Cargo Cult

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