The headlines appear to put in writing themselves (if that cliché is allowed anymore within the age of ChatGPT and generative AI). Tech is culty. However that may be a metaphor, proper? Proper?! 

After 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 Alternate 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 instantly into the digicam, a black gown shirt unbuttoned to show a beneficiant quantity of his neck. It was a typical tech entrepreneur’s publicity shot apart from the lightning bolts blasting from his eyes, and the golden halo crown. Then there have been his tweets:

As MIT’s humanist chaplain, I observe plenty of ministers, rabbis, imams, and monks on-line. Only a few non secular leaders would dare to be this non secular 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 habits from a cryptocurrency salesman? Are tech leaders like Saylor main precise cults? 

Based on Bretton Putter, an skilled on startups and CEO of the consulting agency CultureGene, this needn’t be a serious concern: “It’s just about unimaginable,” Putter writes, “for a enterprise to develop into a full-blown cult.” And if a tech firm or different enterprise occurs to resemble a cult, which may simply be an excellent 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 staff (and prospects) that’s means past the norm.” 

Are the cultlike facets of tech corporations actually that benign? Or ought to we be anxious? To seek out the reply, I interviewed Steve Hassan, a high skilled on exit counseling, or serving to folks escape harmful cults. 

At age 19, whereas he was finding out poetry at Queens Faculty 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 only some hours an evening, and offered carnations on avenue 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 dad and mom 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 preferred e-book on how practices with which he’s all too acquainted have crept into the mainstream of US politics in recent times. (That 2019 e-book, The Cult of Trump: A Main Cult Professional 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 the right way to suppose and talk in regards to the cultish facets of the violent mob of Trump followers who stormed the Capitol on January 6 of that yr.

I needed to ask Hassan what he makes of the discourse round tech cults, however first it’s necessary to know how he thinks about cults within the first place. Hassan’s dissertation was titled “The BITE Mannequin of Authoritarian Management: Undue Affect, Thought Reform, Brainwashing, Thoughts Management, Trafficking, and the Legislation.” The thought was to create a mannequin that might measure cult exploitation and manipulation, or what Hassan and different consultants in associated fields name “undue affect.” His BITE mannequin seems to judge the methods social teams and establishments try to regulate followers’ habits, data entry, ideas, and feelings. As a result of there isn’t any one quintessential, Platonic definition of a cult, what issues is the place a given occasion of potential cultishness falls on an “affect continuum.” On this continuum mannequin, Hassan evaluates the methods wherein institutional cultures try and affect folks. To what extent are people allowed to be their genuine selves or required to undertake a false cult identification? Are leaders accountable to others, or do they declare absolute authority? Do organizations encourage development within the individuals who take part in them, or do they search to protect their very own energy over all else? Whereas any form of particular person or group can battle with a few of the dimensions on Hassan’s continuum chart (which lists constructive behaviors at one finish and harmful behaviors on the different), more healthy organizations will have a tendency towards constructive responses extra of the time, whereas unhealthier establishments—these extra actually worthy of the cult label in probably the most detrimental sense—will have a tendency towards harmful responses akin to grandiosity, hate, calls for for obedience, elitism, authoritarianism, deceptiveness, or starvation for energy. 

It seems that there are some actual, significant similarities between cults and tech, in accordance with Hassan. “That is the proper mind-control gadget,” he instructed me, holding up his iPhone. He defined that when he joined the Moonies in 1974, cult recruiters needed to get data from the sufferer. Now, he stated, customers of on a regular basis applied sciences are sitting geese: “There are 5,000 information factors on each voting American at the hours of darkness internet, and there are corporations that may acquire and promote that information.”

The primary time Hassan was instructed about cryptocurrency, he added, it smacked of multilevel advertising and marketing to him. The proposition that you could make a fortune in a really quick period of time, with virtually no labor, was one thing he had seen many instances in his work. As was the concept should you develop into an early investor in such a scheme, you’ll make more cash should you recruit extra folks to hitch you. “The individuals who began it are at all times going to make 99% of the cash,” Hassan stated. And as within the cults that recruited him and proceed to recruit the varieties of people that in the end develop into his purchasers, “everybody else goes to get burned.” 

All of this will surely appear to elucidate why I so ceaselessly hear from folks, looking forward to me to know they’re fellow atheists, who inform me to purchase some bitcoin as a result of it is going to rewire my neurons and remedy me of the woke thoughts virus.

In fact, it must be famous that some students have complained about Hassan’s work, arguing that brainwashing and thoughts management are ideas for which there’s not ample proof. However I’m not claiming that tech makes use of literal brainwashing, neither is it like when a personality in a Scooby-Doo episode hears “You’re getting very sleepy” after which their eyes develop into squiggles. Hassan in all probability wouldn’t say so both. 

Corporations don’t must go to such extremes to exert undue affect on us, although. And as is evident from the headlines I cited above, plenty of corporations have been accused of, or related to, a little bit of cultishness. 

I received’t try to judge anybody’s cultish tendencies on a scale of 1 to 10. However I see crypto gross sales methods as a very good instance of cultlike habits, as a result of if there’s one factor cults should be good at to maintain their existence, it’s separating folks from their wallets. Cryptocurrency has specialised in that to extraordinary impact. 

It’s all a continuum, and it might be laborious to search out an individual whose life is totally devoid of something cultish, technological or in any other case. However as a tradition, we’re careening dangerously towards the flawed finish of Hassan’s chart. Or to cite a Michael Saylor tweet, “All of us stumble at the hours of darkness till we see the cyber gentle. #Bitcoin.”