The headlines appear to jot down themselves (if that cliché is allowed anymore within the age of ChatGPT and generative AI). Tech is culty. However that could be a metaphor, proper? Proper?!
Once I first noticed Michael Saylor’s Twitter account, I wasn’t positive. Saylor is an entrepreneur, tech government, and former billionaire. As soon as reportedly the richest man within the Washington, DC, space, he misplaced most of his $7 billion web price in 2000 when, in his mid-30s, he reached a settlement with the US Securities and Change Fee after it introduced fees in opposition to him and two of his colleagues at an organization known as MicroStrategy for inaccurate reporting of their monetary outcomes. However I had no concept who he was again then.
In 2021 Saylor began displaying up in my Twitter feed. His profile image confirmed a person with chiseled options, silver hair, and stubble sitting in an influence pose and looking out immediately into the digital camera, a black gown shirt unbuttoned to show a beneficiant quantity of his neck. It was a typical tech entrepreneur’s publicity shot aside from the lightning bolts blasting from his eyes, and the golden halo crown. Then there have been his tweets:
#Bitcoin is Fact.
#Bitcoin is For All Mankind.
#Bitcoin is Completely different.
Belief the Timechain.
Fiat [government-backed currency] is immoral. #Bitcoin is immortal.
#Bitcoin is a shining metropolis in our on-line world, ready for you.
#Bitcoin is the heartbeat of Planet Earth.
As MIT’s humanist chaplain, I comply with plenty of ministers, rabbis, imams, and monks on-line. Only a few spiritual leaders would dare to be this spiritual on social media. They know that few of their readers wish to see such hubris. Why, then, does there appear to be an viewers for this seemingly cultish conduct from a cryptocurrency salesman? Are tech leaders like Saylor main precise cults?
In accordance with Bretton Putter, an professional on startups and CEO of the consulting agency CultureGene, this needn’t be a significant concern: “It’s just about unattainable,” Putter writes, “for a enterprise to grow to be a full-blown cult.” And if a tech firm or different enterprise occurs to resemble a cult, which may simply be a superb factor, he argues: “In case you reach constructing a cultlike tradition just like the way in which that Apple, Tesla, Zappos, Southwest Airways, Nordstrom, and Harley-Davidson have, you’ll expertise loyalty, dedication, and dedication out of your workers (and prospects) that’s means past the norm.”
Are the cultlike points of tech firms actually that benign? Or ought to we be frightened? To search out the reply, I interviewed Steve Hassan, a high professional on exit counseling, or serving to folks escape harmful cults.
At age 19, whereas he was learning poetry at Queens School in New York Metropolis within the early Seventies, Hassan was recruited into the Unification Church—the famously manipulative cult often known as the Moonies. Over his subsequent 27 months as a member of the church, Hassan helped with its fundraising, recruiting, and political efforts, which concerned personally assembly with the cult chief Solar Myung Moon a number of instances. He lived in communal housing, slept just a few hours an evening, and offered carnations on road corners seven days every week for no pay. He was instructed to drop out of school and switch his checking account over to the church. In 1976, he fell asleep on the wheel whereas driving a Moonie fundraising van and drove into the again of a tractor-trailer at excessive pace. He known as his sister from the hospital, and his mother and father employed former members to assist “deprogram” him and extract him from the cult.
After the Jonestown mass suicide and murders of 1978 introduced consideration to the deadly risks of cult thoughts management, Hassan based a nonprofit group, Ex-Moon Inc. Since then, he’s earned a handful of graduate levels (together with a doctorate within the research of cults), began quite a few associated tasks, and written a well-liked ebook on how practices with which he’s all too acquainted have crept into the mainstream of US politics in recent times. (That 2019 ebook, The Cult of Trump: A Main Cult Skilled Explains How the President Makes use of Thoughts Management, appeared much more related in early 2024, when a video known as “God Made Trump” went viral throughout the marketing campaign path.) Hassan even discovered himself advising Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, chief of the second impeachment trial in opposition to Donald Trump, in 2021, on tips on how to assume and talk in regards to the cultish points of the violent mob of Trump followers who stormed the Capitol on January 6 of that 12 months.
