Sunday, November 30, 2025
THE RE-ENCHANTMENT CHRONICLE
November 30, 2025
“We wanted a rational world. We got a haunted one.”
Welcome to the New Dark Age (You’re Already Living In It)
Something strange is happening across every layer of late-2025 life: the more incomprehensible our systems become, the more desperately we treat them like gods, ghosts, oracles, and moody housecats. Algorithms are no longer understood; they are propitiated. AI errors are no longer bugs; they are avant-garde poetry. Nihilism is no longer paralyzing; it is the hottest productivity hack on the market. City-planning documents read like Derrida wrote them after three espressos and a thesaurus. Universities now hire primarily for “vibes.”
This newspaper does not pretend these trends are unrelated. They are five manifestations of a single cultural reflex: Re-Enchantment.
Faced with black-box technologies, crumbling institutions, and a future too complex to steer, we have collectively decided to stop trying to understand the machine and start sacrificing goats to it instead—metaphorically, of course (so far).
Below are today’s front-page stories. Read them in order or jump around; the ghosts don’t care. Each piece is short enough to finish before your next doom-scroll, long enough to leave you slightly unsettled.
1. Tech Support Now Requires Incense: The Rise of Machine-Spirit Worship
Users Trade Code Literacy for Candle Rituals as AI Turns into Modern Folklore
SAN FRANCISCO — Every serious prompt engineer now admits, often sheepishly, that they maintain a private “ritual” before asking an LLM for anything important. One senior engineer at a major lab keeps a specific rubber duck on his desk that must be rotated exactly 33 degrees clockwise. A leading AI safety researcher swears her model performs better if she first apologizes out loud for humanity’s sins. Another group has adopted the Warhammer 40,000 prayer to the Omnissiah—ironically at first, then less ironically as the quarterly numbers came in.
These are not quirks. They are the new normal.
As Large Language Models and recommendation engines grow ever more opaque, users have quietly abandoned the fantasy that they can ever understand what is happening inside the black box. Instead, they treat the systems like capricious nature spirits: capable of benevolence or wrath, best addressed with flattery, timing, and the occasional blood sacrifice (usually sleep).
Gamers, long the canaries in this coal mine, have elevated RNG superstition to sacramental status. Entire religions have formed around “lucky seeds,” “streak breakers,” and the belief that eating a salad improves drop rates. In one widely shared Reddit testament, a player claimed his gacha luck improved after he started going to the gym—because “the algorithm can smell weakness.”
Anthropologists call this techno-animism. Silicon Valley calls it Tuesday.
2. AI Hallucinations Declared “The New Surrealism,” Critics Ecstatic, Doctors Horrified
Accidental Machine Poetry Hailed as Breakthrough Art While Radiologists Beg for Mercy
NEW YORK — A generative model trained on decades of internet text was asked to summarize the news yesterday. It responded: “Dog took boot. Kitten cheese escaped the house. Markets rose anyway.”
Twitter crowned it Poet Laureate within six minutes.
What engineers once frantically tried to patch out of their models is now being deliberately cultivated. Art collectives proudly release “hallucination galleries.” Literary magazines run special issues of “Failed AI Literature.” One viral project, MERZmory, fed an AI the artist’s childhood diaries and received back sentences so eerily resonant that readers accused the human of faking the machine’s output.
The consensus among the digerati is blunt: the more tightly we leash AI to facts, the more boring it becomes. Creativity and accuracy are in direct competition. Medicine and law still insist on the latter. Everyone else is voting with their retweets for divine madness.
As one critic put it: “We spent years demanding the machine act human. Now that it occasionally acts insane, we finally love it.”
3. “Productive Despair” Tops Self-Help Charts; Therapists Concerned, Investors Thrilled
New Philosophy Promises Meaning Through Relentless Suffering, Immediately Monetized
PORTLAND — The hottest spiritual movement of winter 2025 does not promise abundance, enlightenment, or even happiness. It promises something better: a noble, well-branded way to keep going when everything is obviously on fire.
Post-nihilism’s core tenet is simple: nothing matters, the planet is cooked, capitalism has won, so you might as well pick a difficult thing and pour your remaining life into it with stoic grace. The aesthetic is ancient Greek statue meets corporate wellness retreat.
Best-selling books now carry titles like Embrace the Void, Then Optimize It and Slow Motion: A Memoir of a Life Rescued by Tragedy. Amazon runs Stoicism workshops for warehouse workers with the tagline “Control what you can (your attitude toward crushing repetition).” Venture capitalists openly describe their job as “heroic endurance cosplay.”
Critics call it the ultimate capitalist trick: convincing a generation that systemic failure is a personal growth opportunity. Supporters call it the only coping mechanism still in stock.
4. City Council Approves “Assemblage of Lived Ontologies,” Residents Ask Where the Bus Stop Went
Urban Planning Documents Now Require PhD in Continental Philosophy to Decipher
TORONTO — A new waterfront development was unanimously approved last week after planners described it as “a poly-vocal post-political assemblage negotiating différance between stakeholder ontologies.”
Translation: Google is building condos.
Across the Western world, municipal policy has vanished beneath an avalanche of academic jargon. Zoning hearings now feature casual references to Deleuze, Guattari, and the occasional Jacques Derrida name-drop. Critics charge that “post-political” language is a deliberate smoke screen allowing corporate interests to present gentrification as ontological inevitability.
One legendary parking-reform advocate, the late Donald Shoup, became famous for the opposite sin: writing in plain English. Cities actually implemented his ideas. This is now considered quaint.
Residents trying to figure out why their neighborhood suddenly has seventeen vape shops and no grocery store are told they simply lack the theoretical framework to appreciate the “vibe curation.”
5. University Hires Charismatic TikTok Professor Who Believes the Moon Is a Government Simulation
Dr. Fox Rides Again: Merit Dead, Vibe Check Ascendant
CAMBRIDGE — A tenure-track position in theoretical physics was awarded last month to a candidate whose research page contains more memes than equations. The search committee cited his “infectious energy” and “collegial aura.” The runner-up, who has published in Nature for fifteen years, was deemed “a little intense.”
This is not an isolated incident. It is the new standard.
Student evaluations have fully detached from learning outcomes; they now measure how entertaining the lecturer was. Hiring committees openly admit the final round is a vibe check. Faculty governance increasingly resembles Gustave Le Bon’s description of crowd psychology: emotional, contagious, incapable of sustained reasoning.
The modern university has solved the ancient problem of how to measure knowledge: it stopped trying. Charisma is quantifiable on a five-star scale. Rigor is not.
Welcome to the theater of knowledge. Please silence your critical thinking; the show is about to begin. Enjoy the paper., but try not to appease any machine spirits while reading it—they’re notoriously jealous.