Of Bonding and Bondage: Cult, Culture and the Internet Keynote, South by Southwest Interactive Conference 13 March 2000 If I'd had a bit more time and a lot more skill, when I finally sat down to write this talk, I would have actually up and done it, started my own Internet cult. It wouldn't be hard. One of my students at Stanford already gave me the name, which is a good thing. You KNOW how hard it is to get a good domain name these days. [DCult] Whaddya think? Because I was thinking that maybe I could turn it into a template and do my own little dot-com. You know, get some venture capital, take it public. I'm pretty excited about it. I hear you can make a lot of money on those Internet startups. ____________________________ Okay, so why am I here talking about this. I've been writing about technology since before the Macintosh, so if pressed, I can hold forth on pretty much any related topic. But the cult thing is especially juicy for several reasons, not the least of which is that I've personally been enrolled in one for more than a decade. Back then, our little tribe -- the cult of people who were actually *IN* the technology business 15 years ago -- was not exactly a mainstream phenomenon. When I started hanging out with nerds for a living, even the people who wrote about them were considered bonafide social outcast weirdos. In those days, the fastest way to end a party conversation was to tell someone you wrote about computers for a living. You could empty a room in 10 seconds flat. You know, the "gee, I need to refresh my drink" phenomenon. It's funny now, but it sure wasn't funny then. Now my mother uses e-mail to complain that she never hears from me, and there's this one trainer at my gym who constantly asks me for stock tips. [flavio] In any case, because of this newly huge, mainstream, and extremely lucrative cult that we've created around technology ... American culture has uploaded pretty much its whole palette of weird, obsessive-compulsive proclivities onto the Internet. And more often than not, found 5 or a hundred or a couple million people around the world who share them. That's what the Internet is really good at. It's a cult machine. ---------------------- So, what is a cult nowadays? The standard definition usually describes a group of people with some kind of extreme point of view -- ... and the rituals and ceremonies they use for worshipping the object of their obsession: a person, an idea, the latest pet-rock Beanie Baby Pokemon fad thing. [ebay] You probably can't read the type, but as of Saturday night there were STILL 14,089 Beanie Baby auctions on Ebay, despite its outre status. This I will never understand. [Beanie Baby] Which means, if you're so obsessed, you can still buy Hello Kitty Santa Beanie Baby, and pity its confused identity. Or if you're French or a Francophile, you can buy the Smoochy la Grenouille Beanie Toutou. And let us not forget the VERY RARE Fuzzy Mane Derby Beanie Baby, who's billed as a nonsmoker and lives in a kid-free home. Basically, you can type just about anything into just about any search engine today and come up with a match. In fact, it will come as no surprise to this group that it only took a couple hours whacking around the Web to find ... [wacky text list... end w hairless dog] science cults, conspiracy cults, religious cults, game cults, technology cults, business and financial cults, celebrity cults, mass murderer cults, TV show cults, movie director cults, fountain pen cults, amusement park cults, sex and eclipse and millenium cults, hairless dog and reptile cults ... Pretty much you name it. So, let's look at a few of them. Okay, here's a science cult for you ... [foresight] Nanotechnology -- according to its proponents, the new big thing. Well, actually the new very small thing. Nanotechnology being the design of machines the size of atoms. Then you've got your conspiracy cults -- [conspire.com] This is a "debunk" site, but there are hundreds of conspiracy sites on the web -- and all the conspiracies you see on this page are legitimate, quote unquote, within the conspiracy community. [viridian] Bruce Sterling is himself something of a cult figure -- his Viridian project, a kind of openly subversive attempt to start a design movement around green products -- already pulls up almost 5,000 hits on Google. And I'll bet none of you even know about it. [citysuit] That's Al Gore, wearing the Citysuit -- one of the entries in a Viridian design contest from July. Then there are the cults of entertainment, which of course are great news for companies like Sony, but can have some nasty side effects. Bruce sent me a glum email when I was doing research for this talk, telling me about what he considers to be one of the biggest online cults -- [ultima] the thousands of people who are addicted to playing Ultima Online. One of his best friends is getting a divorce because he's literally spending all his time with virtual people instead of tending to the home fires. As you might expect, technology cults abound on the Internet ... [cypherpunks] cypherpunk sites devoted to crypto anarchists and their arcane science of encryption, incredibly rabid We Hate Microsoft cults ... and despite its new status as the Microsoft killer, you'd probably have to call devotees of Linux programming something of a cult, too. And now, with Apple's apparent resurgence, there are actually SEVERAL sites devoted to the very earnest Cult of Steve ... [steve jobs] ... as well as others that I don't even WANT to know what they hell they're talking about. [church of virus] Don't even TRY to read the text on that slide. It's pretty scary. I'm sure no one in this crowd underestimates the effect of business and financial cults on the popularity of the Internet as a get-rich-quick scheme. [motley fool] And, as you might suspect, the Internet is thick with celebrity cults of all stripes. There are the ones you'd expect ... [brittany spears] I'd like to mention here that most of the search results on Brittany were porn sites. And this one gave her email address as "brittany@peeps.com" Then there are the ones you couldn't imagine, or at least I hope not. [jeffrey dahmer] THIS, my friends, in case you can't read the text, is the Jeffrey Dahmer site. Dahmer pictures, Dahmer quotes, Dahmer awards -- I don't WANT to know what you'd get a Jeffrey Dahmer award for -- Dahmer fetishes, crimes, rumors, art, photo album, house, life story. I believe this officially redefines the term "too much information." ----------------------------------------- I don't know how much sites like The Lair have contributed to it, but the connotation for cults on or off the Internet has become progressively uglier as people have escaped from suicide cults like Heaven's Gate and homicide cults like AUM Supreme Truth in Japan -- whose members, you may have heard recently, have apparently infiltrated a number of Japanese corporations as tech support people, which is hilarious in a perverse kind of way. [cult killer must die] But none of this has stopped cults from becoming a hot cultural phenomenon. One statistic says that 5 to 10 million people have been involved with cult groups at one time or another. But nowadays what defines a cult, particularly on the Internet, depends on your point of view. Itıs that "I know one when I see it" phenomenon that some people use to describe art. But unlike art, we tend to brand cults if we DON'T like them, rather than if we do, or if they make us uncomfortable or challenge our world view or somehow fly in the face of cultural norms, like the Goth phenomenon. [goth cult] These kids, for example, are still recovering from the really bad rap they got during the Columbine thing. ----------------------- So what is it about the Internet that makes it a cult factory? The most simplistic explanation is that the Internet is both broad and deep. [text slide of attributes] It is the first medium in history that allows us to both publish and converse at virtually the same time. We can publish our manifestos on the Web, and people around the world can find us just by typing a few words into a search engine. And at the same time, e-mail allows us to communicate in a deeply personal way that would be impossible in any other medium that has traditionally been thought of as publishing. [nytimes story] Except when your email shows up as evidence in an anti-trust trial, I guess. By most cultural indicators, this is a pretty compelling combination. In fact, internet addiction is now officially classified as a psychiatric disorder -- and those of you who have web browsers on your cell phones know who you are. Oh RIGHT, you NEED to browse the web on a 2-inch screen, I'm so sorry! I forgot ... A broad-and-deep communications medium is also perfect for cults because it fully automates the recruiting process -- anyone who hates Jews or collects Pokémon, or worships Trent Reznor, or believes that the lost years of Jesus were spent in India -- [lost years of jesus] ... can find Their People in the privacy of their homes, at the click of a mouse. This is a manifestation of what you might call "the verticalization of everything" -- and in this context, it allows cults to recruit globally via the Web, then use email to cement the bond. And because it's become so affordable, at least by our outrageously decadent Western standards ... ... even Alan GREENSPAN finally had to admit that it's driving the economy ... ... the Internet is a celebration of self-expression -- some might say self indulgence -- taken to the extreme. [justin hall] Probably the first example of this was Justin Hall, who gained no small amount of notoriety in the early days of the Web by publishing a daily journal, in graphic detail, of his life -- which he continues to do. And God bless him, he also took a Greyhound cross- country, teaching whoever was interested how to write HTML and publish their own Web pages. ------------------------- Finally, technology can be designed to be a subtle persuader, to impel people to actions they wouldn't necessarily undertake on their own. In fact, there's a new discipline being taught in Stanford's computer science department, called captology. [captology home page] Captology stands for "computers as persuasive technology," and the guy who came up with the idea focuses on the intentional effect of certain kinds of technology to persuade us to do their bidding. One of the most relevant chunks of his research looks at how product designers use these methods of persuasion. For example, in the most basic terms, there are those ubiquitous nagscreens built into software that pop up to persuade people to upgrade, or buy the commercial version of Quicktime or Real Player, or what have you. Then there are products like the computerized "Baby Think It Over" doll ... [baby think it over] ... that monitors and records whether you feed or change or play with your baby -- clearly designed as a propaganda tool in the fight against teen pregnancy ... [Wells Fargo] ... or the Web sites that won't let you in until you type in some personal information, which will probably come back to haunt you when you least expect it. If you haven't already, you really should read the service agreements for online banking sometime. Captology is a subtle science. It's new enough that most designers don't know how to use the concepts mindfully, and consumers aren't connected enough to make them widely useful. But the people who ARE connected, especially our parents and grandparents and our kids, are much more vulnerable than you and me. They tend to believe stuff because "it's on the computer" -- that's how they say it, "I saw it on the computer" -- just like they believe it because they "saw it on TV." And why shouldn't they? Public relations agencies get paid a lot of money to sell us on the need for computers and connections to the net -- it's the repository of the world's knowledge, even though it's not -- knowing and anticipating all our needs, even though it doesn't -- largely infallible and absolutely indispensible. --------------------------------------------------- [higher source] When the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult -- this is the site for their web design company, which was called Higher Source -- hit the news a year ago, the media made a point of demonizing them as an Internet cult. But as they so often do, they missed the point. Because if we're judging cults from the context of the culture in which they exist, which we must -- then we have to re-examine culture in light of the changes the Internet has wrought upon culture in the past decade. The question is whether culture -- that homogenous, unifying social structure that's defined our identities until now -- even EXISTS anymore, in the shadow of a network that caters, simultaneously, to such incredibly narrow private interests and such incredibly broad commercial interests. In other words, is there really much difference nowadays between cult and culture? [SETI] For example, how do you draw the distinction between the real scientific endeavors of SETI -- the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence group ... [X-Files] ... and the kind of conspiracy-thinking, TV-driven obsession of XFiles fans that's driven by some of SETI's findings? [celebrities.com] At what point does our culture's obsession with celebrity, with exhaustive knowledge about the lives of people we'll never know -- [Cyberstalker] ... encourage cyberstalkers? [Andrew Weil] We all want to know more about the medical breakthroughs and alternative therapies and technologies that are prolonging life ... [Alcor] ... but how you draw the line between Dr. Weil and the people who believe in life-extension techniques that can let people live to be 150 or 200 or 300 years old? And while sspirituality and our desire for transcendance is becoming part of our national dialogue, [Gangaji] where exactly does following a guru of Eastern philosophy ... [Heavenıs Gate] become a perverted desire to return "home"? We all shriek when we hear about cults demanding financial fealty from their members, but what's so different between tithing to [Scientology] or [Amazon]? [Match.com] And of course, sex is a natural instinct, and meeting potential partners is a problem that the Internet has proven to be very adept at solving ... [bondage.com] But again, where do you draw the line? or hang the chain, for that matter? ---------------------------------------- So what is a cult and what's just the dark side of today's culture? It's a matter of perception, of what you know and what you already believe. It also depends on whether you're looking at the question from inside the culture or outside. And on whether we're willing to question our own worldviews, even if the answers make us uncomfortable. --------------------------------------------- So this is what I think. [chicken.net] Even though Heaven's Gate and Columbine got all the chickens clucking about wacko online cults, sorry ... the truth is that in terms of how they work and what they're trying to accomplish online, they aren't all that different from any successful foray onto the commercial Internet. Eek! you say. How can THAT be true? [etoys.com] The domain name battle between Etoys and the Austrian artists at Etoy is a perfect example of the construct. [etoy.com] Artists want to be legitimate, so they incorporate. Retailers want to be hip and aesthetic. And when those two desires meet, sometimes all hell breaks loose. And even though its reputation has been somewhat tarnished, the big cash-cow mantra buzzphrase of the Internet is still "online community." Even the term "sticky application" has fallen out of favor, but it's the same thing -- just a slightly more macho way of saying it. And successful, sticky online communities, in order to BE successful and sticky, have to provoke and encourage and reward exactly the same kind of addictive, obsessive, insular, self-referential behavior as any standard-issue religious cult of years gone by. So you've got your BabyCenter, [babycenter] designed to create a "community" around the issues of parenting -- complete with advertising and shopping opportunities, of course ... And then you've got the Southern Baptists. [directives for raising children] The difference is that these -- well, let's just call them COMMERCIAL cults like BabyCenter -- are economically -- thus socially -- acceptable. Internet companies CULTIVATE cultish behavior. It's the classic "sticky" application --basically the Roach Motel of the Web. You log in but you never log out. You surrender your personal information, you commit your money to buy more stuff, or more services. [america online] You CAN always get what you want, right HERE, anytime, anywhere. You find and commit to the one true website or service that meets all your needs. And of course, in the perfect world of these commercial cults, that is where you live. AOL and Amazon and Yahoo and Ebay have become the kitchen-sink sites of the web -- which means that, according to them, you won't have to go anywhere but there to find -- and buy, of course -- pretty much whatever you want. [napster.com] So if YOUR chosen commercial cult persuades you to store all your music online, or to replace your "old"computer every year, or just to keep shopping, 24/7 -- That's not a cult , is it? You aren't being brainwashed into mindless impulse-purchasing consumption on the Internet, are you? It's GOOD for you to keep pumping your money into this Big Long Boom Economy ! Consumerism is really the One True Religion for the millenium. It is the quintessential global cult. ---------------------------- Now let me just say, this analogy means no disrespect to anyone who has suffered through the real horror of having a family member or friend indoctrinated into a cult -- and a surprising number of my friends have had this experience. But I do believe that the way we -- you -- look at the commercial Internet today -- together with the Internet's unique ability to breed obsession -- has almost completely erased the line between cult and culture. [sxsw.org] I mean, look at the size of this audience. This used to be an underground music festival. The artists want to be legitimate. The corporations want to be hip. Et voila. [cult = culture] So if cult IS culture now -- we ought to admit it and behave accordingly. For example, I was shocked to read a Wall Street Journal editorial last year that really nailed librarians -- calling them pornographers, basically -- because they refused to filter public access to the Internet. It trotted out the same old arguments about protecting our children from cults and cyberstalkers and pornography and all that's skeevy about humanity. But if we're REALLY concerned about the role technology plays in promoting cult behavior, we have to keep in mind that particularly on the net, what's a cult is really open to debate. [ignorance is not bliss] If we REALLY want to help our parents and our kids understand this peculiar, persuasive power of technology, we have to educate them -- and be honest with ourselves -- about how the COMMERCIAL Internet really works as well, what's really happening behind the screen, and tell them the truth about what they might find there. [credible.org] For example, I spent most of last year working on a project with the Pew Charitable Trusts, drafting credibility standards for web sites. [demand the truth] The idea is to get people who use the Internet to demand that anyone who publishes on the Web -- individuals, organizations or companies -- to tell the truth -- to disclose who they are, where they get their money, and whatever biases and ideology are behind the screen. Standards for disclosure could take the steam out of recruiting efforts by cult groups, and pressure commercial cults like Amazon and DrKoop and all the rest, into telling us when their reviews were paid for by publishers or product manufacturers, or when they collect personal data, for example. Needless to say, the industry -- you all -- are not exactly lining up to support this kind of disclosure. For the same reason that it has been such a struggle to get websites to respect people's privacy, the mistaken belief is that telling the truth will somehow hurt business. This could not be less true. I encourage you to try it and see what happens. ---------------------------------------- [fear is the enemy] Fear is the real enemy here, not cults. Sometimes, when people get scared they'll lose out on something -- like the Internet gold rush, for example -- they forget that the very same features that make the Internet a cult factory also make it the most powerful tool for free and open discourse -- for telling the truth, whatever or whomever's truth that might be -- that we've ever known. It's an awesome responsibility, and a tool with an equally awesome power that we should treat with great respect. A friend of mine who used to work at Disney said he had an experience 10 years ago that made him realize the net was the perfect place for cults. He'd stumbled onto a cult of people obsessed with Disney World -- who were so into it that they listed wait times for rides -- BY THE HALF HOUR. And listed ALL the music that was played at the park, by time and date. And argued amongst themselves about different performances of the Main Street Electrical Parade -- which, as some of you may know, is actually the same parade every time. His final pronouncement on the subject pretty much sums it up for me: [thank god] "Thank God these people have somewhere to go," he said. "And the best part is, they're all out there, hiding in plain sight." -------------- But then again, so are you. You are exposed to the hot light of scrutiny on the Internet, in a way that businesses have never before been exposed. [Doubleclick] Watchdogs all over the world are testing your systems, monitoring your behavior, checking to see how your software code reflects your code of ethics. And in case you hadn't noticed, people -- Internet users, your customers -- are getting pretty fed up with the way they're being treated. The PR fiascos of Doubleclick and Real Networks over the past couple of months are just the tip of the iceberg. There was a fascinating piece in the NYT magazine a couple of weeks ago about the new counterculture. [turn off] Evangelical Christian conservatives have coopted the '60s hippie slogan "turn off, tune out, drop out" to their own ends. They are dropping out to focus on not only their religion, which is not so important to you maybe, but also they are taking their children out of the mainstream -- home schooling them, keeping them away from the malls and MTV and Brittany Spears and all the other seductive attractions of the day. The fact that an upcoming generation is being raised to be ultra-sensitive to the effects of consumption and media -- including the Internet, of course -- and who are being trained -- Christian soldiers, for sure -- in ethical and moral values, like kindness and generosity and telling the truth -- could spell big trouble for the Internet economy. The Times piece said, "a culture that lacks a thriving counter culture is always in trouble." And while that has been good for the pre- commercial Internet, what we need to pay attention to is that the counter-culture -- whatever it happens to be -- is always at the root of the pendulum swings in attitude that happen every generation or so. And if this new focus on morality catches on in the same way, the Internet economy's relentless focus on valuations and stock price at the expense of people -- instead of respecting their desires for privacy, for being dealt with honestly and with integrity -- the big long Internet boom may come to a screeching halt. [i want all the power] The way it's being practiced today, the mantra of the new network economy, co-opted from one of my favorite quotemeisters, Ashleigh Brilliant, could be pretty clearly stated as, "I want all of the power and none of the responsibility." Not everything about the Christian counterculture will be attractive to everyone -- just like shooting speed was a lot less attractive than dropping acid to most of the hippies of the '60s -- but the focus on values and ethics could easily become a groundswell. And you have an opportunity today to get out in front of that wave and ride it. If you're going to use the cult-factory powers of the Internet, these powerful tools of persuasion, the very least you can do for everyone -- including your own self-preservation -- is to use them with integrity. Because if you have to act like a schmuck to make money, then what's the point? [Do the right thing.]