Cargo Cult is a podcast hosted by Naomi Karavani and Michele Greenstein that pulls back the curtain on these often forgotten forces shaping our digital world.

A cargo cult is what happens when people copy the visible parts of something they think is successful — without understanding the deeper systems that actually make it work.

The term comes from World War II. Allied forces landed on remote Pacific islands, bringing with them cargo: food, medicine, equipment, and more. To the islanders, this sudden arrival of wealth and technology seemed magical. They noticed planes landing on runways, soldiers in uniforms, and people waving flags. After the war ended and the soldiers left, some islanders built fake airstrips and wooden control towers, hoping the cargo would return. They copied the form, not the function.

Today, “cargo cult” is used as a metaphor — especially in science, business, and tech — to describe similar behavior: loving the surface level symbols of surface of success but missing what actually made it happen.

So what does this have to do with Big Tech?

A lot.

In the tech world, there’s a tendency to imitate what successful companies look like on the outside — without really understanding what made them powerful in the first place. Teams copy Google’s culture, Amazon’s strategies, or Facebook’s experiments — but often miss the context that made those things effective.

We believe the real engines of Big Tech’s rise are rarely talked about: deep partnerships with the state, access to elite networks, and the invisible support of powerful institutions. Our podcast, Cargo Cult, is about exposing this reality — and pushing back on the myth that tech’s biggest winners got there through merit, hustle, or pure technical innovation alone.

The truth is, many of these companies were shaped from the beginning by their relationships with the U.S. government and intelligence community. Google got early funding connected to DARPA. Amazon’s cloud arm, AWS, landed massive contracts with the CIA and Department of Defense. Palantir was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture fund. Microsoft has long been a major federal contractor and now runs one of the largest government cloud platforms on the planet.

These companies weren’t just building better software. They were aligning with the long-term agendas of state power — especially around surveillance, data collection, and behavior control. And yet, all over the world, tech founders and governments keep chasing and advertising the aesthetic of Big Tech: innovation labs, AI initiatives, moonshot pitches, and “disruption” — without understanding the political and financial structures that actually enabled these companies to dominate.

This is the heart of cargo cult thinking.

It’s not that Big Tech didn’t have talented engineers or good products. And we have nothing against open-plan offices or slick pitch decks. But the story we’re often told — of scrappy underdogs changing the world with nothing but brains and code — leaves out everything that made that kind of success possible in the first place. Regulatory capture, government funding, military contracts, surveillance programs, the workings of capitalism, and aligning with long-term elite agendas — these are the real foundations of Big Tech, and it's the stuff we like to talk about on the show. We also talk about pop culture sometimes.

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Complain at cargocultpod@gmail.com