The real-life cult that started on Facebook

Earlier this Summer, The Culture Journalist’s Emilie Friedlander and independent journalist Joy Crane published a 10,000-word investigation about a self-proclaimed “cult” that emerged out of the irony-obsessed Weird Facebook scene of the mid-00s. The piece, titled “Inside the Social Media Cult that Convinces Young People to Give Up Everything,” follows the story of a musician named Matthew who meets two strangers on the Internet during his sophomore year in college, then leaves his life behind to join them in building an online spiritual community called Tumple.

What seems at first like a utopian art project rooted in themes of racial and economic justice devolves over time into a tangled web of financial, emotional, and sexual control—especially after the organization evolves into a roving live-in community called the DayLife Army, which conscripts a small group of idealistic young people into a life of homelessness, punishing content and revenue quotas, and total personal sacrifice.

It’s a story that is as heavy as it is multi-layered, at once a harrowing look at life inside a high-control group and an examination of the strange new forms these relational systems can take within the specific context of millennial Internet culture. On this episode, we go behind the scenes with Emilie and Joy to discuss the year they spent reporting this story together; the group’s complicated relationship with social media, influencer culture, and contemporary social justice movements; and the challenges of navigating investigative reporting projects as a freelancer.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe