Inside the Social Media Cult That Convinces Young People to Give Up Everything
By: Emilie Friedlander, Joy Crane
Tags: Cult, Culture, Facebook, Technology, Social Media

Inside the Social Media Cult That Convinces Young People to Give Up Everything

The DayLife Army always seemed like a troll. Then it became a nightmare.

It started with a tweet. In the fall of 2013, Matthew had recently turned 18 and was just finishing up his first semester at a college in Chicago. A freshman music business student with a happy-go-lucky laugh and a fascination with the internet, he’d been making electronic tracks since high school and wanted to learn how to market his work.

Matthew came to college dreaming of creating his own “multidimensional content brand,” combining the positivity-obsessed social media hijinks of his favorite alt-lit writers with the proudly Web 2.0 memes circulating in the net art scene. He’d had a productive first semester, putting the finishing touches on an upcoming album, setting up a website, and rolling out a few music videos centered around the idea of ushering in a better world. He’d even printed out a set of business cards. Now all he needed was fans.

On November 23, after posting the album’s first single, Matthew noticed a comment in his Twitter mentions praising the track from a woman he’d later learn was named KoA Malone. Around the same time, a man named Eben “Wiz-EL” Carlson started replying to his tweets too, offering bits of advice on how he was packaging the project. As he began tweeting back and forth with them, he learned that KoA and Wiz-EL were partners. In photos, he noticed that they only wore white.

The sudden flurry of interest was strange — Wiz-EL would sometimes reply to one of Matthew’s posts from several different Twitter accounts — but Matthew was flattered that two strangers seemed to be taking his music seriously. “No one was paying attention to me online,” says Matthew. “And suddenly he starts responding to every single one with seven or eight responses.”

Wiz-EL seemed to intuit Matthew’s obsession with branding. “Any tweet that I felt was kind of corny or stupid, he would insult me, make fun of me, or criticize me. Anything that I did that I already thought was good, he would praise me, building me up. I thought, ‘They’re paying more attention to me than I am.’”

Twitter replies evolved into DM conversations, then phone calls. As it turned out, Wiz-EL and KoA also lived in Chicago. Wiz-EL had the sort of credentials Matthew was looking for in a mentor at the time: Forty-six years old with salt-and-pepper hair, he said he came up in the ’90s Seattle rock scene, where he claimed he rubbed elbows with grunge legends. He seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of counterculture, art, and different religious traditions.

Wiz-EL was critical of Matthew’s brand. Matthew remembers Wiz-EL, who is white, quipping that “you can’t be a white dude who talks about saving the world,” but he also encouraged Matthew to think bigger. “He was basically spelling out the history of things as he saw it, implying that I was in a unique position to do something that was revolutionary,” Matthew says. He encouraged Matthew to begin releasing music under a new artistic pseudonym: Buum.

Matthew looked up to KoA too: Née Kimberly Laura Malone and 10 years Wiz-EL’s junior, she’d run a beloved cocktail bar in Tacoma, Washington, and often spoke about coming from a family with deep ties to the music industry. One of her brothers was Kyp Malone, who plays in the popular indie rock band TV on the Radio; another was influential Los Angeles DJ Total Freedom, a regular guest at the zeitgeist-defining queer and POC-focused party GHE20G0TH1K.

Matthew says the couple finally invited him over to their penthouse apartment, located in a luxury building on Lake Shore Drive, during the summer after his freshman year. Stepping inside, Matthew remembers being struck by the dissonance of the place: The apartment was impressive, he says, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of Lake Michigan — but it was basically unfurnished, as though they’d never really settled in.

Though they seemed to Matthew to be strapped for cash, KoA and Wiz-EL were brimming with business ideas, from a plant-based healing company specializing in legal cannabis to a lifestyle brand called Fuxy. They seemed excited about the future: Conversations with Wiz-EL and KoA invariably circled back to the power of aspirational visualization as a means of “manifesting” one’s dreams. Matthew was eager to learn more about the set of spiritual principles they were developing. During the visit, Wiz-EL AirDropped a collection of images to Matthew’s phone from a white iPad: fantasy brand logos, fashion photos, expensive properties, movie stills. Matthew left the apartment with a paper bag full of folded white designer clothes.

The meeting was a step into a rabbit hole that would derail Matthew’s life. During Matthew’s sophomore year, Wiz-EL began posting about a spiritual community he’d started called Tumple. Matthew, who requested we only use his first name for this piece and went by the name “Buum” during his time in the organization, would become Tumple’s first recruit.

A 2016 Daily Dot article about Tumple, “Inside the magic sex cult recruiting from Facebook meme pages,” left the group open to interpretation: Was it a new religious movement? An art project? The group’s leadership, which openly described the organization as a “cult,” communicated in a language they had dubbed “Unglish,” substituting the letters U and Y for random vowels. It was an attempt, they claimed, to subvert the Western written tradition, which they associated with whiteness and maleness.

KoA, who is Black, explained to the Daily Dot that the idea was to dismantle the “white methodology” that governed modern capitalist society and replace it with “a new foundation, the Black pleasure foundation.” Marrying a distinctly internet-centric sensibility with KoA’s knowledge of African diasporic spirituality and Wiz-EL’s interest in Gnostic Christianity, the group outlined a lifestyle that prioritized pleasure, anti-racist education, sober living, and a suite of mystical sex practices, which members could learn through a course called “Pearl Divun,” which cost $2,000 per month. For $1,000 per month, adherents could join a program Wiz-EL described as “lazy visualizatiun” and “like Tumblr.”

By the time of the Daily Dot article, Tumple had reeled in a dozen members along with at least 50 “orbiters,” or more casual followers. The vast majority of these individuals only interacted with the organization over the internet.

There was certainly something utopian about the project — a millennial-focused religious movement rooted in themes of anti-racism and economic justice and tailored to life online. Wiz-EL and KoA painted a picture of a world where users would own the capital generated from their own content, and followers could earn money simply for being themselves on the internet.

But in practice, Tumple would resemble a kind of social media pyramid scheme, one that mostly targeted young artists and musicians: Members would create promotional Facebook posts, Tumple-related videos, Facebook group chats, and other content, generating income through PayPal donations while delivering a cut of their earnings back to Wiz-EL and KoA.