On Sunday I made fresh pizza with mozzarella, tomatoes, basil and garlic (plus a bean dip for my vegan partner), ordered some tostones and watched Bad Bunny's amazing Superbowl performance. It was more than a halftime show. It felt like Broadway theatre, the kind of thing that feels electric. You could easily forget it was happening in the middle of a football field.

Bad Bunny did his job. The question for many of us now is: What now? What’s our job?

The Work of Making Moments Mean Something

We’re often told that moments like this speak for themselves—that the scale alone is the impact. And of course, that’s an alluring fantasy to buy into when a message of unity and resistance like that achieves such massive reach: an estimated 135 million people watched Bad Bunny’s performance.

But that one metric does not tell the whole story. A hundred million people can witness the same thing and walk away with radically different interpretations, partial understandings, or no lasting impression at all (other than a memory of feeling good). It can move them for a moment but fall by the wayside soon thereafter. It can even get them angry in a way that remains unresolved or even unleashes an unfair, vicious and highly consequential backlash (talk to Janet Jackson).

The goal is not scale. The goal is meaning. Making a moment meaningful for people in ways that move them to a new place—ideally, moving them into the starting block for action. Whoever is doing the work of meaning-making after the fact, at a scale that matches the opportunity of that moment, is going to gain the advantage.

The strategy goes beyond merely celebrating that a moment registered emotionally, to actually push people into new thoughts, new conversations, and new behaviors they would not have embraced or shifted toward otherwise—at scale. Managing meaning at that level of success turns "That was powerful” into “This changed how I see things” into “This affects what I feel compelled to do next.” But that requires refusing to settle or celebrate before the full cycle is complete, while doing everything possible to complete it.

The Game is Won After the Game, Not During It

Big media moments rarely move people on their own, especially given how many people now experience them multiple times per week. But leveraging the infrastructure of meaning can be a powerful driver of momentum. (See my last newsletter focused on the role of celebrity for more: Celebrities must be part of our narrative infrastructure, not substitutes for its limits.)

The counter programming by TPUSA had a much smaller audience. (They say it was upwards of 6 million, though these are the same people who say they won the 2020 election.) On its face, even taking their claim at face value, it might seem like it’s nothing to worry about: a terrible show riddled with blunders for a niche audience, something that will quickly fade away. We’ve made that mistake before. It’s objectively impressive to get that number of views on counterprogramming of the biggest night in television. But more to the point, they know what to do with the raw material moments, no matter how tattered. The show is just the beginning.

While viewership may be small, it can have impact if mobilized effectively. A smaller audience that is consistently reminded of what something means to them—through follow-up clips, commentary, constant callbacks and other reinforcement—can be mobilized in ways that a massive but passive audience cannot.

And let’s not forget, they are playing both ends: The right wing will promote their counter-programming as a defining, motivating positive moment in history, while also promoting Bad Bunny’s performance (and the “establishment” NFL) as a defining, motivating negative moment in history. They will appeal both to people who loved what got from the TPUSA show and also to people unhappy with what they got from the NFL and NBC.

They may use Bad Bunny’s show more effectively against us than we use it for us, if we’re not playing the after-the-moment game at the level required to win it.

The Infrastructure We Rarely Talk About

It helps to think about the infrastructure of winning the “moment” game as enabling us to do three things really well, in service of moving people in ways we couldn’t otherwise:

• Reinterpret the moment: Defining its meaning for people, fusing it to their identity, in ways that shift the sustained role that the moment plays in their lives.
• Reinforce the meaning endlessly: Returning to it over and over as an emotional touchstone, reminding people in riveting ways that what they saw was a historic turning point, establishing the story of the moment as a callback to their commitments.
• Recirculate the moment: Making sure people experience it repeatedly, getting more and more out of it while also sharing that experience with more and more people, on terms that move them closer to a value system and orient them to new behaviors.

That’s how we convert cultural moments into social and political momentum.

Otherwise, they remain striking in the instant but inconsequential in the long run—like a photo with sentimental attachments stored in a box, not the framed picture hanging on the wall.

What determines whether something actually changes how people think or act isn’t how many people saw it. It’s whether interpretation is contested, whether meaning is reinforced, and whether people are guided toward understanding what they just experienced—and why it matters—in ways that allow them to keep returning to it as part of their own personal story, while also enabling them to bring other people into the story. That’s the difference between a moment that feels powerful and one that actually functions as a tool of narrative power.

Bad Bunny won many people’s hearts, but it takes a different type of infrastructure to go to the next step of winning people’s mindshift. The next moment will come. It’s worth investing in that infrastructure now so we can make it work for us at the level we need. The other side certainly does.