How Capitalists Use the Language of Cults

In her book, Montell offers evidence that these linguistic tactics have seeped out from cults and into wider society. Propelled by capitalist demands and the reach of social media, the language of cults, she says, is now everywhere. If you question the business model of a multi-level marketing scheme, well, that's just "stinkin' thinkin'," a thought-terminating cliche popular with MLMs like Amway. Similarly, when the predictions of QAnon and other conspiracy theorists don't come to pass, foll...

 Communities That Can't Grow Through Biological Reproduction

There's a membership problem. Haqr society is like the Shakers--the community can't grow by the usual primate strategy--biological reproduction is right out--so its continuation depends on the faithful going out and bringing in new recruits from the general population. Yes, we're saying it out loud: Haqrs recruit. Haqrs are intrinsically subversive to the young. Haqrs are conscious role models for haqr glory. If that weren't enough, haqrs actively seek to conver the imaginative and the credul...

 People Stay in Communities After Jobs Disappear

Surprisingly (to economists, anyway), even though these communities remain decimated, many people have still refused to leave them. Autor, Dorn and Hanson find that it was only foreign-born workers and native workers ages 25 to 39 who were likely to leave. Everyone else basically stayed, even if the economic rug was pulled out from under them. It contradicts the standard economic model, which says people will rationally move to where better opportunities present themselves. Why did so many p...

 A 2030 Vision for Gaming Culture

Young gamers are having fun, learning from each other, and learning to be good citizens of gaming and online communities. They are able to transfer some of their skills and citizenship sensibility to other aspects of their lives. They are connecting and mentoring each other in online gaming spaces that are safe, mixed age, and centered on creation, exploration, inquiry, and friendly competition. Youth and their parents have a deeper understanding of digital citizenship, supported and taught...

 Be Part of Where You Live

What concerns me is how our information networks have enabled us to become hyper-connected to geographically distant communities, while at the same time disconnected from our local ones. Virtual and long-distance relationships can enrich our lives in myriad ways, but I fear that our reliance on them has the potential to erode our physical communities and diminish our sense of place. Wendell Berry once said that “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” Knowing wh...

 The Race Where Children are Fathered by the Tribe

The key to the understanding of this race is, I believe, its strange method of reproduction, which was essentially communal. Every individual was capable of budding a new individual; but only at certain seasons, and only after stimulation by a kind of pollen emanating from the whole tribe and carried on the air. The grains of this ultra-microscopically fine pollen dust were not germ cells but "genes," the elementary factors of inheritance. The precincts of the tribe were at all times faintly ...