Cargo Culture
The article appears to be a promotional piece for a paid newsletter, offering subscriptions at $70/year or $7/month for access to lengthy weekly analyses covering topics like NVIDIA and Anthropic. No substantive news content is provided in the excerpt.
Background
- "Cargo culture" (aka cargo cult) refers to imitating the surface-level practices of a successful system without understanding the underlying principles — like the Melanesian islanders who built mock airstrips to summon the cargo planes they'd seen during WWII.
- This piece is by Ed Zitron, a tech journalist and media critic whose newsletter "Where's Your Ed At" regularly argues that Silicon Valley is driven by hype, self-deception, and broken management practices rather than genuine innovation.
- The article extends Zitron's ongoing critique of tech company leadership: he argues that executives copy each other's strategies (hiring waves, AI pivots, RTO mandates, mass layoffs) as performative rituals, mistaking correlation for causation.