The cult of tech | MIT Technology Review

The headlines seem to write themselves (if that cliché is allowed anymore in the age of ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence). Technique is a cult. But that’s a metaphor, right? Right?!

When I first saw Michael Saylor’s Twitter account, I wasn’t sure. Saylor is an entrepreneur, technology executive and former billionaire. Once reputedly the richest man in the Washington, D.C. area, he lost most of his $7 billion net worth in 2000 when, in his mid-30s, he reached a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after it filed charges against him and two of his colleagues at a company called MicroStrategy for misreporting their financial results. But then I had no idea who he was.

In 2021, Saylor started popping up in my Twitter feed. His profile picture showed a man with chiseled features, silver hair and stubble sitting in a powerful pose looking directly into the camera, with his black shirt unbuttoned to reveal much of his neck. It was a typical publicity photo of a tech entrepreneur, except for the lightning bolts shooting from his eyes and the golden crown with a halo. Then came his tweets:

As MIT’s Humanities Chaplain, I follow a lot of priests, rabbis, imams, and religious people 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 arrogance. So why does there seem to be an audience for this seemingly cult-like behavior of cryptocurrency sellers? Do tech leaders like Saylor lead actual cults?

According to Bretton Putter, a startup expert and CEO of the consulting firm CultureGene, that shouldn’t be a major concern: “It’s pretty much impossible,” Putter writes, “for a company to become a true cult.” And if a tech company or other business resembles a cult, that can only be a good thing, he argues: “If you can build a cult culture similar to the way Apple, Tesla, Zappos, Southwest Airlines, Nordstrom, and Harley-Davidson have, you’ll experience loyalty , the dedication and commitment of their employees (and customers) that go far beyond the norm.”

Are the cult aspects of tech companies really that benign? Or should we be worried? To find the answer, I interviewed Steve Hassan, a leading expert on exit counseling or helping people escape destructive cults.

At the age of 19, while studying poetry at Queens College in New York in the early 1970s, Hassan was recruited into the Unification Church – a notoriously manipulative cult also known as the Moonies. During his next 27 months as a member of the church, Hassan assisted in fundraising, recruiting and political efforts, which included multiple personal meetings with cult leader Sun Myung Moon. He lived in communal houses, slept only a few hours a night and sold carnations on street corners seven days a week without pay. He was told to drop out of college and hand over his bank account to the church. In 1976, he fell asleep at the wheel while driving a Moonie fundraising van and crashed 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 him “deprogram” and get him out of the cult.

After the mass suicides and murders in Jonestown in 1978 drew attention to the deadly dangers of mind control cults, Hassan founded a non-profit organization, Ex-Moon Inc. Since then, he’s earned a handful of degrees (including a doctorate in cult studies), launched a number of related projects, and written a popular book about how practices with which he’s all too familiar have recently crept into the mainstream of American politics in recent years. (That book from 2019 Cult of Trump: Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control(it seemed even more relevant in early 2024, when a video titled “God Made Trump” went viral throughout the campaign.) Hassan even found himself advising Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, chairman of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, in 2021, on how to think about and communicate the cultic aspects of the violent mob of Trump followers who stormed the Capitol on January 6 of that year.