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 190 of 253 · 20 per page

• 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)

  Glass Explorers, they called themselves. Everyone else called them Glassholes. One thing I noticed during that day at Google was that none of our hosts—a bunch of executives from Google’s mobile phone division—wore Glass. That’s when I knew the gizmo was doomed. The suckers who plunked down good money for Glass can perhaps be forgiven for being naïve, but Andreessen and Doerr have no such excuse. They manage billions of dollars and are paid enormous sums of money because supposedly they know what they’re doing. Not coincidentally, Andreessen and Doerr also played leading roles in creating the new tech bubble, by (a) paying too much for investments, forcing other investors to overpay in order to keep up, and (b) investing huge resources into generating hype. Stock market manias are heaven for venture capitalists. Eugene Kleiner, a co-founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the legendary VC firm where Doerr works, once said: “Even turkeys can fly in a strong wind.” Kleiner Perkins was founded in 1972 and is one of the oldest, most respected VC firms in Silicon Valley. Kleiner’s maxim about flying turkeys is one of ten “Kleiner’s Laws,” a set of rules that people all over Silicon Valley still live by. Pump money into sales and marketing, generate enough hype, and you can sell almost anything if the market gets frothy enough. “I love bubbles,” Tom Perkins, another co-founder of Kleiner Perkins, once declared. “We made a lot of money in bubbles.” You can’t blame VCs for feeling this way. They are in the business of making money. Most, however, at least try to play the game with a certain amount of subtlety. Not so Andreessen and Doerr. Doerr joined Kleiner Perkins in 1980 and has been called “the Michael Jordan of venture capital,” a hall-of-fame moneyman, one of the best ever to play the game. Doerr’s big hits include Sun Microsystems, Amazon, Netscape, and Google. But somewhere in the 2000s he seemed to lose his touch, making bad bets on so-called cleantech (renewable energy) start-ups while missing out on big hits like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tesla. “Doerr made (Kleiner) the gold standard of venture firms” but he “is also largely responsible for the firm’s fall,” tech blog Pando wrote in 2013. Doerr has a degree in electrical engineering from Rice University and an MBA from Harvard. My theory is that when investing in start-ups required the ability to understand technology, he was without peer, but when the Valley turned its attention to social networks, photo filters, and games for teenagers, Doerr was out of his element, and so he started chasing fads. In 2008, when the iPhone became the cool new thing, he announced the iFund, to invest in app makers. In 2010, when Facebook got hot, he announced the sFund, to invest in social media companies. Doerr even started wearing a T-shirt and hoodie, just like Mark Zuckerberg. Forming the Glass Collective in 2013 was just another attempt to latch on to something trendy.

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

  All of the stuff about hospitals and Haitians and Huey Lewis is meant to distract us from noticing that Benioff doesn’t really have much to talk about other than warmed-over versions of old products. The misdirection works. People whoop and clap. They nod their heads as if they totally understand phrases like the Internet of customers , where people make decisions at superhuman speeds , and companies operate at the speed of now , as well as at the speed of sales . What sales and marketing people must do, someone informs us with great urgency, is race into the future a little faster than our customers, and get to the future first, and be ready to greet them when they arrive . Before you can try to figure out what that means, Dreamforce rolls on. Over the next few days the show features some of the biggest names in tech, like Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, HP CEO Meg Whitman, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Benioff has latched on to the “Women in Tech” crusade and made it his cause célèbre. “Powerful women” is a theme of the conference—yet oddly enough only four members of Benioff’s twenty-two member management team and only one member of his board of directors are female. Salesforce.com is run almost entirely by white men. But look—over there! It’s the prime minister of Haiti! And wait, hold on—is that thunder and lightning? Indoors? Is that a Tesla? From the future? On stage? Green Day plays a concert in AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. Alec Baldwin gives a talk. Tony Bennett and Jerry Seinfeld make appearances. It’s all part of what Salesforce.com describes as “dynamic programming to exhilarate the Dreamforce community.” Cavernous halls are lined with countless booths rented out by software makers hawking programs that work with Salesforce: add-ons, plug-ins, mobile apps. There’s a “connected devices playground” and a “Dreamforce hackathon.” There are more than a thousand breakout sessions and “success clinics,” where people can learn how to sell stuff. Two people dressed up in foam balls—the Salesforce.com mascots, SaaSy and Chatty—bounce around the conference, dancing awkwardly with legions of mostly white people. The final day features a speech by Deepak Chopra, noted charlatan and quack. He and Benioff are friends. Chopra rambles on about joy and meaning and interconnectedness and the importance of loving yourself. The old W. C. Fields line “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit” seems like the motto not just for Chopra but for the entire conference. Benioff and his philanthropy, the dry ice and fog machines, the concerts and comedians: None of this has anything to do with software or technology. It’s a show, created to entertain people, boost sales, and fluff a stock price. I roam the show floor, gazing at middle-aged salespeople in suits who sit on beanbag chairs staring at their phones, and tech bros in T-shirts and man buns playing Ping-Pong.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Mary Kay’s Career Conferences are known for their masterfully orchestrated recognition ceremonies. Recruits don’t just go for fun; these conventions are advertised as compulsory if a recruit really wants to “succeed.” Though rest assured the point isn’t to provide serviceable selling advice. It’s to paint the most extravagantly flattering portrait of the company possible, to lure already-committed recruits deeper in. The average Amway event reads like a cross between a Christian tent revival, a political rally, a football game, and a supersized family reunion. Some Amway conferences are literally called family reunions. More than any other MLM family, Amway wields unbelievable power—not just over people directly involved with the company, but over the entire American political system. Founded in 1959, Amway operates in a hundred countries and rakes in $9 billion a year, thanks to its network of four million distributors, called International Business Owners (IBOs). Amway is a Christian company whose fundamental message is that Americans have lost touch with the qualities that once made us great: individual freedom to achieve, traditional “American family values,” and unswerving devotion to God’s blessed America.* “I’m going to tell you what’s wrong with this country,” bellowed Dave Severn, one of the company’s unicorn-rare Executive Diamonds, at a 1991 rally. (Amway’s top titles are all named after precious gems and other treasures: Ruby, Pearl, Emerald, Diamond, Double Diamond, Triple Diamond, Crown, Crown Ambassador.) “They have allowed everything we stand for . . . to simply go down the tubes by hiring UN-CHRISTIAN PEOPLE to try and run a Christian-based society. . . . The Amway business is built on God’s laws .” Amway’s two deeply conservative founders were Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos, who died in 2004 and 2018, respectively. That second name should sound familiar: The DeVoses are a Michigan-based family of politically influential billionaires; Rich was the father-in-law of Donald Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy. With a personal net worth of over $5 billion, Rich DeVos served as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, was BFFs with Gerald Ford, secured special Amway tax breaks for hundreds of millions of dollars, and funneled prodigious sums into Republican presidential candidates’ coffers. Amway funded the campaigns of Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, and, naturally, the most direct-sales-friendly president of all time, Donald Trump. Throughout the 2010s, Trump made a killing from his endorsements of several MLMs . These included a vitamin company and a seminar company, both of which paid him seven figures for permission to use his likeness as a mascot and to rebrand as the Trump Network and Trump Institute. (In 2019, a federal judge ruled that Trump and his three children could be sued for frau d in connection with these organizations.) To return DeVos’s favors, these presidents all publicly lauded Amway and the Direct Selling Association in general as a commendable, profoundly patriotic enterprise.* Rich DeVos’s seventeenth-century interpretation of prosperity theology suggests that if you are not rich, then God does not love you.

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

  As with my first score, I don’t argue with Trotsky or try to haggle or negotiate. I just listen. The third category is VORP, the scoring system that Halligan borrowed from Major League Baseball. VORP stands for value over replacement player. VORP is a cruel, heartless metric, and it’s weird to set it right alongside HEART. It’s like putting a photo of Gordon Gekko next to a photo of the Dalai Lama. VORP is the opposite of HEART. It’s the anti-HEART. It’s HEART-less. In this category I figure I will get a one, or a zero, or even a negative number, if that’s possible. I’m being paid a lot of money to do a job that a summer intern could do, a job that originally was created as a part-time assignment for Cranium’s administrative assistant. Scheduling people for a podcast and fetching glasses of water for Cranium and his guests in the studio are not challenging tasks. My salary is pretty high. It’s actually higher than Trotsky’s, because he was clever enough to take a small salary in exchange for getting more stock options. Anyway, I’m getting paid like a top executive, and I’m doing secretarial work. My VORP must be the lowest of any employee in the history of the company. But Trotsky is benevolent. In VORP, he gives me a two. He shuts his MacBook Air. He looks at me. “So,” he says, “what do you think?” I think that I want to burst out laughing. Who can take this rubbish seriously? HEART? Really? I feel like I’ve fallen into a scene from Office Space . How can it be that the two of us are sitting in this ridiculous orange broom closet and talking about such risible bullshit? There is no data behind these scores. Trotsky is just pulling numbers out of his ass. Maybe he thinks that my feelings will be hurt. But I’ve just spent four months in Hollywood working with some of the best writers in TV, and I’ve been asked to come back for next season. In a few hours I’m going get an offer letter to write for one of the best-known tech blogs in the world. Trotsky can give me a score of negative one zillion and I won’t care. “Well,” I say, “those scores all sound very fair.” I’d really like to leave now, but the scores are only the beginning. Trotsky has a few more tricks up his sleeve. I’m starting to feel as if I am being detained by the police and subjected to interrogation without legal representation. Shouldn’t I get one phone call? Or something? In his very solemn voice, the one he uses when he’s really going to say something mean, and when he wants me to know that he really feels sorry that he has to tell me something so terrible about my character, Trotsky says there is another part to the performance review.

• From Cultish (2021)

  “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. I guess I could have predicted Becca wouldn’t be one of those wide-eyed hopefuls who accidentally finds themselves at the bottom of a pyramid scheme. Becca was well aware of Optavia’s tricky setup, but she was also confident she could game it by tapping into her massive network of Facebook friends. “I one hundred percent knew it was a cult,” she said. “But I was like, ‘Whatever, I’ll jump on that wagon.’ Like, let’s scam, you know?” “Sure, sure.” I gulped. Optavia is a weight loss program that delivers prepackaged meals to consumers’ homes, like Nutrisystem or BistroMD. “They definitely try to reel you in by saying all that ‘Be your own boss.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  universities for ideas, and to encounter groups or therapy to emit any “primed scream” of our pent-up emotions. Yet if we are truly aware, we can hear the silent screams of denied feelings echoing off every classroom wall and university corridor. And if we are sensitive enough, we can hear the creative thoughts and ideas that often emerge during and from the open expression of our feelings. Most of us consist of two separated parts, trying desperately to bring themselves together into an integrated soma, where the distinctions between mind and body, feelings and intellect, would be obliterated. Who can bring into being this whole person? From my experience I would say that the least likely are university faculty members. Their traditionalism and smugness approach the incredible. I remember with something approaching horror the statement of a Columbia University professor shortly after buildings were seized and campus turmoil erupted among the students, who could not be heard in any other way. This professor told me, “There’s no problem of communication at Columbia. Why, I speak to students almost every day.” He sounded like a southern slaveowner in the 1850s. No, I think that if change is to come about in dealing with ourselves and others as complete somas with thought and feeling intertwined, it will be the younger generation who achieve it. They are throwing off the shackles of tradition. They have largely discarded the religious dogmas that proclaimed the body evil and only the mind and spirit capable of good. They are a strong hope against the dichotomized, dehumanized being who can drop bombs on Vietnamese civilians, and handle this quite comfortably at the intellectual level. (In his mind, he has not murdered people, or torn flesh from bone: he has only engaged in “a protective reaction strike.”) Only the younger generation, I believe, can help us to see the awful dehumanization we have bred in our educational system by separating thoughts, which are to be approved, from feelings, which are somehow seen as animal in origin. Perhaps the young can make us whole again. God knows we need once more to be unified organisms, responsive to all of ourselves and all of our environment.

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

  Because they’re Andreessen Horowitz.” Andreessen is a physically imposing man: six feet, four inches tall and heavyset, with an enormous shaved head. He’s an avid Twitter user, sometimes posting more than one hundred tweets a day, pontificating and picking fights. When Warren Buffett expressed skepticism of Bitcoin, a technology in which Andreessen has invested heavily, Andreessen called Buffet “an old white man crapping on tech he doesn’t understand.” Andreessen was quite literally the poster boy for the first dotcom bubble, posing for a February 1996 Time cover sitting barefoot on a throne, a millionaire boy king, twenty-four years old. The first bubble, I believe, became a formative experience for Andreessen and shaped his behavior when he entered the venture capital business. As an entrepreneur, Andreessen had a mixed record. Netscape got crushed by Microsoft and started losing money but nevertheless was acquired by AOL for $10 billion. After Netscape, Andreessen founded Loudcloud, which went public when it was only eighteen months old and had barely any revenues. Later, Loudcloud became Opsware, was split into two pieces, and sold for $1.6 billion, despite never reporting an annual profit. In 2005 Andreessen co-founded Ning, a social network that fizzled out. At some point it seems to have dawned on Andreessen that the people who make the most money in Silicon Valley are not the ones who found companies or run them, but rather the ones who put up the capital. (At Netscape, he reportedly made as much as $100 million, while his investor and co-founder, Jim Clark, made $2 billion.) In 2009 Andreessen and his friend and former business partner Ben Horowitz launched Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, as it is known. (The name is a “numeronym,” a way of shortening a word or phrase by using a number to represent the number of letters that have been left out. A , then sixteen letters, then Z . Tech geeks love stuff like this.) Andreessen and Horowitz developed a reputation for overpaying to get into deals, offering valuations that I’ve been told were 30 percent higher than what other venture capitalists would pay. They also recognized the value of publicity. One of the first partners they hired was Margit Wennmachers, a veteran Silicon Valley public relations specialist known for her sharp elbows. They’ve since hired more PR people, as well as journalists and researchers who produce blog posts, podcasts, and market analysis reports—their own little content factory. Horowitz wrote a book about his experience as an entrepreneur and posed for a Fortune magazine cover with his hands wrapped like a boxer, though he apparently does not actually box. He hangs out with rappers and spouts rap lyrics, cultivating a streetwise image—though in fact he was born in London and grew up in Berkeley, and his father is David Horowitz, a well-known author and conservative commentator. As the tech blog Valleywag summed it up, “Ben Horowitz Is Desperate for You to Think He’s Cool.” Andreessen and Wennmachers assiduously court the press.

• From Cultish (2021)

  “Can you imagine having to look up the word ‘of’?” Cathy asked me. (As a linguist, I actually could, yes, though certainly not on Scientology’s terms.) Graduating from Key to Life is considered extremely prestigious just because you’ve invested so many hours of tedium into the church. * MLMers are willing to turn any tragedy—from a cancer diagnosis to a worldwide pandemic—into an opportunity to sell and recruit. It didn’t take long after COVID-19 ravaged the US in early 2020 for MLM recruits to start making public claims that their products could protect against both the virus and financial insecurity. The Federal Trade Commission sent warnings to over fifteen direct sales companies, including Arbonne, dōTERRA, and Rodan + Fields, after their affiliates blew up social media with images of “immunity-boosting” essential oils, captioned with the hashtags “#covid #prevention,” and verbiage like “RODAN and FIELDS is always open for business even during quarantine! I’ve been working from home for over 3 years now and still making money when other people aren’t! Isn’t it about time you found out what it is I do and how this company really works? . . . #workfromhome #financialfreedom.” * The full quote from which this idiom purportedly derives reads, “This Text holdeth their noses so hard to the grindstone, that it clean disfigureth their faces,” a reference to working hard to avoid punishment. It was written in 1532 by John Frith, a Protestant priest who was burned at the stake a few months later for publicly questioning the English Catholic Church. Isn’t blending church and state fun? * “American family values” is a classic piece of loaded language weaponized by the political right to condemn abortion, gay marriage, and feminist politics as inherently anti-American. * Even Democrats have accepted DeVos money in exchange for public praise—Bill Clinton took home $700,000 in 2013 after speaking at an Amway conference in Osaka, Japan. * This is a real workout that exists in LA at a studio called Sandbox Fitness. In a room covered in actual sand, clients mount stationary surfboards and perform a variety of nearly impossible strength exercises aided by resistance bands dangling from the ceiling. I learned of this unusual torture from a modelesque action film star whom I interviewed for a magazine article in 2017. “You get so ripped,” she gushed, her pupils dilating. “I do it every morning. You have to try it.” * Then in 2016, an attendee got injured in Manuel-Davis’s class and filed a lawsuit. To the devastation of her many acolytes, Manuel-Davis resigned from SoulCycle in 2019 to launch a boutique fitness cult of her own called AARMY, in partnership with another former SoulCycle idol named Akin Akman, whose loyal gaggle of fiendish riders were known as “Akin’s Army.” * In some cases, getting “seriously ripped” can cost you your vital organs.

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

  I say hello when I come to work and goodbye when I’m leaving, and that’s about it. Trotsky’s trouble with Spinner is just beginning, however. For whatever reason, she has decided that she hates him, and she’s waiting for another reason to pounce. One night, foolishly, he gives her an opportunity. It starts when Trotsky writes a Facebook post about the Ban Bossy campaign that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is promoting. Sandberg wants everyone to stop using the word bossy to describe girls. Trotsky says that instead of using her bully pulpit to pursue something as trivial as the word bossy , Sandberg should dedicate herself to more important issues, like the plight of the African elephant, which is on the verge of extinction. Trotsky loves elephants. He’s always ranting about the awful poachers who kill them for their ivory. I have no idea how elephants became so dear to him, or how his mind makes the illogical leap from Sheryl Sandberg’s feminist crusade to the issue of elephant poaching. I also don’t care. Spinner, however, does. She goes ballistic. Instead of bringing the issue up at work and talking to Trotsky privately, she leaps into Trotsky’s Facebook post and starts adding comments bashing him for not taking women’s rights seriously enough. She says Trotsky needs to think about the message he is sending to the talented and intelligent women who work for him at HubSpot. What will they think when they read his post? They will feel neglected. They will feel that he cares more about elephants than he does about them. This is insane. It’s also a strange move for a PR person to make. We’re all supposed to be “solving for enterprise value” and protecting the brand at all costs. Why attack your company’s newest vice president, a guy who is two levels above you in the org chart, and do it in public, on Facebook? What is she thinking? I’m starting to suspect that Spinner might be a little bit unhinged. I definitely think Trotsky is unhinged. He gets into fights on Facebook, and goes on and on, like a dog with a bone. But this is even better, because just like Trotsky, Spinner loves to fight and will never back down. For two days they go back and forth, trading insults on Facebook. It’s like watching monkeys throw their shit at each other. It’s ugly, and stupid, and the best thing ever. Spinner lectures Trotsky about feminism, and Trotsky scolds Spinner about elephants. Soon other people—some from HubSpot, some just friends of Trotsky or Spinner—start chiming in, taking sides and egging them on. The argument degenerates to the level of seventh graders trading insults in the schoolyard. Neither one of them will give up. Every time you think it’s over, one of them lobs another grenade. Trotsky sends me email and tells me he’s done, he’s not going to take the bait anymore.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  38 In this arid region, Jericho’s ample food stores would have been a magnet for hungry nomads. Intensified agriculture, therefore, created conditions that could endanger everyone in this wealthy colony and transform its arable land into fields of blood. Jericho was unusual, however—a portent of the future. Warfare would not become endemic in the region for another five thousand years, but it was already a possibility, and from the first, it seems, large-scale organized violence was linked not with religion but with organized theft. 39 Agriculture had also introduced another type of aggression: an institutional or structural violence in which a society compels people to live in such wretchedness and subjection that they are unable to better their lot. This systemic oppression has been described as possibly “the most subtle form of violence,” 40 and, according to the World Council of Churches, it is present whenever “resources and powers are unequally distributed, concentrated in the hands of the few, who do not use them to achieve the possible self-realization of all members, but use parts of them for self-satisfaction or for purposes of dominance, oppression, and control of other societies or of the underprivileged in the same society.” 41 Agrarian civilization made this systemic violence a reality for the first time in human history. Paleolithic communities had probably been egalitarian because hunter-gatherers could not support a privileged class that did not share the hardship and danger of the hunt. 42 Because these small communities lived at near-subsistence level and produced no economic surplus, inequity of wealth was impossible. The tribe could survive only if everybody shared what food they had. Government by coercion was not feasible because all able-bodied males had exactly the same weapons and fighting skills. Anthropologists have noted that modern hunter-gatherer societies are classless, that their economy is “a sort of communism,” and that people are honored for skills and qualities, such as generosity, kindness, and even-temperedness, that benefit the community as a whole. 43 But in societies that produce more than they need, it is possible for a small group to exploit this surplus for its own enrichment, gain a monopoly of violence, and dominate the rest of the population. As we shall see in Part One, this systemic violence would prevail in all agrarian civilizations. In the empires of the Middle East, China, India, and Europe, which were economically dependent on agriculture, a small elite, comprising not more than 2 percent of the population, with the help of a small band of retainers, systematically robbed the masses of the produce they had grown in order to support their aristocratic lifestyle. Yet, social historians argue, without this iniquitous arrangement, human beings would probably never have advanced beyond subsistence level, because it created a nobility with the leisure to develop the civilized arts and sciences that made progress possible.

• 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)

  Maybe Benioff is oblivious to the phallic symbolism, or maybe he doesn’t care, or maybe—and this is my theory—he knows exactly what he’s doing and he loves it. Mine’s bigger! It’s the biggest! For P. T. Benioff there is no end to the extravagant spending. At the 2015 Dreamforce he docks a one-thousand-foot-long luxury ocean liner at pier 27 to serve as a hotel and party space—the Dreamboat, he calls it. Salesforce.com still isn’t turning a profit, but thanks to Benioff’s huffing and puffing Salesforce.com’s market value has topped $50 billion and Benioff’s own net worth has swollen to $4 billion. Benioff has invented a form of financial alchemy, one where he makes money by losing money. The more Benioff squanders on parties, the richer he gets. Looking down from my hotel window in November 2013, I realize that things are playing out exactly the way Tad, my investment banker friend, told me they would when I met him for a drink just one year ago at Anchor & Hope. This is what a trillion-dollar wealth transfer looks like. Across the country, in New York, bonuses on Wall Street are going to be the highest they’ve been since 2007, before the crash. In 2013, there will be more IPOs than in any year since the dotcom bubble peaked in 2000, and in 2014 there will be even more, according to Renaissance Capital, a company that tracks the IPO market. Surely it cannot end well when a bunch of money-losing companies go racing into the public markets, and when risk that previously was confined to private investors gets shifted onto the public. Nevertheless, the Fed keeps printing money, and the stock market keeps going up. The ducks are quacking, and the VCs are racing for the exits, launching IPOs as fast as they can. Somehow I find myself sitting in the middle of the maelstrom. Part of me finds the whole thing appalling. But another part still hopes to profit from it. Fourteen [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] Meet the New BossI ’m still in San Francisco when I get an urgent message from Wingman asking me to call him. There’s some big news, he tells me. The company is about to announce an important new hire—a guy named Trotsky. Trotsky will oversee HubSpot’s content operations and thus will now be my boss, instead of Wingman. On the phone, Wingman keeps talking about Trotsky as if he’s a celebrity. Finally I confess to Wingman that I’ve never heard of Trotsky. I’m a little bit embarrassed to admit this, but who is this person and why is it a big deal that he’s joining HubSpot? Wingman seems taken aback. “He was content marketer of the year in 2012,” he says. “Oh, right,” I say, as if I’ve heard of that award. I feel a twinge of sadness that such a thing even exists. “It’s pretty huge for us to get him,” Wingman says. “I can imagine,” I say. “That’s great.

• From Cultish (2021)

  (For example, as soon as objects start traveling faster than the speed of light, we’ll know that Einstein got his Theory of Special Relativity wrong.) But you can’t prove that brainwashing doesn’t exist. The minute you say someone is “brainwashed,” the conversation ends there. No room is left to explore what might actually be motivating the person’s behavior—which, as it turns out, is a much more interesting question. When tossed around to describe everyone from a political candidate’s supporters to militant vegans, the terms “cult” and “brainwashing” acquire a sort of armchair-therapist éclat. We all love a chance to feel psychologically and morally superior without having to think about why, and calling a whole bunch of people “brainwashed cult followers” does just that. This negative bias is detrimental because not all “cults” are depraved or perilous. Statistically, in fact, few of them are. Barker (our London School of Economics sociologist) says that out of the thousand-plus alternative groups she’s documented that have been or could be described as “cults,” the vast majority have not been involved with criminal activity of any kind. Moore and Barker note that fringe communities only gain publicity when they do something awful, like Heaven’s Gate and Jonestown. (And even those groups didn’t set out with murder and mayhem in mind. After all, Jonestown started out as an integrationist church. Things escalated as Jim Jones grew hungrier for power, but most “cults” never spiral as catastrophically as his did.) A feedback loop of scandal is created: Only the most destructive cults gain attention, so we come to think of all cults as destructive, and we simultaneously only recognize the destructive ones as cults, so those gain more attention, reinforcing their negative reputation, and so on ad infinitum. Equally troubling is the fact that the word “cult” has so frequently been used as permission to trash religions that society just doesn’t approve of. So many of today’s longest-standing religious denominations (Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, Quakers, Jews, and most Native American religions, to name a few) were once considered unholy blasphemies in the United States—and this was a nation founded on religious freedom. Today, American alternative religions (oppressive and not), from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Wiccans, are widely regarded as “cults.” The Chinese government insistently decries the cultish evils of new religion Falun Gong, despite its peaceful tenets, which include patience and compassion through meditation.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Under Mary Tudor, Edmund Bonner, Catholic bishop of London, tried fifteen times to rescue the Protestant John Philpot, six times to save Richard Woodman, and nine times to redeem Elizabeth Young. 54 Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists could all find biblical texts to justify the execution of heretics. 55 Some quoted scriptural teachings that preached mercy and tolerance, but these kinder counsels were rejected by the majority. Yet even though thousands were indeed beheaded, burned, or hanged, drawn and quartered, there was no headlong rush to martyrdom. The vast majority were content to keep their convictions to themselves and conform outwardly to state decrees. Calvin inveighed against such cowardice, comparing closet Calvinists to Nicodemus, the Pharisee who kept his faith in Jesus secret. But “Nicodemites” in France and Italy retorted that it was easy for Calvin to take this heroic line while living safely in Geneva. 56 Under Elizabeth I, there was a strong cult of martyrdom only among the Jesuits and seminarians training for the English mission who believed that their sacrifice would save their country. 57 But recruits were also warned against excessive enthusiasm. A manual of the English College in Rome during the 1580s pointed out that not everybody was called to martyrdom and that no one should put himself at risk unnecessarily. 58 The one thing on which Catholics and Protestants could agree was their hatred of the Spanish Inquisition. But despite its gruesome reputation, the crimes of the Inquisition were exaggerated. Even the auto-da-fé (“declaration of faith”), with its solemn processions, sinister costumes, and burning of heretics, which to foreigners seemed the epitome of Spanish fanaticism, was not all it was cracked up to be. The auto-da-fé had no deep roots in Spanish culture. Originally a simple service of reconciliation, it took on this spectacular form only in the mid-sixteenth century and after its brief heyday (1559–70) was held very rarely. Moreover, the burning of the recalcitrant was not the centerpiece of the ritual: the accused were usually put to death unceremoniously outside the city, and scores of autos were held without a single execution. After the Inquisition’s first twenty years, less than 2 percent of those who were accused were convicted, and of these most were burned in effigy in absentia. Between 1559 and 1566, when the auto was at the peak of its popularity, about a hundred people died, whereas three hundred Protestants were put to death under Mary Tudor; twice that number were executed under Henry II of France (r. 1547–59), and ten times as many were killed in the Netherlands. 59 Very few Protestants were killed by the Spanish Inquisition; most of its victims were the “New Christians.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The number 666 signifies the very name of this imperial monster in Hebrew letters, rs'qi @woonoe , Neron Kaesar, as follows: n (n) = 50, r (r) = 200, / (o) = 6, @ (n) = 50, q (k) = 100, s (s) = 60, r (r) = 200; in all 666. The Neronian coins of Asia bear the inscription: Nerwn Kai'sar. But the omission of the iy (which would add 10 to 666) from rsyq = Kai'sar, has been explained by Ewald (Johanneische Schriften, II. 263) from the Syriac in which it is omitted, and this view is confirmed by the testimony of inscriptions of Palmyra from the third century; see Renan (L’Antechrist, p. 415). The coincidence, therefore, must be admitted, and is at any rate most remarkable, since Nero was the first, as well as the most wicked, of all imperial persecutors of Christianity, and eminently worthy of being characterized as the beast from the abyss, and being regarded as the type and forerunner of Antichrist. This interpretation, moreover, has the advantage of giving the number of a man or a particular person (which is not the case with Lateinos), and affords a satisfactory explanation of the varians lectio 616; for this number precisely corresponds to the Latin form, Nero Caesar, and was probably substituted by a Latin copyist, who in his calculation dropped the final Nun (= 50), from Neron (666 less 50=616). The series of Roman emperors (excluding Julius Caesar), according to this explanation, is counted thus: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba. This makes Nero (who died June 9, 68) the fifth, and Galba the sixth, and seems to fit precisely the passage 17:10: "Five [of the seven heads of the beast] are fallen, the one [Galba] is, the other [the seventh] is not yet come; and when he cometh he must continue a little while." This leads to the conclusion that the Apocalypse was written during the short reign of Galba, between June 9, 68, and January 15, 69. It is further inferred from 17:11 ("the beast that was, and is not, is himself also an eighth, and is of the seven; and he goeth into perdition"), that, in the opinion of the seer and in agreement with a popular rumor, Nero, one of the seven emperors, would return as the eighth in the character of Antichrist, but shortly perish. This plausible solution of the enigma was almost simultaneously and independently discovered, between 1831 and 1837, by several German scholars, each claiming the credit of originality, viz.: C. F. A. Fritzsche (in the "Annalen der gesammten Theol. Liter.," I. 3, Leipzig, 1831); F. Benary (in the "Zeitschrift für specul. Theol.," Berlin, 1836); F. Hitzig (in Ostern und Pfingsten, Heidelb., 1837); E. Reuss (in the "Hallesche Allg. Lit.-Zeitung" for Sept., 1837); and Ewald, who claims to have made the discovery before 1831, but did not publish it till 1862.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He well knew how to use the dissatisfaction of the clergy, of the empress Eudoxia, and of the court with Chrysostom on account of his moral severity and his bold denunciations.1539 In Chrysostom’s own diocese, on an estate "at the oak"1540 in Chalcedon, he held a secret council of thirty-six bishops against Chrysostom, and there procured, upon false charges of immorality, unchurchly conduct, and high treason, his deposition and banishment in 403.1541 Chrysostom was recalled indeed in three days in consequence of an earthquake and the dissatisfaction of the people, but was again condemned by a council in 404, and banished from the court, because, incensed by the erection of a silver statue of Eudoxia close to the church of St. Sophia, and by the theatrical performances connected with it, he had with unwise and unjust exaggeration opened a sermon on Mark vi. 17 ff., in commemoration of John the Baptist with the personal allusion: "Again Herodias rages, again she raves, again she dances, and again she demands the head of John [this was Chrysostom’s own name] upon a charger."1542 From his exile in Cucusus and Arabissus he corresponded with all parts of the Christian world, took lively interest in the missions in Persia and Scythia, and appealed to a general council. His opponents procured from Arcadius an order for his transportation to the remote desert of Pityus. On the way thither he died at Comana in Pontus, A.D. 407, in the sixtieth year of his age, praising God for everything, even for his unmerited persecutions.1543