The cult of tech | MIT Know-how 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 internet price in 2000 when, in his mid-30s, he reached a settlement with the US Securities and Trade Fee after it introduced prices 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 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 straight 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 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 quite a lot 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 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 not possible,” 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, that may simply be factor, he argues: “When you reach constructing a cultlike tradition just like the best way 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 method past the norm.” 

Are the cultlike points of tech firms actually that benign? Or ought to we be nervous? To search out the reply, I interviewed Steve Hassan, a high skilled on exit counseling, or serving to individuals escape damaging cults. 

At age 19, whereas he was finding out poetry at Queens Faculty in New York Metropolis within the early Nineteen 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 only some hours an evening, and offered carnations on road corners seven days per week for no pay. He was instructed to drop out of faculty 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 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 examine of cults), began quite a few associated initiatives, and written a preferred e-book on how practices with which he’s all too acquainted have crept into the mainstream of US politics lately. (That 2019 e-book, 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 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 the way 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.