Superposition Vol 1.1

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.

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).

Who would be your nominee for Science Person of 2024? We’ll share our favorites next time.

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 supposed to be on the Titanic, which has led to all kinds of conspiracy theories. 

Tony: Learned how to solder and starting building audio equipment.

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