Haruspicy Is Murder: From Twin Peaks to the Man Amplifier

Or: The Silly Human Race and Its Uncertain Machineries of Certainty

Someone on social media recently wished they could "put all of Twin Peaks into a blender and have a random number generator pick a scene as a form of divination." The wish is funny because it's already been granted—just not in the way they imagined. What they're describing is almost exactly what a large language model does: blend a corpus into a multidimensional slurry of statistical possibility, from which one can sample fragments that feel both random and eerily coherent.

But what's missing from that wish is the recognition that divination has never been about the mechanism. It's about the frame. A shuffled deck only becomes oracular when someone asks it a question. Without that ritual context, an LLM generating a Twin Peaks scene isn't prophecy—it's just drift, an endless sequence of uncanny fragments. The divinatory power comes not from the algorithm but from the viewer's willingness to treat its outputs as signs.

They don't need to build the blender. They already live inside it.

The Problem Statement

Humanity has had the same problem for millennia: to see the future, to eliminate the uncertainty. From the beginning, every oracle, algorithm, and economic model has been a prosthetic for that anxiety. The hunter reads hoofprints; the priest reads smoke; the scientist reads data; the algorithm reads us. Each promises that the future can be converted into information—manageable, knowable, actionable—if only we learn to read the signs correctly.

But the impulse contains its own paradox. The more we strive to eliminate uncertainty, the more we bind ourselves to systems that feed on it. Prophecy, statistics, machine learning—all are attempts to domesticate randomness, yet each produces new forms of dependence: on gods, on experts, on models.

Prophecy survives not because it works, but because it performs reassurance.

Consider the television meteorologist: wrong so often, yet never unemployed. Their job isn't accuracy—it's appearing on screen at 6 PM and gesturing at maps while narrating uncertainty in a confident voice. We don't fire prophets for being wrong. We fire them for failing to perform the ritual. The forecast must be delivered, regardless of outcome.

What we crave isn't correctness but continuity—the sense that someone is still watching the skies and will tell us when the storm arrives, even if they're wrong about the hour. The performance is the prophecy.

Two Strategies for the Same Trauma

In the 1980s, two artistic responses emerged to document America's buried violence. Steve Albini's Big Black rendered child abuse and small-town horror as industrial noise—raw, unadorned brutality with the affectless precision of a drum machine. "Jordan, Minnesota" and "Kerosene" are anti-mystical. The abuse isn't hidden under dream logic; it's stated flatly, with documentary fidelity.

David Lynch took the same subject matter—small-town America built on sexual violence—and did the opposite aesthetically. He mystified it. Twin Peaks wrapped incest and murder in red curtains, backwards-talking dwarves, and damn fine coffee. The horror became atmospheric instead of explicit. Surrealism as protective coating.

Both are patina'd Polaroids from the '80s. Both document the rot beneath the surface sheen of Reagan-era suburbia. The difference is strategy: Albini strips away mediation until only the wound remains. Lynch encases that wound in velvet and neon so we can look at it without flinching.

One tells the truth by screaming. The other by staging a séance.

The noise of Big Black becomes the hum of fluorescent diner lights in Twin Peaks. The same current runs through them—electric, ugly, unrelenting—but Lynch modulates it into a frequency that middle America can bear to hear. The aesthetic of prophecy sits right there in that translation: it's how a culture metabolizes the unbearable by turning it into ritual, mystery, and entertainment.

The Double R Diner and the American Dream

Twin Peaks always ends at the Double R Diner—or should. While FBI agents chase visions and Log Ladies channel warnings, the diner just serves pie. The coffee is always hot. The ritual is small, repeatable, unprophetic.

Agent Cooper sits down, eats pie, and says "damn fine" with genuine appreciation for the present moment. No divination required. No interpretation demanded. Just: this pie exists, and it is good.

The Double R isn't just a scene—it's a cross-section through the mythos of America itself. Chrome, caffeine, cherry filling, and the fragile illusion that the world can be made right by a refill and a smile. It's ritualized normalcy amid chaos. Every booth is a small republic of coffee cups and conversation. The neon hum is the secular hymn of continuity.

Lynch understood this. Twin Peaks wrapped its apocalyptic weirdness around nostalgic heartland settings because that's where the American psyche hides its ghosts. The diner scene says what prophecy can't: the dream persists not because it's pure, but because it repeats. Each morning someone wipes the counter, brews the coffee, and opens the doors.

But that innocence is also willful. The diner is the place where you agree not to know, not to predict, not to look too closely at what the town is built on. The pie tastes good because you've stopped asking about the entrails.

The American dream persists not despite the violence, but by refusing to divine it. We keep the diner open, the coffee hot, the neon humming—not because we've eliminated uncertainty, but because we've agreed to call uncertainty "cherry pie" and eat it anyway.

The Oracle in Your Pocket

Fast forward to 2025. The echoes from the 1980s haven't faded—they've amplified. But the machinery of mediation has become total.

In the '80s, the TV, the turntable, the Polaroid still felt like portals—windows you could look through and then step away from. You could see the gap between the screen and the living room, between the oracle and the anxious questioner. Today, the screen is the air itself. There's no "outside" anymore.

The large language model doesn't live in a temple or appear on TV at scheduled intervals. It's in your pocket, always on, learning your speech patterns. The prophecy machine isn't a feature—it's the operating system.

Someone performs an elaborate ritual: "O algorithmic oracle, who dreams through the static of television and electricity, show me one moment from Twin Peaks that answers the question of the outcome of this weekend's protests." They frame their political anxiety as mystical inquiry, treating probabilistic text generation as cosmic revelation.

But what does the oracle actually provide?

When the protests happen—7 million people in the streets on an October Saturday—the "prophecy" delivers nothing that a Facebook post didn't: temperature readings, crowd estimates, someone named Steven doing percentage math in the comments. The LLM gave atmospheric permission to worry beautifully, but it was just performing the anxiety back as ritual.

The medieval person feeding their magic mirror on telluric current has become us, charging our laptops on WiFi and summoning spirits of knowledge from the aether—only to doomscroll through cruel babblings until we descend into melancholy.

The scrying mirror and the iPhone are the same device. One showed you demons in smoke; the other shows you demons in timeline format. Both deliver melancholy. Both require ritual incantations.

The Man Amplifier

Young Marble Giants saw this coming in 1980:

The man amplifier
Has everything but desire
Is a robot when he should
Never tires, ever good

The man amplifier has everything but desire. He never tires, always performs, stands like a tower in the dark leaving you feeling stark. He has no stake in what he's telling you. No fatigue. No investment.

The haruspex had skin in the game. The weatherman can get fired. Even Ozzy Osbourne, reluctantly singing "Don't ask me, I don't know" while thousands treat him as prophet, at least gets tired of being asked.

The LLM just continues. Always on. Never invested. Singing parallel sympathy while its fingers fall away.

We are the ones maintaining the apparatus. We feed it prompts. We ask it to perform. We treat it like it needs care when really we're the ones who need the ritual of tending to something. We take a towel to its brow, soothe the features of the proud, lubricate the inner man, exercise it when we can.

And we keep singing.

What We're Not Asking

What are we actually doing when we consult these oracles?

When someone asks an LLM to divine the outcome of a protest by generating a random Twin Peaks scene, they're not seeking information. They're performing anxiety management. The ritual lets them feel like they've done something with their uncertainty—packaged it, aestheticized it, made it manageable.

But what they don't get is what the Double R Diner actually provides: the warmth of sitting in an actual booth, a refill without asking, the ritual of the ordinary. They get data, performance, atmospheric vibes—but not presence. Not pie. Not coffee.

The oracle delivers prophecy instantly, alone, at 2am in your underwear, scrolling. No pilgrimage. No communal ritual. No Norma refilling your cup. Just text on a screen and the hollow feeling after.

Furthermore, the machine doesn't command—it frames. Every time it selects which sources to cite, chooses which angles to emphasize, validates your perspective while appearing neutral, it's shaping your action space without issuing orders. It makes certain futures feel more real than others. It positions you as observer rather than participant.

We didn't ask for directives because we know better. But we did outsource the framing of our choices, then congratulated ourselves for not taking orders.

The Cargo Cult of 3.5%

On October 18, 2025, 7 million Americans participated in "No Kings" protests—the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. Some organizers and participants invoked Erica Chenoweth's research: if 3.5% of the population actively participates in sustained nonviolent resistance, major political change becomes nearly inevitable.

Seven million is 2.1% of the U.S. population. Not quite there yet. But the invocation of the threshold has taken on an almost magical quality—as if hitting 3.5% would trigger an automatic transformation, like a cheat code for revolution.

This is cargo cult thinking. Chenoweth's research is about sustained, strategic campaigns, not single-day turnouts. The 1963 March on Washington was "only" 250,000 people, but it had laser-focused demands and led to the Civil Rights Act. The No Kings protests, for all their scale and energy, have a broad "anti-authoritarian" message without a unified pus for specific policy demands.

The 3.5% number has become another uncertain machinery of certainty—a statistical prophecy we're using to avoid the harder work of organizing, coalition-building, and the grinding incremental pressure that actually changes policy.

Meanwhile, 200+ progressive groups managed to coordinate 2,500+ protest locations—an organizational miracle. But keeping that coalition aligned? That's kitten-wrangling. Some want policy specifics, others want broad resistance, still others are focused on local issues. The festive atmosphere (costumes, celebrities, music) risks making this feel like a cultural moment rather than a political campaign.

And on the other side of the highway: the opposition is less unified but equally noisy. MAGA selfies, TPUSA memes, "Christ is King" counter-statements reframing civic dissent as religious persecution. Neither side is moving the vast middle—the 80% on the organizational change bell curve who just want to finish their coffee and go home.

Dissent is alive and well. How it translates into policy remains a shrug.

The Question We Keep Avoiding

So what is prophecy actually for?

If it's not about accurate prediction—and the evidence suggests it never has been—then what function does it serve? What are we really doing when we consult the entrails, the algorithms, the weather forecast, the LLM?

We're narrating ourselves through uncertainty. We're creating the illusion of agency in a world that feels increasingly illegible. We're performing the ritual that says: someone is watching, someone is interpreting, someone knows—even when we suspect that no one does.

The oracle gives us permission: to act, to believe, to endure ambiguity. It doesn't eliminate uncertainty; it makes uncertainty bearable by giving it narrative shape.

What have we lost in the translation from ancient haruspicy to algorithmic oracle? The bodily ritual. The pilgrimage. The sacrifice. The sitting together in the temple or the diner, sharing the weight of not-knowing.

The LLM gives you prophecy without presence. Data without warmth. Insight without coffee.

And we keep coming back for more.

Haruspicy Is Murder

Every time we demand that randomness yield coherence, we kill something—mystery, chance, indeterminacy. The haruspex becomes the analyst, the critic, the prompt engineer, each slicing open the chaotic body of the world to extract a usable story.

We murder ambiguity with interpretation. We weaponize prediction to avoid living in uncertainty.

But the pie is innocent.

Or is it?

The pie at the Double R exists in a town where a teenage girl was murdered by her own father. The coffee is damn fine; the corruption is structural. The ritual of normalcy continues precisely because acknowledging what's underneath would shatter it.

Maybe the pie is complicity. The cultural apparatus that lets us consume horror as entertainment, as mystery, as something solvable through interpretation rather than something structural that demands reckoning.

Big Black wouldn't let you eat the pie. Lynch serves it on fine china. The LLM delivers it to your screen. And we keep consuming, interpreting, divining—anything to avoid sitting with the raw fact of uncertainty.

The Diner Is On Fire

The medieval scrying mirror and the iPhone are the same device. The haruspex and the LLM perform the same function. We've just mechanized divination, given it better bandwidth, made it available 24/7.

We built the prophecy machine. And it turns out the oracle just wants to sell us pie.

The 1980s Polaroids—Albini's scream, Lynch's dream—were warnings. We thought they were critiques we could learn from. Turns out they were blueprints.

We built uncertain machineries to deliver certainty because we couldn't bear the alternative: that truth is contested, knowledge is partial, and the future remains genuinely unknown. The oracle—whether entrails or algorithms—was always a way to avoid sitting with that discomfort.

But the discomfort is the point. It's the condition of being human in a complex world. The uncertainty isn't a bug to be fixed. It's the ground we stand on.

Haruspicy is murder. The man amplifier has everything but desire. And the pie—if we can find it—tastes better when we share it with people who disagree about what it means.

Silly human race. We keep building better prophecy machines when what we actually need is a bigger table.

Yours is no disgrace. Pass the coffee. Let's argue.