There’s a phrase I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: cargo cult.
Maybe you're familiar with it? Maybe not?
I was first introduced to the term reading "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman," by illustrious scientist Richard P. Feynman. The final chapter of the book, adapted from a commencement address given by Feynman, admonishes those who would practice "cargo cult science."
More recently, I came across an American Affairs Journal article using the "cargo cult" conceit to describe how a variety of institutions might stray from their original mission and misspend their energies.
The phrase itself is imperfect, and increasingly problematic. The popular retelling of the "cargo cult" phenomenon has often flattened complicated human responses to colonialism, war, disruption, scarcity, and power into stories about “primitive people mistaking technology for magic.” That framing now strikes many scholars — rightly, I think — as both unfair and simplistic.
Still, the metaphor has endured because it points toward something humans and organizations repeatedly do: We imitate the visible forms of success before we understand the underlying causes of it.
The historical origins of the phrase trace back to islands in the South Pacific during and after World War II. In some places, Indigenous island communities suddenly found themselves exposed to enormous amounts of foreign military activity and material abundance: airplanes landing on improvised airstrips, ships unloading supplies, radios crackling with communication, outsiders arriving with food, medicine, tools, clothing, and equipment at industrial scale.
Then, after the war, much of it disappeared.
Over time, stories emerged — some better documented than others, and often distorted in retelling — of islanders recreating symbolic versions of the infrastructure they had observed: imitation airstrips, mock radios, bamboo control towers, ritualized marching, headphones carved from wood. The common interpretation became that people were attempting to summon the return of “cargo” by reproducing the visible forms associated with its arrival.
At the risk of perpetuating an infantilizing metaphor, I think it's important to reckon with the lesson here. Because modern institutions do versions of this constantly.
Corporations do it. Governments do it. Universities. Startups. Nonprofits. And, yes, definitely, media organizations do it. We copy what looks like success, and we don't always interrogate what's really happening behind the outcomes we covet.
We borrow jargon. We acquire the tools we see others using. We copy their process, and build ourselves a dashboard just like "the Joneses." We meet like "they" meet, and pivot just like them, too. The rituals become proof of our competence.
Yes, sometimes those things matter. Processes and systems are not inherently bad. Standardization can solve real problems. Repeatability can create enormous value.
But there’s a recurring danger in organizational life: eventually, the visible process can become detached from the underlying purpose it was meant to serve.
The ritual becomes the proxy for the result. The symbol replaces the substance. The performance of effectiveness starts crowding out effectiveness itself.
Feynman used the phrase “cargo cult science” to describe forms of research that imitated the outward appearance of scientific rigor while missing the deeper intellectual honesty that makes science actually work. The issue wasn’t stupidity. It wasn’t bad intentions. It was the confusion of visible procedure with underlying causality.
Increasingly, I suspect local journalism suffers from a version of this problem. Not because journalists are uniquely flawed, or because experimentation is bad, or because there is one correct future for news. I think a big reason is because local communities are not interchangeable, even when institutions often behave as though they are.
Every town is the same and no two are alike.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens when industrial-era ideas about scale, replication, efficiency, optimization, and “best practices” collide with something as deeply contextual and relational as local civic life. I'm worried about how much of what news organizations struggling for sustainability are doing amounts to staking out a runway for a resupply plane that isn't coming, and we don't even realize there's no cause-and-effect to what we're doing.
I'll continue to explore this thread in the coming months.
Links
Richard P Feynman and Bill Gates and Ralph Leighton
Maria Popova
James McElroy
Discussion