Beware: Silicon Valley’s cultists want to turn you into a disruptive deviant

High-tech giants are becoming more like the radical right as they launch populist crusade to block government regulation - and they have the technology to recruit believers

Back in August 2014, Mike Bulajewski, a Seattle-based designer with a penchant for psychoanalysis, published a fascinating essay. In The Cult of Sharing, he argued that the best way to understand why so many users feel emotionally attached to such companies as Uber and Airbnb - even earning them the feel-good moniker "the sharing economy" - is by treating such communities as cults.

Like all good cults, such firms tap into our inner quest for solidarity and belonging, promising to fill our lives with meaning. By presenting their foes as enemies of innovation who want to destroy the new and deviant class of entrepreneurs, technology companies play on the perennial theme of persecution. And they stoke fears of conspiracy - involving governments, trade unions and big corporations - out to suppress all disruptive ideas.

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