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

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

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

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

What Ritual Actually Requires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the Big Argument Lands

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

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

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

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

What Forcing Looks Like

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

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

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

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

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

What Brands Can Actually Do

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

Observe and Diagnose

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

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

Recognize Where Rituals Are Forming

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

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

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

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

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

Support Without Overtaking

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

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

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

Steward Over Time

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

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

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

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

What Gets Earned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Things That Look the Same

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

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

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

The three categories, as they came clear to me:

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

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

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

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

What Separates Them

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Each One Compounds

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

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

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

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

The Categories Are Not Fixed

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

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

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

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

Where Compulsion Compounds Hardest

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

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

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

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

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

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

The One-Year Audit

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why This Matters More Now

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

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

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

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

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

Four Properties of Genuine Ritual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Language

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

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

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

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

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

That is what a ritual is.

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

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

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

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

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

Why Rituals Matter Now

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

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

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

The ritual is what recurs.

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

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

From Coffee to the Wake

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

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

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

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

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

Then there are the rituals built around products.

Products Wrapped in Ritual

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

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

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

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

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

The Marketing Reframe

Brand marketing has spent decades chasing reach.

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

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

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

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

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

This is the resource that brands cannot manufacture.

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

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

The Shape That Lives in Time

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

That asymmetry is doing a lot of work now.

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

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

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

What This Looks Like in Practice

The brands that understand this allocate their effort accordingly.

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

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

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

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

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

What Compounds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Same Question, Asked of Participation

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

Then I applied it to my own body of work.

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

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

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

So I went looking for the shapes.

The Primary Forms Emerge

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

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

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

Here are the eight as they currently stand.

The Eight Shapes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hybrid by Default

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

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

Moving Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE LONG PATTERN OF SCARCITY

Technology has always organized itself around scarcity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI IS THE FIRST TECHNOLOGY THAT MAKES HUMAN PRESENCE MORE SCARCE

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

Call it proof of humanity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE DASHBOARD LIES QUIETLY

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

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

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

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

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

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

PARTICIPATION AS PROOF

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

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

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

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

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

THE ORIGINATOR TEST

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

The answer is the originator.

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

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

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

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

WHERE THE MONEY IS ALREADY MOVING

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

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

The most visible evidence is at festivals.

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

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

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

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

PROOF OF HUMAN AS INVENTORY

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE NEW LINE IN THE SYSTEM

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

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

The industry spent thirty digital years optimizing for attention.

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

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

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

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

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

I know. Stay with me.

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

It solved overnight what took us a century.

Example of slime mold in a petry dish

What It’s Actually Doing

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

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

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

Illustration of slime mold mapping versus subway planning

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

The Planning Problem

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

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

The slime mold suggests this assumption deserves scrutiny.

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

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

The slime mold would recognize this.

What Gets Built Without a Blueprint

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

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

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

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

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

The Participation Connection

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Wild Time to Build

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

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

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

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

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

The Question Worth Asking

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

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

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

Most organizations would do well to try the same thing.

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

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

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

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

What role does this brand play in this world?

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

This is the difference between adjacency and fluency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is where the creative work actually lives now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To: how do we participate in this world honestly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 of 3: Yesterday was part one.

The advertising industry is having the wrong argument about AI.

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

Neither side is asking the more interesting question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now a brand appears.

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

What if instead the brand asked a different question?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is a different business entirely.

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

1 of 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is a commercial break.

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

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

But watch what happened to the exchange rate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now they do.

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

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

The moon has never touched the ocean.

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

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

The Doctrine of Push

Marketing has always been a pushing discipline.

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

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

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

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

The moon suggests an alternative.

The Physics of Pull

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

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

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

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

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

What Creates Gravitational Pull?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tidal Rhythm

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

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

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

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

Entrainment

Living things sync with tidal rhythms.

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

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

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

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

Predicting the Pull

We can predict the tides centuries in advance.

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

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

The Moon’s Indifference

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

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

I find this oddly liberating for thinking about brand gravity.

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

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

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

Learning from Celestial Mechanics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe that’s enough.

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

This is something I felt I had to explore more.

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

What Makes an Economy Real

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

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

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

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

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

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

What changed is technology.

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

This is the mechanism behind the proliferation.

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

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

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

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

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

These Are Not Layers. They Are Nodes.

This is where most of the popular discourse goes wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

The Most Connected Node

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

What they are not being modeled as are participants.

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

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

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

The Participation Economy Was Always There

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

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

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

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

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

What This Means

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

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

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

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

That is the only node no one can automate.

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.