Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 164 of 253 · 20 per page

• From Cultish (2021)

  The business had been founded about a decade earlier by William Penn Patrick, the single most snake-oil-y gasbag of all the direct sales guys I’ve come across. Based in Northern California, this dude was a tightass wannabe Republican senator in his thirties whom the Los Angeles Times once called the state’s “strangest politician .” Like most other MLM founders, Patrick was big on prosperity theology and New Thought, and he was famous for turning inspirational mottoes minacious: “Tell [recruits] they’re going to be happier , healthier, wealthier, and receive what they want out of life with the Holiday Magic program,” he wrote, adding in the same pen stroke, “Any person who fails in the Holiday Magic program must fall into one of the following categories: lazy, stupid, greedy, or dead.” Patrick was also known for throwing the uttermost bizarre MLM conference in history. Called Leadership Dynamics, it took place in a crappy Bay Area motel and cost a thousand bucks to attend. For two days straight, Patrick had recruits engage in a series of freaky power games: He made them climb inside coffins and strung them up on gigantic wooden crosses, where they’d dangle all afternoon. Like Jim Jones, Chuck Dederich, and (to a lesser degree) Jeff Bezos, he also forced them into “group therapy” sessions where they verbally tormented each other for hours on end. Patrick’s behavior was unhinged from all angles, but when the FTC brought him to court, their most compelling argument against him, and what eventually allowed them to shut down Holiday Magic, was their points about his speech. Ultimately, the court ruled that Patrick’s deceptive hyperbole, loaded buzzwords, and gaslighting disguised as inspiration were what defined him as a pyramid schemer. This makes sense, because in every corner of life, business and otherwise, when you can tell deep down that something is ethically wrong but are having trouble pinpointing why, language is a good place to look for evidence. This is where the FTC turned to squash Holiday Magic, and over the next few years, its attorneys cited the same type of outlandish, fraudulent messaging as they prosecuted a litany of MLMs—including the biggest one they ever went after, Amway. In 1979, the FTC finally accused Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos of pyramid scheme activity, which led to a massive drawn-out case. But, as we know, Amway never closed up shop. (Again, this was a company whose founders golfed with heads of state—there was no chance the government was going to take them down.) The judge fined the company $100,000 (chump change for the corporate heavyweight) and sent them on their merry way. Ultimately, the FTC losing its case against Amway offered the whole direct sales industry a measure of protection from there on out. Since 1979, the FTC has only canned a handful of MLMs, and never any of the giants. Now, every time an MLM comes under fire, they can say, “No, no, no, you have us all wrong.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Amway, which sells home goods and personal hygiene products like soap and toothpaste, is a portmanteau of “American Way.” Plenty of modern companies try to sell goods by associating them with larger identity benefits, like by buying this trendy lip gloss or that beach towel made out of recycled plastic, you will establish yourself as a hip, healthy, sexy, ecofriendly person in general. Sociologists call these “organizational ideologies,” and they’re not necessarily all bad. Most successful brand founders agree that having a “cultlike company culture” with intense values and ritual s is simply necessary to secure repeat customers and loyal employees in today’s dubious, transient market. These organizational ideologies should be taken with a grain of salt, of course, since basing one’s politics, healthcare decisions, and very identity on what profit-driven brands have to say, even (and especially) ones that self-identify as “ethical,” “sustainable,” etc., is risky business. “Woke capitalism” does not equal social justice, just as hawking diet pills to your Facebook friends does not make you heavenly blessed. By nature, MLMs take their organizational ideologies way further than most other companies, linking themselves not just to everyday earthly benefits but to the very meaning of lif e. Direct sales slogans boast spiritually charged promise s like “Being Younique is better than being perfect” and “Existing and living are not the same thing. Choose one.” A Pinterest graphic created by the essential oils MLM dōTERRA lists the recipe for a “forgiveness” blend that will allow consumers to “become empathetic, forgiving, freeing, light, loving, tolerant, understanding.” Before his death, one of Amway’s billionaire cofounders, Jay Van Andel, vowed that involvement with his company “gets people into a new life of excitement, promise, profit, and hope.” You might think that an industry as unhip and retro-seeming as direct sales might have gone out of style already. It’s hard to believe it’s survived the internet, where so many ex-MLMers put these companies on blast, spilling their stories of psychological abuse and money loss. Search “MLM scam” on YouTube, and endless pages of videos like “The MLM ‘Girl Boss’ Narrative Is a Lie,” “I Filed for Bankruptcy After LuLaRoe and Now Work 2 Jobs,” and “AMWAY: The Final Straw (with Audio EVIDENCE!)—How I Quit My MLM Cult” accumulate millions of views. Anti-MLMers occupy passionate nooks of Instagram and TikTok. In 2020, TikTok banned MLM recruiters from the platform altogether. There is no shortage of incriminating evidence against the #bossbabe industrial complex. And yet MLM rhetoric is such a successful assault on the human spirit, so consistently compelling and adaptable, that these companies only continue to thrive. In the 2010s, as ingredient-conscious millennials began overtaking the consumer market and demand for “all-natural” “nontoxic” personal care products increased, the shrewdest MLM founders accommodated. Direct sales wasn’t just for old-school Suzy Homemakers anymore, it was for the savvy youth.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Her long, convoluted captions feature a dialect of New Age–speak so cryptic that insiders want to like and comment, while outsiders can’t help but keep scrolling through to find out what her beliefs actually are: “integrating potent codes,” “quantum transformation,” “multidimensional space of time,” “divine alignment,” “upgrading your DNA,” “energy matrices, grids, and frequencies.” In one video, Heather squats on the floor in a green bikini, playing Tibetan sound bowls, undulating her torso. Using a honeyed soprano, she begins speaking a form of glossolalia she calls “Light Language.” The comment section overflows with all kinds of “divine goddess,” “hypnotizing,” and “Heather you are next level light code!” In another clip, she sits before a mandala tapestry lecturing that COVID-19 was caused by government “fear propaganda” and that protecting yourself means “deactivating” your “matrix grid of fear” so as not to pollute the “divine order.” Heather has been reincarnated precisely to cure humans of problems like these, she says, through her ability to access “Source” (God) and other spiritual “realms” available only to her, since everyone else has fallen victim to a “program.” To access her wisdom, just sign up for one of her online courses, like the “Cellular Activation Course—Upgrade Your DNA” for $144.44, or, to tap into her most exclusive wisdom, pay $4,444 for eight one-on-one mentoring sessions. Creeping along the influence continuum toward Scientology, these figures will cajole you into buying their e-book, then their meditation playlist, then their online hypnosis course, and by that point, your spiritual journey would be worthless if you didn’t sign up for a workshop or retreat. For you, it might feel like the quest for self-actualization, but for them, it’s a profitable, scalable, passive-income-generating cash cow. Ghafari points out that when an online guru uses too much “absolutist language,” that’s New Age scammer red flag number one. “Anyone who talks about the concept of feeling our past, our inner trauma, in a universal, oversimplified way,” she clarifies. “For example, statements like, ‘All of us are traumatized as kids, which is why we need to x, y, z,’ or, ‘All of us are from the cosmos and we’re just floating in a quantum field, blah blah blah .’” If simple quantifiers and qualifiers are absent from a guru’s messaging, that’s a sign they are likely unqualified to speak as a mental health authority, and are less interested in actually helping people than they are in convincing as many followers as possible to invest in their prophetic gifts. “New Age holistic psychology and wellness is not about trauma-informed care. It’s about pushing pseudoscience and marketing,” Ghafari concludes. Alternative wellness gurus like Bentinho Massaro and Heather Hoffman fume about the evils of Big Pharma until they’re blue in the face. “But they push a far more deceptive form of capitalism,” says Ghafari. They don’t want to sell you pills. They want to sell you a key to enlightenment they don’t actually possess.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  The BTG is just a first step, ushering in this brave new world. Ashley schedules countless meetings to “brainstorm” ideas and give us progress reports. At last, with great fanfare, Marcia, Jan, and Ashley launch the BTG. The project immediately blows up in their faces, because the BTG produces ridiculous, pointless results. A woman who runs a blog for a hospital complains in the comment section that she tried to use the BTG to generate ideas for Cervical Cancer Awareness Month and received the following: WHY WE LOVE CERVICAL CANCER (AND YOU SHOULD TOO!) and MILEY CYRUS AND CERVICAL CANCER: 10 THINGS THEY HAVE IN COMMON Those headlines are so good that I want to print them out in seventy-two-point headline typeface and paste them on the wall. The BTG is never spoken of again. But it remains online, because, as one manager tells me, if they take it down that might hurt Ashley’s feelings. Six months later, Ashley gets a promotion. These are the bozos. They are graspers and self-promoters, shameless resume padders, people who describe themselves as “product marketing professionals,” “growth hackers,” “creative rockstar interns,” and “public speakers.” They create websites to build their “personal brands,” with huge photos of themselves and lists of their accomplishments. They have a Toastmasters club, where they take turns giving presentations and sharing tips on the art of making PowerPoint slide decks. They dream up ridiculous activities, like having a scavenger hunt in Kendall Square or going kayaking on the Charles River. Marcia and Jan, who run the blog, decide to have a “content hackathon,” where they will round up a bunch of people and work late into the evening, brainstorming ideas for blog posts. On the day of the hackathon I’m packing my bag to go home when Olivia, an intern, asks why I’m leaving. I tell her I have two kids at home and dinner waiting for me, but in addition to that, I don’t see the point of pulling an all-nighter just to write some blog posts. She looks at me as if I’m an imbecile. “It’s a hackathon ,” she says. “I know,” I say, “but why have a hackathon? If we need more blog posts, why can’t we just write a few extra posts over the next few weeks and bank them up?” She pauses. She really is a very nice young woman, and I like her a lot. “There’s food,” she says. I go home. The greatest of all bozo events is Fearless Friday. This is organized by Jordan, the twenty-something manager who has read Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In and been inspired by Sandberg’s admonition that women should “do what you would do if you weren’t afraid.” Jordan seems to believe that Sandberg’s admonition can be used as the basis of a one-day exercise, which she dubs Fearless Friday.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  They wear shorts and T-shirts, with baseball hats on backward, and drink beer at their desks. Officially, HubSpot’s products are supposed to be stamping out cold-calling, just like we’re supposed to be stamping out spam. Our sales pitch is that if you buy our software you won’t need to hire an army of outbound sales reps who spend their days blindly calling people, because our software will generate inbound leads and bring the customers to you. Yet here we are, operating an old-fashioned call center, with a bunch of low-paid kids calling thousands of people, day after day. HubSpot doesn’t keep this room a secret, but the company doesn’t talk about it much, either. It’s not exactly a lovable, magical, one-plus-one-equals-three kind of place. The truth is that most tech companies do some selling over the phone, and for a simple reason: It’s cheap. Oracle, a $40 billion software company, has started hiring thousands of college students and cramming them into call centers, as a way to lower its selling costs. Tech companies refer to these operations as “inside sales,” which sounds more respectable than “telemarketing.” While a lot of tech companies do some selling over the phone, from what I’ve been told HubSpot’s operation is more aggressive than most. But it has to be. We’re selling to small businesses, and our software isn’t expensive. The basic version costs $200 a month, and the “pro” version cost $800 a month. Our average customer spends about $500 a month, or $6,000 a year. These are not big accounts. The only affordable way to sell to them is over the phone. As a CMO friend of mine puts it, “The lower end of the market is a dial-for-dollars segment.” HubSpot isn’t the only software company using a low-cost sales model. Another friend of mine works at a software company that’s about the same size as HubSpot and engages in the same kind of touchy-feely rhetoric while behind the scenes operating the same kind of call center. The company’s investors are demanding astronomical growth rates, and while cold-calling thousands of leads may be a brute-force, blunt-instrument tactic, it’s the only way they can hit their numbers. “When you get a hard-charging sales culture in place, and you’re trying to keep up insane growth rates, all that high-minded preaching about how the New Economy means not doing things like they used to do in the Bad Old Days—all that stuff goes out the window, and they bring in Alec Baldwin to give his steak knives speech,” my friend says. “Our recruiters go out to college campuses and load up the slave ship with a shit ton of identical-looking lax bros. We put them in a frat house with a big brass bell to ring when they close a deal and a basketball hoop arcade game. They walk around shooting hoops while wearing wireless headsets and talking to their victims.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  You make up a culture code and talk about creating a company that everyone can love. You dangle the prospect that some might get rich. But Silicon Valley has a dark side. To be sure, there are plenty of shiny, happy people working in tech. But this is also a world where wealth is distributed unevenly and benefits accrue mostly to investors and founders, who have rigged the game in their favor. It’s a world where older workers are not wanted, where people get tossed aside when they turn forty. It’s a world where employers discriminate on the basis of race and gender, where founders sometimes turn out to be sociopathic monsters, where poorly trained (or completely untrained) managers abuse employees and fire people with impunity, and where workers have little recourse and no job security. In December 2014 Nicholas Lemann published an essay in the New Yorker contrasting the vision of work that Alfred P. Sloan, the legendary CEO of General Motors, described in his 1964 memoir, My Years with General Motors , with the vision laid out in a series of books published by executives from Google. In the twentieth-century model under which Sloan’s GM operated, companies “were heavily unionized, and offered their white-collar employees de-facto lifetime tenure. Employees got steady raises during their working years and pensions after retirement,” Lemann writes. Things changed with the emergence of the Internet and in particular with Google, the first successful Internet company with a large workforce. Google succeeded, Lemann writes, by “breaking the rules about how to run a business.” The biggest rupture involves the social compact that once existed between companies and workers, and between companies and society at large. There was a time, not so long ago, when companies felt obliged to look after their employees and to be good corporate citizens. Today that social compact has been thrown out. In the New Work, employers may expect loyalty from workers but owe no loyalty to them in return. Instead of being offered secure jobs that can last a lifetime, people are treated as disposable widgets that can be plugged into a company for a year or two, then unplugged and sent packing. In this model, we are basically freelancers, selling our services in short-term engagements. We may have dozens of jobs over the course of our careers. “Your company is not your family” is how LinkedIn’s multibillionaire cofounder and chairman Reid Hoffman puts it in his book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age . Hoffman says employees should think of a job as a “tour of duty” and not expect to stay for too long. In his view, a job is a transaction, one in which an employee provides a service, gets paid, and moves on. In addition to his duties at LinkedIn, Hoffman works as a partner at Greylock Capital, a top venture capital firm.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Spam is what the bad guys send, but we are the good guys. HubSpot has even created a promotional campaign, with T-shirts that say MAKE LOVE NOT SPAM . This is breathtaking and brazen. This is pure Orwellian doublespeak. Night is day, black is white, bad is good. Our spam is not spam. In fact it is the opposite of spam. It’s anti-spam. It’s a shield against spam—a spam condom. To me this seems like complete bullshit. Of course we’re creating spam. What else can you call it when you blast out email messages to millions of people? For years after I leave HubSpot I will continue to receive “lovable marketing content” from HubSpot marketing people. The messages are addressed “Dear Marketing Fellow” and offer a free software download or invite me to check out an e-book. Some are addressed to Heinz Doofensmirtz, the CEO of Doofensmirtz Evil, Inc., because I once filled out a form using that name, too. “Hi Heinz,” says a note from my good friend and former manager, Wingman. “Do you know the ROI on Doofensmirtz Evil, Inc.’s marketing efforts?” In December 2015, as I write this, I am still receiving them. Just this morning I got one from a “senior growth marketing manager,” offering me a six-hour course about inbound marketing and a certification. Once I pass an exam, I will get a “personalized badge and certificate.” I can add this to my LinkedIn profile, or even “proudly hang it on your desk,” my friend from HubSpot writes. I get loads of these emails, all sent under the names of real people at HubSpot, often from people I know and worked with, including Wingman. The emails are set up to look like actual personal email messages. Instead of coming from a generic address like offers@hubspot.com, they come from an individual’s HubSpot email address and include a sign-off with that person’s name and title and Twitter handle at the bottom, under a closing like, “All the best,” or “For the love of marketing.” This is what we learn in our training sessions. This is what we’re taught how to do. I can’t tell if the people around me actually believe this rubbish we’re being fed. They seem to, but maybe they’re just playing along. As for me, I am completely transfixed. I’ve never seen or heard anything like this. Have you ever received a call from one of those annoying telemarketers and wondered what it must be like on his end of the phone? How many people are in the room where he is sitting? How does he talk people into buying whatever he’s selling? How did he learn how to do this? How does he rationalize what he does? The online version of that telemarketer’s world is the one that I’ve now entered.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  I am asked whether I know how to use Facebook. Penny, the receptionist, tells me she wants to get off the reception desk and do something else, but she doesn’t know what. What do I think? I suggest a few roles—PR, HR, recruiting—but she doesn’t like those. “What else?” she asks. I tell her I don’t know. “Well what’s the point of having an old guy friend if you’re not going to give me any ideas?” she says. Spinner at one point comes up with an idea to get some publicity. “We should pitch a story about you working here at HubSpot, and how you’re learning a whole new thing,” she says. “We can call it ‘Old Dog, New Tricks.’” I look at her as if to say, You must be kidding. She tries to backpedal, saying she didn’t mean it as an insult. She thinks it’s really cool that I’ve joined this company with such a young culture and I’ve done such an awesome job of fitting in. I want to believe she means well. I tell her I’ll think about it. One day the women on the blog team spot an article by an “old guy” (Mark Duffy, age fifty-three) who works at BuzzFeed. WHAT IT’S LIKE BEING THE OLDEST BUZZFEED EMPLOYEE is the headline. Duffy depicts himself as a clueless doofus and illustrates the article with pictures of Benjamin Button, Grampa Simpson, and the crazy bald senior citizen from the Six Flags commercials, the one who wears a tuxedo and giant eyeglasses and dances around like a halfwit. The blog women think this BuzzFeed article is hilarious. “Dan, you should write something like that for us,” Jan says. “Yeah!” Ashley says. “Like, ‘What It’s Like Being the Token Old Guy at HubSpot.’ You’d be totes awesome at that!” “I hope you die a hundred pounds overweight, surrounded by cats that feast on your corpse”—is not what I say. What I do say is, “Wow, cool idea. That’s something to think about.” I smile. I laugh along with the joke. I’m old! I’m so goddamn old! I should totally write something funny about what it’s like to be this old! At one point I’m working on a project in the brand and buzz department, and one of the twenty-something bros coins a new nickname for me: “I’m going to call you Grandpa Buzz,” he says. Everyone laughs. I laugh too, because why not? Grandpa Buzz! It’s hilarious!

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  The Moth Bay dogs ceaselessly hump each other, copulating though they’re nothing but sacks of ribs and mange, as if they had no choice but to mate, a last ditch effort at immortality. A spastic, robotic rutting lacking in joy — like me and my hand and my photo collage. The proprietress warned me the townsfolk will set out poisoned meat tonight, as they do every year at this time, a ritual cleansing before the pilgrimage and influx of tourists. Tomorrow, before dawn, a noose of dead dogs will be tossed into the ocean. Tied tail to neck, in a distended necklace of bloated corpses, surreal killick that anchors this town to a medieval notion of purging its incestuous plague. The lariat of carrion will rock gently beneath the surface, so easy to tangle an ankle and be sucked down to doom. The water will turn filthy with jellyfish, feeding on the swollen bait. But no matter what the town does to eradicate the dogs, the proprietress says, they return and multiply, a virus. They reincarnate themselves, refusing to be exterminated. Like them, we paparazzi exist on the margins, fighting each other over scraps of humanity. We’re punched and kicked, flipped off, wished dead. The masses spit on us but buy the snaps we take, starving for more. We hound the perimeters, hated, but without us, the fiction falls apart. The spool of film crackles in my hand. I stumble from the closet and bump into Malele, the maid’s toddler. She follows me everywhere. Malele’s dress is dirty, her upper lip encrusted with dried snot. Her mother trails me through the house, sweeping after me, making me uneasy. She leaves cleanliness in her wake, silent except for the flap flap of her rubber slippers and the swish swish of her broom. The Strangler Fig 95 Malele and I have been teaching each other the names of colors. We point to the deadly oleander: pink. To the sleeping grass that snaps its leaves shut when touched: verde. To the prickly guanabana fruit that looks like an angry blowfish: green. To the bumblebee drowned in the pool: negro. To the poisonous angel’s trumpet flower: amarillo. We argue over the ocean’s color: Azul, she says. No, not blue, gray. To my hair: blanco. It turned white overnight, when I saw the faces — not from horror, but with terror that we would grow further apart as I aged while Kiara remained unchanged. A gecko click, click, clicks at us: brown. Malele stomps upon it with her bare foot. It scampers away, leaving its tail, and she runs after it. I pick up the gecko tail and carry it outside, flinging it on to the sand, where the rich insect life will make short work of it. The gecko will grow another tail, a nifty trick of rebirth.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.” You can hear Peale’s influence in Donald Trump’s speeches and social media posts half a century later. “Success tip: See yourself as victorious. This will focus you in the right direction. Apply your skills and talent—and be tenacious,” Trump tweeted in 2013. Upon launching his presidential campaign in 2016, Trump’s rants about self-reliance took a more paranoid turn. Early that year, when asked who he consults on foreign policy, he replied, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things. I know what I’m doing. . . . My primary consultant is myself.” From this complex history, the MLM—the uncanny lovechild of Protestantism, capitalism, and corporatization—was conceived. The Protestant ethic remains very much a part of professional culture as a whole in the United States, and we all grow up internalizing its rhetoric—work hard, play hard; another day, another dollar. My partner and I have an extensive collection of coffee mugs embellished with little sayings, and the other day, I looked up and noticed for the first time that they all just shamelessly evangelize toxic productivity dogma: One mug says “Sleep is for the weak”; another reads “A yawn is just a silent scream for coffee.” A silent scream? Are we all so conditioned to believe it’s romantic to be overworked and exhausted, so terrified of leisure and “laziness,” that we print cute jokes about it on drinkware? In twenty-first-century America, apparently so. The language of Protestant capitalism is everywhere—all the way down to our coffee mugs—but it plays a starring role in the MLM industry, which at once indulges Americans’ most quixotic aspirations and their gravest fears. It’s especially pronounced in the way MLMs stress meritocracy, the idea that money and status are individually earned. Meritocracy is founded on the tenet that people can control their lives in big ways, that as long as they really try, they can pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps. Americans love the mythology that successful people deserve their success while struggling people are simply less worthy. MLM recruits, whose “success” is entirely based on commission from selling and recruiting, relish this notion even more. Per MLM ideology, no win is unearned, regardless of what or who is sacrificed to achieve it. And no failure is undeserved, either. The majority of direct sales propaganda I’ve read emphasizes the “blood, sweat, tears, heart, and soul” necessary to build a sales team, urging sellers to view their efforts as a badge of patriotic honor and to wear it with a smile. Countless MLMs invoke nationalistic slogans to reinforce the idea that enlisting to be a #bossbabe means signing up to serve your country. One diet supplement MLM is literally named American Dream Nutrition; another is called United Sciences of America, Inc.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Sociologists also say that higher education and training in the scientific method generally make people less gullible. And for better or for worse, so does being in a bad mood. In several experiments, researchers found that when someone is in a good mood, they become more innocent and unsuspecting, while feeling grumpy makes one better at sensing deceptio n. Which has to be the most curmudgeonly superpower I’ve ever heard. v.My favorite line I’ve heard MLMers use to defend their business is “This isn’t a pyramid scheme. Corporate jobs are the REAL pyramid scheme.” It’s both a nonsense thought-terminating cliché and a flashing neon sign of us-versus-them conditioning. But while MLMs talk a lot of smack about corporate America and corporate America thinks of MLMs as a scammy joke, they are ultimately both derived from the same Protestant capitalist history. And the toxically positive fable that our society is a true meritocracy—that you can climb the ladder from the bottom to the top if you just work hard and have faith—imbues the rhetoric of our “normal” workforce, too. Many modern companies actively aim to gain a cult following in the image of companies like Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, and Ikea—brands that succeeded in cultivating extreme solidarity and loyalty among both employees and patrons. To learn more about the language of cultlike corporations, I hit up a Dutch business scholar and management consultant named Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries. Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley , tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Much better. Only two steps are required to get you started on this simple path to financial freedom: First, purchase a starter kit containing samples and marketing materials, which will cost you anywhere from $50 to $10,000 or more. Pennies, either way, for a new business owner’s initial start-up cost. Opening up a store or launching an e-commerce brand is so expensive, but getting in on this movement? Practically free when you think about it. Next step: Each month, recruit ten new members (sometimes it’s less, but often it’s not) to join your team, which you’ll want to give a jaunty nickname like the Diamond Squad or the Good Vibe Tribe, or maybe something cheeky like You Win Some, You Booze Some. This will help everyone feel bonded. Then, encourage each of those members to recruit ten monthly sellers of their own. You’ll take a small cut of all the earnings underneath you (from the starter kits and inventory your recruits purchase, and also from their product sales). The generation of sellers below you is called your “downline,” while the person who recruited you is your “upline.” Meanwhile, the MLM founder, sitting pretty at the very top of this tetrahedron, takes a cut of everything. In order to move product and grow a downline, you’ll need to spread the word about your amazing new business to everyone you know. To do this, you’ll be encouraged to host lots of parties, both IRL and online. You’ll want to buy snacks and wine, or spend hours concocting cute virtual activities to incentivize attendance. You’ll beseech guests to thumb through the brochures and lotions or whatever in hopes that they’ll buy something, or—better yet—want to sign up to sell the stuff themselves. It doesn’t matter if the company’s products are any good or fill a market demand, and neither does the fact that zero sales experience is required to come aboard. The typical rules of economics do not apply here. The system is promised to work no matter what. As long as you pay the buy-in fee, follow the company’s path precisely, and don’t ask too many questions, the American Dream itself will be yours. This pay-and-recruit pattern continues for each new group of recruits, affiliates, consultants, distributors, guides, ambassadors, presenters, coaches, or whichever entrepreneurial-sounding title the company chooses for its enrollees, who are made to feel special and chosen, even though literally anyone who ponies up can join. Money from recent joinees siphons to their upline, helping those above meet their monthly or quarterly sales quotas, which are disguised with friendlier-sounding labels like “goals” and “targets.” Fail to reach these periodic minimums? Expect to be demoted or kicked out of the company. That can’t happen.

• From Cultish (2021)

  (“Your riders should want to be you or fuck you” was a mantra instructors reportedly learned and internalized. One all-star openly referred to her riders as “little sluts.”) Some top instructors were known for verbally bullying riders and “lesser” employees, as well as stoking all the studio drama that surrounded them, relishing in their deification, like high school Queen Bees. Purportedly, SoulCycle HQ knew of and condoned the bad behavior, covering up complaints about its most prized instructors making bigoted side comments to riders and staff. (Let’s just say they involved the words “Aunt Jemima” and “twinks” and calling curvy staffers “not on brand.”) Reports of sexual harassment had allegedly been ignored, as well. The company “treated [instructors] like Hollywood stars anyway,” read one headline, which Natalia Petrzela DMed me the hour it broke. Insiders reported that higher-ups threw complaints in the trash, while bankrolling one implicated instructor’s $2,400 Soho House membership and rental Mercedes-Benz, like nothing happened. This news didn’t exactly come as a shock. “When you elevate instructors as godlike, abuses of power will follow,” Natalia tweeted. “It makes sense that we saw this kind of reckoning first in yoga, where leaders have long been revered as ‘gurus’; it was only a matter of time for instructors [with] a ‘cult following.’” I read a 2020 study from the European Journal of Social Psychology revealing that folks who received “spiritual training” in certain supernatural crafts like energy healing and lightwork were more prone to narcissistic tendencies (bloated confidence in their abilities, increased hunger for success and social approval, denigration of anyone lacking their self-evaluated superpowers, etc.). This was compared to people who hadn’t gone through any spiritual training at all, as well as students studying less performative disciplines, like meditation and mindfulness. The study showed that even as these gurus encouraged compassion and self-acceptance in others, their own egos swelled. “Master” SoulCycle instructors seem to display a similar response: existing pride in their natural charisma combined with the company’s extreme training is the recipe for a god complex closer to that of a 3HO Swami than an ordinary mortal employed to teach stationary cycling. As of this writing, SoulCycle hasn’t commented on the specific accusations or fired any alleged abusers. And CrossFit loyalists have ensured that their beloved culture—Hero WoDs, beast mode, and all—lives on, no matter the brand name. Some say the mark of a truly “successful cult” is the power to outlast the death or cancellation of its founder. In that case, CrossFit and SoulCycle, alongside Scientology and Amway, have prevailed—at least so far. Certainly the whitewashed, Protestant capitalism-fueled language of “namaslay,” “detoxing,” and “harder faster more” reflects (and perpetuates) oppressive standards that go beyond fitness. We can find talk of tribes and “push to your max” in so many American industries, from Wall Street to Hollywood to Silicon Valley. This language is pervasive and troublesome, no doubt, but its motives and impact are also importantly different from those of figures like Jim Jones, L.

• From Cultish (2021)

  And yet MLM rhetoric is such a successful assault on the human spirit, so consistently compelling and adaptable, that these companies only continue to thrive. In the 2010s, as ingredient-conscious millennials began overtaking the consumer market and demand for “all-natural” “nontoxic” personal care products increased, the shrewdest MLM founders accommodated. Direct sales wasn’t just for old-school Suzy Homemakers anymore, it was for the savvy youth. “Clean beauty” MLMs with chicer, updated packaging pivoted to populating their seller bases with “micro-influencers”—women with small blogs and a few thousand social media followers who could be tempted by an unctuous DM about how their feed is amazinggg and would they like to add a second stream of income while becoming part of the clean beauty “movement”?! Pairing deliciously with the glamorous image of a self-employed influencer, this hipper generation of MLMs pitched itself as the perfect side hustle. The nimble direct sales industry always finds a way to reinvent itself—the capitalist cockroach that just won’t stop reincarnating. iii. Hey lady! Just wanted to send a reminder that we’re in the business of changing lives here!! Yes, we’re making money, but it’s so much bigger than that . . . it’s a MOVEMENT. People deserve to be a part of it, they just don’t know it yet, so it’s up to you to show them the light!! You need to be reaching out to EVERYBODY . . . family, friends, Insta followers, the person behind you in line at Starbucks. Start up a conversation, and meet them where they’re at. Our products basically sell themselves, so if you’re not meeting your goals, you need to work HARDER and SMARTER like the boss babe you are. You have such potential. Don’t let me down, but more importantly, don’t let YOURSELF down!! xoxo * * * When my middle school friend Becca and I finally got on a call to talk about her MLM experience, it had been a decade since I’d last heard her voice. Becca, now twenty-eight, lives in a little white country house in Maryland with her husband, two dogs, and four cats. She works a nine-to-five and still plays the same local singing gig she did in high school—Friday nights at Backstage BBQ Cafe. She goes to AA several times a week and spends most evenings playing with her baby niece. “I know, look what’s become of me,” she quipped, sporting that old Becca sarcasm and the cozy fronted vowels of our hometown’s accent, which I never get to hear anymore. Becca knew from the jump that Optavia (formerly called Medifast) was a shifty venture. She could hear it. “All that marketing mumbo-jumbo? It was so cringe,” she affirmed.

• From Cultish (2021)

  I suppose I get what I deserve, then, when in the midst of a two-hour social media binge, I come across the profile of a spiritual guru named Bentinho Massaro. With an Instagram bio that reads “Synthesizer of Paths,” “True Scientist,” “Philosopher,” and “Mirror,” Massaro is a thirtysomething white dude who claims to vibrate at a higher frequency than other humans, higher even than Jesus Christ. Sporting forty thousand Insta followers, icy-blue eyes, a robust wardrobe of tight black T-shirts, and a confident voice cloaked in some indeterminate European accent, he reads like a cross between Teal Swan and Tony Robbins. A Hemsworth would definitely play him in the movie. About a dozen proverbial red flags erect in my frontal cortex. I click Follow. A deeper dive soon reveals that Bentinho Massaro was born in Amsterdam but relocated to Boulder, Colorado, and later to the occult mecca of Sedona, Arizona, to run pricey spiritual retreats. All the while, he puts spectacular effort into growing his web presence. Using a Silicon Valley–savvy social media strategy and a portfolio of snazzy websites, he aims to sell you . . . well, your soul. Costing as little as an Instagram follow or as much as $600 per hour on Skype, you can gain access to doses of Massaro’s sacred science—the answers to everything from how to cultivate profound personal relationships to how to become “a human god.” In his YouTube videos, Massaro sits close to the camera, creating the cozy atmosphere of a home gathering or a one-on-one conversation, as he expounds upon subjects like “The Inner Black Hole,” “Presence-Energy Vibration,” and “Cutting Through the Illusion of Mind.” Navigate over to his Instagram and you’ll find minute-long clips where Massaro just stares intensely into the lens, grinning, barely blinking, intermittently murmuring, “I love you.” He calls these parasocial gaze-offs his moments of “oneness—no separation between you or me.” Hundreds of supporters flood his comments with praise: “You are infinite intelligence, love/light,” “Thank you Ben for this wave of consciousness,” “MASTER, teacher, . . . YOU have an amazing ability . . . Please lead us.” Massaro’s ideology is, shall we say, eclectic. He believes in ancient aliens, asserts he can change the weather with his mind, and has announced that he doesn’t want children because he already has seven billion. It should sound familiar by now that Massaro insists he, and only he, possesses the “God’s-eye view” required to guide humanity toward heaven’s “absolute truth.” His teachings, he proclaims, will lead to the “cessation of suffering and endless bliss.” Massaro vows that over the course of any given earthling’s lifetime, they won’t access even “10 percent of what goes on in [his] consciousness in a single day.” His ultimate vision? To bring his internet fellowship offline, buy a big slab of land in Sedona, and build an enlightened new city. Amid lectures on paths, vibrations, and raising your frequency, some of Massaro’s rhetoric takes a grim turn.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Nevertheless, we get a memo saying that Zack is safe, that he is not leaving the company, that he will be assuming a new role and remains a valuable member of the team. But that’s bullshit. “He’s dead,” Trotsky tells me, in one of our first meetings. “He’s gotta go.” Trotsky explains that there is no way he can join a new company, take away a guy’s job, and then let that guy hang around. It’s not personal, but Zack has to go. “How are you going to get rid of him?” I ask. I find this stuff intriguing. I know nothing about office politics. Trotsky leans back on his beanbag chair. “I’m going to help Zack understand that he would be happier somewhere else,” he says. He smiles. He loves this shit, and I get the sense that he’s good at it. Sure enough, two months later, in March, we get an email from Cranium informing us that Zack is “graduating” in order to look for his next adventure. The whole thing is handled with a smile and a hug. Trotsky’s fingerprints are nowhere to be seen. Trotsky’s appointment also spells trouble for Marcia and Jan, the two women who run the blog. For years they have operated their own little fiefdom, pushing people around, ignoring orders, and playing favorites. They bullied Wingman and dismissed Zack. Trotsky makes it clear that he’s going to change the way they do things, and that, unlike Zack, he has real authority and is not afraid of them. One change has to do with e-books. The blog writers are supposed to coordinate their efforts with the e-book writers. If the e-book team creates a book about, say, how to use Snapchat to sell pet food, the blog should generate articles about Snapchat and pet food, and use those posts to promote the e-book. Instead, Marcia and Jan do whatever they want. They might write articles about Snapchat and pet food, or they might not. Some of it comes down to whether they like the person who wrote the e-book. Some of it hinges on whether they feel the e-book people were polite enough to them or gave them sufficient notice. If Marcia and Jan refuse to promote the e-book, the e-book just dies, because nobody finds it unless it gets mentioned on the blog. Over and over, the e-book writers crank out books only to see them die on a virtual shelf, because Marcia and Jan refuse to play ball. That bullshit is over, Trotsky says. The blog women might not like his decisions, but Cranium has brought him in to break up the logjam and dysfunction, something that Wingman has been unable to do.

• From Cultish (2021)

  With destructive groups like Scientology, the Moonies, the Branch Davidians, 3HO, The Way International (a fundamentalist Christian cult we’ll talk about later), and so many others, there is no longer a “sacred space” for that special language. Now words like “abomination,” “curse,” and “lower vibration” or whatever unique vocabulary the group uses holds that almighty power all the time. In American culture, religious language (particularly Protestant language) is everywhere, informing secular choices we make without us even explicitly noticing. I recently came across a frozen low-fat mac ’n’ cheese meal with the word “sinless” printed on the packaging. Conjuring the devil to talk about microwavable noodles felt a touch melodramatic, but that’s how deep religious talk runs in American culture: There are sinners and saints, and the latter choose 2 percent dairy. The permeable membrane between religion and culture is also what allows so many corners of the capitalist marketplace to call upon God to promote their products . . . including and especially the multilevel marketing industry (a cult category we’ll discuss in depth in part 4). Christian-affiliated direct sales companies like Mary Kay Cosmetics and Thirty-One Gifts encourage recruits by saying that God is actively “providing” them with the “opportunity” to sell makeup and tchotchkes . . . and to convert others to do so, as well. Billion-dollar businesswoman Mary Kay Ash was once confronted in an interview about her famous tagline: “God first, family second, Mary Kay third.” When asked if she thought she was using Jesus as a marketing ploy, she responded, “No, he’s using me instead.” iv. You could fill a book longer than this one with a list of all the thought- terminating clichés, loaded language, and us-versus-them labels cultish religions around the world use to convert, condition, and coerce their followers. To start, take a look at Shambhala, where thought-terminating clichés were disguised as wise Buddhist truisms. In 2016, ex-Shambhalan Abbie Shaw moved to the group’s idyllic Vermont commune to work the front desk and study meditation for what was only supposed to be a casual summer. A recent college graduate from California who’d relocated to New York City for a job in PR, Abbie missed the co-ops she’d lived in as a student at UC Santa Cruz. By her mid-twenties, Abbie was looking to press a spiritual reset button. That’s when she dropped into a Tibetan mindfulness class and quickly fell in love with its teachings of “basic goodness”—the idea that all beings are born whole and worthy, but become lost along the way. That’s why we meditate: to get our basic goodness back.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  HubSpot’s official response to the book was an essay called “Undisrupted,” attributed to Halligan and Shah. They admitted that claims in my book were accurate. Yes, HubSpot had diversity issues. Yes, they did call it “graduation” when they fired people—but they were going to stop doing that. Yes, Shah did bring a teddy bear to meetings, but he was going to continue the practice. The problem, however, was that the essay did not mention the hacking scandal or FBI investigation. Apparently someone had decided they could simply leave that out and no one would notice. Of course everyone noticed. “It is HubSpot’s response to the book that suggests it is as clueless as Lyons portrays it,” was how the Financial Times put it in its review of the book. The book hasn’t hurt HubSpot’s business or its stock price. Many HubSpot customers truly love the company and feel an almost religious devotion to Inbound marketing. They’ve been swept up in HubSpot’s narrative about being lovable and magical and making the world a better place. In September 2015, just weeks after the scandal broke, and at a time when he was still being sanctioned by the directors and investigated by the FBI, Halligan gave a keynote speech at the Inbound conference in front of thousands of adoring customers. Those people knew about the scandal, and didn’t care. HubSpot’s employees remain equally loyal. In December 2015 HubSpot was ranked fourth on a list of the top fifty places to work in the United States, based on an employee survey conducted by Glassdoor. Also near the top of the list was Zillow, the real estate website that has been sued by women claiming the company had an abusive, ageist, frat house culture. HubSpot scored higher than even Facebook and Google. A lot of its employees really, truly love the company and are happy there. I understand why. For the right kind of person, it’s a great place, with nice perks and a fun culture. Even former employees remain loyal to HubSpot and still love the company. I had a different experience. Where others saw a fun place to work, I saw a place where “old people”—those over forty, and certainly people over fifty— were largely unwanted, and the company made no secret of it. I saw astonishing uniformity and groupthink, and an incredible lack of diversity, based not just on age but also on race, euphemized as “culture fit.” I saw poorly trained managers, haphazard oversight, and an organization that was out of control. I know that HubSpot can be a fun place to work, that they put on an entertaining show at Inbound, and that at least some customers, maybe a lot of customers, derive real value from HubSpot’s software. But I fear that customers and employees are being naïve about the people they’re working for and doing business with. HubSpot has nineteen thousand customers.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  The problem is that the headline ideas come from Ashley, whose preferences lean toward BuzzFeed-style lists (“15 Reasons,” “7 Ways”) and Miley Cyrus. The idea is obviously cockeyed. A child could see that. Nevertheless, Zack allows Ashley to proceed. Zack believes that computers one day will do the work of content generation instead of humans. The BTG is just a first step, ushering in this brave new world. Ashley schedules countless meetings to “brainstorm” ideas and give us progress reports. At last, with great fanfare, Marcia, Jan, and Ashley launch the BTG. The project immediately blows up in their faces, because the BTG produces ridiculous, pointless results. A woman who runs a blog for a hospital complains in the comment section that she tried to use the BTG to generate ideas for Cervical Cancer Awareness Month and received the following: WHY WE LOVE CERVICAL CANCER (AND YOU SHOULD TOO!) and MILEY CYRUS AND CERVICAL CANCER: 10 THINGS THEY HAVE IN COMMON Those headlines are so good that I want to print them out in seventy-two- point headline typeface and paste them on the wall. The BTG is never spoken of again. But it remains online, because, as one manager tells me, if they take it down that might hurt Ashley’s feelings. Six months later, Ashley gets a promotion. These are the bozos. They are graspers and self-promoters, shameless resume padders, people who describe themselves as “product marketing professionals,” “growth hackers,” “creative rockstar interns,” and “public speakers.” They create websites to build their “personal brands,” with huge photos of themselves and lists of their accomplishments. They have a Toastmasters club, where they take turns giving presentations and sharing tips on the art of making PowerPoint slide decks. They dream up ridiculous activities, like having a scavenger hunt in Kendall Square or going kayaking on the Charles River. Marcia and Jan, who run the blog, decide to have a “content hackathon,” where they will round up a bunch of people and work late into the evening, brainstorming ideas for blog posts. On the day of the hackathon I’m packing my bag to go home when Olivia, an intern, asks why I’m leaving. I tell her I have two kids at home and dinner waiting for me, but in addition to that, I don’t see the point of pulling an all-nighter just to write some blog posts. She looks at me as if I’m an imbecile. “It’s a hackathon,” she says. “I know,” I say, “but why have a hackathon? If we need more blog posts, why can’t we just write a few extra posts over the next few weeks and bank them up?” She pauses.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  How can you get hundreds of people to work in sales and marketing for the lowest possible wages? One way is to hire people who are right out of college and make work seem fun. You give them free beer and foosball tables. You decorate the place like a cross between a kindergarten and a frat house. You throw parties. Do that, and you can find an endless supply of bros who will toil away in the spider monkey room, under constant, tremendous psychological pressure, for $35,000 a year. You can save even more money by packing these people into cavernous rooms, shoulder to shoulder, as densely as you can. You tell them that you’re doing this not because you want to save money on office space but because this is how their generation likes to work. On top of the fun stuff you create a mythology that attempts to make the work seem meaningful. Supposedly, Millennials don’t care so much about money, but they’re very motivated by a sense of mission. So, you give them a mission. You tell your employees how special they are, and how lucky they are to be here. You tell them that it’s harder to get a job here than to get into Harvard, and that because of their superpowers they have been selected to work on a very important mission to change the world. You make the company a team, with a team color and a team logo. You give everyone a hat and a T-shirt. You make up a culture code and talk about creating a company that everyone can love. You dangle the prospect that some might get rich. But Silicon Valley has a dark side. To be sure, there are plenty of shiny, happy people working in tech. But this is also a world where wealth is distributed unevenly and benefits accrue mostly to investors and founders, who have rigged the game in their favor. It’s a world where older workers are not wanted, where people get tossed aside when they turn forty. It’s a world where employers discriminate on the basis of race and gender, where founders sometimes turn out to be sociopathic monsters, where poorly trained (or completely untrained) managers abuse employees and fire people with impunity, and where workers have little recourse and no job security. In December 2014 Nicholas Lemann published an essay in the New Yorker contrasting the vision of work that Alfred P. Sloan, the legendary CEO of General Motors, described in his 1964 memoir, My Years with General Motors, with the vision laid out in a series of books published by executives from Google.