The headlines seem to write themselves (if that cliché is allowed anymore in the age of ChatGPT and generative AI). Tech is culty. But that is a metaphor, right? Right?!
When I first saw Michael Saylor’s Twitter account, I wasn’t sure. Saylor is an entrepreneur, tech executive, and former billionaire. Once reportedly the richest man in the Washington, DC, area, he lost most of his $7 billion net worth in 2000 when, in his mid-30s, he reached a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission after it brought charges against him and two of his colleagues at a company called MicroStrategy for inaccurate reporting of their financial results. But I had no idea who he was back then.
In 2021 Saylor started showing up in my Twitter feed. His profile picture showed a man with chiseled features, silver hair, and stubble sitting in a power pose and looking directly into the camera, a black dress shirt unbuttoned to display a generous amount of his neck. It was a typical tech entrepreneur’s publicity shot except for the lightning bolts blasting from his eyes, and the golden halo crown. Then there were his tweets:
#Bitcoin is Truth.
#Bitcoin is For All Mankind.
#Bitcoin is Different.
Trust the Timechain.
Fiat [government-backed currency] is immoral. #Bitcoin is immortal.
#Bitcoin is a shining city in cyberspace, waiting for you.
#Bitcoin is the heartbeat of Planet Earth.
As MIT’s humanist chaplain, I follow a lot of ministers, rabbis, imams, and monks online. Very few religious leaders would dare to be this religious on social media. They know that few of their readers want to see such hubris. Why, then, does there seem to be an audience for this seemingly cultish behavior from a cryptocurrency salesman? Are tech leaders like Saylor leading actual cults?
According to Bretton Putter, an expert on startups and CEO of the consulting firm CultureGene, this needn’t be a major concern: “It’s pretty much impossible,” Putter writes, “for a business to become a full-blown cult.” And if a tech company or other business happens to resemble a cult, that might just be a good thing, he argues: “If you succeed in building a cultlike culture similar to the way that Apple, Tesla, Zappos, Southwest Airlines, Nordstrom, and Harley-Davidson have, you will experience loyalty, dedication, and commitment from your employees (and customers) that is way beyond the norm.”
Are the cultlike aspects of tech companies really that benign? Or should we be worried? To find the answer, I interviewed Steve Hassan, a top expert on exit counseling, or helping people escape destructive cults.
At age 19, while he was studying poetry at Queens College in New York City in the early 1970s, Hassan was recruited into the Unification Church—the famously manipulative cult also known as the Moonies. Over his next 27 months as a member of the church, Hassan helped with its fundraising, recruiting, and political efforts, which involved personally meeting with the cult leader Sun Myung Moon multiple times. He lived in communal housing, slept only a few hours a night, and sold carnations on street corners seven days a week for no pay. He was told to drop out of college and turn his bank account over to the church. In 1976, he fell asleep at the wheel while driving a Moonie fundraising van and drove into the back of a tractor-trailer at high speed. He called his sister from the hospital, and his parents hired former members to help “deprogram” him and extract him from the cult.
After the Jonestown mass suicide and murders of 1978 brought attention to the lethal dangers of cult mind control, Hassan founded a nonprofit organization, Ex-Moon Inc. Since then, he’s earned a handful of graduate degrees (including a doctorate in the study of cults), started numerous related projects, and written a popular book on how practices with which he is all too familiar have crept into the mainstream of US politics in recent years. (That 2019 book, The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, seemed even more relevant in early 2024, when a video called “God Made Trump” went viral across the campaign trail.) Hassan even found himself advising Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, leader of the second impeachment trial against Donald Trump, in 2021, on how to think and communicate about the cultish aspects of the violent mob of Trump followers who stormed the Capitol on January 6 of that year.