> Without me, he doesn’t move up. Without me, he gets stuck with a room full of product he can’t get rid of.

Being attentive to hints of a "downline" mechanism can sometimes help one avoid MLM-like behaviours in non-MLM contexts as well.

The wealth and political power of Amway is some real-life Black Mirror dystopia stuff.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1996/09/she-did-it-amwa... (1996)

> The distributors use Amvox, Amway’s massive voice-mail network, to communicate with their far-flung downlines. But their messages can go far beyond business matters, ranging from the overtly political to the bizarre. According to a transcript leaked to Mother Jones, Yager apparently forwarded the following message, left on his voice mail, to some of the hundreds of thousands of distributors under him: “If you analyze Bill Clinton’s entire inaugural address, it is nothing but a New Age pagan ritual. If you go back and look at how it was arranged and how it was orchestrated, he talked about forcing the spring. So what they’re trying to do is…force the emergence of deviant lifestyles, of a socialist agenda, and force that on us as American people.”

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/betsy-dick-d... (2017)

> Thanks to the DeVoses, Michigan’s charter schools enjoy a virtually unregulated existence. Thanks to them, too, the center of the American automotive industry and birthplace of the modern labor movement is now a right-to-work state. They’ve funded campaigns to elect state legislators, established advocacy organizations to lobby them, buttressed their allies and primaried those they disagree with, spending at least $100 million on political campaigns and causes over the past 20 years. “The DeVos family has been far more successful not having the governor’s seat than if they had won it,” says Richard Czuba, the owner of the Glengariff Group, a bipartisan polling firm in Michigan. “They have, to some degree, created a shadow state party. And it’s been pretty darn effective.”