Guillermo Rodriguez has been Jimmy Kimmel’s sidekick for more than 20 years, and before that he guarded the parking lot at Kimmel’s studio. On September 15, 2026, the first night of Season 35 of “Dancing with the Stars,” he danced a cha-cha to Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff,” with plenty of jumping and gyrating and not much that resembled a cha-cha. The judges gave him 10 out of 30, the second-lowest score in the show’s 21 years, and the ballroom booed them for it. Then the audience at home voted, and Guillermo stayed.

I should mention that I don’t watch “Dancing with the Stars.” I can still tell you Guillermo’s scores, because news of this season reached me the way it reached a lot of people: through “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and whatever video clips and commentary turned up online the next morning.

His partner was Witney Carson, the reigning champion, pregnant with her third child. Plenty of people assumed she’d been handed Guillermo as a gentle early exit. She told “Entertainment Now” she wanted to win twice in a row, and when she mentioned this to her partner he told her, “Witney, don’t be greedy.” Kimmel, reviewing the footage, offered his own analysis: “I notice your strategy seems to be to dance not with Guillermo but around Guillermo.” She got him around a lot of floor. Two troupe dancers slid him across the finish of their Week 2 paso doble. For Yacht Rock Night the following week, she worked an umbrella into a foxtrot to “Escape (The Piña Colada Song),” and he closed it by pulling open his floral shirt to show the message underneath: DANCING WITH THE PEOPLE. A week after that, he lay flat on the floor for several seconds in the middle of a samba to Mariah Carey’s “Obsessed.”

Every week he finished last or tied for last on the judges’ board, and every week a couple with an equal or better score went home instead. Kimmel campaigned for him the whole way. Taping in Brooklyn on September 28, he promised “every American in this theater a check for $5,000” if Guillermo won. When viewers called the competition rigged, he replied that “life is rigged in Guillermo’s favor.” Kimmel’s show airs on ABC, so the network had, in effect, entered its own employee and handed him a nightly megaphone. But no megaphone, however big, can make anybody care.

The rest of the internet split between viewers who adored Guillermo and viewers furious that better dancers kept leaving. After Ciara Miller went home on Mariah Carey Night, one fan on X asked if Guillermo was “the new Bobby Bones.”

The save that came and went

That fan was reaching back to 2018, when the radio host Bobby Bones won Season 27 with scores well below the rest of the finalists. The backlash was strong enough to change the rules. From Season 28 on, when the bottom two couples were revealed, the judges chose which one stayed, a power that came to be known as “the save.”

It lasted four seasons and vanished at the start of Season 32, in 2023, with almost no announcement. Executive producer Deena Katz explained the decision to TVLine in February 2024: “I think it should be about America.”

Viewers have supplied half of the combined score since the show’s first summer in 2005. ABC has never published the formula, but former pros describe two pies. Each couple gets its share of the night’s judges’ points and its share of the night’s votes, and the two are added together. The judges can only shrink your slice so far, since even a disastrous night earns a 10 against a winner’s 24. The audience can hand you most of the plate. Removing “the save” took away the one step where the experts could overrule that math, and the show has kept it away through Seasons 32 to 35.

That has a price, and Season 35 showed it. Critics pointed out that women in the cast get far less room to be charmingly bad than Guillermo did. Giada De Laurentiis went home in Week 2 with 12 out of 30, the same score Guillermo posted that night. A judges’ save wouldn’t guarantee fairness, since judges carry their own blind spots, but without one the crowd’s preferences go straight into the result, good and bad.

Voting on television goes back a long way. MTV’s Total Request Live let viewers vote the daily countdown from 1998, and American Idol made the phone vote a national event in 2002; I write about both in Wired to Participate. I’ve also written here about two later tests of the same nerve. In 2016 the British public chose Boaty McBoatface as the name for a new polar research ship, but the research council overrode them and named the ship after David Attenborough, giving Boaty to an autonomous submarine. In 2012, the internet voted to exile Pitbull to Kodiak, Alaska, and Pitbull got on the plane (The Internet Tried to Exile Pitbull. He went. Dancing with the Stars has run both experiments on itself, first the submarine and then the plane ticket.

Seventy-two million votes

The show has grown in popularity while letting stand outcomes its judges didn’t like, though the timing takes a little unpacking. “The save” went away in fall 2023, and the big jump came two years later, in Season 34. That fall ABC cast for younger viewers, with TikTok star Alix Earle, Whitney Leavitt of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” Olympic gymnast Jordan Chiles, Dylan Efron and Robert Irwin, while the pros and stars posted rehearsal clips and internet trends all week between episodes. That season had its own lovable non-dancer, too: Andy Richter, Conan O’Brien’s longtime sidekick, who lasted deep into the competition on effort and charm. Two seasons running, America’s favorite bad dancer has been a late-night sidekick.

The numbers followed. The Season 34 finale drew 9.24 million viewers, the most in nine years, and viewers cast 72 million votes, up from 32 million the year before. This season, the online voting site crashed on premiere night, and one week later a regular Tuesday episode beat last year’s finale voting record. Each viewer can cast up to 10 votes per couple online and 10 more via text, so the totals reflect enthusiasm as much as headcount. Either way, participation has grown faster than the audience.

Guillermo didn’t build that curve, and dropping “the save” didn’t either. What ABC did was let its audience’s vote stand when the results got uncomfortable, and the audience kept showing up in bigger numbers.

The second vote

Kimmel asked for votes. Nobody asked for the dance moves to go viral.

The moment this clicked for me came when Kimmel posted a run of TikToks from people copying Guillermo’s moves. Some were people dancing alone, and some were groups, a few of them clearly whole families getting in on it. A TikTok of yourself doing the Piña Colada foxtrot is a second ballot, cast with your body, and it costs a lot more than pressing a button as an episode is wrapping up.

After Yacht Rock Night, the Loco Beach Coconuts, a Banana Ball team, posted a video of their player Erik Ostberg recreating the foxtrot on the field. Jackson Olson, who plays for the Savannah Bananas and was also in this season’s cast, left a snide comment underneath. Guillermo’s fans buried him, which was the same enthusiasm with its teeth showing. Olson deleted the comment, then apologized by recruiting Guillermo into a TikTok with him. A ballclub’s parody of a dance had become a plot point in the competition where the dance had originated.

In the book, I write about memes as a creative outlet most people use every day without calling it that. A meme travels when the next person can add to it without special skill, and Guillermo’s dancing was ideal for that. Harry Shum Jr.’s jive is beyond almost everyone watching at home, while anybody with a phone and a floral shirt can take a run at the Piña Colada foxtrot. The judges score difficulty, but the people filming themselves were rewarding something closer to copyability.

The last dance

The run ended on October 13, in Week 5. The theme was Super Bowl Night, with every couple dancing to music from past halftime shows, and NFL announcer Joe Buck sat in as a fourth judge, which put the scores out of 40 for the night. Guillermo and Witney danced a salsa to Bad Bunny’s “Tití Me Preguntó” and earned 22, the best score of his season and still the lowest of the night. They landed in the bottom two and went home.

No veto was needed. The same vote that carried him through four eliminations let him go on the fifth, whether because his crowd moved on or because a bigger one outvoted it, and nobody had to rescue the show from its audience along the way.

Tuesday night

Most of the art and information that reaches people this year doesn’t respond to anything they do. Wars, politics, AI fears, and the daily news cycle keep coming regardless of what anyone thinks of them. A vote for a 55-year-old in sequins responds. You press the button, he stays, and the next morning you can see your contribution on the leaderboard.

People voted for him for their own reasons, some out of affection and some to needle the judges. For five weeks they had a small, silly piece of control over something, and shared the company of everyone else doing the same. Then a lot of them went further and danced. Guillermo’s shirt said DANCING WITH THE PEOPLE, and for once a slogan undersold the thing it described. They danced alone, in groups, in whole families, and on a Banana Ball field.

Before your next brief goes out, imagine the audience choosing your Guillermo: the person, idea, or moment your team would never have put first. Would you let that choice count? And would you recognize the opportunity when people started making their own versions of it? ABC didn’t choreograph the family TikToks or the dance on the baseball field. It let the vote stand, and people found their own reasons to keep the story moving. If you want to dance with the people, you’ve got to let them lead sometimes.

Through The Participation Exchange, I’ve been exploring the power of participation and how it impacts marketing, media, and culture. In my forthcoming book Wired To Participate, I make the argument that participation is the human path forward in a world that is becoming more synthetic. And I trace how technology and media have been forecasting this since the dawn of the internet. So, when Cannes announced this year’s winners, I felt compelled to have a look at the winners through this lens. And the picture continues to be clear.

Participation had a very good year. About a third of the Grand Prix winners, eleven in all, run on the audience’s own action. In these campaigns, people aren’t watching from the outside or tapping a like. They are the ones making the work happen. That is a striking number, and I don’t think the industry has fully registered how far this has come.

The part that surprised me

What I didn’t expect was where it showed up.

Some Cannes categories are practically built for participation. Entertainment rewards fandom, PR rewards earned spread, Brand Experience rewards people doing things. Wins there are lovely, but they don’t tell you much. What caught my attention was participation winning in the rooms that have nothing to do with it, the categories that answer to sales, to media results, to hard business strategy.

600K Network won a Titanium Lion, the festival’s prize for the idea that fits no existing box (and a Grand Prix for Good besides). It printed a QR code on Venezuela’s election ballots and turned more than 600,000 citizens into a live vote-verification network, ordinary people scanning and transmitting the official count faster than the institutions could. The audience wasn’t the audience. It was the infrastructure.

The pattern held across the serious categories. In Creative Strategy, the prize for the thinking behind the work, the winner was The Pub That Refused to Die, which didn’t so much advertise Heineken as help communities take over and run their own failing local pubs. In Creative Commerce, which answers to sales, Wisła Kraków’s Lucky Fan Index gave every supporter a personal “luck” score tied to their attendance, something to track and defend, generated week after week by the fans themselves. And in Media, Uber Eats’ Build Your Own Super Bowl let 325,000 fans build their own Super Bowl ads inside the app, and the jury noted it converted straight into business growth.

Four categories with no particular reason to favor participation, and four winners built on it anyway. When it wins where the judges are watching sales and results, it gets hard to call it a fad.

It didn’t win everywhere, and that’s a good sign

Plenty of the top prizes went to work that has nothing to do with participation, and I was glad to see it. The Film Grand Prix went to Mother London’s gorgeous Super Bowl spots for Claude, pure craft made for an audience to enjoy. Even the running shoe that took Innovation, adidas’ Supernova Adaptive, carried the theme in its own quiet way, shaped over six years with the Down syndrome community. Participation is turning up all over, but it hasn’t swallowed everything, and it doesn’t need to.

What the winners had in common

The more I looked, the more it seemed like the same few moves, run in different ways.

The strongest work didn’t try to build a community from scratch. It found one that already existed and gave it something to do. Lucky Fan Index rode Wisła Kraków’s fandom rather than manufacturing it. 600K Network equipped a movement that was already there and hungry for a job. People show up hardest when taking part says something about who they are.

The spreading was built in, not begged for. The KitKat Heist turned 400,000 “stolen” bars into a public barcode hunt, where passing it along was the whole point, so no one ever had to ask.

And the best campaigns turned the brand’s problem into the audience’s mission. The Pub That Refused to Die never asked anyone to care about Heineken. It handed communities a fight of their own that happened to run on it.

What’s really going on

Step back, and something bigger is happening than “participation is popular.”

In every one of these campaigns, the audience quietly took over a job that marketing used to pay for. They became the production line (325,000 people made the ads), the distribution (the KitKat hunt spread itself), the media (every fan’s luck score an impression no one bought), even the fact-checkers (600,000 people ran the count).

For a century, the budget bought scale. You paid for reach, you paid for production, you paid to be seen. What these campaigns worked out is how to get the audience to supply the very thing the budget used to buy.

The timing isn’t an accident. As AI makes it cheap to produce endless content and fill every channel, the supply of messages is racing toward infinite. What stays scarce is human commitment, a crowd that actually shows up to verify, carry, and defend something. The more that machines can make, the more the genuinely human version is worth. There was something fitting in the Film prize going to a set of ads for an AI this year, while the sales and media prizes went to work built on people.

Now stop and read that last line again.

How?

Every Grand Prix winner was looked at the same way, on four plain questions:

• Did the audience help make or author the work?

• Was people sharing it the real engine of its reach?

• Did it live through a community that already existed?

• Did ordinary people’s actions deliver results far beyond the media behind them?

Add it up, and about a third of the slate clears the bar for genuinely audience-run work. For most of its history, marketing asked a simple question: how many people did we reach? On this year’s evidence, a more interesting one is taking its place. How much of the work did people become?

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

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

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

The internet had a different idea.

It decided to send him to Kodiak, Alaska.

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

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

And then Pitbull did something unusual.

He went.

A very ordinary promotion

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

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

The internet accepts the rules and rejects the assignment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Worldwide makes a decision

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

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

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

Instead, he said:

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

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

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

Exile becomes arrival

On July 30, 2012, Pitbull landed in Kodiak.

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

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

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

The audience’s agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

“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.

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.