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.

In December 2024, Oxford University Press named “brainrot” its Word of the Year. Their definition: the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material considered to be trivial or unchallenging.

37,000 people voted to make it official.

Nearly forty thousand people found the Word of the Year ballot, formed an opinion, cast it, and collectively crowned a word that means you have surrendered your capacity to think, care, or engage with anything of substance. The most deliberately participatory act imaginable, deployed in service of naming the least participatory condition imaginable.

If you want this whole essay in a single snapshot, that is probably it. But this event deserves more than a punchline, because what lives underneath it is one of the more honest portraits of human nature that our culture has produced in a while.

The word itself has a particular quality that most slang does not: It carries real weight. Rot is biological. It implies something living that has stopped living, something once vital now breaking down at a cellular level. It is not a soft word. It is not a word you reach for when you are being generous. And yet the generation that uses it most reaches for it constantly, cheerfully, almost tenderly. “I am so brainrotted.” “This content is pure brainrot.” “My brainrot is showing.” The horror of the word and the warmth of the tone are in total disagreement, and nobody seems bothered.

That gap between the word and the feeling is worth sitting with. Because it tells you something important about the relationship this generation has with what they are naming.

They are not alarmed. They are not confessing. They are not asking to be saved. They are describing a state they recognize, that they move in and out of, that they have apparently decided is a natural part of being alive online in this particular moment. The diagnosis is theirs. The tone is theirs. The humor is theirs. What you are watching is not a generation that has been told it has a problem. It is a generation that identified its own condition, named it with precision, made it into a cultural identity, and then went right back to actively creating.

That last part is the part people keep missing.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the most participatory generations in human history. Not as an aspiration or a marketing claim, but as a measurable fact about how they spend their time and attention. They do not consume culture as previous generations consumed it, sitting at a fixed distance from a screen broadcasting in one direction. They are inside it, building it. They create, remix, vote, argue, iterate, and co-own in ways that have no real precedent.

Consider the Brainrot character universe. A sprawling, absurdist ecosystem of creatures and characters spreading simultaneously across games, short-form video, and entirely new character spin-offs, built by thousands of creators who have never met, never signed an agreement, never received a creative brief, and never asked anyone’s permission. There is no Brainrot headquarters. There is no IP owner carefully managing brand consistency. There is just the internet collectively deciding to keep adding, and the thing continues to grow because participation itself is the engine.

Yet this is the generation that adults insist has already checked out of life.

The same kids building that ecosystem, producing volumes of creative output that would have been unimaginable to any previous generation at the same age, are the ones who coined brainrot, made it funny, spread it everywhere, and then showed up in sufficient numbers to push it through Oxford’s public vote and into the dictionary.

People who have genuinely checked out do not do that.

What they do, apparently, is hold two things at once without needing to resolve the tension between them. They can go all-in and burn out simultaneously. They can build an entire creative universe and also recognize when they’re savoring in the antithesis of that creativity. And in doing so, they reveal something true not just about themselves but about participation as a force in the world.

Participation always generates its opposite.

Not randomly. Not as failure. As completion. As balance and ballast. Push any system hard enough in one direction, and it produces an equal force pointing the other way. This is what participation does when it runs at full intensity: It kicks out enough energy that it also creates its own inverse.

Gen Z did not invent this dynamic. They just lived it more visibly and more honestly than any generation before them.

Every system that generates real energy needs two poles. A battery does not work because of its positive charge alone. It works because positive and negative exist in relation to each other. After all, the tension between them is precisely what allows current to flow. Remove one pole, and you do not have a more powerful battery. You have no battery at all. The power lives in the gap between the two.

Participation generates enormous energy. But participation as this generation practices it, the volume of creating and reacting and building and voting and remixing that fills their days, requires something balancing it out on the other end. It requires the exhale after the inhale. The drift after the sprint. The scroll after the build.

Brainrot is the other pole.

It’s the condition that makes sustained participation possible, because no system runs on a single charge. What this generation understood, perhaps intuitively rather than analytically, is that you need to know where you are in the cycle. And you need to be honest about the fact that the cycle exists at all.

Previous generations never got to do this for themselves. Every generation has had its exhale. Every generation has had its version of the low-quality, low-stakes drift-and-scroll. But for every previous generation, the exhale was named by someone else. Someone older, more concerned, positioned at a careful distance from the thing they were diagnosing. Television was rot. Comic books were rot. Video games were rot. The internet itself was rot. Each time, the adults looked at the passive end of a generation’s energy cycle and declared it evidence of collapse, never understanding that what they were seeing was the necessary counterweight to everything else that generation was building.

Gen Z did not wait to be diagnosed. They got there first, made it funny, and voted it into the dictionary.

There is a lesson in this for anyone who works in culture, which by now is most of us in one way or another.

The instinct, when you see an audience drifting and scrolling, consuming content that seems to offer nothing, is to try to compete with that behavior. To fight brainrot by being more interesting, more stimulating, more demanding of attention. The assumption underneath that instinct is that brainrot represents a failure of engagement that better content can fix.

But if brainrot is actually the other pole, the necessary exhale in a cycle that also contains extraordinary creative energy, then competing with it is the wrong game. You cannot collapse the negative pole of a battery by making the positive pole stronger. You just create more tension with nowhere to go.

This generation is proving that the cycle itself is the thing worth understanding. The creating and the drifting are not enemies to be reconciled. They are partners in a rhythm that has always existed, but that this generation is, for the first time, living consciously and naming out loud.

The brands and institutions that see only the scroll, that look at brainrot content and conclude the audience has gone somewhere unreachable, are seeing one pole and calling it the whole picture. They are the ones who watch 37,000 people participate to name their own disengagement and somehow conclude that none of them are paying attention.

Oxford’s Word of the Year process has its own participatory tradition, which makes 2024’s outcome richer the longer you look at it. The word for when you have stopped caring was chosen by people who cared enough to show up. The thing offered as evidence of disconnection was named through an act of connection. The rot was identified by people who are, by any reasonable measure, not rotting.

Here is what brainrot actually taught us.

Participation has its counter. Like a battery has two poles. Like the planet has two hemispheres. This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. Energy requires both charges to flow. The world requires both sides to turn.

But here is the part worth pausing on.

The counter to participation was named by the most participatory generation in history. And it was officially recognized through a participatory vote. The exhale was given its name by people mid-inhale. The shadow was voted into existence by people standing in full light.

Which means even brainrot, the word for when participation runs out, could only exist because of participation. It was born from it. It was crowned by it.

That is not irony. It is the deepest possible validation of how fundamental participation is as a human force. It is so core to who we are that we use it even to name its own absence. We cannot escape it. We do not want to. We just needed a word for the other pole.

37,000 people gave us one.

Think about a friend who only ever asks for things.

They might be magnetic. Wildly popular, endlessly charming, genuinely exciting to be around. On the surface the relationship feels valuable. But every interaction follows the same pattern: they need something. Your time, your attention, your recommendation, your money, your presence at their event. They rarely ask how you are, and when they do they never seem to actually care. They don’t remember anything you told them last time. They’re not exactly using you … it’s subtler than that. They just never involve you, never invite you in, never make you feel like your presence changes anything for them.

You probably still reach out, spend time with them. Habit is powerful. But you know exactly what they are.

And you would never go to bat for them.

There’s a conceptual twin of this personality type, and in software development it’s called technical debt. When developers choose the fast solution over the right one, they accrue debt. The code works for now, but the shortcut taken in year one becomes the constraint that limits options in year three. The hack shipped to meet a deadline becomes the legacy system that consumes resources for years. The insidious part is that technical debt doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates silently, compounding in the background, until the day the cost of fixing it exceeds the cost of everything built on top of it.

Every brand also carries a version of this. I call it extraction debt.

Extraction debt doesn’t show up until the moment your brand needs to cash in on trust it never earned.

It’s the accumulated cost of every question you didn’t ask, every voice you didn’t invite, every relationship you treated as a transaction. It doesn’t show up on any balance sheet. It doesn’t announce itself in any dashboard. But it compounds silently, in the background, in the slowly eroding expectations of the people you’re supposed to be serving.

The Seduction of Extraction

The extractive model persists because it’s controllable, and control feels like strategy.

A campaign has a brief. The brief gets approved. The creative gets reviewed. The media plan gets optimized. A transaction happens. The data justifies the spend. Every variable is accounted for, every stakeholder has signed off, and if it underperforms there’s a process to point to.

In this model, everyone involved can justify their role, too. The strategist built the framework. The planner bought the media. The analyst measured the results. The whole machine runs cleanly and produces a predictable return: reach, impressions, conversions. Numbers that make sense in a quarterly report. Nobody gets fired for work that follows the rules.

Participation doesn’t offer this. The output is messier. You can’t map every variable in advance. When something unpredictable emerges from genuine community engagement, and it will, there’s no approved process to blame. So brands keep choosing extraction. Not because it’s working better. Because it’s defensible.

Control masquerades as strategy. Predictable ROI masquerades as effectiveness.

In nature, we know what sustained extraction produces: depleted soil, collapsed fisheries, exhausted resources. The same dynamic runs through customer relationships, just more slowly, with less visible damage, until the damage is severe. You can extract attention, extract data, extract purchase behavior for years while the underlying relationship quietly hollows out.

Everything looks fine on the dashboard. Underneath the dashboard, the extraction debt is compounding.

The Debt Inventory

The debt isn’t abstract. It accumulates in specific, recognizable ways.

Every time a customer writes something, positive or negative, and receives no acknowledgment, they recalibrate their expectations downward. Do it long enough and they stop writing entirely. The debt is a silent audience that has disengaged because engagement was never reciprocated.

Every time you ask for feedback and nothing visibly changes, you teach customers that, in the realm of your brand, participation is theater. They spent social capital on a brand that didn’t value their input. The debt you incur for that exchange is a population of customers who will never participate again because they’ve already learned that nothing happens when they do.

Think of a brand that ran a viral UGC contest, collected thousands of user stories, then went silent. No reposts, no thank yous, no follow-ups. Months later, when they needed advocates during a crisis, their inbox was empty. That’s extraction debt arriving as earned-media bankruptcy.

Then there’s the untended community. Most brands built a social presence because everyone else was doing it, accruing an audience without ever deciding what that audience was for. With no participation strategy, the community becomes a cost center by default: generating work, absorbing resources, generating no clear return. It looks like overhead because it was never designed to be anything else.

Meanwhile, the customers who love what you make are finding each other anyway, in forums and groups and subreddits, building their own narratives about you without you in the room. That’s the real debt. Not the budget line. A parallel universe where your story is being written, and you’re not holding the pen.

When the Bill Arrives

The debt doesn’t take fifteen years to hurt you. It takes fifteen years to become terminal.

It waits for the moment a new CMO decides this is the year the brand finally builds community. For the product launch that needs real advocates, not paid ones. For the cultural moment that calls for something authentic; a genuine invitation extended to people who have been broadcast at for years. The team builds something open. Something honest. They mean it this time.

And the response is silence.

Not hostility. Something harder to fix: indifference. Customers who were never invited to participate have simply stopped expecting to be asked. Each extractive year quietly recalibrates what the audience believes about you. Not consciously, but structurally. Early on, the damage is survivable. A campaign underperforms, a launch falls flat, the brief gets adjusted and the spend goes up. But the expectation doesn’t reset. It compounds.

By the time fifteen years have passed, an entire generation of customers has grown up knowing your brand as nothing but a broadcast. And they didn’t decide not to trust you. They simply never had a reason to start.

That’s when the bill becomes terminal. Not because recovery is impossible, but because the cost of recovery now exceeds the will of any single leadership team to pay it. Turnarounds require years of unrewarded effort on the part of the brand before any metric moves. Boards lose patience. CMOs get replaced. The new brief arrives: drive growth now. And the cycle continues.

The silence in the room, when the team finally tries something real, is not a campaign problem. It’s the accumulated sound of a relationship that was never built.

Paying It Down

The best time to stop accruing extraction debt was ten years ago. The second-best time is today.

Not because a new campaign fixes everything. Because the debt compounds daily, and every day of continued extraction raises the eventual cost of repair.

Stop the bleeding first. Answer the comments. Acknowledge feedback even when you can’t act on it. You cannot begin depositing into a relationship you’re still actively withdrawing from.

Then start small. One real conversation is worth more than a thousand pieces of broadcast content. Find a hundred customers who want to talk and actually talk to them. The scale comes later. The trust has to come first.

Measure what you’ve been ignoring. Your dashboards measure extraction: reach, impressions, conversion rates. None of that tells you whether the relationship is healthy. Start tracking the ratio of how often you ask customers to do something for you, versus how often you ask them to tell you something about their own experiences or opinions or needs. What you measure is what you manage, and right now most brands are managing extraction without knowing it.

Accept the timeline. Extraction debt took years to accrue, and it’ll take years to pay off. Any strategy that requires visible ROI in ninety days isn’t paying down debt. It’s refinancing it.

What Kind of Friend Do You Want to Be?

Here’s the thing about that friend who only ever asks for things: they’re not happy with the dynamic you share either.

The relationship they’ve built is wide and shallow. Lots of people know them. Nobody really knows them. Their world is wide but weightless. They have reach but no resonance. When something goes wrong, nobody shows up. When they need real advocacy, they discover the difference between an audience and a community.

The brands that pay down extraction debt aren’t just fixing a business problem. They’re making a conscious decision about the kind of relationship they actually want to have with people. Whether they want customers who tolerate them or people who genuinely care what happens to them. Whether they want transactions or trust.

The friend who asks how you are and means it. Who remembers what you said last time. Who makes you feel like your presence changes something. That’s who you go to bat for.

That’s the brand worth building.

Every brand carries extraction debt. The only variable is whether you’re willing to stop adding to it. Today. Not in the next planning cycle, not after the next CMO arrives to inherit the silence.

The friend who only asks doesn’t get to be surprised when no one shows up. Neither do you.

In March of 2016, the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)—a serious organization of serious scientists doing serious work—made a decision that seemed, at the time, like a charming bit of public engagement.

They were building a ship. Not just any ship. A £200 million polar research vessel, 129 meters long, designed to conduct world-leading science in the Arctic and Antarctica. A monument to British ingenuity and commitment to understanding our planet. They wanted the public to feel connected to this magnificent beast of a ship while also boosting awareness of the important research it would enable.

So they asked the internet to name it.

You already know where this is going.

Enter James Hand

James Hand was a BBC Radio Jersey presenter. Not a prankster. Not a troll. Not a chaos agent with a sinister agenda. Just a man with a whim and a Twitter account who, on the day the naming poll launched, typed two words that would haunt a government agency for years:

Boaty McBoatface.

He hit send. He moved on with his day.

Within 24 hours, the name was leading the poll by 8,000 votes. Within a week, James Hand was appearing on the BBC apologizing, while simultaneously calling it “a brilliant name” with “legs of its own.” The poll site crashed under the traffic. More than 7,000 names were submitted in total, but Boaty McBoatface won with 124,109 votes. Its nearest competitor got roughly 34,000.

That second place entry, for the record, was named after a 16-month-old girl with incurable cancer. That’s the kind of gravity and sincerity that Boaty McBoatface beat.

The Crowd Was Not Wrong

What gets lost in the telling of this story is that the people who voted for Boaty McBoatface weren’t saboteurs. They weren’t disengaged cynics trying to ruin something nice. They weren’t trying to cause trouble anymore than James Hand was trying to create consternation in the British scientific community. Those voters were people who showed up, paid attention, and voted with genuine delight.

That IS participation. That is exactly what participation looks like when it’s working.

The crowd found the most joyful option in the field and ran toward it at full speed. They didn’t misunderstand the assignment; they rewrote it. They saw a formal institution extending an unusual invitation and they accepted it on their own terms, which is what humans have always done when a door is opened.

NERC wanted consultation. They wanted a polite crowd that would suggest dignified names and feel good about being asked. What they got was something messier and more alive: genuine participation, full of irreverence and wit and collective energy. And since that wasn’t what they anticipated, they panicked.

The Override

The British Science Minister, Jo Johnson, hinted pretty quickly that the result might not be honored. His reasoning was entirely reasonable and entirely beside the point. The ship would be doing important science on climate change and rising sea levels, deserving a name with appropriate gravity. That much was true. But the moment had already moved somewhere else.

Credit: Photograph by Jamie Anderson / British Antarctic Survey.

NERC later confirmed what everyone suspected: the ship would be named RRS Sir David Attenborough, after the beloved naturalist who had come fourth in the vote with roughly 11,000 votes. The public, predictably, lost its mind. Newspaper editorials. Social media outrage. The full democratic grievance cycle.

Harvard Business School researchers actually studied this episode afterward and found something striking: people who were told that NERC overrode the vote were significantly less satisfied with the institution than people who were told that no vote had ever been held. Let that land for a moment: It was better, in the public’s mind, to have never asked for input at all than to ask and ignore. The act of inviting participation created an implied contract. Breaking it felt like a betrayal.

Asking for input is not neutral. When you ask, you’re making a promise. Design your participation system with that promise in mind before you launch it, not after.

The Accidental Masterpiece

The British instinct in these situations is to contain the damage; to find the smallest possible concession that satisfies the loudest possible voices. What NERC actually did, whether by accident or by genuine wit, was something more interesting than that. They gave the name a job.

In what NERC’s own executive called “an eloquent compromise,” the name Boaty McBoatface was assigned to one of the ship’s remotely operated submersibles. A small, autonomous underwater vehicle designed to reach depths of 6,000 meters and journey independently beneath polar ice. That also happened to be cute and yellow.

Credit: Photograph by Matt Cardy / Getty Images

Here is where the story stops being about institutional embarrassment and starts being about something else entirely. A submersible has no press office. It does not give interviews or manage its reputation. It simply goes where it’s sent, does what it’s designed to do, and comes back with data.

Boaty McBoatface, it turned out, was very good at this.

It completed its first under-ice mission in the Weddell Sea, spending 51 hours beneath Antarctic ice and traveling 108 kilometers at depths approaching 1,000 meters. It sniffed for carbon capture leakage on the seafloor. It became a beloved educational ambassador, teaching children across the globe about STEM through a curriculum that bore its ridiculous, whimsical name. In 2017, it became a category on Jeopardy.

Then it kept going. In August 2024, Boaty completed a fully autonomous 2,000-kilometer voyage from Iceland to Scotland. It has since been deployed beneath the Dotson and Thwaites ice shelves, mapping warm-water intrusion and seafloor turbulence that feeds directly into sea-level-rise models. The joke name is now emblazoned on scientific papers.

Meanwhile, the RRS Sir David Attenborough, the dignified, gravity-appropriate vessel with the respectable name, is largely unknown outside oceanographic circles.

The crowd named the right thing. They just named it before they knew it existed.

McBoatfacing

The cultural residue of this whole episode is a word: McBoatfacing. Defined, with no small amount of institutional bitterness, as “making the critical mistake of letting the internet decide things.”

I’d like to propose a different definition.

McBoatfacing is designing a participation system without thinking through what you’re actually inviting. It’s opening the door, being surprised when people walk through it, and then blaming the people.

The mistake wasn’t the crowd. The crowd was magnificent and enthusiastic and true to itself. The mistake was architectural. NERC gave the public a wide-open text field and asked for “inspirational names” with no guardrails, no shortlist, no defined criteria, and, critically, no honest signal about how the input would be weighted in the final decision. They designed a participation theater and got actual participation. Surprise, chaos, headlines.

Good participation design would have looked different. A curated shortlist voted on by the public. Or an open submission with a clearly communicated editorial filter. Or, the boldest option of all, a genuine commitment to honor the result, full stop, because you believe the crowd’s collective instinct is worth trusting.

Any of those would have worked. What doesn’t work is inviting the crowd into your space and then frowning when they sit on the furniture.

The Thing About Boaty

I keep thinking about that little yellow submarine in the dark water under the Antarctic ice.

It went down there with a name that made people laugh. It came back up with data that helps us understand how the planet’s oceans circulate heat, which is one of the most important questions in climate science. The joke became the mission. The irreverence became the icon. What everyone was embarrassed about became what everyone now loves.

Something real is at work in that outcome. When participation is genuine, even imperfect, even messy, even when it doesn’t go the way the institution planned, it tends to find its way to something true.

The crowd gave that submarine a name with joy in it. And that submarine has been carrying that joy into the deep ocean ever since.

I’ll be honest; I still chuckle when I say it out loud. Boaty McBoatface. It’s just a perfect piece of language. Absurd and rhythmic and somehow exactly right. Singed into the Internet’s collective memory forever.

Do you remember when this happened? Do you remember the moment you first heard the name and laughed?

Every winter evening over the wetlands of Gretna Green, Scotland, something impossible happens.

A hundred thousand starlings rise from the reeds and begin to fly. Within seconds, they’re no longer individual birds but a single undulating mass; a shape-shifting cloud that wheels, contracts, expands, and flows like sentient smoke. The murmuration (yes, that’s the actual term) moves faster than any individual bird can process. It responds to predators before any single starling has seen them. It makes decisions without anyone deciding.

There is no leader.

No bird in charge. No chain of command. No strategy memo. Just a hundred thousand individuals following three simple rules, and from those rules: coherent, adaptive, breathtaking complexity.

Brands, at their best, work the same way ... or they should. The ones that endure aren’t controlled from the center so much as they’re animated from within.

The Physics of the Flock

In 1986, a computer graphics researcher named Craig Reynolds was trying to animate realistic flocking behavior for film. The problem seemed intractable: how do you coordinate thousands of individual agents without a central controller?

Reynolds’ breakthrough was realizing you don’t. Instead, give each agent three rules:

1. Separation: Avoid crowding your nearest neighbors.

2. Alignment: Steer toward the average heading of your nearest neighbors.

3. Cohesion: Move toward the average position of your nearest neighbors.

“The rules came from informal observation of the natural world, mostly in urban settings, occasionally out in the wild,” Reynolds told befores & afters magazine. “When I worked at [Information International Inc.] our building was adjacent to a large cemetery. Large flocks of blackbirds would forage in the acres of lawn there, occasionally taking flight and providing me with inspiration. I tried to mentally extract out elements of the motion, looking for ‘modular’ properties that were largely independent of each other. I came up with the three rules quickly, and was sure they were necessary, but until I actually tried it I would not know if they were sufficient.”

Three rules. No leader. No global view. Each bird pays attention only to the seven or so birds closest to it. And from this absurdly simple local behavior emerges the global complexity of the murmuration.

Reynolds called his simulated creatures “Boids.” They’ve been used in everything from “Batman Returns” to “The Lord of the Rings.” But Reynolds wasn’t just solving an animation problem. He was demonstrating a principle that nature had figured out long before we did.

Coherence doesn’t require command.

The murmuration isn’t decentralized, a term that implies a center that’s been distributed. It’s acentric. There is no center. There never was. The flock exists only as an emergent property of localized interactions. And somehow, it works better than any hierarchy could.

The 100-Page Confession

Now consider how most brands approach the same problem: getting a large group of people to act in ways that cohere.

How do they do it? They write a 100-page brand guidelines document. Exact Pantone colors, approved fonts, permissible photography styles, forbidden words. Approval workflows with multiple sign-offs. Brand police to catch violations. Every decision that might affect how the brand shows up in the world, centralized in one massive rulebook.

The brand guidelines document isn’t a failure of effort. It’s a failure of imagination. It assumes coherence requires control in that if you don’t specify everything, chaos will ensue. And so the organization makes every decision in advance, leaving its people to execute rather than think. The intentions are good. The underlying belief is the problem.

Specify everything, and you might get something worse than chaos. You get rigidity. Lifelessness. A brand that can’t adapt to cultural moments because every adaptation requires committee approval. Employees who follow rules rather than instinct. A flock that moves in formation but can’t respond to obstacles until the leader gives approval.

The murmuration responds to a hawk faster than any individual starling’s nervous system can process the threat. The collective sees what no individual can. It flows with the air currents and thermals in the most energy-efficient way possible. This is the miracle of emergent behavior: the whole becomes literally smarter than the sum of its parts.

A 100-page guidelines document doesn’t protect the brand. It insulates the brand from the very people who bring it to life.

The Brand Grammar

So what’s the alternative?

The murmuration suggests an answer: simple rules, locally applied.

Think of it as brand grammar rather than brand guidelines. Grammar doesn’t tell you what to say; it tells you how to say things so others can understand you. It creates coherence without constraining content. You can write a love letter or a legal brief using the same grammar, and both will be recognizably English. Both will make sense to the reader.

A brand grammar might look like this:

Alignment: Every communication should move toward our shared purpose. Separation: Every creator maintains their own voice within that purpose. Cohesion: Every piece should add value to the pieces around it.

Notice what’s missing: No approved color palettes. No specified fonts. No list of forbidden words. Those aren’t elements of grammar, though they may seem that way on the surface. They’re restrictions. They test whether you’ve memorized the rules, not whether you understand the language.

The brand manager’s job, in this model, isn’t to direct the flock. It’s to set the physics. Establish the simple rules that, when everyone follows them locally, produce global coherence. Then get out of the way.

The Seven Nearest Neighbors

The part of switching to the “brand grammar” model that makes traditional marketers nervous: in a murmuration, no bird is watching the whole flock.

Each starling tracks only its seven nearest neighbors. That’s the entire scope of its awareness. It has no idea what the flock is doing on the other side of the sky. It doesn’t need to know. The global pattern emerges from local interactions, and only from local interactions.

For brands, this is deeply counterintuitive. We’ve built entire organizations around the idea that someone needs to see the whole picture. The CMO. The brand council. The executive committee. Someone, somewhere, must be watching the entire flock and keeping it coherent.

The murmuration says otherwise. In a murmuration, your seven neighbors overlap with their seven neighbors, who overlap with theirs. Information cascades across the entire system through these overlapping local connections. That’s what makes it so fast: no one needs to route a message through a central hub. Coherence emerges from the quality of local interactions, not from centralized oversight. If every employee is paying attention to the seven people they work with most closely — if those interactions are aligned, separated, cohesive — the organization will cohere.

This is also how culture actually spreads. Not through all-hands meetings or CEO emails, but through daily interactions between people who sit near each other. The new hire doesn’t learn the brand from the guidelines document. They learn it from the seven people they talk to most often. If those people embody the brand, the new hire will too. If they don’t, no document will save you.

Stop trying to broadcast to the whole flock. Start improving the quality of local interactions. Make sure the seven nearest neighbors are aligned. The rest follows.

What Happens at the Edge

The edge of a murmuration is where all the interesting things happen.

It’s where predators strike — a peregrine falcon diving into the flock. It’s also where innovation occurs — individual birds trying new directions, some of which catch on and ripple through the whole. The edge is simultaneously the most dangerous and the most generative part of the system.

Most brand architectures try to eliminate that edge. Everyone safely in the middle, following the same rules, producing the same outputs. Consistency at all costs. But a flock with no edge is a sitting target.

The healthiest murmurations maintain a dynamic edge of birds cycling from center to periphery and back again. Edge-dwellers bring new information into the system. The center provides stability and memory. The constant circulation between them keeps the flock both coherent and adaptive.

For brands, this means deliberately cultivating edge-dwellers. Employees, creators, customers who aren’t in the center of brand orthodoxy but aren’t outside it either. Outliers and extreme cases with weird ideas and strong opinions. They’re the early sensors who notice cultural shifts. The experiments that might become new directions. The immune system that keeps the brand from becoming too rigid to survive.

Red Bull understood this intuitively. Their brand has coherence; it’s unmistakably Red Bull, but the edges are wild. Extreme sports, music festivals, content studios, a Formula 1 team. Each edge venture brings information back to the center. The flock stays coherent because it keeps moving.

The Trick of Letting Go

I train Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Have for over twenty years. One of the trickier transitions in the art is from gi to no-gi. Transitioning from training with the traditional jacket and pants to training in just shorts and a rashguard.

In gi training, you have grips. The collar, the lapel. You can grab the fabric of your opponent’s jacket and control their movement. Hold positions. Force outcomes. The gi creates handles, and handles create control.

No-gi removes the handles. Everything becomes dynamic, fluid, slippery. You can’t hold positions, you can only flow between them. You can’t force outcomes; you can only influence tendencies.

No-gi is the murmuration.

The transition is real. Everything you’ve relied on for control disappears. You feel out of sync, a step behind. But eventually, if you stay with it, something else emerges. You stop trying to control your opponent and start trying to harmonize with them. You stop gripping and start flowing. You realize the match was never a contest between two controllers. It was always a conversation between two adapters.

Brand leaders face the same adjustment. The 100-page document is the gi, full of handles and full of control points. Letting go of it feels like madness. But the murmuration doesn’t need handles. It needs rules simple enough to internalize, applied to the seven nearest neighbors, with trust that coherence will emerge.

The first step is always the hardest: accepting that control was an illusion anyway.

The First Bird Problem

There’s a question that haunts every murmuration model: who was the first bird?

If coherence emerges from local interactions, and local interactions depend on existing neighbors, how did the flock ever start? Didn’t someone have to lead? Wasn’t there an original vision, a founder’s intent, a first bird who showed everyone else how to fly?

Maybe. But here’s what the biology shows: even if there was a first bird, that bird is now irrelevant. The murmuration doesn’t depend on the founder’s continued participation. It doesn’t reference the original vision. It doesn’t even know there was a first bird. The flock has become self-sustaining, generating coherence from its own internal dynamics.

The healthiest brands reach this point. They cohere not because they’re still following the founder’s guidelines, but because the culture has become self-organizing. The rules have been internalized, not merely memorized. There’s a difference. Memorized means you can recite the brand values on command. Internalized means you make decisions the brand values would approve of, even in situations the guidelines never anticipated. Memorized is the test. Internalized is the fluency. And the rules here have been internalized so deeply that no one thinks about them anymore. The seven nearest neighbors all fly the same way, and so does everyone else.

This is the goal: a brand that doesn’t need a commander. A flock that can murmur without a first bird. A culture so coherent that the guidelines document feels redundant because everyone already knows how to fly.

Set the physics. Trust the flock. And fly.

A crossword puzzle, before anyone touches it, is an act of faith.

Dozens of white squares arranged in symmetrical silence. No message. No argument. No call to action. Just an invitation shaped like possibility. A grid that says, in effect: I am incomplete without you.

Radical doesn’t quite cover it. For most of human history, media has been a delivery mechanism. The author speaks; the audience receives. The newspaper informs; the reader absorbs. The advertisement persuades; the consumer complies. The transaction flows one direction: from full to empty, from those who know to those who don’t.

The crossword inverted this. On December 21, 1913, when Arthur Wynne published his “Word-Cross” puzzle in the New York World, he created a new relationship between producer and consumer. One where the product was deliberately, strategically incomplete.

The blank square was a welcome mat.

The Productive Absence

There’s a concept in Japanese aesthetics called ma. It translates roughly as “negative space,” but that’s like saying jazz is “organized sound:” there’s so much more depth of meaning than that paltry phrase can capture. Ma is the pause that makes music breathe, the empty corner of a scroll that gives the brushstroke meaning, the silence where understanding crystallizes. It carries as much importance and meaning as the rest of an artwork.

The crossword is pure ma. The white squares aren’t missing information; they are the information. They’re an architectural decision that says: meaning will emerge here, but only through your participation.

Commercially counterintuitive, to say the least. The newspaper business in 1913 was built on filling every column inch with content. White space was waste. Incompleteness was failure. Yet here was Wynne, leaving deliberate holes and asking readers to supply their own words.

The readers understood immediately what the publishers didn’t: the blank square was an invitation to co-authorship. When you write in a crossword answer, you’re not consuming content, you’re completing it. Your handwriting mingles with the typeset clues. Your knowledge merges with the constructor’s grid. The puzzle you hold at the end is neither theirs nor yours. It’s ours.

Within a decade, crosswords had become a national obsession, though not universally celebrated. Working-class commuters solved them on the subway. Housewives built morning rituals around them. Office workers snuck them into meetings. The puzzle had found its audience, and that audience was everyone the establishment wasn’t speaking to. By 1924, the phenomenon was significant enough that the New York Times ran an editorial condemning the ‘sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern.’ The establishment always recognizes participation by how much it threatens them.

The Pencil Contract

When Simon & Schuster published the first crossword puzzle book in 1924, they included a pencil.

Not a pen. A pencil.

That small decision contains an entire philosophy of participation. The pencil says: we expect you to struggle. We expect you to get things wrong. We expect you to erase, reconsider, try again. The puzzle is hard enough that you’ll need to make multiple attempts, and we’ve built that expectation into the product.

A pen would have communicated something else entirely: get it right the first time, or live with your mistakes. A pen is judgment. A pencil is permission.

The pencil also solved a psychological problem that every participatory brand eventually faces: the terror of the blank page. Crosswords ask you to write in a published document; to literally mark up someone else’s work. For many people, that feels transgressive. The pencil lowered the stakes enough to make the transgression possible.

Participation design, at its most practical, looks exactly like this. Creating opportunities for engagement is just the starting point; removing the friction that prevents people from taking those opportunities is the real work. Simon & Schuster recognized this. They knew it wasn’t enough to just sell puzzles. So they sold puzzles plus the permission to fail at them.

The Ritual of the Grid

By the 1930s, crosswords had evolved from novelty to ritual. And rituals don’t have to be shared to be real. A morning run is a ritual. So is a cup of coffee before anyone else wakes up. But crosswords became something rarer: a ritual that was simultaneously solitary and collective. You did it alone, but you knew others were doing it at the same time, with the same clues, hitting the same walls. That dual quality is where the feeling of belonging lives.

The Sunday New York Times crossword, which launched in 1942, became secular liturgy for a certain kind of American household. This from the same paper that had called puzzles a sinful waste eighteen years earlier. Every Sunday morning, the same pattern: coffee, paper, pencil, grid. The puzzle took roughly the same amount of time each week, a reliable rhythm in an unreliable world. Families developed traditions around it: who got first crack, whether collaboration was allowed, how long you had to struggle alone before asking for help.

The grid creates intimacy. When you struggle with a clue and finally crack it, you feel like you’ve had a conversation across time and space. The constructor set a challenge; you rose to it. That’s dialogue.

The plagiarism scandals make more sense through this lens. In 2016, when a puzzle constructor was found to have copied grids from older puzzles, the crossword community responded with genuine outrage. Not because intellectual property had been violated, but because trust had been violated. The relationship between constructor and solver depends on the belief that someone actually crafted this challenge for you. If the puzzle is recycled, the conversation was never real.

The Grid as Anchor

During World War II, something unexpected happened to crosswords: they became serious.

Before the war, puzzles had been dismissed as trivial. But as the conflict dragged on and anxiety became ambient, crosswords revealed their deeper function: They kept people sane. They offered a reliable, innocuous distraction that gave people’s brains a break from processing the ongoing horrors of war. The Daily Telegraph in London reported a surge in puzzle submissions. American newspapers noticed their crossword sections becoming more popular than the war news surrounding them.

The reason cuts to the core of what this style of participation uniquely offers: playful solvability. The world outside the grid is chaotic, unjust, and beyond your control. But the grid plays fair. The answers exist. The clues, however cryptic, follow rules. If you’re stuck, it’s not because the universe is cruel—it’s because you haven’t found the pattern yet. And you can find the pattern. You will fill in the squares.

Psychologists would later call this “productive struggle:” difficulty that leads somewhere, as opposed to the unproductive difficulty of circumstances beyond your influence. Crosswords offered a contained, completable challenge in a moment when the larger challenges felt infinite and impossible.

The Incompleteness Principle

Crosswords have survived every subsequent media revolution: radio, television, the internet, smartphones, and the attention economy. Most other newspaper features have withered. Born participatory, the crossword didn’t have to adapt to an age of engagement because it was built for engagement from the first square.

The deeper lesson, for anyone building a brand in 2026 and beyond, is that incompleteness has real allure.

Fill in all the squares before publishing, and you have a word search. Leave them blank, and you have an invitation. The value isn’t in what the constructor provides but what the constructor withholds.

Most brands find this the hardest thing to accept. Every instinct in marketing pushes toward completeness. Finish the message. Polish the product. Control the narrative. Don’t leave room for misinterpretation. The crossword suggests the opposite: leave room for contribution. Make the absence the offering.

Think about the brands that have actually achieved participatory status. Not engagement, not community, but genuine co-creation. LEGO didn’t become a cultural institution by offering pre-assembled, perfectly constructed sets. The appeal is in the incompleteness. Piles of individual bricks, raw material that required human imagination to become anything. Minecraft isn’t a game; it’s a blank grid with physics. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that launched with no articles and an open invitation to write them.

These all demonstrate a principle the crossword creators understood in 1913: the most powerful position a brand can take is I am not finished without you.

The Grid and the Algorithm

If the crossword were invented today, how would it launch?

An AI could generate puzzles infinitely, optimized for difficulty, personalized to your vocabulary level, adjusted in real-time based on your performance. The clues could be dynamic. The grid could reshape itself. Every element that once required a human constructor’s craft could be automated, scaled, perfected.

And no one would care.

Not because AI couldn’t make a good puzzle. It could make a better one. The problem is that a better puzzle, optimized for you alone, destroys the thing that made crosswords matter in the first place: everyone gets the same one.

When you’re stuck on 42 Across, thousands of other people are stuck on 42 Across. The struggle is collective even when the solving is solitary. That shared constraint is the invisible thread connecting strangers across breakfast tables, subway cars, and Sunday mornings. Personalization severs that thread entirely. A puzzle built only for you is a puzzle no one else ever suffered through.

It also kills the ritual. The Sunday crossword became liturgy precisely because the same puzzle landed on every doorstep at the same time. The shared object created the shared moment. An AI-optimized puzzle can be intellectually challenging. It cannot be that.

The Lesson of the Blank Square

Every brand is a crossword. The question is whether you’ve left any squares blank, or filled them all in before anyone arrived. Whether you’ve included the pencil, and along with it the permission to fail and try again. Whether you understand that your job isn’t to deliver a finished message, but to create the conditions where meaning can emerge in the space between your intention and their interpretation.

Arthur Wynne probably didn’t know he was inventing a new form of media relationship when he drew that first diamond-shaped grid. He was just a puzzles editor trying something different for the Sunday paper. The square came later, standardized by repetition and ritual. But the blank square at the center of it all stayed exactly the same.

The Japanese call it ma. The productive absence. The space that only becomes meaningful when someone brings themselves to it. Wynne didn’t invent the crossword so much as he invented a container for that space, and trusted that people would show up to fill it.

That trust is still the whole bet. Write here. This space is yours.

In 1996, a guy in Topeka built a website dedicated entirely to his hamster. It had a visitor counter, a MIDI file that auto-played when you landed on the page, and a guestbook where strangers left messages like “cool hamster.” It served no commercial purpose. It solved no problem. It was glorious.

That same year, a web ring connected fourteen sites about medieval swordcraft. Someone built a page that was just a single animated GIF of a dancing baby on a black background. Another person created a choose-your-own-adventure story using nothing but hyperlinks. The internet was a playground with no supervisor and no business model, and people were building things for the purest reason imaginable: because they suddenly could.

We forget this. We talk about the internet now like it was always destined to become Google and Amazon and Meta. But before the compression came, there was this extraordinary window of creative anarchy. Regular people, many of whom had no technical background beyond a library book on HTML, were putting pieces of themselves online for the first time in human history. The web was personal, strange, sometimes ugly, and completely alive.

Then it got tidied up. Platforms emerged. The wild web was organized into feeds and search results and walled gardens. The energy didn’t disappear, but it got channeled. Consolidated. Monetized. The hamster site went dark. Facebook became a verb.

The App Store Gold Rush

Apple launched the App Store in July 2008, and the whole cycle restarted.

Suddenly, anyone with an idea and a developer could put software on millions of phones. And what did people build? A flashlight app (your phone’s screen just turned white). An app called “I Am Rich” that cost $999.99 and did absolutely nothing except prove you’d spent $999.99. An app called “Yo” that lets you send the word “Yo” to your friends. That’s it. That was the whole app. It raised $1.5 million in venture funding.

People made apps that turned your phone into a virtual lighter. Apps that made fart sounds. Apps that let you pop bubble wrap on your screen forever. A developer created “Hold On,” a game where you just held your finger on the screen for as long as possible. Someone built “Nothing,” which was, true to its name, an app that did nothing at all.

It was absurd. It was wonderful. It was humans doing what humans always do when you hand them a new creative tool: playing with it like kids who just discovered finger paint.

And then, just like the web before it, it compressed. The app economy matured. Investors wanted unit economics. Users settled into their 30 essential apps. The average person uses about 30 apps a month, but spends nearly all their time in the same handful. The playground became a strip mall.

We’re Standing at the Edge of Wave Three

Right now, something is shifting again. AI-assisted building tools, no-code platforms, and what people are calling “vibe coding” have dropped the barrier to creation to its lowest point ever.

I know because I just lived it. A few weeks ago, I built an app. Not a mockup. Not a prototype. A functioning application. I’m a strategist, not an engineer. I’ve never written production code in my life. But I sat down with an AI coding tool, described what I wanted, iterated on it conversationally, and had something working in a weekend. I posted about the experience on LinkedIn, and the response was immediate and intense. People were fascinated, skeptical, curious, excited, and nervous.

That reaction told me everything. We’re in the opening minutes of the experimental phase again. And if history is any guide, what comes next is going to be beautifully weird.

The Width of the Wave

Each cycle has expanded the creator pool dramatically.

The early web required you to learn HTML. You had to understand file structures, FTP uploads, and maybe some rudimentary CSS. The creator pool was millions.

The app era required a developer, or the resources to hire one, plus knowledge of platform guidelines, app store submissions, and software architecture. The creator pool was smaller than it looked, but it produced more polished output.

This wave? The barrier to entry is an idea and the ability to describe it in plain language. The creator pool is, for the first time, essentially everyone with access to robust AI tools.

Think about what that means for the experimental phase. When a few million people had access to web publishing tools, we got hamster fan sites and dancing baby GIFs. When a few hundred thousand developers had access to app distribution, we got Yo and iFart and Hold On. When billions of people have access to AI-powered building tools?

The volume of weird, creative, pointless, personal, passionate, bizarre, delightful things about to come into existence is hard to fathom. We’re going to see apps built for an audience of one. Tools that solve problems so specific they border on absurd. Creative experiments that make the dancing baby look conservative. Someone is going to build a fully functional app for tracking how many times their cat sits in a specific chair, and it’s going to be perfect, and it’s going to matter to exactly one person, and that’s going to be enough.

The Fun Part

The experimental phase is the fun part. Every time. And we keep forgetting that.

We’re so conditioned to evaluate new technology through the lens of scale, monetization, and disruption that we skip past the actual magic: the moment when people pick up a new tool and start making things that nobody asked for. The phase when voluntary participation is feral and hilarious.

Nobody asked for a hamster website. Nobody asked for an app that just says “Yo.” Nobody asked for the weird little vibe-coded passion projects that are starting to pop up everywhere right now. They exist because creation is a fundamental human impulse, and when you lower the barrier, that impulse floods through the gap.

This is what I keep coming back to in my work on participation. We talk about engagement, about users, about audiences. But what actually drives people is the desire to make something. To put a piece of themselves into the world. To participate in the act of creation, not just the consumption of what others have created.

Every technology wave proves this. Give people tools, and they don’t sit around calculating ROI. They build hamster shrines and fart apps and things that make their friends laugh. The commercial layer always comes later. The first instinct is always play.

But Will It Compress the Same Way?

This is the question I find most interesting. Because twice now, we’ve watched a creative explosion get consolidated into a handful of dominant platforms. The wild web became Big Tech’s internet. The app gold rush became the App Store duopoly. The pattern suggests that this wave will compress too, with a few AI-powered platforms absorbing all that chaotic creative energy into tidy, monetizable channels.

Maybe. But I think something different might happen this time.

In previous waves, the compression was driven by distribution. You needed Google to be found on the web. You needed the App Store to reach mobile users. Distribution was the bottleneck, and whoever controlled it controlled the wave.

But when AI makes building trivially easy, distribution changes shape. You don’t necessarily need a platform to reach people when you can build something tailored for a specific community, a specific need, a specific group of twelve people who care about the same obscure thing you do. The organizing layer might not be a corporation. It might be communities themselves, curating and sharing and building on each other’s creations.

If that happens, the next phase will look less like consolidation and more like coordination. Less like five companies winning and more like thousands of communities thriving. The energy doesn’t get funneled up into platforms. It gets distributed across networks of people who are all participating together.

I don’t know if that’s what will happen. But for the first time in three waves, the conditions exist for it. And that alone makes this moment worth paying very close attention to.

For Now, Enjoy the Weird

We’re in the opening act. The dancing baby era of AI-powered creation. A few years from now, we’ll look back at this period the way we look back at GeoCities and the App Store gold rush: with nostalgia for the chaos, the playfulness, the willingness to build something just to see if you could.

So if you’ve been curious about vibe coding, or no-code tools, or building something with AI that nobody asked you to build, now is the time. Not because it’ll scale. Not because it’ll make money. Because the experimental phase is the best phase, and we only get to live through it once per wave.

Go build your hamster site.

A quick ask: Have you vibe-coded something? Built an app, a tool, a weird little experiment using AI or no-code tools? I want to see it. Reply to this post or drop me a note with what you made, why you made it, and how it felt to make it. I’m collecting stories from the experimental phase in real time, and the weirder the better. Future issues of The Participation Exchange will feature the best submissions. Show me your hamster sites.

Listen to how fans talk after a game and you'll notice a quirk of grammar…"We won." "We got robbed." "We need to fix our defense." "We're going all the way this year."

We. Not "they"—the athletes who actually played. Not "the team"—the organization that employs those athletes. We. First person plural. As if the person in the jersey, watching from a barstool three thousand miles from the stadium, had personally contributed to the outcome.

This is ridiculous. And it's one of the most important things happening in modern life.

The Tribalism We Can't Escape

Humans spent 99% of their evolutionary history in small tribal bands of fifty to a hundred people. Survival depended on the group. Your tribe was your identity, your protection, your purpose. The neurological wiring that made tribal belonging feel essential was genetically selected for over hundreds of thousands of years.

Then we invented agriculture, cities, nations, globalization. The tribal bands dissolved. We became individuals in mass society, anonymous, atomized, disconnected from the small groups that our brains had evolved to need. But the wiring didn't change. The brain that needed tribal belonging in the Pleistocene still needs it now. It's looking for a band to join, a group to identify with, a "we" to be part of. The need is so deep it feels like hunger.

Sports feed this hunger.

When you become a fan, a real fan, not a casual observer, you're joining a tribe. You're adopting its colors, learning its history, pitting yourself against its enemies. You're participating in something larger than yourself that persists across time. Something that gives you a "we" to belong to.

The jersey isn't clothing. It's a tribal marker. It says: these are my people. This is who I am. The face paint, the chants, the rituals … these are tribal technologies, adapted for stadium scale. We haven't outgrown tribalism. We've just found new tribes.

Participation Without Production

What makes sports fandom genuinely interesting as participation: the fans don't play.

This seems like disqualification. How can you be a participant if you're not on the field? How can you claim "we won" when your contribution was drinking beer and yelling at a screen?

But participation has never required direct action. It requires investment, identity, and exchange.

Investment: Real fans invest. Time, hours watching games, following news, analyzing stats. Money, tickets, merchandise, subscriptions, travel. Emotion, the mood swings tied to wins and losses, the genuine grief when seasons end badly. The investment is real, even if it doesn't influence outcomes.

Identity: The team becomes part of how you understand yourself. "I'm a Cubs fan" isn't a statement about entertainment preferences. It's an identity claim, like "I'm a Catholic" or "I'm a New Yorker." The team's story becomes your story. Its history becomes your history. Its rivals become your rivals.

Exchange: This is the part that's easy to miss. Fandom looks like one-way consumption, the fan receives entertainment and gives money. But the exchange is richer. Fans give attention, which creates value for broadcasters and sponsors. Fans give atmosphere, the roar of the stadium, the energy that players feed on. Fans give continuity, carrying the team's identity across generations, through ownership changes and stadium moves. The team needs the fans as surely as the fans need the team.

This is participation without playing. And it might be the purest form of participation there is: contribution without any expectation of direct reward.

What sports reveal here is not an exception. It's a blueprint for how any brand can create genuine participation.

Meaning Needs Structure

Something is happening in modern life that sociologists call the "meaning crisis." Traditional sources of meaning like religion, community, and stable employment have weakened. People are freer than ever to construct their own identities, but freedom without structure produces anxiety. The question "what is my life about?" haunts people in ways it didn't when the answers were provided by tradition.

Sports step into this vacuum.

A team gives you a narrative to follow. A season gives you a rhythm: anticipation, competition, resolution. A championship gives you a telos, a goal, something to hope for that structures time. The off-season gives you fallow, a rest before the cycle begins again.

For people struggling to find purpose, and there are many, a sports team can provide it. Not as a substitute for "real" meaning, but as a genuine source of it. The community around the team, the rituals of fandom, the emotional arc of the season: these are meaning-making structures as legitimate as any other. They create real belonging, inspire real enthusiasm, and offer those who are lost a simple and reliable compass.

I've seen people dismissed for caring too much about sports. "It's just a game," is a common refrain for nonbelievers balking at the passion expressed by genuine fans. But it's not just a game. It's tribalism, identity, community, narrative, purpose. It's a participation architecture that meets deep human needs. The dismissal says more about the dismisser's failure to understand human nature than about the fan's priorities.

And when you need to see this instinct made visible, made physical, just buy a ticket and show up.

The Stadium as Participation Architecture

Walk into a stadium during a big game.

Eighty thousand people, synchronized. The wave rolling around the bowl. The chants echoing off concrete. The roar when something happens, a roar that no individual creates but that everyone contributes to. The experience of being part of something massive, something that exceeds any individual's capacity to produce.

This is collective effervescence, sociologist Émile Durkheim's term for the heightened emotional state that emerges when people gather for shared rituals. The energy in the stadium isn't the sum of individual energies; it's an emergent property that belongs to no one and affects everyone.

Sports stadiums are designed to amplify this. The bowl shape focuses attention and reflects sound. The seating puts strangers in physical proximity, breaking down barriers through shared experience. The rituals, seventh-inning stretch, fight songs, coordinated chants, give the crowd ways to participate together.

Every architectural choice is a participation choice. The stadium is a machine for manufacturing collective experience.

And it works on television, too. Diminished, mediated, but still present. The fan watching alone at home is hearing the crowd, feeding off their energy, participating vicariously in the collective effervescence. The watch party brings it closer: a small tribe gathered to share the experience, synchronized with the larger tribe in the stadium, synchronized with other watch parties across the city and the country.

The participation scales. From the individual at home to the sports bar to the stadium to the distributed global tribe. Different intensities of the same phenomenon. Watch the Swifties who've turned NFL stadiums into hybrid concert venues, or the World Cup crowds that transform entire cities into collective viewing parties. The architecture adapts, but the participation remains.

And for some, bringing a wager into the mix cranks that intensity up even more.

Fantasy and Gambling: Participation Layers

Although the essential components have remained the same for centuries, something changed in sports fandom over the last few decades.

Fantasy leagues turned fans into pseudo-managers. League members are deeply invested in building their teams, making decisions, competing against friends. The individual stake in participation deepened. Individual player performance across the league now has direct, monetary impact. Games between teams that would otherwise be meaningless suddenly matter. Members check stats daily, analyzing matchups, investing attention at a level that pure fandom never required.

Sports betting did something similar. The casual fan has no financial stake. The betting fan has skin in the game. The participation becomes literally invested: money on the line, attention sharpened, outcomes mattering in a new way.

These are additional participation layers built on top of the base layer of fandom. They don't replace the core of tribal belonging; they intensify it. They give existing fans more ways to engage, more decisions to make, more identity to express.

The leagues understand this. They've embraced fantasy and gambling because they create stickier fans. A fantasy player can't quit mid-season because their team needs them. A bettor watches games they wouldn't ordinarily care about. The participation architecture expands, and the tribe grows more engaged.

What makes fandom truly tribal, though, isn't how deep you go. It's whether it outlives you.

The Generational Transfer

Fandom is inherited.

Not genetically, culturally. The parent who takes a child to their first game. The grandfather who explains the history. The ritual of Sunday football, the pilgrimage to the ballpark, the stories of great moments witnessed and suffering endured.

This is participation across generations. The tribe persists because its members reproduce and bring their offspring into the fold. Each generation receives the tradition and passes it forward. The team that's been in a family for three generations isn't just a preference. It's an inheritance, a sacred trust, a connection to ancestors.

I've watched children at their first games, overwhelmed by the scale, the noise, the spectacle. They don't understand what's happening on the field. But on a gut level they understand something more important: this matters to the adults who brought them, that they're being initiated into something significant, that they're becoming part of a "we."

The moment of inheritance is a participation moment. The parent is participating by transmitting. The child is participating by receiving. The team is participating by being worth transmitting. The culture is participating by providing structures that enable transmission.

Brands that last multiple generations understand this. They're not just acquiring customers, they're becoming part of family identity. Something passed down, something that connects past and future. The sports team is the ultimate example of multi-generational brand participation.

The Local and the Universal

Sports fandom has a geography.

The local team is different from the national team, is different from the bandwagon team. Each represents a different kind of tribal belonging.

The local team ties you to place. Chicago Cubs fans aren't just baseball fans. They're Chicagoans, participating in a particular city's identity. The team is the place made manifest. Rooting for them is rooting for home, even if you've moved away, even if you've never lived there, even if the connection is tenuous.

The national team ties you to nation. When the World Cup arrives, tribal allegiances shift. The club rivalries suspend and the country unifies. The participation becomes patriotic, charged with a different kind of meaning. For a month, the nation itself becomes the tribe.

The bandwagon team, the one you chose because they were winning, because you liked a player, because the brand appealed to you, has a different character. Less rooted, more chosen. The participation is still real but it's elected, not inherited or geographic. This is a more modern version of tribalism: identity as consumer choice.

Each kind of fandom is legitimate. Each meets the tribal need in a different but equally genuine way. The point isn't which is best, the point is that the need is so strong that people find multiple ways to meet it, layering local and national and chosen affiliations into complex identity structures.

The Primal Exchange

Sports viewership reveals something essential about participation: it doesn't require production.

Fans don't make anything. They don't play. They don't directly influence outcomes. And yet their participation is real, because participation is about exchange, not output.

The fan exchanges attention, emotion, identity, time, money. The team exchanges entertainment, narrative, community, meaning. Neither could exist without the other. The relationship is symbiotic, not extractive.

This is the model for all participatory brands. Not "what can we get customers to produce?" but "what exchange are we creating?" The fan produces nothing but their own fandom. And that's enough. Because the exchange is real, the investment is real, and the identity created is real.

When someone says "we won," they're not confused. They're expressing a truth that transactional thinking can't capture. They participated. They invested. They suffered and hoped and showed up, game after game, season after season. The victory belongs to them because they're part of the tribe that achieved it.

We won.

And that "we" is the whole point.

Logan Sudeith is 25 years old. He makes most of his trades from bed, laptop propped on his chest, in his Atlanta apartment. He estimates he spends about 100 hours a week on prediction markets.

Last month he made $100,000.

As profiled in NPR, Sudeith is not unusual. He’s just one of the more successful participants in an industry that processed more than $5 billion in volume during the last week of 2025 alone. An industry that barely existed two years ago. An industry that is rapidly becoming, in the words of Polymarket’s CEO, “the most accurate thing we have as mankind” for predicting future events.

How did this happen so fast?

The answer isn’t gambling addiction or crypto speculation. It’s participation. This emerging industry is growing because it lets ordinary people contribute to something that used to be reserved for experts: forecasting the future.

Welcome to prediction markets. Where collective intelligence and collective degeneracy turn out to be the same thing.

The Trust Vacuum

We live in an era when nobody agrees on what’s true.

Polls feel weighted. Media feel biased. Experts contradict each other on cable news. Scientific consensus gets politicized. The institutions that used to tell us what was real have exhausted their credibility, and now everything feels like narrative.

Then came the 2024 election.

Polls had it as a coin flip. Trump versus Harris, too close to call. But Polymarket had Trump as a clear favorite. Kalshi agreed. The prediction markets saw something the polls didn’t.

Trump won. The prediction markets had called it. And suddenly everyone paid attention.

What changed wasn’t just the numbers. It was the narrative. Before the election, prediction markets were curiosities. After, they were oracles. Polls have long been relied upon as barometers of public opinion, but they’ve developed a credibility problem. Too many people suspect they’re weighted to create narratives rather than reflect reality. Prediction markets were initially met with even stronger skepticism, but after that 2024 election they earned real trust. When someone puts $50,000 on an outcome, you believe they mean it.

The skin in the game isn’t just an accuracy mechanism. It’s a credibility mechanism. When you can’t trust the source, you trust the incentive. And suddenly, participation became more credible than expertise.

Participation Markets

What prediction markets actually are: participation infrastructure.

Before Polymarket and Kalshi, if you had strong opinions about geopolitics or economics or scientific outcomes, you had two options. You could yell into the void on social media or you could become a professional analyst. There was no way for an ordinary person to contribute their knowledge to a collective forecast. No way to participate in predicting the future.

Now there is.

Today, if you want to bet on an election, Kalshi is the legal option for Americans. It’s a CFTC-regulated exchange where you can wager real dollars. Polymarket is the larger platform by volume but operates offshore, accessible mainly through crypto wallets. Between them, they’ve opened forecasting to anyone willing to put money on their convictions.

The result is collective intelligence at scale. Thousands of people researching, analyzing, and betting on outcomes. Each trade is a contribution. Each position is a signal. The aggregate is smarter than any individual participant, more objective than most expert panels, and updating in real time.

This is participation doing what participation always does: creating something communal that exceeds individual capacity.

Everything Gets a Price

Here’s what the front page of Kalshi looks like right now.

Will the Federal Reserve cut rates in March? Will MrBeast’s next video get 70-80 million views in its first week? Will the U.S. invade Greenland this year? Will Elon Musk tweet more than 580 times this week? Will we confirm alien life?

The 2025 Golden Globes announced Polymarket odds before every commercial break. The NHL’s New York Rangers signed Polymarket as their official prediction market partner. The Wall Street Journal’s parent company is partnering with Polymarket. South Park did an entire episode about it. Truth Social is launching Truth Predict, its own prediction market platform.

The CEO of Kalshi has stated that his long-term vision is “to financialize everything.”

Some of this is absurd in the best way: humans collectively pricing uncertainty about questions we couldn’t even ask a decade ago. When will we confirm extraterrestrial life? What will the Fed do next? Some of it is deeply uncomfortable: bets on mass starvation in Gaza, on whether an ICE agent will be charged after a fatal shooting, on nuclear war with Iran.

That’s what unconstrained participation looks like. The market doesn’t discriminate between the delightful and the disturbing. That’s the feature that makes it work.

The Texture of Participation

The traders are young, mostly male, and very online. They have strong opinions about probability. They spend their days researching arcane questions, looking for edges, placing bets from their laptops. They speak in a specific argot. They form communities on Discord and Twitter. They share tips and strategies and wins and losses.

That sounds like community. And maybe it is. Or maybe it’s just shared obsession with the same game.

The distinction matters for anyone building participatory systems. Prediction markets are participation without gift exchange. Connection without warmth. Intelligence without belonging. It’s a different texture than the community-building version of participation. But it still works. It still creates something larger than any individual could produce alone.

That’s worth noticing. Participation doesn’t require community to generate value. Competition works too. Skin in the game works too. The mechanism is more flexible than the warm version of the story suggests.

The Signal

For anyone watching participation reshape industries, prediction markets are a proof of concept.

Two years ago, this industry barely existed. Now it processes billions in volume. The growth curve is almost vertical. And it happened because someone built infrastructure that let ordinary people participate in something they previously had no access to, whether out of genuine curiosity, the thrill of the game, or the prospect of making real money.

Prediction market volume didn't spike for the 2024 election and fade. It came back bigger. Source: Dune/@datadashboards

The trust vacuum helped. When institutions lose credibility, participatory mechanisms fill the void. But the deeper driver is simpler: people want to be active. They want agency. They want to be part of something larger than themselves, even if that something is a zero-sum betting market.

Prediction markets are participation markets. That’s the insight underneath all the noise about accuracy and gambling and financialization.

The participation is real. The intelligence is real. The growth is real.

The moral cost is also real. Every platform that invites participation must answer for what it unleashes.

So is it collective intelligence or collective degeneracy? Yes. That’s the point.

Last week I published “Becoming Chinese,” about the trend that should have gotten cancelled but didn’t. Chinese creators invited the internet to adopt their daily practices, and the internet said yes. No accusations of appropriation. Something closer to communion.

Writing it, I realized the piece had a framework buried inside it. The line between cultural participation and cultural extraction isn’t intent. Everyone has good intent. The line is structure.

I wanted to see if I could map what that structure actually requires.

The diagnostic is where most brands fail. They design elaborate guest experiences for communities they want to reach without anyone to answer the door.

No hosts, no invitation. No invitation, no exchange. Just tourism with a media budget.

Perhaps this framework is useful to you. If so, please use it and pass it along. I'll keep exploring how frameworks emerge from the deeper work on participation. This one struck me because I have experience with a brand built on hosting in a completely different context. Yerba Madre (formerly Guayakí), the leading yerba mate brand, was founded on service and sharing. In the language of this framework, they were hosts long before they were marketers and it is a core reason why they have such a passionate community built around their product.

“Tomorrow, you’re turning Chinese. I know it sounds intimidating, but there’s no point fighting it now. You are the chosen one.”

That’s Sherry, a Chinese American TikToker. She’s not joking. She’s also not entirely serious. She’s doing something more interesting.

She’s issuing an invitation.

The Trend That Didn’t Get Cancelled

The “Becoming Chinese” trend is currently everywhere. People are drinking hot water instead of iced. Wearing house slippers. Boiling apples with goji berries and red dates. Practicing gentle morning exercises instead of high-intensity gym sessions. Protecting their “jing” (vital essence) through rest and warmth.

If you’ve been online at all this month, you’ve seen the phrase: “You met me at a very Chinese time in my life.”

Usually when a trend involves “becoming” another culture, the internet prepares to cancel it. This one got celebrated. The people whose culture is being adopted are cheering it on. The people adopting it feel genuinely welcomed. Something that usually triggers accusations of appropriation has instead triggered something closer to communion.

This didn’t happen by accident.

The Invitation Architecture

Most cultural trends work like this: outsiders observe something, extract the aesthetic, replicate it without context, profit without attribution. The culture-holders watch their traditions get flattened into content. Everyone feels vaguely gross about it.

The “Becoming Chinese” trend inverted every part of that structure.

Chinese creators initiated and led the trend. Sherry, Emma Peng, Chao Ban. These aren’t outsiders documenting exoticism. They’re culture-holders opening doors. When Emma says “my culture can be your culture,” she’s not describing what’s happening. She’s authorizing it. She’s hosting.

The content isn’t aesthetic. It’s practical. You’re not being asked to wear something or pose a certain way. You’re being asked to change daily habits. These are behaviors, not performances.

And the framing is explicitly welcoming. “You are the chosen one.” “I’m so proud of you.” “I’m so glad I met you at such a Chinese stage of your life.” The language isn’t tolerant or permissive. It’s enthusiastic. It’s the language of someone who wants you to join.

One commenter noted: “We’re appreciating their culture, not shaming it and then claiming we invented it.”

Another replied: “Right. Simple appreciation, no ownership.”

That exchange captures the entire architecture. Participation offered by culture-holders, received by participants, structured to prevent extraction. Everyone knows where the gift is coming from. Everyone knows who’s hosting.

What Appropriation Actually Is

The discourse around cultural appropriation has always been confused because it conflates two very different things: participation and extraction.

Participation is joining something. Being changed by the exchange. Extraction is taking something. Profiting without reciprocity.

The line between them isn’t about who you are. It’s about the direction of value flow.

When a fashion brand copies traditional Chinese designs and sells them without credit, value flows one direction: out. The culture-holders get nothing. The brand gets profit. That’s extraction.

When Sherry invites her audience to “become Chinese” and teaches them the reasoning behind the practices, value flows in circles. Her culture gets appreciation and genuine adoption of its wisdom. The participants get practices that might actually improve their health. Everyone contributes and everyone receives.

That’s participation.

The Fight Club Key

There’s a specific phrase that became the trend’s calling card: “You met me at a very Chinese time in my life.”

It’s a riff on Fight Club. Edward Norton’s character, reflecting on his disintegration, says “You met me at a very strange time in my life.”

The substitution is perfect. Both imply transformation, that something fundamental has shifted, that the speaker has adopted practices that feel foreign to their previous identity.

But the Chinese version is different in one crucial way: it’s gentle.

Fight Club’s transformation was violent, destructive, ultimately nihilistic. The “Chinese time” transformation is about hot water and rest and nourishing soups. Self-care rooted in traditional wisdom rather than destruction rooted in alienation.

The meme kept the structure but replaced violence with care. That replacement is doing cultural work. It suggests that transformation doesn’t require burning down what you were.

Why This Moment

This didn’t emerge randomly. It emerged because multiple cultural pressures converged at once.

There’s the geopolitical context. American media has spent years framing China as threat, rival, enemy. And here’s a generation of young people casually announcing that they’re “becoming Chinese,” adopting Chinese practices, celebrating Chinese wisdom. The trend functions as a soft rebellion against nationalist framing.

There’s the wellness context. American health culture oscillates between extreme optimization and learned helplessness. Cold plunges and 5am gym sessions on one side. Processed food and sedentary despair on the other. Traditional Chinese Medicine offers a third path: balance, gentleness, sustainable daily practices rather than heroic interventions.

There’s the burnout context. January is when everyone notices they’re exhausted. The trend’s emphasis on rest, warmth, and protection of vital essence lands differently when you’re already running on empty. It’s not asking you to do more. It’s asking you to do less, but differently.

And there’s the participation context. People are hungry for genuine connection to something larger than themselves. Purpose-driven brand messaging has become so hollow that it repels rather than attracts. When Chinese creators extend a sincere invitation to participate in their cultural practices, it registers as something real in a sea of something fake.

The trend works because all of these contexts aligned at once. And because the architecture was right to receive them.

The Brand Lesson

Marketing teams will notice this trend. They’ll observe the engagement numbers. They’ll try to figure out how to “do something like this” for their brand.

Most of them will get it exactly wrong because they haven’t created the conditions for invitation. They’ll be extracting lessons from the trend without understanding what made it function.

The “Becoming Chinese” trend works because:

The hosts were genuine culture-holders. Not brands borrowing cultural signifiers. Actual people sharing their actual daily lives. You can’t fake this.

The invitation was unconditional and substantive. “You are the chosen one” doesn’t ask for anything. No purchase, no subscription, no conversion. And what’s being offered is real: behaviors to adopt, not content to consume. The participation has a cost (changing habits) and therefore has meaning.

The value flowed in multiple directions. Creators got engagement. Participants got practices. The culture got appreciation. Everyone gave something. Everyone received something.

The architecture prevented extraction. By keeping culture-holders at the center, by framing participants as guests rather than owners, by emphasizing the “why” alongside the “what,” the trend made it difficult to strip-mine without everyone noticing.

Brands can learn from this. But the learning isn’t “create cultural content.”

It’s: build participation architectures where genuine hosts extend genuine invitations to genuine practices, and where the value flows in circles rather than lines.

Most brands can’t do this because they have no genuine culture to share. They have positioning and messaging and brand voice guidelines. They have aesthetic systems. They don’t have daily practices that changed the lives of their culture-holders over centuries.

The few brands that might pull this off are the ones with actual communities, actual practices, actual wisdom developed through actual experience. Brands that are stewards of something real rather than manufacturers of something marketable.

The Gift Economy

There’s an anthropological term for what this trend demonstrates: gift economy.

In a gift economy, value is created through giving rather than trading. The gift creates obligation, but the obligation is social rather than transactional. You don’t pay back a gift with money. You pay it forward with another gift. The circulation creates community bonds that market transactions can’t.

When Sherry says “you are the chosen one,” she’s giving a gift. The gift is inclusion, welcome, permission to participate. The recipient owes something vaguer and more powerful than engagement metrics: appreciation, respect, the continuation of the gift by sharing it with others.

Most brands understand only market economy. They see every interaction as a potential conversion. They approach culture as a resource to be mined rather than a gift to be circulated.

The “Becoming Chinese” trend is a gift economy running at scale. No brand created it. No brand could have created it. But brands can learn from it. If they’re willing to understand what gift actually means.

A Very Participatory Time in My Life

Something is happening that’s bigger than any single trend.

People are exhausted by content. They’re exhausted by messaging. They’re exhausted by brands that claim to stand for things while doing nothing differently. They’re exhausted by the performance of meaning without the substance of practice.

What they’re hungry for is participation. Not “engagement” in the metrics sense. Actual participation in actual communities with actual practices that actually shape daily life.

The “Becoming Chinese” trend is one expression of this hunger. The 6-7 meme is another. Action so stripped of meaning that the belonging itself becomes the entire point. Sports fandom is another. Religious communities. Hobby groups. Any space where people show up, contribute, and become part of something through their involvement.

Brands that understand this moment will stop trying to create content and start trying to create conditions for true engagement. They’ll stop asking what they want to say and start asking what they can genuinely invite people to join. They’ll stop optimizing for extraction and start designing for circulation.

It’s a very participatory time in our lives.

The brands that recognize this will build something durable. The ones that keep broadcasting will wonder why nobody’s listening anymore.

Fun fact: The most sophisticated human organizations consistently get outperformed by brainless insects.

Not in some narrow, specialized way. Across the board. In every imaginable type of complex problem-solving. Ant colonies optimize foraging routes faster than algorithms designed by computer scientists. They allocate labor more efficiently than most HR departments. They build climate-controlled structures that would challenge architects. They’ve been running successful operations for 140 million years.

And they do all of it without putting anyone in charge.

No CEO. No strategy deck. No all-hands meeting. No OKRs. Just millions of individuals following local rules, leaving traces in the environment, and somehow producing collective intelligence that exceeds what any individual ant could comprehend.

The mechanism is called stigmergy. And it’s the oldest participation architecture on Earth.

The Communication That Isn’t

The word “stigmergy” was coined in 1959 by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé, who was studying one of nature’s most confounding mysteries: how termites, with brains smaller than a grain of sand and no foreman barking orders, could construct towering mounds of ventilated chambers, spiraling tunnels, and arched galleries. The term he created derives from Greek: stigma (mark, sign) and ergon (work, action). Literally, communication through the traces left in the environment. Grassé soon saw that the same behaviors were present in both termites and ants.

Here’s how it works: A forager leaves the nest. She wanders semi-randomly until she finds food. On her return journey, she deposits pheromones along her path. These traces evaporate over time. But if she’s found a good food source, she’ll return quickly, doubling up her pheromone markers, and her trail will be strong when the next forager encounters it.

That next forager doesn’t receive instructions. She just encounters someone else’s pheromone gradient and follows it. If the trail leads to food, she reinforces it on her return. If the food is gone, she doesn’t. The trail evaporates.

The ants aren’t communicating with each other. They’re communicating through their environment. The trail itself becomes the message, and the message is constantly updated by the collective behavior of everyone who encounters it.

We imagine communication as something that must be facilitated by active senders and receivers. Speakers and listeners. Broadcasts and audiences. Stigmergy has none of this. There’s no sender, only traces. No receiver, only response. The communication is merged with the medium itself.

The Queen Isn’t In Charge

What about the queen ant, you ask?

Well, she doesn’t rule. She doesn’t command. She doesn’t set strategy or make decisions for the colony. She lays eggs. That’s her entire function. The word “queen” is a projection of human hierarchy onto a system that operates by completely different logic.

The intelligence of an ant colony has no address. It doesn’t reside in any individual, no matter how critical their biological function. It’s distributed across the entire system, encoded in pheromone trails left in tunnels, in the behavioral responses triggered when one ant encounters another’s chemical signature, in the aggregate patterns that emerge from millions of local decisions.

This is what makes stigmergy so unsettling for anyone trained in command-and-control thinking: coordination happens without a coordinator. Strategy emerges without a strategist. The colony adapts to threats, exploits opportunities, and optimizes complex operations through a distributed decision-making system where individual contributions compound into collective intelligence without anyone orchestrating the whole.

This should fundamentally reshape how we think about building participatory systems. Maybe coordination doesn’t require command. Maybe strategy can emerge from traces rather than directives. Maybe the organism that lays the eggs isn’t the organism that runs the show.

The Desire Path

Stigmergy shows up outside of termite mounds and ant hills. One example from the human world is an urban planning disruptor called the desire path.

It works like this: a university builds a new quad. Architects design elegant paved walkways connecting buildings at right angles. Students ignore the paths and cut across the grass diagonally to get to their destinations quicker. Over time, their footsteps wear a trail into the lawn. The path they actually wanted, as opposed to the path that was designed for them.

These paths aren’t confined to campuses, of course. They show up anywhere engineering clashes with expediency. Last year I stayed at a boutique hotel near a surf break in Santa Catalina, Panama. The owners had put real effort into the grounds. Stone paths winding through flowers, carefully designed circulation. But the first thing I noticed were the secondary trails. No stones. No flowers. Just trampled grass cutting between the designed routes. They felt more natural, more direct. I followed them everywhere without thinking about it.

The desire path is human stigmergy. Each student flattens the grass. The next sees it and follows, deepening the trail. No one coordinates. No one plans. The optimal route emerges from accumulated behavior.

This is what brands could be doing but mostly aren’t.

Instead of broadcasting messages at customers (”walk this way, on the paths we’ve designed”), brands could be reading the trails customers are already leaving. Where do they click? What do they search? What do they ask each other in forums? What workarounds have they invented? These are pheromone trails, desire paths in the landscape of your product. They’re telling you where the real value is.

But reading trails requires a different posture than broadcasting. You have to pay attention to the environment rather than filling it with your message. You have to trust that customers know something you don’t. You have to be willing to acknowledge and formalize the paths they’ve chosen rather than insisting on the paths you planned.

Most brands are too busy talking to notice what the trails are saying.

Amazon Reviews as Pheromone

Brands that aren’t ready to use stigmergy to understand customer desires can still benefit from the mechanism in other ways. Consider Amazon reviews, trails of communication that influence buying decisions every hour of every day.

A customer buys a product. Has an experience. Leaves a review. That review sits there in the environment, a trace of their activity. The next customer encounters it, not as a direct communication, but as a gradient. Five stars, good reviews, the trail is strong. One star, warnings about quality, the trail is weak or negative.

No one is coordinating this. Amazon isn’t telling customers what to think. Reviewers aren’t addressing future buyers directly. The communication is stigmergic: traces left in the environment that shape subsequent behavior.

The review system works because it mirrors ant colony dynamics. Good products generate positive trails that attract more buyers who leave more positive trails. Bad products generate negative trails that repel buyers. The system is self-correcting through environmental feedback. Wikipedia works the same way: edits as pheromones, vandalism triggering correction, the encyclopedia emerging from millions of traces left by millions of contributors.

When these systems break, they break like corrupted pheromone trails. Fake reviews are false signals laid deliberately to mislead. Amazon’s endless war against fraudulent reviews is really a war to maintain stigmergic integrity because once the environmental signals become unreliable, the entire coordination mechanism collapses. Which raises a critical question: if these trails are so powerful, why don’t they last forever?

The Conundrum of Evaporation

Ant biologists have long known that pheromone trails evaporate.

This seems like a flaw. Why would evolution design a communication system that destroys its own messages? But evaporation is the feature, not the flaw. It’s what makes the system adaptive.

If trails never evaporated, the colony would be paralyzed by outdated information. Every path ever taken would be marked forever. The environment would become saturated with conflicting signals. The ants couldn’t distinguish between “food was here last week” and “food is here now.”

Evaporation creates recency. Fresh trails are strong; old trails fade. The system naturally weights toward current information. When food sources are depleted, the trails leading to them disappear. When new sources appear, new trails emerge. The environment is constantly updating.

Brand participation has the same dynamic. Customer enthusiasm evaporates. Community engagement fades if not encouraged. The review from three years ago becomes less relevant than the review from last month. Participation needs continuous refreshment or the trails go cold.

This is why “launch and leave” participation strategies fail. You can build a community, seed a forum, create a UGC campaign. But if you don’t maintain the trails, they evaporate. The environment returns to blank. The customers who might have followed the path find nothing to follow.

Ants don’t stop laying pheromones once they’ve found food. They refresh the trail with every journey. Participation requires the same discipline: continuous deposit, continuous renewal, continuous presence in the environment.

The Trail Is the Strategy

Remember that ant colony outperforming your organization? Here’s what its members understand that most brands don’t: you can’t not leave trails.

Every customer interaction deposits a trace in the environment. Every email response time. Every packaging detail. Every support call resolution. They’re all pheromone trails shaping how the next customer will navigate your brand.

The question isn’t whether to create a stigmergic system. You already have one. The question is whether you’re literate enough to read it.

Most brands operate like urban planners insisting students use the rectangular paths while ignoring the desire paths worn into the grass. They debate strategy in conference rooms while the environment outside screams its truth to anyone willing to listen. Reviews, support tickets, forum questions, usage patterns, abandoned carts … all brimming with relevant but overlooked insights.

The stigmergic approach inverts traditional brand strategy. Instead of designing the path and forcing traffic onto it, you observe where traffic naturally flows and formalize those routes. Instead of broadcasting what you want customers to believe, you amplify what customers are already demonstrating through their behavior. The trails become your strategy document, constantly updating, immune to quarterly planning lag.

What would it mean to run your brand more like an ant colony? To let product development follow the desire paths in your usage data. To let enthusiastic users leave trails that attract similar users, creating self-reinforcing loops of engagement that require no ad spend. The mechanisms already exist. In Reddit communities where expertise compounds, in GitHub repos where improvements stack without coordination, in Discord servers where newcomers learn from the residue of previous conversations.

​Your job isn’t to prevent this. It’s to recognize it, enable it, and occasionally pave the paths that emerge.

The colony doesn’t wait for commands from above. It reads the environment and responds.

Maybe your brand should, too.

SOURCES:

Theraulaz, Guy, and Eric Bonabeau. “A Brief History of Stigmergy.” Artificial Life 5, no. 2 (1999): 97–116. https://doi.org/10.1162/106454699568700

A teacher says, “Turn to page sixty-seven.”

Twenty-three students erupt. They shout the number back. They make a gesture, hands mimicking a balance scale, tipping side to side. They hold the moment for exactly two seconds, then return to their textbooks as if nothing happened.

The teacher, bewildered, has just witnessed something they cannot parse. Which is exactly why it works.

What Adults Can’t Have

Every generation needs rituals that belong only to them.

This isn’t new. Teenagers have always developed codes, gestures, and slang designed to exclude parents and teachers. What’s new is the completeness with which this generation has abandoned meaning as a requirement, and the sophistication of the immune system that protects their rituals from adult colonization.

The 6-7 phenomenon started with a collision of unrelated elements: a rapper’s hook, basketball highlights, an internet remix. The specifics don’t matter. What matters is that the number detached from all of it. By late 2024, 6-7 had become free-floating slang, a ritual triggered by hearing the number in any context. A math problem. A page number. A sports score.

The meaning of this participation is nothing. Ask any student why they do it, and they’ll either shrug or explain that you wouldn’t understand.

The Post-Semantic Ritual

Consider what this generation has grown up with.

Meaning was first co-opted by brands. Fifteen years of purpose-washing: every company with a mission, every product “values-aligned,” every ad promising to make the world better while selling sugar water. The vocabulary of meaning (authentic, purpose-driven, intentional) has been so thoroughly captured by marketing that the words themselves ring hollow.

Then meaning collapsed everywhere else. News cycles that contradict themselves within hours. Institutions that say one thing and do another. Adults who claim to have answers but visibly don’t. An information environment so saturated and contradictory that making sense of it isn’t just difficult. It’s beside the point.

There’s a historical rhyme. In 1916, as Europe destroyed itself in the trenches, artists at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire responded with Dada: deliberate nonsense, art that refused to signify anything. When meaningful words had been weaponized to justify slaughter, the only honest response was to abandon meaning entirely.

The 6-7 meme is Dada for the content apocalypse. It’s not authentic because authenticity is a brand strategy. It’s not meaningful because meaning is a content play. It’s just there. A gesture, a shout, a two-second flash of recognition between people who have collectively decided that meaning is overrated.

When meaning is unreliable, recognition becomes the reward.

The Grammar of Belonging

The 6-7 ritual has structure, even if it has no content:

Trigger: The number appears (spoken, written, displayed)

Response: The shout, the gesture

Recognition: A micro-moment of mutual acknowledgment

Dissolution: Immediate return to normal

Total elapsed time: two seconds.

Think about what this accomplishes. It’s learnable in one exposure. It requires no context, no backstory, no explanation. It can be performed anywhere: classroom, grocery store, sporting event. It’s instantly recognizable to insiders and completely opaque to outsiders.

Anyone can do it. Only insiders know when to do it.

And the opacity to outsiders isn’t a bug. It’s the primary feature.

The Value of Exclusion

In information theory, the value of a signal is inversely proportional to its predictability. If everyone can guess what you’re going to say, saying it communicates nothing. But if your signal is incomprehensible to those outside your group, it carries maximum information.

What does this ritual communicate? Membership.

The 6-7 meme works because adults don’t get it. If teachers and parents could parse it instantly, it would lose all social value. The gap between those who understand and those who don’t: that gap is where belonging lives.

This is counterintuitive for brands trained to maximize comprehension, to craft clear messaging with universal appeal. But the 6-7 meme suggests that incomprehensibility to outsiders might be more valuable than comprehensibility to everyone.

The most devoted communities already know this. Sneakerheads, crypto traders, gamers: they all speak languages deliberately impenetrable to casual observers. These aren’t communication failures. They’re communication successes for a definition of success that prioritizes belonging over reach.

The Cringe Bifurcation

Brands, naturally, tried to participate.

In early 2025, Pizza Hut offered 67-cent wings. Google created an easter egg that made the search results page shake when you typed “6 7.” One worked. One didn’t.

The difference was the direction of value flow.

Google’s shaking search page was a gift. A small, unsigned present for the community. We see you, we think it’s funny, here’s a toy. It didn’t try to explain the meme or own it or monetize it. The value flowed from brand to community with nothing asked in return.

Pizza Hut’s 67-cent wings were an extraction. Here’s a trend, here’s our product, please engage and convert. The attempt to pull value out of the community was visible. And visibility is death.

This is the cringe bifurcation. Cultural participation is splitting into two categories: gift and extraction. There’s almost no middle ground. Communities can detect extraction intent at a nearly pre-conscious level. It’s not about the execution. It’s about whether you’re there to give or to take.

The Year’s Most Engaged Brand

Let me tell you what the 6-7 meme actually is.

It’s a brand. A participatory brand.

Not a company’s brand. Nobody owns it. But by every functional definition, it’s a brand. It has instant recognition. Consistency: the same trigger, the same response, everywhere. Emotional resonance: the hit of belonging when you perform the ritual. Loyalty: participants who will defend it against outsiders. Community: millions coordinated around a shared symbol.

The only thing it lacks is a product. And a purpose. And a manifesto. And a values statement. And a Super Bowl ad explaining why it matters.

For fifteen years, the industry has been telling brands they need all of that. Stand for something. Articulate your values. Broadcast meaning at scale. And here’s a generation that built something more resonant than most brand campaigns, with none of it.

No purpose. No position. No attempt to make the world a better place. Just a gesture, a shout, and two seconds of belonging.

Maybe participation doesn’t need all the scaffolding we keep trying to build around it. Maybe belonging is enough on its own.

The Two-Second Gift

The teacher will never understand why twenty-three students erupted over a page number.

And that’s fine. The ritual wasn’t for the teacher. It was for the twenty-three. A two-second flash of membership in something no brand created, no agency strategized, no purpose statement justified.

The 6-7 meme will fade. It’s likely already fading as its transitioned from high school to elementary school. But the question it leaves behind is worth sitting with:

What if the question for anyone trying to build in culture isn’t “how do we inject meaning into people’s lives?” but “are we willing to give something without asking for anything back?”

The kids figured that out. They built something joyful and dumb and connected millions of people in a way that all our purpose-driven, values-aligned brand storytelling hasn’t.

Maybe we’ve been taking this all too seriously. Maybe the gift is lighter than we thought.

The most magnetic brands today aren’t fueled by campaigns. They’re emerging as full-blown worlds. This constitutes a fundamental shift in what brands actually do and how value gets created.

To understand this shift, start with what changes when you stop thinking in campaigns. Campaigns are finite: they have launch dates and end dates, creative assets with shelf lives, media budgets that get depleted. Worlds are continuous: they provide ongoing infrastructure where people show up, contribute, connect, and create value together. Campaigns broadcast messages outward, hoping for response. Worlds create spaces inward, inviting contribution.

Your Brand Is a World With its Own Physics.

Think of your brand as a world, not a message. Every world needs rules that make it recognizable: gravity, language, aesthetics, values. These aren’t constraints; they’re what make the world a world rather than formless space. The world has physics (values, tone, aesthetics) and rituals that make it recognizable and distinct. Your job isn’t to micromanage every detail. It’s to maintain integrity of the core physics while giving people tools to live in that world, to build their own stories within it, to make it theirs through inhabitation.

Nike doesn’t just sell shoes. It creates a context where people can understand themselves as athletes, regardless of their skill level or competitive accomplishments. The world’s physics say that movement matters, that pushing yourself counts, that your body is capable of more than you think. Within that world, a morning jogger and an Olympic marathoner are both athletes, just exploring different territories of the same landscape.

Red Bull doesn’t just sell energy drinks. It creates permission to live without boundaries, to attempt the extraordinary, to see limits as invitations rather than barriers. The world’s physics say that human potential is meant to be tested, that creativity thrives at edges, that the impossible is just the not-yet-accomplished.

These aren’t products. They’re participatory mythologies. Permission structures for identity. Contexts for meaning-making that people choose to inhabit because the worlds offer something more valuable than functional benefits … they offer ways of understanding who you are and who you might become. When you enter Nike’s world, you’re not buying footwear; you’re claiming an identity. When you enter Red Bull’s world, you’re not purchasing caffeine; you’re accepting an invitation to see yourself differently.

This is closer to how language itself works. No one controls English, yet it remains recognizable across continents, contexts, and centuries. It has grammar, patterns, norms—but infinite variation in expression. The most participatory brands operate similarly: stable in the center, adaptive at the edges.

According to research by Sarasvuo, Rindell, and Kovalchuk in the Journal of Business Research, brand co-creation happens through “intentional interaction between or among two or more parties that influences a brand.” The operative word is “intentional.” Meaning is made deliberately, through active exchange, not absorbed passively through repeated exposure. The world’s physics—those stable values and aesthetics at the center—create the conditions for that intentional interaction while the adaptive edges allow for infinite variation in how people inhabit and express the brand.

Worlds create infrastructure for this intentional interaction. They provide tools for creation, spaces for gathering, mechanisms for recognition, paths for progression from observer to contributor to co-creator. They don’t control what gets built; they enable what communities choose to build.

Inhabitants, Not Audiences

The broadcast era convinced us that brands could control their meaning by controlling their messages. Perfect the thirty-second spot, buy enough media weight, repeat the tagline often enough, and audiences would internalize what you intended.

But that was always fiction. Even at the height of Madison Avenue’s golden age, meaning was being negotiated in living rooms, debated around water coolers, reinterpreted through cultural lenses the brand never anticipated. The control was illusory. We just couldn’t see the audience’s side of the conversation.

People don’t consume brands now. They create them, share them, and fundamentally shape what they mean. This is a recognition of how meaning actually works … and always has worked, even when infrastructure made that process invisible. No matter what the ad industry told itself, audiences were never passive recipients dutifully absorbing carefully crafted messages. They were always active interpreters, meaning-makers, collaborators in constructing what brands represented in their lives. The difference now is that worlds make this collaboration explicit, intentional, and scaled.

Where campaigns treat audiences as targets to be moved through predetermined stages toward conversion, worlds recognize them as inhabitants who shape meaning through voluntary contribution. In a campaign, you’re trying to change someone’s mind or drive a purchase. In a world, you’re creating conditions where people contribute because participation itself is intrinsically rewarding. The motivation shifts from external persuasion to internal satisfaction.

And when people shape a world, they feel it’s theirs. The labor creates the love.

This isn’t just sentiment, it’s psychology. The IKEA effect shows that people value things more when they’ve participated in creating them, even when the participation is as minimal as assembling flat-pack furniture with an Allen wrench. The time spent, the choices made, the creative energy expended all become inseparable from the object itself.

Research shows that value co-creation behaviors directly strengthen customer loyalty and brand equity. Participatory engagement fuels word-of-mouth and purchase intent because people advocate more passionately for things they’ve helped build. Your community isn’t just an audience to market to. They’re a resource to learn from, a creative engine to tap into, a collective intelligence that sees opportunities your team misses. Their distributed creativity, operating across thousands of different contexts and needs, generates innovation at a scale and specificity that centralized teams simply cannot match.

The World-Builder’s Dilemma

When brands operate as worlds rather than campaigns, they immediately confront a tension that campaign-based marketing never had to face. Campaigns maintain control through their finite nature: The creative is locked, the message is approved, the media buy is scheduled, and nothing deviates from the plan. Worlds, by contrast, invite unpredictability the moment they open their infrastructure to participation.

Open your world too much? It dissolves into incoherence. A shapeless cloud of conflicting interpretations where nothing means anything anymore because everything is permitted. Control it too tightly? You suffocate the very creativity that makes participation valuable in the first place. You end up with a world that feels like a disguised campaign: the appearance of openness with the reality of constraint.

Scholars call this the “brand identity co-creation dilemma.” It’s real, and it doesn’t have an easy resolution. When brands build platforms that invite genuine participation, they gain authenticity, engagement, and advocacy that can’t be manufactured through traditional marketing. But they also risk fragmentation, dilution, and loss of coherent meaning when too many voices pull the brand in too many directions simultaneously. The platform provides the stage, but who decides what story gets told there?

The answer isn’t a formula. It’s a sensibility: build scaffolding, not walls. Give people the grammar of your brand world, then let them speak their own dialect. Learn to live with the tension, to navigate with judgment and courage, to balance through constant recalibration.

Yerba Madre learned this when their community started calling the product “Yerbs,” which is a pet name that emerged organically from people who’d made the brand theirs. The instinct to correct it, to reassert the “proper” name, would have been the campaign-era response. Instead, they embraced it as evidence that people weren’t just drinking a beverage; they were inhabiting a world. A world already rich with its own language, and a lexicon rooted in the plant’s sacred origins that gave people the grammar to build upon. “Yerbs” wasn’t dilution it was actually dialect.

The tension between structure and freedom never fully resolves, and that’s precisely the point. Brands that thrive as worlds don’t eliminate this tension, they learn to navigate it with increasing sophistication, developing institutional muscle memory for when to hold firm and when to flex.

What World-Building Requires

If “brand” used to mean logo and tagline, today it means infrastructure for expression. You’re building a context where people show up with ideas, knowing both what’s possible and what makes it recognizably yours. The scaffolding isn’t abstract; it’s built from specific, intentional elements that create the grammar people need to participate meaningfully.

A clear scaffold. This is your stable center. The core grammar that makes your world recognizable and distinct. You need a world identifiable enough that people know when they’re inside it. Without this clarity, your world becomes formless. All edges, no center.

User-driven creation. Scaffolding only matters if people can actually build upon it. Threadless lets users design the products that get manufactured and sold. Spotify gives users tools to become curators themselves, with the most successful user-generated playlists attracting millions of followers. This requires trusting your community to have taste and valuable perspectives.

Connection and community. People don’t connect with points. They connect with each other. Peloton’s world succeeds not because of the bike but because riders form teams and develop genuine friendships through shared struggle. When you build infrastructure for people to connect with each other rather than just transact with you, you transform customers into community members.

Curation loops. Participation needs to be visible to be meaningful—both to the contributor who wants recognition and to the observer who’s deciding whether to contribute next. GoPro curates and celebrates user-generated footage, turning customers into filmmakers whose best shots get featured in brand channels.

Layered access. Not everyone wants to participate at the same intensity, and your world needs to honor that reality. Different levels of involvement for different levels of interest. Not everyone wants to be a creator. Some want to curate. Some want to comment. Some want to witness. Red Bull’s Flugtag exemplifies this: teams invest months building flying machines, spectators attend live events, millions watch content online, and countless others share clips on social media. Each layer is valuable, and each layer feeds the others.

When these elements align, they create the conditions where the tension between openness and coherence becomes productive: the world has enough structure to remain recognizable, enough freedom to enable genuine creativity, and enough infrastructure to turn individual participation into collective momentum.

The Bottom Line

Consistency once meant control. Now it means coherence amid variation.

The most powerful brands will invite participation without losing themselves, turning audiences into collaborators, fans into storytellers, consumption into creation.

Because when people see themselves as belonging inside a brand’s world, they don’t just buy the product. They live the brand. They defend it. They contribute to it. They make it theirs.

The future of brands is participatory because the future of meaning is participatory. Meaning was never delivered from above. It emerges from contribution. The brands that understand this will build durable and alluring worlds for their people to enjoy. The ones that don’t will keep renting attention until they can’t afford it anymore.

Sources

Sarasvuo, S., Rindell, A., & Kovalchuk, M. (2022). “Toward a conceptual understanding of co-creation in branding.” Journal of Business Research, 139, 543-563.

Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). “The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love.” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453-460.

For 300,000 years, humans survived by participating. We hunted in groups, raised children collectively, built shelters together, and passed knowledge through shared story and song. Participation wasn’t a marketing strategy. It was the operating system that kept us alive.

Then, for about a century, we forgot.

Mass media taught us to sit still. Broadcast technology made us audiences. Advertising trained us to receive messages, not create them. For a few generations, participation became something you did on weekends—if at all.

But something has shifted. And if you’re reading this, you’ve probably felt it too.

Three billion people now play video games. They’ve logged thousands of hours in worlds where their choices matter, where they shape outcomes, where passive observation isn’t even an option. Billions more have grown up on platforms designed around contribution—duets, remixes, replies, stitches. They’ve never known a media environment where they couldn’t talk back.

These aren’t just new behaviors. They’re the old behaviors, finally given room to breathe.

Technology didn’t create our instinct for participation. It uncaged it. And now we have entire generations who expect—as a baseline—that the experiences they engage with will respond to their input. That’s not entitlement. That’s 300,000 years of wiring reasserting itself after a brief interruption.

This creates a profound challenge for anyone trying to build a brand, lead an organization, or create something that matters. The playbook that worked for decades—craft a message, buy distribution, measure who received it—that playbook is failing. Not because it was wrong for its time, but because the people it was designed for no longer exist.

The people who exist now are participants. And they’re waiting for you to invite them in.

What This Publication Is

I’ve spent thirty years in advertising watching this shift take shape—first as a whisper, then as a pattern, now as an undeniable force. And I’ll be honest: I’ve never been more excited to share what I’m seeing.

The Participation Exchange is a weekly exploration of what happens when brands stop broadcasting and start inviting. We’ll examine the shift from passive consumption to active contribution—why it’s happening, how to navigate it, and what it means for the future of marketing, media, and human connection.

Some weeks we’ll make the argument: the strategic and philosophical case for participation as the defining framework of modern brand-building.

Some weeks we’ll show the proof: research, data, and evidence that participation drives outcomes traditional marketing can’t match.

Some weeks we’ll catch participation in action: brands, campaigns, and communities doing this work in the real world, with lessons worth learning.

And some weeks we’ll simply survey the landscape: what’s happening, what’s emerging, and what it might mean.

Throughout, we’ll return to a central conviction: participation isn’t a tactic. It’s a recognition of what humans have always needed and what technology has finally made scalable. The brands that understand this will build communities. The ones that don’t will build campaigns that vanish the moment they stop paying for them.

An Invitation

This publication is, fittingly, an invitation to participate. Subscribe if these ideas resonate. Reply if they provoke. Share if they’re useful. Push back if they’re wrong.

We don’t do passive here. We hope you won’t either.

Welcome to The Participation Exchange.

For anyone following news of the ad industry, 2025 was defined by upheaval. (And maybe just a dash of panic.) As we enter 2026, that transformation shows no signs of slowing. But amid all the unnerving stories of AI takeovers, holding company mergers, and agency brand retirements, we’ve been tracking something else: a fundamental shift in how brands and people relate to each other.

If you’re paying attention at all, you can already feel it: the fatigue with passive content, the death of “audience” as a meaningful concept, the collapse of linear storytelling under the weight of infinite remix. The old ways of operating have started to feel equally onerous to creatives and consumers alike. We believe what will replace them isn’t another “era of community” or “wave of creator marketing.” It’s something more foundational.

Participation is becoming the modern brand’s core operating system.

The Signal Shift

The change started quietly. Algorithms began rewarding agency over passivity. Remixes, duets, stitches, replies … actions rather than attention. Platforms discovered through relentless investigation that participatory features won A/B tests again and again, and brands adjusted accordingly. The metrics stopped tracking who watched and started tracking who built.

This pattern emerged first in gaming, then social media, then everywhere at once. And the numbers told an unexpected story. The game developers watched their metrics intently to see exactly how long people played and whether they came back. Single-player games saw users play once, maybe twice, then vanish. But multiplayer games, games with user-generated content, games where players shaped the experience themselves ... those kept people coming back for hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours. Other platforms followed suit when they realized the value of engaging people for longer, richer, collaborative experiences.

​These companies weren’t reading evolutionary psychology or studying tribal behavior. They were optimizing for engagement metrics: time spent, daily active users, retention curves. But what they accidentally unearthed was a 300,000-year-old truth: humans are wired for participation, not consumption.

As more brands acknowledge this truth, passive content will become invisible. The signal that matters is participation. Brands that don’t adjust will simply vanish from algorithmic distribution.

From Owner to Steward

The architecture of branding is mutating in response. For a century, brands hired agencies to create messages, purchased media to distribute them, and measured how many people received them. The creative authority flowed one direction: from institutions to individuals. Now 3.4 billion people play video games globally. Billions more have practiced participatory behaviors daily on TikTok, Discord, YouTube. They’ve become fluent in progression systems, co-creation mechanics, and community governance.

This creates an uncomfortable truth for brands: you can no longer hand audiences a finished message and expect applause. They’ve spent thousands of hours learning to shape and modify the experiences they engage with. When you give them something polished and complete, something that says this is done, just consume it, their instinct isn’t admiration, it’s disinterest. Because closed systems violate everything their experience has taught them about how engagement works.

This shift requires a fundamental reframing of the brand’s role. The brands adapting fastest have stopped seeing themselves as sole authors of their meaning. Instead, they’ve become stewards: caretakers of something the community itself has helped build through thousands of hours and collaborative effort.

Stewardship matters because the power dynamic has reversed. In 2026, the audience doesn’t want to join the conversation. That’s not enough. They want to write the next line themselves. And if you don’t invite them to do so, they’ll find a brand who will.

From Voice to Protocol

What we’re watching is the replacement of “brand voice” with “brand protocol.”

Instead of messaging, there are frameworks. Instead of storytelling, there’s platform design. Instead of campaigns, there are feedback structures: living, evolving ecosystems where the audience is the author, the algorithm is the editor, and the brand is the infrastructure keeping the whole thing from collapsing.

The old model was extractive: extract attention through interruption, extract brand recall through repetition. The new model is additive: add value to communities, add platforms for contribution, add models that make participation possible.

Under these new rules, content stops being something brands push out and becomes scaffolding they build for others to climb.

A post, a sound, a filter … each is an unfinished sentence waiting for the crowd to complete it. This changes everything about what brands create. Brands that once “told stories” now must shift to building participatory canvases: modular worlds that can be lived in, remixed, extended, and rebuilt by the people who inhabit them.

This is a fundamentally different competency than traditional brand management has required.

Traditional brand managers were trained to protect consistency, maintain control, ensure every execution matched the brand book. The new competency is facilitation: creating conditions where communities can shape experiences, designing rules that enable emergence rather than prescribing outcomes. You can’t hire for this by looking for people who’ve perfected campaigns. You need people who understand how systems behave when you relinquish control.

Protocol, not voice, is now the primary expression of brand identity. The rules you’ll establish that enable others to build, cementing trust through transparency rather than polish. Those that master this shift will become the cult brands of the new era.

The Threshold

2026 isn’t another “trend year.” It’s a threshold moment. Each individual change was significant, but their simultaneous maturity creates a transformation in kind, not merely in scale.

Brands will stop asking people to “join the conversation” and start recognizing that the conversation is the brand. Algorithms will demand participation. Communities will cohere through it. AI will accelerate it. Measurement will depend on it. Ethics will define it.

This convergence makes the shift permanent. People can’t unlearn their preference for user-generated content and mutual value creation any more than they can unknow how to swipe a screen. The neural pathways are already formed. Their expectation that experiences should respond to their input is now brain architecture.

And what’s hardwired in the brain becomes a moat around the brands that satisfy it first. Participation compounds uniquely for each brand. Your community, your contributors, your co-creators ... these can’t be copied even if competitors mimic your strategy. The people, the relationships, the shared history, and the voluntary time already invested belong to you specifically. Time is the glue that solidifies tribal belonging, and once someone has invested those irreplaceable hours, the bonds become irreversible.

The brands that design for participation from the ground up will build something durable. The ones that keep optimizing for impressions will drift toward irrelevance.

What This Means Now

The infrastructure has arrived. The barriers have fallen. The time for philosophical debate is past, and the time for implementation has arrived. As participation becomes the marketing operating system of the future, you can begin planning for the transformation by:

Auditing for participatory potential. Look at your current brand architecture. How much of it enables participation? How much of it assumes passive consumption?

Building infrastructure before campaigns. Create the spaces, tools, and interfaces that enable contribution. The campaign can wait. The infrastructure can’t.

Developing governance frameworks. How will you handle community conflicts? Attribution disputes? Content moderation? These questions need answers before you scale participation.

Shifting measurement. Start tracking contribution metrics alongside traditional reach metrics. Build the internal understanding that different math applies.

Training for different work. The skills required for participatory brand management differ from traditional brand management. The learning curve is significant.

Participation has become the environment in which all strategies operate. The brands building infrastructure now will accumulate communities, relationships, and shared history that late movers will never catch. In part because the window for building this equity is closing: Gen Z and Gen Alpha are forming their brand relationships today. The brands they connect with in their teens and twenties will enjoy loyalty that’s extremely difficult for competitors to break.

But that loyalty must be earned through participation, not purchased through persuasion. Every quarter you wait, communities are forming around your competitors. Every month of delay means relationships building elsewhere that could have been yours.

The only question left is whether you’ll build while there’s still time, or explain later why you waited.

Sources

1. Platform algorithm research: Analysis of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts ranking signals, 2023-2024 platform documentation and creator guidance.

2. Gartner (2024). Predictions on AI agents and participatory platform evolution.

3. Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press. Foundational text on participatory culture and the shift from audience to participant