The cult of tech | MIT Expertise Evaluate

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 could be a metaphor, proper? Proper?! 

After I first noticed Michael Saylor’s Twitter account, I wasn’t positive. Saylor is an entrepreneur, tech govt, 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 expenses towards him and two of his colleagues at an organization referred to as MicroStrategy for inaccurate reporting of their monetary outcomes. However I had no concept who he was again then.

In 2021 Saylor began exhibiting up in my Twitter feed. His profile image confirmed a person with chiseled options, silver hair, and stubble sitting in an influence pose and searching instantly into the digicam, a black costume 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:

As MIT’s humanist chaplain, I comply with loads 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 need 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? 

Based on 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, that may simply be factor, he argues: “If you happen to achieve 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 manner past the norm.” 

Are the cultlike elements of tech corporations actually that benign? Or ought to we be frightened? To search out the reply, I interviewed Steve Hassan, a prime professional on exit counseling, or serving to folks escape damaging 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 also referred to 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 bought 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 referred to 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 examine of cults), began quite a few associated tasks, and written a well-liked 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 referred to 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 towards Donald Trump, in 2021, on how one can suppose and talk concerning the cultish elements of the violent mob of Trump followers who stormed the Capitol on January 6 of that yr.