Leaving the Real World: How I Escaped Andrew Tate's Get Rich Quick 'Cult' (opens in new tab)

I don't know what you mean about it not being "an accident", but IMO the problem is when one casts off a whole bunch of prescriptive assumptions/memes/paradigms, one can quite easily end up replacing them with different, more virulent ones. The new ones seem quite liberating and exciting, since they have fresh predictive power. But in actuality you're just going down into a different Matrix that you haven't yet hit the limits of, but is likely to be much smaller than longstanding ones that have gone through the wringer of many corners of society. And in this case it was an extremely tiny universe where these people were being recruited to work as simple spammers^Wgrowth hackers. This critique probably applies to any person/community marketing themselves using the language of liberation only to supply a new dogma for the implementation, rather than being centered around continual questioning and self-reflection. (Although I'd still expect failure modes of the latter going sideways as well!)

> It's interesting how the Matrix still has this influence today. I don't think there's any movie that has had a worse influence, and I don't think that's an accident

baffling comment. I never considered these movies to have bad influence. In what way?

Alex Jones is objectively fascinating, though. And hilarious.

What happened to your friendship?