My hot take on doping

As a fairly competitive runner, I unsurprisingly have a lot of thoughts about doping. First of all, I’m anti. But my hot take is that I don’t really have a problem with it in terms of keeping the sport “pure.” Almost everything in running comes down to optimizing performance, so in a purity sense, EPO isn’t all that different from carbon-plated shoes, Norwegian doubles, or taking 100g+ of carbs an hour. Whether or not you consider them as such, (legal) performance enhancements are a large part of the reason we’ve seen any records fall at all: we learn more about what could enhance performance, we try it, we get faster.

My issue with doping is rooted in something entirely different: it is a straight up health risk. Doping can kill you. Sure, if you’re constantly monitored by a doctor and only use tiny amounts you’ll probably be fine, but introducing it into sport turns it into a competition of who can take the most without actually dying. Athletes already have a bit of a skewed risk/reward ratio, and the opportunity to reach the pinnacle of sport is a hell of a tempting and heady drug itself. Performance enhancing drugs are different from everything else we do to get faster because they’re a lethal combination of effective, dangerous, and tempting.

Regardless, it’s far more interesting to me what humans are capable of in imperfect circumstances, rather than supposedly “perfect” ones. It’s why Survivor is still going after 25 years and 50 seasons, and why I spent last weekend running a 200 mile relay at 9,000 ft elevation through Utah’s national parks with 8 near-strangers on a single hour of (van) sleep. To me, that’s the shit that really tests the limits of human performance and spirit. And that’s how we build real worthwhile community.

(And just because I know you’re curious, we won third place.)

– Shanna

Commodity-Maxxing the Transformation Economy

by Doug Freeman

So... did anyone else follow the coverage of the Enhanced Games with more than a little bit of delicious shadenfreude? The inaugural event held last month in Las Vegas (of course) went off with more of a whimper than a bang. Only one asterisk-laden “world-record” was set, when Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev topped the 50-meter freestyle record by .07 seconds in the final event. This seems even less of a big deal when we just saw two runners cross the 2 hour marathon barrier this past April at the (un-Enhanced) London Marathon.

While the Enhanced Games didn’t provide the kind of fireworks that organizers had hoped for — or that WADA and the Olympics had been pre-emptively dismissive of — it probably did at least achieve some of what its investors and Enhanced wanted in pushing the conversation around transformational new drugs, treatments, supplements, and the rising wave of peptides. As Lucas Ropek at TechCrunch noted in covering the games: “[Enhanced’s] business is part of an industry that is due for a gold-rush-like boom later this year.”

As I was taking in all of the coverage of the Enhanced Games, I also happened to be reading Joseph Pine’s new book, The Transformation Economy, which outlines the current shift from an Experience Economy to one of corporations selling us our own capability for change. The Enhanced Games seemed to not only perfectly encapsulate this shift, but also highlighted just how quickly this new Transformation Economy has already become commoditized.

Pine is known for having originally defined the Experience Economy in his 1999 book with James Gilmore, where he highlighted the previous economic shift from businesses thinking of themselves as providing services, to staging experiences in order to win and maintain customers. That idea has certainly become one of the dominant marketing trends of the 21st century. (Are you even a brand these days if you don’t have an “activation”?)

The Experience Economy moved us up the ladder from mere goods and services to experiences, and companies differentiated with customers by creating exceptional and memorable events. This was fueled by the rise in data harvesting that could more personalize experiences (think everything from streaming recommendations to personalized preferences at a hotel).

And now, the Transformation Economy is an evolution of that Experience Economy, moving us up yet another ladder, to sell us transformation, whether physically, mentally, financially, or otherwise.

There are certainly elements of the Experience Economy that are still relevant in this new formulation, but the promise is a program that will fundamentally change the individual. Pine writes: “Where experiences are memorable, transformations are effectual…Where experiences are inherently personal, transformations are fundamentally individual…And where experiences are revealed over a duration of time, transformations are sustained through time.” In this new economy, Pine sees brands as doulas helping usher you through metamorphosis from larva to butterfly.

This idea is nothing new, of course. The Transformation Economy and marketing to it has always been with us, from education to fashion to fitness culture. Hell, Nike’s marketing is built on it, and Apple would have you believe their devices unlock an entirely new creative personality for you. “A New You!” is a promise that’s been made to us maybe even longer than the idea of self.

I don’t disagree with Pine’s assessment of the emerging Transformation Economy as a distinct force, but I think he misses a bit exactly why it is taking hold now, and that he is in fact already behind what the Transformation Economy has evolved into. What’s propelling this trend toward transformation now isn’t a want for something beyond the Experience Economy, but rather because transformation is already becoming commoditized.

Traditionally, the transformation being sold by Weight Watchers or Peloton or BetterHelp requires the individual to put in the work. At best, what these companies could provide was a better experience (more convenient, more accessible, more personalized, more fun). But they couldn’t actually do the transformation – that was on you. Now with products like GLPs and peptides, companies can sell the transformation as a commodity. Buy a pill, change your life.

The closest thing we’ve had to this is probably plastic surgery, which we’ve seen over the past few decades shift in ubiquity from high-end procedures just for the rich and famous to pop-in botox clinics in a stripmall. AI is also certainly playing into this with its idea of instant education (or at least “smarts”), like Neo mainlining knowledge and skills in the Matrix.

I’m certainly not against these advancements, in theory. Helping people lose weight, be healthier, or even learn more, are incredibly noble goals for society. I don’t think one could be against the responsible/necessary use of GLPs any more than they could be against SSRIs, which undoubtedly transform and even save lives. (Ahem, Mr. Kennedy). But Pine’s examples are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Pandora’s Box that the Transformation Economy has the potential to open up. (See: We’re IV-dripping students now??)

With transformation becoming commoditized, Pine’s argument that the novelty of this new economy as a move from “time well saved” (services) and “time well spent” (experiences) to “time well invested” fails. With its commodification, transformation becomes just another financial investment instead of one of personal time or energy.

If Pine sees the role of businesses in the Transformation Economy as playing guide to customers wanting to effect these changes, that’s not really a different model from what universities or fitness programs have been doing for ages. The problem is that the “guide” role is actually being rapidly rejected already, replaced by accessible DIY models. AI is commoditizing everything from college to programming; GLPs are selling rapid weight loss; roboinvesting is telling us we don’t need financial advisors. “Do your own research!” the sovereign-everything movement screams, while also selling the supplements and peptides flooding your research results.

The transformational promise of these drugs and treatments may be very real, and I hope they are. But it’s going to be really messy for a while, and marketing is already exploiting it full tilt. There is also the question of what kind of transformation we’re talking about here. Nobody should confuse AI spittingballing an analysis of something for you as you having actually learned it, but then maybe GLP-1s can rewire your brain into healthier habits? Again, the distinction between surface or performative transformation and actual change and personal growth is going to be a swamp filled with lots of snake oil.

In this commoditized environment, it’s worth examining exactly what Pine’s notion of businesses operating as guides, sherpa-ing folks through transformation, actually looks like. We see expertise to guide transformations emerging through things like functional health clinics or peptide testing labs, but it’s not clear yet if these are just taking advantage of the uncertainty of the grey markets of transformation or actually adding that guidance layer on top of it.

The element of this role of companies serving as guides for customer transformations that Pine largely ignores is the necessary function of community building. Even in a commoditized economy and DIY ethos, the most compelling and retention-worthy approach towards any “customer” remains creating a genuine community around transformation. Fitness programs have long understood this. Even Jeep has managed to do it, oddly enough. Mar-a-lago Face only works if there is a community and culture that actually values that Texas Chainsaw Massacre look.

Community is the backbone that makes the marketing of transformation actually sustainable over time — that propels both the desire (whether noble or narcissistic) and the process. So when I think of Pine’s Transformation Economy, the opportunity isn’t for brands and businesses to be just guides to the transformation, or to cheerlead and inspire those ambitions for customers, but rather to build the communities that will actually enable and sustain them.

And as the Transformation Economy continues to evolve and expand, the communities that develop around it will become much more important. Every economy Pine outlines ultimately pushes down towards commoditization, and we’ve seen this process play out with goods, services, experiences, and now already transformation. The upside is making these things more accessible to more people to people who may need them. The downside is a race to the bottom towards enshittification, and marketing/communities that are built for extraction more than for the benefit of the customer. With transformation being commoditized as quickly as it is right now, there are no guardrails or norms established to handle this new economy responsibly, and the communities that are cropping up first in this new economy are often serving as validation to more reckless, vacuous, or even destructive change.

The question is of course how much we really trust companies to build responsible communities around the very real effects of transformation rather than just exploiting them to sell unproven or unscrupulous products and procedures. Commoditized community-creation is a very different endeavor than true customer-focused community.

This commoditized community was ultimately the goal of the Enhanced Games, too. I’m sure they would have loved to have broken records and shown off the ‘roid-maxxed potential of the human body, but ultimately they didn’t need to. They needed to bring together a group of folks that believed in this vision, to show that that community had substance, and convince others it’s actually real and worth joining. The Claviculars of our society have been laying this groundwork on our social platforms for years, and the Enhanced Games were just an IRL celebration of that.

With this race to the bottom that the transformation economy is already sinking into, we need to make sure we’re building responsible and positive communities around change, ones that can fulfill our ineffable desire toward transformation in meaningful ways. I tend to be an optimist, but our recent history of the kinds of communities that have emerged around transformation messaging (from MAHA to the Manosphere) don’t exactly leave me with a lot of confidence. These commoditized transformation communities are real, and are powerful, particularly due to their promise of change and their tendency towards groupthink.

But — as seriously as we should be taking these more toxic and dangerous communities, we can and should also be taking seriously our own autonomy and responsibility towards building or seeking out communities centered around positive transformation. At its best, the transformation economy has the capacity to empower high quality and responsible collective change, but we have to demand it and hold these new company-sponsored guides to responsible standards.

Big shots: At the invite-only California Peptide Club, 'not for human consumption' is a provocation.

There is no better example of the communities emerging around the Transformation Economy than peptide parties. The Homebrew Computer Club this ain’t, but of course Silicon Valley is leading the way in experimenting with all forms of peptide bio-hacking. We also really appreciate this notable data point from Arielle Pardes’ article in Business Insider: “Interest around peptides has been surging. In April, Google searches for the word ‘peptide’ overtook ‘pickleball.’”

What We’re Into

Joshua Wauk created a jazz ensemble out of the New York City subway system, and it’s pretty mesmerizing: Train Jazz.

The screwworm has officially returned to the US, but the story of how they were originally eradicated by Edward Knipling back in 1970s is a fascinating tale of scientific persistance.

Artemis III will be a much more technical test mission, but we’re still excited about the new crew, and appreciate the in-depth breakdowns of our initial disappointment that no women were selected. The bigger question though is what their “Rise” mascot will be.

Speaking of new economies, Kristen French argues that the “Achievement Economy” is crushing us.

Building Five

Last month, JDI Sidetracks had the opportunity to tour the conservation and preservation labs of the renowned Harry Ransom Center archives. We got to learn firsthand how the conservation teams think through restoration projects with manuscripts, film, and any number of other artifacts. Aside from the expected highlights of seeing some of their work readying the upcoming Houdini archive exhibit, we were really impressed with the intricate and clever design considerations that their experts came up with in fabricating customized boxes and enclosures to properly store the materials.

If you’re in Austin, join us on Monday, June 29 for a hands-on cyanotype happy-hour workshop! RSVP and get more details here, then follow JDI Sidetracks on Instagram to keep up to date on our upcoming events.

A Thousand (and Six) Words

A Peek into the Future

If so much of our society is driven by instant gratification culture, can we train our dopamine response in positive ways that’s not just shopping on Amazon or the endless TikTok scroll?

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

Gonna tell my kids these are the Big Four

I love the Artemis II astronauts and our collective obsession/parasocial relationships with them for lots of reasons, but in going through the editing process of this issue’s article with Doug, I realized the biggest one: it is so refreshing to see people in leadership roles who I think the world of. Victor Glover, Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman, and Jeremy Hansen are brilliant. They are articulate, joyful, thoughtful, poetic, creative, driven, funny, and kind. They are good dads and siblings and friends and daughters, even as they have experienced grief, failures, doubts, and setbacks. They are human beings who represent all the best parts of us as a species, and I’m honored to get to look up at the TV screen, and even up at the moon, knowing that people who genuinely deserve to be role models are finally the ones we get to hear from.

And if something crazy goes down and the Integrity astronauts do happen to make first contact with an extraterrestrial species, I’m glad to have them be the first impression of who we are on Earth. (And a little jealous of those aliens).

– Shanna

Locked in on Moon Joy

by Doug Freeman

Like many of us, I’ve spent most of the past week with a live feed from space constantly playing in the background. The Artemis II mission has delivered a blast of optimism and excitement that we really haven’t experienced in years, and it feels especially poignant set against our current backdrop of assaults on both science and civilizations. My social feeds are currently a dichotomy of earthly outrage and heavenly wonder.

The direct communications with the Artemis II crew have of course provided the biggest must-see moments of the Integrity’s mission, but I think I’ve loved just as much the silent views of the cameras mounted outside the Orion spacecraft as it approached the moon, and the feeds trained on the mission control room back in Houston.

There was something beautiful in the simplicity of both the slow calming look out into space and the ground control team meticulously and competently going about their jobs to achieve something extraordinary, something that had never been done before, and my being able to voyeuristically tag along on that journey in real time.

On Monday, as the Artemis team began describing features of the far side of the moon and meteors they were watching strike the lunar surface, the entire feeling of the mission seemed to change. As many have noted, one of the key goals of the mission was for the crew to describe what they were seeing, to relate their reactions, and even their emotions. The cameras may snap amazing details and the data may reveal invaluable insights, but it was humanness of the mission that has captured all of our imaginations.

Watching the scientists and engineers be amazed and overwhelmed with surprise and joy as the crew described what they were seeing was probably the biggest highlight of the entire thing for me. The excitement and chatter visible in the control room even as the direct communication remained (mostly) calm and technical revealed a sense of discovery that I don’t feel we have shared collectively in a long time.

The entire world seemed to grasp at one moment in particular. Mission commander Reid Wiseman piped down to describe what he was seeing from the window: “It’s just everything from the training, but in three dimensions and absolutely unbelievable. This is incredible.” In response, Jacki Mahaffey in mission control replies with a chuckle, “Copy, moon joy.”

And so a new term was born out of the ineffable experience that pushed our communication to its limit. A simple term of childlike wonder that captured all of our feelings of not only the historic feat unfolding of humans reaching the furthest point in space that we’ve ever been, but of the experience of the moment and awe we all felt together. “Moon Joy.”

If that’s not the word of the year for 2026, we will have missed a glorious opportunity.

I’ll admit I had watched the Artemis II launch without any particular sensation of monumentality. I understood the achievement and importance of the mission, the significance for NASA to launch astronauts back to space for the first time in over 15 years, and to send a crew to the moon in nearly half a century. But it didn’t necessarily hold any sense of excitement for me.

After all, we have become used to rocket launches these days, from the constant stream of satellites sent into orbit or missions to the ISS. And we have telescopes that are showing us the most amazing images from deep space. In my mind, what we were achieving with Artemis was purely a technical feat and just another step towards whatever we might do next in space.

Like many of my generation, my most defining experience of NASA was the Challenger explosion in 1986. I was among the kids across the country sitting in front of TVs wheeled into classrooms suddenly confused as teachers scrambled to move on with the day after celebration turned to tragedy.

The Challenger explosion was effectively the beginning of the end of NASA’s launch program, which was finally shelved after the Columbia disaster in 2003. Sending humans to space had become too risky for us, and wasn’t worth the cost in lives, money, or morale. In the 21st Century, our space achievements became more technological than human, and for the public, even the ISS seemed to achieve only a few viral video moments rather than any groundbreaking human discoveries.

The NASA I grew up with was celebrated more for its history than its future; for what we had accomplished, not what we could achieve. And space today had become merely a place for billionaire tourist stunts that hardly represent the best of us.

We need NASA, and science more generally, to be bold and inspirational, to dare and risk even failure in a way that motivates our best instincts. Jeremy Hansen acknowledged as much on the crew’s call with Canadian Prime Minister Carney. That’s been missing for a long time as we have ceded our sense of human advancement to a cold technical achievement.

Hearing the astronauts’ and control room’s excitement was something different though. It was alive and infectious and overflowing with possibility. And I have to admit it felt a bit like some kind of generational redemption for my NASA-scarred childhood to have four astronauts between the ages of 47-50 leading this charge, and for the science and command teams on the ground to be led by so many brilliant women and showcasing such a diversity.

The fact that this event is happening as Project Hail Mary is the biggest film in the country right now is serendipitous. PHM’s story builds on the twin pillars of the excitement (and necessity) of sciencing our way out of an existential situation, and the essential need for fearless connection and “humanity” to achieve it.

Listening to the crew and ground control share those experiences of awe with the rest of us was truly a gift. It pulled us out of our doomscrolling and the pettiness of our day-to-day dramas to remind us to look up and marvel at the world, together. The Artemis II mission was decades in the making, a million small steps and innovations that the vast majority of us didn’t see to reach this point of epiphany and awe. When we did finally see it, feel it, no one could doubt the impact and monumentality of the mission.

But it was the humanness of it that made it so special, to see with our eyes what machines can not, to experience it and share that feeling with the world. To name a timeless spot in space for a spouse that passed away. The images will no doubt enlighten our understanding and unlock invaluable information, but what will stick with us about Integrity are the moments of humanity.

I believe that we have been craving that vision of collective awe, and for stories of hope and possibility and our best instincts. They are essential for us to imagine and build a better future. For all the technical achievements we’ve made in the past couple of decades, none of them can compare to the kind of inspiration that comes from sharing a profound human experience. We need to remember the power and joy of experiencing and sharing awe with the world.

And I’ll admit when I looked up at the sky tonight, I saw something different. Hopefully it’s something that I, and all of us, can hold onto. Amaze Amaze Amaze.

Mixtapes to the Moon

One of our favorite Radiolab episodes is from 2024, where Simon Adler looks at the impact of the Walkman in creating our own solipsistic experience of the world. But he takes that exploration all the way to the personal mixtapes taken aboard the Apollo 11 mission, and imagines Michael Collins’ experience traversing alone across the dark side of the moon.

What We’re Into

Do you know about the Moon Trees from Apollo 14 that are planted across the US? Turns out we’re going to have Artemis trees as well!

But really, how far away is the moon?

The Top “I Told You So!” Moments in the History of Science

Enshittification, but make it funny. Well played, Norway.

Three Artemis II poems that are heartbreaking, hopeful, and poignant.

Building Five

JDI Sidetracks (our creative club for interested and interesting people in Austin) has been having a creative year so far! We hosted an ikebana workshop in our office in February, and a visionboarding/collage night last week, and we’re excited about the other field trips and hangouts we're in the process of planning for the rest of the year. Follow us on Instagram at @JDI.sidetracks to stay in the loop with future events – we’d love to have you join us. Future event ideas and requests more than welcome!

A Thousand (and Twelve) Words

A Peek into the Future

“There may have been a moment when digital insights could have unlocked a vision of commerce that was more equitable, but unsurprisingly, the evolution towards surveillance capitalism has no interest in that type of economy.”

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

Happy Book Book season!

It’s March, which means we’ve finally all decided on our favorite books of the past year (it takes awhile, I know). Thus, it’s time for our ninth annual “Thoughts in Return” (or more casually known around the office as the “book book”), now shared with you on Superposition.

As always, these books don’t have to have been published in 2025, or be about science or design. The only requirement is that they fed our curiosity for the world around us, and added to our experience of the year enough to stick with us past closing their covers.

We have to admit, 2025 was filled with a lot of uncertainty, and in our world of science, a lot of setbacks. But it was also an amazing year for bold opportunities and new ideas. Inside you’ll find a list of our favorite reads over the past year, complete with personal commentary from our team.

From futuristic (re)visions to a supernatural graphic novel to a post-apocalyptic dating reality show to a deep-dive into quantum mechanics, these were some of the books that got us through 2025 with inspiration, comfort, and fascination. And if you’re in Austin, drop by our office for a physical copy (which also includes our past picks all the way back to 2017!).

– Shanna and Doug and the JDI Team

The Compound by Aisling Rawle

This book is like a car crash in the absolute best way: you really can’t look away. I tore through it in a day, and lost sleep reading “just one more page.” It takes place in a post-apocalyptic dating reality show (a Love Island-style paradise set in a desert hellscape) that becomes increasingly life-threatening and unhinged as it progresses. The most fun I’ve had reading in years with a book that actually had something to say.

– Shanna Gerlach

Could Should Might Don’t by Nick Foster

Nick has spent a career designing the future, and he shows that the typical sci-fi-driven version of the future that we tend to acquiesce to is often uninventive, and in many cases filled with things we don’t actually want. He challenges us to actually design a version of the future that shares our values and is worth bringing to life.

– Josh Jones-Dilworth

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

After aliens demolish Earth and force survivors into a game dungeon for a galactic reality show, Carl and his cat, Princess Donut, fight to survive one brutal level at a time. Fun, absurd, and surprisingly heartfelt. The audiobook version is a true standout.

– Michelle Gamboa

Ghosts: A Graphic Novel by Raina Telgemeier

This coming-of-age graphic novel is about sisterhood, disability, courage, and grief. It’s set in a small Northern California town that has an unusual relationship with ghosts.

– Liz Jones-Dilworth

Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor

Notes on Infinity follows a group of young scientists who find early success in biotech while still figuring out who they are. Like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, it looks at what happens when talent and ambition collide with friendship, love, and the realities of growing up. It’s as much about the human cost of innovation as it is about the thrill and peril of pushing science to its limits. 

– Rebecca Ewing

Our Migrant Souls by Héctor Tobar

Weaving his own story with those of students, writers, and everyday people, Hector reveals the interior lives and experiences of the growing number of Americans who identify as “Latino”. This is a great read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the Latino identity and culture in the United States today. 

– Risa Fielder

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Ravelli

An exploration of the fundamental ideas of modern physics, relativity, quantum mechanics, and our place in the universe.

– Collin Young

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

In a small Irish town in the 1980s, a coal merchant, Bill Furlong, makes a disturbing discovery at the local convent and must decide whether to take a stand, or accept the status quo.

– Emily LeClair

The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

I love history and this book didn’t disappoint! It offers an intimate look into Winston Churchill’s personal and professional life during his first year as Prime Minister, providing a nonfiction account of what it was like leading a nation during one of the world’s most harrowing and horrific times in history.

– Brittany Edwards

Universe at the Tips of Your Toes: Real Poems for Real Kids by the poets of Typewriter Rodeo

Our own Shanna Gerlach is a co-author of this brilliant and charming collection of poems from the word wranglers at Typewriter Rodeo. Full of wonder and wander.

– The JDI Team

What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Dr. Johnson doesn’t sugarcoat the climate crises facing us, but she also boldly seeks out alternative visions to the catastrophic for what our future could be. Interviews with artists, scientists, community activists, and designers lay out possibilities amid the disruption.

– Doug Freeman

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

This book stayed with me long after I finished it. As a mom, it brought up the quiet sacrifices we make and just how fragile everything around us really is. One line in particular stuck with me: “But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.” The book also paints a powerful picture of climate change, the environment, and the impact it can have.

– Kayla Ritchie

A Thousand (and Five) Words

Building Five

JDI Sidetracks, our creative club for interesting and interested people, is back on March 30th for a night of collaging and vision boarding. Unlike our more structured workshops (last month was Ikebana!), this one doesn’t have a cap on participants and is open to anyone who’d like to join for a relaxed and creative hang.

If you’re in Austin (or know anyone who is and might enjoy a night of low-stakes art experimenting with other curious people), go to our Creative Mornings registration page to get details and sign up!

Can’t make it this time? We’re aiming to meet up on the last Monday of each month, so mark your calendars and follow @jdi.sidetracks for info on future events.

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

I can’t stop thinking about women.

Women in sports, to be specific. The audiobook that I’ve been listening to on long solo runs over the last couple weeks (Marathon Women by Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon with an official bib) has been an interesting dovetail with the Olympics coverage that’s been the background to the rest of my waking hours recently. Switzer’s memoir details not only her experience as a long distance runner back when the pervading school of thought was that women’s uteruses would fall out if they ran farther than a mile, but her career-long journey to reverse that school of thought (including finally bringing the women’s marathon to the Olympics). That’s one of my favorite not-so-fun facts: there was no women’s running event in the Olympics longer than 1500m until the marathon event was finally included in 1984 – recently enough that my mom was already my age. Every woman runner from that era had to fight to prove that they were capable of more than anyone gave them credit for, without athletics causing them to lose their femininity or childbearing abilities (not that that should matter, but I digress), creating a counterculture that feels almost impossible to imagine in this era of running influencers and an absolutely thriving female running market.

In stark contrast to Switzer’s fight for women in sports, these Winter Olympics have shown women utterly dominating – powerful bodies, feminine bodies, aggressive and confident and technical and tough and graceful bodies. When the US women’s hockey team won gold in overtime as I was writing this, the entire (packed!) stadium roared as the women tumbled out of the bench onto the ice and into each other, and I’ll be honest, I teared up a bit. Further proof of the death of another counterculture – this time because it’s fully embedded into culture.

– Shanna

The Counterculture Must Die

by Doug Freeman

Last month when Bob Weir passed away, the founding Grateful Dead guitarist was rightly celebrated by everyone from political leaders to the nightly news. It all felt a bit incongruous to me, though. Here was one of the cornerstones of the Sixties’ counterculture, being feted by the most mainstream of culture.

It got me blasphemously wondering if it is fair to even still consider the Grateful Dead countercultural? Certainly they were for “their time,” but probably not for the past 40 years, at least. By the 80s the Deadhead stickers were on Cadillacs and their logo plastered on tee shirts at the beach. Hell, the Dead even received Kennedy Center Honors. And Bob Dylan has a Nobel Prize for Literature.

That’s not a knock necessarily on the Dead, but really more a recognition of what counterculture is and how it operates. Countercultures, by their nature, are not meant to last. A counterculture has an inherently limited life-cycle.

By definition, counterculture is set up against a homogenous mainstream culture. It questions what the mainstream culture considers right, just, healthy, and proper. And there are only so many ways that it can evolve from that position of opposition.

Most countercultures will burn out. They are not compatible with the ecosystem, so will die or be pushed so far to the edges as to lose any sense of threat to the culture. But they are also often eventually consumed by the mainstream, and if it manages to keep its ethos, at best become a harmless subculture. This strikes me as the Grateful Dead’s path.

The reason we celebrate and idealize the Sixties so much is because it was largely a counterculture that was consumed and diffused into the mainstream. On the one hand you could view this as the movement having gained real cultural power, and in that sense maybe even “won.” I don’t think that’s invalid, and in the half-century since the 1960s the US has certainly moved more socially progressive in notable and important ways. On the other hand, though, you could see this as the dilution of its power. Those views aren’t incompatible.

A true counterculture is inherently political, because as much as it is a stance against a mainstream culture, it’s a stance against power. If it’s not truly threatening to the mainstream ideologies, it’s really just a subculture.

That brings me to the final way a counterculture can evolve, which is into revolution - a sudden overwhelming shift that breaks the system when the counterculture gains control of power. For a counterculture to actually succeed in revolution though, it has to have made enough mainstream inroads to actually have popular support. Otherwise, it will likely need to become authoritarian and against the “people” to maintain its power.

So we have three potential paths for the counterculture lifecycle. It can be ostracized to the edges and burn out; it can be sublimated into the culture and maybe maintained as a subculture; or it can become a revolution, in which case it has either tipped into mainstream culture, or holds onto power by force.

American capitalism prefers the consumption model, while American power seeks the destruction. Right now in the US, and to some extent globally, we’re witnessing a cultural cataclysm of these forces playing out before us.

Where is Today’s Counterculture

Adam Mastrioni recently wrote a substack post on “The Decline of Deviance” about how our culture has lost these pockets of weirdness, dangerousness, and rebellion. There’s a lot of good data and points in the post, and indications that perhaps the internet has flattened culture and suppressed outliers rather than allowing them to flourish.

I have another hypothesis though. What if there is a vibrant and powerful counterculture, but it just doesn’t look like what we expect? And what if we don’t actually like it? What if the counterculture today is anti-science, socially regressive, isolationist?

If a counterculture is set in opposition to mainstream culture, and our culture in the U.S. has become increasingly progressive over the past 50 years, then the reactionary culture of MAGA is in fact the most impactful counterculture we have right now.

They have certainly positioned themselves as such, which I think is a large part of the confusion for most liberals (and perhaps even MAGA itself). Everyone has come to see themselves as the outsiders, underdogs, and oppressed. Liberals love the idea of a counterculture, because we think in terms of 1960’s countercultural values and non-conformity as a positive, but there is absolutely no rule that says a counterculture has to be progressive.

As with most culture clashes, this moment has created an absolute mess, not the least because MAGA is currently in power right now. To be clear, I think most of the political push of MAGA is about power and money more than culture, but a number of these regressive countercultural forces have coalesced around the movement in a messy swirl. You can have anti-vaxxers and peptide-experimenters converging over self-directed healthcare; crypto-bros and anti-capitalists looking for an alternative to a K-shaped economy; anti-government activists and authoritarian thugs. It’s turned into a toxic mess of opportunism for all these groups to take advantage of this moment of upheaval.

But if a counterculture by nature must die, then we are at an inflection point right now. Perhaps this is an extinction burst for many of these cultures and they’ll fade back to the edges. Perhaps it’s a revolution, one that seems increasingly tipped towards authoritarianism against the norms of mainstream culture and social values. Or maybe the current countercultural power-play will dissolve into another half-century of steady dilution into mainstream culture, and we’re set on a path to a regressive era in the US, and perhaps worldwide. I can’t pretend to know how this will play out.

I do think this framing is useful though, mostly because the underlying force of any counterculture is change.

The system isn’t working for a lot of groups of people, and suddenly many of those folks previously on the outside or in opposition have found themselves part of the “party” in power, like a dog that caught the car and now has no clue what to do with it. The current countercultural coalition can’t hold together, especially as it becomes more clear that it’s really just the same powerful interests co-opting a populist angst.

The Sixties counterculture was of course also an oddball mix of various groups and goals and grievances, and certainly not as coherent as our Woodstock nostalgia would have us believe. But the overwhelming discontent with the systems of mainstream culture and power was a shared feeling, and that discontent was turned into a real political will.

Even if these countercultural forces of today seem rallied into a regressive MAGA miasma (however tentative that coalition may be), this chaotic moment also offers an opportunity to reclaim the counterculture narrative, and a reminder it won’t happen by fighting for a “return to normalcy.” It’s a moment to boldly imagine something better rather than timidly argue for the safety of the status quo. That includes social, cultural, and scientific visions, not just systems of power and money.

The common underlying sentiment of all countercultures is a need for change. It’s difficult to rally that energy into something meaningful and progressive if all of our visions of the future that we’re projecting are catastrophic. Right now, we have the opportunity to build a narrative counter to the regressive pushes of power, but it needs to go beyond the necessary resistance and opposition to present a galvanizing and inspiring alternative counterculture vision.

Everybody Wants to Be a Counterculture

Looking at what might define the counterculture today, here are two interesting visions. For Florencia Lujani writing in 2021, she finds it in the Black Lives Matter, Afrofuturism, and Solar Punk. For Arek O’Connell of the Christian Reformed Church of North America, its religion (and Christianity has of course always been a bundle of internal countercultural splinters!). While they see counterculture in different places, they both identify how so many folks, and especially youth, are searching so desperately for those meaningful alternatives. It’s a good reminder of how toxic cultures have been able to attract so many youth online these days - looking at you, manosphere.

What We’re Into

We spent way too much time drawing stick horses this week.

A weekly roundup of cool data visualizations, with a heavy emphasis on the Winter Olympics (as it should).

And speaking of the Olympics, if you haven’t yet stumbled across SportsBall’s data viz videos, please enjoy a sharp nudge down the rabbit hole with his most recent curling, hockey, and figure skating breakdowns.

Depending on the day, our feelings on AI bounce between Matt Shumer (we’re all screwed!) and David William Silva (Calm down, fools!).

Peptide biohacking is all the rage, but honestly these parties sound like they suck.

Building Five

Starting on March 4th, we’re turning the first Wednesday of every month into community co-working days at JDI. We’re opening up our office and inviting anyone that wants to come in and use a desk to swing by and work on their projects. Whether you need a place to hunker down or hang out, we’d love to have you! Just shoot us an email at hello@jones-dilworth.com.

Also, SXSW will once again be taking over Austin next month, and we’re not exactly sure what to expect this year. Under new management, they’ve consolidated all the various festival tracts (film, music, and interactive) into a single week. We’re excited to have so many friends return this year, and for their panels on everything from biomimicry to how AI is transforming the lab. If you’ll be in town, let us know. We’re hosting several events throughout the week and would love to have you join us!

A Thousand (and Five) Words

A Peek into the Future

THE BOOK BOOK: JDI’s annual roundup of our favorite books we read last year.

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

Tis the season.

It’s the most nostalgic time of the year. I feel pretty confident in saying I’m not the only person somewhat transported back to childhood by a sensory overload of Christmas (for better or for worse; for me, it’s bittersweet): The first notes of the opening theme to your favorite holiday movie, the taste of those weird fruity rainbow candy canes, the smell of ham wafting from the oven while you fight over new toys, the itchy flannel of matching pjs, the wide-eyed jumpscare vintage smirk of Elf on the Shelf when you accidentally make eye contact walking into a room, etc etc etc depending on your own traditions.

Even for those who don’t celebrate Christmas, I’d imagine at this point it’s pretty impossible to leave the house in December without creating/resurfacing past memories and associations that involve at the very least Mariah Carey and twinkly lights. Both a blessing and a curse, this time of year can start to feel like there’s a lot riding on it because of how strongly sensory associations can be attached to our emotions and vice versa (I don’t make the rules and neither do you; it’s neuroscience).

Anyways, all that is to say: work with your brain, not against it. Notice which sensory inputs are grounding or comforting this time of year and lean in. Get curious about your friends’ and family’s different memories and sense associations. Or try a new one to lay the groundwork for a future memory a few years down the line. Give yourself a little grace — both current you and childhood you.

And…read the first linked article in our “What We’re Into” section below: it’s a Brian Eno piece from 1992 on his attempt to collect and map the bazillion or so different scents that exist (the sense that is most closely tied to memory and emotion because of its direct and unfiltered connection to our hippocampus and amygdala. You can trust me on that one, I did a middle school science fair project all about smell). It’s a cool concept to bounce around and wander through alongside Eno, and the “punchline” also manages to feel relevant to today’s current conversations on AI (and Doug’s article below) decades later.

Merry nostalgia season,

– Shanna

Stumbling Into the Generative Information Age

by Doug Freeman

In the last Superposition, we looked at LLMs as an information system through the lens of Media Studies, arguing that its inherent conversational mode is conflicting with our traditional mode of an archival information system. The distinction between archival and conversational exchanges of knowledge arguably sets up one of the biggest challenges with how we are currently utilizing AI and why it is failing us as we move from the Information Age to the Generative Information Age.

We proposed that the root of our current problems with LLMs is that we are treating them like an archive instead of as conversational engines.

I want to take this idea a step further now though, and look at what it might mean when the information systems that we consider the anchor of knowledge become generative rather than archival. You could say this has been the case since the Web opened the archive to more public contribution, but generative AI is pushing us into entirely new territory.

In his recent essay that received a ton of attention, The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, James Marriott basically argues that civilization is going down the tubes because nobody reads anymore. He cites a litany of studies that have chronicled the nosedive of literacy rates, IQs, and attention spans since the smartphone emerged as the medium of choice for so much of our information.

I think Marriott is being wildly hyperbolic here, though I don’t disagree with what he’s saying. He’s following along the Neil Postman lines of Amusing Ourselves To Death in saying modern media has wrecked our ability to think critically and deeply, and that our modern civilization was enabled by the ability to read, which – in the tradition of Walter Ong – actually reshaped how we think.

Sure, I buy all that. My grandmother, who grew up during the Depression, used to say sagely that “If you can read, you can do anything,” which I still want to hold as some basic tenet of humanity. But man, I’ve fixed so much more stuff in my house thanks to DIY Youtube videos than instruction manuals.

My point is, I don’t think people reading fewer books is a sign of civilization’s collapse, and I say this as someone with an over-devotion to the books stacked around my house. Marriott conflates literacy with reading, but literacy takes many forms, and isn’t simply about books. Literacy is a competence, knowledge, and critical thinking, and can be applied to everything from baseball to baking, from books to TikTok - and from an archival literacy to a conversational literacy.

What Marriott is really bemoaning is a lack of literacy for our new information environment, and I would argue (admittedly optimistically) that new generations are learning more every day about how to think critically within these new modes. Right now it’s exceedingly messy because old literacies are increasingly ineffective, and new literacies are still being formed. And it’s happening incredibly rapidly before norms can be fully established.

This of course is a debate that goes back to Plato’s Phaedrus (and probably even earlier) when he has Socrates warn of the effects of writing as potentially destroying our human capacity for memory. In fact, it’s impossible not to read Phaedrus today and not think of AI in Socrates’ description of bad rhetoric, of performance and form without soul and substance.

Which brings me to our current civilization-collapsing calamity of AI literacy. My biggest concern is not that we haven’t yet developed the proper critical understanding of how to understand or use AI — we’ll get there just as we have with past media and technologies — but rather the disruption to our sense of the archive with the rise of the Generative Information Age.

The Generative Archive

The archive isn’t going away, but our relationship to it is certainly changing. If, as we argued in the last Superposition, the Information Age has exposed a lot of the fictions and fragility of how we organize knowledge, the Generative Information Age is transforming how we interact with it.

The biggest change I would anticipate is a shift away from the notion that there is a stable (if evolving) body of knowledge, and that access to it can provide “wisdom.” As Dr. Sarah Bentley noted in her excellent article in Nature earlier this year:

“What generative AI inadvertently did was to expose the highly ‘constructed’ nature of knowledge, both its origin story (who, where and why) but also the subsequent representation of that knowledge as it is composited onto our digital screens. This particular form of AI, along with its limitations, biases, and hallucinations (Sun et al., 2024), serves us with a timely reminder of the fallible nature of knowledge (Emsley, 2023). For social scientists, this may not be news. But for the world at large—the voting electorate, the summoned juror, or even the doomscroller—this is big news. And when it comes to the need to understand and tackle the reality of mass-scale mis- or disinformation (which significantly predates the arrival of generative AI), this is much-needed news (Posetti, 2018).”

Instead, what we get with generative AI is the idea that the conversation is how knowledge is built. We don’t just go to the archive to find a received knowledge, but rather to dynamically engage with it, probe it, evolve it. This conversational and generative construction could actually be very empowering, even as it upsets so many of our traditional knowledge systems.

So what does conversational knowledge look like in comparison to archival knowledge?

Most immediately, it’s not about direct answers. It’s about the process of how we come to those answers and the questions we ask. Bentley compares this new mode to the Sophists of ancient Greece, and proposes we should adopt a more Socratic approach to interactions with conversational AI. But we also need to appreciate Generative AI for what it actually is — a tool rather than some kind of oracle.

Let’s be clear that there are many problems with this generative information mode as well, including reinforcing our own assumptions and echo chambers, the lack of transparency in these systems, and the disruption to our perception of a shared, concrete “knowledge” base. We used to think that the digital archive was a path to a more stable permanence, but I’ve had enough writing disappear when an online publication goes away to fill several books!

But more concerning is what happens if we imagine the Web as completely dynamic and generative, with a generative UI that constructs webpages and content on demand based on what the visitor wants.

It’s easy to imagine that future, and it’s in fact already somewhat happening as websites and search results become more individually personalized. Right now, we still largely go to a website and expect the information to be the same for everyone. We may have to click around to find what we’re looking for — and it can of course be updated — but we’re all working from the same text, as it were.

But in a conversational knowledge mode, we’d simply ask a website what we want to know, and it would return answers, perhaps even generate graphics and web-pages on demand with a Generative UI. ChatGPT and other LLM engines are making this notion more familiar, and I imagine that’s the battle the major players are gearing up for - to be the fount of all information and essentially replace the WWW. It makes the browser wars seem quaint.

This shift from archival webpage to generative conversation is essentially what we’ve already experienced from customer service FAQs to customer service chatbots. FAQs were a shared, collective archive of knowledge, whereas the chatbot puts the onus on us to ask the right questions.

The challenge with this is the not-knowing what we don’t know — what we might be missing because we’re not thinking of asking. We like to pretend that our LLMs are tapped into some omniscient archival brain, but even if that was any semblance of realistic, the problem remains with how we retrieve and understand the information it is presenting. We have fully crossed over the Rumsfeldian Rubicon into a world of unknown unknowns.

The Generative Information Age requires that we consider ourselves generative information intakers, and understand how to use the information in a conversational, interrogative mode. It requires a reliance on our own critical thinking even more than the mode of accepted archival knowledge, and the holding of divergent perspectives at once. This may be discouraging to a lot of folks who have watched skepticism towards science or other expertise erode so much of the past couple of decades.

But I believe we can flip that perspective too, as messy as the repercussions may be. Maybe the distrust in expertise is a questioning of “received” information, of the archive. We’re in a period of such social flux precisely because we are skeptical of information, which we will need to be in a Generative Information Age. This new AI Literacy will need to better cultivate our overall critical skills so we’re not simply seeking reinforcement of our thinking but embracing the uncertainty and ability to evolve our understanding with new perspectives.

I think Socrates would dig it.

How AI is rewriting the rules for product review sites

According to Adobe, referral traffic to retailers on Black Friday from AI chatbots and search engines jumped 800% over the same period last year. The Media CoPilot digs into what this means for the future of review sites, and our own purchasing behavior, especially as we move from SEO to Generative Engine Optimization (or whatever we’re going to end up calling this new pocket of publishing and marketing).

What We’re Into

Brian Eno on scents? Yes, please.

If a water molecule were the size of a grain of sand, E. coli would be the size of a cow. Metaphors for Biology: Sizes

Oh no, WSJ is on to us! Companies are Desperately Seeking “Storytellers.”

A conversation on the impossible math of maps from the Science Friday podcast.

A beautiful, devastating, and poetic plea amid the impossible possibilities of our attention-addled era.

Building Five

We hosted 2025’s final JDI Sidetracks event of the year last week (our first one partnered with CreativeMornings!), and it was one of our favorites that we’ve done so far: Lauren Luscombe, Austin’s only certified kintsugi artist, joined us to lead a hands-on workshop. We’ve long been fascinated by the ancient Japanese tradition of mending cracks in broken pottery, and it was amazing to try it together. Follow our Sidetracks Instagram for more events in 2026!

A Thousand (and Several) Words

A Peek into the Future

We don’t know what the new year will bring, but we’re excited to continue to explore all the weirdness and possibilities emerging on our scientific and cultural frontiers. Thanks for reading Superposition this year, and we’ll see you in 2026!

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

Libraries refuse to die (thank God).

And library social media is absolutely killing it right now. One of my favorites is this reel from the City of Marion Libraries in Australia. But also this one, from Vancouver’s Public Libraries. And this one from North Little Rock. (Clearly, it’s easy to end up down the rabbit hole). Their posts are somehow equal parts unhinged and wholesome, on-trend and unexpected, “chronically online” and still so analog. Most importantly, though, they’re human, and the comments section is loving it.

All of this is just more evidence of how, against all odds, libraries have continually laughed in the face of extinction as the entire world has shifted around them. The internet exists now and you don’t need to dig through shelves of books anymore? Great, come use our public computers. Global pandemic means you can’t come check out physical books? No problem, here’s an automatic ebook library card. Ebooks mean now you don’t ever need to come pick up a physical book again? Cool, we hired an award-winning architect to create a really gorgeous building so it kinda feels like a destination in and of itself so you’ll probably want to visit anyways. Also we have community events and we’re the last place you can go hang out while spending zero money, no strings attached. (A real conversation between libraries and everyone else, probably.)

Anyways, long live libraries. And shoutout adaptation.

– Shanna

The Conversation Versus the Archive

by Doug Freeman

Over the past couple of months, Wikipedia has been under attack from conservatives for a perceived liberal bias. Again. This time the controversy was stirred up in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assination as editors debated whether his wife, Erika Kirk, deserved her own Wikipedia stub.

As these things tend to go on hot-button topics on Wikipedia, the publicly available discussion among the editors took a lot of turns before ultimately deciding through their standard consensus process that she did deserve a dedicated page based on notoriety and enough external sources. This is exactly how the process is supposed to play out.

Yet the whole debate has refreshed the aggravation from conservative activists over their right to control narratives. Fox News blew up the outrage, which then took off into completely predictable mischaracterizations of how Wikipedia works and its editors make their decisions.

As Tim Higgins noted in his Wall Street Journal article (with an amazing lede, btw), Wikipedia has core policies to guide how entries are written. But that doesn’t seem to matter much if you disagree with what’s written, or perhaps have an agenda to reshape political and social narratives. And now we’ve gotten a Grokipedia courtesy of Elon Musk and AI, which is going just as great as you’d expect.

I’m old enough to remember when we had to instruct our college freshman writing students that this new “Wikipedia thing” was not a reliable source. This is still somewhat true, but now it’s more about getting students to dig deeper into the cited primary sources. We can’t pretend that Wikipedia isn’t a core resource for information for nearly everyone these days.

Now we’re faced with AI engines providing summaries and information, and schools are trying their damndest to create policies that incorporate this new technology. The bigger issue is not just citations, but that we’re relying on these AI results to deliver us factually-based information and instead, these engines are just spitballing to appease us like my dad explaining why the sky is blue.

There’s no need to regurgitate the litany of bad results that LLMs have returned in conversation, but it’s clear that we don’t know how to properly use this technology yet. And that’s of course just the tip of the iceberg with the challenges that AI presents as the Information Age evolves into the Generative Information Age.

But let’s be clear about what’s happening here. Media Studies provides a useful lens to think about the shifts we’re experiencing. LLMs operate in a conversational framework: a dynamic system of back and forth, with answers shifting slightly depending on the context in which they’re asked. These tools are actually quite excellent and useful when we use them conversationally, as they’re designed to function. The problem is that too many of us are using and thinking about LLMs within an archival framework. We’re treating AI as an exhaustive encyclopedia, and conferring upon it the credibility of that knowledge base.

The Generative Information Age

When we think about knowledge as an archive, we get libraries and encyclopedias and the sense that all collected human information and knowing is available to us, if we can just find it within the stacks. We developed all kinds of systems to both navigate and curate these archives.

Conversely, a conversational mode of information does not have that grounded sense of shared “knowledge” or expertise that we expect from an archival mode. It would be more in line with oral traditions that are expected to evolve, adjust histories to current moments, and focus less on answers than how we get there.

I’m not necessarily arguing that an archival information system is better than a conversational one. There are, in fact, great advantages to both. But we’ve relied on an archival information system for centuries, while conversation has operated in a different sphere for us. It’s not that we don’t know how to operate within a conversational information system (we do it every day!), but we need to recognize it is fundamentally different from an archival system.

In Media Studies, we consider the creation of the printing press to be the start of a democratization of knowledge in the sense that the archive was no longer hoarded and related to the public only by scholars, elites, and priests. Our current Information Age has exploded that democratization even more, but beyond just expanding access to the archive, we also have the internet’s capability for us to add to it. We’ve fully entered into a Read-Write mode of information, and all kinds of wackadoodle ideas can be easily published and placed (somewhat) on the same level with everything else on the Web. We flattened the archive and expertise.

Back when I was teaching those first-year college students at the turn of the century, this flattening of the information hierarchy was the biggest concern. We were focused on teaching them how to judge sources and context to determine reliable information from the dubious. If we could at least get students to question and probe the credibility of the source of the content, then they could hopefully sift good information from bad.

Needless to say, there are all kinds of problems we can call out an archival mode of information for – biases, control, access, authority, authenticity, etc. And as much as the new Read-Write Web muddied our perception of the information archive, it also excitingly expanded perspectives and whose voices were “allowed” to be included. We’ve managed to balance that fairly well with a notion of transparency that has made Wikipedia reliable.

Every new form of media brings with it the predictable pearl-clutching that it will destroy our society (will someone please just think of the children!). Our reactions to LLMs are certainly following that expected pattern. But AI is breaking that tentative balance of our new chaotic web archive. Even beyond its hallucinations and eagerness to please, its black box formulations wreck our ability to judge sources or the veracity of where and how it is getting its information. It’s not just a matter of whether we can trust what it is saying is true, but that we don’t know the point-of-view and potential biases that are inherent to its information. In contrast, I can judge a publication’s POV based on its author or source.

Grokipedia highlights this problem with, as Renee DiResta outlines in the Atlantic: “855,279 articles, no human editors, and no way for users to request improvements beyond a suggestion box addressed to its eponymous chatbot author.”

A new report from the Washington Post analyzing 47,000 ChatGPT conversations found that 35% of the conversations were seeking specific information. That far outweighs the next highest proportion of 13% for “musings and abstract discussion.” In the Generative Information Age, we understand the importance of asking the right questions, but we don’t properly know how to comprehend or use the answers that return.

We’re treating LLMs like an archive instead of conversational engines.

We do know how to operate in conversational informational systems, and how to understand them. Conversations, unlike the archive, are inherently both input and output, and from that back and forth, new ideas or insights might emerge. Even in conversation with an expert on a topic, where there may be deference to the other’s point of view, we wouldn’t consider talking with that expert as access to a full archive of knowledge around a subject, but as access to that person’s own experience and knowledge base.

Conversations are an excellent format for sparking insights, which is why some of the best use cases for LLMs remain facilitating brainstorming or seeking out our own potentially overlooked biases. LLMs are an amazing conversational tool, though we also have to realize the effect is ultimately solipsistic. Our conversations with AI are not truly a shared exchange of ideas, but are merely mimicking that exchange.

The challenge right now at the dawn of this new Generative Information Age is to establish how we should be properly using these tools. We need to teach AI literacy in the same way we were instructing digital literacy 20 years ago. When used as an archive, LLMs can be highly problematic. As a conversational medium, they become incredibly powerful and useful.

Zooming out though, it’s not simply about understanding the mode of conversational versus archival mediums. What happens to the very ways we think about knowledge when our information systems become fully generative rather than archival?

In the next Superposition, we’ll dig into those repercussions. Stay tuned.

With Grokipedia, Topdown Control of Knowledge is New Again

As everyone is diving into all the obvious biases and problems with Elon Musk’s Grokipedia, Ryan McGrady puts the new AI encyclopedia in the context of information and knowledge control.

What We’re Into

A fascinating interview from Nautilus with Steve Ramirez, author of How to Change a Memory: He Erased Memory in Mice. Then Thought About Erasing His Own.

We won’t go on another rant about the word of the year, but in case you haven’t been fully beaten down by tweens throwing around “Six Seven” everywhere, Dictionary.com has you covered.

Ever seen a video of a Peacock Spider? You’re welcome.

A new book that explores 600 years of Tarot card designs. Some of these decks are stunning, including Dali’s famous deck.

What did your hometown look like 750 million years ago? Here’s an interactive map that lets you see how the earth has changed.

Building Five

The past two weekends, our office was an official stop on the Austin Studio Tour. It’s one of our favorite events in Austin every year, and we had some incredible artists showcasing their work in our space. Enjoy some photos from the weekend, and check out the art of Lauren Luscombe, Axuro LTD, Marnie Jean, Haley Lancaster, and Kate Hellenbeck.

A Thousand (and Seven) Words

A Peek into the Future

Next time on Superposition: “What happens if we imagine the Web as absolutely dynamic and generative, with a generative UI that constructs a webpage and content on demand based on what the visitor wants?”

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

We’ve finally broken Doug.

The day after the 2024 election last fall, Doug and I had a heart-to-heart. I was crashing out, and he was ever the optimist, reassuring me that while yes, this sucks, it could also be an opportunity for something new and better to be rebuilt (starting in four years) if the currently existing systems were torn apart by the new administration. He was able to acknowledge the reality of what was happening, move straight into opportunity mode, and continue functioning. Impressive, honestly.

This edition of Superposition, and of 2025, reveals a slightly different layer to Doug. It's a little scary to see even the most positive of us lose their eternal sunshine, but maybe also refreshing? And a bit less lonely. As Doug quotes Ayana Johnson below, “We’re pretty fucked, but…”

- Shanna

A Crisis of Doomer Loops and Hopium Hype

by Doug Freeman

A friend once told me that my belief system seems to exist somewhere between “It will all work out the way it’s supposed to” and “It’s your own damn fault.” I typically love the dichotomy of those poles, of operating between an assured faith and personal responsibility.

I consider it an optimistic realism, which I’ve found to be a generally good posture to get through most things in life. It’s an outlook that allows me to consider even the most dire of situations and look for solutions, without letting resignation or rage tilt into ineffectuality.

This summer has really put that mindset to the test for me, though. All of our challenges - politically, socially, environmentally - seem too large and insurmountable to put a dent in. I imagine that I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed to the point of exhaustion, and even paralysis.

With all of this in mind, reading Adam Mastroianni’s recent post looking at this paralyzing moment hit a particular chord with me: how we all seem to be walking around with this sense of impending doom and yet still just going about our days as if it’s inevitable or there is nothing we can do about it.

For me, the breaking point came in July when floods ripped through the Hill Country down here in Texas. Over 100 people were killed, including a number of children who were attending summer camps in the area. It was an awful event that struck in the middle of the night on the Fourth of July, so the short-notice flash flood alerts that were sent went largely unseen until it was too late.

This of course happened as our government retreats from advancing any climate solutions, if not outright undermining them. Efforts like the decommissioning of the climate-monitoring satellites emphasize just how much we are moving from climate denial to active negligence and harm. These are the systems that not only supply us with fundamental research data, but help predict disasters and alert us to precisely the kind of storms that are currently impacting us.

So I’ve been feeling particularly…ineffectual.

We all recognize that as individuals, our impact on these catastrophic problems is pretty limited, if not outright futile. Perhaps we could have previously felt that “the powers that be” were working towards solutions, but even as slow and lumbering as those systems have proven on any number of issues over the years, we can’t even delude ourselves with that comfort now.

I feel like I’m caught between the cycle of climate doomerism and hopium, except it’s been extended out to so many aspects of our lives these days. And I haven’t quite been sure how to break out of that cycle, either personally or more broadly for us as a culture.

Like the climate doomerism/hopium debate, we seem to agree on the catastrophe but not the route forward. On one hand, the challenges are so insurmountable that it seems only drastic change (say geoengineering) is needed; on the other hand, we already know what needs to be done (cut carbon emissions) and should focus on progressing towards those goals.

Here’s the thing, though: I truly believe that those doomer/hopium polarities are a false dichotomy. Both things can be true. In fact, both things need to be true. In my mind, organizations like Reflective get it right in calling for research into geoengineering solutions like stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), but as a potential part of a comprehensive approach that necessarily requires longer-term solutions like cutting our emissions.

We want a magic solution that can set things right quickly and with as little effort and inconvenience as possible - that’s our tech-driven miracle mindset at work, to which I’m certainly susceptible. And who knows, maybe we’ll get it. But we can’t just passively wait for it. We have to put in the work, holistically across all fronts, precisely because we don’t actually know what might work best. We need all ideas on the table, and I don’t want you to stop just because I personally think it’s crazy or that it won’t work. (Spoiler: I’ve been wrong before!).

I love the way that Ayana Johnson frames all of this in her book What If We Get It Right?. Johnson starts from a pretty provocative place. As she admits at the outset, her usual response when asked how bad climate change truly is: “We’re pretty fucked, but…”

Johnson’s “but” is doing a lot of work, holding the entire world on its back. She follows that sentiment unspooling an array of potential “visions of climate futures” through interviews with some of the leading scientists and activities working on addressing climate change, and expands the conversation to everything from policy and design to culture and community.

But her starting from a place of admitting how bad things are and how much worse they are going to get was really freeing to me. There is something incredibly empowering when we look the disaster in the face and admit how bad it is. We can start imagining ways that things can be different. Instead of plugging our fingers in the wall to stop the leak, we can start dreaming up pump stations. That’s what Johnson presents in her book – visions that break “the way things are” for the possibilities of the way things could be.

In this newsletter over the past few months we’ve emphasized the need to think about how we will rebuild the science infrastructure that this administration is dismantling, and embracing the fundamental shifts in the systems and order we’ve relied upon for decades. The idea is to find opportunities to do things better coming out of all this disruption, even while recognizing how painful this transitional moment will be.

Part of the reframing that Johnson’s book provided for me though was to stop thinking about just “rebuilding.” In this moment when so much work is being lost and destroyed, it’s tempting to first want to right the scales, set the foundations back up. But this mindset of rebuilding is not necessarily progress, and really just another form of nostalgia.

You don’t recover from a flood by rebuilding the exact same thing in the exact same spot.

I believe deeply in the power of the stories we tell and visions that we project for the way things can be. In a moment of disaster, our instinct is to pull everything back to “normal” as quickly as possible. But what if we run into it, clear-eyed at the leveled landscape of destruction, and think what could be here instead?

Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult

It’s a bit eerie to read an article that feels so relevant to today’s exact moment, and then realize it’s over seven years old, written in a world before COVID and only a year into Trump’s first term. A bit discouraging, too, to realize this is nothing new; but maybe also a bit validating that we’ve already “survived” this long? Have things gotten worse? Have they always been this bad? As someone with family members in echo chambers that feel absolutely indestructible, I appreciated this exacting and nuanced analysis of how and why they happen, along with a path (a possible, albeit difficult one) towards escape.

What We’re Into

A fascinating project to design an interactive, relational database of music genres. Hint: zoom in to see the connected web. (Thanks to Instead of Doomscrolling!)

Melanie Mitchell takes Thomas Friedman to task for his “Magical Thinking” about AI.

Check out the front pages of newspapers all over the world, for any date in the past 15ish years.

Jeff DeGraffe sees AI causing a collapse of “intellectual agility,” which is needed more today than ever.

A Thousand (and Eight) Words

A Peek into the Future

Next time on Superposition: “In the Generative Information Age, we understand the importance of asking the right questions, but we don’t properly know how to comprehend the answers that return.”

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

I’ll admit, I fell for it.

I’ve been through so many tech hype cycles – hell, even helped orchestrate a few – but AI got me pretty good. I’m not alone. Over the past couple of years, many of us have worked through the cycle from amazed to appalled with the various generative AI platforms.

I still think AI is and will be a transformative technology, but if I’m honest the problem I have with it was really my own expectations. I believed the hype. After all, the texts and conversations that the technology generated looked good, seemed smart. But even aside from the obvious fallacies and hallucinations that it spewed out, eventually just about everything it created began to feel hollow.

AI is just a technology, just code, and I had let myself believe it was something more. And even as I continue to find my own ways of making it useful, it still feels so empty, and damn if I’m not disappointed when I feel that lack of spark, creativity or imagination - the unexpected.

I think Shanna articulates this delta between human creativity and generative AI that I’ve been feeling incredibly well in her article below. Creativity is not really the input or the output, but the experience of the connection between the two. AI might mimic that, but there’s really nothing behind the facade.

- Doug

The Inevitable Pull Towards Provenance

by Shanna Gerlach

A middle-aged woman I’ve never met before walks up to me on the verge of tears. Over the din of the party swirling around us, she leans forward and tells me that her mother recently passed away, and that she has no idea how to live on this earth without her; she’s never experienced a world where her mom didn’t exist. She’s quiet, vulnerable, already grateful for the poem she’s requesting. I let her prop her phone up on my typewriter with an old photo of her mom on its screen, and I start to write.

Five-ish minutes later, I roll the paper off the typewriter’s rubber platen, sign the bottom corner, slide the poem into a plastic sleeve, and hand it back to her, a gift. She holds it to her heart, mouths a “thank you,” and walks away to read it alone.

Later that event, a mom asks me for a poem for her four year old son, to let him know it’s okay to mess up. A couple requests a poem about the inevitability of their love; a stepdad wants a gift for his stepkids; a girl who hasn’t been back to the mountains of Virginia since she was a little kid has been remembering what those summers felt like.

I type poem after poem, the words marching only forward in permanent ink, the same way time doesn’t allow for backspaces. My “O” key is aggressive, poking holes clear through the paper. From the back, each page looks like a severed constellation. Bits of some letters are colored red, when the ribbon lifts slightly on a key press. Most, but not all, of the spaces have appeared in their proper places. It adds up to ten minutes per poem from start to finish (give or take), and hundreds and hundreds of strangers who’ve shown me a tiny piece of themselves over the last two years.

Typewriter Rodeo began in the early 2010s with the idea to create a spark of magic by writing spontaneous poems for strangers. It’s not actually magic, of course – we are just humans writing poems – but sometimes it feels that way.

In contrast to back when TR started, every single person that walks up to our table for a poem today could’ve instead opened up the phones in their pockets and (for free, within seconds), gotten any of a number of LLMs to write them an instant AI poem about whatever they wanted. But they don’t – they stand in line and wait their turn, racking their brains for the perfect topic request, letting their curiosity about who we are and what we’ll write for them eclipse their nerves or shyness.

Why?

Why does a custom poem typed by a human being still matter so much? What are we looking for from this experience that we can’t get from Claude or Gemini – what’s the difference?

Maybe they didn’t even realize a poem written just for them was something they wanted, something they could ask for, until they saw us there, offering. Maybe humans crave the intimacy of sharing pieces of ourselves with an absolute stranger and feeling visible. Or getting to watch a vintage typewriter at work – tech so old that it’s exciting again. The promise of something physical and tactile to take with you. An experience you haven’t seen anywhere else before. The thrill of setting a challenge for someone and being the judge of whether they succeed. Simply knowing that another human being shared this time and space with you? A combination of all of it?

And on the other side of all this, if we as poets can (in theory) use AI to write poems about any topic that someone else asks for, why do we still show up to write in analog?

It’s in part the connection with another person, the trust they have in us to create for them something so intimate, so personal, and then the act of surprising them with something that’s genuinely good, that they likely couldn’t have done themselves. Perhaps we also do it to experience the adrenaline rush of taking a risk. There is no risk in asking ChatGPT for a poem; there is inherently risk in asking the same of yourself, in an environment where success couldn’t be farther from a guarantee. It’s the challenge of taking another person’s request and fulfilling it on the spot, where there is no promise you’ll make anything good at all. Anything sure-er feels hollow, like cheating.

If I’m honest, it also feeds the ego: a whole line of people in awe of your “magic,” and the knowledge that you’re writing a poem for such a specific audience that it’s guaranteed to be read in a way that not all poets can take for granted. Every gig is a dopamine rush feeding on your innate and animal need for legacy, attention, belonging, creation, growth.

And maybe, above all, we crave the making itself: that deep, rich satisfaction in creating something (good) out of nothing.

In a recent conversation with Ross Golan on his “And the Writer Is” podcast, songwriter + producer Jon Bellion puts it simply: “At a certain point, we’re going to have to choose to work[…]because working feels good.” He makes an analogy that I’ve found useful lately, comparing the dilemma of creative AI use to a woodworker faced with the choice to produce millions of chairs in a factory and never touch a chair again, or to continue to physically make chairs because at his core he is a woodworker. When is it necessary to sacrifice productivity for the joy of doing the thing yourself? “We wonder why we're sad [— it’s] because we're not doing the thing, we're just having the thing brought to us. But doing the thing is the reward.”

The satisfaction lies in the process of creation, not in having the end product itself. And maybe that’s also what gives a product value to another person: not the product itself, but the knowledge of the effort and care that the maker has put into the experience you receive.

In a predictable segue, this all aligns with what I’ve begun to notice about the process of typing custom poems. Usually, the poem recipients light up before they’ve even read a word of their poem – what the words on the paper say don’t matter nearly as much as the fact that they were written. This realization is simple, but striking: the actual gift isn’t the poem itself, but is the experience on either side of the poem – the space to share, the dignity of a genuine question, the hug or hand clasp or silent tear. The gift is in the connection, the idea that someone has taken the time and attention to write a poem specifically for them, listening, curious, matching laughter or tears, hearing the parts they’re not quite saying out loud, adding a piece of one’s own DNA into the narrative – a fingerprint that acknowledges the existence of both poet and subject.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of provenance lately. In the art world, an item’s provenance refers to the running log of who has owned that specific piece of art, including where and when it’s been sold or shown. It’s important because of the moral and ethical implications of where art has come from, and its cultural context. Is it an original? Was it stolen or looted? Who has had power/possession over it, and why? It can lead to a deeper appreciation for the piece, or restitution.

When abstracted and romanticized, the concept of provenance can extend to daydreaming about who else has read the library book you’re holding, or looked out your childhood bedroom window for the years before and after you did. I’m a bit enchanted by this idea of knowing where something has been and whose fingerprints have been on it. What other lives that library book has touched, a faint pencil underline or mosquito trapped and flattened between pages. The Sharpie self-portraits and “autographs” my brother and I scrawled on the briefly-exposed concrete floor of the home we grew up in as little kids, then preserved under new carpet for a future generation to discover. A bed and breakfast guestbook filled with doodles, names, dates, hometowns. Graffiti notes inside a bathroom stall to mark even the shortest of “ownership”s. As humans, we’ll latch onto anything that connects us to others.

I’m moving into a new house this weekend, and passing my current one onto its next tenants, one of whom is a friend. I’ll admit there’s a little part of me that is soothed by imagining the walls carrying my four years of memories, laughter, roommate changes, parties, and the feeling of home into its next chapter. It’s a notion of the house as soup – more flavorful the longer it braises, the more ingredients it incorporates, its provenance becoming part of what makes it feel special to live there. Maybe this is why it feels important to me to physically hand a poem directly to the person I wrote it for – it’s the transfer of both a tangible and intangible item, a new entry for the poem’s provenance, that person’s story briefly merged with my own.

This joy of provenance, even in the smallest and briefest sense, can’t exist in an AI-written poem in the same way. My fingerprints, both literal and figurative, are all over that piece of inked paper. In a sense, the provenance of the piece even stretches back one more step, to the point in time when it was an idea inside the recipient’s head that they shared with me as the poet. I borrowed it, turning thoughts and feelings into written words, before transferring ownership back to the person who requested it. Some poems change hands again soon after – finding their intended audience as a birthday gift, engagement proposal, “just because” present, a future family heirloom. Everyone along the way has impacted the piece, added depth and humanity to its existence as a piece of art.

Because of this, the author emerges indirectly as a key character in the piece – the poem itself is inseparable from the fact that it exists because of the poet. The idea stands in direct opposition to Barthes’ postmodernism and “The Death of the Author.” While Barthes might assert that the “ultimate meaning” of a piece of writing lies with the reader, and the author is irrelevant, in Barthes’ world all writing was still invariably written by humans. That’s a luxury(?) that we no longer have, as a likely-larger-than-we-realize percentage of the writing we read now is AI-generated. The success of Barthes’ philosophy relies on human authors: I’d argue that they are what allows for a piece of writing to so fluently speak to multiple readers with a wide-range of interpretations.

With this, postmodernism has run its course to the most extreme conclusion – the author is dead, and has been replaced by AI, exposing the hollowness of the theory in the ultimate “be careful what you wish for.” While we stumble around in a time where nothing can be trusted to be fully real, a piece’s author, its provenance, has become more consequential than ever.

Knowing that a human being once thought deeply enough about something to string the words you’re reading together is part of what makes those words special, regardless of what meaning you personally interpret in them. Reading and writing are, by definition, activities we do in order to both understand and to feel understood. In a world where so much connection is online, or shallow, or tempered by artifice, it matters that another human listened to and then wrote a poem for you.

And maybe that’s why, over and over, people line up and wait to request a typewritten poem: this brief but invaluable opportunity to be seen and understood deeply enough to feel human again.

Typewriter Rodeo: Mount Bonnell (dusk)

While the magic of Typewriter Rodeo is best experienced in person, you can get a taste of their spontaneous poetry every week on the Texas Standard on KUT, Austin’s NPR station. Here is Shanna pondering upon the small moments subtly charged with meaning atop Mount Bonnell, Austin’s iconic high point.

What We’re Into

Everyone freaked out over the MIT study on the effects of using generative AI, but Anne-Laure Le Cunff has a more nuanced take on whether ChatGPT is really rotting our brains.

“The importance of imagination and inspiration is about experience,” writes Ben Holliday, arguing that great design requires a point of view and pushes how we see and understand the world.

Wired delves into the growing backlash against generative AI.

We love Abraham Burickson’s thoughts on AI and creativity in his Phase Zero newsletter: “And this is what I think we don’t talk about enough with this new technology: interiority. The things we make are as much about what the making does to us as they are about what is made.”

Building Five:

JDI has been busy building Sidetracks, our brand new Austin-based creative club of interesting and interested people. We gather regularly for experiences alternating between Detours (creative field trips) and Hands-On (workshops that center unique ways of “making”).

Our next Hands-On experience is this coming Monday, July 14th at the JDI offices. We’ll be playing around with typewriters with a workshop run by Typewriter Rodeo poets Sean and Shanna (from JDI and Superposition), completely free to attend. If you’re local to Austin, we’d love to see you there! More info and RSVP here.

A Thousand (and Nine) Words

A Peek into the Future

Next time on Superposition: “Time and Attention may have become the chosen obsession of the web analytics gurus, but those online metrics are just the sad shadow of their IRL impact.”

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

Polarity of Yes

At the risk of sounding extremely cliche, I’ve recently decided I need a “season of yes.” I have had the most incredible time saying “no” more the past several months, and that’s been a good thing – I’ve set, reset, and maintained boundaries; I’ve prioritized my own stability and emotional security; I’ve established routines and traditions; taken care of myself and the people closest to me; worked on limiting my guilt over not being able to please everyone all the time. But, just like all polarities, there comes a time to switch back over, and ride the sine curve to the other side. My goal for the next however-long is to default to “yes” instead of “no,” to look for reasons to do new things rather than excuses not to, to try things and experiment and explore and fail.

On a macro level, culture seems to follow this same general wave: in times of crises and uncertainty, we return to routine, hunker down with the people we love, and take care of ourselves. But, again, this is a polarity: a transition to the other extreme is inevitable, welcome, and — right now — it’s imperative. Let’s try shit again.

- Shanna

Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

by Doug Freeman

For the past few years, the common refrain in business is that we’ve been navigating through a VUCA world — an ocean of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Most organizations have been addressing this chaos with a plan to simply outlast the storms, before inevitably being able to move back to calmer and more predictable waters when the tides return to normal. This posture was certainly behind many of the reactions to COVID and even the polarized political disruptions that defined so much of the past decade in the US.

Now though, I’d argue that we’ve moved beyond simply surfing choppy VUCA waters and have sailed off the edges of our known maps into the “here be dragons” territory. We're not just navigating a period of disruption anymore, but experiencing the throes of a major shift. What lies on the other side of it will not be a familiar stability or “return to normalcy” but rather a world that operates quite differently from the rules of the past 80 years.

And it’s going to be extremely uncomfortable.

This idea has been rolling around my gut the past few months, but was reinforced at SXSW in March with Amy Webb’s annual Emerging Tech Trends Report. It’s one of my favorite presentations every year, a massive debut of what she and her Future Today Strategy Group have identified as the driving forces that will impact the world in the near and long-term. She traces emerging technologies and outlines scenarios for how their distribution and influence will play out.

The goal of Webb’s futurecasting is to prepare us for the disruptions that are coming so that we can identify and act on potential threats and opportunities. The past few years of these talks have gotten pretty wild, but with the added chaos of the new geo-political, economic, and social shifts we’ve experienced even this early into 2025, an additional uncertainty hung heavy over this year’s presentation. You can watch the full talk here or download the entire 1000 page report on the FTSG website.

While the insights on cutting edge technologies are always fascinating, this year’s keynote was memorable more for the dramatic stance that Webb took on our having passed the point of no return. She sees our current moment as one when we have “crossed the Rubicon” in a way that will have civilization-altering repercussions. As she writes in the opening executive summary of her report:

In the past year, humanity crossed multiple points of no return. This didn’t happen gradually, but in sudden, irreversible leaps that have fundamentally altered the trajectory of civilization. We’ve moved beyond our mental models, beyond biological constraints, beyond social norms—into territory we can neither fully explain nor comprehend. Just as the first telescopes revealed the vastness of space, today’s science and tech advances are revealing how much we don’t understand about our own potential….

Let me be clear: The decisions we make in the next five years will determine the long-term fate of human civilization. This isn’t hyperbole—it’s the sobering conclusion drawn from our best available data. The convergence of tech isn’t just changing how we work or live; it’s changing what it means to be human. We’re building systems that can reprogram biology, reshape matter at the atomic level, and process information in ways that defy classical physics.

To emphasize this point during her talk, she had the crowd sit on small wooden blocks throughout her whole presentation. The idea was that things are about to get really uncomfortable — as they already are in many aspects — and if you’re only focused on the immediate discomfort and disruption you’re experiencing, you’re going to miss the transformative shifts that are happening.

Webb focuses a lot on the biological revolution that is underway in the 21st century, which when combined with sensor and AI technologies, will completely disrupt how we think about our bodies and ourselves. She’s also been at the forefront of considering biological computing — what she calls “living intelligence” — as the next frontier that will push machine capabilities beyond our understanding.

In short, things are about to get really weird, and there is no going back.

I can’t help but think of this in relation to Benjamin Labatut’s book When We Cease to Understand the World. In the work, Labatut explores that moment of vertiginous excitement and fear of confronting scientific breakthroughs, what it must feel like to have the entire structure of the universe as you know it pulled out from under you. He induces this in the reader as well, mixing fact and fiction so that you’re not sure what is real.

Interestingly, the original Spanish title for the work is the wonderfully poetic Un Verdor Terrible, which echoes in my mind Yeats’ “terrible beauty.” Revolutions are dramatic and brutal, even scientific ones, but there is a “greenness” of hope and opportunity in what may emerge from it. Both things can be true, and we need to be able to hold that tension.

We are in a moment of unmooring, and cannot be sure what is beyond the horizon. The key is how well we can navigate into that unknown as things change, to remain flexible and open to possibility. We need the ability to question familiar frameworks and assumptions rather than try to shoehorn our understanding of these changes into them.

This isn’t simply about AI or climate change or the shifts we’re already anticipating, but rather being able to confront the “unknown unknowns” that will emerge, being able to see them more quickly and move into them.

To be clear, this is a much easier stance to take in a newsletter than in reality. Any kind of transformational shift, especially on the global level, will result in hurting a lot of people as the systems we have relied upon break down. My mother is fond of quoting the apocryphal ancient Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times,” and she’s been saying it a lot lately.

A friend of mine described this moment as the feeling of starting at a new school that doesn’t have grades. You’ve learned how to work and even excel in a system to achieve a top GPA, but now all the rules have changed. In this new Montessori environment we’ve entered, we have to figure out the new values and where to put our energy. But we also need to remember that while the rules may have been abandoned, we have to ensure we’re still propelled by core ethical principles, even as others may not.

Reactionary policies that attempt to prevent the flood of change will never work for long, and especially not in the tech and science-driven transformations that are coming. These transformations are not simply new gadgets, but advancements that utterly alter how we understand things like our very biology. And while some may try to hold back that deluge, it’s more important that we lean into the discomfort of the shifting waters and instead work to shape its flow towards the most valuable, equitable, and positive outcomes for humanity and our world.

There is opportunity to build better worlds in these moments but it requires flexibility and willingness to lean into the discomfort. We don’t know what ideas will work, but we need the audacity to try them, or even begin asking questions to rethink what we think we know. We need to break our reliance on the frameworks that have worked in the past, and even the systems that they’re designed to utilize, and begin designing and testing new blueprints for the world on the other side of the Rubicon.

We need to learn to cook instead of bake, to work without a recipe and with the ingredients we have. The old recipes won’t work anymore, anyway.

If we cling too tightly to the familiar models and what worked in the old systems, no matter how effectively, we’ll miss the opportunities to productively and ethically shape what will emerge in the new.

We have to get comfortable with not knowing, and with being wrong and going back to the drawing board. Science is, after all, more about questions than answers.

The Crises Are Simulations, but the Lessons Are Real

What can we learn from the dramatic, civilization-scale crises and transformations of Civilization VII? Yussef Cole’s recent review in the New York Times suggests there are lessons in working through seismic shifts as the game’s civilizations rise and fall. “Remember that the potential for change can work both ways. The civilization that makes it out of a crisis often won’t look anything like the one that went in.”

What We’re Into

“How can AI be the centerpiece of a sustained competitive advantage when everyone has it? We argue that it simply cannot.” MIT’s Sloan Management Review on what happens when AI is ubiquitous and homogenized.

Mike Sowden’s “Everything is Amazing” with three stories of water that will blow your mind.

Producer, songwriter, performer, and artistic genius Jon Bellion in fantastic conversation with Ross Golan. His take on AI vs the human instinct to stay in motion and “choose to work and do the thing because working feels good” is both refreshing and nuanced. Start around 6 minutes for just that segment, or listen to the whole thing. His new album Father Figure comes out June 4th, and I can’t stop listening the singles that have come out so far.

Building Five:

During SXSW, Josh (JDI’s CEO) moderated a panel alongside Helen Protheroe and Christina Agapakis all about Storytelling in Science. The panel talked most about fostering more open collaboration, both among researchers and with other communities like the arts. The conversation also focused on how we can make science more engaging and accessible to the world, without compromising rigor.

What was most heartening about the experience was the full room of audience members from a wide variety of industries and domains. More people wanted to have this conversation than we anticipated, including a large number of non-scientists, and that’s a really good sign.

Listen to the conversation here.

A Thousand (and Seven) Words

A Peek into the Future

Next time on Superposition: “Time and Attention may have become the chosen obsession of the web analytics gurus, but those online metrics are just the sad shadow of their IRL impact.”

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

If hospitality is a dialogue, Marfa is a conversation.

I’m writing this from a “hotel” room with rounded adobe walls, a tiny yellow door, southwestern fabrics, and a tiled shower sunk several feet into the ground. Every living space in the complex is completely different, so each of them feels like we’re renting out a small home rather than being put up in a cookie cutter hotel room that could be anywhere at all.

Our team is currently in Marfa, Texas, on a site visit for our next Penrose gathering this fall, and our priority while we’re here is hospitality– working out all the little details to make every guest? feel instantly both at home and fully dropped into the environment.

Being somewhere new can shake your day-to-day self loose from its normal frame, shedding light on pieces of yourself that have been tucked away by routine. It flips your perspective, reminding you to notice your surroundings in ways we’ve all gone blind to over time when things stay the same (or close enough). This is the gift we aim to give each person at Penrose: the ideal circumstances to access that self, a little bit of wonder and surprise for inspiration, and the attention to detail that gives each guest permission to attend to themselves just as deeply and fully as we have.

And for me, out here, I’m experiencing that same rattling around in my bones, a loosening that allows for something new to emerge.

See you back in Austin,

- Shanna

When Did We Stop Caring About the Customer?

by Doug Freeman

On an earnings call in January, Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth admitted that their attempts to prevent their perceived deluge of shoplifting by locking up every stick of deodorant and gum in the store had been bad for business. Shocking, I know. We’re truly only sending our best into leadership positions these days.

As quoted in Business Insider: "When you lock things up, for example, you don't sell as many of them," he said. "We've kind of proven that pretty conclusively."

This HBR-worthy insight could have been predicated by anyone - literally anyone - that has entered a Walgreens in the past couple of years and tried to purchase the most basic item. And it’s not like the store thought ahead to hire more folks to man these lockboxes, either. You stand in front of a plexiglass case looking left and right for anyone that might be able to help you, but even the check out lines are automated. Maybe the loyalty card should come with a key? Or can we at least train the new pharmacy robots to dispense shampoo, too?

In these moments of literally and figuratively rattling the cage, I can’t help but think about Sam Walton’s celebrated process of walking through his stores to get an on-the-ground perspective of both the employee and customer experience. Has Wentworth even been in one of his Walgreens?

In marketing, one of our guiding principles is to always put yourself in the customer’s shoes. This isn’t some revelatory technique, it’s the 101. And yet it seems that companies have thrown that out the window and nobody actually cares about the customer experience anymore.

Perhaps this is the inevitable result of tech-driven growth hacking, or the natural progression of growth-at-all-costs enshittification. As Ed Zitron has so frothingly raged: “You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value.”

We can point in any number of directions for why this rot of customer experience has happened, but if we’re to consider Walton and Wentworth, the biggest culprit seems simply that we have traded thinking about the human experience for being driven solely by data.

It’s easy to see this across social and tech platforms, as Zitron and so many others have exasperatingly chronicled. But the sheer lack of consideration for the customer experience in deference to what the data is seemingly directing just shows us what these companies really value - despite the customer-centric declarations their marketing might profess.

To be clear, this isn’t to deride data-driven insights. We obviously do want to make decisions that are backed up by evidence, and crunching the numbers has undoubtedly led to some unexpected operational efficiencies and even improved experiences.

But I worry if at some point we have let data drive us into short term gains at the expense of long term relationships. Whoever realized that optimizing the tip screen at your local coffee shop to 20% led to higher tips was probably so excited they didn’t bother to consider the slowly building backlash simmering within customers feeling technologically pressured into a $4 charge for being handed a bag of beans.

The most egregious divergence between experience and data in our culture is of course our health care system, where insurance companies have optimized the numbers so magnificently that they look at customers like Neo in The Matrix - just seeing patterns of code instead of actual people.

Everything from education to hiring to news coverage has bowed to the tyranny of data in making even the smallest decisions. Or worse, we’ve just simply cut out the middle man and let AI use the data to make the decisions of what customers want. Poor Matthew McConaughey is left eating shrimp in the rain because the restaurant didn’t use Salesforce’s Agentforce? How about some common sense to look out the window, and, you know, think about the customer instead of just blindly following what the data tells you to do or not do.

Like everything in life, there is balance to be had here. But over the past couple decades we have become so drunk on our new digitally-derived data capabilities that we’ve turned that pendulum into a customer experience wrecking ball. In fact, we’ve contorted ourselves into entirely new metrics to justify chasing data goals, like deciding time on site correlated to quality customer engagement rather than brain-rotting frustration. And the inevitable end result is that we promote a business culture that is more about trying to manipulate users than cultivate customers.

I’m not sure it’s going to get particularly better in the near term, because the short term manipulation is still paying off. And as tech companies continue to expand their monopolies, customers aren’t getting alternatives that might offer a better experience. There’s no need to over-index on customer experience when you’ve locked the customer into an enshittified ecosystem that bleeds them to death by a thousand frustrating indignities.

But I’m hopeful, too. We face major issues in climate change, healthcare, education, and social opportunity. Data can be as empowering as it is manipulative, and if challengers were to flip the script and put the actual customer first, there is opportunity for incredible change.

As AI-generated content and decision making takes control of marketing, there is a new marketing being born to counter the downward spiral. The race to define the new differentiation is on, and while some companies and marketers are all too happy to embrace the automated efficiencies and think their customers won’t care, others are looking at this moment to understand what comes next.

Right now, that differentiation is being led by experiences, whether the customer experience of an interaction with a business, or an increased focus on IRL human interaction and community-building. These aren’t new strategies, but they take on a new and much more impactful meaning within the current deluge of AI-marketing slop.

In fact, I would go one step further and say the key to fantastic marketing and customer experience today isn’t just exceptional service, it’s rooted in the notion of hospitality. As restaurateur Danny Meyer famously noted in his 2006 book Setting the Table: “Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes the recipient feel.”

And for those science companies currently dealing with a chaotic market and funding environment, being genuinely customer-focused can provide a unique foothold to help spur traction and change. Too often we think that simply having a better solution unlocked by science is enough to justify adoption but any behavioral scientist would of course tell you that’s simply not how humans, or markets for that matter, operate. Lord knows, this is the constant struggle of every public health official everywhere.

Our frustrations have primed us for a better experience, so companies that actually care about the human experience can create a powerful differentiator to be leveraged for change as much as it drives profits - whether in electric vehicles or insurance or education. After all, both Amazon and Wal-Mart gained their initial footholds by being obsessed with the customer experience (before data became a stand-in for actual humans).

For so many services and products in our lives these days, the customer has come to be considered a transaction more than a relationship. When we’re overly-focused on the transaction - whether it be for money or attention - we lose sight of the human, of the actual value we’re creating by doing business together.

At the end of the day, even the most transactional business should be about cultivating an exceptional experience. For the customer, that doesn’t necessarily mean just less friction or more content, but all of us feeling satisfied or even delighted with the interaction. It’s about cultivating a hospitality towards the customer that truly makes them feel seen, heard, and valued.

The Secret Ingredients of Unreasonable Hospitality

Sometimes - perhaps even often - more is not more when it comes to hospitality. Restaurateur Will Guidara, who built Eleven Madison Park into the top restaurant in the world, recalls how he learned this by serving a hot dog at his four-star NYC restaurant. In his TED Talk, Guidara shares how centering human connection through extraordinary experiences can transform a business, no matter the industry.

What We’re Into

Speaking of user experience, you can disable Google’s AI summaries by cursing. We don’t need to guess how this was discovered.

Eric Hoerl presents his new theory of emergence for science. To be honest, we didn’t actually realize there was an old theory.

We dig Ron Cobb’s “Semiotic Standard for Commercial Trans-Stellar and Heavy Element Transport Craft” developed for the film Alien.

Marcin Wichary on the Hardest Working Font in Manhattan. (Spoiler, it’s Gorton)

Cortical Labs unveils the first biological computer running on living human cells. And here we thought living intelligence was being replaced!

Building Five:

ClimateTech Coffee Tomorrow

We’re excited to open our office up to our friends at ClimateTech Coffee to begin hosting their monthly morning meetup. Each month, Bryan White and James Gray bring in an expert to discuss their work on some area of climate science and technology. In the past these talks have included everything from cellular agriculture to carbon capture to geothermal.

If you’re in Austin, join us tomorrow, Friday April 4th at 8:30am for coffee and conversation with Kevin Silverman of Kateri Carbon and Luke Hawbaker of Carbon Direct. You can RSVP here.

A Thousand (and Seven) Words

A Peek into the Future

Next time on Superposition: “If the last century was led by breakthroughs in physics, this century will be defined by biological advancements that will transform our lives and society. And things are about to get really weird.”

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

Take a look, it’s in a book…

One of our favorite things we create every year at JDI is “Thoughts in Return” (or more casually known around the office as the “book book”): a collection of some of our team’s favorite reads from the past year. These books don’t have to have been published in 2024, or be about science or design. The only requirement is that they fed our curiosity for the world around us, and added to our experience of the year enough to stick with us past closing their covers. In the past, we’ve had recommendations that span everything from cookbooks to children's books, with a whole lot of memoirs, genre-bending novels, historical fiction, how-to books, and graphic novels in between.

If you’re anything like us, you have way more books on your shelves (or e-readers) than you’ll ever possibly have time to read. But again, if you’re anything like us, you’re also easily distracted by new books to add to your list. So allow us to add a few more, with love. And if you’re in Austin, drop by our office for a physical copy (which also includes our past picks all the way back to 2017!).

-Shanna and Doug

All Boys Aren't Blue by George W. Johnston

I loved everything about this book. While written as a memoir for young adults, George was able to captivate my inner youth while also teaching me about how to parent. This is a great memoir about a young Black gay man's journey and helps the reader stand in the shoes of overcoming obstacles and leaning into love. 

– Liz Jones-Dilworth

All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker

I was loath to do a best-seller, but this was my favorite read of 2024. Part missing person mystery, part serial killer thriller, part love story, with a unique twist on each (and short chapters that kept the reading pace flowing.)

– Rebecca Ewing

By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult

Another well-researched, character-forward, and timeline-hopping Picoult novel that leans into the theory that a woman named Emilia Bassano was the primary playwright of the majority of William Shakespeare’s plays. Reading this felt simultaneously like comfort food and brain food.

– Shanna Gerlach

Darkome by Hannu Rajaniemi

Science fiction and Science research have long had a reciprocating influence on each other, but rarely does a scientist at the forefront of a field have the opportunity (or skill) to craft future visions of its impact. Ramjaniemi leads both with his novel that imagines a future of mRNA as a platform. 

– Josh Jones-Dilworth

Freedom is a Feast by Alejandro Puyana

Puyana’s debut novel explores the turbulent modern history of his native Venezuela. Following generations of an estranged family, Puyana movingly traces the complicated political movements that led to the rise of Chávez, and its impact on a nation’s people. 

– Doug Freeman

Korean American by Eric Kim

Kim’s cookbook pairs gorgeous photos and heartfelt essays with delicious recipes that are both Korean and American, yet still uniquely its own. It’s a beautiful exploration of food and what it means to be a hyphenated-American. 

– Michelle Gamboa

Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See 

Inspired by the true story of Tan Yunxian, a woman physician from Ming dynasty China. Rich with details of period, this captivating novel speaks to the myriad ways women care for each other.

– Sohaila Mueller

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xóchitl González

This book follows a Nuyorican family that includes a militant radical, a popular congressman posing as straight, and the city's most sought-after wedding planner, set against a backdrop of Hurricane Maria.

– Risa Fielder

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

Considered one of the books that kickstarted the Latin American Boom, Pedro Páramo is a magical realism masterpiece that travels through time, space, and the afterlife.

– Juan Ávila

Polostan by Neil Stephenson

An adroit and entertaining piece of historical fiction set in the US and the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, Polostan follows the adventures of Dawn Rae Bjornberg – the daughter of a communist, Russian father and a swashbuckling cowgirl of an American mother.

– Tony Fassi

Radically Content by Jamie Varon

This book is about unlearning our fear of contentment. I immediately bought the accompanying journal, but I’m content with not having cracked it.

– Emily LeClair

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

A story about the perseverance of the arts and humanity... the good and the bad. (Caution: This book hits very differently now that we're on the other side of a modern-time pandemic.)

– Damaris Alfonso

A Thousand (and Nine) Words

A Peek into the Future

Next time on Superposition: “There’s no need to over-index on customer experience when you’ve locked the customer into an enshittified ecosystem that bleeds them to death by a thousand frustrating indignities.”

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

Anything to Feel Something

Every few months for the past couple years, Rebecca (my creative director) and I pick a book together, then talk about it over breakfast: a 2-person book club with a syllabus that has ranged from Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act to Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence. This week, we got to surprise ourselves with just how much bubbled up to think and talk about after reading Gretchen Rubin’s Life in Five Senses. Being intentional about paying attention to all our senses (not just sight on auto-pilot) means more chances to be inspired, find comfort, or experience awe.

I’m now working on a “senses self-portrait,” and jotting down one thing I remember from each of my five senses each day, in an attempt to notice more deeply. My most neglected sense is smell, which also happens to be the one most closely connected to our brain’s memory center, so I’m also on the hunt for a bit of olfactory nostalgia.

In that vein, close your eyes and imagine: a crackling campfire, the tickle of smoke in the back of your nose, bare toes in the grass, the aftertaste of crispy marshmallow, eyes trained towards the stars…

-Shanna

In Praise (and Search) of Awe

by Doug Freeman

One night last fall, I found myself lying on my back staring up at one of the most extraordinary skies I’ve ever seen. I was at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of west Texas, part of our Penrose gathering that brought together scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs, and others deeply invested in our science ecosystem. 

The company was exceptional, and the folks at the McDonald Observatory wonderful and insightful hosts as we peered through their world-class telescopes at comets and planets and even deeper galaxies. But what struck me the most was simply looking up into the incredible richness of the dark skies, aglow with an unfathomable river of light. 

It was the same sky that’s always there, of course, but somehow I’d forgotten just how amazing it is. Blame the city lights that usually drown my view upward, or just the endless run of day-to-day life that makes me forget to stop and look up. 

I’d been to observatories before, camped under splendidly remote skies, and admit that I hadn’t been particularly expectant of anything transcendent in attending the McDonald Observatory’s star party. Maybe it was that lack of expectation that made the shock of night sky so powerful to me, or perhaps it was just my opening up the space in my mind to be amazed, or maybe it was the communal experience. 

Whatever allowed the experience, it was a moment filled with awe. 

The experience sent me down a rabbit hole to better understand exactly why that moment hit me so hard. There’s been a lot of science focused on understanding awe over the past couple of decades, led by Dacher Keltner, psychology professor at UC-Berkeley and founder of the Greater Good Science Center. Awe presents an interesting confluence of psychology, neuroscience, health, and even aesthetics, and we’re only beginning to understand what is happening in our brains and our bodies when we experience it.

In his 2023 book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life, Keltner posits “Eight Wonders of Life” that his research concluded inspired awe. Nature was of course high on the list, along with “Life & Death,” but most intriguing were the more accessible things in our lives that can inspire awe - examples such as music and visual design. And then there are spiritual inspirations, and metaphysical and scientific epiphanies. The top two Wonders that he found precipitated moments of awe in cultures around the world though, were stories of “other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming,” and “collective effervescence,” the feeling and energy of belonging to a greater group or cause. 

But the most compelling thing to me was how awe impacts us, and how this experience can transform how we see, understand, and relate to the world. To take that idea one step further, it made me wonder: how can we communicate and share those experiences in a way that can extend their impact?

In some ways, it seems that today we can see the most extraordinary things any time we like. We have social feeds filled with vistas of ridiculously beautiful and remote places. We have incredible images of deep space from the James Web Space Telescope. We can see the most fundamental elements of our DNA inside us. 

And yet access to all of these astounding things hasn’t seemed to really expand our collective sense of wonder or bring us more together. Maybe it’s just human nature that we should take these things for granted, but I think about the promise and inspiration of the Earthrise photo and how that helped catalyze Stewart Brand’s vision of the Whole Earth Catalog. Humanity was forced to stop and collectively marvel. For a moment, we could all see ourselves together, and imagine how fragile and beautiful our unique little circumstance of the universe is. Earthrise was an artifact that showed us something new, and helped expand the overview effect that previously only astronauts had experienced to the rest of us. 

Maybe awe by its very nature is something that must be transient, something we cannot live in precisely because it is meant to shake us out of our everyday lives. It is a confrontation with a vastness, even when experienced in something small. And at that edge of our understanding, we confront the recognition that so much of the world is beyond our control. That we as humans (and we as egos) are not the center of the universe. If awe is something of a death of the ego, then it would make sense our minds cannot permanently exist in that space.

Importantly, there is also a researched effect of awe that can open generosity, and expand our sense of belonging with each other - something that we seem in dire need of these days. But if those moments and their impact are inherently fleeting, how can we harness them for lasting impact? And should we even try?

Imagined Futures

A friend of mine teaches a course at the University of Wisconsin on American Protest Literature. She was surprised to hear from her students at the end of last semester that their favorite section of the syllabus was the exploration of utopian visions, of writers and activists imagining better futures. Some of these were grand social rethinkings, but others were more personal moments of reframing like Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Gate A4” or Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders.

Her students told her that the readings were so meaningful because most of their lives had been barraged by only negative views of the future. Global warming, economic anxiety, world conflicts, and the expectation that the world will be ravaged by weather, disease, and scarcity. As she and I discussed this feedback, it was a heartbreaking revelation, even though we feel the same anxieties about the future. 

As a science communicator, I couldn’t help but feel this as something of a failure in how we’ve been doing our jobs. We live in an exceptional time of science, and we’ve seen things, experienced things, that previous generations would never even have imagined. Our future generations will likewise feel the same way. And yet it seems the general public is rarely awed by science these days. 

If awe is connected to inspiring curiosity, and breaking us out of our everyday thinking, then I wonder if the science community as a whole may be narrowing the scope of imagination too much, ignoring science’s inherent mandate to ask more questions. We have been dictating to the public rather than bringing them along for the ride. Few folks had actually heard of mRNA technology before the COVID-19 vaccines, and even the science community had scoffed at Katalin Karikó’s work. We have to admit that as an overall community, scientists shut down inquiries and questions from the public with a particular disdain, and often even eschew research that may be outside of the mainstream.

Even in art, it seems our visions of the future are disaster-ridden, and have been for a long time. They’re overwhelmed by post-apocalyptic worlds, humanity turned brutal. The discourse around climate change has been catastrophic in framing, with solutions focused on mitigating rather than transforming. Not to downplay the existential crisis of it all, but works like Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock paint a bold vision of not just confrontation with the realities of climate change, but rethinking what is possible in and for our world. And these are visions built upon work that exists today, if science dares to be bold and inspirational. 

The story science is telling these days isn’t particularly hopeful. It’s not pointing to possibilities, but rather to a world that will be worse– just maybe not as bad as the worst we can imagine. Of course, we do need those grounded voices and perspectives, but we can certainly use more inspiration. While I admire the necessary storytelling frame in works like Kate Marvel’s “Slaying the Climate Dragon,” I think we can do even better in providing inspiration while still facing reality.

So we need to tell better stories, not just in our art, but in our communications of what is actually happening in science. I remember visiting the Kennedy Space Center a few years ago, and the vibe was incredibly different than when I had been there only a decade earlier. Instead of merely celebrating our history, the primary focus had changed to an excitement about returning to the Moon, and even exploring Mars. There was a galvanizing mission, and it was communicated with excitement and possibility, and something that we all were a part of together. 

We have the opportunity to inspire excitement and possibility behind our incredible breakthroughs in science and technology. We can bring the public along for the adventure, and instead of falling victim to the pessimism of problems, we can tell a story with the excitement of solving them. We need less discarding of ideas because “that will never work” and more exploration of “But what if it does!” We can imagine better futures. 

More than that, we owe ourselves that awe. Science is under assault, in ways big and small. Those of us who have dedicated our lives to pursuits of credibility, rigorous investigation, evidenced-based expertise, and teaching are having their work dismissed, derided, and deprioritized. While we confront those political and cultural realities, we’ll also need to sustain ourselves with these moments of awe, the inspirations that have led us to these pursuits in the first place. 

Keltner’s Eight Wonders might be a valuable guidebook in this moment, for inspiring both ourselves and others. It’s imperative that we keep ourselves open to awe and even seek it out, whether in following the drive of curiosity or forcing ourselves into the (sometimes uncomfortable) space to have our world shaken. It doesn’t have to be epic-scale. It’s taking a moment to stop, and look up at the sky or down at the earth with new eyes, see things in new ways and let ourselves marvel for a moment in wonder. 

And more than just cultivating awe, we should strive to remember that feeling and share it with others. We have to dare to blast it out into the world, Double Rainbow style. The stories we’re building need as much emotion as they do knowledge, curiosity as much as understanding, and imagination as much as scientific rigor. 

As for me, I’m heading to Fairbanks next week to experience the Northern Lights, which I’ve never seen before. I’m going in search of awe, and I’ll try to bring some back to share. 

Can microdosing awe help our mental and physical health?

If we know there are positive mental, physical, and even social effects for experiencing awe, then how can we utilize that for potential treatments of trauma or anxiety? Florence Williams seeks to answer this question (and others) as she and Dr. Michael Amster go in search of awe.

What We’re Into

Life in Five Senses reminded us to experience more everyday awe by paying closer attention to our senses.

Listen: A playlist of constellation-inspired songs, curated by Shanna for Penrose this past fall.

Taste: One of our most beloved members of the JDI family, Ali Haider, writes monthly about his journeys in baking, food science, and human connection through taste. Read his intro article here: Every loaf of bread is a love letter. (Then read his others).

Smell: How the World Sensorium Conservancy is seeking to preserve native smells.  

See: Can You Spend 10 Minutes With One Painting? An interactive series so well-loved that the NYT now publishes a new painting monthly (but start with this first one for guidance and context).

Touch: Though often dismissed as one of the more “background” senses, touch is the one sense we literally cannot survive without. Here’s more on why touch research matters from many angles, including its connection to autism.

Peer Review

We enjoyed the range of responses to our “science person of the year” question. A few of our (and your) favorites below:

FlyWire Consortium (AI/Bio)
Jonah Rosner (Human Performance)
Es Devlin (Stage Design)
Dario Amodei (AI)
Nathan Myhrvold (Food)

New JDI Masterclass: Telling Stories That Shape Tomorrow

At JDI we believe a good story well-told can shape the world. So we’re thrilled to invite folks into our office for an all-day immersive storytelling masterclass in a few weeks.

We’ve been wanting to host workshops like this for a long time, and it’s finally happening. The day will be led by our founder and CEO, Josh Jones-Dilworth, and our VP of Creative, Rebecca Ewing. It will be in-person only at our HQ in Austin.

If you or someone you know might be interested in joining, we’d love to have you! You can find more information and sign up here.

Learn more

A Thousand (and Eleven) Words

A Peek into the Future

Next time on Superposition: The Book Book!

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

Welcome back to Superposition!

A lot has changed in the world since our first (new) Superposition a couple weeks ago, but we are here, and for now that is enough. 

There are still plenty of things to look forward to, however: one of them being the debut of a Superposition column called “Tony’s Book Corner,” starring JDI’s very own Tony Fassi. Tony once got a single wish from a genie, and (not believing the genie to be real), asked for the superpower of reading books at the speed of light. As you may have already guessed, the genie was in fact real, and though Tony instantly regretted not wishing for something more outlandish and cool, his loss is our gain in this specific circumstance.

Thanks for being here with us.

-Shanna

Science Communications in the Trump Era

by Doug Freeman

As Trump and his gaggle of Muskovites return to office, most of the scientific community is bracing for what the administration will bring. Among the priorities being pushed are massive cuts to and restructuring of federal agencies, with particular targets set on essential science organizations like the NIH, FDA, CDC, NOAA, and the nation’s research universities and institutions. 

Already in the first week, Trump has begun the not-unexpected process of removing the US from the WHO and Paris Climate Agreement. And although our international partnerships and alliances are the first to receive the wrecking ball, our domestic science organizations and policies are undoubtedly next up on the Executive Order rollercoaster. So far we’ve gotten the very un-Elon order to end the EV mandate, and a demand to dismantle wind turbines to save the birds (or more likely, the birdies).

It’s not enough that our scientific agencies are poised to be led by conspiracy peddlers and folks hostile to their missions, but those same appointees are actively profiting from the campaigns to undermine science-based solutions– even more so now that it seems we’ve completely eschewed any notion of conflict-of-interest divestment. Between RFK Jr making money from vaccine lawsuits and Surgeon General nominee Janette Nesheiwat shilling supplements, we might as well give each cabinet position a memecoin to rugpull. Meanwhile, Grandma will be paying more for Medicare prescriptions, but I’m sure Dr. Oz has some alternatives to sell her. 

But enough ranting– we’ll have to keep our rage reserves full to ration out appropriately over the next four years.  

More important is actually facing the political realities in which the science community now finds itself. While that will certainly include plenty of resistance to anti-science, anti-climate, and anti-public health policies, we also need to recognize that the world keeps turning and we must also move forward. 

In fact, we need to consider that perhaps the binaries of pro- or anti-science/climate/etc aren’t even the right framework for navigating the realities of this new administration. After all, RFK’s science (or lack thereof) may be absurd when it comes to understanding vaccines, but his crusade against our processed food industry is something long overdue. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, I guess?

So we shouldn’t expect the next four years to simply be anti-science, but rather a nestbed of chaos and contradictions that we’ll need to work through (and even work with).

A New Posture For Science

In an editorial published after the election, Nature intoned that “the research community must engage with the new administration with courage, tenacity, strength and unity,” by “continuing to speak facts to power.”

Suppose we were to answer Nature’s call– what should scientific communication look like in the face of both policymakers who place ideology above evidence and a public environment flooded with bad faith interpretations (let alone direct disinformation about science)?  

For one thing, we can’t think of science as above or outside public engagement. Science cannot become the language of “the elite.” It needs to build more bridges into more communities, and speak to direct, real-world concerns. It can’t turn its nose up at the American public’s growing disregard for facts while insisting that science is not political. Science itself may not be inherently political, but science has certainly been politicized. That’s unfortunate, and it also creates an opportunity.

Right now, the public is arguably more curious about science than at any point in the past 50 years, even if trust in scientists has declined. People recognize that our systems (like healthcare) are falling short, and are eager for new solutions amid an exciting explosion of new bioscience possibilities. That leaves a lot of room for charlatans to take advantage of the public’s questioning, and when the science community fails to engage (or worse, dismisses those questions outright), misinformation will fill the void. If the science community can fortify its reputation as a change agent, it can have a powerful voice in the conversations that will define not just the next four years, but a lot of our policy moving forward. 

Science needs advocates of all types, but most of all, it needs clear and realistic communication about what we know and what we don’t know. Admitting what science doesn’t know is, of course, risky to many science professionals because it will be taken advantage of by those seeking to undermine or manipulate research for their own agendas. But as we’ve seen with everything from climate change to the Covid response, not engaging transparently to genuine (and sometimes even disingenuous) questions only undermines public trust.

The politics, policies, and communication of science are messy and have real-world consequences on our lives and society. The discourse on social media discards uncertainty and nuance, but science must not fall into the trap of following suit. We must advocate for solutions (and even radical changes) based on what we currently know. The science community needs to acknowledge and set expectations that our knowledge will evolve and change.

An Entrepreneurial Imperative

The other major communication challenge that science faces in the coming years is the expected privatization of some (potentially many) science and research programs that are currently publicly administered. Any such transition will also be messy, but means that the science community will need to entrepreneurially step up, lest more dubious private actors fill those vacuums. 

Let’s take NOAA as an example here. It has emerged as a specific target for either commercialization or to be spun out as a more politically-influenced independent agency. Although most of the conversation around its privatization has focused on the impact for weather forecasting services, NOAA also oversees a great deal of vital environmental data and research efforts, ranging from coastal and fishery management to support for international shipping. 

Should the agency become more commercialized, we can expect more public-private partnerships similar to what we’ve seen with NASA. I’m sure that’s only one vein of the federal goldmine that the owner of the world’s largest satellite constellation company is looking to mine. 

And speaking of mining, we can probably expect a new NOAA to put even more emphasis on extracting deep sea resources. This will be a classic opportunity vs opposition moment for the science community. The seabed minerals are critical to scaling the energy transition, but the environmental concerns need to be taken into consideration as well. While we would expect this administration to run roughshod into the oceans to extract whatever value it can, this is very much a long-term project and any company involved will need to move with the recognition that their technology and approach needs to have an equally long-term vision.  

The biggest threat, however, remains to basic research funding, especially as priorities are anticipated to shift to more commercialized and applied technologies. But even with this, the chaos monkeys are not setting up a simple black-and-white situation. Disease research may take an extreme funding hit, but at the same time, the investments in AI could accelerate bio breakthroughs. The science community will be faced with any number of Operation Warp Speed-style contradictions over the next four years, and we can’t just dismiss those opportunities outright. 

While the science community should be skeptical of these reorganizational efforts, and be prepared to resist them wherever makes sense, it also shouldn’t view the shake up as purely an either/or scenario. There's an opportunity to accelerate scientific discovery in the chaos, and a moral obligation to pursue it. 

Certainly, some of the scientific bureaucracy could stand to be shaken up, whether that means how we allocate breakthrough research funding, or the evolution of regulations in order to meet current challenges. 

So even as the science community resists the destructive dismantling of essential programs, it also needs to be actively involved in what may replace them. We need to understand the changes as opportunities to operate and communicate differently– and perhaps more effectively.

Science as Science

It’s tempting to throw trite talking points and slogans back at those who seek to undermine science. But we can’t simply rely on mantras like “follow the science” to change minds and promote scientifically rigorous agendas. It’s not naive to believe we can still galvanize the public behind good science because today's breakthroughs are exciting and full of meaningful opportunities that can impact our lives. 

It would, however, be a mistake to attempt to impose science upon the public as truth or fact, rather than as a nonstop process of discovery. In an era defined by negative partisanship, any effort exerted in the war on facts is met with equal and opposite force. Science has an alternative this time: to present itself transparently for what it is– a powerful source of exciting discoveries, and a continual pursuit to expand human knowledge with evidenced-based progress. And, perhaps most importantly, a catalyst for radical change.

How Watch Duty’s wildfire tracking app became a crucial lifeline for LA

Watch Duty emerged as the essential app for communities during the LA wild fires, and we especially appreciate founder John Mills’ commitment to keeping the app a free, non-profit, and citizen-sourced system. In an age where government and commercial solutions often fail us, it’s encouraging to remember how much we can accomplish as a community. Much like the Covid Tracking Project, though we shouldn’t have to rely so much on the public to spearhead these initiatives, we should celebrate and support those who step up to lead the necessary work.

What We’re Into

Daniel Drezner on the opportunity cost of having to relitigate fundamental science. 

Colombia’s national anthem as presented through its biodiversity? Yes, please.

The Arctic may be melting, but the “Freezing Finger of Death” is still fascinating.

If you love evidence-based research, you’ll love the “how do they know” breakdowns in Howtown.

As we transition towards a future where googling no longer requires us to leave the results page to get answers, Christopher Butler asks “Who is the internet for?”

Building 5

Tony’s Book Corner

While Neal Stephenson is most readily recognized as a master of speculative sci-fi, with his latest novel, Polostan, he reminds us that he is also an adroit and entertaining writer of historical fiction. 

Polostan, set in the US and the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, follows the adventures of Dawn Rae Bjornberg – the daughter of a communist, Russian father and a swashbuckling cowgirl of an American mother. Over the course of her travels across the US and the incipient Soviet Union, our delightfully vulnerable and charismatic protagonist rides the rails with Old Left activists of the sort Woody Guthrie sang about, runs guns with the help of Al Capone's Chicago mob, catches the eye of a young George Patton, and is suspected of spying for the Americans. After being tortured, and then cleared, she is enlisted as a spy by Lavrentiy Beria, the abhorrent head of Stalin's secret police. 

We are introduced to Russian and American scientists who are trying to explain the origin of cosmic rays and engage in high-altitude balloon research. These scientific and technical scenes are as engaging as any fan of Stephenson's more speculative fiction will have come to expect. Delightfully, what really makes Polostan worth reading is the author's attention to character and narrative development. 

Whether you are a fan of Stephenson's science fiction or new to him altogether, Polostan is a treat. It's the first part of a multivolume work (Bomb Light), and while I will eagerly anticipate the next installment, I also found Polostan engaging enough to stand on its own.

A Thousand (and Nine) Words

A Peek into the Future

Next time on Superposition: “We need less discarding of ideas because ‘that will never work’ and more exploration of ‘But what if it does!’”

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman

Welcome to the brand new Superposition.

What’s the same? We still care immensely about science design and communications, and we still want to share that excitement and curiosity for the world around us with you: our friends, our co-conspirators, our collaborators, our partners in science, our fellow nerds. Superposition is about exploring what’s possible amid what is, the important work of how we relate science to the world, and discovering what’s currently at the edge of our (collective) thinking and understanding. 

So what’s different? Everything else. We’ve rethought every aspect of what has ever made us excited about JDI’s Superposition venture, and rebuilt it from scratch on a fresh canvas. We’re taking a page from our work with our science & tech clients and experimenting.  Stay tuned as we try, discover, fail, and learn our way through what Superposition can become. But maybe most importantly, we’re pulling back the curtain a bit and letting you more into who we are and what we’re thinking about. We hope you’ll join us. 

Welcome to Superposition. Let’s go.

-Shanna and Doug

Of Brain Rot & Enshittification

by Doug Freeman

In their annual attempt to be hip and relevant, the Oxford English Dictionary chose “Brain Rot” as their 2014 Word of the Year. It’s a good choice, all things 2024 considered, and certainly seems to capture the Zeitgeist better than their shortlist of other contenders. 

The official definition that the OED composed for the term is equally inspired: “The supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”.

Brain Rot is a perfect circle of shit. It is both cause and effect. What causes Brain Rot? Brain Rot. How do you get Brain Rot? From Brain Rot. 

The best part of the OED’s efforts is undoubtedly their etymological work. They have traced the first recorded instance of Brain Rot as having been used by none other than Henry David Thoreau, whiling along on the shores of Walden Pond with nothing better to do than complain about the pathetic decline in thinking from everyone else: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

Public intellectuals, it seems, have always been insufferable bores. 

Brain Rot has, of course, always been with us in one form or another. Even as pearls could not possibly be more tightly clutched about Gen Alpha’s pandemic-propelled regression, I see your “Skibidi Toilet” and raise you Beavis and Butthead screeching “I Am Cornholio.” Every generation recreates culture (including absurdity) for themselves, much to their parents’ horror. 

With all due respect to Brain Rot, though, I think there is a better, though quite related, Word of the Year: “Enshittification.” In fact, Australia’s national wordkeepers, the Macquarie Dictionary, declared Enshittification their winner this past year. 

Corey Doctorow first coined the term in a 2022 screed about how bad Amazon has become. Macquarie formalized the definition as “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.” 

Since its coining, this term has seemingly become increasingly relevant as our experience of everything from Facebook and Twitter/X to Google Search and news media has been utterly and thoroughly enshittified. It’s not just you, these services are becoming unusable - especially compared to their original vision and peak user-experience. 

The Case for Enshittification

There’s a distinct reason why I think Enshittification is a better word of the year than Brain Rot. The latter puts the focus on the user, on us. We’re the ones consuming this low-quality content that is rotting our brains, and that’s our fault. Maybe the failure really is our own inability to turn away from viral rage-inducing clickbait, and our getting sucked into the vortex that is flushing our brain cells down the proverbial skibidi toilet is just the inevitable willingness of our being unserious people. But maybe this is how these systems are designed to work.

Enshittification is of course very related to Brain Rot, but it puts the onus on the systems that uphold, circulate, and, most importantly, profit from Brain Rot. Enshittifcation happens because, in a capitalistic framework, you eventually reach a point where the only way to extract more money is to create a more “efficient” product or service. And if it’s free to use, that experience is going to be even worse. We spent the past decade riding on the digital waves of VC-funded user-growth, and now that we’re either hooked (social media) or traditional alternatives have been eliminated (taxis), this decade is finally bringing the reaping. (We’re the harvest, by the way).

As Doctorow has explained it: “Let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.”

So our Google searches are slathered in ads and increasingly irrelevant results; your Facebook and Instagram feeds want you to be friends with brands; your cell service sucks; any sporting event has become a platform for gambling ads. We can go on forever screaming at clouds. 

2024 has been an especially good year for enshittification. Twitter has devolved so spectacularly behind Elon Musk’s transparently juicing the algorithm as to become an unusable reply-bait factory, a record jump from Doctorow’s step 2 to step 4. The US banned TikTok because another country was actually better at brain rot than we are. And news organizations have shit the bed so badly that Joe Rogan is now our leading public intellectual. 

The most amusing enshittification has been AI platforms like ChatGPT. They have gone through the entire cycle in the past year, from the dizzying hype and catastrophizing of inevitable AGI to the remarkable recognition of just how poor these services and their content are right now. I think we still have many more cycles for AI to go through, but the slop it’s producing right now is not exactly encouraging.  

Not to cut ourselves too much slack, but we’ve created a technology base and digital world where enshittification is the natural process, and brain rot is the result. These systems were intentionally designed (perhaps not at first, but certainly somewhere along the way) to produce precisely the kind of the brain-rotting experiences that they have become. Optimizing for user capitulation, while externalizing any mental health side effects. Lather, rinse, repeat. 

I think about enshittification in terms of Douglas Ruskoff’s notion of “Program or Be Programmed,” which is conveniently receiving a 15th Anniversary revision next year. These services are training us to operate in certain ways, with expectations that they have defined. While that is true of any form of media, it’s imperative that we remain cognizant of what is being valued and prioritized by these platforms and services, and whether they are actually serving our priorities and values. 

The rapid decline of Twitter/X and rise of Bluesky is a valuable reminder that we do actually have a significant say in the process of enshittification - we do not have to accept what they are selling us. After all, the other side of capitalism is entrepreneurship. So long as we can keep the balance against monopolistic incentives, the cycle of progress can continue. As Doctorow reminds us, the final step in the process of enshittification is that those services ultimately, and mercifully, die. 

Why does Pantone have a color of the year? It started with ... birds

In related news, “Mocha Mousse” (lesser known as “PANTONE 17-1230”) has been chosen as the official color of 2025. While it’s now associated with marketing campaigns (and maybe an excuse to get a new colorway of a product you already own), Pantone’s Color of the Year has roots far earlier than the program’s official start in 1999 - extending all the way back to the 1800s, when ornithologist Robert Ridgway created one of the first and most robust color swatch booklets in order to better describe bird coloring. Dig deeper with National Geographic here (if nothing else, for the astoundingly gorgeous bird photography).

What We’re Into

Adam Mastroianni counters our enshittification rant that maybe things aren’t getting worse, it just seems that way? 

Pentagram’s Debbie Millman on what the visual differences between Trump’s 2016 and 2024 Time Person of the Year covers tell us

Casey Newton’s and Gary Marcus’ slap fight over whether AI sucks or not.  

Spotify Wrapped, wrapped.

But no, really, Spotify is up to some shady stuff.

Building 5

Checking in with JDI

Some of the coolest things that we learned last year:

Damaris: On a visit to the Hoh Rainforest outside Seattle, Suzanne Simard’s research on forest root systems and communication among trees. 

Sohaila: Angela Lansbury used Murder She Wrote as a way to cast older actors in guest appearance roles so they could keep their SAG benefits.

Justin: Don’t just create a will, get a living trust. It will save you more in the long run.  

Jenny: The Sal del Rey in South Texas, a giant salt lake that has been an important site since the Aztec era.

Michelle: Both JP Morgan and Milton Hershey were suppos be on the Titanic, which has led to all kinds of conspiracy theories. 

Tony: Learned how to solder and starting building audio equipment

A Thousand (and Six) Words

A Peek into the Future

Next time on Superposition: “We can’t simply rely on mantras like ‘follow the science’ to change minds and promote scientifically rigorous agendas.”

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman