> Mahmoud would regularly spend 10-12 hours a day - sometimes as many as 16 - at his computer, editing and publishing social media videos promoting Tate daily as part of the required coursework.
He mandated they do affiliate marketing for himself... for those wondering how the guy got into your feeds so often without you soliciting it, i wondered for a long time.
> The centrepiece of Tate’s business empire, the site bills itself as “the world’s most advanced financial education platform” and promises to equip young men with the entrepreneurial skills to allow them to “escape ‘the Matrix’” – Tate’s disparaging term for mainstream society – and avoid an otherwise inevitable future as a “brokie”. Mahmoud was convinced it would make him rich.
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.
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?
I lost a good friend to the Andrew Tate culture. Said friend loves Trump, thinks Alex Jones is interesting, etc. etc.
Not really sure what you can do. Some random guy (Andrew Tate) starts making online content and some people (my friend) just get sucked into it. How do you get them back out?