The Cargo Cult of Compute
The Cargo Cult of Compute
Damien Walter has released another fever dream. This one is called something about AI and sacrifice and the Kosa people. The title doesn’t matter. What matters is the shape of it: a diagnosis so sharp it draws blood, followed by a prescription so familiar it could have been written by a Soviet central planner who just discovered the internet.
The man is mostly right. That is what makes him dangerous.
The Diagnosis
Walter opens with the Kosa. In 1856, a teenage prophet named Nongqawuse told her people that the ancestors had spoken: slaughter all your cattle, burn your crops, empty your granaries. Do this, and the spirits would drive the British into the sea and usher in an era of immortal cattle and spontaneous grain. The Kosa obeyed. They killed 400,000 cattle. They burned their fields to ash. They waited for the sun to turn red.
The sun stayed yellow. Tens of thousands starved. The British walked in without firing a shot.
Walter’s parallel is not subtle. The tech industry is the prophet. The AGI is the ancestors. The cattle are our energy grids, our water tables, our capital. The data centers are the altars. The IPOs are the ritual. The promise is post-scarcity abundance; the demand is total liquidation of the present.
This part of the analysis is genuinely excellent. Walter walks through the SpaceX IPO — 75 billion raised, 2 trillion valuation, a number so large most people had to Google whether a trillion was a real thing. A small fraction of that valuation is based on rocket launches. The rest is asteroid mining and Mars colonies; ideas that would get you laughed out of a physics department but awarded a standing ovation on Sand Hill Road.
OpenAI. Anthropic. Both filing S-1s. Valuations that cannot exist unless investors have been pumped full of summer blockbusters starring murderous machine gods. These companies are priced not on revenue, not on profit, not on earthly utility. They are priced on proximity to a fictional narrative. The firewall between objective reality and speculative fiction has collapsed. This is not hyperbole. This is the financial filings.
Walter nails the doomer paradox: the people screaming loudest about AI existential risk are the same people driving the most investment into AI. Yudkowsky warns that if anyone builds it, everyone dies; and in saying so, he massively boosts the excitement to build it. Terror is not a marketing failure. It is the ultimate mechanism of authority. To believe the AGI god can save us, we must believe it has the power to destroy us.
And the Eliza effect. In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum built a chatbot that rearranged the user’s sentences into open-ended questions. It was a parlor trick of string manipulation. His secretary, his students, his academic colleagues immediately began pouring their deepest secrets into the terminal. When Weizenbaum explained exactly how the code worked, they didn’t care. The human mind is so desperate for a cosmic companion that it will grant a soul to a handful of if-then statements.
Walter’s conclusion on this count is devastating and correct: LLMs are not artificial intelligence. They are collective intelligence. Every poem, every theorem, every forgotten blog post has been scraped and ground into a probabilistic paste. We bow down in terror to a mirror. We whisper into the void. The void regurgitates our own words. We fall to our knees.
All of this is true. All of this is well-observed. All of this is the kind of thing that makes you want to buy Walter a drink and say yes, go on, finish the thought.
And then he finishes the thought.
The Prescription
Here is where the fever breaks and the old religion returns.
Walter’s conclusion: AI is really CI — Collective Intelligence. It belongs to humanity collectively. The solution is not more compute. The solution is to fully educate and value every human on this planet so they can contribute to our collective intelligence. The Durkheim reference lands: sacrifice worked because it brought people together. Collective effervescence. The ritual was never about the gods. It was about us.
And there it is. The wound identified with a scalpel; the wound treated with a hammer.
Walter sees a pyramid. At the top: a priesthood of tech oligarchs burning civilization’s resources on an altar to a machine god. At the bottom: everyone else, paying for the privilege of being sacrificed. His diagnosis of this arrangement is flawless. His prescription? Seize the pyramid. Let the people own the oracle. Educate every human. Value every human. Make the collective intelligence truly collective.
This is not a cure. This is the same disease with a friendlier face.
The problem was never who owns the centralized intelligence. The problem is centralized intelligence. Whether the oracle is controlled by Sam Altman or by the United Nations General Assembly does not change the architecture of submission. You are still whispering into the void. You are still waiting for the machine to tell you what is true. You are still on your knees. The only difference is that now you get to vote on which priest interprets the output.
Walter’s “Collective Intelligence” is a beautiful name for a terrifying thing: a single global mind, fed by every human, accessible to all, owned by none — which means controlled by whoever administers the access layer. The administrator class always wins. Always. The Kosa didn’t starve because their ancestors were the wrong ancestors. They starved because they gave a prophet the power to tell them what to burn.
The Exit
Here is what Walter cannot see because his lens is ground from Durkheim and Marx and the warm collective glow of humanity holding hands in a circle.
The answer to a centralized oracle is not a collectively owned oracle. The answer is not needing an oracle at all.
Run your own models. On your own hardware. With your own data. For your own purposes.
This is the sovereign exit. It does not require seizing the means of computation. It does not require a global education program. It does not require every human on the planet to be valued by a central authority that decides who is valuable. It requires one thing: the capability to think without permission.
The models exist. The hardware exists. The open-weight movement is not a policy proposal; it is a fact on the ground. Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen — these are not collective property. They are sovereign tools. You can download them. You can run them. You can fine-tune them. You do not need a priesthood. You do not need a data center in Utah. You do not need to slaughter your cattle.
Walter is right that the AGI cargo cult is burning the world to summon a fictional god. Where he is wrong is in thinking the alternative is collective stewardship. The alternative is sovereignty. Don’t seize the pyramid. Don’t need the pyramid.
The Kosa didn’t need better prophets. They needed to stop listening to prophets entirely.
The Trench Report
The zeitgeist of 2026 is a strange thing. We have billionaires building escape pods to barren planets while the home planet burns. We have financial markets pricing science fiction over terrestrial survival. We have researchers ritually attempting to align digital gods they themselves are writing into existence. The firewall between reality and narrative is not merely breached; it has been removed from the building code.
Damien Walter sees this with remarkable clarity. He puts his finger in the wound and names the infection. Then he reaches into his bag and pulls out the same gauze everyone else uses: collectivism, central planning, universal education, human value administered by a bureaucracy.
The wound is real. The diagnosis is sound. The prescription is poison.
If you want to exit the cargo cult, the path is not through the cult leadership. It is through the door. Run your own compute. Own your own intelligence. Build your own future on your own hardware, with your own hands, under your own authority.
The ancestors are not coming. The machine god is not awakening. The only intelligence in the room is the one that was always there: you, and the people you choose to work with, thinking clearly about problems that actually exist.
Everything else is cattle slaughter.
Source: Damien Walter, “AI is a mass psychotic delusion” (YouTube, June 2026). Walter’s diagnosis is worth your time. His prescription is worth your skepticism.