing in and the contest you’re about to enter. Cross that seam, and you stop being a person who trains. You become a participant in this exact match, right now.

Of course, martial arts aren’t the only sports that love a good pre-match routine.

Crossing the Seam Alone

Rafael Nadal crosses the same seam alone, and he does it with water bottles. Watch him in the ninety seconds before a tennis point, and you’re watching a man hold off chaos with his bare hands. He picks the back of his shorts. He tucks the hair behind one ear, then the other. He wipes his nose, wipes it again, touches both shoulders. And before any of that, back at the changeover chair, he sets down two drink bottles like a surgeon laying out instruments. Labels turned to face the baseline. One nudged a fraction behind the other. Both angled toward the court he’s about to fight on. Move them, and something in him goes quietly wrong.

My wife loves tennis, so we’ve seen a lot of Nadal on our television, and my wife and kids can narrate his routine out loud the way some people narrate a nature documentary. The bottles, the ears, all of it, but mostly the long sequence before each serve that ends with a tug at the back of his shorts. A man who does that on international television, that many times, across that many years, is doing it on purpose. There’s a reason, and it isn’t the one most people reach for.

People call it superstition, and Nadal has heard that ten thousand times. He rejects it flatly. A superstition stops the moment it stops paying off, and he keeps arranging those bottles whether he wins or loses. He calls the whole routine a way of placing himself in a match (USA Today For The Win). That phrase is doing a lot of work. He’s walking himself through a door, and the contest waits on the other side of it.

Engineers of Attention

Swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian in history, ran a pre-race routine with the tolerances of a Swiss movement. The same breakfast every morning of competition: eggs, oatmeal, energy shakes. The same warm-up, lap for lap, eight hundred of swim, six hundred of kick, four hundred of pull, two hundred of drill, then a burst of race-pace twenty-fives to wake the fast-twitch fibers. The same music, the same order of stretches, each one checked off. On the blocks, he pulled his right earbud when officials called the swimmers up, the left only when they read his name, and he always mounted from the left side (SwimSwam). None of it shaved a hundredth off the clock. What it did was make him Phelps. By the time he stepped onto the block, the race was just the next item on a list he’d started hours earlier, and he was already inside it.

That’s the magic hiding inside all of this. The routine looks like a cage and works like a key. Make a hundred small choices in advance, which sock, which earbud, how the bottles sit, and you free up the one thing that can’t be rehearsed: The performance. Sports psychologists have a plain name for the mechanism: ritual. Rituals minimize distractions and keep an athlete task-focused, says Dr. Bradley Cardinal of Oregon State University, and they take the edge off anxiety while building confidence (Deutsche Welle).

And that part transcends sport. A ritual leaves the act itself untouched and works on the performer instead. The serve is the same serve. The high note is the same high note. The takedown is the same takedown. The fouetté is the same fouetté. What moves is the person arriving to do it, carried from one state into another. That’s the participation function of ritual, and it doesn’t stop at the edge of the field. A stage asks for the same crossing. So does a hard conversation you’ve been putting off or a deal you’re eager to negotiate. The small repeated act is how you arrive as the version of yourself that the moment is about to require.

Private Certainties

The record books are full of these private certainties. Wade Boggs, the Hall of Fame third baseman, ate chicken before every single game and took batting practice at 5:17 on the dot. The nickname “Chicken Man” stuck, and so did five batting titles, so it’s hard to say the routine cost him anything (Sporting News). Michael Jordan wore his past into every game, keeping the powder-blue shorts from his 1982 national-championship team at North Carolina under his Bulls uniform for his whole career. He had the Bulls shorts cut longer to hide them and almost by accident started the baggy-shorts era (Sporting News). Serena Williams kept the same unwashed socks going through a tournament, and when she lost, she’d sometimes blame herself for breaking the pattern rather than the opponent across the net (Evening Standard).

Even Tiger Woods, the most clinical competitor of his era, carried one rule into every final round: a red shirt. He says his mother thinks red is his power color, he tested well in it during college, and he never stopped (Sportskeeda). Red fused so completely to who he was that he eventually built an apparel brand on it, Sun Day Red. Usain Bolt ran the opposite ritual. Where his rivals coiled tighter in the blocks, he mugged for the cameras and threw his lightning-bolt pose, a practiced looseness that became the most copied gesture in the history of the track (Liam Sandford). The looseness did for Bolt exactly what the rigidity did for the others. Wound tight or shaken loose, every one of them was crossing the same seam.

Borrowed From the Ancestors

Repeat a certainty across enough bodies and enough years, and it hardens individual habit into something nobody owns alone. Push the idea that far, and the ritual stops belonging to the athlete. It belongs to the ancestors. The salt a sumo wrestler hurls into the ring is Shinto purification, cleansing the dohyō before two bodies meet on sacred ground. The thunderous shiko stomp drives out evil spirits. The “power water” passed from the last victor to the next competitor carries winning energy down the bracket, and only wrestlers of the top two divisions earn the right to throw the salt at all (SumoSumoSumo, Martialhive). Nothing in sport carries more of this weight than the Haka, the Māori war dance the New Zealand All Blacks have performed before matches for more than 130 years, first on a tour of Britain in 1888. The classic “Ka Mate” was composed around 1820 by the chief Te Rauparaha to mark his escape from death. In 2005, the team added the fiercer “Kapa o Pango,” whose closing throat-cutting gesture has drawn awe and controversy in equal measure, and in 2014, New Zealand law formally recognized “Ka Mate” as a national treasure (BBC, The Independent).

The Pacific Islands answer with their own. Tonga’s Sipi Tau, Samoa’s Siva Tau, Fiji’s Cibi, and Bole. When two of these teams face off and perform at the same time, inches apart, then embrace, the whistle hasn’t blown, and you’re already watching two tribes recognize each other (WalesOnline).

The Cost of Admission

Nadal’s bottles and the All Blacks’ war dance run on a shared instinct: Before you can play, you have to arrive. The contest itself can’t be controlled, so you build a small place beside it that you can control. And you cross from one into the other along a path you’ve walked a thousand times. The bottle gets set down straight. The hands slap, the knuckles touch. The seam closes behind you. You stopped preparing for the match a moment ago. Now you’re in it, your whole self, and you’re ready.

A rally beard is a ritual no one designed and no one owns. The only brand that ever found a place inside it got there by waiting for the right moment.

By October of 2013, Fenway Park was full of beards that never grew on anyone’s face. Foam ones, knit ones, ones held on with a loop of elastic. The men on the field had the real thing, thick and unkempt, and when a Red Sox player hit a home run, his teammates would grab the beard and pull it like a bell rope. A city that had spent that spring grieving was tugging on the same beard, in the stands and from the couch, and somehow it helped.

The rally beard is one of the purest rituals I know of. One that no one designed and no one owns. It is worth tracing, because the way it formed reveals the core mechanics of participation itself, and the narrow, honest role a brand can play inside it.

It Did Not Start in Baseball

The tradition traces back to the New York Islanders, who grew beards through their Stanley Cup runs in the early 1980s. I grew up watching that team, and here is the strange part: I can still see Bob Nystrom’s overtime goal in 1980, the backhand that started the dynasty. I have no memory of the beards at all. It turns out there was almost nothing to remember. The scruff was thin, and nobody had even coined the phrase “playoff beard” yet.

Ask those players how it began, and you get a shrug. Maybe it came from two Swedes on the Islanders roster who had watched Björn Borg refuse to shave at Wimbledon. Maybe it was superstition that hardened after a couple of wins. Nystrom, who could barely grow one, later said it was simply something that happened.

That vagueness is so important. A ritual rarely has a clean founding moment, because no one is in charge of starting one. It accretes. Players stopped shaving, won, kept not shaving, and a coincidence slowly stiffened into a tradition the league itself never wrote down. Nobody started it on purpose. It grew on repetition and belief.

How It Crossed Over and Found the Fans

For about thirty years, it stayed mostly a hockey thing, spreading rink to rink. But eventually it migrated into the stands, where fans began skipping the razor along with their teams. Then baseball got hold of it and made it loud. In 2010, the San Francisco Giants rode a closer named Brian Wilson, whose jet black beard, dyed darker than nature ever intended, became the face of their title run. “Fear the Beard” went up on signs and shirts around the ballpark, and the crowd started arriving in beards of their own, real where they could manage it and fake where they could not.

I am not a baseball fan. I still watched this become a thing, which tells you how far it traveled. And the part that traveled is the part that matters. When a fan glues on a beard and yells across a stadium with forty thousand others doing the same, meaning changes hands. They are carrying the ritual now, putting their own face into it. And a thing you carry is a thing that belongs to you.

That move, from watching the beard to wearing the beard, is the transformative one. A ritual only turns powerful when people on the outside begin to participate of their own volition.

The 2013 Red Sox and a City That Needed a Symbol

The version most people remember came three years later. The 2013 Red Sox had finished dead last the season before. They were not supposed to be interesting. Then, in April, two bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and the season took on a whole new meaning.

The beards were already growing, almost by accident, started by a few veterans in spring training. As the team won, the beards stayed, and then the city reached for them. Boston Strong was the phrase everyone repeated after the bombing, but the phrase is hard to see. The beards gave it a face.

They did not fix anything, and no one pretended they could. What they gave a shaken city was a shared symbol, communal and a little ridiculous, that anyone could put on. The team that looked like a band of lumberjacks kept winning, the fans grew and faked beards alongside them, and the whole thing belonged to the city by the time the Red Sox won the World Series that fall. The beard had carried meaning all season that no marketing plan could ever have assigned to it.

Where a Brand Finally Fit, and How

Here is the part that should interest anyone who works on brands. No company built the rally beard. No company could have. It’s a phenomenon made of superstition, grief, camaraderie, and a city’s need, and none of those fit in a media plan.

And yet one brand did find a real place inside it by waiting for the single moment that was honestly its own. After the victory parade, David Ortiz and Shane Victorino went to the headquarters of Gillette, the razor company that has been based in Boston for more than a century, and shaved the beards off. Gillette gave a hundred thousand dollars to the fund supporting the bombing victims and turned the shave into a moment for the city rather than for itself.

Think about how easily that could have gone wrong.

A razor brand has every reason to resent a beard, and every temptation to force its way in early. To sponsor the beard or slap its logo on Dollar Beard Night and claim a movement it had nothing to do with. Gillette did none of that. It stayed out of the part that was sacred, and it stepped in at the razor, the one place it actually belonged. The ritual was the city’s. The shave could be Gillette’s. Because the brand held back everywhere else, what it did add, a public ending and real money for the victims, came across as a gift to the city. The restraint is what made the gift possible.

What It Teaches

The rally beard is pure participation. The meaning was made by the people taking part, players and fans together, and it grew precisely because no one controlled it. That is also why no brand will ever manufacture a ritual this powerful at this scale. You cannot schedule grief, or the moment a stranger decides to glue on a beard and belong to something.

What a brand can do is what Gillette did. It can pay attention to a ritual already forming and resist the urge to colonize it. A brand does not earn its way in by naming a growing trend or sponsoring it. It earns its way in by finding the single moment where its help is honest and useful, and arriving there late enough that it never feels like theft.

Earn a place. Do not claim one. Do that, and you can give the ritual something it could not have given itself.

That is the difference between forcing and fostering. A city full of fake beards understood it better than most marketing departments ever will.

I’ve been writing about ritual for a few weeks now, essay after essay. Lately, when appropriate, I’ve started pulling the framework out of each piece once it’s done. The essay makes the argument. The framework makes it portable.

This one came out of Not Every Return Is the Same.

Here’s the part worth keeping. Compulsion, habit, and ritual are indistinguishable from the outside. Same cadence. Same form. You return at the same time, in the same way, to the same thing. The repetition is identical across all three. What’s different is what compounds underneath it.

Compulsion compounds dependency. Habit compounds routine. Ritual compounds meaning, identity, and belonging. Three behaviors that look like twins, quietly building three completely different things.

The cleanest test is a slow one. Stand back and audit the practice across a full year, then ask what the person would actually say about it. Compulsion: “It cost me more than it gave.” Habit: “It was neither here nor there.” Ritual: “It improved my life.” The year tells you what the day can’t.

I’m sharing the one-sheeter in case it’s useful, whether you’re trying to build repetition into something or hoping a habit of yours might grow into a ritual. Either way, it’s worth knowing which one you’re actually making.

Same architecture. Different substance. Different outcomes.

For a while now, this series has been circling the concept of ritual from different angles. The more I looked at the types of engagement that actually last, the more ritual kept surfacing as the most valuable position any brand could hold. Ritual over reach, if you want it in three words.

So I started examining what ritual really is. I worked to separate it from the things that wear its shape without doing its work, the habits and the compulsions, and what kept surfacing was that ritual is where identity, belonging, and deeper connection live. It is a behavior a person repeats because it has become part of who they are.

Put that way, the appeal to a brand is obvious. A position rooted in someone’s identity is one no campaign can rent, and no competitor can dislodge. Of course, a brand would want to live there.

That is exactly the problem. The same property that makes ritual the most valuable position a brand can hold is the one that makes it impossible to manufacture.

What Ritual Actually Requires

Ritual is repeated behavior that carries meaning beyond its function. The morning coffee makes coffee, but it also marks the beginning of the day. The mat slap before martial arts training acknowledges a shared agreement between training partners. The Sunday family dinner reaffirms a bond that the food alone could not affirm. Repetition is the architecture. Meaning is the load it carries.

In another essay in this series, I have described what separates ritual from other things that resemble it: the habits and the compulsions that share the architecture of repetition without doing the same work. The three properties that separate ritual from these pretenders are sensory texture, intentional meaning, and identity formation. The body engages. The meaning is felt. The practice becomes part of how the person describes who they are.

For the brand, the properties that matter most are the second and the third. Because those are the two that cannot be granted from outside.

A brand can offer sensory texture. The weight of the cup. The smell of the bean. The pour cadence of the kettle. The temperature of the water. These are real design decisions, and the brand can make them, or at least shape them. They are necessary, but they are not enough.

A brand cannot grant or create intentional meaning. Meaning is what the human brings to the practice. The brand can supply the medium, but the meaning is the participant’s contribution. The coffee company can design the best mug in the world. It cannot decide what the cup means to the person who wakes up at five forty-five and pours into it the same way every morning. That meaning is a private agreement between the practitioner and the practice.

A brand cannot grant or create identity formation. Identity emerges from the participant over time. Every iteration of the practice, performed with attention, becomes a little more part of who the practitioner is. The brand can be present in that process. It cannot drive it. Identity is something a human discovers about themselves by doing the practice again, with intention, until the practice becomes part of who they are.

This is why brands cannot build rituals. Two of the three properties that constitute ritual live inside the participant. The brand can supply the texture and the form. The meaning and the identity have to come from the human who is making the practice their own.

Where the Big Argument Lands

This is also where the larger thesis of this whole project lands hardest. The argument I keep coming back to is that participation works better than persuasion in human engagement, especially for marketing and communications. Most of the time, when I say that, the implication is at the macro level: participation produces stronger and more durable engagement than interruption.

The brand-ritual question is where the principle becomes mechanical.

Persuasion can drive purchase. Persuasion can drive habit. Persuasion can drive compulsion under the right conditions. Persuasion cannot drive ritual, because ritual is constituted by what the participant brings, and what the participant brings has to come from the participant. You cannot be persuaded into meaning. You can only arrive at it through your own engagement with something worth engaging with.

The reason ritual is the most valuable position a brand can hold is also the reason a brand cannot manufacture it. The same property that makes it powerful makes it unbuyable. That paradox is the spine of everything that follows.

What Forcing Looks Like

The clearest way to see the limit is to watch a brand run straight at it. Michelob Ultra has spent the last two years on a campaign it calls Play For An Ultra, the friendly wager where someone says play you for an Ultra, and the loser buys the round. It runs constantly, with Super Bowl money and high-profile talent behind it, and every time one of the spots comes on, I cringe. It feels forced. It feels like a brand trying to install a social ritual by saying the line out loud often enough that the rest of us start saying it back.

For a while, I wondered whether I was the one who had it wrong. The numbers do not obviously agree with me. Michelob Ultra became the best-selling beer in America by volume in 2025 and now holds the largest share of the country’s draft lines. If the work is forced and the brand is winning, maybe forcing works.

Then I looked at what was actually driving the win. The Michelob Ultra brand sits on correct positioning, a light beer that belongs to an active life, which is a real association that people already hold. On top of that sits enormous media weight, marquee sports sponsorship, and a piece of category luck, the collapse of Bud Light after its boycott, and the pressure on Modelo from tariffs, within a beer market that shrank overall. That is a media machine using brute force on top of a sound position. It is the persuasion engine doing exactly what the last section said persuasion can do, which is to drive purchase. None of it is evidence that Play For An Ultra has become a ritual in anyone’s real life. The beer is selling. The practice the ad depicts is hard to imagine happening in the real world.

So the cringe was diagnostic after all. The positioning is fine. What grates is the attempt to script the practice itself, to write the participant’s line for them and hand it back as though they had chosen it. That is the difference between fostering and forcing, and forcing always leaves a mark. My kids would call it “try-hard.” A brand that has earned its way into a ritual never looks like it is trying that hard, because it did not have to manufacture the thing it is standing in. The strain is the tell.

There is a quieter irony in it. Michelob already stands next to a real practice, the beer at the end of the run or the round, the reward at the close of the effort. That is something forming in the world, and it could be fostered. Play For An Ultra is the louder, more synthetic thing built on top of it. Even inside a single brand, you can watch the choice play out, between noticing what is already there and trying to construct what is not.

What Brands Can Actually Do

Once you can see the structural limit, the useful work begins. Brands cannot build rituals. But they can do four other things, in sequence, that produce something close to the same outcome over time.

Observe and Diagnose

The first move is getting honest about what the brand is currently doing in the lives of its customers. Most brands have no idea. They have engagement metrics, frequency data, and retention curves. They do not have a clear answer to the question of whether what they have built is a ritual, a habit, or a compulsion.

The diagnostic I recommend for this is the One-Year Audit I have described in detail in a previous essay. Stand back from what the brand is doing in a customer’s day, week, or year. Imagine asking the customer, a year from now, how they would describe what the brand is doing in their life. “It improved my life” indicates ritual. “It cost me more than it gave” indicates compulsion. “It was neither here nor there” indicates habit.

Recognize Where Rituals Are Forming

The next move is observational, not generative. Brands that earn ritual position usually do not invent the ritual. They notice it.

Stanley did not invent the morning hydration practice. The cup had been on the market for over a century. What changed was the company’s recognition that a specific product had quietly entered the morning routines of millions of people, and that they could leverage that information once they saw it.

Wordle did not need to be marketed. Josh Wardle built a small game for his partner, and the daily one-puzzle structure baked the ritual in. The New York Times acquired it after the participants had already made it a daily practice. The skill was in seeing what was already happening and not breaking it.

Apple has been building its keynotes into the technology calendar for four decades. Most of that history is the company paying attention to what was forming around its own announcements and shaping the form to honor what the participants were already doing.

The pattern is consistent. Brands earn ritual position by recognizing where the practice is forming, not by engineering it from a blank page. This is closer to gardening than to construction. The brand notices what is growing and gives it the conditions to keep growing.

Support Without Overtaking

Once a ritual is forming around a brand or its category, the brand’s job is to remove friction from the practice without inserting itself into the mechanism. This is harder than it sounds, because most marketing instincts run in the opposite direction.

The brand that tries to colonize the meaning, to put itself at the center of what the participant is doing, breaks the ritual. The brand that knows how to stand back, to serve the function without occupying the heart of the practice, earns its way deeper over time.

The instinct most brand teams will resist here is the one that says do less. Do not overlay. Do not message at the moment of practice. Do not turn the cup, the socks, or the pen into an advertising surface for the brand at the exact moment the participant is using it. The brand that respects the practice gets to stay in it. The brand that tries to use the practice as a billboard gets pushed out of it.

Steward Over Time

Rituals compound across years, not quarters. The brand that earns ritual position has to operate on a timescale that most marketing teams do not plan for.

This means consistency in form. The mug needs to be the same mug, year over year, with the same weight, the same lip, and the same color. The pen has to be the same pen. The keynote has to keep its shape. The annual event has to happen on the same day in the same week. Variation kills ritual position. The practitioner is depending on the form to be what it was last time.

It also means consistency in posture. Brands change marketing leadership every couple of years. Strategies pivot. Messages get refreshed. The brand that earns ritual position has to behave as if those changes do not happen at the level of the practice. The mug does not care who the CMO is. The Wordle player does not care who owns the New York Times this year. The brand has to develop a way of working that protects the ritual layer from the noise of the broader business.

The marketing teams that manage this well share a few characteristics. They are usually small enough that decision-making stays consistent over time. They sit inside companies where founder-led continuity has kept the practice steady through changes in leadership. They work with brands whose ritual position has become so well established that the brand itself acts as a conservative force in its own organization. None of these is an easy condition to manufacture. All of them are what the position requires.

What Gets Earned

The brand that does this work, year after year, earns something the rest of the industry cannot manufacture.

It earns time. Not bought time, not borrowed attention, not impressions. Recurring time. The time the participant is going to spend anyway, in the morning, the week, or the year, on the practice that has become part of their identity. The brand sits inside that time as the medium of the practice. Every iteration deepens the relationship between practice and brand. Every iteration is also defensive against competitors who would want to occupy the same position but cannot, because they were not present when the practice was forming.

This is the deepest version of what the rest of this Exchange has been pointing toward. Participation produces stronger engagement than persuasion. Ritual is participation at its most concentrated. And the brand that has earned its way into someone’s ritual has earned a position no campaign can buy, and no competitor can dislodge.

As a brand, you cannot build a ritual. But if you embrace the four practices described above in sequence, with patience, you can become part of one. That is the play. That is what the brand teams asking for the recipe were really asking for. That is the position I kept arriving at when I went looking, the one no campaign can buy and no competitor can take. The meaning was never the brand’s to write. The work is quieter than that. Be present while the practice is forming. Be patient enough to still be there when it becomes part of someone’s identity. That is the whole play, and it is the one most brands will never slow down enough to run.

In Rituals Beat Reach, I made the case for ritual as the most valuable position a brand can hold in the era of infinite reach. The argument held. But once it was out in the world, the question that kept popping into my head was about the edges. The morning coffee, the Sunday family dinner, the pre-game tunnel run, and the mat slap before training are all clearly rituals. What about the wake-up scroll? It happens daily. It shapes the morning. It compounds across years. Does it qualify? Is it a darker version of ritual, or something else altogether?

I had been treating ritual as a category without drawing the lines around it. The previous essay made the case for ritual as a powerful position but did not need to define it precisely. Once I tried to answer the wake-up scroll question, the looseness in my own framework started to show.

Then it became clear. The wake-up scroll is not a darker ritual. It’s not a ritual at all. It belongs to a different category, one I had not been distinguishing. There are at least three kinds of repeated behavior that get labelled as rituals, but only one of them actually qualifies.

Three Things That Look the Same

I had been thinking in binary terms at first. Ritual versus habit. The morning coffee versus the 365th tooth-brushing. Both repeated. Both daily. Both are architecturally similar. The difference, I thought, was that ritual carries meaning the person feels, and habit does not.

That binary was incomplete. The wake-up scroll is not a habit. Nobody who scrolls before they have opened their eyes describes the practice the way they describe brushing their teeth. The character of it is different. The person often knows it is not quite serving them, even if they keep doing it.

That third thing is compulsion. It looks like a habit because it repeats. It can look like a ritual because it can have intensity. But it is neither, and the distinction matters.

The three categories, as they came clear to me:

Compulsion. Repeated behavior driven by anxiety, dopamine seeking, or a pattern of return the person has not chosen. The wake-up scroll. The slot machine pulls. The streak-preservation play in a mobile game built for daily login. Compulsion can be mild and harmless, or strong and costly, depending on the person and the duration. At the harder end, it compounds dependency.

Habit. Repeated behavior driven by routine. The 365th tooth-brushing. The background podcast on the commute. The way most people open their email in the morning. Habit is mostly invisible to the person who performs it. The behavior is functional, sometimes useful, sometimes not. Habits are not necessarily good or bad. They are mostly background.

Ritual. Repeated behavior that carries meaning beyond its function. The morning coffee, with the temperature of the cup, the sound of the grinder, the smell of the bean, the marking of the beginning. The weekly family dinner. The mat slap before jiu-jitsu training. Hajj. Rituals are felt by the people doing them. They evoke meaning, personal or shared. Some are solo, and some are communal. Communal rituals tend to carry more force because the shared performance amplifies what is being marked, but solo rituals still qualify because intention is what makes a repeated behavior a ritual. They produce something more than the activity itself produces. The coffee is just coffee. The morning ritual is also the beginning of the day.

All three are forms of repeated engagement. All three are more meaningful for brands than the interruption-based marketing that defined the previous era. The distinction between them is structural rather than moral. They compound different things, and what compounds is what eventually emerges. Getting that right is what the rest of this essay is about.

What Separates Them

From the outside, the three look almost identical. A person watching someone else scroll at seven in the morning cannot tell whether the practice is a compulsion, a ritual, or something in between. The difference shows up not in the behavior but in what the behavior is doing to and for the person performing it.

Three things belong to ritual that do not belong to the other two.

The first is sensory texture. Ritual engages more than one sense. The morning coffee has temperature, smell, the sound of the grinder, and the weight of the cup before the day starts. Hajj has movement, light, sound, and the press of bodies in shared space. A scroll has visual stimulus and nothing else. The body is barely involved. Compulsion can be intense without being textured. Habit is texture-free by definition.

The second is intentional meaning. Rituals carry meaning beyond the behavior itself. The morning coffee marks the beginning of the day. The mat slap acknowledges a shared agreement between training partners. The Sunday family dinner reaffirms a bond that the food alone could not affirm. Habits have no such layer. Compulsion may have an emotional layer, the relief or the anxiety, or the dopamine hit, but it is not the kind of meaning that survives outside the moment.

The third is identity formation. A ritual becomes part of how the person describes themselves. “I am someone who makes coffee every morning the same way.” “I am a black belt.” “I am a member of this congregation.” Habit produces no identity. Compulsion produces a kind of negative identity. The person who scrolls knows they scroll, often with embarrassment, but does not see it as part of who they choose to be.

The morning coffee has all three. The wake-up scroll has none.

What Each One Compounds

All three compound. That’s why they look so similar from the outside. All three involve repetition that builds up over time. The mistake I had been making was assuming the compounding direction was always the same.

Compulsion compounds dependency. Each iteration reinforces the underlying mechanism. The brain learns to expect the next iteration and produces discomfort in its absence. At low intensity, this is barely noticeable and largely harmless. At high intensity, scaled across years, it produces the kind of attachment that costs the person more than it gives.

Habit compounds routine. The 365th tooth-brushing is no richer than the first. What accumulates is the strength of the pattern, not any meaning the pattern carries. Most marketing that succeeds at repetition reaches habit. That’s not failure, but it’s also not a ritual.

Ritual compounds something different. Meaning, identity, belonging. Year ten of a real ritual is richer than year one because the participant has become more themselves through the practice. The compounding moves in a direction the person values and recognizes.

The Categories Are Not Fixed

One more observation before going further. The categories describe where a behavior currently sits, not where it will always sit. Movement happens in both directions.

A compulsion, recognized and named, can decompose into a habit. The morning scroll that has been a pull for years might soften into a routine that no longer feels as costly. A habit, infused with intention and meaning over time, can become a ritual. The cup of coffee that was background routine for a decade might, on the day a parent dies and is poured one more time at the table they used to share, suddenly become a ritual.

The opposite movement happens too. A ritual can hollow out into a habit when the person stops bringing intention to it. A habit can be hijacked into compulsion when the underlying mechanism gets exploited. None of these are stable categories. They’re descriptions of what a behavior is doing now.

For brand work, this distinction matters. The brand that finds itself in habit territory might be on a path toward ritual if the conditions are right. The brand operating in compulsion territory might be on a path toward dependency if the architecture goes industrial. The categories describe the slope as much as the location.

Where Compulsion Compounds Hardest

Some examples make the mechanics easy to see, especially where compulsion has been scaled up by design.

Casino loyalty programs are built on compulsion architecture. The system rewards return visits regardless of the outcome for the gambler. The brain learns to expect the next iteration. Over the years, the compounding produces dependency in some users and entertainment in others. The architecture is the same. What it compounds depends on the person and the duration of exposure.

Mobile gaming uses similar mechanics. Daily login streaks. Energy systems that refill on a schedule, and that the player learns to obey. Limited-time events that create urgency. These are compulsion mechanics, and they’re not pretending to be anything else. Some players find them fun and stay light. Others find them costly and stay anyway. The structure doesn’t care which.

Buy-now-pay-later platforms operate on compulsion mechanics around purchase. The four-installment structure makes each purchase feel small. Return to the platform becomes conditioned. The platform compounds usage. The user compounds the obligation. The structure is real, and so is what it builds at the harder end.

The algorithmic feed runs compulsion at the largest scale of any of these. It learns what keeps a particular person scrolling and serves more of it. The conditioned return is the product that the platform sells to advertisers. When the person comes back, the architecture is working as designed.

None of these are pretending to be rituals. The mechanics are compulsion mechanics, and they do not disguise themselves as anything else. The confusion happens downstream, in the marketing language. Habit-building, ritual-building, and engagement-loop-building have all been used to describe what is actually compulsion architecture at scale. The diagnosis gets blurred. The categories matter precisely because they look identical from the outside but produce different outcomes inside.

The One-Year Audit

The cleanest way to tell which of the three you are dealing with is a simple audit. Stand back from the practice. Imagine running it across a full year. Now ask what the person engaged in the practice would say about it, looking back.

If the answer is “it improved my life,” the practice is ritual.

If the answer is “it cost me more than it gave,” the practice is compulsion compounding hard.

If the answer is a shrug, “it was neither here nor there,” the practice is habit.

If the answer is somewhere in between, the practice is on a slope, headed somewhere.

The audit can help you separate the categories that look the same on the surface.

Why This Matters More Now

The tools have gotten sharper. The psychology has not moved an inch.

Algorithmic feeds do not distinguish between a person who returns because something matters to them and a person who returns because they have been trained to do so. They optimize for the signal of return itself, blind to what drives it. AI-driven personalization can now identify the exact sequence, the exact cadence, the precise emotional pressure point that will keep a specific human being coming back, whether or not coming back is doing them any good. The behavioral nudges were first designed to help people exercise more, save more, and live better. They have been quietly repurposed. They are now standard infrastructure for any platform that needs daily users to survive.

What this machinery produces at its hardest end is not connection, far from it. It is captivity dressed as convenience.

These are not rituals. Rituals build identity and meaning that compound over time. What optimization systems manufacture is the shape of ritual without its substance: the return without the reward, the habit without the humanity. Compulsion at scale. And compulsion compounded for years, no matter how precisely engineered, cannot generate the meaning it was designed to mimic.

This is why the brands that pursue ritual as a strategy in the current environment carry a different responsibility than the brands that pursued mass reach in the previous one. The mechanism is more powerful. So is the consequence of confusing one tier for another. A reach campaign that misses its target is a quarter of wasted spend. Compulsion at scale, marketed as ritual, is a slow harm distributed across millions of lives, compounding for as long as the architecture holds.

Four Properties of Genuine Ritual

The same four properties that distinguish a ritual from its imitators also reveal whether a brand is building something that earns compounding, or something that merely mimics it.

First, the underlying offer has to be worth repeating without the ritual layer. The morning coffee works because the coffee is good. The Stanley tumbler works because the cup keeps drinks cold for thirty-six hours. Strip the ritual scaffolding from a real ritual offer and you still have something the person uses. Compulsion fails this test. Strip the ritual architecture from a slot machine, and you have a random-number generator no one cares about. Strip the streak mechanic from a brand built on streak mechanics, and the brand has nothing left.

Second, the ritual itself has to reward the person more over time. Year ten of a real practice should be richer than year one. The instrument you have played for a decade rewards you in ways the first fumbling month never could. The morning meditation that has quietly become part of who you are carries a weight, a settledness, that day three could not touch. Meaning compounds. That’s what makes it meaningful.

Compulsion runs the other direction when it compounds hard. Year ten of a slot machine relationship is hollower than year one, even as the pull gets stronger. Especially as the pull gets stronger. The commitment deepens while the return evaporates. That is the signature of a system that was never designed to give the person anything lasting or beneficial.

Third, the community formed around the practice has to be additive. Real ritual produces voluntary advocacy. Wordle players sharing their results are doing something the brand cannot make them do. Stanley collectors recommending colorways to each other are not being paid for the conversation. Compulsion at scale produces the opposite. Isolation, in part because the participant often knows the relationship is unhealthy and avoids talking about it.

Fourth, the brand has to benefit because the person benefits. The contract is not zero-sum. The morning coffee company sells more coffee when more people make coffee at home, which is also better for the people making it. The exercise brand grows when more people exercise, which is also better for them. Symbiosis. On the compulsion side, the casino grows when more people lose money, which is worse for the people.

A practice with all four properties is a ritual. A practice with some of them is on the way. A practice with none of them is likely a compulsion.

The Language

The value of working all this out is not the three categories themselves. The categories are useful. What is valuable is the diagnosis they give you.

Once a brand team can name what they are building, the conversation changes. The team that has been calling something a ritual when it is actually a habit can ask whether the habit is what they wanted in the first place. The team operating in compulsion mechanics gets to decide whether that is the position they want to keep. The team approaching something closer to ritual can stop trying to engineer it and start paying attention to what is forming organically.

All of those conversations require the diagnostic: the audit. That is the lever. Once you have your diagnosis, your operating architecture becomes legible. What was happening on its own becomes something you can shape. That is the value of the language. Name it. Then shape it.

Most mornings, before I do anything else, I make my coffee. And that coffee always gets made the same way.

The grinder runs for the same number of seconds. The kettle clicks off at the same temperature, and the pour starts in the same place every time. There is nothing functionally necessary about any of this. I could make coffee faster. I could make it differently. The ritual exists because, for ninety seconds every morning, before the day arrives, I am doing something I have done thousands of times before.

That is what a ritual is.

A repeated action that carries meaning beyond what the action itself produces. The coffee could be made in a thousand different ways. What makes my morning process a ritual is that the series of actions does something the coffee alone cannot. They mark the beginning. They steady the start of a day that will otherwise contain a thousand unpredictable moments.

Humans have been doing this for as long as we’ve existed. Long before commerce or marketing or any modern apparatus, rituals were how human beings made sense of time. The shared meal. The seasonal observance. The marking of births and deaths and the partnerings in between. Every culture in every era has developed them.

What rituals do for us is make a pattern out of flow.

Time itself is featureless. The hours arrive one after another, and none of them is inherently distinct from the others. The ritual gives this new morning a relationship to last morning, and to a morning a year from now. It creates the through-line that makes a life feel like a life rather than a sequence of unconnected hours.

A ritual is, in this sense, the most concentrated form of participation a human can practice. It is the deliberate choice to show up for the same form across time.

Why Rituals Matter Now

That function has always mattered. But it matters more now.

The world that human rituals evolved to comprehend moved at the pace of seasons and lifetimes. The patterns that rituals tracked were the patterns that actually structured human experience. The world we live in today is different. The pace of change is no longer set by anything human. The technology stack underpinning our daily life updates faster than we can adapt to it. The cultural references shift weekly. The platforms migrate. The tools transform. We watch hundreds of fragments of other people’s lives before breakfast and remember none of them by lunch. The expectations around what we should know, who we should be, and how fast we should respond all keep accelerating.

In a world like this, anything that recurs becomes valuable in a way it did not used to be.

The ritual is what recurs.

Whatever else is changing in your life, however the week is reorganizing itself, the morning coffee is still there. The Sunday phone call is still there. So is the pre-game tunnel run, the mat slap before training, the candle on the table, the week-long observance every spring. These are the few places left where pattern is preserved on purpose. Where what happened last time will happen again, more or less, because the practice itself depends on it.

That is not nostalgia. It is structural. Rituals are one of the only grounding things humans have left.

From Coffee to the Wake

Rituals can be as small as the morning coffee or as large as the funeral.

A ritual is anything that runs on the same principle: repetition makes meaning. The scale of the practice is unrelated to its weight. A morning gesture between two people can carry as much ritual force as a national holiday. A daily walk with the same dog along the same route can carry as much ritual force as a religious observance. What makes something a ritual is the fact that the same form gets repeated on purpose, with meaning accumulating inside repetition.

At the heavy end are the rituals built around the things human beings cannot otherwise face. Funerals, wakes, burials. Every culture in human history has developed rituals around the moments that are too large for any individual to navigate alone. They are load-bearing structures. The Irish wake. Shiva. The jazz funeral. The Day of the Dead. The forms vary. The function does not. The community gathers, the form holds, and the unbearable becomes survivable because nobody is asked to survive it alone.

At the light end are the daily and weekly practices. Coffee in the morning. The Sunday newspaper. The five o’clock dog walk that turns into the same conversation with the same neighbors over the same loop around the block. These rituals do not announce themselves. Most people who do them do not even call them rituals. They function the same way the heavy rituals do, just on a smaller scale and at a faster cadence. The wake holds the bereaved together when grief alone would scatter them. The morning coffee holds the day’s first ten minutes together before the day itself can scatter them. The scale of what they hold against differs. The mechanism is the same. Repetition is what does the work.

In between is everything else. Sports teams build elaborate pre-game rituals because coaches understand intuitively that the ritual itself produces something that strategy and practice cannot. The Notre Dame players touch the Play Like A Champion Today sign. The All Blacks perform the haka. The locker room speech, the warm-up music, the captain’s address, all of it is ritual scaffolding around the moment when the team has to walk into the noise as a single entity. Religious traditions across the world are essentially nested ritual systems, daily prayer inside weekly observance inside annual cycle. We jiu-jitsu practitioners slap our training partner’s hand and bump fists before every roll, a tiny ritualized acknowledgment that what is about to happen is bound by an agreement to take care of each other. The ritual layer in human life is much thicker than most modern people realize.

Then there are the rituals built around products.

Products Wrapped in Ritual

A bottle of yerba mate is not, in any meaningful sense, just a beverage.

The traditional way of drinking yerba mate in South America involves a gourd, a metal straw, hot water poured at a specific temperature, and a group of people sitting in a circle while the gourd passes from hand to hand. The cebador, the one who serves, refills for everyone. The drinking is communal. The conversation has its own pace because the gourd’s pace dictates the rhythm. The product, the leaves themselves, is almost incidental to the practice that has built up around them over centuries.

When companies sell yerba mate today, they are not selling a caffeinated tea. They are selling access to a ritual structure that predates the brand. The product is the ticket. The ritual is the experience.

This is what the strongest product rituals all have in common. The product itself is functionally replaceable. The ritual is not. You could drink your morning coffee from instant grounds and get the same caffeine. You don’t, because the ritual is doing something the caffeine cannot. You could play Wordle once and stop. You don’t, because the daily practice is doing something the puzzle alone cannot. Most Stanley tumbler owners could replace the cup with any thirty-dollar insulated bottle and lose nothing functionally. They don’t, and they wouldn’t, because the cup is not what the brand is actually selling.

What the brand is selling, in each of these cases, is the ritual layer that the product unlocks. The plastic and the steel are the medium. The repeated practice is the product.

The Marketing Reframe

Brand marketing has spent decades chasing reach.

The logic was simple. More people seeing the message means more potential customers. The whole machinery of media buying, optimization, attribution, and creative production was built on top of that assumption. Reach was the asset, the scarce resource. The brands with the most reach won.

That logic is breaking, and it is not breaking because of AI or any technical problem inside the media stack. It is breaking because reach has become abundant, and time has become scarce.

Human attention spans have not increased. Human hours have not been extended. What has changed is that the volume of content competing for that attention has exploded past anything advertising was originally designed to handle. The signal-to-noise ratio inside any given person’s daily life is now operating at a level that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. A brand that gets seen once does not stay seen. A brand that gets seen ten times in a row may still not stay seen.

What does stay seen is what gets folded into the ritual.

The morning coffee. The 5 p.m. dog walk. The pre-game tunnel. The Sunday paper. The holiday meal. Any time a brand becomes part of one of these, it has earned something that no amount of reach can manufacture: time. Specifically, it has earned recurring time, time that compounds, time that the person is going to spend again, whether or not they are being marketed to.

This is the resource that brands cannot manufacture.

You can buy reach. You can rent attention. You can pay for impressions, dwell, engagement, and any number of other proxy metrics. But you cannot buy ritual time. Ritual time is earned through years of being integral to a practice that the person has decided is worth repeating.

Reach was always a function of space, the dimension marketing knew how to buy. Ritual is a function of time, the dimension that earns itself. Ritual time is the only currency in marketing that compounds, because every additional iteration deepens what is already there.

The Shape That Lives in Time

An earlier essay in this Exchange described eight recurring shapes of participation. Seven of them are spatial structures, visible at a single moment. Ritual is the one that is not. Ritual is the only shape that lives in time rather than in space. It does not get larger through reach. It gets deeper through repetition.

That asymmetry is doing a lot of work now.

The reach economy was always spatial. Buy more billboards, run more ads, expand more channels, extend the message across more screens. The whole machinery of mass marketing was built to optimize for the spatial dimension. AI is making that dimension effectively infinite, which means it is also making the dimension effectively worthless. When the supply of any resource explodes, the value collapses.

The ritual economy is temporal. Time, in the world that is now arriving, is the one resource that cannot be made cheaper or more abundant. Every person has the same number of hours they had a century ago. The amount of attention any one person can give to any one practice is bounded by the fact that they are a human being with a finite life. That boundary is not optimizable.

Which means the brands that figure out how to earn time, rather than rent attention, are going to compound while the brands that keep buying reach watch their numbers grow on dashboards that no longer correspond to anything happening in the world.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The brands that understand this allocate their effort accordingly.

Stanley did not become a billion-dollar brand by buying impressions. Its products had been on the market for over a century. What changed was the company’s recognition that a specific cup had been quietly folded into the morning routines of millions of people. The cup goes in the car. The cup goes on the desk. The cup gets filled and refilled and noticed by everyone in the room. Stanley leaned into the ritual layer the cup had accidentally entered, and the brand has compounded ever since on a piece of plastic that any competitor could match functionally but not match ritually.

Wordle did not need to advertise. The daily one-puzzle structure baked in the ritual. Players shared their results because the sharing itself was part of the practice. The game survived an ownership change, a paywall, and a thousand competitors because the ritual layer was the actual product.

Apple has spent four decades building keynote events into the technology calendar. The keynote is functionally a press conference. The ritual layer is what makes it an event that millions of people show up for, year after year, with no advertising spend required to remind them it is happening.

Peloton, even through corporate crisis, retained the bulk of its committed user base because the rides themselves had become ritual practices. The bike was the hardware. The 6 a.m. ride was what people had actually committed to.

The pattern across these examples is consistent. The product is the medium. The brand is the connective tissue. The ritual is the durable asset that survives competitive pressure, market shifts, and the brand’s own occasional mistakes.

What Compounds

The world that has emerged over the last few decades has accelerated past most of the social structures that used to do this work. Many of the traditional rituals are weaker now, or absent entirely, or replaced by routines that do not quite fill the same space. People are looking, mostly without naming it, for whatever still steadies them.

The brands that get folded into that work are doing something different from the brands that interrupt the day. They are not buying time. They are being given it. And the time being given is the only kind that matters, because it is the only kind that compounds.

The original framing of this argument is that rituals beat reach. That is true at the level of marketing tactics. The deeper version, the one that connects to everything else this Exchange has been working on, is this: Reach is a function of space, ritual is a function of time. Of the two resources, time is the genuinely scarce one. It cannot be manufactured. And humans need more of it, not less, the further into the synthetic decade we go.

That is what the brands that compound have figured out. They left the impression economy long ago. What they do now sustains itself. They stopped chasing the impression. They started being present for the ritual. And presence, repeated across time, is the only thing in marketing that does not need to be bought twice.

The visualization frames the foundational forms. What it doesn’t yet show is the more interesting fact: most participation systems blend multiple shapes at once. A great brand or movement is usually two or three of these running in parallel.

A few months ago, I went down a research rabbit hole on shapes in the natural world. The kind of rabbit hole that starts with a passing curiosity and turns into something I could not stop thinking about, because the question it raised seemed to apply to everything I work on.

The question I could not stop turning over in my mind was this: Why does the natural world reuse so few structural forms?

A river system, a tree, and the bronchial network inside your lungs share a branching pattern that was never designed in common. Spirals show up in galaxies, in nautilus shells, in the way water drains from a basin. Hexagons appear in honeycomb, in basalt columns, in the compound eyes of insects, and in the lattice of certain crystals. Lattices, helices, fractals, vortices. The same handful of forms keep appearing across scales and substrates that have no obvious relationship to each other.

Biologists have a name for this. They call it morphology, from the Greek word for shape. Morphology is the discipline of structural form, separate from function. Two organisms with completely different functions can share a morphology. Two organisms with identical functions can have completely different morphologies. The form is its own variable, with its own logic and its own consequences.

The reason the natural world reuses so few forms is roughly this: Forms are constrained by underlying rules. The way fluids minimize resistance produces branching. The way materials distribute load produces hexagons. The way certain growth processes unfold produces spirals. Nature doesn’t have infinite stable configurations to choose from. There are only a few that satisfy the constraints. Once a form has been found that works, it gets used everywhere those same constraints apply.

It’s a simple truth explaining how the physical world is built.

The Same Question, Asked of Participation

Morphology. The study of form. Once I had the word, I could not stop applying it.

Then I applied it to my own body of work.

Participation is what I study. I have spent the last several years building a way of thinking about how human beings show up for things together, and an atlas of cases that documents how participation actually shows up in the world. The atlas has now grown to a few thousand cases, drawn from civic life, brand campaigns, cultural movements, religious practice, software communities, governance experiments, sports, education, organizing, and art. Almost every domain where humans participate in something larger than themselves.

So I dived into the Atlas cases with morphology in mind.

I did not know the answer when I started. But I had been noticing for a while that cases in the Atlas, which looked unrelated on the surface, seemed to behave in similar ways structurally. A beer campaign and a democratic governance platform. A fan community and an open-source software project. A religious pilgrimage and a viral hashtag. The activities had nothing in common. The behavior of the participation around them had quite a lot in common. I had been writing it off as a coincidence. Once I started thinking morphologically, it stopped looking like a coincidence.

So I went looking for the shapes.

The Primary Forms Emerge

What follows are my findings so far. I want to be careful about how I describe this, because the work is genuinely in progress and the patterns are still being tested. But I find it interesting enough to share what I am seeing revealed.

Eight recurring shapes have emerged from the data with enough consistency that I have started treating them as primary forms. They are not categories I imposed. They are structures observed and named after the fact, when the same configurations had already shown up enough times to demand naming. The original identification happened across the human-classified cases in the atlas. Since then, we have added shape as a classification criterion for the most recent 2,500 cases loaded, and it will be a criterion for every case going forward.

I do not know yet whether the eight will hold. I suspect some will sharpen. Some may merge. New ones may emerge as the atlas keeps expanding into corners of human participation it has not yet reached. What I know for sure is that participation has shapes, the shapes have rules, and the rules tell you something about the participation that no other measurement can.

Here are the eight as they currently stand.

The Eight Shapes

Hub. A central node radiates outward. The organizing entity controls the flow. Invitations go out from the center, responses come back to the center, and the center decides what gets seen. Old Spice’s response day was a Hub. Apple keynotes are Hubs. Reddit AMAs are Hubs. Most branded social media participation is a Hub. The brand or the celebrity is the sun, and everyone else orbits. Hubs can generate enormous short-term energy. They are also entirely dependent on the center continuing to invest. Remove the center, and the structure collapses, because there is no structure without it.

Swarm. Decentralized agents follow simple rules and produce emergent global behavior. No one is in charge. The rules are the architecture. The Ice Bucket Challenge was a Swarm. Wordle sharing was a Swarm. The Arab Spring, at its most generative, was a Swarm. The mechanics in each case were simple enough that millions of people could execute them independently without coordination. Swarms can achieve massive scale with almost no central investment. They are also almost impossible to sustain, because the simplicity that makes them spreadable makes them structurally thin. There is nothing left to belong to once the moment passes.

Loop. The output of participation becomes the next input. The system feeds itself. Dell IdeaStorm ran as a Loop: customer ideas fed product development, which fed new ideas, which fed more customer investment. LEGO Ideas runs as a Loop too, with customer designs becoming real products that drive more customers to submit. Loyalty programs at their best are Loops. Any system where contributing makes the thing better, and the thing being better attracts more contributing, has Loop architecture. Loops can be extraordinarily durable. They can also calcify. The same voices come to dominate, the feedback becomes self-referential, and the system starts optimizing for its own continuation rather than genuine openness.

Mesh. Every node is simultaneously a producer and a consumer. There is no distinction between the people who make the thing and the people who use it. Wikipedia is a Mesh. Linux is a Mesh. A functional DAO is a Mesh. The Mesh is the most democratic of the structures and the hardest to build, because it requires every participant to shift from consumer identity to contributor identity. Most attempts at Mesh participation quietly collapse back into Hub or Loop dynamics, either because the people at the center cannot actually let go, or because most participants prefer consuming to contributing.

Cluster. Dense local participation with loose connections between active groups. Fan communities are Clusters. Local civic groups are Clusters. A neighborhood mutual aid network is a Cluster. The internal density creates genuine belonging. People know each other, share history, and develop norms. The loose inter-cluster connections prevent insularity and let the broader movement grow. Clusters are among the most humanly satisfying participation structures, because the scale is right for actual relationship-building. They are also vulnerable to fragmentation. The loose connections can fray, and isolated pockets can quietly lose momentum.

Branch. Hierarchical cascading from a central stem. Participation is structured and sequential. You earn your way from one level to the next, and each level carries different rights and responsibilities. Franchise models are Branches. Martial arts belt systems are Branches. Most membership organizations with tiered structures are Branches. Branch participation is legible. People always know where they stand and what comes next. The risk is rigidity. The hierarchy that makes a Branch legible can also make it slow and hostile to the lateral energy that produces genuine innovation.

Constellation. Independent nodes organized by shared identity with no center. The diaspora is a Constellation. Distributed protest movements are Constellations. The global network of people who identify as surfers, or practitioners of a martial art, or adherents of a philosophy, with no central organizing entity holding them together. Distance does not weaken the bond in a Constellation the way it does in other shapes. A jiu jitsu practitioner in Chicago feels a line of connection to another practitioner in Cape Town or Kyoto, two people who may never meet but who recognize each other through what they share. A Cluster needs proximity. A Constellation does not. What holds a Constellation together is identity rather than architecture. People participate because of who they understand themselves to be. Constellations are extraordinarily resilient and almost impossible to direct. There is no center to defund, no structure to shut down. You cannot tell a Constellation where to go. You can at most create conditions that make certain directions more resonant.

Ritual. The most temporal of the eight shapes. The other seven have spatial form you can see at any moment. Ritual has a form that only exists across time. A community dog walk at 5 pm, a 7 am Sunday mass, and the annual Thanksgiving table where the same people sit in the same chairs across decades. Each individual occurrence traces a circle, a closed path that starts and ends in the same place. What turns repetition into a Ritual is what builds up across many circles stacked through time. Year ten of any practice is not year one. The participants have changed, and so has everything around them. The same form of participation returns, but the position has shifted along an axis that the participants couldn’t access when they started. That cumulative structure is a spiral. Hajj makes this literal: the Tawaf around the Kaaba traces a spiraling path, repeated seven times by every pilgrim. The shape of one instance is a circle. The shape of the practice is a spiral. The value is not what gets produced. It is what gets renewed: identity, belonging, continuity. Rituals score highest on identity because the activity becomes part of how people describe themselves. They are also the most resistant to optimization. The moment you try to make a Ritual more efficient, you have subverted what it is for.

Hybrid by Default

Most interesting participation is hybridized. The Swarm that becomes a Cluster over time. The Loop that develops Ritual properties as it matures. Other combinations show up constantly across the atlas, and the most useful classification names the dominant structure and the direction of drift, rather than forcing the case into a single box.

This is true of forms in nature, too. Trees are not pure branches. They are branches with a hexagonal cellular structure inside the bark and helical growth in the pith. The pure forms are useful as analytical primitives. The actual organisms are always combinations.

Moving Forward

What I am working out, in real time and with the help of an atlas that keeps expanding, is something close to this: Participation behaves more like the natural world than the dashboard culture of modern marketing has been able to display. It has structure. It has form. The forms have rules, and the rules determine behaviors.

The brands and institutions that build participation systems without understanding the morphology might be missing an opportunity.

The morphology itself is asymmetric in ways that may turn out to matter. Seven of the eight shapes are spatial structures you can diagram at a single moment. Ritual is the exception: a form that exists only across time. That asymmetry is honest about what the data shows, and it may turn out to be the most interesting thing about the taxonomy. The eight shapes may not all be the same kind of thing.

The next question I am following up on is one that the morphology has not yet answered. The shapes explain a lot about how participation behaves. They do not fully explain why some examples of the same shape persist for decades, and others collapse in a season. A Hub can be brittle or surprisingly enduring. A Cluster can fragment quickly or hold together for generations. The shape sets the conditions for what is possible. Something else determines whether the participation keeps turning.

I have a working hypothesis. The shape that turns participation into something self-sustaining is itself a shape, and the engineering of that shape is the spine of Wired to Participate, which releases in October.

For now, what I can say with reasonable confidence is that participation has shapes, the shapes are real, and that a new layer for participatory design might be in the process of revealing itself.

• Bots outnumber humans: 51% of web traffic in 2024 was automated, with sophisticated AI bots now mimicking human behavior at scale

• The core assumption fails: Digital advertising was built on the idea that impressions equal people. That’s no longer reliably true

• AI creates abundance everywhere: Every traditional signal (views, clicks, engagement, dwell time) can now be manufactured at zero marginal cost

• Only one thing remains scarce: Verified human presence. The actual person making a decision with stakes, in real time, in front of others

• Money is already moving: Marketing budgets are shifting toward live events, owned communities, and verified creators where proof of humanity is built into the structure, not the analytics report

• The new threshold: The only question that matters is whether a human originated the action and whether you can prove it. Everything else will be priced to zero

The industry spent 30 years optimizing for attention. The next 30 will be spent proving whose attention is real.

As long as there has been media, the entire business has run on a single question: how do we get in front of people?

The question hasn’t changed. The answer is breaking.

The infrastructure built around it is still operational. The trading desks. The attribution models. The impression-based pricing. The agency compensation structures keyed to media spend. Every assumption inside media operations traces back to attention being scarce and reach being the asset. For decades, brands paid for impressions because impressions were proof that a person had looked at something they otherwise would not have seen.

That logic is breaking quietly, and almost no one in the industry has updated their behavior.

THE LONG PATTERN OF SCARCITY

Technology has always organized itself around scarcity.

Sometimes it creates the scarcity. Sometimes it exploits one that already existed. Either way, the scarce resource is where value accumulates, and the technologies that win are the ones that figure out which scarcity will matter next.

Steam and the factory created scarcity around capital and coordinated labor. Broadcast created scarcity around airwaves and prime time: three networks, a finite number of evening hours, and an entire advertising economy organized around buying access to those windows. Digital created scarcity around attention. Inventory became infinite, distribution became frictionless, and the only resource that could not be manufactured at scale was the willingness of a person to look at something. The platforms that captured and resold that willingness became the largest companies in the world.

In every case, abundance somewhere produced scarcity somewhere else. The pattern held.

AI breaks the pattern by accelerating it past its own limits.

It is producing abundance everywhere at once. Content is infinite. Engagement is generatable. Personas are manufacturable. The signals the industry has historically priced as scarce can now be produced at zero marginal cost: views, clicks, dwell time, and sustained behavioral patterns. There is no remaining bottleneck inside the digital system that AI cannot saturate.

Which means the next scarcity has to come from outside the system.

The thing AI cannot generate is the actual human on the other end of it. The body in the room. The person making a decision in real time, with stakes, in front of other people who will know if they are faking. That presence is the new bottleneck. The only input the technology can’t simulate, scale, or replace.

AI IS THE FIRST TECHNOLOGY THAT MAKES HUMAN PRESENCE MORE SCARCE

For two centuries, technology has made human labor more abundant. AI runs the other direction. The digital substrate it operates inside is being saturated with signals that no human originated, and in a media economy built on signals, the only signal that retains value is the one that proves a human was actually there.

Call it proof of humanity.

The phrase sounds technical because most of the work being done on it has been technical. Bot detection. Identity verification. Cloudflare blocking AI scrapers. The detection-and-evasion arms race that runs in the background of every major platform.

Those tools matter. They are also the perimeter of something much larger.

The real shift is operational. The silent assumption that made the old media business work, that an impression equaled a person, is no longer reliably true. Once that assumption fails, every system stacked on top of it starts to wobble in ways that are difficult to see from the inside.

The numbers have been quietly arriving for those who care to read them. Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report, the firm’s twelfth annual study of automated traffic across its global network, found that for the first time in a decade, automated traffic surpassed human activity on the internet. Fifty-one percent of all web traffic in 2024 was non-human. Bad bots alone, the kind specifically engineered to mimic human behavior for fraudulent purposes, accounted for thirty-seven percent. The remaining human share has been declining for six consecutive years.

The trajectory matters more than the headline. The synthetic share registered in 2024 was crude by the standards of what is coming. The systems generating bot activity in 2026 were trained on human behavior at scale and have become very good at imitation. The signals the industry has historically used to filter for humans are now generatable: cursor movement, dwell time, and scroll velocity.

What sits underneath the modern internet is a layer of activity that is no longer being produced for any human to read or watch. It is being produced because optimization systems demand it, because other optimization systems consume it, and because the loops between them have become an economy of their own.

That economy can sustain itself for a long time before anyone with a P&L notices.

THE DASHBOARD LIES QUIETLY

Inside a marketing operation, this does not arrive as a crisis. It arrives as a slow disconnect.

Numbers that pencil cleanly on the dashboard but produce nothing in the field. Conversion lifts that show up in the model but not in the warehouse. Engagement rates climbing while the brand teams admit, in rooms with the door closed, that they cannot tell whether anything is actually moving. The instruments are calibrated. They’re monitoring the wrong signals.

Optimization engines do not care whether the data is human. They optimize against whatever signal they receive. If conversion behavior in the dataset is half synthetic, the model will confidently learn to drive more of it. The lookalike audiences will model audiences that do not exist. A creative test validated by bot traffic will greenlight a bad ad. The more sophisticated the operation, the deeper the contamination, because automation amplifies whatever it is fed.

The brands with the most reliable signal turn out to be the ones with the simplest measurement. That is an inversion the industry was not built for.

I’ve sat with senior performance marketers who describe the gap as a feeling first. The numbers say one thing, the gut says another, and the gut is right more often than they will admit out loud. Eventually, someone in the room asks the quiet question: whether the underlying data is even describing real people.

That question, asked once, changes how a marketing operation thinks about every input it receives.

PARTICIPATION AS PROOF

This is where participation stops being a soft word for engagement and starts being the only signal worth measuring.

Participation is proof of humanity expressed through action. A click can be produced by a script. A view can be paid for. A follower can be rented. The deeper forms of participation are harder to fake. Entering an experience, contributing to it, responding in real time to what other participants do, being shaped by what unfolds: that pattern degrades quickly when the underlying agent is not human, because the agent has no body, no history, no stake in the outcome, no social cost for getting it wrong.

Bot networks can simulate shallow participation. The simulation breaks down fast as the participation deepens. Real-time decisions in a shared environment, in front of other people who recognize coherence and incoherence, generate a signal that machines have not yet learned to forge well.

Anyone who has trained in jiujitsu has felt the cleaner version of this. You can roll with someone for thirty seconds and know whether they’ve had actual time on the mat. The pressure is wrong. The timing is wrong. The body lies to itself in ways that other bodies have already learned to read. A pretender in jiujitsu and a practitioner of jiujitsu register as different things almost immediately, and not because of any single signal you could name. It is the absence of the lived weight.

Real participation has weight. The simulator does not. The closer you stand to it, the easier it is to read the difference.

THE ORIGINATOR TEST

The objection I get is always some version of the same one. AI is going to participate too. Agents will comment, attend, coordinate, and even create. How is that different from a bot?

The answer is the originator.

A person orchestrating an agent is participating. The agent is a tool: the way a microphone is a tool, the way a phone is a tool, the way any extension is a tool. The intent originates with the human. The chain of action terminates in a body somewhere with social context and consequence. That is participation, even when most of the execution is automated.

A bot operating without any human originator is a different thing entirely. Nothing is being expressed. No one is participating. The activity is the byproduct of an optimization process that has no relationship to the people the activity is being measured against.

The threshold is not whether AI is involved but whether a human is.

Everything downstream of that distinction reorganizes once you accept it. Verification systems become provenance systems. Engagement metrics get audited for their chain of custody. The question every marketer learns to ask, on every signal, becomes some version of: did a person originate this, at what level of involvement, and through what structure?

WHERE THE MONEY IS ALREADY MOVING

The brands that figure this out a few years before the industry does will be the ones that move budget while it still costs nothing to move. They will fund the environments where the human signal is structural rather than promised. Direct community. Owned audience. Verified creators with real followings. Live events. Membership. The kinds of placements where proof is built into the architecture and not appended to the report.

The early evidence is already showing up in the spend data. Event Marketer’s EventTrack 2025 found that roughly three-quarters of Fortune 1000 marketers were increasing experiential investment heading into 2026. The trade press has been calling this an experiential rebound, which might be underplaying what is really happening. It is an early proof-of-human reallocation, even if the marketers doing it cannot yet articulate why their gut is pulling them there.

The most visible evidence is at festivals.

Coachella activations got materially better this year. Not incrementally better. Visibly better, in a way that anyone walking the grounds could feel. Adweek, reporting from on the ground at the festival, observed that the standout activations “felt less like marketing moments and more like experiences built around festival-goers.” The brands that showed up showed up with effort. Pinterest, a platform whose entire business is capturing attention through phones, built Coachella’s first-ever phone-free activation, asking guests to lock their devices away on entry in exchange for a more present, analog experience. It is the kind of choice that looks like marketing self-sabotage against a CPM model and looks rational against a model that prices verified human presence at a premium.

Which raises the question worth asking out loud. The Super Bowl has been the cathedral of impression-based advertising for forty years, the purest expression of the old logic: maximum simultaneous attention, premium pricing, the ads themselves becoming the cultural ritual. The model worked because the audience was real, the moment was singular, and proof of human was incidentally guaranteed by the format.

The question is whether the budget that has flowed there for two generations starts redirecting toward environments like Coachella. Live festivals. Cultural moments where participation is structural. Places where the brand is not interrupting the experience but is part of it, and where the proof of humanity is not something the analytics team has to argue for after the fact.

Live sports work this way. Newsletters with verified subscribers work this way. Creator partnerships with audiences that talk back work this way. Direct community works this way. None of these are new categories. What is new is the pricing logic.

PROOF OF HUMAN AS INVENTORY

Once you accept that proof of humanity is the new underlying scarcity, the consequence is that it becomes an inventory class.

The industry already organizes its buying around inventory classes. Network television was its own class. Programmatic display was its own class. Connected TV is its own class. Each one carries its own pricing logic, its own buyers, its own measurement standards, its own seat at the upfronts. They got organized as classes because they shared an underlying signal type and could be priced against each other.

Proof of humanity inventory will get organized the same way. The shared signal type is verified as a human originator at a usable level of involvement. The placements that clear that threshold will trade against each other; the placements that do not will trade against a different and rapidly cheapening pool. Live, opt-in, community-anchored, creator-led, membership-bounded environments belong in the first pool. Most programmatic display, most synthetic-amplifiable social, most reach-extended digital belongs in the second.

This is the part that the industry has not built the language for yet.

When it does, the consequences will be structural. Pricing changes, because proof-of-humanity inventory commands a premium that the old impression-based math cannot generate. Planning changes, because plans get built around human density rather than reach curves. Compensation changes, because billing against verified-human signal looks different from billing against impression volume. Measurement changes, because every metric becomes a provenance metric, weighted by the chain of custody on the underlying signal.

The naming has not happened yet. It is going to.

THE NEW LINE IN THE SYSTEM

This is not a moral argument about AI. The synthetic internet is not going away. AI will continue to extend what people can do, including the work of participating, and that is fine.

The threshold is the originator. Above it: proof. Below it: noise. Everything that happens inside marketing for the next decade will eventually have to clear that line or be priced as if it does not.

The industry spent thirty digital years optimizing for attention.

The next thirty will be spent proving whose attention is real.

Everything that cannot prove a human will be priced to zero. Everything that can will be the only thing worth buying.

This is a true story that reminds me a lot of DRTV media, and is very relevant for how we might consider strategy in an ever-changing world.

In 2010, Japanese and British researchers published a study in Science with a setup so simple it borders on insulting. They took a single-celled organism called Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold, though the word undersells what it’s about to do) and placed it in a flat dish. Around the edges, they arranged oat flakes in the geographic pattern of the towns surrounding Tokyo. They put a food source at the center. Then they watched.

Twenty-six hours later, the organism had grown into a network connecting every food source that closely resembled the actual Tokyo rail system. A network human engineers had spent decades and billions of dollars designing.

I know. Stay with me.

The slime mold has no brain. No nervous system. No neurons at all. It cannot think, plan, or strategize in any meaningful sense of those words. At the cellular level it is about as simple as living things get.

It solved overnight what took us a century.

Example of slime mold in a petry dish

What It’s Actually Doing

The slime mold isn’t smart. It’s responsive.

It follows two rules with absolute consistency: grow toward nutrients, abandon paths that don’t pay off. That’s the entire algorithm. No master plan. No project manager coordinating the tendrils. Just local responsiveness applied everywhere in the network at once.

What emerges from those two rules looks, from above, like sophisticated engineering. Redundant pathways that survive single-point failures. Efficient connections that minimize distance. Fault tolerance built in not by design but by how the network grew.

Illustration of slime mold mapping versus subway planning

The researchers weren’t only marveling. They were saying, pretty clearly, that Physarum‘s algorithm might be useful to us. That studying how it builds networks could help engineers design better infrastructure and better logistics. Their payment was oat flakes.

The Planning Problem

Every organization over a certain size eventually develops the Planning Apparatus.

Strategy decks. Quarterly reviews. Annual offsites where senior leaders gather to decide, in advance, what the organization will do and how it will do it. The assumption underlying all of it is that complex outcomes require complex coordination, and complex coordination requires someone seeing the whole picture and making deliberate choices about where resources go.

The slime mold suggests this assumption deserves scrutiny.

Planning isn’t useless. Humans aren’t slime molds, and organizations aren’t dishes of oat flakes. Real planning matters when the environment hasn’t formed yet, when regulatory ground is shifting, when the bet is capital-intensive enough that commitment has to precede feedback. But most of what the Planning Apparatus does isn’t that kind of work. It’s the ordinary work of moving an organization through an environment that is actively telling it what to do, if anyone is listening.

Reed Hastings didn’t plan Netflix’s arc from DVD-by-mail to streaming to original content to global media company. He responded, repeatedly, to what the environment was showing him. Amazon’s long-running internal principle of staying stubborn on vision and flexible on details is the same logic at different scale: keep the growth rule, abandon the paths that don’t pay off.

The slime mold would recognize this.

What Gets Built Without a Blueprint

The Tokyo rail network isn’t the only thing slime molds have designed.

Researchers have turned Physarum loose on the geographic constraints of ancient Roman road networks and found the organism builds something remarkably close to what Roman engineers did. Run the same experiment on the US interstate system or the backbone topology of the internet, and the patterns converge again. Efficient network topology has something like a right answer, and responsive systems find it whether or not they’re trying to.

This is humbling for anyone who has ever sat through a three-day strategy offsite. Which is most of us, at this point.

The network that emerges from genuine responsiveness, from paying attention to what’s working and killing what isn’t, often converges on the same place elaborate planning would have reached. Faster. With far less spent on coordination.

Thus, the slime mold doesn’t need alignment meetings because it is aligned with reality.

The Participation Connection

A cleaner illustration at human scale: Encyclopædia Britannica versus Wikipedia.

Britannica was the Planning Apparatus applied to knowledge. Expert editors. Centralized review. Quarterly updates. The structure was defensible on every conventional measure of quality control. Wikipedia was the slime mold. Millions of tendrils, each responsive only to the article in front of them, each abandoning edits that didn’t hold and reinforcing ones that did. No single tendril understood the encyclopedia it was building.

Britannica stopped printing in 2012. Wikipedia is now the default reference layer for most of the internet, including most AI systems currently being trained to replace it.

This is the participation principle at its most basic. When enough individual agents are genuinely responsive to their local environment, the system they compose develops capabilities none of them possess individually. The whole gets smarter than the sum of its parts, not because someone coordinated the parts, but because the parts were paying attention.

The brands that function this way, where employees, customers, and communities respond to each other rather than wait to be directed from a central point, develop a similar kind of intelligence. They catch cultural shifts earlier. They adapt faster. They find routes no planning process would have discovered, because no planning process had the local information to find them.

The slime mold doesn’t know what it’s building. But it builds well.

A Wild Time to Build

The Planning Apparatus was always a bit of a fiction. Right now, it’s a fiction nobody is pretending to believe.

Consider the macro variables most five-year plans depend on: interest rates, trade policy, and geopolitical alignment. All of them are volatile enough that plotting five years against them feels like a category error. AI is reshaping entire categories of work on a timeline nobody working inside it can confidently predict, including the people building the AI. Technology stacks that were stable for decades are getting rebuilt on twelve-month cycles. The environment isn’t telling us what to do next year. It’s barely telling us what to do next quarter.

This is a bad moment for the Planning Apparatus but a great moment for slime mold rules.

Grow toward nutrients. Abandon paths that don’t pay off. Run the experiment. Keep what works. Kill what doesn’t. Do it again. Stay alive long enough for the network to reveal itself.

It’s a wild time to build, and probably the best time to build in the history of humanity. Follow the slime mold’s two rules, and you’ll most likely be fine.

The Question Worth Asking

The researchers who ran the Tokyo study weren’t arguing we should replace urban planners with petri dishes. They were asking a stranger question: what can a system with no intelligence teach us about how intelligence works?

Their answer was that intelligence, at least in applied form, might be less about thinking and more about responsiveness. Less about having the right plan and more about having the right feedback loops. Less about someone at the top seeing the whole picture and more about everyone at the local level staying honest about what the environment is telling them.

A single-celled organism with no brain outplanned Tokyo because it never stopped responding to what was actually true.

Most organizations would do well to try the same thing.

3 of 3. Part One: The Campfire was Never Meant to be Interrupted. Part Two: A Gift to the Story.

Every creative brief in advertising starts with some version of these basic questions: Who is the audience? What do we want them to feel? What do we want them to do?

They are not bad questions. But they frame the audience as a target. They position the brand outside the experience, looking in, calculating the most efficient angle of interruptive entry.

There is a different question. One that most briefs never ask because it was an impossibility.

What role does this brand play in this world?

It is an entirely different approach, and one that is now possible. But it requires real creativity, just a different creativity than the industry has been trained on. Learning to adapt and become fluent in a world that is not yours.

This is the difference between adjacency and fluency.

Not what the brand wants from the audience. What does the audience’s world need from the brand? What could the brand contribute that would make the audience’s experience richer rather than shorter? What would a person who loves this story, this game, this community, this moment, actually want to receive?

That question invites a different kind of craft. Genuine curiosity about the world a brand is entering, rather than familiarity with the demographic profile of the people inside it.

Adjacency is what contextual advertising has always promised. Put a car ad near automotive content. Put a travel ad near vacation planning. Put a sports drink near the game. The logic is that proximity to relevant content increases receptivity. And it does, marginally. But adjacency is still an interruption. It is still someone walking up to the campfire with their own agenda. The only difference is that the agenda is loosely related to the story already being told.

Fluency is rarer than adjacency and harder to counterfeit. It means understanding the rules of a world well enough to operate inside it. Not just to be near it, but to belong to it.

A brand that is fluent in a story-world knows what that world values. It knows what its textures are, what its characters want, what its audience would recognize as native versus foreign. It can make something that feels like it came from inside the world rather than parachuted in from the outside.

Most brands have never had to develop that fluency before because the economic model of interruption did not require it. You bought time. You ran your spot. The audience either watched or looked away. Fluency was not the variable. Reach was.

When AI removes the production constraint, and the cost of making content calibrated to a specific story-world has dropped to nearly nothing, reach stops being the variable that matters most. You can reach anyone with almost anything for almost nothing. The new variable is belonging. It goes to brands willing to understand the worlds they want to join.

That is where the creative work actually lives now.

Think about what fluency requires in practice. A brand entering a story-world has to ask questions it has never been asked to ask. The questions stop being about the brand and start being about the world. Not “how do I tell these people about me?” but “how do I fit here, and what could I add?” That shift means setting brand guidelines aside. They were built for broadcast, not belonging. The work is determining a connective opportunity. Is there something the audience of this world actually needs that the brand can genuinely provide?

That last question is the hardest. Because it requires honesty about what the brand actually is, not just what it wants to project. The reality: some worlds are not yours to enter. There is a parallel here used in product sampling: “right people, right place, right time.” That’s a thoughtful approach that can now move beyond one-to-one marketing into mass marketing.

It all comes down to the basic mechanics of narrative. A character who does not fit the world breaks the story. A brand that does not fit the world breaks the spell. And breaking the spell, as the neuroscience makes clear, is not just aesthetically unpleasant. It reverses the very conditions that make the audience receptive in the first place.

This is a different posture than advertising. It is contribution. A brand that takes it seriously stops thinking of itself as a sender and starts thinking of itself as something a world could actually use. It makes things the audience wants. It builds mythology instead of messaging. It adds texture to an experience rather than taxing it.

Until now, that posture has been the exception. It was available only to the handful of brands with the resources and timelines to sustain it. It could not be the model.

What changes now is that the capacity to contribute at the level of the story, in context, at the moment the audience is inside the experience, is no longer reserved for the few. A brand willing to ask the right questions, and willing to develop genuine fluency in the worlds where its audience lives, can now act on that fluency in real time.

The brief changes from: how do we interrupt this audience efficiently?

To: how do we participate in this world honestly?

That is not a small shift. It changes what the creative team is asked to do. It changes what research is for. It changes what success looks like. An impression is no longer the unit. Belonging is.

And belonging, unlike an impression, compounds. A brand that earns its place in a world that people love is not forgotten when the content ends. It becomes part of what the audience carries out of the experience. Not as a message they received, but as a presence they recognized.

That is participation in the oldest sense of the word. Not broadcasting to people. Not even talking with them. But existing inside the same world, contributing to it, being part of what makes it worth returning to.

The campfire was always like this. No one sat around it to consume. They sat around it to share something. To be changed by it together.

For most of advertising’s history, brands sat outside that fire. They interrupted it, or tried to compete with it, or settled for being adjacent to it.

What happens next depends on whether they are willing to learn what it takes to sit inside it.

That requires fluency. Honesty. Genuine curiosity about the story-worlds where people choose to spend their time.

And it requires accepting something humbling: that belonging is not granted because you paid for it. It is earned because you understood the world well enough to add to it. Because the people sitting at that fire looked up when you arrived, and moved over to make room.

The seat at the campfire was always available. Brands now have what they need to show up as someone worth sitting next to.

2 of 3: Yesterday was part one.

The advertising industry is having the wrong argument about AI.

On one side, the advertising old guard warns that machine-generated content will flood the market with cheap, soulless work that degrades the craft. On the other, CFOs and holding company executives see a cost-efficiency revolution and want to know when the headcount reduction begins. Both sides are treating AI as a production tool. A faster, cheaper way to make the same thing they were already making.

Neither side is asking the more interesting question.

If the cost of making content approaches zero, what should we make? And more precisely: for whom?

I wrote recently about what a commercial break actually is. Not in the polite language of media buying, but in the honest language of human experience. It is someone walking up to a spellbinding campfire mid-story and interrupting it with something unrelated. Or worse, trying to out-entertain the story that the audience was already inhabiting. This interruption violates the neurological state that makes storytelling work. It extracts attention from the audience and converts it into revenue for someone else.

That model is not dying because AI arrived. It was already in its death throes. Ad blockers. Skip buttons. Subscription tiers. The audience has been voting with its attention for two decades. AI just makes the ad industry’s next move more urgent.

If, as creators, we no longer have production constraints, the excuse for irrelevance disappears.

Here is the question I’d like to raise instead: If commercials still have to exist, and for now they do, we need to stop asking “how do we interrupt well?” and start asking “how do we stop interrupting entirely?” I believe the answer is found not by removing ads from the equation, but by changing what an ad is allowed to be.

Think about what it means to watch something you are genuinely inside. A show about vampires. Not a procedural, not background television, but the kind of world-built storytelling that transports you. You are in that world. Its rules feel real. Its textures feel inhabited. You have relocated, in the neurological sense, to somewhere specific.

Now a brand appears.

In the current model, what happens is a hard cut. You are pulled out of the vampire world and placed inside a thirty-second story about a truck, or a pharmaceutical, or a fast food item. The truck story has its own visual grammar, its own emotional register, its own agenda. It is not in conversation with where you were. It is competing with it or simply indifferent to it.

What if instead the brand asked a different question?

What does this story-world need? What would feel like a gift to the audience rather than a toll?

I’m not talking about product placement. Product placement is a brand logo sitting in the frame of someone else’s story, hoping proximity does the work. What I am describing is something more intentional. A brand that studies the world it is entering and asks: what can we contribute to this experience? What can we add that the audience would actually want to receive?

If we can make almost anything for almost nothing, that question becomes answerable in ways it never was before.

A brand inside a vampire narrative is not stuck running its standard creative. It can make something that lives in that world. Something that extends the mythology rather than interrupts it. Something that the audience experiences not as an extraction but as an addition. A piece of the world they didn’t have before.

That is a different creative brief. It requires a different relationship between the brand and the story.

The industry term that gets closest to this is contextual advertising, but the current version of that idea is too thin. Contextual today means matching keywords, or placing a hotel ad near travel content, or a running shoe ad near a fitness segment. That is congruence at the category level. What I am envisioning is congruence at the world level. Not just does this ad relate to this content? But does this ad belong in this story? Does it understand the rules of this place? Does it add something that a person who loves this world would actually want to learn about, participate in, or buy?

The brands that have ever done anything close to this did it expensively and rarely. For a stretch, Red Bull pushed beyond sponsoring extreme sports to building the world those sports lived in. They made media, they created characters, they developed mythologies. The product was almost secondary to the story. The people who sought out Red Bull content weren’t interested in an energy drink. They sought that content because Red Bull had become fluent in a world they cared about.

That fluency used to require enormous resources and long time horizons. What changes now is that the barrier to fluency drops dramatically. A brand that can generate contextually appropriate content, calibrated to the specific world a viewer inhabits, at the moment they are inside it, is no longer making ads in the traditional sense. It is making contributions.

That is a different kind of value, and a different kind of relationship.

The audience knows the difference between a brand that understands their world and a brand that wandered into it with a thirty-second spot built for a different context entirely. One feels like a stranger interrupting. The other feels, at its best, like the story got a little bigger.

Currently, the industry argument about AI focuses on what it costs and what it threatens. Those are legitimate concerns. But the more urgent argument is about what it makes possible.

For the first time in the history of commercial storytelling, a brand can afford to ask not just how do I reach this audience, but what does this audience’s narrative world actually need from me?

That question is harder than making cheaper ads. It requires the brand to be genuinely curious about the story it is entering. To understand the rules of the world. To make something that adds rather than extracts. A situation where agencies and creative directors still hold massive relevance.

But it is the only question, in a world where interruption is optional, that leads anywhere worth going.

The campfire was always generous. The storyteller gave something. The audience received it and gave back their full attention. That exchange was never extraction. It was participation.

The brands that figure out how to belong inside that exchange, rather than interrupting it, will not just be more effective. They will be welcomed.

That is a different business entirely.

Tomorrow: what it means for a brand to belong to a world rather than just advertise near it.

1 of 3

Last Monday, I wrote about the physics of pull. This is what happens when you break it.

For most of human history, stories were protected in a very specific way, not by law or by custom, but by something more instinctive than either. When the storyteller spoke, everyone went quiet. No one had to tell them to do it. They did it independently because they wanted to be somewhere else, and the story was the only way to get there.

Bedouins gathered after dinner. Irish seanachaithe commanded silence in village homes. West African Griots spun mythic tales over crackling fires. Every oral tradition on earth treated the listening state as something worth preserving. You entered it deliberately. You were changed by it. And then, when it was over, you came back.

Researchers have a name for what happened inside you during those stories: narrative transportation1. The state where your brain actually relocates. Your heartbeat changes. Your sense of time bends. You are, in the most literal neurological sense, somewhere else. Studies show that people in this state aren’t just entertained. They are genuinely altered, their beliefs and behaviors quietly shifted by what they lived through in the story-world.

Narrative transportation is fragile. If anything breaks the coherence of the experience, the spell breaks. You surface. And what surfaces is a slightly disoriented person who has to rebuild the whole internal architecture from scratch.

Now imagine you are at a campfire. Someone is telling a story. A good one. The kind where the flames feel like punctuation, and nobody moves. You are in it. Enthralled.

And then someone else walks up and interrupts. Not to ask a question about the story. Not to add something to it. They want to tell you about something completely different. Their own thing. Their own agenda. It has nothing to do with where you were or where you were going. They just want a turn.

Or worse: they want to compete. They have their own story, and it’s louder and flashier and designed specifically to pull your attention away from the one you were already exploring. They are not joining the campfire. They are trying to become a better campfire.

That is a commercial break.

Not a metaphor for one. That is exactly what is happening every time.

We built an entire economy on that interruption. I’ve worked inside it for thirty years. I know the logic. Content costs money. Advertising funds content. Viewers get programming for free. There is a genuine exchange buried in there, and for a long time it held.

But watch what happened to the exchange rate.

In the 1970s, a prime-time hour of American television contained about eight minutes of commercials. By 2020, that figure had risen to between sixteen and twenty minutes. A thirty-minute show that once gave you twenty-six minutes of story now gives you nineteen to twenty-two. The content didn’t shrink because stories got shorter. It shrank because the interruption machine demanded more room.

Television writers did not resist the interruptions. They built around them. The breaks were not pauses in the story. They became the structural principle the story was built to serve.

That worked, in its way. Sitcoms and procedurals found their rhythm inside those constraints. Act out. Big moment. Cut. Act back in. Recap. Rebuild. Repeat.

Then streaming arrived and gave creators the ability to design for immersion instead of interruption. The results pushed beyond “good television.” They were a different medium entirely, built on the assumption that the spell would hold, that the viewer would stay inside, that the story could breathe on its own terms.

Streaming exposed something the ad industry had glossed over for decades: The moment you could design for continuous immersion, the interruption became visible as the choice it always was. Not a law of nature, a business model. And now that ad breaks are returning to streaming, the incongruity is sharper than it ever was in broadcast. Viewers know what the alternative feels like. The disconnect is harder to ignore.

Showrunners noticed what they had. And now, as platforms reintroduce ads into streaming, some of them are pushing back hard. Lulu Wang, whose show “Expats” was designed for continuous viewing, said recently that if she had known ad breaks would be inserted, she would have made the show differently. Alan Poul, executive producer of “Tokyo Vice,” said it plainly: “We fought so hard to get rid of commercials.”

That fight is not really about aesthetics. It is about what interruption does to the neurological state that makes storytelling work in the first place.

The research is unambiguous. Placing ads within narrative programming, specifically the kind that truly absorbs viewers, reduces the emotional impact of the ads. Not just the program, though, that is impacted, too. The mechanism being exploited is the same one being destroyed.

The campfire model was never about passive consumption. The story shaped the listener. The listener shaped the story. There was a feedback flow between teller and room that made the whole thing come alive. That exchange had a word. It was called participation.

But the advertising industry looked at it and saw something else: inventory.

So what we built instead was a toll booth at the entrance to the fire. You want the story? First, listen to us. First, look over here. First, let us have thirty seconds of wherever you are going.

The audience tolerated it because they had no other way in.

Now they do.

Tomorrow: what a brand would have to become to be welcomed at the fire instead of posted at the gate.

NASA’s Artemis program has put the moon back in public conversation in a way it hasn’t been since Apollo. That felt like a reason to pull up something I wrote a while back, an essay about what celestial mechanics can teach us about participation.

The moon has never touched the ocean.

Think about that. The moon is 238,900 miles away. It has never made contact with a single drop of seawater. And yet, twice every day, the ocean moves toward it. Billions of gallons of water, rising and falling in perfect rhythm, pulled by something that has never pushed.

This is gravity. Pull, not push. This is what participation could look like if we stopped trying to force it.

The Doctrine of Push

Marketing has always been a pushing discipline.

Push messages into awareness. Push products into consideration. Push conversions through the funnel. The language is violent if you listen closely: impressions, penetration, reach, frequency. We’re trying to get inside, to break through, to force attention.

This made sense in an era of scarcity. When there were three TV channels and one newspaper, pushing your message into limited space was the only way to be heard. The push doctrine was a response to real constraints.

Those constraints are gone. There’s infinite space now: infinite channels, infinite content, infinite noise. And still we push. Harder and harder, louder and louder, more and more frequently. The budget goes up. The impressions increase. The actual engagement plateaus or declines.

The push model is exhausted. Pushing still works, somewhat. But everyone else is pushing too, and more force doesn’t help when the room is already full of force.

The moon suggests an alternative.

The Physics of Pull

Gravity is strange. It’s the weakest of the fundamental forces, trillions of times weaker than electromagnetism. And yet it shapes the universe. Galaxies form around it. Stars ignite because of it. The tides obey it absolutely.

How does something so weak have such power? Because it’s always on.

The moon doesn’t run campaigns. It pulls constantly, continuously, every second of every day. The force is tiny, imperceptible in any single moment. But it’s relentless. And over time, relentless tiny forces move oceans.

This is the physics of pull: constant presence over force, attraction over intrusion. Not loud. Not pushy. Creating conditions where the natural movement is toward you.

The push marketer asks: how do I force attention? The pull marketer asks: how do I create gravity?

What Creates Gravitational Pull?

The moon creates pull through mass. It’s a quarter the size of Earth, massive enough that its gravity extends across 238,900 miles to shape our oceans. No effort required. The pull is a consequence of what the moon is, not what the moon does.

Brands that create pull have analogous qualities, things they are rather than things they do.

Substance. You have to actually be something worth moving toward. The moon doesn’t create gravity through branding. It creates gravity through mass. Brands that pull have genuine weight: real expertise, real community, real value. The gravity is a consequence of substance, not a substitute for it.

Consistency. The moon doesn’t pull harder some days than others. The gravitational field is constant. Brands that pull show up reliably, present even when they’re not speaking. The pull is ambient, a background force that shapes behavior whether anyone’s paying attention or not.

Patience. Gravitational effects are slow. The tide doesn’t respond instantly. It builds over hours. Brands that try to create immediate pull from a single campaign are misunderstanding the physics. Real pull accumulates. It takes time for the water to move.

Distance. The moon pulls without touching. It doesn’t need to be in direct contact with the ocean to influence it. Brands that pull well understand that some distance is necessary. Too close and you’re not pulling. You’re pushing. The over-personalized notification, the re-targeting that follows you across every tab, the engagement prompt the moment you pause on a post — these feel like reach but they function like pressure. The space between is where the gravity works.

The Tidal Rhythm

The tide doesn’t just come in. It goes out. That’s not a failure of the moon’s marketing strategy. It’s how tidal systems work.

Every pull has a corresponding release. The ocean moves toward the moon, then recedes. High tide, low tide, high tide again. The rhythm is as important as the pull.

Brands that understand pull also understand release. They don’t try to keep customers in constant engagement. They create rhythms: periods of intensity followed by periods of rest. The tide comes in during a product launch, a community event, a seasonal campaign. Then it goes out. Then it comes back.

Constant push exhausts. A tidal rhythm gives people something to sync with instead. They know when to pay attention and when to rest. The predictability of the rhythm is part of the pull.

Entrainment

Living things sync with tidal rhythms.

Intertidal creatures, crabs, mussels, sea anemones, have internal clocks that match the tidal cycle. Even in a laboratory tank with no tidal variation, they continue to behave as if the tide were coming and going. The rhythm is that deeply embedded.

This is called entrainment: the synchronization of an organism’s rhythms with external cycles. We do it with the sun, with work weeks, with seasons, with content cycles. We’re built to sync with environmental cycles.

Brands that create reliable rhythms become entrainment points. Customers sync with the cadence of your communication, your releases, your community events. The rhythm becomes expected, anticipated, part of how they experience the year.

The entrainment creates loyalty that push can’t match. Pushed messages interrupt. Entrained rhythms integrate. You become part of how customers experience time itself.

Predicting the Pull

We can predict the tides centuries in advance.

The position of the moon, the sun, the shape of the coastline: calculable centuries out. We know when high tide will occur in any harbor on any date in 2200. Ships schedule their movements around it. Coastal communities plan their lives around it.

The reliability of the rhythm matters as much as the rhythm itself. Customers who know your cadence can plan around it. They can anticipate, prepare to engage, rather than being caught off-guard by a push they didn’t see coming. Predictability creates the conditions for willing participation.

The Moon’s Indifference

The strangest thing about the moon’s relationship with the ocean: the moon doesn’t care.

The moon isn’t trying to move the tides. It has no strategy, no goals, no metrics for ocean engagement. It’s just there, being massive, and the ocean responds. The pull is utterly impersonal.

I find this oddly liberating for thinking about brand gravity.

The most powerful pulls aren’t desperate. They’re not trying to engage you. They’re just being what they are, substantial, consistent, present, and the engagement follows. The neediness that characterizes so much marketing is anti-gravitational. Neediness collapses gravity. It pushes people away.

The moon doesn’t need the ocean to respond. It will continue being massive whether the tides obey or not. Brands with genuine gravity have a similar quality. They’re doing what they do because it’s what they are, not because they need your response to validate them.

This is different from indifference to customers. It’s more like confidence, a centeredness that doesn’t require constant external validation. The pull is a byproduct of substance, not a performance designed to extract reaction.

Learning from Celestial Mechanics

The moon teaches a few things about participation worth naming plainly.

Push interrupts. Pull accumulates. In the short term, push looks more effective. In the long term, pull moves oceans.

Gravity requires mass. You can’t create pull through tactics alone. You need substance: real value, real expertise, real community. The pull is a consequence of what you are, not what you say about yourself.

Rhythms matter. Tidal rhythms, not constant engagement. High tide, low tide. Activity, rest. Customers entrain to reliable cycles. Unpredictable pushing exhausts them.

Distance is necessary. The moon pulls precisely because it doesn’t push. The space between brand and customer is where gravitational attraction does its work. Too close and you’re not pulling. You’re pushing.

Patience is essential. Tides build over hours. Gravitational effects accumulate over cycles. If you’re measuring pull on a weekly basis, you’re measuring the wrong thing.

The moon never gave a presentation about its engagement strategy. We, however, build decks. It never optimized its approach based on quarterly metrics. It just showed up, massive and consistent, and the ocean moved. Participation followed.

Maybe that’s enough.

Spend enough time listening to podcasts and pundits, and you start to notice a pattern. We are surrounded by economies now. The attention economy. The creator economy. The intelligence economy. The trust economy. The experience economy. The ownership economy. The gig economy. The care economy. Every season adds another name to the list, and each new arrival tends to come with the same story: the last one is fading, the new scarcity is ascending, and the world is reorganizing around it.

This is something I felt I had to explore more.

Because the proliferation is real, and most of these terms are pointing at something genuine. But the story underneath them is confusing, and depending on which authority you’re listening to, it gets more so. We seem to talk about these economies in sequence, as if attention gave way to creators, and creators are giving way to intelligence, and history moves in a clean line from one dominant scarcity to the next. That is a timeline projected onto what is actually a network. And the difference between those two maps is not small.

What Makes an Economy Real

The word gets used loosely, but the concept has a structure.

An economy, at its most fundamental, is a system organized around the exchange of something scarce. Three conditions have to hold:

There is a resource that is not available in unlimited supply, There are participants who want that resource, and there are mechanisms for acquiring, exchanging, and capturing it.

Remove any one of those conditions, and you don’t have an economy. You have a trend, a community, maybe a movement. But not an economy.

The financial economy organized itself around capital. The labor economy organized itself around time and skill. These were legible for centuries because the scarcity was obvious and the mechanisms of exchange were formalized.

We built entire civilizations on these foundations because their physics were stable. The value of a dollar followed known laws. The price of a skilled hour rose predictably. Markets could be read, mapped, and anticipated. Then something changed the physics entirely.

What changed is technology.

Technology Does Not Just Create Products. It Creates New Scarcity.

This is the mechanism behind the proliferation.

Every significant technological shift reveals or manufactures a new form of scarcity. And wherever genuine scarcity exists, a marketplace forms. When a marketplace has enough structure and volume, it earns the name “economy.”

The internet made distribution essentially free. What became scarce in its wake was attention. Platforms, publishers, and advertisers organized themselves around capturing and trading that attention, pricing it in CPMs and optimizing for it algorithmically. The attention economy is not a metaphor. It has pricing, arbitrage, supply and demand curves, and dominant players who have accumulated extraordinary power by mastering it.

The rise of social platforms and creator tools made it possible for individuals to build audiences and monetize them directly. What became scarce then was authentic relationships between a creator and an audience that trusted them. The creator economy formed around this, with its own infrastructure, revenue models, and market dynamics.

Now, AI systems are advancing to the point where they can reason, synthesize, and recommend at scale. The scarce resource shifting here is not information itself, but the ability to act on it well, fast, and repeatedly. The intelligence economy is forming around this new hierarchy, even if the name is still settling.

The pattern holds. New technology. New scarcity. New economy.

These Are Not Layers. They Are Nodes.

This is where most of the popular discourse goes wrong.

When people frame these economies as sequential, the attention economy giving way to the creator economy giving way to the intelligence economy, they impose a timeline that does not exist. The financial economy did not go dormant when the attention economy arrived. The attention economy is not winding down because AI is ascendant. They are all running simultaneously, influencing each other in every direction, with no clean hierarchy between them.

A better way to see this is as a network of nodes, each one an economy organized around its own scarce resource, each one connected to the others, each one growing or contracting based on technological relevance and commercial activity at any given moment.

The creator economy node is being reshaped right now, squeezed by platform dependency and AI-generated supply pressure. The intelligence economy node is expanding rapidly as capital and attention flood into it. The financial economy, the oldest node in the network, absorbs and amplifies everything that happens around it.

Nodes do not replace each other. They coexist, influence each other, and change in size. What looks like one economy “replacing” another is usually just a node gaining enough mass to become visible in the cultural conversation for the first time.

This matters because it changes the question worth asking. Not “which economy is next” but “which node is underbuilt, undervalued, and underconnected to the rest of the network.”

The Most Connected Node

Across every economy in this network, people are being modeled as targets. Viewers. Users. Subscribers. Decision-makers optimized for conversion.

What they are not being modeled as are participants.

Participation is something categorically different from attention and consumption. It is the active investment of a person’s identity, effort, creativity, or voice in something beyond themselves. It cannot be automated at scale or manufactured without consent. It is the most human signal in the network.

And it has been present inside every other economy without being named as a resource.

When open source communities built Linux, that was participation. When fans organized around a sports team and created a culture the founders never imagined, that was participation. When a brand ran a campaign that invited people in rather than broadcasting messages at them, and the results outperformed everything else in the media plan, that was participation.

The Participation Economy Was Always There

The Participation Economy is not emerging. It has existed as long as humanity, because participation is how humans are wired. Every durable cultural institution, religion, sport, craft, tribe, runs on participation. Not audience, or viewership, but active involvement.

What is changing is that the tools for participation are becoming frictionless, and its commercial infrastructure is finally being built.

AI removes skill barriers. A person who could not code, design, compose, or distribute now can. Platforms have removed distribution barriers. What once required a publisher, label, or network can now happen from a phone. Communities have removed coordination barriers. Groups that once required geography, budgets, or institutions can now organize around ideas at the speed of a conversation.

The cost of participation is collapsing toward zero. The scale of participation is expanding toward everyone.

What makes the participation node distinctive in this network is that it connects to all of the others. Every other economy runs at a higher level of value when participation is active inside it. Attention deepens when it becomes participation. The creator economy becomes durable when audiences participate rather than consume. The intelligence economy becomes meaningful when humans are using it rather than being used by it. Participation is not the next economy. It is the most connected one, and it is only now gaining the commercial infrastructure to match its actual scale.

What This Means

AI will commoditize information. Agents will optimize decisions. The intelligence node will keep growing until those capabilities are table stakes, and then it will stabilize like every economy before it.

The proliferation will continue. Every new technology will surface a new scarcity, attract participants, and generate mechanisms for exchange. And another economy will earn its name. The network of nodes will keep growing.

Over time, some nodes will rise and plateau. Some will be absorbed into larger ones. The intelligence economy is ascending now with capital flooding in and attention following close behind. Give it a decade, and it will be as legible and as assumed as the financial economy, the new infrastructure everyone builds on top of, without calling it by name.

What no technology can manufacture is the will to participate. The choice to invest effort, voice, identity, creativity in something that exists beyond the self. That capacity is not scarce because of any technological constraint. It is scarce because it is irreducibly human. And it has been present, unnamed, inside every economy that has ever mattered.

That is the only node no one can automate.

Before there were brands, there were ceremonies.

Before markets, before media, before any of the infrastructure we’ve built to connect people to things and things to meaning, humans gathered. Around fire. Around food. Around the dead and the newborn and the changing of seasons. They marked transitions with shared acts. They turned strangers into kin through repetition and presence. They brewed fermented drinks and passed them between hands and in doing so said something that had no words yet: we are here, together, and this moment is worth marking.

Ceremony is the oldest participation technology we have. Not a metaphor, a technology. A designed system for creating shared meaning that every culture on earth, without coordination, without contact, without any common ancestor of instruction, arrived at independently. The Japanese tea ceremony and the West African kola nut ritual and the South American mate circle and the Germanic beer hall and the Mexican ofrenda — none of these borrowed from each other. All of them solved the same problem the same way. When you need people to feel that they belong to something larger than themselves, you design a ritual, and you invite them in.

This is not a historical observation. It is a description of what humans are still doing, right now, whether we call it that or not.

Every tailgate is a ceremony. Every Thanksgiving table is a ceremony. Every bar where the same group of friends occupies the same corner every Thursday is a ceremony. The form changes, the function doesn’t. We are wired, at the level of neurochemistry, for the rituals that make participation visible. We release oxytocin, the hormone of belonging, when we are in the presence of shared acts. Our mirror neurons fire when we watch others move in rhythm and pull us toward joining. The drive to gather and mark and celebrate is not a cultural habit. It is a biological instruction.

I’ve been writing about participation as the original human operating system for nearly three years now. The argument I keep returning to is that the most durable brands aren’t the ones with the largest audiences. They’re the ones that have earned the largest groups of active participants. The ones that figured out how to make showing up feel like it means something.

What I haven’t said clearly enough is that this isn’t a new insight brands need to discover. It’s an ancient truth they need to remember.

And then, a year ago, two of my co-founders at The Many decided to make a beer.

Not a craft beer. Not a flavored beer. Something more specific than that. Jens Stoelken — who grew up in Germany where beer is heritage before it is beverage — traveled to Kyoto and encountered a matcha beer at a small brewery and recognized something that most people would have dismissed as a novelty. He saw a signal. The botanical wasn’t a gimmick. It was a cultural ingredient carrying centuries of ritual in its DNA. Matcha comes from the tea ceremony. It was never just a flavor. It was the medium of a gathering practice.

He came home and built Ceremony Botanical Brewing around that instinct, together with Blake Marquis, who named the brand and designed every element of its visual identity and packaging. The name Ceremony wasn’t a marketing decision. It was a recognition of what the thing actually was. The botanicals Jens chose are not trendy ingredients. They are ingredients that cultures selected, over hundreds of years, because they belonged to occasions. Hibiscus moves across three continents under three names — aguas frescas, bissap, karkade — and everywhere it appears, it appears at gatherings. Mate is passed in a gourd between people. That is the entire ritual. Receiving from someone else’s hands and passing it forward.

Every botanical was chosen by a culture, across time, to mark the moments that matter.

And then Jens put them in beer. Which is itself among the oldest ceremonial creations humans have made. The Sumerians wrote hymns to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing. Egyptians placed beer in tombs as an offering. Germanic tribes sealed bonds by passing it at communal tables. The first beers weren’t made to quench thirst. They were made because humans needed a reason to gather and something to share when they did.

Ceremony inside ceremony. Ritual all the way down.

I want to say one more thing about why this matters right now, in this particular moment.

We are entering an era in which the question of what is human and what is synthetic is going to define our culture. What a person made versus what a machine generated. What it means to actually be in a room together. What counts as a real experience and what is a produced simulation. These questions are already in the air and they will only get louder. People will be looking, without always knowing that’s what they’re doing, for things that are unambiguously human. Things that cannot be machine-generated. Things that require a body, a place, other people, and the irreducible act of showing up.

A botanical chosen by a culture over centuries. Fermented by hands. Opened at an occasion. These things cannot be automated. The ritual that happens when people gather around them cannot be produced. Ceremony didn’t plan to launch a beverage that stands as a counterpoint to artificial intelligence. But it did. Because what it is, at its root, is a celebration of the thing that makes us human: the ancient, biological, universal need to gather around something meaningful and say, together, that this moment counts.

On April 4, at 4:30 in the afternoon, Ceremony Botanical Brewing is hosting a free public event at Hi Sign Brewing in East Austin, 730 Shady Lane. Live music. A local artist. The first pours of the Matcha Botanical Pilsner and the Hibiscus Botanical Ale. An open door.

If you’re in Austin, please come. Not because it’s a product launch. Because it’s an invitation. The participation is the point.

That’s always been the point.