3 ms·

This explains so much about google

lofatdairy 4y ago
Not really... I love to bash Google as much as anyone but a religious cult within a department within a massive corporation doesn't really mean much about the company as a whole. Especially when you could pretty clearly see the difference between cult's teachings and the public stances for women's rights and for same-sex marriages that many Google employees have taken.
- cs137 4y ago
  A modern religious ethnographer would distinguish between NRMs (new religious movements) and the minority thereof that are actually criminal, coercive, etc., as the term "cult" has come to imply. That said, NRMs aren't always free of toxicity. Pyramid schemes and actual cults often target them, exploiting a high-trust network of people considered to be gullible. The typical corporate "cult"--I don't think Google is any more or less toxic than any other company at this point, and the true cult is capitalism itself, not a specific company--is somewhere between NRMs and actual cults in terms of virulence. Companies have displaced communities in modern life and yet they frequently un-person people for economic or petty political reasons. That said, executives usually prefer to keep their child sex abuse and their economic exploitation in different buildings--and, if Epstein is any indicator, on different landmasses--so, there's that, at least.
  - CryptoPunk 4y ago
    [dead]
  - lofatdairy 4y ago
    Excuse me if I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that the FoF falls under the more pejorative sense of cult, rather than NRM, given the central role of leadership and the abuses of power. It seems distinct from, say, neo-paganism in that sense. If you're referring to the parent comment's description of Google, then there's really no point in trying to make a distinction, since they were using it as a polemic anyways. That said, I don't think describing capitalism as the cult is necessarily useful either, in that it implies a reliance on _active_ belief and conscious performance of rituals which doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to me that the more useful framework is Fisher's capitalist realism, which more accurately describes this neoliberal end of history that inspires so much pessimism (and a more Foucaultian sense of power which is pervasive and defines the discursive space, rather than religious, which identifies a moral power within entities). Regardless, theorizing endlessly on capitalism is probably not going to solve actual issues of corporate overreach and abuses of power, so it's infinitely easier to just call Google a cult and hope it shifts public opinion and motivates political action lmao.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

Not really... I love to bash Google as much as anyone but a religious cult within a department within a massive corporation doesn't really mean much about the company as a whole. Especially when you could pretty clearly see the difference between cult's teachings and the public stances for women's rights and for same-sex marriages that many Google employees have taken.

cs137 4y ago
A modern religious ethnographer would distinguish between NRMs (new religious movements) and the minority thereof that are actually criminal, coercive, etc., as the term "cult" has come to imply. That said, NRMs aren't always free of toxicity. Pyramid schemes and actual cults often target them, exploiting a high-trust network of people considered to be gullible. The typical corporate "cult"--I don't think Google is any more or less toxic than any other company at this point, and the true cult is capitalism itself, not a specific company--is somewhere between NRMs and actual cults in terms of virulence. Companies have displaced communities in modern life and yet they frequently un-person people for economic or petty political reasons. That said, executives usually prefer to keep their child sex abuse and their economic exploitation in different buildings--and, if Epstein is any indicator, on different landmasses--so, there's that, at least.
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
  [dead]
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  Excuse me if I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that the FoF falls under the more pejorative sense of cult, rather than NRM, given the central role of leadership and the abuses of power. It seems distinct from, say, neo-paganism in that sense. If you're referring to the parent comment's description of Google, then there's really no point in trying to make a distinction, since they were using it as a polemic anyways. That said, I don't think describing capitalism as the cult is necessarily useful either, in that it implies a reliance on _active_ belief and conscious performance of rituals which doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to me that the more useful framework is Fisher's capitalist realism, which more accurately describes this neoliberal end of history that inspires so much pessimism (and a more Foucaultian sense of power which is pervasive and defines the discursive space, rather than religious, which identifies a moral power within entities). Regardless, theorizing endlessly on capitalism is probably not going to solve actual issues of corporate overreach and abuses of power, so it's infinitely easier to just call Google a cult and hope it shifts public opinion and motivates political action lmao.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]