In 2018, then-25-year-old Patrick Cage made money betting on political events. Over the years, a growing wave of "bet on what you believe in" platforms—like PredictIt, or its blockchain cousin Augur—gained traction. These sites let everyday users submit and wager on near-future events of all kinds. On these platforms, Patrick began noticing bets that seemed totally off. People were staking money on, say, indictments of political figures—despite no media coverage, no public speculation. Naturally, Cage started betting against these long shots, all the while wondering: where were they coming from?

Cut to a pig farm in the Philippines, a few hours outside Manila, where Jim Watkins, resides—founder of a forgettable Japanese porn site and, more infamously, owner and admin of 8chan (now 8kun), a reputed stronghold of hate and conspiracy. To this day, 8kun hosts the majority of QAnon  “drops”, the unverifiable leaks on state security and political affairs, by a presumed US government insider under the pseudonym Q. It was on these platforms that Cage eventually traced the origin of the strange bets. These weren't just wild guesses; they were seeded by self-proclaimed recipients of insider knowledge from Q.

In recent years the profession of a prophet seems to be getting chic again. More than (but not excluding) television or religious gatherings, the most fertile grounds for professing inevitably become digital gathering grounds such as social media and less scrutinized forums. Rather than top-down frameworks of traditional information dissemination, forums bring a sense of digital community with active conversation and support. Furthermore, propagation of news within social media has always been a question of immediacy and style. The process through which visions pollinate is oftentimes canonical: piercing noise with exclusive, insightful, quick-to-digest content, upon which more complex narratives are extrapolated and eventual physical collective actions—storming pizza shops or capitols—taken. Q’s drops are usually concrete enough to loosely reference events IRL but abstract enough to be malleable, retracted or reinterpreted in case of failure; often accompanied by images and memes as hooks. Thanks to their popularity, posts are further aggregated by more mainstream social media through targeting, algorithmic loops, and biased moderation. Conspiracist prophets turn influencers turn machines turn Qs.

In recent years, the role of prophet has come back into fashion. Less on TV or in church pews, more in social media, fringe forums, anonymous message boards. Unlike top-down models of traditional information dissemination, these online spaces foster a sense of grassroots truth—collaborative, supportive, and self-validating. The spread of information here is defined less by accuracy, more by style and speed. The formula is familiar: cut through the noise with exclusive, evocative, fast-burning content; let others extrapolate the narrative; and watch as it spills into real life—storming pizzerias or capitols. Q’s posts are typically specific enough to latch onto real events, but vague enough to be reinterpreted. Once they're sticky enough, they're scooped up by more mainstream social platforms, amplified by targeting algorithms. Conspiracist prophets become influencers become machines become Qs.

Major social media stakeholders are told to self-regulate and track down fake news—a move that often only concentrates more power in the hands of corporate platforms. Traditional religions aren’t much help either, fumbling their way through the tech age with VR sacraments, metaverse confessions, religious smart watches, e-rosaries, and robot arms that perform blessings. Meanwhile, in the dusty corners of the internet—bruised but not broken by social media’s virtue-signaling suspensions and flashy bans—devotees regroup. They reforge troll battalions, ready to drown new seekers in algorithmic whirlpools of tailor-made truths and freshly anointed pseudo-spiritual systems.

In a world of chaos, ALTAR-3000 becomes a long-overdue, automated totem of customised belief. A smart home altar for the age of chaos, adorned with relics that may have once meant something but now serve mostly as decoration in a landscape of easily digestible truths. ALTAR-3000 channels the revitalised New Age aesthetics of the cyber-hippie era—when digital utopias still shimmered with the promise of transcendence.

But don’t mistake ALTAR-3000 for a toy. Despite its gimmicky rituals, it is a potent AI prophet. It connects to the internet and pulls betting headlines from PredictIt—America’s speculative pulse on the near future IRL. Trained on a blend of classical prophetic texts (Nostradamus), pop futurists (Yuval Noah Harari), compilations of Q-drops, and politically-tinged poetic fragments, the shrine generates short, poetic—if often disjointed—prophecies. Upon vocal command, ALTAR-3000 posts its vision to 8kun’s “random” board. If CAPTCHA is required, the user must assist—speaking the verification aloud, like a prayer.

Under the hood, ALTAR-3000 is driven by a fine-tuned GPT-Neo model, inspired by research on the memorization of conspiracy theories in text generators—studies that show how inconsistency, typically a flaw, makes these models strangely perfect for crafting cultish content. Where most AIs are slick, silent, and abstract, ALTAR-3000 is tangible, bold, and almost charmingly luddite. Disagree with the machine? Unplug the power cable.