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.

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

  One popular test is called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. HubSpot uses a methodology called DISC, which stands for four basic personality types: dominant, influential, steady, and conscientious. You can be a mix of more than one trait—a D with a little bit of C mixed in, for example. The basic idea on all of these things is that you answer a zillion random questions, and a piece of software analyzes your answers to determine what kind of person you are. You do the test online. In the DISC assessment, you’re presented with statements to which you must answer yes or no. I am a neat and orderly person. I like peace and quiet. I am very persuasive. I am a very modest type. A week or so after filling out my questionnaire I am sent to a meeting where I will find out my results. It’s a group encounter, with about twenty people. I’m the only person from my department. The others seem to be mostly from sales. I don’t know any of them. DISC is based on concepts created in 1928 by a psychologist named William Marston, who also created the comic book character Wonder Woman. That tells you pretty much all you need to know about DISC. Other people picked up Marston’s concepts in the 1950s and 1970s, and used them to create personality assessment tests. The ideas are pretty much hogwash, and to make things worse, they are put into practice by people with no psychological training or expertise. At HubSpot, the assessment program is overseen by Dave, the energetic goateed heavy-metal guitarist who runs the company training program. Dave is assisted by a middle- aged woman named Deb, who sports dramatic eyewear. The day begins with Dave and Deb explaining the four traits to us. No trait is better than any of the others. There are no bad traits and no good traits. They are all just different. We do an exercise where we all have to guess which type we think we are. Then we open our packets and find out the truth. It turns out I’m a D, which means the kind of person who hates sitting through personality assessment encounter groups and team-building exercises. I guessed right. I’m hoping that the meeting is over, but in fact we’re booked to be in this room for half a day, and, sure enough, now that we’ve all opened our packets, it’s time for the dreaded role-playing games. The big theory behind DISC is that if you know what kind of person you’re dealing with, you can understand how to interact with them. Someone like me, with a D personality, is probably going to have trouble working with a C personality, because my personality type tends to be impatient, overbearing, and judgmental, and C personalities tend to be lazy nitwits.

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

  KPI means key performance indicator, or what are the goals of this project.” Put them all together, and what Marcia was saying was that she and Jan would be in charge of the project—they’ll be the DRIs—and they would try to figure out some suggested goals for the project, meaning the KPIs, and once they had those in place then the two teams, blog and e-book, could go over the goals and revise them, and finally agree on which things each side needs to do for the other on a monthly basis. That agreement will form the SLA, or service-level agreement. Both teams need to bear in mind that they need to create some content for new prospects—the TOFU people—and different content for leads that are already in our system, or MOFU. All of the content should be aimed at SMBs, and all of the ideas should be based on what customers need, rather than what the writers think is interesting, because at HubSpot we’re supposed to always solve for the customer, or SFTC. I want to tell Zack that they all need to STFU because WTF does any of this have to do with how ordinary human beings actually speak to one another. Instead, I try a more diplomatic approach. “Why don’t we just say, ‘Who’s going to be in charge of this?’ And instead of asking about KPIs, we could say, ‘What are the goals?’ That would be like speaking English. You know what I mean?” Zack says he does know what I mean. He majored in English at college. But these are the terms people use here. HubSpot has its own language, with so many terms and acronyms that they’ve created a special page on the corporate wiki where new people, like me, can look things up. HubSpeak is what I start calling it, but only to myself. Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech start-ups seem to be especially prone to groupthink. Drinking the Kool-Aid is a phrase everyone in Silicon Valley uses to describe the process by which ordinary people get sucked into an organization and converted into true believers. Apple and Google are famous for being filled with Kool-Aid drinkers. But every tech start- up seems to be like this.

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

  Cranium believes he is a marketing genius. He has people surrounding him who believe that, too. But sometimes I wonder if Cranium knows what he’s doing. One of his ploys to get attention involves publishing an article on Mashable, a technology news site, with the provocative headline 10 REASONS WHY I IGNORED YOUR RESUME. In the article Cranium makes fun of the awful resumes he fields in his position as a world-famous marketing superstar. Cranium says people need to proofread their resumes, catch typos, and spell things correctly— but his article contains typos, and includes a reference to the actor Will Ferrell, but misspells his name as Will Farrell. Some readers post comments praising the article, but others savage Cranium, not only for the Will Ferrell mistake and typos, but for his snooty tone. “Would anyone want to work for HubSpot after the CMO writes something like this?” one person writes. “All the money in the world as payment would not be enough to work for this moron,” another commenter writes. “Someone has a power/ego problem,” says a third. Cranium perceives himself as being skilled at recruiting and hiring, yet turnover in his department is so high that people in other parts of HubSpot refer to the marketing department as “the French Revolution.” People are constantly being hired and fired, or “graduated,” as Cranium says in his emails to the group. I keep making friends, only to have them disappear. These “graduations” sometimes happen suddenly, with no warning. In my second week at HubSpot I have lunch with a woman named Bettina. She’s right out of college, working in her first job, and wants to write a book about marketing to Millennials. That night everyone in the department gets an email saying Bettina has “graduated” and will not be back in the morning. I email Bettina and ask why she never mentioned this at lunch. She tells me she didn’t know. Her boss just fired her, out of the blue, and told her to never come back. Usually, Cranium has other people do the firing for him, and he typically does not speak to the “graduates,” even in cases where the person being fired has spent years working in his department. Before my time, Cranium created a weekly video podcast called HubSpot TV, starring himself and a co-host. The show streamed live, every Friday afternoon. I can’t imagine many people outside HubSpot actually watched it. Cranium didn’t care! He and his co-host kept doing the podcast for four years and recorded 225 episodes. Those videos still exist online someplace.

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

  At Halloween I do the same thing, roping people in for photographs, snapping away as they strike crazy poses and act like they’re the shit. Along with his constant stream of happiness surveys, Cranium asks us to submit suggestions (anonymously) for new ways we could all have fun at work. “Sundaes on Mondays” is one of my ideas—every Monday, Cranium should truck in a huge supply of ice cream and toppings so we can all make sundaes. Another week I suggest that we should take the hammock out of the nap room, replace it with a massage table, and hire full-time massage therapists. Neither idea succeeds. In meetings, where previously I would say as little as possible, I now pitch the most ridiculous ideas I can think of, while keeping a straight face. One day Trotsky convenes about a dozen of us with the goal of coming up with big, new, outside-the-box ideas, revolutionary approaches to marketing that will put HubSpot on the map. He says he’s looking for a “Thom Yorke moment,” referring to the singer from Radiohead, who in September 2014 sidestepped the entire music industry and put out a new album as a bundle on BitTorrent, got millions of downloads, and earned $20 million, without having to deal with a record label. We’ve had a week or so to come up with our own ideas that are as revolutionary as the one Thom Yorke had. When it’s my turn, I pitch this: “We take five thousand one-dollar bills, and we stamp the word HubSpot on each one, in big red letters, along with our web address. We take the dollar bills to a city— let’s say it’s Cincinnati, because my brother lives there, but it doesn’t matter which city. We scatter the dollar bills—all over the city. It’s a metaphor for marketing. Do you get it?” They don’t. The women from the blog team stare at me with hate-filled eyes. I can’t tell if that’s because they don’t like my idea or because they just hate me. “Right now the way we get customers,” I say, “is we take millions of dollars and we pay people to create content on a blog. Then we hope that some tiny fraction of the people who see our content eventually turn into customers. Our conversion rate is tiny. “I propose we cut out the middleman—that’s us—and just literally give the money away. People in Cincinnati start spotting these bills all over the place. They start wondering what’s going on. The press gets wind of it. The local paper does a story. Then we get on local TV. Halligan talks about his crazy marketing scheme. It’s free coverage! Let’s say, after all this, we get one new customer in Cincinnati. We just spent five thousand bucks and got a customer. That’s way better than our current customer acquisition cost.”

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  He issued a direct and disturbing challenge to the Confucians and Mohists. The family li had insisted that a person’s life was not his own. Heaven had allotted humans a fixed life span, so if you put your life in danger, you violated Heaven’s will. Now that life at court had become so dangerous, it was clearly wrong to seek political office. 9 Yangists, therefore, made a principled retreat from public life. They argued that Yao and Shun had not retired from government out of humility, as the Confucians believed, but because they refused to put their own or other people’s lives at risk. Yangists liked to quote the example of Tan Fu, an ancestor of the Zhou kings, who had renounced the throne rather than fight an invading army: “To send to their deaths the sons and younger brothers of those with whom I dwell is more than I could bear,” he explained in his abdication speech. 10 Yangists had no time for either ren or “concern for everybody.” Their philosophy was “Every man for himself.” 11 This seemed monstrously selfish to the Confucians, who complained that if Yangzi “could benefit the empire by pulling out one hair, he would not do so.” 12 But Yangists insisted that it was irresponsible to get involved with other people or institutions; your prime duty was to preserve your own life and do only what came naturally. 13 Yangists must not meddle with their human nature, but should follow the Way that had been established by Heaven. It was wrong to refuse pleasure or submit to the artificial rituals of court life, which distorted human relationships. You could not make real contact with people if you followed the li instead of your feelings. Life should be spontaneous and sincere. Many people in China were attracted by the Yangist ideal, but others found it disturbing. 14 They had always believed that the rituals established the Way of Heaven on earth. Were these li really damaging? If Yangzi was right, virtuous kings who had denied themselves pleasure for the sake of their subjects had been foolish and wrongheaded, while immoral tyrants who simply enjoyed themselves were far closer to Heaven. Were human beings basically selfish? If so, what could be done to make the world a better place? What was the basis for morality? Was the Confucian ideal of self-cultivation perverse? And what exactly was the “human nature” that the Yangists prized so highly?

• From Cultish (2021)

  “In my way of thinking, that was a good thing.” This goal of isolating followers from the outside while intensely bonding them to each other is also part of why almost all cultish groups (as well as most monastic religions) rename their members: Ti, Do, Andody, Chkody. The ritual signifies a member’s shedding of their former skin and submitting wholly to the group. It’s not just followers who gain new names; outsiders get them, too. Jones’s and Applewhite’s vocabularies were chockablock with inflammatory nicknames used to exalt devotees and villainize everyone else. A Heaven’s Gate member might be called a “student of the Kingdom of Heaven,” a “recipient of the gift of recognition,” or a “child of a Member of the Level Above Human.” By contrast, mainstream Christians belonged to a “Luciferian program” and a “counterfeit God,” having succumbed to the “lower forces.” Ti and Do encouraged their students to distance from souls who hadn’t received the “deposit of knowledge.” According to Heaven’s Gate teachings, mere possession of “the Truth” would make separating from the rest of society “inevitable.” In the Peoples Temple, “my children” was the coveted title Jones bestowed upon obedient supporters, while “outside forces” naturally applied to anyone who didn’t follow. Even more loaded, “traitors” meant defectors, like Garry Lambrev, who’d seen the light but turned away. The “Hidden Rulers” referred to what some might later call the “deep state.” The odious “Sky God” (the bogus Christian deity) described the enemy to “God in the Body,” aka Father Jones. But the words themselves only did half the job; the other half was the performance. As anyone who ever attended one of Jim Jones’s sermons remembers vividly, the guy had a flair for the dramatic. On the pulpit, he’d pound out short, hyperbole-laded phrases to get his congregation fired up. Once the group energy was high, it did the work for him. Every time Jones gave a sermon, he’d pick one fact from the news, or a historical event, and catastrophize it. Jonestown survivor Yulanda Williams recalls Jones showing the Redwood Valley congregation a film called Night and Fog about the Nazi concentration camps. “He said, ‘This is what they have planned for people of color. We’ve got to build our land up over there in Jonestown, we’ve got to get over there. We’ve got to move fast, we’ve got to move swiftly, we’ve got to pool our resources together,’” she explained. Garry Lambrev couldn’t forget Jones’s rococo preaching style if he tried: “He’d say things like, ‘The paper idle’ [his term for the Bible] ‘is useful for one thing,’ and he’d point to his ass—toilet paper,” Garry narrated. “He would tear it up theatrically on the podium and let the pages fly all over.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  There was a sinister directive in The Laws that took Plato even further away from the Axial Age.104 His imaginary city was a theocracy. The first duty of the polis was to inculcate “the right thoughts about the gods, and then to live accordingly: well or not well.”105 Correct belief came first; ethical behavior only second. Orthodox theology was the essential prerequisite for morality. “No one who believes in gods as the law directs ever voluntarily commits an unholy act or lets any lawless word pass his lips.”106 None of the Axial thinkers had placed any great emphasis on metaphysics. Some even regarded this type of speculation as misguided. Ethical action came first; compassionate action, not orthodoxy, enabled human beings to apprehend the sacred. But for Plato, correct belief was mandatory, so important that a “nocturnal council” must supervise the citizens’ theological opinions. There were three obligatory articles of faith: that the gods existed; that they cared for human beings; and that they could not be influenced by sacrifice and prayer. Atheism and a superstitious belief in the practical efficacy of ritual would be capital crimes in Plato’s ideal polis, because these ideas could damage the state. Citizens would not be permitted either to doubt the existence of the Olympian gods or to ask searching questions about them. Poets could use their fables to instruct the masses, but their stories must not be too fanciful. They must focus on the importance of justice, the transmigration of souls, and the punishments that would be inflicted on wrongdoers in the afterlife. These doctrines could thus guarantee the good behavior of the uneducated. Plato was aware that some atheists lived exemplary lives, so he allowed a convicted unbeliever five years to find his way back to the fold. During this time, he would be detained in a sequestered place for reflection. If he still refused to submit to the true faith, he would be executed.107 At the beginning of his philosophical quest, Plato had been horrified by the execution of Socrates, who had been put to death for teaching false religious ideas. At the end of his life, he advocated the death penalty for those who did not share his views. Plato’s vision had soured. It had become coercive, intolerant, and punitive. He sought to impose virtue from without, distrusted the compassionate impulse, and made his philosophical religion wholly intellectual. The Axial Age in Greece would make marvelous contributions to mathematics, dialectics, medicine, and science, but it was moving away from spirituality.

• 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)

  One Mary Kay Executive Senior Cadillac Sales Director laid out her version of the Husband Unawareness Plan in an instruction manual for her consultants: “If you do wish to shop for things today I want you to know that I accept CASH, Check, VISA, Mastercard, Discover, American Express. I also do interest free payment plans and the husband unawareness program or otherwise known as very creative financing; a little cash, a little on a check and a little on a card. No one will know the total.” Becca was told to withhold all specifics until she got a potential downline on the phone. That’s when she’d conduct her “health intake”—a twenty-point survey featuring intimate questions like: “If you could not fail, how much weight would you like to lose? When was the last time you were there? What has changed between now and then? Do you remember what that felt like? What would it be like if you were there again? Are there any family members you also want to help? Thank you so much for telling me . . . I really believe I have something that can help you reach your health goals; I’m so excited to share it with you.” These intakes weren’t medical examinations conducted by registered dietitians. They were trauma-bonding tactics carried out by regular people, like Becca and her mother-in-law. The company knows what it’s doing by bestowing recruits with titles like coach, senior coach, Presidential Director, and Global Health Ambassador—it fills them with a sense of authority. “I think a lot of these women convince themselves that they really are a health coach,” Becca asserted. “They say you are giving people an amazing gift of life. If your coach gives you a shout-out in our secret Facebook group, people are like, ‘Incredible job! Saving lives!’” Everyone knows deep down that the difference between a coach and a senior coach has nothing to do with nutrition expertise; it’s how many people they were able to add to their downline that month. Yet when the company is love-bombing you with a fancy title and adulating you as a lifesaver, you become conditioned to interpret it that way, if you want to. Nothing gets Optavia’s coaches hyped like its annual leadership retreats and conventions. Recruits save up all year to attend these events, skipping best friends’ weddings and grandchildren’s births if they must, for the chance to meet Optavia’s charismatic leader and cofounder, Dr. Wayne Andersen. “They called him Dr. A and he’s, like, their ruler,” Becca winced, referencing the anesthesiologist turned self-described “leader of the movement to better health.” “Dr. A comes out and spits culty inspiration about how we are saving people’s lives one person at a time, how we are making America healthy. Of course they charge a fortune for tickets to see him.” All MLMs throw similar Tony Robbins–esque self-help bashes, which cost thousands of dollars to attend. Tupperware hosts an annual Jubilee.

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

  I can’t believe HubSpot charges people money to use its CMS, or that anyone is gullible enough to pay them. Then again, a lot of HubSpot’s customers are small-business owners, so maybe they don’t know any better. Or maybe they think using WordPress would be too much of a hassle. Maybe they would rather pay for HubSpot because then they can call a tech support line and get answers to their questions about how to use the software. They probably also figure that over time HubSpot will improve the software and add more features. There’s a program for sending out email. It automates the process, so you can blast thousands of people with a sequence of email messages that will be sent out on a schedule. Another program lets you store a database of customer contacts. There are tools that analyze the traffic to your website, to see which pages are attracting the most visitors and how much time people spend on a particular page. There is a search engine optimization feature that helps you load up blog posts with keywords so that people are more likely to find your page when they do a search on Google. One of our assignments involves inventing a fake company and fake product and then crafting an email campaign to sell the product. HubSpot’s software lets you set up a series of emails in a tree structure. You write one first-round email that goes out to everybody on the list. For the second-round email, you might create three versions—one for the people who deleted the first email without opening it, another for people who opened the email and looked at it before deleting it, and a third for people who went one step further, who clicked through on the link in the first email and looked at your website, but then left without buying anything. Then you create a third round of email messages based on the possible responses to the second email, and so on and so on. The goal is to keep pushing people toward your website until they buy something. Once they buy something, you set up a new campaign and try to get them to buy something else. You can set up a campaign with multiple steps, aim it at a list that contains thousands of names, then press SEND and let the software go to work. At HubSpot this happens on an incredible scale. Every month, HubSpot’s customers send out, in aggregate, more than a billion email messages.

• From Cultish (2021)

  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. His mystical vernacular is fraught with thought-terminating clichés, intended to gaslight followers into mistrusting science, as well as their own thoughts and emotions. In one lesson, he commands, “Thinking about something is the surest way to miss out on the beauty of that actual something. . . . See where you have these allegiances to logic, to reason, to linear description, and simply start destroying these.” In another video, he shouts at a female student after she expresses feeling disrespected by the phrase “fuck you,” saying, “If you weren’t so high up in your own ass about this fucking concept of respect, you would actually see how much love there is behind me saying what I say.” Massaro always finds a twisted way to justify his use of verbal aggression: Once on Facebook, he posted, “Being friends with an awake being is nearly impossible, because: A) his first priority is your purification and elevation into truth; not kindness . . .

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

  It’s November 2013, and that’s where I am, along with Cranium and Spinner and a bunch of other HubSpotters, sitting through Benioff’s three-hour keynote speech on the opening day of the conference. I was psyched when Cranium asked me to go to Dreamforce, if only for the chance to spend a few days in San Francisco. I haven’t been back here since I left my job at ReadWrite. I have a list of people I want to see, restaurants I want to visit. But San Francisco is a shitshow. One hundred forty thousand people have descended on a one-square-mile area of downtown. Dreamforce takes place over four days, with concerts and comedians and inspirational speakers. It’s basically Woodstock for people who work in sales and marketing. Or, as Benioff has declared, “the largest and most transformational event in the history of enterprise technology.” Entire blocks have been shut down to traffic. All of downtown is gridlocked. Restaurants and hotels are booked solid. I’m staying at the Courtyard Marriott, which was my home away from home during my stint as editor of ReadWrite. Last year I spent so many months living in this hotel that when I walk into the lobby the woman at the front desk recognizes me and remembers my name. Last year I paid $129 a night. This week, because of Dreamforce, I’m paying close to $700 a night. As for getting around town, forget about finding a taxi. They’re all booked. Oh, and the forecast calls for rain. It’s a nightmare. None of this is as awful as Benioff himself. He stands six-feet-five-inches tall and weighs three hundred pounds, with gleaming white teeth and curly black hair that glistens with hair gel. He is a former salesperson who now sells software that lets other salespeople sell more stuff. It’s called customer relationship management, or CRM, software. Benioff is also one of the wealthiest people in the world, a member of the Forbes billionaire list. Here in the main auditorium of the Moscone Center, thousands of people who sell things over the Internet are standing up and cheering for him as if he’s some kind of superhero. The whole thing makes me depressed, in part because Benioff is a buffoon, a bullshit artist, and such an out-of-control egomaniac that it is painful to listen to him talk. He lives in Hawaii and signs his emails “Aloha.” He’s a Buddhist and hangs out with Zen monks from Japan, and he gave his golden retriever the title “chief love officer” at his company. He is the Ron Burgundy of tech. He and this conference are the essence of everything that has gone wrong in the industry. “Have you transformed the way you innovate?” was Benioff’s big line at the 2012 Dreamforce show. Note that you can switch the two buzzwords in the sentence and it still sounds good and still means nothing.

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

  Among those who do use the software, results vary. There are some places where the stuff just doesn’t work very well, the consultant told me. “And then there are about 10 percent of customers where it’s absolutely magic,” he said. “It’s like you’ve given them a dowsing rod, they’ve found a well, the town is saved. It’s magic.” Gordon says Halligan and Shah are good at telling stories and generating hype, but he doesn’t think much of HubSpot’s engineering team, and he is particularly dismissive of Shah. “He’s not really an engineer anymore,” Gordon says. “He’s a blogger. He writes a blog. He makes PowerPoint decks.” Gordon was equally contemptuous of Cranium: “Everyone tells me he’s some kind of marketing genius, but I don’t see it. I’ve asked him several times to explain the product to me. He couldn’t do it. I still don’t understand what the product does. I’ve met a bunch of people at HubSpot and nobody there impresses me. None of them seems that smart.” After breakfast, we stood outside. It was a chilly Cambridge morning, with a cold wind blowing off the Charles River. Gordon told me I should stick around through the IPO, then find something better to do. “The place is a house of cards,” he told me. “I’m just hoping they can get to an IPO so the guys who invested can cash out before the whole thing collapses.” Those were pretty strong words, especially to use around a former business journalist. I don’t think Gordon meant that HubSpot was a flimflam operation. Obviously HubSpot had a real business, and was selling a real product, to real customers, and generating real revenue. I think what Gordon meant was that he didn’t think the business was sustainable, that sooner or later a strong wind would come along and blow the place down. Later, in August, when HubSpot publishes its financial results, I will think back to this breakfast and Gordon’s comment about the “house of cards.” Because it turns out the numbers are not so great. In seven years the company has accumulated losses of more than $100 million. It has burned through its cash and is borrowing money against a line of credit. If the market bounces back, HubSpot will be able to go public and its investors will get a return. But if stocks remain depressed, or if, God forbid, the bubble pops and the market crashes and HubSpot can’t sell shares to the public, then its fate will be uncertain. In the worst possible scenario, its investors could lose a lot of money. That’s what is at stake. That, I believe, is why Halligan has seemed so freaked out, why he pushed out his head of sales, and why the new CFO has been cutting costs.

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

  They use the word awesome incessantly, usually to describe themselves or each other. That’s awesome! You’re awesome! No, you’re awesome for saying that I’m awesome! They pepper their communication with exclamation points, often in clusters, like this!!! They are constantly sending around emails praising someone who is totally crushing it and doing something awesome and being a total team player!!! These emails are cc’d to everyone in the department. The protocol seems to be for every recipient to issue his or her own reply-to-all email joining in on the cheer, writing things like “You go, girl!!” and “Go, HubSpot, go!!!!” and “Ashley for president!!!” Every day my inbox fills up with these little orgasmic spasms of praise. At first I ignore them, but then I feel like a grump and decide I should join in the fun. I start writing things like, “Jan is the best!!! Her can-do attitude and big smile cheer me up every morning!!!!!!!” (Jan is the grumpy woman who runs the blog; she scowls a lot.) Sometimes I just write something with lots of exclamation points, like, “Woo-hoo!!!!!!! Congratulations!!!!!!! You totally rock!!!!!!!!!!!!” Eventually someone suspects that I am taking the piss, and I am told to cut that shit out. The cheerleading and delusions of grandeur are staggering. At one point HubSpot posts a job listing on LinkedIn, searching for a new PR flack. But because this is HubSpot, the advertisement says we are looking for a “Media Relations Superstar .” The implication is that the person conducting the job search, our head of public relations, is herself a superstar and thus needs someone who can keep up with her. What she is actually looking for is an entry-level person, probably someone right out of college or with a couple years of experience, who will work for low pay, believing that time spent at HubSpot will look good on a resume. The advertisement challenges potential candidates: “Think you can get HubSpot on the cover of Time magazine or featured on 60 Minutes?” Take it from someone who worked at Time ’s primary competitor—the only way a company like HubSpot will ever merit that kind of coverage is if an employee brings in a bag of guns and shoots the place up. The question is nuts, and any experienced PR person—any actual “media relations superstar”—would know that. The only person who could answer yes to that question and then apply for the job is by definition someone with very little experience. Like the person who posted the advertisement. This is the peppy, effervescent, relentlessly positive, incredibly hubristic and overconfident attitude that everyone in the HubSpot marketing department exudes from Cranium on down. These people are super cheery cheerleaders. The whole world of online sales and marketing is filled with people who listen to Tony Robbins audiobooks on their way to work and dream of unleashing the power within themselves, people who love schmaltzy, smarmy motivational-speaker guff about being passionate, following your dreams, and conquering fear. Conquering fear!

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

  It’s the American dream.” —Chris Taylor, Mashable (“Geek Book of the Week”) “Read this book if you work or invest in tech and, in particular, tech startups. And not just for the tales of corporate intrigue, hypocrisy, and ridiculousness that have caused HubSpot and its allies to get so hot under their collective collar… [Lyons] makes a strong case for how all of that young labor, when increasingly wrapped up into an over-arching ‘corporate culture,’ creates subtle age discrimination that these employees won’t recognize for years to come..” —Dan Primack, Fortune.com “Using his trademark wit and clear-eyed analysis, Dan Lyons has delivered a much-needed referendum on the current state of Silicon Valley. In wildly entertaining fashion, Disrupted explores the ways in which many technology companies have come to fool the public and themselves. Lyons has injected a dose of sanity into a world gone mad.” —Ashlee Vance, New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk “Dan ‘Fake Steve’ Lyons runs such a savage burn on his ex-employer, HubSpot, that the smoke can be seen clear across the country in Silicon Valley. Disrupted is fun, compulsively readable, and just might tell us something important about the hypocrisy and cult-like fervor inside today’s technology giants.” —Brad Stone, New York Times bestselling author of The Everything Store “Dan Lyons goes deep inside a company that uses terms like ‘world class marketing thought leaders’ to show us how ridiculous, wasteful, and infantile tech start-ups like this can be. And best of all, Lyons does this with his trademark pejorative and hilarious tone.” —Nick Bilton, New York Times technology columnist “Hilarious and unsettling… An exacting, excoriating takedown of the current startup ‘bubble’ and the juvenile corporate culture it engenders.” —Kirkus Reviews “Disrupted provides an eye-opening and gut-busting account of the maddening world of startup excess, hubris and groupthink from the unique perspective of a prominent technology reporter and satirist who was inexplicably hired and given a front row seat to the lunacy.” —Mashable “A juicy read… The book made me fearful of the fact that startup culture—from Google-style perks and zero work-life balance to corporate cheerleading and a cult-like devotion to the ‘mission’—has become aspirational to many corporations. The ways in which the worst parts of startup culture benefit managers and investors while making workers disposable are particularly scary, and Lyons attacks that issue in a compelling way.” —Erin Griffith, Fortune.com “Lyons finds the right company, if only for the raw material that he, a seasoned satirist, spins into gold… But the book is not just a chronicle of the tech bubble’s silly quirks… Lyons uses the lens of his growing disillusionment to focus a broader critique of Silicon Valley.” —Financial Times “This humorous and well-crafted memoir is part of a proud literary tradition: the disgruntled ex-employee tell-all.

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

  (Jan is the grumpy woman who runs the blog; she scowls a lot.) Sometimes I just write something with lots of exclamation points, like, “Woo-hoo!!!!!!! Congratulations!!!!!!! You totally rock!!!!!!!!!!!!” Eventually someone suspects that I am taking the piss, and I am told to cut that shit out. The cheerleading and delusions of grandeur are staggering. At one point HubSpot posts a job listing on LinkedIn, searching for a new PR flack. But because this is HubSpot, the advertisement says we are looking for a “Media Relations Superstar.” The implication is that the person conducting the job search, our head of public relations, is herself a superstar and thus needs someone who can keep up with her. What she is actually looking for is an entry- level person, probably someone right out of college or with a couple years of experience, who will work for low pay, believing that time spent at HubSpot will look good on a resume. The advertisement challenges potential candidates: “Think you can get HubSpot on the cover of Time magazine or featured on 60 Minutes?” Take it from someone who worked at Time’s primary competitor—the only way a company like HubSpot will ever merit that kind of coverage is if an employee brings in a bag of guns and shoots the place up. The question is nuts, and any experienced PR person—any actual “media relations superstar”—would know that. The only person who could answer yes to that question and then apply for the job is by definition someone with very little experience. Like the person who posted the advertisement. This is the peppy, effervescent, relentlessly positive, incredibly hubristic and overconfident attitude that everyone in the HubSpot marketing department exudes from Cranium on down. These people are super cheery cheerleaders. The whole world of online sales and marketing is filled with people who listen to Tony Robbins audiobooks on their way to work and dream of unleashing the power within themselves, people who love schmaltzy, smarmy motivational- speaker guff about being passionate, following your dreams, and conquering fear. Conquering fear! I have no idea what all of these people are afraid of, but to marketers, the world is filled with fears that must be conquered. Maybe they like this rhetoric because it makes online sales and marketing seem like some kind of epic adventure rather than the drab, soul-destroying job that it actually is. Marketing conferences are filled with wannabe gurus and thought leaders who work themselves up into a revival-show lather about connecting with customers and engaging in holistic, heart-based marketing, which sounds like something I made up but is actually a real thing that really exists and is taken seriously by actual adult human beings, which makes me want to cry. Except I’m also fascinated by this world. Part of me fantasizes about becoming one of these phony gurus. Some of these people make a lot of money, and all they do is fly around the world giving speeches.

• From Cultish (2021)

  (I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when, a few months after our interview, Sparkie the SoulCycle instructor became a distributor for “nontoxic” skincare MLM Arbonne, #bossbabe Instagram posts and all.) The prosperity gospel says that if you don’t succeed in becoming the picture of flawless fitness—if you don’t acquire the six-pack and the inner peace (like if you are poor, marginalized, and can’t clear the structural hurdles keeping you from those things)—then you deserve to be unhappy and die early. You didn’t “manifest.” It’s Rich DeVos’s same message, just delivered in a slightly different dialect. It might sound cloyingly heartfelt to roar “I am powerful beyond measure” while punching the air as hard as you can, but it’s nowhere near as spooky as yoga studios full of rich white women wearing the same overpriced athleisure, possibly embellished with a bastardized Sanskrit pun—“Om is where the heart is,” “Namaslay,” “My chakras are aligned AF”—and calling themselves a “tribe.” Commodifying the language of Eastern and Indigenous spiritual practices for an elitist white audience while erasing and shutting out their originators might not seem “culty”—it might just seem commonplace, which is exactly the problem. For years, CrossFit HQ denied any suggestion that its culture was unwelcoming to Black members. But during the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, Greg Glassman shot off a series of racist emails and tweets (in one, he responded to a post about racism as a public health crisis with “It’s FLOYD- 19”), prompting white CrossFitters to finally start coming around to what many Black folks had known for decades: The place was not really “for everyone.” And the linguistic red flags had always been there: By glorifying the police in the names of its Hero WoDs, CrossFit had been telling on itself all along. Hundreds of gyms disaffiliated with the brand, big activewear companies pulled their contracts, and Glassman stepped down as CEO. A few months after Glassman’s fall from grace, it was SoulCycle’s turn for a scandal. In late 2020, things were already going south for the company due to COVID-19 lockdowns forcing location closures left and right, when multiple damning exposés surfaced online: According to reporting from Vox, underneath all the motivational Soulspeak, studios across the country harbored long track records of toxicity. Cults of personality formed around certain “Master” instructors, who took advantage by creating hierarchies of favorite and least favorite clients, giving private “off-the-clock” rides, and allegedly sleeping with some students.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Spiritual influencers are sanctified by the apps for the same reason any other content creator is—because their posts are on-trend and hyper-engaging. They exchange regrammable quotegrams full of buzzy wellness vernacular for ego-boosting likes and ad dollars, profiting from Apple Pay–enabled seekers aiming to soothe the distress and ennui of contemporary existence. Because their actual beliefs take a back seat to the success of their brand, these gurus are willing to fudge them according to whatever the zeitgeist seems to want. If CBD supplements are all the rage, they’ll suddenly flood their feeds with affiliate posts and act like cannabis has been part of their ideology all along; if conspiracy theory–type content seems to be doing well, they’ll head in that direction, even if they don’t fully understand the volatile rhetoric they’re trafficking in. Spend a few minutes poking around the Bentinho Massaro borough of Instagram and you’ll find dozens upon dozens of similar accounts. In one corner, you’ll find “alternative healing” opportunists masquerading as benevolent medical professionals. Like . . . “Dr.” Joe Dispenza, a generic-looking middle- aged white guy who well over a million Instagram followers somehow trust as their New Age sage. Dispenza’s army of adoring acolytes claim he’s helped them manifest everything from their dream job to their spouse to their cancer remission. Dispenza shrewdly exploits SEO and other web-marketing strategies to make millions selling an extravagant emporium of self-help workshops and retreats, public speaking engagements, corporate consultations, guided meditations, CDs, gifts, and books like Becoming Supernatural and Evolve Your Brain. Branding himself as the ultimate “scientific” spiritual authority, Dispenza’s Instagram bio reads “Researcher of epigenetics, quantum physics & neuroscience,” and he proudly flaunts his studies in biochemical sciences at Rutgers University, as well as his “postgraduate training and continuing education”—whatever that means—“in neurology, neuroscience, brain function and chemistry, cellular biology, memory formation, and aging and longevity.” Taking a page out of L. Ron Hubbard’s playbook, Dispenza marries academic- sounding language with the paranormal. Examine, for instance, his definition of a quantum field: “an invisible field of energy and information—or you could say a field of intelligence or consciousness—that exists beyond space and time. Nothing physical or material exists there. It is beyond anything you can perceive with your senses.”

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

  In addition, Holly has put herself in charge of making parody videos that are meant to promote the HubSpot brand but don’t always help the company. “Watching this video gave me cancer” is how one commenter reviews one of Holly’s productions, a parody of “What Does the Fox Say?” called “What Does the Web Say?” Says another: “After watching this video I gouged out my eyes and shoved knitting needles in my ears so I would never have to endure it again.” The video is so bad that one of HubSpot’s engineers posts a question on the corporate wiki asking why the video was even created in the first place. Cranium defends Holly, and insists the video was a brilliant piece of marketing. A few months later, Holly strikes again, recording a video that takes “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and changes it to “All I Want for Christmas Is Leads,” with lyrics about sales and marketing. Everyone tells her it’s great. Beneath these people lies another layer of fortified bozofication, which consists of people like Sharon, a forty-something woman who describes herself on Twitter as a “manic pixie dream girl” and calls herself a member of the management team even though she has no one reporting to her. “I manage a team of one,” she tells us one day in a department meeting, and by one she is referring to herself. She runs “influencer relations,” which means she’s supposed to identify people who influence corporate software buying decisions, and become friendly with them. One year at Halloween she gives a speech at a marketing conference while wearing a witch costume, with sparkly shoes, a broom and a big pointy black hat. She posts pictures of herself doing this on Twitter. Marcia from the blog team, who has been at HubSpot since 2008, discovers that by changing the date or byline or some of the information in an old blog post she can trick Google into thinking the post is new, which boosts its rank in search results so it gets more traffic. She starts changing the dates on old blog posts, and writes a blog post teaching Marketing Mary how to do the same. “Historical Blog Search Engine Optimization,” she calls it. Ashley, the youngest blogger, publishes a post titled, “Fifteen Common Grammar Mistakes We All Need to Stop Making,” in which she (a) suggests the passive voice is grammatically incorrect, and (b) claims that “e.g.” stands for “example given.” Ashley also dreams up a solution to one of Marketing Mary’s problems, which is how to come up with ideas for new blog posts. Ashley’s solution is a sort of Mad Libs generator, which she calls the Blog Topic Generator. Type in three keywords, and the BTG will spit out three headlines.

• 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.