Read on Twitter
A lot of people are like “the conditions are right why haven’t we seen an absurd explosion in cults?” but we have, for a while, they’re just dressed up as business opportunities, CEO worship, tech optimism, and blind belief in investment and eternal growth https://twitter.com/avdi/status/1380854697054105601
WeWork promising a total WeLife experience complete with childcare, Amazon choosing people for social media gospel and preaching, Netflix having corporate struggle sessions and public denouements. American cults always go after nice, normal looking professional class people
Call it the upward mobility of Wal-Mart demanding workers sing the Wal-Mart song every day, but in a world where no one makes money snd the logic of the market has gone black inverted pyramid, of course start-ups would start to resemble sleeper cells
Like the Qstuff we can all easily see that’s culty or at least having lots in common with weeping, pleading Protestant sects. But the stuff in Patagonia zip-ups promising eternal future prosperity with equally empty but more business school grad friendly vocabulary? Not so much.
American cults look like Est, not the Manson family. “Spirituality” plus Market Fundamentalism plus crystal magic plus a determined belief that you will buck the odds and win. In some sectors there’s no substations difference between a religion, an MLM scheme, and venture capital
Thinking about how one of thr more powerful recent cults, The Family, had a huge successful political project in the U.S because they dressed it up in polos and prayer breakfasts and restoring order or how the big cult (ends in -ology) borrowed business management culture until..
.. business management culture started cribbing from them.
Last thought, if the When Prophecy Fails moment happened to Trump supports when their lives didn’t get magically better and everyone was proven wrong and this created the need for something like Qstuff to explain it away ...
..then what will the When Prophecy Fails moment look like for tech and start-ups and venture capital and everything that needs a weird zero interest world to even survive let alone make sense And what comes after?
If you can leave voluntarily then it’s not a cult ...then what does it mean if everyone in your industry believes in and behaves the same way
