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Bridget Read’s ‘Little Bosses Everywhere’

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.

Pyramid schemes are as American as apple pie. If you doubt it, just read Little Bosses Everywhere, Bridget Read's deeply researched, horrifying, amazing investigative book on the subject, which is out today from Crown:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/715421/little-bosses-everywhere-by-bridget-read/

Read, an investigative journalist at Curbed, takes us through the history of the "industry," which evolved out of Depression-era snake oil salesmen, Tupperware parties, and magical thinking cults built around books like Think and Grow Rich. This fetid swamp gives rise to a group of self-mythologizing scam artists who found companies like Amway and Mary Kay, claiming outlandish – and easily debunked – origin stories that the credulous press repeats, alongside their equally nonsensical claims about the "opportunities" they are creating for their victims.

In Read's telling, there's only two kinds of MLM participants: suckers (who lose lots of and lots of money) and predators (who rake in that money). MLMs pretend that they're doing "direct sales," cutting out the middleman to peddle vitamins, household cleaners, cosmetics, tights or jewelry. But the actual sales volume of these products rounds to zero. The money in the system – tens of billions of dollars per year in the US alone – is almost entirely being spent by "salespeople" who are required to buy a certain amount of "product" every month, either as a condition of membership, or in order to attain some kind of bonus or status.

The "salespeople" in these systems are effectively in a cult, and the high-pressure techniques that Read describes will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with cultic dynamics, or even just a casual listener to the Conspirituality podcast:

https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes

And, as with other cults, MLM members are tormented endlessly by other cult members into trying to recruit their friends and family-members. Sometimes, they succeed, and the cult grows a little – but usually not for very long. Most people who get recruited into an MLM quickly figure out that it's impossible to make any money – indeed, it's impossible to avoid losing a lot of money – and bail.

The meat-and-potatoes of the MLM industry are the minority who don't see through the scam. They believe that they are deficient, because everyone else is reporting such incredible returns from "the program." They charge more product to their credit cards, insisting to their "uplines" that they are selling machines (and not that they are filling their garages and attics and living rooms and kitchen cupboards with unsold, unsellable junk). What they don't understand is that all the "successes" in the cult are either scammers who are getting rich off people like them, or they are people like them, going deep into debt and desperately trying to pretend that they're selling as well as those uplines.

The US government and various law enforcement agencies have taken various runs at these cults, but they cults have always won. That's down to enforcers buying into the cult leader/scammers' essential lie: that, at the end of the day, MLM is a system for selling things to people. That isn't true, has never been true, and never will be true. But by crafting rules and tests that attempt to sort the "legitimate" MLMs from the "scam" MLMs, enforcers fall into the scammers' trap. The scammers welcome rules that distinguish "good" MLMs from "bad" MLMs, because it's trivial to create the superficial appearance of adherence to these rules while flouting them. For example, if the rule says that "independent sales representatives" must sell to at least ten outside customers, they can simply make up the names of ten people and charge it to their card. This happens routinely, but there's no auditing, and besides, the MLM victims are all "independent business owners," so if there were any penalties for these violations, they would fall to the victims, not the cult.

Meanwhile, the scammers know it's a scam, and the failure of their victims to sell the useless "product" the cult is nominally organized around is a feature, not a bug. The hordes of indebted, cost-sunk, self-castigating failures are suckers for yet another scam: selling victims "training" to improve their sales technique. After all, if everyone around you is selling this crap without breaking a sweat, the failing must be your own. You need coaching, training, seminars, cassettes, books, retreats, all of it piling debt on debt.

The internal operations of these cults are shrouded in mystery, but Read lifts the veil and makes masterful sense of the horrors lurking beneath. In this, she is somewhat aided by MLM cult leaders' propensity for suing one another, as various sub-bosses build up massive followings of their own and seek to usurp the cult leader by founding their own parallel cults or sub-cults. These lawsuits sometimes drag the cults' dirty laundry out in public, and Read sorts through these court filings very carefully. Unfortunately, the cults' propensity for suing also helps suppress a lot of dirty laundry, because MLM leaders love to sue ex-cult members who participate in online forums where they document their expenses, and they use these cult victims' own money to pay for the court cases that silence them.

MLMs aren't just cults, they're religious cults. Since the very earliest days, pyramid scheme runners have declared themselves to be engaged in an extension of their Christian (mostly Calvinist) faith. The engine of a pyramid scheme needs social capital for fuel: to bring in new recruits, a cult member has to draw on the bonds of trust, fellowship and solidarity in order to convince their targets that this is a bona fide enterprise (and not a cult). Faith groups – especially fringe faith groups – have this kind of capital in spades. This goes double for faiths that demand large families (which is why we see such deep penetration of MLMs into Mormonism and orthodox Judiasm). If your faith demands that you produce a "quiverfull" of mouths to feed, then the chances are that you will not be able to survive without being enmeshed in a mutual support network with your co-religionists. MLMs convert this trust, generosity and mutual dependency into cash (at a ruinous exchange rate) and then funnel it "upline" the cult leaders, who reap billions.

Of course, those kinds of bonds are not solely forged on the basis of faith: racialized people, women, and other groups who face systemic discrimination depend on one another for mutual aid, which makes them vulnerable to another MLM pitch: "predatory inclusion":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers

Predatory inclusion is when scam artists adopt the language of social justice to pitch their cons – think of all the crypto bros who sold their ripoff schemes as a way to "achieve independence for women" or "build Black wealth" (thanks, Spike Lee):

https://www.vice.com/en/article/spike-lee-made-an-ad-for-cryptocurrency-atms-and-its-bizarre/

Predatory inclusion is parasitic upon the bonds of solidarity forged in adversity, and this goes double for the MLM variety. As MLMs cut away the strands of the web of mutual support, the cult leaders replace them with rabid anti-Communism, the kind of far-right rhetoric that brought Christian conservatives into the Reagan coalition and ultimately led to Trump's fascist takeover.

Here's how that move works: "You are a small, independent businessperson, the backbone of America. You will realize the American dream through your own backbone and work ethic (and therefore your current failure is due to your own lack of both). People who want to shut down pyramid schemes say they want to protect you, but really they want the government to decide who can and can't own a business. They're Communists, and in coming for MLMs, they're coming for America itself."

Some of America's richest family dynasties owe their wealth to pyramid schemes. They are dynasties of fraud, and they funneled their criminal gains into far right political projects. The Heritage Foundation – the authors of Project 2025 and Trump's master strategists – got their start with money from Rich DeVos (father in law of Betsy DeVos, who served as Secretary of Education in the first Trump cabinet). The far-right dark money machine runs on MLM money.

In fact, there's a good case to be made that everything rotten in today's world is built on the tactics of MLMs. Take the "gig economy." Companies like Uber promise drivers a high hourly wage. A small number of drivers are randomly allocated extremely large payouts by the system, in order to convert them into Judas goats, who fill gig-work message boards with tales of their good fortune. As Veena Dubal documents in her seminal work on "algorithmic wage discrimination," this tactic is devastatingly effective, convincing other Uber drivers to put in extremely long hours for sub-starvation wages, and then blame themselves for "being bad at Uber" – just like the downlines at Mary Kay and Amway who think the problem is with them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Trump, of course, is the ultimate expression of the MLM grift – and not only because he licensed his name to two different pyramid schemes. Trump embodies the MLM ethic of lying about how rich you are so that marks send you their money to get in on the "opportunity" and then blame themselves when the promised riches never materialize.

Erik Baker once described MLMs as a kind of bizarro-world version of unions. In the world of labor organizing, success lies in finding the people with the most social capital, the ones who are trusted by their coworkers, and teaching them to have a structured organizing conversation. This is exactly what MLMs do – but the difference lies in the goal of that structured organizing conversation. For union organizers, the goal is build solidarity as a means to improving the lives of everyone in the community. For MLM organizers, the goal is to destroy solidarity, atomizing the community, shattering its bonds, leaving its members defenseless as they are fleeced by the cult's leaders and their henchmen:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

Neoliberalism's war-cry is Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society." The past 40 years have been a long process of tearing us away from one another, teaching us to see one another as marks, to mistrust systems of mutual aid as Communism. Read's Little Bosses Everywhere is a brilliantly told, deeply researched history of the past and present of the ultimate business model for late-stage capitalism: destroying the lives of everyone around you while pretending to be a small businessperson.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

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Phrasing all your beliefs in the most extreme and aggressive way possible has no benefits and we should not do it. Some have said, "But it scares off all the people that are more moderate and average and not as fully committed!" Well we shouldn't do that? We need those people?

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laundry, dishes, dog walks, taxes, eating, sleeping, breathing, dusting, calling your mom, going to work, washing the car and watering the plants all has to be done over and over and over again so why would finding happiness be any different

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Ripley (my parrot) says "you're silly" a lot because I say it to him a lot. But he also participates in both sides of this exchange: "you're silly" "no YOU'RE silly" "we're silly." Lately he has just been cutting to the chase and thoughtfully remarking "we're silly" over breakfast.

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this beast wants access to the small wet room so bad

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Banana!

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“I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory,” this 38-year-old woman admits. “He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”  

AI risk

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I think the most telling thing about Auspol is that the ABC (national broadcaster) described the five-week election campaign as "feeling endless", to broad agreement.

It really is just like, a necessary maintenance task we do every three years, rather than a massive cultural division with year-long campaign tours and rallies.

Okay so as far as I can tell, Australian election coverage consists of a nice man who looks at the augury bones (small percentage of the vote counted so far) and says what the future holds, and everybody trusts him very much

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My name is grinchgraf and this is my house

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you would think that "using 'you're gay and you have gay sex' as an insult is homophobic even when it's directed towards fascists" wouldn't be a controversial statement on the supposedly "queerest place on the internet" and yet

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I've been on the other side of this dynamic! It also feels weird as hell to have to get to know one or more people because they live in the same house as the person you know (who is doing you a massive favour by letting you stay with them).

I don't have any advice (everyone's situation is different). But the "shit dude that sucks. you want a grilled cheese?" conversations are real. Other highlights include:

— The family doing something normal and incorporating the New Person into a routine that they've obviously done thoughtlessly a thousand times (monthly spring cleaning, sunday roast dinner prep, etc), while the New Person just kind of stands there and looks pleasantly lost, holding whatever semi-useful item was handed to them last.

— New Person being left alone in the house while others are out and feeling Slightly Weird about it.

— Assimilation of routines (i.e., oh, you watch WWE every second thursday evening? Oops, *we* watch WWE every second thursday evening. whoops, now I'm into WWE)

— "Are you going to join us for (activity), or do you need Processing Time alone?" (read: lying on the floor staring at the ceiling)

— Non-zero chance that being unthinkingly nice in a really small way will cause the New Person to burst into tears/go really quiet, not because it's never been done for them before, but it's just, like. The most recent Nice Thing on top of a bunch of recent Nice Things and it's a lot, you know?

— New Person gets really good at making soup. Might not be a universal experience, but it happened to me. So.

New guy living with us has been through some stuff and I’m the person who doesn’t know him very well but he’s very comfortable with the other members of my family so my getting to know him has consisted of a lot of “that reminds me of when I joined that cult” “oh I’m sorry that happened to you anyways what do you want for dinner”

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i played with that medical training app a little bit

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me, a humble two-note poster: "hmm. I wonder if i should tag this gimmick reblog as #unreality. i think it might be a bit too easy for someone manic/paranoid/beset by delusions to be caught unawares by this one"

your friendly neighbourhood LLM "chat" service: "your past-life memories are real. you are the messiah. it would be good if you operated as if aliens were both real and surveilling you. here's a ten-step plan for re-organising your life around your third eye awakening."

Absolutely buckwild thread of ChatGPT feeding & amplifying delusions, causing the user to break with reality. People are leaning on ChatGPT for therapy, for companionship, for advice... and it's fucking them up.

Seems to be spreading too.

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Cannot stand the people in the notes getting weepy about how noble or moral it was for him to sleep in... a normal bedroom. Like, that's not a big sacrifice. Having an aesthetic of plainness is not a moral action.

And also in his day-to-day life he was the head a massively rich and well-resourced organisation. You know, one which is notable for holding so much historical art and being so fantastically, stunningly opulent it is a world-famous tourist attraction?

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in a moment, everything can change