In the final chapter of Imagined Communities, Anderson argued that every new form of imagined community inherits the ghosts of its predecessors. The nation inherited the ghost of the religious community it replaced — which is why national cemeteries, national martyrs, and national shrines echo the structure of religious devotion even in secular republics. The AI-builder community inherits its own ghosts: the professional guilds the Luddites defended, the specialist silos the organizational chart encoded, the national education systems whose credentials the Software Death Cross is making illegible. These ghosts haunt the new community, shaping its anxieties and its possibilities in ways the triumphalist discourse cannot see.
Anderson was especially attentive to the religious residues in secular nationalism. The tomb of the unknown soldier is functionally a reliquary; the flag is functionally an icon; the national anthem is functionally a hymn; dying for one's country is functionally the martyrdom the new community no longer