#devos

Amway – and MLMs like it – don't just bleed out their members by convincing them to buy mountains of useless crap they're supposed to sell to their families, while enriching the people at the top of the pyramid who sell it to them. The "toxic positivity" of multi-level marketing cults forces members deep into debt to pay for seminars and retreats where they are supposed to learn how to repair the personal defects that keep them from being "successful entrepreneurs." The topline of the cult isn't just getting rich selling stuff – they're making bank by selling false hope, literally, in Hilton ballrooms and convention centers across the country, where hearing an MLM scammer berate you for being a "bad entrepreneur" costs thousands of dollars.

Amway destroyed so many lives that Richard Nixon's FTC decided to investigate it. The investigation wasn't going well for Amway, which was facing an existential crisis that they were rescued from by Nixon's resignation. You see, Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, was the former Congressman of Amway co-founder Jay Van Andel, who was also the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful business lobbyist in America.

At Ford's direction, the FTC exonerated Amway of all wrongdoing. But it's even worse than that: Ford's FTC actually crafted a rule that differentiated legal pyramid schemes from illegal ones, based on Amway's destructive business practices. Under this new rule, any pyramid scheme that had the same structure as Amway was presumptively legal. Every MLM operating in America today is built on the Amway model, taking advantage of the FTC's Amway rule to operate in the open, without fear of legal repercussions.

MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It's not just that these people are desperate – it's that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you're living out of.

In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That's why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for "leads" and "customers" and to use the language of social solidarity ("women helping women") to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don't need and can't afford.

But it's worse, because what MLMs really sell is MLMs. The real purpose of an MLM sales call is to convince the "customer" to become an MLM salesperson, who owes you a share of every sale they make and is incentivized to buy stock they don't need (from you) in order to make quotas. And of course, their real job is to sign up other salespeople to work under them, and so on.

An MLM isn't just a pathogen, in other words – it's a contagion. When someone in your social support network gets the MLM disease, they don't just burn all their social ties with you and the people you rely on – they convince more people in your social group to do the same.

Which brings me back to the mirror world, and Erik Baker's conversation with the Know Your Enemy podcast. Baker starts to talk about who gets big into Amway: "people who already effectively lead by the force of their charisma and personality many other people in their lives. Right? Because you're able to sell to those people, and you're able to recruit those people. What are we talking about? Well, they're effectively recruiting organizers, people who have a natural capacity for organizing and then sending them out in the world to organize on behalf of Christian capitalism."

Listening to this, I was thunderstruck: MLM recruiters are the mirror world version of union organizers. In her memoir of growing up in Amway, Andrea Pitzer talks about how her mom would approach strangers and try to lead them through a kind of structured discussion:

Everywhere we went—the mall, state parks, grocery stores—she’d ask people whether they could use a little more money each month. “I’d love to set up a time to talk to you about an exciting business opportunity.” The words should have seemed suspect. Yet people almost always gave her their number. Her confidence and professionalism were reassuring, and her enthusiasm was electric, even, at first, to me. “What would you do with $1 million?” she’d ask, spinning me around the kitchen.

This kind of person, having this kind of dialog, is exactly how union organizers work. In A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey's classic book on labor organizing, she describes how she would seek out the charismatic, outgoing workers in a job-site, the natural leaders, and recruit them to help bring the other workers onboard:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Organizer training focuses on how to have a "structured organizing conversation," which McAlevey described in a 2019 Jacobin article:

“If you had a magic wand and could change three things about life in America [or her town or city or school], what would you change?” The rest of your conversation needs to be anchored to her answers to that question.

https://jacobin.com/2019/11/thanksgiving-organizing-activism-friends-family-conversation-presidential-election

The MLM conversation and the union conversation have eerily similar structures, but the former is designed to commodify and destroy solidarity, and the latter is designed to reinforce and mobilize solidarity. Seen in this light, an MLM is a mirror world union, one that converts solidarity into misery and powerlessness instead of joy and strength.

The MLM movement doesn't just make men like Rich De Vos and Jay Van Andel into billionaires. MLM bosses are heavy funders of the right, a blank check for the Heritage Foundation. Trump is the MLM president, a grifter who grew up on the gospel of Norman Vincent Peale – a key figure in MLM cult dynamics – who tells his followers that wealth is a sign of virtue. Trump boasts about all the people he's ripped off, boasting about how getting away with cheating "makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

The corollary is that being cheated means you're stupid. Caveat emptor, the motto of the cryptocurrency industry ("not your wallet, not your coins") that spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected.

Tech has its own mirror world. The people who used tech to find fellow weirdos and make delightful and wonderful things are mirrored by the people who used tech to find fellow weirdos and call for fascism, ethnic cleansing, and concentration camps.

In Picks and Shovels, my next novel (Feb 17), I introduce readers to a fictitious 1980s religious computer sales cult called Fidelity Computing, run by an orthodox rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Mormon rabbi:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

Fidelity is a faith scam, a pyramid scheme that is parasitic upon the bonds of faith and fellowship. Martin Hench, the hero of the story – a hard-fighting high tech forensic accountant – goes to work for a competing business, Computing Freedom, run by three Fidelity ex-employees who have left their faiths and their employers to pursue a vision of computers that is about liberation, rather than control.

The women of Computing Freedom – a queer orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family, a Mormon woman who's renounced the LDS over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who's left her order to throw in with the Liberation Theology movement – are all charismatic, energetic, inspirational organizers.

Because of course they are – that's why they were so good at selling computers for the Reverend Sirs who sit at the top of Fidelity Computing's pyramid scheme.