Author Archives: beatriceco

The cult of tech

“THE CULT OF THE FOUNDER.” “THE CULT OF THE TECH GENIUS.”  “Beware: Silicon Valley’s cultists want to turn you into a disruptive deviant.” “Tech’s cult of the founder bounces back.” “Silicon Valley’s Strange, Apocalyptic Cults.” “How the cult of personality and tech-bro culture is killing technology.” “Company or cult?” “Is your corporate culture cultish?” “The Cult of Company Culture Is Back. But Do Tech Workers Even Want Perks Anymore?” “10 tech gadgets with a cult following on Amazon—and why they’re worth it.” “13 steps to developing a cult-like company culture.” The headlines seem to write themselves (if that cliché is allowed anymore in the age of ChatGPT and generative AI). Tech is culty. But that is a metaphor, right? Right?!  When I first saw Michael Saylor’s Twitter account, I wasn’t sure. Saylor is an entrepreneur, tech executive, and former billionaire. Once reportedly the richest man in the Washington, DC, area, he lost most of his $7 billion net worth in 2000 when, in his mid-30s, he reached a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission after it brought charges against him and two of his colleagues at a company called MicroStrategy for inaccurate reporting of their financial results. But I had no idea who he was back then.
In 2021 Saylor started showing up in my Twitter feed. His profile picture showed a man with chiseled features, silver hair, and stubble sitting in a power pose and looking directly into the camera, a black dress shirt unbuttoned to display a generous amount of his neck. It was a typical tech entrepreneur’s publicity shot except for the lightning bolts blasting from his eyes, and the golden halo crown. Then there were his tweets: #Bitcoin is Truth.  #Bitcoin is For All Mankind.  #Bitcoin is Different.  Trust the Timechain.  Fiat [government-backed currency] is immoral. #Bitcoin is immortal.  #Bitcoin is a shining city in cyberspace, waiting for you.  #Bitcoin is the heartbeat of Planet Earth. As MIT’s humanist chaplain, I follow a lot of ministers, rabbis, imams, and monks online. Very few religious leaders would dare to be this religious on social media. They know that few of their readers want to see such hubris. Why, then, does there seem to be an audience for this seemingly cultish behavior from a cryptocurrency salesman? Are tech leaders like Saylor leading actual cults? 
According to Bretton Putter, an expert on startups and CEO of the consulting firm CultureGene, this needn’t be a major concern: “It’s pretty much impossible,” Putter writes, “for a business to become a full-blown cult.” And if a tech company or other business happens to resemble a cult, that might just be a good thing, he argues: “If you succeed in building a cultlike culture similar to the way that Apple, Tesla, Zappos, Southwest Airlines, Nordstrom, and Harley-Davidson have, you will experience loyalty, dedication, and commitment from your employees (and customers) that is way beyond the norm.”  Are the cultlike aspects of tech companies really that benign? Or should we be worried? To find the answer, I interviewed Steve Hassan, a top expert on exit counseling, or helping people escape destructive cults.  At age 19, while he was studying poetry at Queens College in New York City in the early 1970s, Hassan was recruited into the Unification Church—the famously manipulative cult also known as the Moonies. Over his next 27 months as a member of the church, Hassan helped with its fundraising, recruiting, and political efforts, which involved personally meeting with the cult leader Sun Myung Moon multiple times. He lived in communal housing, slept only a few hours a night, and sold carnations on street corners seven days a week for no pay. He was told to drop out of college and turn his bank account over to the church. In 1976, he fell asleep at the wheel while driving a Moonie fundraising van and drove into the back of a tractor-trailer at high speed. He called his sister from the hospital, and his parents hired former members to help “deprogram” him and extract him from the cult. After the Jonestown mass suicide and murders of 1978 brought attention to the lethal dangers of cult mind control, Hassan founded a nonprofit organization, Ex-Moon Inc. Since then, he’s earned a handful of graduate degrees (including a doctorate in the study of cults), started numerous related projects, and written a popular book on how practices with which he is all too familiar have crept into the mainstream of US politics in recent years. (That 2019 book, The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, seemed even more relevant in early 2024, when a video called “God Made Trump” went viral across the campaign trail.) Hassan even found himself advising Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, leader of the second impeachment trial against Donald Trump, in 2021, on how to think and communicate about the cultish aspects of the violent mob of Trump followers who stormed the Capitol on January 6 of that year. I wanted to ask Hassan what he makes of the discourse around tech cults, but first it’s important to understand how he thinks about cults in the first place. Hassan’s dissertation was titled “The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control: Undue Influence, Thought Reform, Brainwashing, Mind Control, Trafficking, and the Law.” The idea was to create a model that could measure cult exploitation and manipulation, or what Hassan and other experts in related fields call “undue influence.” His BITE model looks to evaluate the ways social groups and institutions attempt to control followers’ behavior, information access, thoughts, and emotions. Because there is no one quintessential, Platonic definition of a cult, what matters is where a given instance of potential cultishness falls on an “influence continuum.” In this continuum model, Hassan evaluates the ways in which institutional cultures attempt to influence people. To what extent are individuals allowed to be their authentic selves or required to adopt a false cult identity? Are leaders accountable to others, or do they claim absolute authority? Do organizations encourage growth in the people who participate in them, or do they seek to preserve their own power over all else? While any kind of person or group can struggle with some of the dimensions on Hassan’s continuum chart (which lists constructive behaviors at one end and destructive behaviors at the other), healthier organizations will tend toward constructive responses more of the time, whereas unhealthier institutions—those more truly worthy of the cult label in the most negative sense—will tend toward destructive responses such as grandiosity, hate, demands for obedience, elitism, authoritarianism, deceptiveness, or hunger for power.  It turns out that there are some real, meaningful similarities between cults and tech, according to Hassan. “This is the perfect mind-control device,” he told me, holding up his iPhone. He explained that when he joined the Moonies in 1974, cult recruiters had to get information from the victim. Now, he said, users of everyday technologies are sitting ducks: “There are 5,000 data points on every voting American in the dark web, and there are companies that will collect and sell that data.” The first time Hassan was told about cryptocurrency, he added, it smacked of multilevel marketing to him. The proposition that you can make a fortune in a very short amount of time, with almost no labor, was something he had seen many times in his work. As was the idea that if you become an early investor in such a scheme, you’ll make more money if you recruit more people to join you. “The people who started it are always going to make 99% of the money,” Hassan said. And as in the cults that recruited him and continue to recruit the kinds of people who ultimately become his clients, “everyone else is going to get burned.”  All of this would certainly seem to explain why I so frequently hear from people, eager for me to know they are fellow atheists, who tell me to buy some bitcoin because it will rewire my neurons and cure me of the woke mind virus.

Of course, it should be noted that some scholars have complained about Hassan’s work, arguing that brainwashing and mind control are concepts for which there is not sufficient evidence. But I’m not claiming that tech uses literal brainwashing, nor is it like when a character in a Scooby-Doo episode hears “You are getting very sleepy” and then their eyes become squiggles. Hassan probably wouldn’t say so either.  Companies don’t need to go to such extremes to exert undue influence on us, though. And as is clear from the headlines I cited above, a lot of companies have been accused of, or associated with, a bit of cultishness.  I won’t attempt to evaluate anyone’s cultish tendencies on a scale of 1 to 10. But I see crypto sales techniques as a particularly good example of cultlike behavior, because if there’s one thing cults need to be good at to sustain their existence, it’s separating people from their wallets. Cryptocurrency has specialized in that to extraordinary effect.  It’s all a continuum, and it would be hard to find a person whose life is completely devoid of anything cultish, technological or otherwise. But as a culture, we are careening dangerously toward the wrong end of Hassan’s chart. Or to quote a Michael Saylor tweet, “We all stumble in the dark until we see the cyber light. #Bitcoin.” Adapted from Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. Copyright 2024 by Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at MIT. Used with permission of the publisher, MIT Press.

Visitors can Learn about White House in New Interactive Experience in Washington

WASHINGTON, D.C. – If you’re looking for a unique experience visiting our nation’s capital, why not try being President for a few moments? Well, you can at a new interactive experience from the White House Historical Association. In September, they unveiled their new immersive experience for visitors and what it’s like inside the world’s most powerful building.  

Just a block away from the White House is The People’s House: A White House Experience. It’s a new visitor experience by the White House Historical Association where visitors get to learn about the White House’s history throughout time. 

While the White House itself does allow visitors, not every room is accessible. This experience aims to give a peek inside the most powerful building. 

“During COVID we learned about this great reach we could have with technology and virtually and what we really wanted was a physical space where we could continue to tell those stories as people started to come back together,” said Luke Boorady, Managing Director of The People’s House: A White House Experience. “So November 2022 we embarked on this mission and then 20 months later we opened the doors.”   

So far they get about 600 people each day and expect that number to grow.  

“People will be able to see a one to five scale replica of the White House,” said Boorady. “They will be able to see into those rooms both in those inside rooms interactive areas to peak into those rooms see historical moments. You can go up to a space or an object and hover your hand over the object like here turn the light on and learn more about those historical aspects.” 

Visitors can sit across presidents during a cabinet meeting, experience a State Dinner, lounge in the family theater and yes, even experience one of the most famous rooms: the Oval Office.   

“Visitors will see a scale replica of the Oval Office exactly how it is across the street and this will transform with every new administration what they have furnishing their Oval Office,” said Boorady. “We really hope people feel connected to White House history and the continuity of the space both through the people who have inhabited it, people who have worked there and that it’s a continuous representation of American democracy.” 

Federal judge in Washington applies per se treatment for algorithmic price-fixing claims

In an update to our prior report on the evolving antitrust landscape for algorithmic pricing, a federal judge in Washington recently denied a motion to dismiss claims that a group of multifamily rental property managers violated federal antitrust law by sharing commercially sensitive information with a property management software company and implementing the software’s pricing recommendations. Notably, the judge also held that the per se standard applies to those claims rather than the more complex rule of reason. The decision in Duffy v. Yardi Systems breaks with several other algorithmic pricing rulings that have either dismissed the plaintiffs’ conspiracy claims or held that their allegations are not per se illegal. And it underscores the importance of consulting experienced antitrust counsel when considering information sharing or use of algorithmic systems in connection with pricing.

Court rejects distinction between “traditional” horizontal price-fixing agreements and agreements facilitated by technology

Defendants in Duffy include a group of ten owners and operators of multifamily residential units, along with Yardi Systems, Inc., the developer of the property revenue management software that the lessor defendants employ. Plaintiffs—a proposed class of people who leased multifamily residential real estate units—allege that defendants “joined a conspiracy to share detailed, competitively sensitive, non-public information which would be used to establish supracompetitive rental rates in the multifamily housing market in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act,”1 and that the agreement is per se2 illegal under the Sherman Act.

On December 4, 2024, Judge Robert Lasnik denied defendants’ motion to dismiss the complaint, finding that plaintiffs adequately alleged, among other things, “both invitation and acceptance and sufficient plus factors to give rise to a plausible inference of a preceding agreement.”3 Furthermore, Judge Lasnik found that “the key to plaintiffs’ antitrust claims is the horizontal agreements between and among the lessor defendants to entrust Yardi with their sensitive commercial information in order to obtain and implement the supracompetitive rental rates generated by Yardi’s algorithm.”4 The court rejected defendants’ argument that, because plaintiffs’ claims are “premised on the use of a revenue management product,” they are “non-traditional” and do “do not fall within the limited category of claims meriting per se treatment.”5 Citing Supreme Court precedent stating that “the machinery employed by a combination for price-fixing is immaterial,” Judge Lasnik found that, since plaintiffs adequately alleged a horizontal price-fixing agreement, and because the “Sherman Act declares all such horizontal agreements to tamper with price structures unlawful”,6 the court need not determine whether plaintiffs have also alleged anticompetitive effects under the rule of reason.

Notably, Judge Lasnik expressly disagreed with a prior ruling from the Middle District of Tennessee in a similar case7 against RealPage and a group of landlords that allegedly used RealPage’s algorithmic pricing tools to raise rents. Unlike Judge Lasnik, the court in RealPage declined to apply the per se standard because plaintiffs failed to allege that RealPage or any of the lessors “can enforce acceptance of price recommendations,” and because “courts are hesitant to apply the per se standard to new or novel ways of doing business that have not yet been tested or studied by economists to conclusively determine that these types of conspiracies are per se anticompetitive.”8

The Duffy decision also comes on the heels of two recent decisions in the District of Nevada and District of New Jersey, which granted motions to dismiss similar algorithmic pricing cases targeting the hotel industry for failing to allege facts sufficient to infer agreements between competitors.9 Both cases are currently on appeal.

Looking ahead

As we have previously discussed, algorithmic pricing and information-sharing have been frequent targets for antitrust enforcers and private plaintiffs, and the DOJ Antitrust Division has publicly argued that using algorithmic software can be per se illegal. It remains to be seen whether the next administration, under the leadership of a new Assistant Attorney General,10 takes the same approach and whether Judge Lasnik’s decision in Duffy fuels future claims alleging similar conduct.

1 Order Denying Defendants’ Joint Motion to Dismiss, Duffy v. Yardi Systems, Inc., No. 23-cv-1391 (W. D. Wa. Dec. 4, 2024), ECF 187 (citing Complaint, Duffy v. Yardi Systems, Inc., No. 23-cv-1391 (W. D. Wa. Sept. 8, 2023), ECF 1).

2 Per se violations are those that are deemed “so harmful to competition and so rarely prove justified that the antitrust laws do not require proof that an agreement of that kind is, in fact, anticompetitive in the particular circumstances.” NYNEX Corp. v. Discon, Inc., 525 U.S. 128, 133 (1998). By contrast, agreements evaluated under the “rule of reason” standard require “court to conduct a fact-specific assessment of ‘market power and market structure . . . to assess the restraint’s actual effect’ on competition.” Ohio v. Am. Express Co., 585 U.S. 529, 541 (2018) (quoting Copperweld Corp. v. Indep. Tube. Corp., 467, U.S. 752, 768 (1984)).

3 Order Denying Defendants’ Joint Motion to Dismiss, Duffy v. Yardi Systems, Inc., at 11.

4 Id. at 12.

5 Order Denying Defendants’ Joint Motion to Dismiss, Duffy v. Yardi Systems, Inc., at 13 (citing Defendants’ Omnibus Reply in Further Support of Motion to Dismiss the First Amended Class Action Complaint, Duffy v. Yardi Systems, Inc., (March 15, 2024), ECF 155 at 3).

6 Id. at 15-16 (citing Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., 310 U.S. 150, 223 (1940)).

7 In re RealPage, Inc., Rental Software Antitrust Litig. (No. II), No. 23-MD-3071 (M.D. Tenn.)

8 Id. at 14 (citing In re RealPage, Inc., Rental Software Antitrust Litig. (No. II), No. 3:23-MD-03071, 2023 WL 9004806 at *22 (M.D. Tenn. Dec. 28, 2023)). Judge Lasnik argued that the judge in RealPage approached the question of per se treatment incorrectly and “cite[d] no authority for judging the reasonableness of an adequately alleged conspiracy to restrain trade by the strength of the conspiracy allegations.” Id.

9 See Gibson v. Cendyn Group, LLC, 2024 WL 2060260 (D. Nev. May 8, 2024), and Cornish-Adebiyi v. Caesars Entertainment, Inc., 2024 WL 435618 (D.N.J. Sept. 30, 2024).

10 On December 4, 2024, President-elect Trump announced that he plans to nominate Abigail (Gail) Slater to lead the Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division.

United States Prevails in USMCA Dispute with Mexico on Biotech Corn

United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced that the United States has prevailed in its dispute under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) challenging certain Mexican biotechnology measures concerning genetically engineered (GE) corn. The USMCA panel agreed with the United States on all seven legal claims, finding that Mexico’s measures are not based on science and undermine the market access that Mexico agreed to provide in the USMCA.

“We commend the dispute settlement panel for its thorough and impartial assessment, which affirms that Mexico’s approach to biotechnology was not based on scientific principles or international standards. Mexico’s measures ran counter to decades’ worth of evidence demonstrating the safety of agricultural biotechnology, underpinned by science- and risk-based regulatory review systems,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “This decision ensures that U.S. producers and exporters will continue to have full and fair access to the Mexican market, and is a victory for fair, open, and science- and rules-based trade, which serves as the foundation of the USMCA as it was agreed to by all parties. It is also a victory for the countries around the world growing and using products of agricultural biotechnology to feed their growing populations and adapt to a changing planet.”

“The panel’s ruling reaffirms the United States’ longstanding concerns about Mexico’s biotechnology policies and their detrimental impact on U.S. agricultural exports,” said Ambassador Katherine Tai. “It underscores the importance of science-based trade policies that allow American farmers and agricultural producers to compete fairly and leverage their innovation to address climate change and enhance productivity. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the Mexican government to ensure a level playing field and provide access to safe, affordable, and sustainable agricultural products on both sides of the border.”

“The panel’s conclusion backs up our long-held position that agricultural trade policies must be grounded in science and must not disrupt trade in agricultural products,” said Ambassador Doug McKalip. “This ruling is a critical step in ensuring that U.S. farmers can continue to compete fairly in the global marketplace. We have worked tirelessly with the interagency and industry stakeholders for almost four years to address this issue, and we remain committed to ensuring Mexico complies with its obligations under the USMCA and eliminates its USMCA-inconsistent measures. This outcome supports our efforts to maintain a strong, science-based trade relationship that benefits American producers and consumers in both the U.S. and Mexico.”

American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall commented that, “Farm Bureau applauds the USMCA panel decision regarding Mexico’s actions to ban biotech corn for human consumption and animal feed. The panel affirmed what AFBF and America’s farmers have emphasized all along – biotech corn is safe and decisions must be based on science, not politics. “We thank the U.S. Trade Representative for defending the safety of biotech corn and pursuing Mexico’s action as a violation of USMCA. If left in place, Mexico’s restrictions would have impacted the corn supply chain, stifled innovation, hurt trade and opened the door for other countries to pursue similar restrictive measures. “We look forward to engaging with USTR as it works with the Mexican government to remove the ban on biotech corn and provide certainty to the corn industry.”

The panel issued its final report to the Parties on December 20, 2024. Under USMCA rules, Mexico has 45 days from the date of the final report to comply with the Panel’s findings.

From January through October 2024, the United States exported $4.8 billion of corn to Mexico, the United States’ largest export market for corn.

Background

The present dispute challenged two sets of measures reflected in Mexico’s February 2023 presidential corn decree: (1) an immediate ban on the use of GE corn in dough and tortillas, and (2) an instruction to Mexican government agencies to gradually eliminate the use of GE corn for other food uses and in animal feed. The United States established the panel on August 17, 2023, under Chapter 31 of the USMCA. The United States brought six legal claims under the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures Chapter and one legal claim under the National Treatment and Market Access for Goods Chapter of the USMCA, as reflected in the United States’ request to establish a dispute settlement panel. The United States prevailed on all seven claims.

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USDA/AFBF

Michael Kratsios Returns to White House as Director of Science and Technology Policy

Michael Kratsios, a prominent technologist and proud Greek American, has been appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, marking his return to public service under President Donald Trump.The announcement was made on X (formerly Twitter) by Trump, who lauded Kratsios’ previous achievements in his administration: “In my First Term, Michael was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Chief Technology Officer of the United States at the White House. He also served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering at the Pentagon and received the DoD’s Distinguished Public Service Medal. He graduated from Princeton and is a Distinguished Fellow at Stanford.”Kratsios responded with enthusiasm, emphasizing the importance of scientific and technological advancement for national prosperity and security. “Thank you, Mr. President, for the honor of serving in your White House again, this time as Assistant to the President for Science & Technology and for the nomination to be Director of OSTP,” he wrote on X. “A Golden Age of American Innovation lies ahead!”Kratsios, whose family roots trace back to Greece and his father is a Greek Orthodox priest, is widely recognized for his transformative work in technology policy. As the youngest U.S. Chief Technology Officer, he championed initiatives in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and 5G development, while also strengthening the U.S. defense technology infrastructure as Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering.His reappointment signals a renewed emphasis on leveraging cutting-edge science and technology to bolster America’s global competitiveness. Trump’s decision to reinstate Kratsios underscores the former president’s continued focus on prioritizing innovation as a cornerstone of economic and national security strategy.