OF BONDING AND BONDAGE: CULT, CULTURE AND THE INTERNET American Institute of Graphic Artists Biannual Conference Las Vegas, September 1999 When I finally sat down to write this talk, I was kicking myself for not calling it "Designing Your Own Cult on the Web." If I'd had more time and a bit more skill, I'm sure I could have actually up and done it, started my own Internet cult. It wouldn't be hard. One of my former students at Stanford already gave me the name: DCult.com Whaddya think? Because I was thinking that maybe I could turn it into a template and do my own little Internet startup. 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 -- that would be the cult of people who were IN the technology biz 15 years ago -- was not exactly a mainstream phenomenon. When I started hangin' with the nerds for a living, we were bonafide social outcast weirdos. In those days -- it's funny now, but it wasn't funny then -- 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. Now even GRAPHIC DESIGNERS want to talk to you! 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 thousand people around the world who share them. That's what the Internet is really good at. It's a cult machine. So, what exactly 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 ideal, the latest pet- rock beanie-baby fad thing. [ebay/beanie baby page] You probably can't read the type, but as of Tuesday night there were 11,268 Beanie Baby auctions on Ebay. [pics] Which means, if you're so inclined, you too can 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. But I digress. Basically, you can type ANYTHING.COM into just about any search engine today and come up with a match. In fact, it only took a couple hours whacking around the Web to find ... 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, hairless dog and reptile cults, amusement park cults, sex and eclipse and millenium cults ... Pretty much you name it. So, let's look at a few of them ... but let me warn you, many of them didn't take any courses in design. Okay, here's a science cult for you ... [foresight.org] Nanotechnology -- according to its proponents, the next big thing. Well, actually the next very small thing. Nanotechnology is the design of machines the size of atoms. [conspire.com] Then you've got your conspiracy cults ... now this is a "debunk" site, but trust me, 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. (And yes, there is a conspiracy community, too.) Then there are the cults of entertainment, which of course are great news for companies like Sony, but can have some nasty side effects. [ultima online] A science fiction author friend of mine, Bruce Sterling, sent me a glum email telling me about what he considers to be one of the biggest online cults -- 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 in a virtual world, with virtual people. As you might expect, technology cults abound on the Internet ... cypherpunk sites devoted to the arcane science of encryption, incredibly rabid We Hate Microsoft cults, and you'd probably have to call devotees of Linux programming something of a cult, too. [cult of steve, church of virus] And now, with Apple's apparent resurgence, there are actually several sites devoted to the very earnest Cult of Steve, as well as others, like the Church of Virus, that _I_ don't even want to know what they hell they're talking about. (Don't EVEN TRY to read the text on that slide. It's actually pretty scary.) And we should not underestimate the effect of business and financial cults on the wild popularity of the Internet as a get-rich-quick scheme. [motley fool] There are people who spend all their waking hours, day-trading stocks and trolling for information and typing endless to each other about what they find, what to do with it, how much money they made/lost, rumors about the CEO and what he does with hairless dogs, blah blah blah. And, as you might suspect, the Internet is thick with celebrity cults of all stripes, both the expected ... [ricky martin] and the unexpected ... [jeffrey dahmer] THIS, my friends, in case you can't read the text, is the Jeffrey Dahmer site. Y'got yer Dahmer pictures, Dahmer quotes, Dahmer awards -- I don't want to KNOW for what -- Dahmer fetishes, crimes, rumors, art, photo album, house, life story. Kind of redefines "too much information." I don't know how much sites like this 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. But none of this has stopped cults from becoming a hot cultural phenomenon. Cult-education organizations say they've gotten reports about more than 3,000 individual cults -- most of them small, but some, like Scientology, with tens of thousands of members. 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 the "I know it 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 movement. [alt.goth] These kids got a really bad rap during Columbine -- and anyone who knows a Goth or used to be one knows it. 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. It is the first medium in history that allows us to both publish and communicate, often at the same time. We can publish our ideas globally on the Web, and people can find us just by typing a few words into a search engine. And at the same time, we can communicate in a deeply personal way by e- mail, to have conversations that are impossible in any other medium that we traditionally think of as publishing. By most cultural indicators, this is a pretty compelling combination. Internet addiction is now officially classified as a psychiatric disorder. We all know at least one person -- if we aren't one ourselves -- who is obsessed with some aspect or another of the online experience. A broad-and-deep communications medium is perfect for cults because, for one thing, it automates the recruiting process -- anyone who hates Jews or collects Beanie Babies, or worships Trent Reznor, or believes that the lost years of Jesus were spent in India, 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 proselytze globally via the Web and use email to personalize the bond. And because it's become so affordable, at least by our outrageously decadent Western standards -- even Alan GREENSPAN says it's driving the economy -- the Internet is a celebration of self-expression taken to the extreme. Also known as "self-indulgence." [justin hall in garters page] Here we have Justin Hall, who became famous in the early days of the Web by publishing a daily journal, in graphic detail, of his life -- and traveling by Greyhound around the country, teaching whoever was interested how to write HTML and publish their own Web pages. Finally -- and this may be of particular interest to you -- 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.org] 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, nagscreens built into shareware programs to persuade people to pay up. [baby think it over page] Or the computerized "Baby Think It Over" doll, that tells you when your "baby" needs to be fed, and changed, and bathed, and played with -- clearly designed as a propaganda tool in the fight against teen pregnancy. Captology is a subtle science. It's new enough that most designers don't know enough 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," 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 computers as repositories of the world's knowledge, knowing and anticipating all our needs, largely infallible and absolutely indispensible. [microsoft.com] Microsoft, of course, is the classic example. Why wouldn't cults on the Internet bill themselves the same way? [higher source home page] 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, sociologists started publicizing what they believe are the characteristics of a cult. But clearly those definitions need to evolve for the Internet age. Because if we're judging cults from the context of the culture in which they exist, then we have to re-examine culture in light of the changes the Internet hath 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 global network that caters, simultaneously, to such incredibly narrow private interests and such incredibly broad commercial ones. In other words, is there really much difference nowadays between cult and culture? For example, how do you draw the distinction between the real scientific endeavors of SETI -- the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence group ... [SETI] ... and the kind of conspiracy-thinking, TV-driven obsession of XFiles fans? [X-Files] At what point does our culture's obsession with celebrity, with exhaustive knowledge about the lives of people we'll never know -- [celebrities.com] ... encourage cyberstalkers? [Cyberstalker] We all want to know more about the medical breakthroughs and alternative therapies and technologies that are prolonging life ... [Andrew Weil] ... but where do 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? [Alcor] Spirituality and our desire for transcendance is becoming part of our national dialogue, but where exactly does following a guru of Eastern philosophy ... [Gangaji] become a perverted desire to return "home"? [Heavenıs Gate] We all shriek when we hear about cults demanding financial fealty from their members, but what's so different between tithing to [Scientology] or [Tony Robbins]? And of course, sex is a natural instinct, and meeting potential partners is a problem that the Internet has proven to be very useful at solving ... [Match.com] But again, where do you draw the line? [bondage.com] What is a cult and what's just a mirror 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. Even though Heaven's Gate got all the chickens clucking about wacko online cults, 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? Well, the big cash-cow mantra buzzphrase of the Internet is online community. And successful online communities, in order to BE successful, 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. [parent soup] So you've got your iVillage Parent Soup, designed to create a "community" around the issues of parenting -- complete with advertising and shopping opportunities, of course. [raising children] And then you've got the Southern Baptists. The difference is that these -- well, let's just call them COMMERCIAL cults like iVillage -- are economically, thus socially, acceptable. Internet companies CULTIVATE cultish behavior. For them, 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. You CAN always get what you want, right HERE. 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. [free pc] As you might be able to glean from its home page, Free PC will give you a free PC -- in exchange for reams of your personal information and your willingness to be bombarded by advertising every moment you're online. And Amazon.com just announced that it's going to become an Internet bazaar -- which means that, according to them, you won't have to go anywhere but Amazon to buy pretty much whatever you want. So if YOUR chosen commercial cult persuades you to buy more music, 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 people look at the commercial Internet today -- and the Internet's skill at breeding obsession -- has almost completely erased the line between cult and culture. And if cult IS culture now -- we ought to wake up to that reality, and make sure that we proceed with caution. For example, I was shocked to read a Wall Street Journal editorial last month 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 pornography and everything else that's yukky 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. We'd be far better off cultivating the courage to allow all points of view on the Internet, without censorship. If we REALLY want to help our parents and our kids understand this peculiar, persuasive power of technology, it's a much better idea to educate them -- and ourselves -- about how the Internet really works, and prepare them for whatever they might find there. For example, I've been working on a project with the Pew Charitable Trusts for nearly a year now, drafting credibility standards for web sites. The idea is to get people -- YOU, people who use the Internet -- to demand that anyone who publishes on the Web, be they individuals, organizations or companies, tell the truth. To disclose who they are, where they get their money, and whatever biases and ideology are behind the screen. Disclosure standards have the potential to take the steam out of recruiting efforts by cult groups, and hit commercial cults, too, by -- for example -- making Amazon.com and DrKoop tell us when their reviews were paid for by publishers or product manufacturers. Fear is the real enemy here, not cults. Sometimes, when people get scared, 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 that we've ever known. 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 they played at the park, by time and date. And argued amongst themselves about different performances of the Main Street Electrical Parade -- which, as you may know, is actually the same parade every day. His final pronouncement on the subject pretty much sums it up for me: "Thank God these people have somewhere to go," he said. "And the best part is, they're all out there, hiding in plain sight."