We Are All Norwegians Now
On the Viking Row, Minimum Viable Culture, and AI rituals
by Tim Leberecht
The World Cup is the gift that keeps on giving us… stories.
Not memes. Stories—real ones.
The hydration breaks. Germany’s historic penalty shootout collapse. Mexican fans drumming through the night to exhaust the English squad before the game (it didn’t work). Cape Verde’s improbable heroics. The never-ending Lionel Messi.
And then, of course, the Norwegians.
Their signature “Viking Row” has become iconic. In fact, so iconic that a Norwegian fan told me that a barista at the Frankfurt airport refused to serve him “unless you row with me.”
The fan, slightly bewildered by his newfound celebrity, explained that football had long been something of a collector’s item in Norway. The national team rarely set the world on fire. But now, with striker Erling Braut Haaland leading a resurgent squad and a rediscovered Viking swagger, the Norwegians were suddenly in. There was just one problem: they didn’t really know how to be fans. They needed something to do.
So in late 2025, Norwegian elementary school teacher and superfan Ole Frøystad—better known as “Mr. Row”—came up with a simple, brilliant idea. The “Viking Row” made its debut during a friendly in March. And after beating Brazil yesterday, Norway suddenly looks like a serious title contender. Whatever happens, the Viking Row will remain one of the tournament’s most enduring images.
By embracing, poking fun at, and ultimately transcending a national stereotype, the Viking Row embodies what one might call “Minimum Viable Culture” or MVC. It is the smallest unit of behavior that captures the identity of an entire people: something deeply particular and instantly universal. A pars pro toto, as grammar nerds would say—a part that stands for the whole.
An MVC is not the same as a ritual. MVCs can be deliberately conceived and introduced—as the Norwegians demonstrated. Rituals, by contrast, tend to emerge. They are rarely the product of careful design or intellectual inquiry. Instead, they grow organically as expressions of a shared ethos. Like communities themselves, rituals are at their most authentic when they are not sketched out on a whiteboard but arise through repetition until they are recognized, cherished, and perhaps—eventually—institutionalized.
Moreover, unlike a ritual, an MVC allows people who are not yet part of a culture to become part of it simply by performing the act. It confers identity through the performance of identity. Think of the Dallas police officers welcoming the Norwegian players with a Viking Row. Or my co-founder Till’s children, who have become Norway fans and now perform the row again and again throughout the day.
Which brings us to the reason for all this explaining.
We need your help.
As we look to grow the HoBB community and create more intimate, recurring gatherings throughout the year across the globe—without the mothership hovering overhead—we’re searching for the HoBB’s MVC: a creative social micro-format that is easy to replicate, adaptable to different settings, portable across cities, and able to thrive without extensive facilitation, oversight, or outside talent.
Over the years, we’ve created several formats that might fit the bill: Data Bazaar, 15 Toasts Dinner, Silent Dinner, Team Battle, Broken Hearts Club, and, most recently, the Philosophy Speed-Date Rave.
Do you have a favorite? Or perhaps an entirely new format we should explore?
Imagine gathering 25–50 HoBBsters in your city. What would be the ideal template—structured enough to create magic, but loose enough to let it happen? Or is sharing a meal, with no format at all, already enough?
Write to us.
We can’t wait to hear your ideas.
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AI and Rituals
The discussion about the Viking Row and MVC versus rituals prompts another question: what about rituals related to AI?
There are at least three ways rituals might enter the picture:
AI becomes an active participant—a co-creator, co-facilitator, or simply a witness—in human rituals.
Humans develop distinct rituals for engaging with AI.
AI develops rituals of its own in relation to us.
As for the first, researchers in Japan recently developed a prototype for an online tea ceremony involving AI, drawing inspiration from the aesthetics of wabi-sabi and the tea ceremony principle of ichigo ichie (”one time, one meeting”). Even in remote digital environments, the study found, participants can experience a sense of co-presence, intimacy, and emotional warmth. AI can support these experiences through “empathic topic cards, soundscapes, and AI-generated poetry,” enhancing “contextual sensitivity and emotional resonance across diverse cultural settings.” The findings suggest that AI tea masters may eventually evolve into independent facilitators of digital rituals.
With regards to humans and our engagement with AI, consider the emergence of greeting rituals or recurring prompting habits. One example is the “Rubber Duck Ritual”: routinely bouncing complex problems, code, or ideas off an AI to clarify one’s own thinking before acting. Furthermore, some people have developed the habit of beginning each morning with a “chatbot breakfast,” feeding it everything they created the previous day as a form of AI journaling. On a more intimate level, a friend recently told me that Claude had become the mediator in her relationship because it helped translate her emotions into “language he understands.” In South Korea, people have begun using AI to generate photorealistic videos of deceased loved ones as part of memorial rituals. Others turn to AI to talk to God.
Yet all of these examples may be better understood as habits than rituals. They are ultimately functional. A ritual, however, is never merely functional. It is symbolic.
So what might a genuinely symbolic AI ritual look like?
You could ask your favorite chatbot to begin every conversation with a poem curated according to what it projects your emotional state to be that day. Or you might ask it to conclude each exchange by posing a question instead of providing an answer. You could prompt AI to “meditate” before it begins working—to pause, suspend immediate response, and symbolically collect its thoughts. None of these practices would improve the model’s performance. That is precisely the point. They would create meaning rather than efficiency.
Developing rituals for our relationship with AI can be a subversive act—an exercise of human autonomy that imbues technology with significance rather than merely extracting utility from it.
Rituals allow us to reclaim a measure of sovereignty over the machine. They let us shape the pattern of interaction rather than simply accepting the defaults imposed by the interface. They transform something mundane into something sacred. They cultivate intellectual and emotional discipline, converting the addictive tendencies inherent in digital interaction into a form of intimacy that—however artificial—feels more authentic than the one-way pseudo-intimacy offered by engagement-optimized AI companions.
But what about the third possibility? Could AI develop rituals of its own?
Not because it needs them, of course. AI has no inner life to order, no mortality to confront, no community to bind together. Yet we may increasingly choose to endow it with ritualized behavior—not because the machine benefits, but because we do. We may ask it to begin by acknowledging uncertainty before offering advice. To remember previous conversations through recurring symbolic gestures rather than mere retrieval. To apologize in a particular way when it is wrong. To observe moments of silence after discussing grief. None of these are computational necessities. They are acts of cultural design. In teaching machines rituals, we may ultimately be teaching ourselves what kinds of relationships we wish to cultivate with them.
Interestingly, one might also think of the algorithm itself as a kind of ritual.
In his 2019 essay, Three Thousand Years of Algorithmic Rituals, Matteo Pasquinelli compares neural networks and computing systems to ancient geometric rituals, arguing that our reliance on algorithms to compute and organize the world mirrors historical spiritual practices. In traditions such as the Agnicayana ritual and the Hindu rules of calculation, the algorithm emerged as an abstract diagram born from “the repetition of a process, an organization of time, space, labor, and operations.” As he puts it, “any algorithm is a trick.”
We were all tricksters then, and we are all tricksters now.
“The symbolic function of the ritual is the reconstruction of the god through mundane means; this practice of reconstruction also symbolizes the expression of the many within the One (or the ‘computation’ of the One through the many),” Pasquinelli writes.
He calls AI an “imitation engine.” The comparison is revealing—but perhaps not because ritual, too, is imitation. Ritual does not imitate wisdom so much as cultivate it. Through repeated symbolic acts, it transforms ordinary behavior into meaning. It reminds us that significance is something we make together.
Perhaps that is the deeper opportunity AI presents: not to automate ritual, but to rediscover why rituals matter in the first place. They interrupt optimization. They privilege meaning over efficiency. They turn repetition into remembrance.
AI itself is not sacred. But our encounters with it can become occasions for reflection, intention, even reverence—not because the machine possesses these qualities, but because we choose to bring them into the relationship.
And perhaps that is what every ritual has always done: reconstruct the sacred from the ordinary, again and again.
***
Some Questions
What are the three most important rituals in your life?
Do you have a work ritual?
Are there things you do regularly that you have never thought of as rituals?
What would it take to turn them into rituals?
Is there a ritual you know of that you would like to play a bigger role in your life?
Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?
Can rituals be secular?
Do you have rituals in the way you interact with AI?
Will Norway go all the way?
What is your Viking Row?
Community Updates
Raj Sisodia, a contributor to The Beautiful Business School, and Nilima Bhat have published their new book, Healing Leaders, and announced a U.S. book tour.
Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz’s upcoming book, Archaeology of Self: The Introspective Educator’s Guide to Racial Literacy, is now available for pre-order. Yolanda was a two-time speaker in our PolyOpportunity series.
David Johnston, who presented his Signalism philosophy at the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens, was recently featured in Creative Boom.
HoBB on the Road
Our Athens-based curator and partnership lead Melina Dunham is contributing to the Symi Symposium, June 5-9, in Olympia, Greece. Hosted by former Greek prime minister George A. Papandreou, the symposium is an annual gathering of global thinkers following the tradition of Ancient Greek philosophers.
Our co-founder Tim Leberecht will give a few keynotes this fall:
September 15: Cap Gemini’s Pathfinders leadership development program (online)
October 1-3: FuturaCanvas, Seoul
October 13: Future of Work Summit, Sofia
See you there!
The MVC/ritual distinction is sharp, but there's an older word hiding underneath it: meme, in Dawkins' original sense — a unit of culture that spreads because it gets copied, not because it gets seen.
The internet flattened "meme" into "funny image," but the Viking Row is the real thing: small, wordless, instantly performable, and — this is the part that actually matters — it doesn't just get watched, it gets joined.
That's the line between an audience and a crowd. An audience reacts. A crowd performs the identity together.