Cargo Culture

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2026-06-23 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/cargo-culture/

Summary

Ed Zitron’s “Cargo Culture” argues that the current AI investment cycle is a cargo cult: the industry mimics the surface features of past technological breakthroughs (Google Search, AWS, the iPhone) without the underlying conditions that made those moments generative. The core critique is economic — AI companies operate at sustained losses, hide inference costs inside accounting categories, and spend more on “sales and marketing” than on R&D, while $765 billion in data center capex chases a revenue model that hasn’t materialized. Zitron reads the Snapchat Spectacles failure and Noam Shazeer’s $2.7B acquisition as symptoms: money is circulating, but the products aren’t landing for the people who’d actually use them.

Implications

• Voices/power dynamics: This is the clearest current articulation of the skeptic position, and it’s gaining traction outside the usual bear-case circles. Worth tracking whether the “cargo cult” frame becomes the default vocabulary for AI criticism the way “AI winter” was in prior cycles — framing shapes what evidence gets cited.
• Agent landscape: The economic critique applies directly to agent products: if the demo loop is impressive but inference costs aren’t falling fast enough to make the unit economics work, the “agentic future” is a funding story as much as a technology story. Watch gross margins, not capability announcements.
• Model capability: Zitron’s critique implicitly bets that scaling has peaked its returns. That’s the exact bet the open-weight movement is also making structurally (efficiency over scale) — the two threads converge.