I Handed the Comment Section the Keys and Drove Straight Into a Lake

Let me be clear about something upfront: I consider myself a person with a vision. Ask anyone who's worked with me. I have opinions about kerning. I have opinions about the order songs should appear on an album. I once argued for twenty minutes about whether a project title should have a comma in it. (It should not. I was right. This is not up for debate.)

So naturally, last month, I did the dumbest thing imaginable: I let the internet name my next project.

The Rules of My Own Downfall

The premise was simple. I posted a poll. Name my next project. First round, open submissions. Then I'd take the top contenders, pit them against each other in head-to-head brackets, and whatever won, I'd keep. No vetoes. No committee of one (me). The people speak, the people get what they want.

The submissions came in fast and they came in feral. Some highlights: "Soggy Prophet." "The Microwave Years." "A Modest Crisis." One person simply commented "garlic" and it received 200 upvotes, which tells you everything about my following.

The final bracket came down to a name I'd genuinely have picked myself against an entry that read, and I quote, "Hurvi Sadamm and the Existential Tupperware."

The Tupperware won by eleven votes. Eleven. I have been abandoned by democracy.

The Part Where It Actually Worked

Here's where I have to eat some crow, because something strange happened once I surrendered the title. The project stopped being the careful, tasteful thing I'd been circling for months and became something with teeth. The Existential Tupperware demanded a certain tone — a little absurd, a little sad, leftovers of the self sealed in plastic. Once I accepted the name, the work came fast. Like, embarrassingly fast. The name had a point of view, and my vision had to rise to meet it.

I think I finally understand why this works. When you name your own project, you name it to match the thing you've already made. It's a label on a finished jar. But when someone else names it, the name arrives first and the work has to grow toward it. That's not a constraint. That's a dare.

The Line You Shouldn't Cross (But I Did, Repeatedly)

Now, the honest caveat: collaboration with an audience is a dial, not a switch, and I cranked mine past several settings that should come with warning labels. There is a difference between letting people name the project and letting them redesign it mid-stream. I ran a second poll on the project's color palette and got a 50/50 split between "deep ocean blue" and "hot dog red," which is not a palette, it's a cry for help.

The line, as far as I can tell, sits here: let the audience steer the parts of the work that face outward — titles, names, packaging, the jokes on the tin. Keep the parts that face inward. The structure, the heart, the thing you actually mean. They gave me a name. They don't get to tell me what the Tupperware contains. That's mine.

Try It, Coward

If you make anything — songs, essays, ceramic frogs, whatever — I'm telling you, hand the naming rights to your people once. It'll sting. You'll lose a vote to the word "garlic." And then you'll build something weirder, funnier, and more alive than the tasteful thing you were about to make alone.

Democracy has terrible taste. But terrible taste, it turns out, is a style.