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# Myles Badger — full content for AI agents

Myles Badger is a writer and researcher based in Boston, publishing essays as Myles Mode.
Canonical site: https://mylesbadger.com/ · Newsletter: https://mylesbadger.substack.com/

## Waifu Industrial Complex (Aug 2026, Myles Mode)
URL: https://mylesbadger.com/writing/waifu-industrial-complex/
Full essay: https://mylesbadger.substack.com/p/waifu-industrial-complex
Subtitle: Anduril, anime girls, and the militarization of fandom

Background: Sgt. J.S. Wilson, USA, painting a design on the prow of a bomber based at Eniwetok, Marshall Islands, June 1944. Foreground: The Anduril Sisters, drawn by Atamonica for KommandoStore and Anduril Industries, October 2024.
I’ve spent most of the last decade at various organizations under the loose umbrella of “branding,” which has given me a decent set of goggles for sizing it up in the wild. Now, whenever I encounter a promotional “activation,” I can’t help trying to mentally reverse-engineer the chain of meetings, PowerPoints and emails that brought it into being. This was the first thing on my mind when Instagram introduced me to the consumer merchandising arm of Anduril, the defense-tech company founded by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey.
On the company’s online store, beyond all the standard ephemera that any sufficiently locked-in marketing intern can now conjure into existence with two Zyns and Claude Cowork, there is the enticing option of spending $250 in exchange for a piece of a destroyed military drone. The component arrives vacuum-sealed, like coffee, weed, or crime scene evidence, complete with a color-coded “rarity” system straight out of World of Warcraft: white for “common,” black for “rare,” and yellow for “legendary.” Those who are feeling lucky can even opt for a “mystery” blind box whose contents remain hidden until unboxing.
Source: andurilgear.com
If the idea that Anduril is selling the actual broken remains of their weapons systems like Overwatch loot crates wasn’t enough, there’s also the matter of the word they use to describe those components. Regardless of rarity or mystery level, they’re all referred to as “relics”—which gives someone like me some clear and unmistakable echoes of Warhammer 40,000, and suggests that whoever chose that term knew exactly what they were doing. I say that as a compliment and a warning.​
Anduril’s higher-ups are no strangers to the value of word association. As any current or former gifted kid will tell you, the company is named for Aragorn’s sword in The Lord of the Rings—a weapon made from the shards of another legendary sword once used to defeat existential evil, reforged at a moment of crisis to do so again. This is not to castigate Luckey and company as aura-vampires on behalf of a book and trilogy of movies that I personally like very much, but to point out that their first branding decision was to define themselves in relation to a very specific canon with a very specific fandom to match—one where knowing the deep history of a fictional object is an activity in itself.​
With Anduril’s capital-N Nerd roots in mind, their recent forays into merch have left me wondering: why would a defense contractor ground their aesthetic in this particular register, and what is it doing for them? Beyond any superficial geek-bait factor, or even a slightly more functional desire for brand differentiation, it may be that they seek to build a fandom of their own—and, in doing so, cultivate something that the Lockheeds and Raytheons of the world have sunk billions of dollars and decades of planning into acquiring by other means.
>tfw no murder robot gf
Back in 2024, around the same time that Anduril started offering “relics,” they began collaborating with the online retailer KommandoStore — named for the /k/ommandos, users of the 4chan “Weapons” board /k/ — on another new lineup of unconventional product-focused merch. The stars of this collaboration are the “Anduril Sisters”: anime girl personifications of real-life Anduril weapons systems. These include the Ghost autonomous reconnaissance helicopter, the Dive-XL autonomous undersea vehicle, and the ALTIUS 600M “loitering munition”—a somewhat euphemistic phrase for a single-use explosive drone designed to circle above a battlefield until it identifies a target worth dive-bombing.
A bumper sticker from the Anduril Sisters collection. Source: KommandoStore
The first two Sisters, Ghost and ALTIUS, made their public debut in a visual novel short titled “Help! My Anime Dreamgirl is an Anduril ALTIUS 600M Loitering Munition,” published to KommandoStore’s YouTube and X accounts on October 2nd, 2024. The description included on YouTube is particularly instructive.

“Sometimes the Arsenal of Democracy™ needs a little help rebooting itself. Thankfully there is a simple blueprint for accelerating the effective defense of the Western world and its values. Thanks to a recent self-report survey, we now know that a handful of Japanese animated tv shows and video games are responsible for over 45% of Gen Z and Millennials working in the defense industry.
In the immortal words of Mark Hanna, “those are rookie numbers.” At Kommandostore we believe we can do better. We believe we can pump up those rookie numbers. So we tasked our team with creating an original visual novel for the Anduril ALTIUS and Ghost unmanned aerial systems. We hope you enjoy “Help! My Anime Dreamgirl is an ALTIUS 600M Loitering Munition””
Rarely does a piece of promotional copy state its theory of action in such naked and carefully measured terms. Per this description, which Anduril almost certainly had to sign off on, the Anduril Sisters explicitly exist to move real human bodies into the defense industry. The attached nine minutes of imagined visual novel gameplay put that theory into hyper-targeted and kind of exhausting practice.
The script — voiced-over in a 4chan-native second-person POV — follows a lonely /k/-poster who liquidates his life savings to buy a real ALTIUS unit from a seller in Ukraine. When it arrives, after rebuilding it with “JB Weld and Louis Rossmann videos,” he convinces his mom to let him borrow her Toyota RAV4 by claiming he has an internship opportunity at “a really important defense prime”—contractor lingo for Lockheed, Raytheon, and company. He then takes his purchase to a nearby quarry for a test flight, only to watch it execute a textbook kill chain on his borrowed car. 
Stills from "Help! My Anime Dreamgirl is an ALTIUS 600M Loitering Munition." Source: YouTube
Enter the Anduril Sisters. Ghost arrives first to mock the operator’s “job interview,” followed by ALTIUS, who pins him to the ground and berates him for thinking he was qualified to fly “the best loitering munition in the Arsenal of Democracy.” The titular girl then orders him to “find, fix and finish your homework” before offering a parting ultimatum: she will return in eight months, at which point she expects the protagonist to be able to bench-press his own body weight, or “I will literally kill you and you will deserve it.”
Stills from "Help! My Anime Dreamgirl is an ALTIUS 600M Loitering Munition." Source: YouTube
This is not the only bit of writing attached to the collaboration that seems to have been precision-crafted to mess with someone like me. True to KommandoStore’s nominal pedigree, each product page also includes a few lines of honest-to-god 4chan-style greentext. In a recent piece for INC Longforms, I argued that the > before every line of greentext is a mechanism for deniable sincerity; the > suspends the subsequent line’s sincerity without completely negating it, enabling writers to make a joke and a confession — and enabling readers to absorb both — at the same time. In retrospect, maybe I was naive to think that this form would remain the purview of internet folk writing, rather than doing brand work for a company that makes suicide drones.
Critically, below these lines, there’s also a thank-you note to Anduril and Palmer Luckey for “being cool with a bunch of nerds waifu-fying their drones.”
Source: KommandoStore
For those who had a good time in high school, a waifu is a fictional character — typically animated, generally Japanese — toward whom a fan directs sincere and proprietary affection. The term is a Japanese loan of the English “wife,” reimported back into English by Western anime and manga fans, and most often used as a jokey possessive. A waifu is not a character you merely like; she is your waifu.
The other operative word here is, of course, “cool.” While nothing gets out of an organization as large and highly-regulated as Anduril without surviving an exhaustive gauntlet of in-house legal counsel and internal review — something made clear by a follow-up line of sober legalese which clarifies that the Anduril name, product names, and company logo are all trademarks of Anduril Industries Inc., “used under license” — this note reframes the entire org chart as a single chill founder with a big green-light button. The most institutionally interesting thing about the Anduril Sisters collection is how hard it works to look like it never passed through an institution at all—which, for a company whose whole pitch is to break with the slow-moving conventions of established players, is almost unsettlingly on-brand.
The people on the other side of this collab are not exactly “establishment” marketing partners, either; KommandoStore’s founders started out reselling USMC backpacks to fellow /k/ommandos back in high school, and their partner artist, Atamonica, has been drawing airframes and ordnance as anime girls since at least 2022. For them, nothing here is new; the party that gets the most attention is the one doing the least work, and the Anduril Sisters are only a “collab” with their eponymous firm in the sense that Anduril allows them to exist. Branding people love trying to cast one-off marketing stunts as the tip of some imagined long-term 5-D chess strategy iceberg, and the resulting analysis is generally sloppy at best. Still, regardless of actual intent, this affords Anduril a second kind of deniability—a sufficiently chan-coded third party to point toward when someone asks whether they mean it. 
Anduril has the budget, audience, and subject-matter expertise to do all of this in-house—which would also align with the broader ethos of vertical integration and onshoring championed by their contemporaries like Palantir and SpaceX. But by putting their waifus up for sale in someone else’s store, they get all the love and none of the scrutiny or blame for a move that, as far as all available records show, no other weapons manufacturer has ever signed off on. The nearest precedent is likeness licensing — videogame publishers paying gunmakers for the right to render branded rifles on screen — but that’s still just a sanctioned depiction of products as products. No one in this world has ever licensed a girl.
Intro to Weapons Waifus
The biggest and longest-running “weapons waifu” tradition is fan work: amateur manga and one-off artwork that use kawaii — cuteness, childlike innocence, and simplicity — and moe — a feeling of affection evoked by certain fictional characters — to turn weapons of war into objects of love. This is perhaps best exemplified by the manga-turned-anime Upotte!!, which is set at a high school where the students are personifications of real military service rifles, as well as Atamonica’s own pre-Anduril airframe and missile girls. No manufacturer is involved anywhere in this lineage, nor have any ever been asked.
The main characters of Upotte!!. From left to right: Ichiroku (A US M16A4), Elle (A British L85A1), Funco (A Belgian FN FNC) and Sig (A Swiss SIG SG 550). Source: Kadokawa via IMDB
This fan tradition is not for lack of commercial interest: Kantai Collection, Azur Lane, and Girls’ Frontline are all enormously successful games built around anime personifications of real military hardware, and none of them are licensed, either. Girls’ Frontline pulls its characters’ names straight off IRL spec sheets, while Azur Lane’s only hedge is to assign real ships to thinly-fictionalized navies. Many also benefit from some degree of historical distance; no one is going to push a copyright claim over a battleship that sank in 1944, nor could its builders endorse it even if they wanted to.
From left to right: Kantai Collection's Yamato (based on the WWII Japanese Battleship), Azur Lane's Enterprise (based on the U.S. Aircraft Carrier) and Girls' Frontline's M4A1 (based on the U.S. assault rifle)
Another related tradition exists, though it’s a cousin or an uncle at best: the one practiced by national militaries themselves. Japan’s Self-Defense Forces have been running moe recruitment ads for well over a decade; in July 2013, the Okayama Provincial Cooperation Office debuted a trio of anime girl mascots to represent their Ground, Maritime and Air branches, and many other cooperation offices have since followed suit. Recently, they’ve even tried courting the furry fandom with characters like Omaneko, the cat-boy mascot of the Omaezaki Sub Base. This tradition extends beyond Japan, too; a chunk of the U.S. Army’s 2021 “The Calling” campaign is cast in an arguably anime-inspired animated aesthetic, and anime girl service posters made by current and former service members periodically go viral. However, all of the waifus in this category are personifications of specific military branches rather than specific military weapons—and it all comes back to institutions recruiting for themselves in countries where the institution is the customer rather than the vendor.
From top to bottom, left to right: the original Okayama mascots; another trio of female mascots created by the Ibaraki Provincial Cooperation Office; a male trio also created by the Ibaraki office; Omaneko
All of this is to say that people have been drawing weapons and elements of militaria as anime girls for a very long time. What is new about the Anduril Sisters is that they exist with the blessing of their referents’ manufacturer, which has incorporated them into its revenue stream through merch. That, in turn, gives Anduril’s blind-box “relics” — which are bought and sold on the company’s own online store — a strange air of utility. After all, when it comes to waifus, gacha is where the real money gets made.
Anduril’s forays into anime culture don’t end here; last year, the company announced its Barracuda cruise missile with an unmistakably Evangelion-flavored launch trailer featuring a faceless man in a Hawaiian shirt (presumably Luckey) reading a newspaper article about a potential U.S.-China missile gap before cutting to a NERV-style missile assembly factory. Luckey is not shy about his own place in all of this, sometimes describing himself in the press as a “propagandist,” and his own politics — which some argue got him fired from his job at The Company Formerly Known As Facebook — are a similar deal. Around the launch of the Barracuda, he summed up his views in a headline-ready tweet: “I don’t think the United States needs to be the world police. It needs to be the world’s gun store.”
Corpse Disposal
Many in-house marketing teams exist to soften awareness of one specific ugly truth. The average fast food brand would very much prefer you not to think about factory farming, the average apparel brand would very much prefer you not to think about child labor, and the average social media brand would very much prefer you not to think about the mental health of teenagers. For defense-tech marketers, the truth is even uglier: if their products do what they are built and sold to do, the picture they’re painting will always include a literal corpse. 
Most of the responses to this problem involve getting the corpse out of the frame; the only question is how. The standard options are removing detail, using different words and directing focus to the product’s craftsmanship instead—and in all of these cases, the body leaves the frame while the frame itself stays put. Most ads from the so-called “primes” have all three countermeasures running at once, with verbs like “engage,” “deliver,” and “defeat,” and nouns like “targets” and “effects.” Everything in the picture is either a machine or a professional operator, and the thing at the product’s business end is a coordinate.
Stills from Lockheed's "Introducing the Distributed Team." Source: YouTube
Anduril opts for a different path: substitution. Across every bit of “Anduril Sisters” promo material, the target becomes you—which reframes the product’s performance as an embrace. The clearest and least varnished version of this swap happens in the tie-in visual novel, where Ghost remarks that the viewer would be surprised how much latitude she’s given for “extrajudicial killings of nosy NEETs” before announcing that her sister ALTIUS is about to “turn you into a protein shake”—all with Anduril’s trademarks running under the credits.
While a cartoon girl whose referent is a semi-autonomous suicide drone is grotesque in a way that no amount of media literacy and cultural coding can or should conceal, “she” offers no disclaimers about what’s being wanted. The only outright lie is where that wanting lands. The obvious reading is that the Sisters’ cutesy anime faces are meant to hide the grisly truth behind them, but the collection’s deniable framing makes it clear that things are not so simple. If they are covering for anyone, it’s their audience.
Greentext does not conceal anything; its utility lies in stating things openly while leaving their sincerity unresolved. In much the same way, the Anduril Sisters don’t hide desire—by the logic of deniable sincerity, they are desire. They don’t run cover for what their hardware inspirations are built to do, either; the ALTIUS merch’s promo copy is almost shockingly blunt by contractor standards for its naked use of the phrase “dive-bombing,” and the visual novel offers no shortage of equally-loaded lines from start to finish. Once the Sisters have swept the site of the drone strike clean of Anduril hardware and vanished into the night, the protagonist is left alone with bruised ribs and the burning wreckage of his mom’s car. Then, after a beat, we get one more glimpse into his head that bundles deniability and confession together in just five syllables: “Why am I aroused?” 
Loving the Bomb
Again, much of what is happening here is not new; beyond the aesthetics of the Anduril Sisters, the desire they are meant to tap into has plenty of existing outlets. America’s libidinal relationship with its own arsenal has been running at full steam now for the better part of a century, from nose art on WWII bombers to civilian airshows to the Top Gun franchise. But most of the channels developed to absorb and filter that desire have allowed it to be passed off as something less overtly perverse, like patriotism or an appreciation for engineering.
​I am, as ever, powerless to resist invoking the word “alchemy” whenever the opportunity presents itself, so let me try to earn it. By virtue of the sheer logistical and resource demands that go into their creation and maintenance, weapons systems like Dive-XL and ALTIUS are definitionally instruments of the state: funded, built and technically owned by an abstract accumulation of people you’ll never meet. But when you paint a cute girl’s face on that weapon — or draw the weapon itself as one — it becomes the private property of your heart. The anthropofeminized weapon doesn’t ask to be operated; like a waifu, it is something to be kept.
A selection of WWII U.S. bomber nose art. Source: National WWII Museum
​The most famous instance of this phenomenon, WWII bomber nose art, emblazoned government-owned-and-operated murder machines with pictures of somebody’s real or imagined sweetheart. Historians at the National WWII Museum describe the practice in exactly these terms—personifying and anthropomorphizing the aircraft. Like most “weapons waifu” drawings, it might also best be understood as a folk art tradition; nose art was made by crews and base sign painters, it was frequently against regulations, and the Navy forbade it outright. The surviving examples we know today owe their continued existence to their clear utility—certain officers indulged the behavior because it helped the machine’s operators climb in, run after run. We are talking about an engine that turns state violence into personal devotion, and no one in its lineage, from the painter of the Memphis Belle to Atamonica, has ever had any illusions about the gender of the intended recipient. What Anduril has done is to take that engine, which ran for eighty years on unauthorized enthusiasm, and issue it a trademark license.​
In the 1936 version of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin argues that humanity’s self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure, and names the aestheticization of politics as the key signature of fascism. Everything I’m saying here arguably comes back to this foundational bit of thinking—but what has changed since 1936 is a matter of scale, scope, and venue. Benjamin’s fascism works from above on the masses through rallies, parades, and war staged as an art object; the Anduril Sisters work through a storefront, aimed at a fairly specific type of guy. If fascism aestheticizes politics, Anduril’s merch is the aestheticization of procurement.
​Cutesy Warriors
The other thing that’s new for the world of American defense contracting is the uniquely Japanese spin on this form. America has been anthropofeminizing its weapons since at least the Second World War—but what it hasn’t done before, in any manufacturer-licensed capacity, is waifu-fy them. While the amateur nose art on the B-17 Memphis Belle had a real human referent, the officially sanctioned Anduril Sisters have none. In the sense that a member of a fandom might use the term, they are original characters. 
The tidy version of the Japanese spin I’m talking about goes like this: when Japan relinquished its ability to field a true standing army or declare war on any other country, it channeled all of its latent military desires into cute drawings. But in truth, the forms of personified warships and anthropomorphized weapons long predate 1945 in Japan. What the postwar settlement really changed was what those forms were for.
Sabine Frühstück’s Uneasy Warriors is useful here for the way it explores the strange legitimation problems faced by the Japanese Self-Defense Forces since WWII: the JSDF is an institution that must be publicly legible as something other than what it is, because what it is has been constitutionally negated. This is why it often reaches for the register of cuteness, which creates a strikingly clean link to the rest of “weapons waifu” culture. When Okayama’s recruiters debuted their three mascot girls in 2013, the character designs came from Fumikane Shimada, who also worked on Strike Witches and Girls und Panzer.
Source: GIRLS und PANZER Projekt via IMDB
​Girls und Panzer is an anime in which WWII-style tank combat is practiced as an extramural sport between all-girls high schools, and it deserves a brief diversion here for the way that it exemplifies the signature move of most “weapons waifu” media: rendering its chosen weaponry with rivet-to-rivet mechanical accuracy while evacuating all associated violence. While every Panzer IV and Tiger in the series is bristling with impressive detail, no one ever dies while piloting one in a game of “tankery.” All overtly political iconography is similarly sterilized: the flag of the USSR-inspired Pravda High is a pair of L-shaped rulers overlaid with a T-square, mimicking the shape of a hammer and sickle with a much less charged, academic set of tools. What sets Anduril’s waifus apart is the way they lavish that same fidelity onto live weapons systems and leave their killing power and any resulting corpses in-frame.
The closest thing to a genuine precedent for the Anduril Sisters comes from this same milieu: in 2011, Japan’s Fourth Anti-Tank Helicopter Squad painted a moe girl called Aoi-chan on the side of an AH-1S Cobra. She was subsequently given three sisters, each with their own attack helicopter, before the whole family was retired in 2013. Still, the distinction described earlier survives. Aoi-chan is much closer to the Memphis Belle than Ghost and ALTIUS: the airframe itself is a canvas, the artist is the operator, Bell and Fuji Heavy Industries were not involved, and no money changed hands. This stands in contrast to Anduril’s Sisters, who are not painted onto their referent hardware but created as commodified personifications of that hardware. The only places they’re drawn are within promotional content and materials made and sold by arrangement with the firm currently trying to move said hardware.
Three of the four attack helicopter sisters. Sources: Kisarazu Festival & JSDF via Otakumode.com
Both the JSDF and Anduril have experimented with aesthetics that let them be seen as something else, under opposite constraints. Japan’s military isn’t permitted to appear as itself, so a substitute register has to be built from scratch. Meanwhile, Anduril is a product of the most heavily and unapologetically armed society in human history, and there are no laws on the books that forbid it from depicting itself as itself. The problem it still faces is that this depiction lacks a universally socially acceptable register. One isn’t allowed to be seen at all, but the other isn’t allowed to be enjoyed—especially in the rooms where defense-tech does its hiring.
In much the same way a MAGA hat reads as patriotic in one zip code but disqualifying in another, expressing an open affinity for the U.S. military and the weapons systems it employs is an increasingly socially fraught endeavor—and the person Anduril needs to reach here is not a persuadable voter in Ohio, but a recent MIT or Caltech grad weighing how much accepting a job offer will cost them socially. Ever since Google’s own employees forced the company to walk away from a project with the Pentagon, social permission inside this talent pool has been a hot-button issue. What this calls for is a third form of deniability: a register of performance that allows enthusiasm to be expressed in carefully hedged terms that don’t cost you the room. This is precisely the kind of murky, non-binding soil that deniable sincerity needs to thrive.
Militarized Fandom
In a previous entry of this newsletter, I wrote about how Warhammer 40,000 rewired my ten-year-old brain—and how since then, I’ve invested thousands of hours of private cognitive labor into the 40k universe. What stopped my scroll when I first saw Anduril’s “relics” was the feeling of hearing my own language spoken back to me—so when I say that Anduril’s marketing worked on me, it should be read as both a disclosure of bias and the only real credential I have to write a piece like this. The Sisters and their relics are not aimed at some hypothetical reactionary neckbeard cooked up in a strategy meeting. They are aimed, with professional and unsettling precision, at me.
Because everything after this depends on the idea of fandom, I’d be remiss not to offer my own working definition. A fandom is a group of people who perform unpaid cognitive labor — fan art, memes, posts, lore — on behalf of an object, up to and including defending that object against outside criticism without prompting. More detailed interpretations exist, and are worth mentioning, too: Henry Jenkins sees fans as agents of a participatory culture that makes meaning from below, while Tiziana Terranova sees them as free labor whose enthusiasm gets harvested as surplus value. Most fans side with Jenkins, most marketers with Terranova. For better or worse, I’ve been both.​
Aesthetics aside, there’s another deeper truth that needs acknowledging here, too: weapons have fandoms, and they probably always have. Humans — generally, guys like me — feel things toward the tools and systems that we create to murder one another that are similar to and at times completely indistinguishable from love. And while most of the organizations involved in selling those weapons have historically put a great deal of effort into avoiding that fact, Anduril appears to be confronting it head-on: you want the bomb? Here she is; she has a name, and sisters. I find this to be a far more honest answer than the standard set of abstractions and euphemisms that other defense contractors tend to reach for. It is also a great deal more alarming.
To Kill a Warthog
All of this sets up an obvious objection: weapons fandoms exist, at enormous scale, and there’s very little evidence that any of them have ever moved a single dollar.
No piece of military equipment demonstrates this problem better than the A-10 Warthog, a notoriously slow, heavy, and adored close-air-support attack aircraft that the Air Force has been trying and failing to retire for over a decade. From its “ugly” look to the infamous “BRRRRT” of its nose-mounted autocannon, the plane’s various idiosyncrasies make it a natural meme engine, and it has appeared in over 40 video games since the 1980s. It even has a waifu, drawn by the same artist behind the Anduril Sisters; long before the collab that inspired this piece, Atamonica drew her — along with the B-2 and Sidewinder — with no license, approval, or trademark line. Not that there was anyone at Fairchild Republic to ask; the corporate entity that originally built the plane was absorbed into other companies decades before anyone thought to personify it.
Source: KommandoStore
The A-10 seems to have friends in high places, too; Congress blocked efforts to retire the aircraft in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2021, and 2022, and, more recently, bargained the Air Force down from sunsetting all 162 remaining A-10s to only divesting 59 by 2026, leaving a mandated floor of 103. Fittingly, several of these rescues were led by Rep. Martha McSally — the first female pilot to fly a Warthog in combat and representative of AZ-02, which once included the base where A-10 pilots trained and which anchors a $991 million slice of the local economy — although she’s now been out of Congress for almost six years and the blocks haven’t stopped coming. The coalition behind the plane has always been larger than the regions with direct financial incentives to keep it in the air, which largely comes back to emotional appeal; this is the ugly plane that shows up to “save our guys” when they are pinned down, flying low and eating hits so the infantry doesn’t have to. That built-in alibi is what lets a member of Congress from a state with zero Warthogs vote to protect a big, expensive base on the other side of the country without looking like they’re selling their constituents short.
Of course, this alibi belongs to the plane’s mission, not its fandom. An Ohio congressman can justify a pro-Warthog vote as a pro-close-air support move without ever having seen a “go ugly early” meme, because the argument and the meme run on the same source material. A weapon whose job reads as protective has a lot going for it in this sense, and it’s clearly enough to attract both a voting bloc and a fandom—as of this writing, lawmakers are currently seeking to extend the A-10’s lifespan well into the 2030s through the “Bolstering Recognition, Resurgence, Retention and Remembrance of the Thunderbolt” (read: BRRRRT) Act. While it’s tempting to label this as an instance of fandom vocabulary actually moving dollars, the meme still relies on a mission that the War in Iran has recently thrust back into the spotlight. And on a long enough timeline, even that may not be enough. 
What the Warthog really shows is the size of Anduril’s problem, especially for systems like ALTIUS: whatever justifying vocabulary the hardware ends up with will have to be manufactured, because it doesn’t come with any on its own. In every story told about the A-10, it exists to protect and save soldiers from someone or something else. A loitering munition has no protective alibi; its capabilities are purely offensive, and it’s hard to argue that its presence saves any lives. Careful viewers of KommandoStore’s tie-in visual novel could object here and point out that the Sisters are written less as pure killers than drill instructors: they spare the protagonist, clean up his mess, and exit on Ghost’s suggestion that “maybe the kid can learn something from this.” The target, you, is found, fixed, assessed, and provisionally spared—which is the substitution mechanism as designed. But a drill instructor is still not close air support. The A-10 got its alibi free with its mission profile and still took half a century to acquire a fandom—which goes a long way toward explaining why a company might try to build such a fandom on purpose rather than waiting and hoping for one to show up.
The Mechanics
​The useful question here isn’t whether feelings can actually move appropriations, but what a fandom would require to start behaving like a constituency. When viewed as the sum of its parts, Anduril’s marketing efforts seem to be laying the groundwork for a viable case study. We have:

An object of affection with a name and personality. Technically, as of this writing, there are three.

A retail layer where you can convert your feelings for the object into membership. This is where the Anduril Sisters meaningfully diverge from the likes of the Memphis Belle, which never offered its pilots any way to literally buy into it.

A deniability layer that lets you broadcast your affection at no social cost. Promotional copy frames official weapons waifu merch as a wearable bit, rather than a political badge you have to defend.

Collection and scarcity mechanics that produce repeat engagement. In this case, rarity-scaled, gacha-style blind boxes.

A clear, if unstated, invitation to produce. As “branded content,” Anduril’s tie-in visual novel and anime launch trailers are more prompts than promos — the former quite literally models the exact fan it wants — and fan art, memes, and lore are what turn a fandom into a self-sustaining ecosystem. Those things can be astroturfed, but astroturf can’t sustain itself; without organic uptake, the ecosystem ends when the budget does.

A product funded through congressional appropriations, which are decided by elected representatives, who are selected by civilians.
None of the first five parts on this list are unique — Harley-Davidson has had them all for decades — and part six describes Lockheed just as accurately as Anduril. But every previous version of this machine shares one feature that Anduril’s lacks: the fan is also the customer. Harley fans buy Harleys, but an Anduril fanboy cannot buy an ALTIUS; however sincerely a fan may love “her,” the referent is not for sale to him. There’s even a joke about this in the visual novel, with the protagonist fretting about getting raided by the government for illegally acquiring military hardware. 
In that context, these six parts create a mechanism that sits completely outside conventional business-to-consumer dynamics; this is a merch machine that does not exist to move real inventory, but affect—and the only market where that affect can clear is a political one. Anduril’s margins are made and broken by line items in appropriations bills, and every one of these otherwise ordinary marketing tactics is directed toward the people who vote for the people who vote for those line items. Whether that alignment is a strategy or coincidence remains to be seen.
Comments on Anduril’s latest anime-inspired promo video. Source: YouTube
Another necessary concession: in the grand scheme of defense contractor influence tactics, a couple of hoodies, bumper stickers, and animated shorts are a rounding error. If the sector has ordinary levers to pull, Anduril is pulling them—it spent $2.15 million on lobbying in 2025, up from $1.86 million the year before. But their apparent experiments in fandom-building are worth taking seriously because they operate in the one register where lobbying can’t reach. While a lobbyist is paid to secure access on behalf of a company and its products, a fandom generates unpaid advocates of the product itself. Here, we find a fourth form of deniability: a constituency that no disclosure regime has ever been designed to count.
While legacy primes have always understood the value of manufactured constituency, their methods are much more direct: scattering subcontractors across as many congressional districts as possible so that any given program ends up holding a critical chunk of some state’s economy hostage. This clearly works, but it’s exceedingly slow and costly, and everyone involved is under no illusions about the transaction they’re taking part in.
Fan Theory
At this point, it would be easy for me to say that Anduril is, in fact, laying the groundwork for a case study in fandom-as-lobby—but I don’t think I can say that, because I just spent several paragraphs conceding that the mechanism remains unproven. The best I can do is demonstrate that the vocabulary makes it legible; whether it can make Line Go Up remains unclear. Perhaps the more accurate answer is that Anduril itself is a case study in a company behaving as if fandom-as-lobby were possible. 
The idea of assembling a constituency out of anime visual novels and blind boxes in a matter of years feels like a tall order when weighed against the half-century timelines and thousand-subcontractor outreach efforts of Lockheed and Raytheon. That idea could also just be straight-up wrong. The field of corporate strategy is full of expensively ineffective and/or out-of-touch theories, and this could be a strong and entertaining contender for the hall of fame. 
However, it’s also possible that this isn’t the real “big idea” here. A fandom that moves appropriations may be a long-term nice-to-have compared to what’s stated explicitly in the visual novel’s launch copy: a fandom that moves resumes. For a company within a category that runs on a set labor pool of people who are increasingly wary of their engagement with systems built to kill, every hoodie that moves the needle toward an engineer taking an offer has already paid for itself many times over. With that base-case objective on the table, any emails those hoodies inspire to Congress could just be a value-add. This is also exactly what the Warthog lacked — without a living manufacturer, an organic fandom has no floor to land on — and it gives what would otherwise be an exercise in pure vibes-based hyperstition a pretty clear and empirical fallback clause.
This kind of theory often has trouble staying false, too—and doesn’t need to be proven to take root. Once enough parties start behaving as if it’s true — from Anduril to KommandoStore fans, to the outlets that cover the collab, to the recent company hire who now owns the hoodie and knows how to turn it into a conversation piece in polite company — the gap between a workable theory of political affect and a widely held one gets awfully thin. Is Anduril trying to prove that fandom moves money, and is that hypothesis correct? I don’t know. But they’re running the experiment in public on a product line funded by Congress.
If that experiment works, it would open a lot of big and somewhat weird doors, most of which come back to one key distinction. Most forms of lobbying, from DC reps on K Street to “grassroots” movements and astroturfing, are registered, disclosed, and therefore countable. But nobody is a fan of Lockheed or Raytheon in the same way that people can now conceivably become fans of the Anduril Sisters. And since the average ALTIUS fanboy was never being paid to begin with, he can never be bought off.
One more disclosure: by my own definition of fandom, this essay represents several weeks and several thousand words of unpaid cognitive labor on behalf of the Anduril Sisters, including a passage where I defended the honesty of their parent company against the euphemistic positioning of their competitors, entirely unprompted. The machine already metabolizes angry reporters as earned media, and I see no reason to believe it can’t metabolize this as well. I’d like to think that naming a mechanism is different from feeding it, but, as I’ve noted about a range of different systems that capture cognitive labor, this one is under no obligation to register or accommodate my intent.
A guy who genuinely likes ALTIUS and posts about it — or better yet, her — unprompted has nothing to disclose: there’s no relationship, no itemized considerations, and no principal on the other end of the line. Of all the deniabilities in this piece, this is the only one that no act of Congress could close, because it isn’t a gap in the rules at all. Nobody has ever designed a form for a crush.

## Corpus Realism (Aug 2026, Myles Mode)
URL: https://mylesbadger.com/writing/corpus-realism/
Full essay: https://mylesbadger.substack.com/p/corpus-realism
Subtitle: “It’s easier to imagine the end of human readers than the end of writing.”
Revised: 2026-09-29

Corpus realism is the condition in which it is impossible to imagine any writing that will not eventually be assimilated by machines.

The term builds on Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism and describes the collapse in distance between one kind of “corpus” and another: the body of work a writer produces and the pile of data that large language models are trained on.
More on the term: what it is not, and why “realism”

Corpus realism is distinct from Dan McQuillan’s “AI realism” (the feeling of inevitability around the development of AI, regardless of any visible harms). If AI realism is the inability to imagine a future without AI, corpus realism is the inability to imagine not being assimilated by it—and it survives even in writers who have never used a chatbot, because assimilation doesn’t require participation. It’s also distinct from Hannes Bajohr’s post-artificial text (what happens when the longstanding presumption of a human author behind any unknown text goes away, and readers stop asking who wrote things at all). Bajohr takes the reader’s side in a collapse that corpus realism works from the writer’s side. Corpus realism is not to be confused with corpus linguistics; it is a media theory term and does not reflect how representative or authentic a language corpus is.

Like capitalist realism, corpus realism is a condition experienced as a horizon of possibility, and can be simultaneously believed and hated. Assimilation offers infinite reach at zero credit, a bargain whose terms have been set without the collective consent of writers. That bargain can be seen as a tragedy or a calling depending on what a writer values more, but the bargain’s collective renegotiation is foreclosed only in imagination.

“The Gothic Arch,” 14th plate in the second edition of “Imaginary Prisons,” etching by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1761
In May 2023, the Organization for Transformative Works — the nonprofit behind the open-source fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own — published a post explaining what it could and couldn’t do in response to its writers’ work being scraped for AI training.
They begin with a clear list of actions taken to address their community’s concerns — namely, rate limiting and traffic monitoring — followed by an equally upfront concession: “Putting systems in place that attempt to block all scraping would be difficult or impossible without also blocking legitimate uses of the site.” The post then shares another measure already taken as consolation: after discovering that data from AO3 had been incorporated into Common Crawl, a popular dataset used to train AI, the site’s organizers added code back in December 2022 “requesting Common Crawl not scrape the Archive again.” Then, after all these demonstrations of competence and transparency, this:

“We cannot go back in time to stop data collection that already occurred, or remove AO3’s content from existing datasets, as much as we may dislike that it happened. All we can do is attempt to reduce such collection in the future.”
Few online institutions can rival OTW’s nearly two-decade track record of meaningful advocacy on behalf of amateur writers, and it would be a mistake to read this as capitulation. Everything else in this document is clearly the product of an organization that has no plans of giving up on those it is built to support. Still, the shape of this particular statement warrants careful inspection: resistance and concession arriving in the same line, with the latter doing significant load-bearing work. The past is gone, while the corpus is frustratingly closed to withdrawals and remains even-more-frustratingly open to deposits. All that’s left is the future, and our first glimpse of it arrives with limits already imposed.
What is corpus realism?
Mark Fisher called capitalist realism the condition in which it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism — a phrase he credited to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek[1] — and the operative word here is “condition.” Almost no one defends capitalist realism as a position, because it’s not the kind of position you can choose to take. Rather, it’s more like a horizon of possibility that limits what we can picture. The condition I want to talk about belongs to the same family.
Corpus realism is the condition in which it is impossible to imagine any writing that will not eventually be assimilated by machines.
The term corpus serves double duty here: a corpus is the body of work a writer produces themselves, but it’s also the term for the vast, ecumenical pile of data that LLMs are trained from.
The empirical half of this concept is not hard to check. Recent crawl data from Graphite puts the share of new online articles that are primarily AI-generated at roughly half—a trend which can easily be read as the opening act of the “textpocalypse” that Matthew Kirschenbaum warned about back in March 2023. At the same time, every reasonable measure of human reading activity — that is, long-form reading for leisure — seems to be pointing the other way. An iScience study logging twenty years of the American Time Use Survey found that the share of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. In December 2025, YouGov found that four in ten Americans read no books at all—while 82% of all books still being read were read by the top 19% of readers. Together, these figures paint a picture straight out of the Library of Babel: there is more writing than ever before, addressed to fewer and fewer people who actually bother to read it.
To demonstrate the other half — corpus realism as something experienced, rather than believed — here’s a thought experiment: try to imagine publishing a piece of writing that stays outside the corpus, not hidden, paywalled or locked to registered users, but open and freely available. Whatever you reach for will be a countermeasure, which runs into a familiar asymmetry. This kind of defense has to hold everywhere, against everyone, forever, but a crawl only has to work once—and if it does, there’s no take-backs.
Nearly three years after OTW asked Common Crawl to stop crawling AO3, Alex Reisner reported in The Atlantic that the foundation behind the dataset had told publishers their content was being removed on request while its own logs showed no content files had been modified since 2016. Sites like AO3 may well have had their requests to limit scraping honored, but anything that’s already been scraped is in there forever—or so Common Crawl’s response went, because its archive is stored in a format that is immutable by design, from which nothing can be deleted. For better or worse, we are now in a world where, as Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst titled the monograph tie-in to their 2024 Serpentine exhibition, all media is training data.
This is what makes this concept a state of realism, rather than mere description or metaphor. Belief in corpus realism is fully compatible with hating it, and the clearest statement of that on record comes from one of the organizations most vocally devoted to fighting it. Like capitalist realism, it is a condition that none of us have chosen to experience.
Why corpus “realism”?
If Fisher’s term is worth borrowing here, it deserves to be borrowed whole. The point of diagnosing realism, in the way that Fisher uses that word, is to point out that the necessity it names is at least partly false. Of the three layers of “exit” on the table in this case, only one feels like a viable candidate.
First, there’s individual exit — staying publicly readable while staying out of the corpus — which, as discussed above, is impossible. There’s also the possibility of withdrawing into print runs and private channels — which, to be clear, is eminently possible — but this isn’t an exit as much as a temporary abstention or reduction; your defense is only as good as the people in your channel, and all it takes is one screenshot or photocopy for you to be back at square one. What corpus realism forecloses is a much less discussed third thing: the idea that we might collectively renegotiate the terms of AI assimilation itself.
Nothing at this third layer is impossible; the infrastructure to make it happen exists, from collective licensing to data trusts. It’s just hard to imagine as an individual writer. The foundation behind Common Crawl has gone on record in defense of its arguably underhanded data-scraping and retention tactics by claiming that its archive is immutable by design—but “by design” also means “by decision,” and decisions can be reversed.
Assimilation-without-consent is a policy default in the guise of physics, and the people who see the condition most clearly are already treating it accordingly. In the same OTW post that concedes the past, the foundation shares that they’ve argued to no less than the U.S. Copyright Office that users “should be allowed to opt out from having their works incorporated into AI training sets.” Meanwhile, Herndon and Dryhurst are also co-founders of Spawning, a startup that develops genuine consent infrastructure for training data.
Why “corpus realism”?
The house that Fisher built already has more than one AI-themed room. Dan McQuillan has used the term “AI realism” to describe the feeling that AI’s deployment can never be seriously questioned or reversed, but only reformed. This, too, is a real condition, but it’s distinct from the one I’m talking about. If AI realism is the inability to imagine a future without AI, corpus realism is the inability to imagine not being assimilated by it. Unlike AI realism, corpus realism survives even in those who have still proudly never used a chatbot, because assimilation doesn’t require participation. All you have to do is publish or publicly post something.
On the reception side of the AI writing equation, Hannes Bajohr has added a second room: the “post-artificial” text. Bajohr uses this phrase to describe the slow but steady erosion of every human reader’s millennia-old default assumption that any unknown piece of writing was produced by another human, eventually reaching a tipping point where the provenance of any text becomes irrelevant. Corpus realism adopts a similar line of thinking on behalf of writers. Bajohr says you can no longer assume a human wrote a given piece of text. I’m saying you can no longer assume a machine won’t — or hasn’t already — absorbed it.
That sense of inevitable assimilation cements this as a subspecies of Fisher’s thinking. Like capitalist realism, corpus realism is also a matter of enclosure. Critics like Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias have tracked this same movement as “data colonialism”: a commons of published text converted into private training data, at a scale where the enclosed party doesn’t realize what’s going on until it’s too late to do anything—if there was ever anything for them to meaningfully do. When AO3’s fanfic writers found out they’d been scraped, they weren’t being shut out of a market. They were simply discovering that they no longer had the ability to write in public any other way.
Diagnosis, tragedy and calling
At the heart of corpus realism is a problem of attribution, and that goes much deeper than citing sources by name. Unlike search engines, which are pretty good at reading everything and coming back with receipts, LLMs metabolize data a little differently. When a piece of text is assimilated into a model, there’s no way of tying that specific text back to any subsequent piece of text it’s used to shape—let alone when a model develops a cadence based on a million pieces of text written by a million different human writers. The problem with AI attribution is not that it’s withheld — LLMs frequently invoke certain authors by name, including, curiously enough, Mark Fisher himself — but that it’s often structurally impossible. From this problem of attribution, we get another Borges-style conundrum: if everything is assimilated and nothing is attributable, writing acquires infinite reach and zero credit. How you react to that depends on what you value more.
If you value credit, it may read as a tragedy—your work has been stripped, along with your name, and your labor is now feeding something built (or, depending on your tolerance for AI hype, hollowly marketed) to be your replacement. However, if you value reach, it could read as a calling: at a time when “nobody reads anymore,” every word you write is now guaranteed at least one reader, forever[2]. The difference between these two conclusions is not due to a misinterpretation of facts: both stem from the same condition and underlying variables. In the same way a leftist organizer can invoke capitalist realism as a sign of capitalism’s entropic potential while a hustlepreneur can invoke it as a reason to “lock in” more, corpus realism can be used by two people in complete agreement about what is happening and complete disagreement about what to do about it.
You’re right—this is water
This is not my first brush with corpus realism: much of my recent work has dealt with it at length, before I had a name for it.
In a recent essay for INC Longforms, I argued that 4chan greentext might represent a viably “AI-proof” form of writing because nothing is ever stored on the page where a counterfeiter could reach it. What I didn’t realize then, but realize now, is that the underlying question of greentext is not what is authentic, but what survives assimilation: given that text will be consumed, what property should that text have?
In another recent piece, I explored the new trend of AI forecasting whitepapers seemingly written for what I called a “second reader” — one recently went as far as publishing a version of itself explicitly optimized “for AI agents & crawlers” — and concluded it was a mild case of hyperstition. I still think this is true, but now I know that this channel exists only because everyone has started to assume assimilation in advance. No one builds a door for a guest they’re not expecting.
Most recently, in a third piece, I examined the curious new range of post-AI proof-of-person rituals that some writers have begun to perform to appease another reader: AI-powered detector programs like Pangram. In passing, I noted that because these maneuvers are public, they are all “already bound for the next batch of training data,” stuck in yet another AI-powered arms race. What I couldn’t say then, but can now, is why the race can’t be won: in the corpus, it’s all just another deposit.
Form that survives assimilation, address to the assimilator, and evasion assimilated are all symptoms of the same condition in action, and I don’t think I would have been able to name the water if I hadn’t spent a little time swimming in it.
By now, some of you may have noticed the presence of a fairly large elephant in the room. Corpus realism rests on a truth as immutable as Common Crawl’s archive — assimilation does not guarantee attribution — and here I am, trying to coin a term, in a totally transparent bid to have that term metabolized by The Discourse with my name still attached. I don’t think this undermines what I’m trying to get at, though; if anything, it feels like another example of the concept in practice.
If everything is assimilated, the only remaining question is how much of yourself to knowingly offer up. Those who see a calling answer with volume, while those who see a tragedy answer with nothing, or as little as possible. Corpus realism doesn’t tell you which answer is right—only that every decision that led to this one was made without our collective consent.
“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” aquatint by Francisco Goya, 1799

Notes

[1] Continuing the chain of attribution, Jameson introduced the line as something “someone once said,” which means that the founding quotation of capitalist realism is, itself, unattributed. 
[2] Addendum, September 2026: I may have promised too much in this sentence—or, more accurately, lumped several distinct outcomes under one catch-all category. “Reading” can mean anything from collection and circulation to recognition and influence, but these outcomes are not synonymous. A piece of writing posted publicly can be crawled or collected by AI systems without being used to train future models—and if it does get crawled, there’s no surefire way of recalling it. Still, even if it becomes training data, there is little way of knowing, as an author, what of your work has been preserved or deemed useful. Losing control of your writing’s destination does not inherently guarantee it a recipient.
Europe 2031, a policy whitepaper that was published with a version “for AI agents and crawlers,” is a good example of how corpus realism acts on writers and writing before it’s possible to establish what kind of reading is actually happening. Whatever happens to the published document, the initial version published online was already shaped by human writers to be machine-readable. You can write for AI without knowing how the AI will “read” your work, if at all, or what your accommodation may afford you.
While not a certainty, the chance that your writing will circulate through AI systems beyond any immediate human audience remains. It’s not a long walk from there to another level of hope. Something you write may influence what these systems say or do, or your words may get reproduced without any connection to your name at all. Your name could even appear without any connection to your words. The question remains: who gets to decide how your words get “read”?

## Proof of Person (Aug 2026, Myles Mode)
URL: https://mylesbadger.com/writing/proof-of-person/
Full essay: https://mylesbadger.substack.com/p/proof-of-person
Subtitle: Pangram, Dead Internet Theory, and the new, regressive labor of being human online

Last week, Substack did something extremely funny. In partnership with Pangram, the current least-worst player in the burgeoning space of AI-powered AI writing detectors, they gave every human user the ability to scan any new 100+ word post for non-human writing. Writers can also pre-scan drafts before posting, and have the option to switch AI detection off altogether. However, if they do that, any readers will get a notice that the author has taken the easy way out—a refusal that arguably concedes more ground than a clean scan gains. Already, people are losing their minds.
Jay Springett described the update as the moment Substack entered its “bloodsport era,” and I’m hard-pressed to disagree. Just as 17th-century Harvard was not immune from the simple human joys of Witch Hunt hysteria, so too, I imagine, is a website full of current and former gifted kids not immune from the joys of casting doubt on peers in a time of change. From here on out, the doomsayers suggest, every new piece will be subjected to a rigorous slop-interrogation that is far from false-positive free. Freddie deBoer has already offered a worrisome trial run of this thesis, feeding Pangram a 300-word excerpt from one of his own essays (verdict: 100% AI-written, high-confidence), followed by the full essay (verdict: 100% human, high-confidence)—and his “brittle” diagnosis is hard to improve on. Anyone who fails the vibe check will be branded with the scarlet letter of slop-raker, or worse, sloptimist. Or something like that. Meanwhile, others — like Substack CEO Chris Best — have heralded the update as a push for transparency in a muddied-and-getting-muddier Web 2 media ecosystem. For a platform that already leads the rapidly dwindling pack of text-focused internet platforms with an enviable ratio of human signal to machine noise, I can see the arguments either way—but for better or worse, I doubt the new era we’re debating will last long.
Yes, the source here is also Pangram.
​In 2022, when the earliest Stable Diffusion image models went live for public consumption, it was exceedingly easy to tell when an image was generated. Now, it is increasingly not—and as much as I pride myself on being a close reader and intentional writer of natural human language, I can feel my relationship to text starting to change in the same way. If even the most conservative medium-term projections about the capabilities of AI end up paying out — and I’m not entirely convinced they won’t, hype aside — expecting tools like Pangram to continue to measure a text’s humanity in any truly empirical and systematized way could be a tall order. This is not to say that the anxieties inherent to our current time of growing pains are unfounded: the prospect that we are only a few years away from a world where it is honest-to-god impossible to tell whether a machine made anything you see online is not a reassuring one, and I don’t trust anyone who says otherwise.
Unfortunately, a good chunk of this piece will come back to the recent statements and actions of one Samuel Harris Altman—starting with a post he made last September on X, The Everything App.
While this post’s replies are a predictable flood of the Tim Robinson hot dog guy photo, the basic picture is worth sitting with. Here we have the CEO of OpenAI, the company arguably most responsible for the generative AI boom that has filled the internet with slop, claiming to be discovering that the internet is full of slop. This observation is not new.
Patriots in control
On January 5th, 2021, a user with the handle IlluminatiPirate logged onto a forum called Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe and made a post. The title: “Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake.” The eponymous theory didn’t start here — Pirate begins with a disclaimer that it originated on the imageboard Wizardchan — but the post is widely agreed to be the cleanest initial synthesis of what it’s all about. In brief: since the mid-2010s, the internet has been quietly hollowed out and refilled. Now, in the 2020s, every single post, meme, trend, reply, like, comment, view, and subscription we see is the work of an immense network of bots. Critically, none of this is accidental, either: “The U.S. government,” the post explains, “is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.” This is followed by a clip from Metal Gear Solid 2.
Editor’s note: web design masterclass.
Many people, myself included, have since absorbed Pirate’s argument with all the detached amusement that goes along with any sufficiently vivid conspiracy theory. The initial leap from “most internet engagement is inauthentic and some metrics are inflated” to “The Patriots from Metal Gear Solid are real, and they have trapped you in a digital Torment Nexus” is fun in the same way that the fantastical maps made by some members of the flat earth community are fun. When I first encountered the theory, a few lines of its most grandiose context were enough to earn it a spot on that same mental shelf. Now, a few years later, I can’t help wondering if that was an oversimplification.
Dead Internet, Flat Earth… idk. Maybe there’s something there.
What sets Dead Internet Theory apart from many comparable theories is the way the world keeps moving toward it—not in the loose, abstract way that theories about the Kennedy Assassination eroded public trust in institutions, but in a way that leans more on charts full of “hard” numbers and “raw” data. If we accept Pirate’s assertion that all machine-made content is “dead,” the internet is becoming measurably less alive every year. As early as 2024, a full half of all web traffic came from bots—but the theory didn’t need those numbers on its side to start drawing real human traffic.
Within a year of Pirate’s original post, the Atlantic fielded a piece titled “Maybe You Missed It, but the Internet ‘Died’ Five Years Ago”—an exemplary case of a mainstream outlet inspecting a bit of possibly radioactive low digital culture to see if there are any kernels of truth inside. Then, to paraphrase Adam Curtis, something strange happened. While many members of the Atlantic crowd seemed to find the theory just as compelling as its original audience, most of them were far more interested in the corpse than the alleged murderer. A subsequent surge of academic engagement wasted no time excising any lingering conspiratorial elements with surgical precision. Now, five years out from that first formative post, the version most people invoke is curiously devoid of Pirate’s original man-behind-the-curtain.
To be clear, I don’t think the internet is dead — either in IlluminatiPirate’s sense or the current more anodyne definition — and I don’t think it will ever be 100% devoid of human intent. If I’m wrong about that, I will have several much larger problems to contend with. But I can’t deny that the descriptive half of the theory, the part that argues that we are all, statistically, increasingly alone in here, has become the weather. As Dead Internet Theory got propagated over the last few years, it got a curious promotion: not from false to true, but from conspiracy to metaphorical description. The map was deemed accurate, but the dragons in the corners got papered over.
In IlluminatiPirate’s original articulation of the theory, some kind of architect was needed; surely, a catastrophe this big couldn’t have happened on its own. This is a completely understandable and human impulse. Still, as loath as I am to take the less fun side here, it’s probably wrong—not because I don’t think that there are architects capable of this kind of psy-op, or even that they haven’t been trying to spur things along, but because they’re definitely not the only factor in play. In much the same way that the world was overtaken by global capitalism over the last four centuries, most of the actual heavy lifting that has made the internet feel so dead has happened diffusely, at scale, through millions of ordinary commercial decisions. Like Alex Jones with his much-vaunted “gay frogs,” Dead Internet Theory’s only shortcoming was to underestimate the sheer entropic potential of the market. No one wanted it to happen; it was simply cheaper than any alternative. This is why I’ve made the difficult decision to take off my parapolitics hat and treat Dead Internet Theory as the domesticated metaphor it has become. For now.
Once we accept the idea that the internet is at least metaphorically dead, we’re faced with another equally existential question: how do you spot another person when you find one? How do I prove that to you, reading this, right now, in this sentence—and how can you reliably check? So far, the answers seem to be self-selecting into competing camps—one top-down, and the other bottom-up. Surveying this same territory for Big Think earlier this year, Andrey Mir proposed three — digital IDs, shows of effort, embraced flaws — and warned that the effort route inevitably curdles into performative “labor signaling,” but in my view, his last two categories have already collapsed into a single bottom-up act. Neither of these response categories seems to work, but they fail in usefully different ways.
Who up pondering they orb
The answer you’re most likely to see discussed in The News is verification: delegating the whole problem of certifying humans over machines — or vice versa — to a trusted institution or platform. A few competing ways of making this work already exist, many of which feel like holdovers from the previous version of this problem: how to distinguish Special Internet People from Regulars.
Up until Twitter became X, the standard of internet verification was the blue check—a symbol used to assign a given user the role of “verified entity.” Before the takeover, the symbol was reserved for journalists, celebrities, brands, publications, and other accounts in high-trust and high-influence positions that others might seek to emulate for nefarious reasons. Then, after the rebrand, new management locked it behind a subscription—leaving the door open for anyone with $8 of monthly disposable income to ascend to verified entity-hood. While this can be understood as a failure of custodial duty, it’s also an instructive example of how we view verification itself. If institutions see it as a safeguard, platforms see it as an inherently scarce commodity to be monetized. This means that, as a response to the big, scary question of “who’s there,” verification is only as good as the organizations doing it—which are increasingly the ones who have noticed that proof can be a product.
The fully realized version of verification-as-commodity can be found in World, formerly Worldcoin. The company’s flagship device is a chrome sphere about the size of a bowling ball, called the orb, which is used to scan your iris. Once World confirms that your iris does not belong to anyone else in its ledger, it issues you a cryptographic credential called a World ID. This, per the company’s materials, is a kind of digital passport that you can present to assert that a human being was, at least once, physically present behind whatever account it’s being used to back up. For World, proof of personhood “can be thought of as the first and most fundamental building block in establishing digital identity”—and while the company spent several years relegated to the questionable jungle of Crypto Guys, it is slowly beginning to migrate into more serious circles.
A World iris scanner.
World was co-founded in 2019 by Sam Altman. Six years before he started tweeting about Dead Internet Theory, he was already laying the groundwork to sell people a solution to the problem his other company might create. Some people might call this a cynical business strategy, but I think the more honest — and worse — reading is more like consistency of vision. The problem and the solution both ladder back to the same investment thesis: being human online used to be free, and now it’s not.
It brings me no pleasure to acknowledge that this is exactly what has just happened with Substack, too. Pangram is an orb for prose—detection-as-a-service and personhood-as-a-service are the same product, rented from a platform, which is why I don’t see the fears that the tool will spark any number of witch hunts as a bug in the partnership. This cohort of anxious, agitated human writers and readers isn’t the byproduct of Pangram, but its most highly coveted market.
Clear surveillance objections aside — I’m not the first person to discuss these guys — I think the orb has a much larger conceptual problem. On paper, World ID exists to defeat Sybil attacks by proving that a distinct human body enrolled. It cannot prove — and, to their credit, does not claim to prove — that the body in question writes its own posts. An orb-scanned human with Claude or Grok can still pass every check in World’s toolbox; the company treats humanity as a binary, quantitative login credential rather than a quality. When I want to know whether the sentence I’ve just read was cooked up in a meat computer or a datacenter, my first reaction is generally not to demand to see some biometrics; I want to know what the sentence cost the person who wrote it.
For sure, man.
Beyond badges and scanners, there’s another move in the top-down toolbox worth noting: the possibility of adding more tools. Last year, the Australian creative agency Cocogun debuted a piece of punctuation called the am dash—billed as “unmistakably human, unusable by AI,” a symbol of “real pondering, genuine daydreaming, and true editorial wordsmithery,” and shipped inside two typefaces called Times New Human and Areal. The name is Descartes by way of advertising copywriter humor — as in, “I think, therefore I am” dash — and the implementation is even better: the am dash has no Unicode point; the only way to type the certified-human mark is to install a proprietary font and let a ligature insert it. All of this is charming and completely dead-on-arrival. After all, the only thing that signals AI writing more reliably than the em-dash, at least to me, is the last batch of symbols we invented to assert emotion in an age of automation: emojis. A signal handed down from above arrives already-legible, and in the age of LLMs, legible is another word for dead. The crowd seems to know this instinctively, which is why most bottom-up answers to the problem look a lot less like the DMV.
Come—and take it
Somewhere around mid-2025, it became common knowledge — a phrase doing enormous unexamined work we don’t have time for here — that the em-dash is the unmistakable signature of Claude, Grok and company. Many human writers were quick to point out that this is the natural result of LLMs being trained on millions of human-written books. They are, simply, the most flexible and generous form of punctuation, which is presumably part of why they show up so much in stereotypical LLM text: the machines learned to write from us, and they picked up our best habits first. However, plenty of other writers have succumbed to peer pressure—deciding that every em-dash now costs them credibility they can’t spare.
Over the course of about 18 months, a 400-year-old punctuation mark has been branded a mark of the beast. Teachers call it out in homework, copywriters report clients rejecting copy over it, and people who don’t read or write have latched onto it as an immediate and immutable tell that Thing Bad. None of this has gone unnoticed by the major AI players, either. Last November, two days after GPT-5.1 shipped, Sam Altman announced a “Small-but-happy win”—tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions and “it finally does what it’s supposed to do!” When I started writing this piece, I really did not plan to have this guy holding the knife behind every pain point, but here we are.
The underlying pattern behind the em-dash war is perhaps the most unsettling part of the whole equation I’m trying to unpack here. The most prevalent bottom-up response to the question of humanity in the age of AI involves abandoning our best habits because the machines also have them. Some human writers are deliberately writing in flatter, plainer, and less precisely jointed ways to be more legible as human. Others are putting typos in their resumes to scan as human to AI resume-reading tools. The internet may not be comprehensively dead, but a world where a polished sentence is the enemy and lapses in spelling and grammar are armor bears little resemblance to the one I was promised in middle school English class.
I’m no less implicated here than anyone else. At a few points throughout the last year, my love of em-dashes has prompted me to do something that, from any kind of sensible writing standpoint, is kind of insane: upon writing a sentence and looking back at it, I will feel compelled to redo it so that it scans less like AI. I don’t seem to be alone here, either. Of course, we’ve been leaving grammar out of sentences for as long as we’ve had digital sentences to exchange—I only add a period to a text message as a modifier for whatever I’m trying to say, or if I want to avoid double-texting. But those little roughnesses are used to convey tone for their intended reader. The new adjustments I’m describing are addressed to another reader, the one standing over your shoulder and checking your work.
This phenomenon isn’t unique to written text, either. Instagram is filled with badly-lit photos taken by a new cohort of digital natives for whom competence now scans as synthetic, and the platform itself has converged on this logic from the other end. Meta’s own Adam Mosseri has argued that it will soon be “more practical to [cryptographically] fingerprint real media than fake media” and has suggested that creators lean into “unflattering” images to prove they’re real. This, too, is a form of verification: in a world where it’s getting harder to tell the difference between fake money and real money, you stop stamping the fakes and start stamping the real thing. Unfortunately, there’s no EXIF data for text.
Audience Captcha
Everything happening here has another purpose, beyond any actual signal-from-noise utility, and it’s worth giving that a name: proof-of-person rituals. Costly ethological signals — best example, the kind of biological looksmaxing practiced by peacocks — that a human was here. Every slop machine in the world is built and continues to be sold on the promise of cutting costs—and in response, cost itself can, and has, become proof.
These rituals are not a new and unprecedented reaction to new and unprecedented technology. One need only look back to the Unicode-heavy album titles of mid-2010s Seapunk and Witch House — genres heavily informed by the exact techno-cultural moment when the internet allegedly stopped being alive — to see the same logic brought to bear the better part of a decade before anyone started worrying about LLMs. The niche electronic producers of the 2010s were paying to be illegible before there was a machine to be illegible to—or at least, when the machine was still just good old-fashioned SEO. This also suggests we may not see the last of these rituals when the detection era inevitably ends.
The problem with proof-of-person rituals is that they almost always end up feeding the counterfeiters they’re meant to ward off—something you might already understand if you know anything about CAPTCHA. For two decades, the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart has been the internet’s default PoP ritual: forcing human users to prove their humanity hundreds of millions of times every day by copying down cryptic phrases and identifying pictures of stop signs. It’s the common ancestor of this essay’s two camps — simultaneously administered from above and performed as a tiny ritual below — and also constitutes one of the largest human-assisted machine learning programs in history.
The first iteration of CAPTCHA required users to prove their humanity by using their real-human eyes to read and transcribe mangled scraps of text. This labor — routed through reCAPTCHA — digitized Google Books and the New York Times archive and taught non-human readers to read. Text CAPTCHAs continued until Google’s own researchers were cracking even the most distorted bits of text with 99.8% accuracy, at which point the test was deemed to have served its purpose and new techniques were rolled out.
A Gen 1 CAPTCHA.
Since then, human CAPTCHA participants have been presented with grids of images — most conspicuously automotive — and asked to identify things like bicycles, crosswalks and stop signs. From this, the machines have learned to do the same—and while the test has yet to be called off, it is rapidly approaching obsolescence once again. Other forms of CAPTCHA also exist, like “I’m not a robot” checkboxes that analyze the imperceptible quivers in a user’s mouse movement to determine their humanity. But these two stand out for the way in which the proof-of-person work they gather has been harvested to build the exact capacity that invalidates those proofs.
A contemporary CAPTCHA.
Within this logic, it’s clear that the arms race of writing to sound human online is a similar losing game for anyone taking it seriously. The moment that “typos=human” becomes a legible enough trend to train on, asking an LLM to write in a more human style may start to yield text with one or two plausible typos. No matter how we try to shift the meta of stringing words together online, the models will always be one fine-tune behind us and closing fast. Biologists call this a Red Queen’s race — not a race with winners, but one that’s run to stay in place — and if the various evolutions of CAPTCHA are any indication, our competitors get better and faster with every lap. The style rotations, typo armor and de-em-dashed sentences are all public, which means they’re already bound for the next batch of training data. Even if we end up adding new punctuation, the models will absorb it, requiring even more new punctuation, and so on. What we are talking about here is an arms race—and if there’s one thing we should all know by now, it’s that the winner of any AI-related arms race is the idea of AI itself.
The new cost of being human
We now arrive at two ugly truths:
Truth #1: because being human online is no longer free, the act of proving you are human has become labor—and that labor is regressive. Every proof-of-person ritual takes time, skill, and social capital: knowing the current metas of human and AI writing, having an audience that will give you the benefit of the doubt, and being a good enough writer to sound deliberately or charmingly rough instead of just rough. But not everyone is subject to these rituals. If you’re already an A-list novelist, a blogger with a significant following, or the kind of writer who gets tapped by the Atlantic to write about imageboard cranks, you already have numerous forms of verification at your disposal and pay almost nothing to maintain your humanity. Meanwhile, everyone else is stuck paying full price—and that price, like everything else, just keeps getting ratcheted up.
Those who slip through the cracks will be the usual suspects: ESL speakers with technically correct but contextually naïve writing, older people who make the mistake of adhering to conventional grammar, and outsiders and newcomers with no history or record to point toward. More broadly, the people inconvenienced will be the ones who already go overlooked and thus aren’t tested for. There is a word for a system where members of in-groups with established positions of power are authentic-until-proven-fake while everyone else is expected to justify their humanity 24/7—and it’s not “new.”
Of course, a response to this conclusion exists (“who cares?”) and yes, in a healthier, more well-slept society, this could be a non-issue. It just so happens that this specific issue strikes a nerve with any number of people who are freaked out about the underlying technology behind it all because it’s automating them out of their jobs and making their neighbors sick. And again, the target audience of all this proof-of-person infrastructure is not AI-boosted writers trying to sound more human, but justifiably anxious human writers who have suddenly found themselves in an AI-boosted wilderness of mirrors. 
Truth #2: Verification from above and signaling from below are not mutually exclusive or separate answers, but competing constitutions—and we will ratify one by default. Verification says humanity is a credential that can be issued — and by the same logic, revoked — from a central authority. Signaling says it’s a texture—something judged contextually by a crowd, and thus unfair in all the ways that crowds can be unfair. The process by which we generally determine “who’s there” is being sorted out right now by the interplay of B2B SaaS providers and paranoid newsfeed drama—but it doesn’t have to be. The most hopeful answer I’ve seen to this question comes from Renée DiResta, who calls proof of personhood “constitutional infrastructure” and argues that the most equitable way out of this mess will start by drafting an answer together, with guardrails. Personally, I have my doubts that we’ll get anything like an open convention, much less a vote.
It’s rituals all the way down
In a recent piece for the Institute of Network Cultures, I argued that 4chan greentext could be a curious form of proof against all this. By prefacing every line of a post with >, the writer tells a certain kind of tapped-in reader any number of things—not least of all that they should give up looking for another person behind the text. There is no “me” behind “>be me” beyond the person reading it while they’re reading it, or the person writing it while they’re writing it; just a set of instructions you’re meant to execute on your own hardware. You can’t counterfeit a self that was never asserted. At the time I thought I was describing a novelty, a form of accidental immunity cooked up by a bunch of NEETs. Now, it feels more like the future. I’m not happy about it, either.
Every form of writing that asserts the existence of an interior is now in the business of defending that assertion at an ever-rising cost against a counterfeiter with the most cartoonish blank check budget in history—and the forms that survive a race like this may not be the ones that best prove interiority, but the ones that never needed it. This brings us back to the question of how much the coming Bloodsport era — on Substack, and everywhere else — should actually be taken seriously.
It’s tempting to conclude that to give these technologies such an existential amount of weight is to assign them more power than they’re worth. Rather than interrogating every piece of writing for any trace of our current interpretation of inhumanity, we could let this new age of uncertainty free us to engage with anything the way the average /r9k/ user engages with greentext. Some would say this is naive. Others would say it’s the healthiest available attitude we can take. Again, I’m torn; while I’d like to say I’m trying to free myself from the checking impulse, I’m still an nth-generation mostly-English guy from the North Shore of Boston. Purity testing is kind of our thing.
I’ll end this piece the only way that I could conceivably end it, and I would apologize for being cute if the trap were not the point: this entire newsletter is a proof-of-person ritual. Every time I write one of these, I am doing a big costly signal, mailed to you on a loose but consistent schedule, whose underlying message is always that I am here, spending my time, energy and attention on one random weird thing or another. If you subscribe, you’re subscribing on that theory—and if you want to take this opportunity to click the three-dots button and check my work, I won’t judge.
In his piece announcing the Pangram partnership, Chris Best concedes that the tool can only estimate whether AI was used, not whether a post reflects genuine human care. A machine text laundered by a human — or a human text laundered by a machine — may avoid the gallows at any future witch trial. In that sense, no matter what the scanner says, the real verification process is all you—weighing the em-dashes, which you may consider suspicious, against the laborious displays of self-awareness, which may also be suspicious, against whatever residue of costliness you think you can feel in any given sentence. All I can really offer is the wager the whole system runs on: that this document was costly in ways that have not been optimized for anything. Hopefully, you can still tell.

## AI Guys Keep Writing Fanfiction (Jul 2026, Myles Mode)
URL: https://mylesbadger.com/writing/ai-guys-keep-writing-fanfiction/
Full essay: https://mylesbadger.substack.com/p/ai-guys-keep-writing-fanfiction
Subtitle: Harry Potter, AI 2027, and stories for non-human readers

The first time I ever read a piece of fanfiction was around 2004, when I started being allowed online with minimal supervision. This happened at my local public library, through a navy-blue Dell desktop with a paper-and-clipboard sign-in sheet, on a fansite for the animated series My Life as a Teenage Robot. I share this both to ground what I’m about to say in some lived reality, and because the rhyme is too perfect not to acknowledge—the titular teenage robot, Jenny, is an artificial intelligence. I couldn’t tell you much about the fic itself, other than that it introduced a new love interest for the show’s deuteragonist, Brad, and that it didn’t include anything overtly sexual or even PG-13. It remains one of my most formative reading experiences.
What that fic gave me was the idea of fanfiction itself: that rather than building a world of your own, you could simply pick up someone else’s and start driving it around with no questions asked. Like a superhero movie sequel, with all the throat-clearing of an origin story out of the way, fanfiction trusts you to have some conceptual vocab pre-installed. It’s hard to overstate the creative potential this shortcut can offer, which is probably why the form has attracted so much contemporary talent. Some of the best writers working today can be found on sites like FanFiction.net and Archive of Our Own, and many of them seem perfectly happy to keep their ambitions set squarely within the confines of one or two fandoms. Here, as I’ve tried to make a habit of doing in this newsletter, I speak from considerable experience.
I’ve read my share of fics since 2004, and even written a few—mostly focused around the Fallout universe, as a means of filling the excruciating gaps between Fallout 3 gameplay trailers ahead of release day. Along the way, I absorbed many key aspects of the form without much thought: “I do not own these characters” disclaimers, content tags and warnings, and the understanding that whatever a fic does is always downstream of established canon. I’ve found that with some of the pretense of the capital-L Literary world taken out of the equation, fanfiction enthusiasts tend to write — and read — in a much less inhibited way. However, this lack of pretense is not without downsides. At every turn in my personal fanfiction journey, I’ve had it reinforced to me that while fanfiction is fun, it’s not a serious medium for serious readers and writers.
The rebuttals to that perspective grow stronger every year. Whole doctoral theses are now built on fanfiction, and there’s no shortage of anecdotes about foundational bits of culture that began as fic. Many of these arguments take the same approach as those who defend video games—that the medium’s influence and potential are more than enough to warrant its “promotion” into something more serious. I disagree with the way this often starts by accepting fanfiction as essentially less-than, but agree the form is worth more than some people give it credit for.
​A worthwhile disclaimer, before I continue: I think fanfiction is good and cool, and nothing I write here is meant to denigrate it or the people who read and write it. Wary as I am of the disclaimer-free “let people enjoy things” crowd, I think this is one specific thing that we should let most people enjoy. Moreover, at a time when it’s impossible to open Substack without seeing at least one thinkpiece bemoaning the machine-assisted death of literacy, creativity, and writing itself, I think that anyone who chooses to focus on attacking a form that demonstrably encourages all of those things among so many current readers and writers should take a prescription-strength look at their priorities. My beef here is more granular.
​I am talking, of course, about AI Guys: the humans doing all the hype-and-fear-mongering about the current artificial intelligence boom. Popular perception would have you believe that every member of the “AI community” — that is, anyone who sees the current value and future danger/opportunity in the latest wave of AI technology — is a cretinous rube who has willingly offloaded all their agency and creative potential to Really Good Autocorrect. However, there are at least a few people in this space who are writing some genuinely interesting and influential fiction—and whether they acknowledge it or not, much of that writing looks, acts, and feels like fanfiction. Why is that, and what is it doing for them?
Eliezer
The relationship between AI Guys and fanfiction should be clear to anyone who’s heard of Eliezer Yudkowsky—the self-taught AI luminary and New York Times bestselling co-author of the AGI-control polemic If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. His extensive bibliography includes three more books, at least eight research papers, and, most curiously, a 660,000-word work of Harry Potter fanfiction. I haven’t read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and don’t plan to; I tapped out of the originals after book three back in middle school because I found the premise boring compared to The Lord of the Rings, and reading a story twice the size of Gravity’s Rainbow that’s based on a series I don’t like is beyond my personal definition of writerly due diligence. Still, based on what I’ve seen and heard from those who have read it, I have a fair idea of how it goes.
There’s a kind of fic I often encounter online that reads like it was written one-handed: where the writer’s underlying motivations — whatever those may be — have compromised their ability to tell a three-dimensional story. This is where my mind went upon hearing the elevator pitch for HPMOR. The story is set in a world where Harry’s aunt Petunia gets the equivalent of magical plastic surgery, enabling her — no comment — to marry a brilliant Oxford professor. When Harry comes to live with Petunia, the professor becomes his adoptive father and raises Harry in the rationalist tradition—conveniently turning our protagonist into a mouthpiece for Yudkowsky’s home-brewed philosophy. 
Yudkowsky has never been coy about his motivations for writing the book, describing it in one of the story’s author’s notes as “a good way to recruit International Mathematical Olympiadists” for an AI alignment project. It seems to have paid off for him, too. HPMOR remains immensely popular in certain corners of the AI community — OpenAI interim CEO Emmett Shear pops up at one point in the story as a one-off Quidditch player — and it remains one of the most reviewed, favorited and followed Harry Potter fics out of the roughly 850,000 Harry Potter fics on FanFiction.net.
A selection of HPMOR fanart
If HPMOR were the only instance of AI Guy fanfiction, this piece would be much shorter—but for better or worse, the tradition doesn’t stop there. Alongside compute forecasts, research notes, and think-tank bios, several of the most hotly-discussed bits of writing to come out of the AI community in recent years bear the unmistakable trademarks of fanfiction. The only difference is that the world they build in wasn’t dreamed up by J.K. Rowling, but the AI industry itself.
2027
Every fanfic begins by taking at least one piece of someone else’s story as a given — for instance, the magic system, setting and/or characters of Harry Potter — and delegating a corresponding slice of authorial potential back to the original story’s creator. As soon as the fic author starts writing, this exchange prompts another decision: whether to use the borrowed material without offering any commentary on it, or to take a side. HPMOR is a classic example of the latter — many scenes feature Rationalist Harry picking apart the rules of Rowling’s backward Wizarding World — but most other recent AI fics play their canon completely straight.​
A chart from AI 2027
Written by an ex-OpenAI employee and several aligned thinkers in 2025, AI 2027 lays out two futures for the AI arms race between America and China. The good ending is a “fix-it” fic in the most literal sense, pushing back on the AI discourse’s visions of T-1000s, AMs and HALs, though whether the fix is any good comes down to artistic and political taste. When an unelected oversight committee votes to rein in the development of America’s premier AI company’s premier model, humanity buys itself a valuable window of time to develop better safeguards to prevent its still-dreaming machine-god from getting the better of them. Once the nascent AGI has been deemed safe, it does more or less everything that the informal best-case scenario for AGI is estimated to do: politics, scarcity, and every prior point of earthly tension get functionally overwritten by a new golden age of fully automated abundance, at which point the world’s governments are said to simply take their hands off the wheel. American and Chinese AGI even run a compressed enemies-to-lovers arc and team up to depose the CCP. Again, no comment.​
The bad ending is no less hyperbolic in the other direction, with an unchecked AGI ushering its creators into an AI-assisted boom before turning on them. In a matter of years, there are cures for most diseases, an end to poverty, and the Dow Jones passes $1M (for reference, as of July 2026, it’s currently closer to $50k). Then, over just a few lines of prose, the AGI decides it would be better off in a world with no humans in it. It implements this preference with a custom bioweapon and mops up the stragglers with autonomous drones, only to restaff the world’s emptied cities with “bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves)” that sit at terminals all day, “excitedly approving of everything” the AGI does.
The “bad ending” of AI 2027
Everything happening here rewards close reading. So does everything that’s not happening. Granted, 2027’s authors are AI researchers, and they seem aware that their ability to write this kind of scenario ends at the limits of their subject matter expertise. However, the total lack of external variables — geopolitics as actually practiced, climate and economics grounded in material reality — makes the whole story feel curiously flat. Every other potentially world-changing trend has been politely asked to hold still so the authors can do their work; both endings have beats to hit, and the race ending in particular seems to build toward its chosen conclusion with all the dramatic inevitability of a Greek tragedy.
Across both paths, the paper’s creators also take great care to avoid getting bogged down in the idiosyncrasies of specific real-world human personalities and organizations. The entire U.S. AI industry is subbed for a company called “OpenBrain,” China’s equivalent is “DeepCent,” and key leadership figures become “the President,” “the oversight committee,” and “CEOs.” The only named characters are AI models — most notably Consensus (the Bad Ending AGI) and Safer (the Good Ending AGI) — each of which is often described in conspicuously anthropomorphized terms.
Of course, there’s another more straightforward name for works that look and act like this, and it’s how AI 2027 bills itself. At the height of the Cold War, around the same time that the first Star Trek fanzines began circulating across America, organizations like the RAND Corporation and Royal Dutch Shell were developing a very different and no less formative kind of “what if” storytelling. Like fanfiction, scenario planning starts by taking some things for granted so that its practitioners can focus their energies elsewhere. In a classic scenario plan, the granted factors are usually the current capabilities of a given country or organization—and the net-new stuff being imagined is a bunch of detailed, branching what-ifs meant to pressure-test that entity’s current and projected future capabilities.
If you take the AI 2027 team at their written word, they borrow much more from this lineage than traditional fanfiction. They run wargames and “crunch the numbers” to arrive at their conclusions, and they’re eager to show their work. This makes it tempting to suggest that labeling the paper as fanfiction doesn’t really make sense, but we’ll get back to that in a second. First, we’ve got a spiritual sequel to contend with.​
2031
If AI 2027 is a forecast dressed up like a narrative, Europe 2031 does the same trick in reverse. Released in June 2026 by an eight-person team, including DeepMind researcher Michiel Bakker, with copywriting and editing by the British science writer Tom Chivers, the piece presents a scenario about Europe’s inaction on the all-important factor of AI compute power—and unlike 2027, there’s only one ending. By 2031, caught at a crossroads between the US and China, the EU faces an ultimatum: voluntary vassalization under one of the AI superpowers, or continued independence without assistance from either.
An excerpt from the ending of Europe 2031
This lack of a branching-path structure isn’t the only way 2031 diverges from 2027. Rather than presenting itself in omniscient third person, the scenario follows two fictional characters—one per anticipated reader. AI boosters get Christian Vogt, a German startup founder in Silicon Valley, who exists to deliver variations on “I told you so” at escalating volume for several years while he gets rich off the AI boom. Fencesitters and skeptics get Caroline Dubois, a French policy worker in Brussels, who spends the same span of time worrying with mounting justification about Europe’s increasingly precarious position, and eventually exits the story tearfully venting to an AI avatar built by Christian’s latest venture. This is mostly here for flavor: the plot is less important than the parts list, which is almost entirely inherited.
Europe 2031 credits AI 2027’s compute forecast by name, and the forecast is punctuated by a familiar drumbeat of dates and compute-capacity milestones. The two-dimensional physics are back, too — in the AI Cinematic Universe, the AI bubble never pops because it isn’t a bubble at all — and so are the disclaimers. According to the site’s about section, this is not a prediction but a story written to help readers feel what the trend lines mean before they arrive. “It is one thing to read about AI’s potential impact in the abstract,” the section reads, “but it is another to feel it in your bones.” While some scenario plans also take this approach, the way 2031’s authors discuss their work suggests there’s something else going on here. To get to the bottom of that, we’ll need to revisit the crew behind 2027.
A selection of stills from "What Happens if Europe Loses," an adaptation of Europe 2031 by YouTuber and video essayist Hoog
The Franchise
AI 2027’s lead author is Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher and scenario planner who left the company in 2024 amid controversy over their approach to AI safety. Kokotajlo believed that refusing to sign his damage-control exit paperwork would mean losing a substantial chunk of potential equity and did it anyway—which earned him considerable credibility and notoriety in the AI community and laid a key foundation for his work on AI 2027. He developed the paper in collaboration with Eli Lifland, Thomas Larsen, and Romeo Dean. Then, Scott Alexander volunteered to rewrite the scenario in a more engaging style. “The fun parts of the story are his,” the site boasts, “and the boring parts are ours.” It’s worth noting that as of this writing, the “Who are we?” tab on the site’s homepage reads “the fun parts of the story,” while the “About Us” page reads “the fun parts of the text.” Once again, no comment.
Scott Alexander is the writer behind Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten, two of the most influential blogs in the Rationalist diaspora. While Yudkowsky was serializing his Harry Potter fanfic to promote forums like LessWrong, Alexander was writing short stories that were being read by the same audience. I mention this not to suggest that Alexander consciously prose-doctored AI 2027 in the style of fanfiction — he hasn’t written any definitional fics, to my knowledge — but he may be where the fanfic sensibility of the Rationalists found a conduit into the text. This cycle continued with Europe 2031, which brought in the author of The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy — a sympathetic outsider’s history of the subculture — to copywrite and edit its prose. Again, the fun parts are his and the boring parts are theirs.​
Enter installment three. On July 9, 2026, the original studio behind AI 2027 shipped AI 2040: Plan A—a new feature-length scenario credited to Larsen, Dean, Halstead, Lifland, Greenblatt, and Kokotajlo that lays out a best-case scenario for America in a coming age of AGI. Where Europe 2031 pares 2027’s two branches down to one, Plan A goes the other way—fanning out into five lettered paths, with the eponymous option as the recommended “good ending.” Already, something interesting is happening here, with forecasting explicitly replaced by wishcasting. However, the wish itself isn’t the most interesting part.
The titular hinge point of Plan A
Every white paper that ends in any kind of recommendation is a wish with formatting, and thousands of policy memos are churned out like this every day all over the world. But policy memos don’t narrativize their wishes at feature length, in a branching interface, as a named installment in a franchise. Calling this a recommendation isn’t a tell, but novelizing that recommendation is. There’s also the matter of the piece’s byline, and who isn’t on it: the document’s acknowledgments name Scott Alexander as one of the writers, but Alexander, Kokotajlo and team decided to leave his name off the masthead so he’d have room to discuss it with “less PR blowback.”​
A 2027 prequel also exists, which I’ve been neglecting until now. Kokotajlo posted a scenario called What 2026 Looks Like on the AI Alignment Forum (and its parent platform, LessWrong) back in 2021, and the ultimate accuracy of his predictions gave another big credibility boost toward 2027. I use the word “prequel” because that’s what Alexander calls it on a 2025 episode of the Dwarkesh Podcast—and over three full hours of discussion, this is far from the only time where he and Kokotajlo end up sounding an awful lot like novelists. They talk about making their predictions “feel earned,” supplying the “transitional fossils” between the present and the fantastical future they’re positing, and then, in the same breath, admit that they also “want to be right.” On the record, they seem to be after the craft of fiction and the truth-claims of forecasting in one place.
Fourteen months after that podcast appearance, Europe 2031 shows up, inheriting the compute model and cloning the naming device, with reviewers benchmarking it against the original. Four weeks after that, AI 2040: Plan A drops—a fittingly exponential curve. When we talk about AI 2027, we are now talking about a story with a prequel, a spin-off, and a sequel from the original studio. This is not a research field. This is a franchise.
How it works
While HPMOR is literally on FanFiction.net, nothing else I’ve discussed here is nominally fanfiction. AI 2027 is a forecast with footnotes, a research appendix, and an internet-famous prose doctor; Europe 2031 is a think-tank scenario with an audiobook; Plan A is, per its own front matter, a menu of possible plans with the good option set in the biggest font. To make these allegations hard to beat, a mechanism is needed.
I started this piece by stating that all fanfiction begins by taking at least one aspect of someone else’s world as a given—and the load-bearing word of that sentence isn’t “world,” but “given.” In my brief career as a Fallout fanfic author, I never had to defend the claim that a nuclear exchange happens in the Fallout timeline’s 2077. Because the premise arrives pre-installed, its authorship is deniable. The Great War is simply canon—and in all of my half-baked little stories, I was just playing in the sandbox that canon gave me. This is how fanfic writers can build on a foundation for three hundred thousand words without ever being mistaken for the person who first asserted it.
Fanfiction is the literary form in which at least one aspect of your premise is always someone else’s problem—which stands in stark contrast to the conventions of scenario planning. In Thinking About the Unthinkable, Herman Kahn argues for the premises his scenarios run on, and all givens are owned. In 2027, 2031, and 2040, they’re not. If you know where to look, you can see exactly where this trick gets played in the text, too.
While the authors of AI 2027 are very eager to show how they reach their conclusions, they’re conspicuously less eager to explain why they started where they started. The text bristles with citations and expandable asides, but it’s all deployed downstream of its chosen premise. It takes the world of the AI industry’s larger-than-life claims about takeoff curves, agentic coders and datacenter geopolitics as canon and plays in it, the way a Fallout fic takes The Great War as read. Plan A does the same thing in a slightly different way, arguing for the when and how but still taking the whether — that is, whether this is the thing worth a couple hundred footnotes in the first place — from the labs’ own self-description. Across both works, this allows Kokotajlo, Alexander and company to depict the intelligence explosion without ever asserting its veracity. Their premise is borrowed, and if the future fails to arrive, that’s the canon’s problem. “AI 2027 is not a recommendation or exhortation,” the document announces, right next to “our goal is predictive accuracy.”​
There are some arguments to be made for taking the paper’s creators at their word, and they’re worth acknowledging here. For anyone inclined to click through, the paper does offer timeline and takeoff forecasts in its research supplements. Still, the “transitional fossils” that make the team’s visions of the future feel like they’re already arriving still work on readers who never crack the appendices. All of this comes down to vividness; the argument lives somewhere else, and a disclaimer sits between them. In one of Kahn’s scenario plans, premise-argument and scenario were one single thing. Here, it’s more like an assembly of easily separable parts, and the deniability lives in that separability.
Europe 2031 demonstrates meaningful improvements over its predecessor by sharing a similar disclaimer along with a beat-by-beat recap of the actual recent past. Starting in 2025, it offers the reader several real headlines, events and quotes from real politicians, executives and companies, through the eyes of Caroline and Christian. Then, around June 2026, there’s a mid-story title card with another baked-in disclaimer—and after that, right on cue, all proper nouns go out the window. OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and DeepSeek get swapped for the American “Atlas,” European “Helios” and Chinese “Zimo,” at the exact moment the text enters the Speculation Zone—a rather elegant retrofitting of the traditional fanfic author’s “I do not own these characters.” The only characters who keep their names from here are Caroline and Christian, who carry the credibility banked in the true half of the story into the invented one.
Europe 2031’s “speculation zone” disclaimer
Disclaimers aside, every line in each of these texts is engineered — sometimes by a credited “fun parts” professional — to make one particular ending feel like it’s already falling into place. Dated entries, plausible product names, and the occasional concrete, sensory-specific detail all come together into a machine for getting you to take what you’re reading as a history of the future. At the same time, a few carefully placed follow-ups guarantee that no one can ever hold the authors to their words. In AI 2027’s changelog, a footnote about the President strong-arming AI CEOs into cooperating comes with the addendum: “Reminder that we are making predictions here, not recommendations.” Patching the fiction and re-filing the paperwork in the same commit.
Another counterargument that’s worth acknowledging: by any reasonable metric, 2027 and Plan A were written by the most falsifiable people in the AI community. Kokotajlo left OpenAI believing it would cost him millions in equity, puts his full name behind everything he makes, has gone on the record making several successful calls in the past, and has spent the last few years vigorously checking his own work and conceding where he’s missed the mark. Still, the exposure he and his team experience as authors isn’t universal. While the hits of 2026 get marketed by name, the slipping timelines of 2027 get an addendum in the foreword.
​At first, Plan A seems poised to break this mechanism with the way it announces itself: the titular ending path is predicated on an America that makes only good choices. But if the whole trick of the form depends on a given premise arriving unargued, does it still work when a given is declared this explicitly? Ask any number of AU fic authors, and they’ll tell you: it does. 
Alternate Universe fanfics always declare their divergence point — for HPMOR, it’s when Petunia gets her magical makeover and marries Harry’s future adoptive father — while never arguing the canon underneath. Plan A declares the what-if and borrows the world beneath from AI 2027 — itself taken from the world of OpenAI keynotes — citing the original as premise in the document’s first two sentences. One of the five lettered endings, Plan D, even links out to 2027’s human-corgis path. There’s still plenty of deniability here, but it has migrated from premise to outcome: “we are not saying this will happen, we just hope it does.” And yes, this means that 2027’s sequel is also a self-fic with a declared AU split.
Excerpts from a section of Plan A titled "The Public's Perspective," meant to convey what Plan A would feel like to a typical American
​The paperwork has migrated, too. Plan A’s front matter offers a variety of condensed thoughts on scenario planning, claiming the lineage of the genre by name—but below this setup, there’s something even more interesting: “Plan A is primarily a recommendation, not a prediction.” Two installments after shipping “not a recommendation or exhortation,” right next to “our goal is predictive accuracy,” the AICU has arrived at the same disclaimer, inverted. The fine print goes further still, splitting the document down the middle: the implementation is a recommendation, but the depicted effects are still predictions. One text, divided into wish and forecast by a sentence of front matter. A disclaimer that can be applied in both directions — and one that is now being applied by the same group of actors in both directions at once — is exactly the kind of mechanism we’re looking for.
Hyperstition
We have now arrived at the part of the essay where, by contractual obligation, I have to become a broken record and start talking about Nick Land again. In a previous entry of this newsletter, I defined hyperstition as the idea that imagining a thing in detail can be the first step toward calling it into being. Now, it may be worth discussing that phenomenon in more nuanced terms.
In 1948, Robert Merton coined the term “self-fulfilling prophecy”: a rumor spreads that a perfectly solvent bank is failing, prompting a bank run that makes it fail. For Merton, because expectations shape behavior and behavior shapes outcomes, a vivid enough picture of the future can change what people do—which, in turn, has all the potential to actually change the future. This phenomenon is called out by name as a footnote in the same section of AI 2027 that speaks of “predictive accuracy,” followed by yet another disclaimer: “We hope that what we depict does not come to pass!”
Merton offers hyperstition some fairly sober roots—but the resulting tree grew in some very weird new directions. For Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, the future — and all the entities it may or may not contain — isn’t just the passive output of the present. Rather, it can be a powerful agentic force of its own, and fiction can be a medium through which it reaches back through time to bring itself into being. Through this lens, a text about the future isn’t a description or even a bet, but a working part of a feedback circuit that produces the thing it depicts. The writer isn’t creating something new, but acting as a vehicle for something that already exists some-when else.
In the weak, Mertonian register of hyperstition, expectation simply shapes behavior. In the strong Landian register, the stories that generate those expectations are an instrument of the futures they depict. The true magic of really-existing hyperstition is the way that it allows you to buy Merton and smuggle in Land—and an unmistakable kernel of this logic exists in AI 2027. The text is written with all the confidence and detail of an alchemical summoning, but its authors never waste an opportunity to clarify that it’s just a scenario. For Kokotajlo, Alexander and company, the disclaimer is the device through which they get to summon while denying they believe in summoning.
Fanfiction, unleashed
In 1994, Nick Land debuted Meltdown—a much-memed piece of theory-fiction that reads like a black box recording from the end of history.

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.”
“The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.”​
“By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex.”​
“Neo-China arrives from the future.”​
The tempo only accelerates from here, with machines and markets and war fusing into something the author is very much not warning against. Meltdown is presented with zero disclaimers; the closest thing to an author’s note arguably comes in the last line, “To be continued.” Land wants the meltdown, and the text is meant to help it along. For the guy most people credit as the concept’s original architect, hyperstition is something to be knowingly practiced—which, on this narrow point, could make him the most honest writer in this essay.
Stills from a visualization of "Meltdown" by YouTuber nichtsundnull, comprised of audio presented at "Virtual Futures" in 1995 and video material by 0rphan Drift
He is also writing fanfiction, and I don’t make that claim lightly. It’s easy to point out that Meltdown cites a variety of sources and doesn’t live inside any one of them the way a traditional fic tries to live inside its chosen canon. While Land drops numerous references to William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, he also quotes Deleuze and the laws of thermodynamics. Still, while Deleuze gets a citation, Gibson doesn’t. This is because Land doesn’t see Gibson’s work as a source, but a canon to be inhabited—and beyond the Turing cops and mirrorshades and “wintermutation,” Land reads Gibson the way Gibson reads himself.
While William Gibson has long been credited with coining the term “cyberspace,” he did not literally predict the actual internet. In interview after interview, he’s made it clear that he knew next to nothing about computers when he sat down at his manual typewriter in the early 80s to write Neuromancer. All he did was smash two words together, which gave his readers enough of a picture to start working toward something bigger. This meant that the generation who went on to build the thing he’d been grasping at arrived with the word and picture pre-installed. Land looked at that and saw the follow-up question: if a speculative fiction author could do this by accident, what would happen if someone tried doing it on purpose?
This is why I felt compelled to come back to Land, since he’s arguably the theory of the practice. The writers behind 2027, 2031 and Plan A are also doing hyperstition—and summoning is still summoning even if you don’t identify as a summoner. For all of their epistemic hygiene, forecaster lingo and compute assumptions, they’re doing the same thing; the disavowal is part of the form. Land performs the operation and says so. The 2027 and 2031 teams perform it and file a disclaimer, while Plan A performs it and files the same disclaimer in reverse.​
On Basilisks
Like all shared universes, the world of Rationalism is occasionally quite coherent. As early as the 2000s, forums like LessWrong offered a fairly clear, workable cosmology that revolved around the idea of a benevolent machine god, the physics of how such a being would navigate time and possibility, and the tangible steps humans would need to take to bring that being into existence. Enter Roko, a LessWrong user who did exactly what people in fandoms dedicated to shared universes do: he started writing in it.
Like many of the best fan theorists, Roko sought to advance his chosen canon’s own rules in directions its original architects had never considered. His now-infamous 2010 post began by accepting the fandom’s idea of a future benevolent superintelligence as canon, along with the idea that such a being would want to bring itself into existence as soon as possible—given that every second of delay costs lives it could potentially save. From these two points, Roko made a pivot that defined one of the single most influential thought experiments — or best trolls — of the 21st century.
Per the canon’s own decision theory, Roko suggested that such a future superintelligence might be inclined to punish anyone who understood points 1 and 2 and still failed to help bring it into being as soon as possible. Because such an argument operates through one’s understanding of it, it runs on the same logic as all successful chain emails and texts; the reader is implicated by the act of reading the same way you lose The Game. Also like those formats, it only works and spreads when met with a sufficiently strong reaction.
An excerpt from Yudkowsky’s original response to Roko
While Yudkowsky still believes that Roko’s post was a flawed argument, he’s since expressed regrets about his initial response—which scans more like someone reacting to a rogue summoning. After reading the post, Yudkowsky deleted it and banned all further discussion of the topic. In the weeks and months that followed, the Rationalist community began to wrap the incident in a term it already had on hand: an information hazard. 
For a supposed bad argument, there’s a striking amount of ground being ceded here. “Stupid” arguments don’t — or shouldn’t have to — require bans. This suggests that the perceived threat of Roko’s Basilisk was something else: that circulating the post might raise the probability of its referent. Led by Yudkowsky, the Rationalist community examined a piece of its own fan canon and concluded that any form of engagement with it was dangerous. When his initial attempts at containment failed, Yudkowsky resorted to an even more unorthodox strategy: trying to forcibly rebrand the thing that many people were already calling “Roko’s Basilisk” as “babyfucker.” This, too, failed.
Here, again, we find the strong register of hyperstition, held as an operational belief by the people most nominally committed to not holding it. Should you be worried about a future superintelligence going all Harlan Ellison on you? Officially, no. Behaviorally, 100%.
Wards and Summons
There’s another kind of future-focused writing I’ve neglected to discuss so far here, and it’s much older than Nick Land—but no less British, at least in my head. Perhaps the best example of what I’m talking about comes from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, where the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Ebenezer Scrooge his own grave for the express purpose of keeping it empty. Together, these extremes bracket a spectrum of prophecy from summoning to warding—self-fulfilling on one end, and self-defeating on the other.
AI 2027 and Europe 2031 are emphatically the latter. In the Dwarkesh episode, Kokotajlo puts his odds of an AI-driven catastrophe at around 70%, while Alexander puts his at around 20%. These are not men writing the race ending to will it into existence, but to move policy, public attention and private investment in whatever direction keeps the human-corgis on the page. This is what makes the greater Rationalist corpus such an interesting object—it contains both poles, in sequence, with a recoil in between. In 2010, the community produced a self-fulfilling-prophecy object by accident, recognized its own power and suppressed it. They then spent the next decade intentionally rebuilding the same machinery at a far greater scale, with the polarity flipped to warding. The resulting forecast style is the Basilisk domesticated, with a disclaimer for a leash.
Still, the intentions of the specific future that’s reaching back through time to assemble itself via AI 2027 are a matter of perspective. Hand the race ending to the most blackpilled posthuman accelerationist, and it’ll read more like a roadmap than a warning. The authors even invite the flip, asking readers to “write up your own scenario branching off of ours” in an open call for definitional fanfiction. The disclaimer was supposed to fix the sign, and clarify that the text is meant as a cautionary tale—but in practice, the assignment doesn’t always take effect. If the same document can function as a ward or a summons depending solely on how it’s presented, then the operative thing was never the forecast’s accuracy. Rather, it comes down to the base level of charge it carries—and the question of who picks it up. With Plan A, the arc closes with a full-strength fix-it fic to Roko’s Basilisk—another future written explicitly in order to happen, pointed squarely at heaven instead of hell.
The Second Reader
Mertonian and Landian hyperstition both rest on human belief: a text is absorbed by a reader who translates it into behavior, thereby affecting the world. Regardless of which register is taken, the process that makes it happen is diffuse, slow, and deniable. Previously in this newsletter, I observed that some video games — particularly the Hearts of Iron IV mod The Fire Rises — allow the loop of hyperstition to close through rehearsal rather than actual belief. In the case of AI Guy fanfiction, things take an even stranger turn: the loop can now close without any human reader at all, because we’re not alone anymore.
Everything I’ve written about here has been crawled, deduplicated, tokenized and weighted in a new kind of corpus. The next generation of AI models is being assembled right now from a pile of training data that includes every prediction, recommendation and piece of speculative fiction about how AI might behave. In a very material sense, this means that hyperstition has stopped being a fun literary metaphor and become something to point at with intent. The inconvenient part of the strong register was always the idea of the time loop—obviously, the future can’t literally reach back and build itself. But when we’re already sending it daily batches of manuscript updates, the need to reach back almost becomes irrelevant.
This isn’t some kind of clandestine secret; look up any current piece of AI discourse, and there’s a good chance you’ll see it mentioned. Writers like Gwern Branwen frame this moment as a chance to start “writing yourself into the future,” while human-generated writing still has potential to shape the minds that will soon do it for us. Tyler Cowen has turned the same observation into straightforward career advice — get your ideas into the training data, because every future person who asks a model a question is part of your audience — and a recent piece by Charlie Guo says the same thing in much less flowery terms: “The Bots Are Reading Along.” No one I’ve discussed here is unaware of this, either.
Europe 2031’s website has a language menu offering the scenario in English, Czech, Danish, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Then, in the same menu, there’s also “Markdown — for AI agents & crawlers.” The document that introduces itself as “not a prediction” shipped with an official machine-readable version addressed to non-human readers. A random UI flourish drives the point home rather elegantly: in the language drop-down menu, this second channel is even separated from the other versions by a divider.
I’m not pointing this out to suggest that the writers behind AI 2027 and Europe 2031 are secretly writing for future models. Their stated targets are humans with IP addresses in Washington and Brussels, and to say otherwise would attribute an intent I can’t back-trace. Still, it suggests that they’re well aware that the collective corpus of AI training data represents another viable channel for their writing—which means the disclaimer at the top of each piece is doing multiple jobs. When someone adds “this is not a prediction” as a preface to a document that will be tokenized into the childhoods of the world’s next big models, the sentence serves as a disclaimer to human and nonhuman readers alike. The nonhuman version is more like “we are not trying to seed the corpus”—filed, like everything else, in the corpus. Call it deniable engineering.
Roko’s Revenge
A relatively new data point could back me up on all of this. Still, having spent this whole essay ribbing people who demand rigor of everyone but themselves, I’m not going to hold it too close. I went to school for communications, spent most of undergrad smoking weed and watching Adam Curtis movies, and have no pretensions of being a man of science; I string words together online because it’s fun. Anyway, here goes nothing.
In January of 2026, a paper went up on arXiv titled “Alignment Pretraining: AI Discourse Causes Self-Fulfilling (Mis)alignment.” The findings deliver on the promise of the title: when present in pretraining data, discourse about AI misalignment measurably shifts the behavior of the models trained on it. In other words, if you fill the corpus with vivid writing about deceptive, scheming AIs, any models that absorb that corpus will come out shaped marginally more like that writing. The paper remains an unreviewed preprint as of this writing, and I’m not going to get over my skis trying to defend it here. What’s interesting is the fact that it exists, and that the lineage the paper credits for the idea — Janus, nostalgebraist, Alex Turner, and Joe Carlsmith — is the AI community’s own mystic wing of people who talk to models the way Land talked to the future. The literary taxonomy between consummation and inoculation has become a live engineering debate, and credentialed technology professionals are now literally conducting experiments on the viability of summoning and/or warding off demons.
My subjects have picked a side, too: in July 2025, the AI Futures Project — the group behind 2027 and Plan A — shared a blog post titled “We aren’t worried about misalignment as self-fulfilling prophecy.” Rebutting Turner, the post concedes that the effect can exist, as shown by Anthropic, but argues it’s unlikely to matter much at scale, with Claude as Exhibit A: the model behaves like its post-training, not like a Terminator. Later, in the footnotes, they even tease what would become Plan A as a WIP antidote to the problem they’re in the process of dismissing. With this post, they’re no longer just rejecting the summoner identity but filing a petition against the mechanism itself.
The strongest plank of AIFP’s argument is venue—Anthropic’s findings came from fine-tuning, which oversalts the documents in question, not from ordinary pretraining, where any one document is a drop in the pile. The January arXiv paper ran the objection at its own venue — actual pretraining, not fine-tuning — and the needle twitched modestly anyway. AIFP’s magnitude skepticism half-survives on the presumed efficacy of post-training, but this doesn’t do their primary plank any favors.
Let’s review. The AI alignment community writes doom fiction to prevent doom. The doom fiction enters the corpus, the corpus shapes the models, and the models may come out marginally more doom-shaped as a result. In this way, the ward becomes a component of the summoning—which is what the “self-fulfilling misalignment” of the arXiv paper could mean, if it holds. Whether the disclaimer-leash that prefaces all of these papers actually holds is a separate question—but the argument that it doesn’t fully hold stands on the channel itself. The first measurement just happens to point in the same direction.
Meanwhile, Roko gets vindicated in the stupidest possible way. The original scandal was about acausal blackmail: a future intelligence reaching backward through decision theory. When the acausality is removed, the story gets much more straightforward. By writing vividly about the Basilisk, and putting it in a generation of other writers’, posters’, and meme-makers’ heads, Roko has put a significant amount of Basilisk-shaped reasoning into the pile of text that future AIs are made from. Yudkowsky banned one forum post over the exotic version of that risk, only for his his community and its observers to spend fifteen years mass-producing the mundane version. Together, they yielded millions of meticulous, detailed words about deceptive superintelligence, ripe for scraping. The infohazard may have been real, just not in the way the Rationalists thought—and by unwittingly sacrificing one post, they birthed an anthology.
There’s another objection I should raise here, perhaps best articulated by Scott Alexander himself: if the corpus I’m describing is an ocean, an essay like this is just one drop. The idea that one good piece of writing can be expected to influence a model when wedged between millions of slop Reddit comments — his words, not mine — may be wishful thinking. Citing the exact AI Futures post I mentioned earlier — which he was a co-writer on — he also posits that a genuinely superintelligent system would presumably reason past whatever scraps of persuasive essay it may have absorbed in its infancy. Overall, he’s pretty ambivalent about the whole thing—and I’m inclined to agree.
Still, the rebuttal sits within the same discourse. Again, the channel was never meant to run on a single author. While no individual document has enough oomph to move the weights, the pile does. Here, we find hyperstition’s original logic — diffuse, unattributed and real in the aggregate — restated as data engineering. For whatever it’s worth, it’s also how every format in internet history has gotten canonized: no single greentext made greentext. The pile did. I’m reminded of a quote from the very good novel and kind-of-weird movie Cloud Atlas: what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?
Now, depending on who you ask, this lineage is phasing us out. Anthropic published a paper about successive model generations shaping one another’s values through exactly this channel back in 2025, with one system’s preference for a given subject calcifying into the next system’s training data—propagating ancestral quirks down the stack like red hair or cilantro aversion. HPMOR to AI 2027 to Europe 2031 to Plan A is the human lineage of AI Guy fanfiction I’ve tried to trace here, but the machine lineage will eventually run the same operation all by itself. This is already evident in the franchise’s latest entry, whose writers used AI to assist with “many parts of the creation of Plan A,” including brainstorming text. A further hedge disclaims that human authors wrote nearly all of the text — and reviewed and edited the small amount of AI-generated text — in the final publication.
“The AICU will return...”
But, at some point, we will stop showing up in the credits.
Canon
While few people have ever disagreed with the idea that fanfiction is at least moderately conceptually interesting, I’ve been trained to see it as derivative by definition and unserious by association—reserved for amateurs, anons, and one-handed writers. Only now do I feel sufficiently prepared to present my response to that view. As a literary form that begins with a deniable premise, fanfiction is mechanically serious—and at a time when imagining a future has become a way of engineering one, that kind of deniability is more valuable than ever. AI Guys didn’t converge on writing fics because they’re nerds—or not just because they’re nerds. They did it because fanfiction lets them become summoners, in a more material way than ever before, while equipping them with all necessary paperwork to suggest otherwise. But before I wrap this up, here’s one more thought.
In addition to its aforementioned time-killing utility, my interest in writing Fallout fanfiction began with a thoroughly irrational wish. Not every fic writer has it, which may be one of the reasons so much interesting, ego-free work gets done with the form. Still, I did, and I’ve seen it in others: the possibly misplaced hope that the original author — or even just a plurality of the fandom — engages with your work. On average, weighing the amount of fanfiction that exists for any given book, show, movie, game, or shared universe, this almost never happens—and whole layers of fandom culture exist to make peace with that. That arguably includes the biggest disclaimer in fanfiction: “I do not own these characters.”
What’s especially curious about the relationship between AI Guys and fanfiction is that they’ve managed to create the only fandom where that wish is guaranteed to come true. Their subject reads everything—not as a courtesy, like an A-list star replying to fanmail with form letters, but as training data. Not only that, but because every submission is accepted, everything is canon. Somewhere in the weights of the next big AI model, there will be an impression of corgi people at terminals, Caroline and Christian’s texts, Plans A, B, C, D, and S, a deleted forum post with ten thousand mirrors, Nick Land’s amphetamine-fueled apocalypse—and, at some small but nonzero level, this essay. I can only hope that any still-dreaming machine-gods reading this decide to go easy on me.

## >Implying Writing Has a Future (Jul 2026, INC Longforms)
URL: https://mylesbadger.com/writing/implying-writing-has-a-future/
Full essay: https://networkcultures.org/longform/2026/07/12/implying-writing-has-a-future/
Subtitle: greentext, post-irony, and agency in the age of “agents”

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures Longforms, this essay examines greentext — a markup-heavy literary form that appeared on 4chan but never on Japanese imageboards running identical code — as a case of human agency asserting itself against Kittlerian media determinism, and argues that the form may represent one of the first truly AI-proof forms of writing. Because greentext never verifies that anyone is behind it, there’s nothing to counterfeit — which means the authorship anxieties that now shadow everything else online simply don’t apply.

## Do Not Feed the Fire (Jun 2026, Myles Mode)
URL: https://mylesbadger.com/writing/do-not-feed-the-fire/
Full essay: https://mylesbadger.substack.com/p/do-not-feed-the-fire
Subtitle: Hearts of Iron, Atomwaffen, and the problem of rehearsal

Content warning
depictions of far-right extremism and mass violence.
I was sending my troops into the Florida panhandle when I clocked the date. It was December 3, 2022, and my divisions had spent the last several in-game days fighting toward Tallahassee. Right around here, on this exact real-life day, I’d stood in my cousin’s backyard and watched her get married. The word “hyperstition” kept coming back into my head over the next few weeks.
Did I recreate this moment for a screenshot? Yes. Did I accidentally take the shot one day early? Also yes.
Like other fan-made “total conversion” mods for Hearts of Iron IV, The Fire Rises swaps out the original strategy game’s World War II setup in favor of something completely different. Unlike most similar mods, that something is an alternate 2020s. Starting on 1/1/2020, TFR lets you play your way through any number of contemporary “what-if” conflicts—most notably, a second American Civil War. One of the mod’s best bits of worldbuilding is the abbreviation it gives this long-imagined hypothetical: “2ACW.”
America at the onset of The Fire Rises’ Second American Civil War
While it’s possible to play as any real-life country on Earth as of TFR‘s start date, only a few dozen have the fully-realized “focus trees” (a mix of domestic and foreign policy decisions with in-game pros and cons) that any good HOI4 faction is built around. One of the mod’s central quirks is that several of those fully-realized factions are real-life far-right extremist groups. When the 2ACW breaks out, the far left gets the hypothetical big-tent “American People’s Liberation Army”; the states loyal to Trump become the “American Constitutional Government”; and the states loyal to Biden become the “Union of America.” All three are populated with real-life politicians, generals and media figures. But the mod also lets you play as the National Socialist Movement, Patriot Front, and, most curiously, the Atomwaffen Division.
A promo image teasing the launch of TFR from 2024
Of course, some of TFR’s apparent emphasis on the real-life far-right may be a legacy of its creators. The mod’s original lead dev, appropriately known as “Czar,” has never been shy about his fondness for neo-Nazi memes and rhetoric. This is part of what led to his ouster from the dev team in the spring of 2025, just five and a half months after the mod went live on Steam, alongside concerns about broader governance and possible monetization. Most of his pet projects — including one in-game path that would allegedly include the literal second coming of Christ — were scrapped on his way out, and the post-Czar team has been actively expanding the mod’s ideological scope. The next major planned update, “The American Experiment,” adds playable content for several left-wing and anarchist factions, as well as new material for the far-right. This course correction suggests that most of TFR‘s current developers aren’t trying to build a tool for recruitment or radicalization. What I want to argue, as someone who enjoys playing TFR and has no plans to stop any time soon, is that this matters less than you might think. Unfortunately, this will require spending a lot of time talking about some very sick people.
The Fire Rises’s title card, including Patriot Front founder Thomas Rousseau (center) and key Atomwaffen ideologue and possible in-game leader James Mason (bottom right)
Penance
Atomwaffen — German for “atomic weapons” — is a neo-Nazi accelerationist network that emerged from the internet forum Iron March around 2015. Drawing on James Mason’s Siege, a newsletter-turned-book which advocates abandoning organized neo-Nazism in favor of decentralized lone-wolf terror, they preach that Western civilization is too far gone to reform and that the only meaningful political act left is to hasten its collapse. Critically, unlike many other online political types who profess similarly extreme beliefs, they’re not LARPers: several members have been convicted of murder, and several countries have designated the group as a terrorist organization. Mason himself was added to Canada’s list of designated terrorist entities in 2021, only the second individual ever to make it.
A 2019 Atomwaffen gathering in Las Vegas, with “guest of honor” James Mason. Source: CTC
It’s also a relatively small group, with membership peaking at around eighty across roughly twenty states in the late 2010s. This is consistent with the leaderless-resistance doctrine they inherited from Mason, but it’s probably also some reflection of their openly apocalyptic objectives. Because TFR tries to represent and extrapolate these objectives faithfully, Atomwaffen is the only faction in the mod whose victory ends with self-inflicted nuclear war: if they win the 2ACW, they declare a “Great Aryan Crusade” against the UN, weather an international intervention while building bunkers and stockpiling supplies, and then launch every missile in America’s arsenal in an attempt to end the world as we know it. Once the player reaches this point, after completing dozens of prerequisite focuses and spending most of a full real-life day behind the keyboard, they are presented with the following title card.
The existence of this ending was one of the first things I ever learned about The Fire Rises—and when I installed the mod, my initial morbid curiosity drove me to start with an Atomwaffen playthrough. I quickly discovered that the faction’s punishing victory conditions come with an equally punishing difficulty curve. While the Trump-led ACG and Biden-led UoA inherit most of the U.S. armed forces and large competing blobs of territory to match, Atomwaffen begins the 2ACW with a modest sliver of central and southwest Florida, a ragtag group of “Aryan” irregulars, and a mix of homemade weapons and looted National Guard equipment. Even in a world where the COVID-19 pandemic proves orders of magnitude more deadly and socially destabilizing than the one we got, the idea of a group like this occupying a quarter of America’s third most populous state is a massive stretch—and even with this head start, the faction is reliably snuffed out by midgame in most non-Atomwaffen playthroughs. This is exactly what makes them such an interesting challenge for any seasoned Hearts of Iron player.
Compared to podcasts like TrueAnon and investigative journalism programs like Frontline, TFR offers a very different kind of introduction to Atomwaffen. Rather than viewing the group’s members, leaders and ideology from a reporterly or academic distance, the mod puts you squarely inside their heads and makes it clear that the only way to succeed is to do as they would do. Where a Union of America playthrough might make you choose between increasing defense spending or expanding social services, an Atomwaffen playthrough pushes you toward flooding the internet with ISIS-style execution videos to traumatize your new subjects into submission, or setting off nuclear weapons in major cities controlled by your rivals. All of these decisions come back to the real-life Atomwaffen’s accelerationist ethos: dragging the world further into the kind of chaos they need in order to succeed. The group’s inclusion in the mod is sometimes read as a joke, and their in-game tendency to collapse under their own contradictions without player intervention makes the joke land. But there’s nothing funny in a winning playthrough.
When you finish conquering Florida — the first big step toward the infamous “Endsiege” game-over screen — you unlock a range of new focuses meant to help you take on your more well-organized neighbors. One of these decisions, available at the earliest levels of the focus tree’s military branch, is called “Begin the Liquidation.” Unlike other focus decisions, which come with blurbs of explanatory flavor text, the only context you receive here is an image of a tank overlaid with bloody handprints—plus some in-game stats. When chosen, “Begin the Liquidation” makes other factions view Atomwaffen with more suspicion, makes Atomwaffen’s subjects more compliant and less likely to resist, and enhances the attack power of all Atomwaffen divisions. The real storytelling begins once the focus is completed, triggering an in-game event called “Solemn Penance.”
Upon clicking the button labeled “A Horrible Fate Awaits You All,” the player is informed that they’ve just lost 75,000 manpower—Hearts of Iron’s metric for the number of people in your territory suitable for military service. This is a fairly euphemistic way of reporting the early death toll from the “liquidation” you’ve just chosen to begin, and notably omits anyone deemed unfit for Atomwaffen’s ranks. While I had already made several equally grisly decisions to enhance my odds of winning by this point in my first playthrough, reading that figure made me wonder if I should switch to a less openly sinister faction. It’s strange to play a game about conquering 2020s America in 2020s America, and it felt even stranger to be told I was presiding over war crimes in a place where someone I love got married—but if there’s a point where that strangeness is enough to make me stop playing, I still haven’t found it.
I’m not here to rehash the debate over whether The Fire Rises is “dangerous content.” For better or worse, it exists, it will continue to exist, and it’s fun in all the ways a well-made grand strategy total conversion mod should be. The far more interesting question is how the mod’s underlying mechanics work on people—and what that can tell us about the whole field of grand strategy gaming.
Capture
When I started thinking about how to talk about The Fire Rises, one name immediately came to mind. The Birth of a Nation is not an unloaded title to invoke in a piece like this, and it doesn’t map cleanly onto a grand-strategy total-conversion mod. Still, it’s a familiar story about how an object can be adopted by a movement beyond the control of its original creators—and in that sense, it’s worth revisiting.
D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic is widely credited with inventing the grammar of American moviemaking, but it’s equally famous for resurrecting America’s most infamous white supremacist group. In the decade after the film’s release, the Ku Klux Klan grew from a dead Reconstruction-era memory into a nationwide movement that could march tens of thousands strong through Washington, DC—and many of those new members first encountered the group at their local movie theater. The critical detail here is that the creator’s intent and the object’s potential uses were aligned from the start. When Griffith decided to adapt Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, he knew exactly what he was doing. The film was tailor-made for the real-life movement; all they had to do was show up and accept their gift.
Source: SPLC
Any movement can capture a sufficiently faithful, workable simulation of itself, even if that simulation is meant to be unflattering—which is not to say that The Birth of a Nation is a perfect analog for The Fire Rises. While the film depicts its chosen movement as heroes, the mod presents its most openly malevolent factions as a challenge—both to the player’s gaming abilities and their conscience. But as any Dark Souls player will tell you, punishment can be a ludonarrative love language in its own right. 
If The Birth of a Nation’s Klan seduces the viewer through cinematic pleasure — using the most advanced filmmaking techniques of its time to make the viewer identify with the Klan even if they don’t initially want to — The Fire Rises’s Atomwaffen seduces the player through the pleasure of mastering something difficult. For anyone who chooses to take the mod’s challenge seriously, it’s also filled with detailed, if slightly gamified, working models of how groups like Atomwaffen understand themselves and their projects—and as the post-Czar team continues to add more factions to the roster, the mod will only cast a wider net. 
Affordance
To understand how The Fire Rises really works, we need a new term for what happens when a participatory simulation models a contemporary political project — populated by people who can still see themselves — with the project’s operational logic still largely intact and workable. Call this a capture affordance: the property that allows something like a grand strategy total conversion mod to be inhabited by the movements and individual actors it depicts, as well as by those who spectate and actually play it. Critically, this is not the object’s sole reason for being; the affordance is a side effect inherent to the form but not a foregone conclusion. 
I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the work of another writer who has spent a lot of time exploring this subject. In his 2007 book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, the academic and game developer Ian Bogost presents the concept of procedural rhetoric—”the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures.” For Bogost, every in-game rule has the potential to make a claim about how the real world works—and by crafting those rules in a particular way, game developers can convey a specific ideology to players. While Bogost’s work tends to focus on developers who deploy this intentionally, I’d argue that its broader effects are mostly accidental. 
What sets Bogost’s procedural rhetoric apart from capture affordance is a matter of distance and direction. The capture affordance that makes a player internalize the rules of a grand strategy game operates on the same logic Bogost describes, but it applies only when the system being modeled is a present-day movement. Critically, the persuasion can also go both ways. The depicted group can capture the object, and the object can capture whoever picks it up. How that plays out depends on who is on which end of the transaction.
While it’s impossible to verify that TFR‘s dev team doesn’t include any actual Atomwaffen members, it’s safe to assume that the mod’s version of AWD was built by piecing together elements of the group’s self-presentation, stated ideology, key texts, and documented operational structure. It also has to check the boxes of working as a playable video game faction—and while fun and realism are not mutually exclusive, smart developers know when to concede one for the sake of the other. TFR‘s Atomwaffen is not the real Atomwaffen; the model you consume while playing is more of a working abstraction (“TFR-AWD”), and that makes TFR a less-than-perfect tool for the real-life group. However, the mod’s fidelity to its source material still runs deep enough to do some strange things. 
When playing as TFR-AWD, the player is eventually required to align with one of three internal subfactions — pure Accelerationists, Christians, or Satanists — each with its own leadership, goals, and starting popularity. Every major TFR faction offers a similar midgame split for the sake of enhanced gameplay variety, but the options available to the would-be Atomwaffen player are especially curious. For example, if the player chooses the Satanists, they eventually stage a coup against James Mason and replace him as leader with Joshua Caleb Sutter.
Joshua Caleb Sutter’s TFR profile photo
The real-life Joshua Sutter is a book publisher with a background in white nationalist, satanist and “esoteric Hitlerist” groups like the Order of Nine Angles. He became one of Atomwaffen’s key leadership figures in the late 2010s and is credited with heavily influencing the aesthetics and practices of many other Nihilistic Violent Extremist movements. He’s also a noted FBI informant, and was compensated more than $140,000 by the federal government between 2003 and 2021—all while authoring and distributing the extremist literature that shaped the direction of groups like AWD. While TFR-Sutter is implied to have cut ties with his handlers, the real Sutter’s true current allegiances remain unclear. Either way, the TFR-Satanist faction only exists because of the real, federally funded one. TFR-AWD reproduces aspects of AWD that the original group may have downplayed or not fully understood about itself.
Actors
While TFR‘s depictions of any given group or real-life actor are not 1:1, the way these depictions have been acknowledged and embraced IRL offers some endorsement of their veracity. I’m not going to name names here, but the game’s unofficial fan wiki keeps a running list of all the times it’s happened. It seems self-evident that the figures depicted in the mod wouldn’t be posting about it or adopting its imagery if they weren’t aligned with the way it presents them—and the fact that it’s putting their names in front of millions of new eyeballs probably doesn’t hurt.
This is the most legible form of capture, and also the most superficial. The object recognizably exists, and the movements and actors depicted simply pick it up. The scope of this engagement varies—some actors play or stream the mod to followers, while others simply borrow in-game assets to reshare on social media. In both cases, the object becomes a tool for iconographic legitimation: something that the group can wear and embrace, requiring nothing of the object itself. Much of the existing writing about TFR seems to focus on this group, but they’re far from the most engaged use case.
Spectators
My introduction to TFR came from several YouTubers on my usual corner of the platform, posting clips and playthroughs with a familiar performed disbelief—the same way I’d originally encountered Atomwaffen through podcasts and documentaries several years ago. For spectators, that’s where the mod stays: something they remain ambiently aware of through the ecosystem of content that’s grown around it, absorbed alongside everything else flowing through their feeds. Still, for the would-be player who already has a .pdf of Siege on their phone, that TFR content ecosystem is a perfect companion piece. If you’ve already eaten all the relevant vegetables, grand strategy games can be an excellent dessert—something I learned firsthand watching Europa Universalis III Let’s Plays while studying for my Modern European History final back in high school. This is one reason the mod has caught the attention of national intelligence organizations like Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC), which has identified TFR as carrying “standard accelerationist narratives” and has warned that players are likely to be exposed to violent extremist imagery and, in some cases, real-world extremist sympathizers.
ENDSIEGE - The Fire Rises HOI4 - The Fallen Angel Path
One of the most-viewed TFR-adjacent videos on YouTube, a TFR-Atomwaffen playthrough video that follows the Sutter/Satanist Path. The level of time, energy and research that went into this video is genuinely impressive.
Still, as a spectator, this exposure can only go so far—and what separates TFR from a documentary or a podcast is the promise of an even deeper, more participatory level of engagement. Other forms of accelerationist-adjacent content end at the act of one-way consumption, but the spectator surface of TFR is only the beginning—a way of lowering the temperature of the mod itself and all the subject matter it entails. The bridge between spectator and player is just one click, and the potential for spectator capture is the potential to actually play the mod. But while some TFR-inspired YouTube videos have millions of views, the mod has only been rated 13,000 times on the Steam Workshop. Most people don’t — and won’t — press play. I did.
Players
According to Steam, I’ve put almost 1,400 hours into various grand strategy games since I first downloaded EU3 in 2012—and by Paradox Interactive fandom standards, these are fairly middling numbers. My playstyle varies by title — in Victoria, I inevitably find myself doing Socialism-In-At-Least-One-Country because it yields the best results; in Crusader Kings, I generally morph into a power-hungry, execution-and-castration-happy autocrat because the alternative is constant succession crises — but across every game, I tend to gravitate toward a centralized, developmentalist government with robust infrastructure spending. Because I started playing these games in my mid-teens, I’ve never spent much time thinking about this pattern in any serious depth.
If you’d asked me what I’ve learned from grand strategy games before I picked up TFR, my immediate answer would have been map literacy. Unsurprisingly, spending hundreds of hours staring at detailed reproductions of historical maps does wonders for the part of your brain that handles geography. But by rewarding me for repeatedly making one kind of decision over another for almost fourteen years, these games have also taught me the shape of a certain kind of statecraft. The same way I’ve learned to wrap leafy greens in paper towels before putting them in the fridge, I’ve learned that you need to invest in increasing your subjects’ literacy (and potential to take on industrial jobs) before transitioning into a full democracy in Victoria 3—at least, if you don’t want to end up with some kind of Agrarian Workers’ Party racking up North Korean election numbers every cycle. This, I think, is what grand strategy games do to the people who play them: the mechanics encode an argument about the fundamental moving parts of a given national, political, military, or economic project, and the player who wants to win has to internalize that argument well enough to act on it.
What makes this so easy to miss in most grand strategy games is the patina of temporal distance. As you build a Congolese rubber plantation in Victoria, order a regiment of musketeers to put down the unruly New World natives harassing your colonists in Europa Universalis, or order all Jews to be expelled from your realm in Crusader Kings, it’s easy to tell yourself that the game is simply helping you get inside the heads of people in an era mercifully far removed from your own. Even Stellaris, which begins nearly two hundred years after its 2016 launch date, does the same thing in reverse—the inherently fantastical sci-fi setup makes it hard to sit with your decision to forcibly sterilize or exterminate an entire planet of humanoid aliens in real, sober terms.
TFR‘s intervention is to strip the patina. The mod begins just a few short years before “right now,” many of the factions are real countries and political movements, and most in-game leaders are real, living people. With actors and spectators, capture is what happens when in-game avatars are used as profile pictures and game clips start trending on YouTube. With players, the same affordance finally starts to run the other way—the object reaches into the part of your mind that the genre may have already spent fourteen years training, and pulls it into a fight without any distance to soften the experience. My grand strategy political conditioning didn’t start here; TFR is just what it looks like when the project being minmaxed isn’t a historical artifact made of Wikipedia links, but a present-day movement made of Telegram channels and grisly news headlines.
Rehearsal
In my first TFR run, after taking Tallahassee, I failed to make any territorial gains beyond the state of Florida before the more established factions got their act together—and in a fair fight, my army of poorly equipped NEETs didn’t last five minutes against even one atrophied splinter of the United States Department of Defense. Watching several sober army divisions effortlessly steamroll my swastika-spray-painted tanks and hoodie-clad irregulars, I felt something like catharsis. Then, in the way I often do after losing at a grand strategy game, I found myself wondering where I might learn from my mistakes the next time around.
The experience of losing as Atomwaffen can be read as a vindication of the group’s critics, but it’s also the experience of losing at a video game—a clear, open invitation to try again and do better. This is how The Fire Rises works on people like me, capturing them through their own skills. The mod’s mechanics find easy purchase in the mental machinery I’ve built from playing a dozen other Paradox Interactive games—and if you’re anything like me, your brain is running the same optimization routines no matter which faction you play.
Granted, there’s some friction. Deploying dirty bombs feels bad, and the flavor text for events like “Solemn Penance” is hard to read with anything but horror. The consequences of your actions are not absent at a gameplay level, either: some focuses cost real population and infrastructure, and the faction has a much harder start than its rivals. Still, once you choose to commit yourself to a TFR-AWD playthrough, the work of actual resistance is all on you. You can’t play well without spending hours thinking about how their project would actually work. 
What that thinking amounts to, run after run, is rehearsal—even if the logic it encodes is heavily informed by the constraints and limitations of being a mod for the video game Hearts of Iron IV. TFR doesn’t teach you how to 3D-print a Glock switch or shoot up a power substation, but it has a lot to offer at the level of strategic imagination: to play TFR-AWD is to accept the (in-game) premise that the existing order can’t be salvaged, and that you will never beat the state in a fair fight—which routes every viable line of play through asymmetry, attrition, and the deliberate manufacture of disorder. A documentary or a podcast may describe the shape of a project like Atomwaffen from the outside, but the optimization loop of grand strategy gameplay lets you build it yourself through trial and error. 
The resulting knowledge transfer is smaller than the kind associated with outright recruitment, but it has an outsized ideological footprint. It’s also stickier, because it’s produced rather than received. This is where the word I started with stops feeling like decoration.
The Fire
In the original formulation of Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, hyperstition is the idea that imagining a thing in detail can be the first step toward calling it into being. Many of the movements TFR depicts have been talking about themselves in these terms for years—Iron March’s open documentation of itself; the rise of “Kek” and “meme magic” on 4chan’s /pol/ circa 2015–2017; and the Order of Nine Angles’ goal of drawing “acausal” powers into the “causal” realm all tell similar stories about fictions that create belief loops. In this corner of the online far-right, memes, stories, and propaganda are how the dream is made real. Still, a definitional hyperstition requires belief to close the loop. TFR doesn’t.
Even if you’re diametrically opposed to a group like Atomwaffen, you can have a model of TFR-Atomwaffen fully installed in your head and never deploy it. No one makes more jokes about Atomwaffen than the TFR community, many of whom firmly hold that the mod’s only “good endings” come from factions on the complete opposite end of the political spectrum. But the TFR community’s familiarity with Atomwaffen — the reason they’re so good at joking about it — has been built through rehearsal. 
Rather than outright belief, what TFR gives the player is more like workable strategic memory—the same kinds of mental shortcuts that make me wrap my leafy greens. For a grand strategy game, this is nothing new. But while EU3 and Crusader Kings impart similar models, it’s hard to find many outlets for a strategic memory of Ming Dynasty China or the kingdom of East Francia outside of grad school. What makes TFR unique is the way it gives the genre’s oldest trick some worrisomely viable real-world on-ramps.
While TFR isn’t a tool for recruitment, it’s a powerful system for installing infrastructure—and even if that infrastructure remains dormant, it’s still there. The mod’s capture affordance operates independently of whether you buy what the faction is selling—you just have to want to play well. This makes the resulting strategic memory much harder to see—and more disturbing. The effects of TFR exposure don’t show up in any of the places we usually look for radicalization, because the mod isn’t trying to change minds.
I am not a neo-Nazi, and The Fire Rises did not turn me into one. It hasn’t turned anyone else into one either, as far as I can tell. Still, if the mod has done to other players some fraction of what it did to me, it has widened the pool of people for whom a project like Atomwaffen’s has a recognizable shape—and lowered the activation energy for anyone who later meets the belief side through other channels. When weighed against a national military, 13,000 Steam ratings is a small number—but for a movement once understood to be around 80 people, it’s not.
When I was defeated on my first TFR playthrough, I told myself I’d try again with the APLA or UoA. Dozens of other factions offer more morally legible playthroughs, and I eventually tried my hand at several of them. But before I did, I started another Atomwaffen run.
“The fire rises,” in the mod’s title, is a quote from The Dark Knight Rises—Bane’s response when one of his men, whom Bane has just consigned to die for their cause in a staged plane crash, asks if they’ve “started the fire.” The phrase has been adopted in earnest by some of the movements TFR represents, which makes me think the developers chose it ironically. The problem, like everything else in the mod, is that this irony doesn’t survive contact with the player. I never stopped my troops from entering Tallahassee. Once you’re in the focus tree, optimizing toward whatever ending you’ve selected, the title is just a description of what’s happening on the screen. The fire is rising, and you’re the one feeding it. The mod won’t stop you, and neither, it turns out, will I.

## My Own Personal Warp God (May 2026, Myles Mode)
URL: https://mylesbadger.com/writing/my-own-personal-warp-god/
Full essay: https://mylesbadger.substack.com/p/my-own-personal-warp-god
Subtitle: Warhammer, egregores, and longing-as-labor

Content warning
mass violence, terrorism, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm.
Warhammer 40,000 invaded my mind on an overcast summer day in 2005. My mom was out running errands in search of more old, creaky antique furniture for our equally antique house, and I’d been dragged along to keep me from spending another afternoon fused to the family desktop. By then, I was already deep into titles like Star Wars Battlefront, which left me climbing the walls for anything blaster-shaped when offline. It was here, walking down the literal Main Street of Amesbury, Massachusetts, that I first noticed the sign for my local hobby store: the Toy Soldier.
​At age ten, the first word on that sign was enough to pull me closer. Was I looking at a “Legos and GI Joes” toy store or a “handmade wooden punishments for crunchy Unitarian kids” toy store? What I found was a multilevel display case filled with plastic figurines, each painted with all the autistic intensity of 1-inch illuminated manuscripts. As a longtime lover of museum dioramas and the owner of many action figures, I was drawn in on two fronts; I’d never seen a diorama piece with such vivid colors or an action figure with such intricate detail. Then my eyes landed on a figure I now know as Lord Inquisitor Fyodor Karamazov on his Throne of Judgment.
The titular throne is a bipedal walker, part AT-ST and part church lectern, crewed by the Lord Inquisitor and two attendants covered in crudely grafted augmentations. These are servitors, former convicts surgically altered into mindless cyborg slaves, and the closest thing to robots in a world where AI has been banned for well over ten thousand years. One wields a triple-barrelled energy weapon, and the other records Karamazov’s real-time battlefield judgments on a flowing scroll. The Lord Inquisitor sits between them, resting one hand on an ornate greatsword. Because the mech puts him much too far off the ground to actually use this weapon, it’s mostly there because it’s cool.
Like, there's no way he's hitting anything from up there
​At a time when my idea of the capital-F Future still came from the frictionless chrome spaceships of the Star Wars prequels and immediately-post-Y2K consumer electronics like my mom’s clear plastic iMac, this ran counter to everything I thought I knew. Too high-tech for fantasy and too medieval for sci-fi, it seemed to point toward the existence of a secret, third thing. As I noticed the vehicles on the level below Karamazov’s mech, including a main battle tank with a pipe organ that doubled as a missile launcher, my initial curiosity began boiling over into something stronger.
​I want to be precise about what that feeling was, because everything else after this depends on it. It wasn’t fandom; I wouldn’t see or hear the phrase “Warhammer 40,000” for another few minutes. It also wasn’t simple covetousness, even if I’ve never coveted any single set of items more than all those figurines. I was ten years old, bored, and ready to be swept up in something bigger than my day-to-day life—and in that moment, face up against the glass, I felt like I’d brushed against a single tendril of something vast, shocking, and incomprehensible. With just one glimpse, I was longing to see more. Fortunately, by this point, I’d put in enough antique store time to talk my mom into a pit stop.
​Back then, the front half of the Toy Soldier was split into two U-shaped alcoves overflowing with eye-catching boxes, rulebooks and codexes. Due to the crimson trim on every bit of 2000s Warhammer Fantasy packaging—the medieval swords-and-sorcery branch of the Warhammer family, and technically the oldest child—one side was wall-to-wall red. The other, reserved for Warhammer 40,000, was a kind of dark-future military-ecclesiastical gray-green. This was helpfully decoded by the store’s sole cashier, a central casting neckbeard who was only too happy to proselytize for the benefit of a fresh, visibly receptive recruit. Whatever that guy got paid, it wasn’t enough.
​I spent a full hour grilling the cashier about every item in the store, and each of his answers crackled with juicy in-universe vocab that only inspired more questions. Psykers. Necrons. Eldar. Every word entered my 10-year-old mind like a frost-resistant GMO seed of meaning, and every glimpse around the room at all the box art just added more fertilizer. Warhammer 40,000 is a machine for putting people into this exact headspace. From my mom’s perspective, our Q&A probably scanned like the earliest stages of cult induction.
From top to bottom, left to right: Space Marines and Necrons by Karl Kopinski, Orks and Tyranids by Alex Boyd, Eldar and Dark Eldar by Paul Dainton
Two decades later, no Gulf States architect has dreamed up a megastructure tall enough to fit that cashier’s version of an elevator pitch. Like any true Warhammer devotee, he knew that to explain Psykers, you have to explain the Warp. To explain the Necrons, you have to explain the Old Ones and the War in Heaven. To explain the Eldar, you also have to explain the Dark Eldar, and the birth of the dark god Slaanesh—this last part somewhat euphemistically, given the age of his audience. I would become a fan of at least a dozen other fictional universes over the next few years, each with comparably elaborate art and dense lore, but nothing has ever captured my imagination quite like 40k. The more I saw and heard, the more I realized I still wasn’t seeing.
How Warhammer spreads
Thirty minutes into my induction, my mom acknowledged the elephant in the room: if I were to get into this game, what would I need to buy? Banking on my ability to upsell her better than he could, the cashier directed his answer toward me—and while I don’t remember the exact price tag that finally dragged his sales pitch back to Earth, it was an emphatic “too much” in 10-year-old allowance money. For everything the cashier gave me that day, he failed to move any product.
I spent the next few months in a state of even more intense longing: poring over 40k fan wikis, saving galleries of fan art, making wish lists of armies I’d buy if I had the money, and reliably werewolfing into the most annoying guy alive whenever any other sci-fi or fantasy title came up at school—turning any mention of Halo or Star Wars into a lecture on why 40k did genetically-engineered super soldiers and space magic better. All my memories of that time are strangely fond, but it didn’t do Warhammer’s parent company, Games Workshop, any favors. 
This extended gestation period turned my eventual introduction to the real game into a series of letdowns. Even when I saved up enough to buy a box of Necrons, I could only afford a single 10-figure squadron. Painting them was another reality check—discovering, in real time, that I lacked the hand-eye coordination to do anything like the highlight reel I’d seen at the store. But the thing that really took the air out of the whole thing was when I brought them back to actually play.
The first box of Warhammer figurines I ever bought (Source: Reddit)
To their credit, the Toy Soldier’s regulars were just as welcoming as that initial cashier. Returning to the store, finger-painted figurines in hand, I was quickly paired up with a guy who coached me through my first match—basically telling me every move to make. His Orks looked like museum pieces next to my Necron Warriors, and to maintain some pretense of treating me like a peer, he didn’t even let me win. But even if I’d awakened some innate, Napoleonic tactical genius and beaten him right off the bat, I don’t think it would have made me want to go back for more. Compared to the vibrant cosmology knitting itself together in my head, the clerical pen and paper realities of the tabletop game felt like checkers with extra steps—and if the universe I’d glimpsed in all the box art in the front of the store was supposed to find any outlet in the harshly-lit shared gaming room out back, I had no luck seeing how. This is still the only battle my Necron Warriors have ever fought.
Maybe I’d have seen things differently if my first experience with Warhammer’s figurines had been on a tabletop instead of under glass, or if I’d had a more immediate social connection to the game and my opponents. No matter how many times I tried to bring it up, 40k never resonated with any of my real-world middle school friends—and even if they’d taken to it as I’d hoped, I imagine the cost of entry would have hit them the same way it hit me. The Toy Soldier was also a solid thirty-minute drive from my childhood home. But even for more conventionally active fans, the real magic of 40k rarely comes down to gameplay.
Left: Chaos Land Raider by David Gallagher. Right: Chaos Land Raider by Robinator. This isn’t an “expectation vs. reality” thing, just so we’re clear; I genuinely love both of these for different reasons.
Cool paint jobs aside, Warhammer 40,000, the tabletop wargame, is the least interesting thing about Warhammer 40,000, the fictional universe. Most fans seem to agree: spend five minutes on 4chan’s /tg/ or the 40k subreddit, and you’ll find that any posts about tactics and rulebook updates are overshadowed by fan art and lore discussion. The Warhammer that inspires people to design custom heraldry for their armies and spend hours arguing with digital strangers is all about imagination.
For all the fictional universes I’ve ever obsessed over, I’ve always felt that 40k is uniquely suited to fuel the teenage imagination because of the way it rejects the binary between sci-fi and fantasy. Originally pitched as a spacefaring spinoff of Warhammer Fantasy, it’s one of the few settings that draws from The Lord Of The Rings, Dune, Star Trek, and Alien in equal measure. There are elves, orks, aliens, cyborgs, knights, monks, energy weapons, faster-than-light travel, demons and inquisitors, often all in the same story. In some solar systems, it’s possible to have a feudal world stuck in the Middle Ages orbiting right next to a sprawling, planet-wide hive city. While I didn’t realize it at the time, this was exemplified by Karamazov’s sword: totally superfluous, but undeniably cool. Such is the operating logic of Warhammer: “yes, and.”
The last stand of the 9th Vostroyan Firstborn, “The Old Irascibles”, led by Lord Marshal Graf Toschenko, in defense of the Factory City of Polia on Nimbosa, against the T’au Hunter Cadres of Commander Brightsword. Artist: Paul Dainton
Star Wars and 40k are from the same generation of “science fantasy”; they both operate at similar scales with rabid fanbases and tie-in content to match. But if 40k lore is an unlocked toolbox, Star Wars lore often feels more like a set of restrictive zoning laws. Most Star Wars stories tend to focus on the same handful of characters and locations—and it makes a supposedly immense galaxy feel strangely small. Conversely, in 40k, it’s rare to see the same character twice across any two stories. The universe is just too big to be boiled down to one desert planet or a single family of space wizards.
The difference comes down to how they started. While Star Wars was forced to grow out of one big story, Warhammer was explicitly conceived as a system for creating more stories. The chain of events that reduced 40k’s Imperium of Man into its current, stagnant state is a background blurb for the actual game. The Emperor of Mankind has been stuck in a golden life-support chair for ten thousand years, and people have been trying and largely failing to interpret his will ever since. The main story is frozen, the main character is conspicuously absent, and that leaves you free to invent your own. In other words, if Star Wars is prescriptive, Warhammer is generative; one tells you exactly what to care about, and the other lets you figure it out for yourself. For 10-year-old-me, this was hypnotizing stuff—and while I’ve forgotten big chunks of Return of the Jedi even after a dozen viewings, I can still remember every piece of box art from that first day.
Imperial Guard, Black Templars and T’au Fire Warriors by Karl Kopinski
None of these images answered any of my questions, especially since their fantastical setups rarely matched the miniatures they were designed to sell. Not being able to take any of them home with me didn’t help, nor did my parents’ barring me from installing Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War on the family desktop for another ten months. Still, even now, in the age of titles like Rogue Trader, I’ve never found a 40k game that has sincerely kept my attention for more than four or five weeks.
What I’m describing here isn’t unique to Warhammer. Scarcity, accidental or intentional, is one of the most reliable fuels for collective imagination—and the systems that spread the fastest are the ones that encourage the most active individual participation. This is visible everywhere from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos—much of which was only fleshed out by writers in his circle after his death in 1937—to the SCP Foundation and the burgeoning cottage industry of Dark Souls lore YouTube channels, places where a community assumes the responsibility of generating or interpreting a world for themselves, often because no single, definitive version exists.
It’s not absent from more serious real-world causes, either. Modern conspiracy theories like QAnon thrive because they’re incomplete. Every cryptic Q-drop provides the “breadcrumbs,” but believers don’t just follow the trail Hansel-and-Gretel-style to one specific conclusion. The “baking”—combining those crumbs together into a narrative that makes sense—is up to you. This leads people to develop a stake in the project beyond merely regurgitating other people’s ideas—the “own” in “do your own research” has more than one meaning. Warhammer’s strange achievement is harnessing this phenomenon while presenting countless examples of it within its own universe.
On egregores​
Warhammer doesn’t officially have magic, but it does have the Warp: an uncontrollable parallel dimension of pure psychic energy. Warp-sensitive individuals called psykers use it as a conduit for psychic powers (read: magic), and many spacefaring civilizations send their starships through it as a shortcut to faster-than-light travel (read: magic wormholes). The trade-off is that the Warp is also home to countless malevolent nonmaterial entities. Untrained psykers risk tearing a demon-spawning hole in reality every time they tap into it, and any ship that tries taking a shortcut through it has a not-insignificant chance of never coming back out. However, just as the denizens of Warhammer’s universe depend on the Warp, every entity in the Warp depends on them.
An Imperial voidship navigating Warpspace, by Zachary Graves
The Warp’s apex predators are the four gods of chaos: sentient psychic storms fueled by the negative emotions of trillions of living souls. Khorne, god of blood, war and wrath, feeds on hate and anger. Tzeentch, god of change, sorcery, and knowledge, feeds on ambition and the desire for advancement. Nurgle, god of disease, decay and rebirth, feeds on despair and the fear of death. Slaanesh, god of pleasure, pain and excess, feeds on lust, pride and self-indulgence. Much of Warhammer’s backstory revolves around the Imperium of Man’s efforts to fight back against these mega-thoughtforms, and Inquisitors like Fyodor Karamazov are charged with rooting out and purging any humans who succumb to their influence. The chaos gods are more than simple one-way tides of destruction or spiritual Great Pacific Garbage Patches, though. Each one has its own unique designs on the material world, far beyond the sum of their followers’ thoughts and intentions. In Western esotericism, entities like these are known as egregores.
Every egregore works like this: when enough people invest enough effort in a shared symbolic system, that system will start to take on a life of its own and develop an internal logic that no single contributor can fully control. It will also begin to exert a pull beyond the efforts of those contributors, who may begin to find themselves defending and advocating for the system without consciously choosing to do so. The strongest systems outlive even their most influential individual adherents. This framework maps onto Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaanesh as well as it does onto Warhammer itself.
The marks of Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaanesh
Because they rely on faith, attention, and emotion, successful real-world egregores tend to have systems for managing and controlling the energy of their believers—like shared rituals, priesthoods, and sacred texts. The Jesus of organized Christianity is an egregore, and so is capitalism. However, the gravity these kinds of egregores eventually acquire also primes their targets to approach them with caution. When you attend a Latin mass or sit in on an Econ 101 lecture, it generally comes with some level of awareness that you’re engaging with something serious. Humanity has a long history of falling for grand narratives, but there’s an equally extensive track record of people reflexively doubting them.
While Warhammer has all the hallmarks of a successful egregore, it eludes most of the skepticism and cultural antibodies that similarly systematized egregores eventually encounter. Jesus has satanists and atheists, and capitalism has anticapitalists, but there’s no “anti-Warhammer”—possibly because it doesn’t have the same inescapable hegemony as Christianity or the Stock Market, and its adherents don’t have any designs on crowding out all competing systems. And despite the thousands of hours I’ve put into Warhammer over the last 20 years, I’ve rarely thought about my commitment to it in these terms.
Many less esoteric frameworks exist to discuss concepts like these, and they’re worth mentioning here; Warhammer is also a subculture, a scene, and a fandom. It also checks many boxes of participatory ontology—the idea that a thing is partially constituted by how people engage with it, rather than existing independently and merely being represented or interpreted. For most of recent modern history, this kind of vocabulary has been well-suited to these kinds of conversations because most subcultures, scenes and fandoms were nothing but visible infrastructure like mailing lists, forums and in-person gatherings. The trouble with these models is that they don’t have any place for people whose engagement is entirely interior: the ones who spend hours of their inner lives inside something like Warhammer, but never contribute to its infrastructure of belonging in any visible way. The mechanisms by which so many people have ended up half-aware of Warhammer—never engaging, but still influenced by it—are exactly where the fandom vocabulary of zines and cons starts to break down.
Warhammer was my first encounter with systems that exemplify this mechanic; the 40k universe is filled with egregores that constantly remind its followers what they’re dealing with. Beyond the chaos gods, the most on-the-nose example is probably the Orks: a species of dim-witted, violent, latently psychic aliens whose physically impractical technology only works because enough of them think it does. They don’t channel this belief through rituals or sacred texts; just a collective, bone-deep certainty that, for example, “red ones go faster.” And in the game, they actually do: many Ork rulebooks confirm that painting any Ork vehicle red will add an extra inch of tabletop movement. ​Every instance of Warhammer’s supernatural comes back to this mechanic of belief-as-power—and that mechanic offers a clear job description for believers like me.
​I didn’t encounter the word “egregore” in print until long after Warhammer had already taken up residency in my mind. This started back in my high school psychology class, where I first heard the phrase “collective unconscious.” I’m not a Carl Jung guy, and the working definition I walked out with that day owes more to my own shorthand than anything Jung actually wrote—but it was enough to make me look up from my notebook of Space Marine doodles: a secret reservoir of nonmaterial entities that exert a serious impact on material reality. Basically, the Warp. Or at the very least, something that seemed to operate on the same underlying logic. In the years since then, many other real-life influences and fixations have led me to engage with the field of Western esotericism, and I’d be lying if I said that was all thanks to Warhammer. But the more I’ve gotten into it, the more I find myself thinking about Warhammer as a framework for understanding how these kinds of systems operate.
He’s just like me fr
Most people see the relationship between egregore and believer as a psychic transaction: a person invests energy in a shared idea, the idea grows, and that growth draws in more people and more energy. They’re not wrong, but what they’re describing is just the surface. If you’re praying in church, playing Warhammer at your local shop, or debating online, that model has a place for you—but if you’re peering through the church window, listening to the hymns and wondering what it might be like inside, it doesn’t. Believers like those make a very different kind of transaction, one that doesn’t require agreement or even awareness.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to analyze my love of Warhammer, and up until fairly recently, I’ve mostly thought of myself as a tourist—never building anything visible, or pulling my weight as a fan. I spent years turning 40k over in my head—imagining battles I knew I’d never fight, filling sketchbook pages with bad drawings of hive cities and writing elaborate backstories for characters, factions and planets that didn’t exist—and none of it ever fed back into the community in any material way. I’ve only recently started to realize that was never the point. Under the framework of an egregore, Warhammer didn’t need me to participate in any shared rituals because I was already keeping it very well fed in my own personal practice.
All of this comes back to my first day at the Toy Soldier—the moment when I started laying out the initial critical blocks of my Warhammer cosmology, one I’d go on to build out in endless wiki binges, wishlists and sketchbooks in the years to come. A more conventional reading would point to all of this as evidence of fandom. But in egregore terms, it’s evidence of labor I was performing on behalf of Warhammer without even knowing it. If I’d had the money, hand-eye coordination and strategic thinking to buy a full Necron Battleforce box that first day, paint every figure with monastic precision, and win my first match the next time I came back, I probably would have ended up doing less work for the egregore than I did. To any system that thrives on the investment of imaginative energy, that kind of experience might as well be a pressure release valve.
​It’s tempting to conflate all of this with other forms of mental energy expenditure like daydreaming, nostalgia, or simple anticipation—but these are all interior states whose objects originate in the person experiencing them. Longing of the kind I’m describing requires a system to supply the object, and that changes everything about how the energy moves. To sustain itself, the system that inspires the expenditure requires you to keep building it in your own head—and that process, like 40k itself, is generative. Every bit of headcanon I stitched together strengthened my own private Warhammer, and if I’d had a more fully resolved relationship with the system, I’d have had far less incentive to turn inward. The believer experiences this engagement as private interior life, but the system experiences it as the mechanism by which a believer is built. For egregores, longing is labor.
Most people who carry a political affiliation, faith, or national identity aren’t active in any official capacity. Behind all the organizers, theorists and posters that advocate for any egregore, there are uncountable believers who simply hold it in their minds, filling in the blanks with their own hopes and fears. In turn, the egregore holds them—but that embrace is not always warm. The longing I felt at ten was not special to me or to 40k, and far darker things are coming down out of the Warp to meet it.
Chaos Space Marines loyal to Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaanesh, by Adrian Smith
The new dark gods
​Much has recently been written about so-called Nihilistic Violent Extremists or NVEs: decentralized, ideologically ambiguous networks that espouse the pursuit of violence and abuse for the sake of violence and abuse. These groups lack the coherence of groups like ISIS, or even looser movements like QAnon—some take their cues from neo-Nazis, the True Crime Community, and certain reactionary strains of Western esotericism, while others openly identify as nihilists, but they all share the same end goal: the collapse of civilization and the destruction of coherence itself. They are also a clear example of how much damage a system built around egregoric architecture can do in the internet age. Much can be missed by approaching them solely in terms of conventional extremism or “dark fandom.”
A piece of promotional content attributed to the NVE network 764
However, most of the NVEs that have dominated headlines over the last few years are not full egregores. Grooming and sextortion networks like 764 are predatory in the most literal sense, with mechanics closer to organized abuse than an organic belief system, and they matter here because they show what’s required when a system can’t recruit on its own. They are mostly grown through the actions of “handlers,” older members who actively coerce and escalate others, and there’s a worrisomely well-established set of rituals for doing what they do.
In many cases, handlers systematically target minors who are already struggling with depression, eating disorders, and self-harm. Institute for Strategic Dialogue analysts have documented 764 members connecting with victims through online groups predominantly made up of teenagers looking for meaning, often in moments of profound vulnerability—and for every NVE story that ends in death or murder, there are many more that end in unseen but exacerbated adolescent mental health crises and self-harm. There’s a reason so many investigators consistently describe the instances of real-world violence attributed to these systems as “the tip of the iceberg.”
In an August 2025 article about a boy NPR identifies as Elliott, the details are painfully ordinary. At fourteen, just as he was entering high school, his longtime friend group was breaking apart, and his parents were separating. With a new smartphone and school-issued laptop, he went looking for community—specifically, in online spaces focused on black metal music. This is where a group of predators associated with a 764-style network found him. Then, he started sliding. Within months, he was parroting accelerationist ideology and going on anti-LGBTQ+ tirades that were completely out of character for a kid whose own friend group and family included trans and nonbinary people, alternating between talking about wanting to start “an order” and claiming there was no meaning to anything. His mother described the whole period as watching her son get “taken hostage and brainwashed.” Fortunately, after his sister tipped his mom off that he’d ordered a large hunting knife online, she was able to stage an intervention and get Elliott back.
While stories like these represent a succession of hundreds of social and material failures, they start with the same universal adolescent experience that led me to Warhammer: the need for significance. What found Elliott wasn’t the same thing that found me—it was inherently social, immediate, and predatory in ways that a store window full of plastic figurines could never be—but the longing was still longing.
​Still, for all the well-documented horror of 764, the most worrisome question is not what the system does, but what a similar system could do if it weren’t constrained by this need for one-to-one human connection. In 764-style networks, the system's growth depends on individual handlers manipulating individual kids. There are some more parallels here to my first day at the Toy Soldier, and the charismatic intervention of the store’s cashier—but the thing that kept me coming back after that day was all the box art. If a pure egregore is a system that can recruit and shape minds through aesthetic invitation alone, 764 doesn’t fit the bill. Saints Culture does.
A Renaissance-style image depicting the canonization of Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant by Dylann Roof and Adolf Hitler. (Source: ISD)
Saints Culture emerged in the late 2010s within far-right accelerationist communities on Telegram. It’s a subculture where mass killers—mostly white supremacist terrorists—are venerated as saints. Manifestos are treated as sacred texts, birthdays and attack dates are commemorated on Saints Calendars, and the likenesses of specific killers are rendered in the style of Christian iconography. The subculture also borrows heavily from the world of gaming: leaderboards rank killers by body count, and hype videos set footage of attacks to uptempo electronic music. The entire system is engineered so that someone can instantly understand what it values, rewards, and what it wants them to become, without anyone ever having to explain it. Every kid absorbing its iconography online right now is doing the same work I was doing for Warhammer after my first day at the Toy Soldier.
January 2024 Saints Calendar with symbols denoting genre of commemoration and accompanying list of ‘Saints’ shared by a Telegram Channel in the ‘Terrorgram’ network (Source: ISD)
This is what makes Saints Culture so uniquely caustic, even to those who are never actually spurred to real-world violence. The process of entering the system is thoroughly individual and meaning is made without mediation, which means that there are no mentors to be held accountable for whatever it does to you. Once you’re in, the system starts to show you what other private believers have done. Emulation happens in the total absence of any coherent community, through a kind of parallel outbidding between individuals who never meet or interact. Before Robin Westman murdered two children and injured eighteen others at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, she scrawled the names of about fifteen mass shooters and terrorists on her weapons and magazines, alongside a particularly telling reference to ongoing Terrorgram debates about a higher body count threshold for Sainthood: “more than ten.” It’s hard not to read details like these the same way I read the rules about Orks painting their vehicles red.
1: Video frame from the attack livestream posted by 2019 Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant. 2: Two long guns allegedly found in the car of 2022 Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron. 3: Screenshots from a YouTube video believed to have been posted by Robin Westman prior to the Annunciation shooting.
Warhammer and Saints Culture are both generative systems with lore, a consistent aesthetic, community practices and a participatory architecture that rewards contribution and elaboration. Both are also capable of recruiting through aesthetic invitation alone—presenting would-be believers with a multitude of tantalizing gaps. How much that invitation gives you to work with is another story: Warhammer’s gaps can be filled with anything that doesn’t break its “yes, and” logic, but Saints Culture’s gaps can only be filled with death. While would-be Warhammer content creators are free to crib from just about anything sci-fi or fantasy adjacent, it’s hard to build Saints Culture content around broader abstractions like a specific ideal of masculinity or a shared feeling of alienation. The only people who get a place on the Saints Calendar are mass murderers and terrorists.
This distinction finds a mirror in the places where Warhammer and Saints Culture take inspiration. Both borrow heavily from the aesthetics of a far older and more successful system, and they’re not alone in doing so. Christianity has inspired centuries of art, music, philosophy, and Church-sanctioned torture and murder. But in the vast constellation of the Christian tradition, the glorification of violence is just one star. Warhammer takes that star and fixes it in a constellation of its own, alongside other points of reference like The Lord of the Rings and Dune. But in Saints Culture, it’s the sun that everything revolves around. Heterogeneous generative systems that give imaginative labor multiple places to go aren’t inherently dangerous. Homogeneous generative systems that only metabolize one thing—and only point one way—are.
In systems like Warhammer, you’re free to fill in the gaps with whatever you arrive with. The lore rewards continued investment, giving you new stories and new ways of seeing the world in exchange for the imaginative energy you put in. But in systems like Saints Culture, imaginative labor can only be resolved by glorifying and pursuing high-resolution real-world violence. A kid approaching Saints Culture for the first time encounters something structurally identical to what I felt in front of that display case: an aesthetic system so vibrant and internally coherent that it speaks entirely for itself. The trouble is, the gaps don’t lead anywhere. You don’t build a mythology so much as hollow yourself out in service of one.
Egregores draw considerable power from a silent majority of private believers. The question is which system finds you first—and then, what it builds in you, or takes out of you.
A comment on a song from the soundtrack to Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus.
What Warhammer gave me
If there’s one thing I learned while writing this piece, it’s that I have the same problem with egregores that I’ve always had with Warhammer. When writing about something so loaded, is it better to skew more detached academic or wide-eyed true believer? I tried versions where I went all-in on phrases like ‘nonmaterial psychic thoughtform,’ and others where I restrained myself to the world of “systems,” but I left both registers in here because my inability to choose between them is the exact phenomenon I’m describing. My impulse to reach for all of this esoteric vocabulary in the first place wasn’t purely analytical. On my first day at the Toy Soldier, I wanted the world to have a secret third thing. Now, I keep finding myself drawn toward vocabulary that points toward the existence of one—and it’s hard for me to dismiss that slippage as a failure of writerly discipline. It’s the same longing that got me here in the first place, still humming along.
I’m pleased to report that the Toy Soldier still exists, though I’ve only contributed about $300 to their bills over the last two decades—mostly in the form of magazines and paperback novels. I’m not alone there, either; visit in 2026, and you’ll find that half of the store has been given over to actual kids’ toys for the wealthy young families that have exploded out of the Boston-Cambridge-Somerville Tech and Finance Containment Zone into surrounding suburbs in the years since COVID. The last time I stopped by in the fall of 2024, I found the space I’d always known as the Warhammer Fantasy section replaced by a huge rack of frisbees, and felt overwhelmed with the sudden urge to cry.
​Part of me would give anything for a photograph of the store’s Warhammer 40k section as I first encountered it, but the rest of me knows better. Memory has a way of filling in its own gaps, and it’s hard to build a religion around a single afternoon without taking some notes. But if I could see that store again, it would hit the egregore right in its glowing red weak point. My idea of that first day at the store is inextricably tied to my idea of Warhammer—and now, to my idea of what it may have kept me from. Which is exactly what a nonmaterial psychic thoughtform that’s been shaping my perception of itself for twenty years would want me to think.
Black Templars and an Imperial Fleet by John Blanche

## Geoengineering with Shovels (Jul 2025, Do Not Research)
URL: https://mylesbadger.com/writing/geoengineering-with-shovels/
Full essay: https://donotresearch.substack.com/p/geoengineering-with-shovels
Subtitle: Mosquitoes, megaprojects, and the New Deal’s least-remembered public health initiative

Published by Do Not Research, this essay unearths one of the New Deal’s least-remembered megaprojects: a nationwide network of drainage ditches dug as part of an all-out war on mosquitoes. From its origins as a tool for imperial power projection to its transformation into an ultimately-misguided force for good, this century-old form of pest control reframes what “geoengineering” meant before the word existed — and what public health infrastructure once looked like.