This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, please purchase your own copy.

I found this notice on the copyright page of something I bought at a recent used book sale. I can't recall seeing a warning so overtly hostile to book borrowers and hope I never do again. I know about the first sale doctrine, and that this is completely unenforceable, but it still offends me. Should I contact the author for instructions on returning it unread?

As a huge BTTF fan, I'm really excited to read this! I just added it to The StoryGraph, and you can shelve it for your TBR here: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/c02ec440-d907-4c9d-b13c-6bc967207a0e

Bridget Read's 'Little Bosses Everywhere' (permalink)

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 the 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" to 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.

I don't know what it is but I feel like there is something especially enjoyable about reading on a train or bus. Like I would be fine with making my commute longer because it dosen't feel like wasted time since I am reading. Also its just nice to be stuck somewhere for a bit with nothing to do but wait and be forced to read.

I have to change the page colour and usea ruler or I can't see it properly

The book is about the mathematical concept of dimensions, but in a fun way with over 170 illustrations.

I'm not affiliated with the author. I just think her message and her enthusiasm is something admirable in these times. She's also completely self published and that's why I pre-ordered the book.

The announcement video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y53AXT4IBew

Excerpt from the website:

Hello friends, I wrote a book! I've spent the last 2 years thinking about dimensions and have collected all the most interesting ideas into this fun guide. I am so excited to finally share it with you!

This book is bound to make you think, teach you something new, and inspire you to continue playing with science and mathematics for many years to come.

Featuring color illustrations by Martina Pepiciello.

No prerequisite knowledge is required.

The website
https://tibees.com/

The authors who manage to clear the low bar of incorporating characters/communities from diverse cultures into their fiction without cultural appropriation/stereotyping/racism... who are they and how do they do it?

I know many writers sidestep the difficulty altogether, either by creating a fictional universe with cultural proxies (fantasy stories/video games with Chinese, Japanese, and Russian analogues, I'm looking at you) or by writing in the distant future where the cultures have blended into new ones with flavors of the past (sci-fi does this a lot).

I've seen so very few authors do it well, but I do believe it's both possible and worth doing.

Well, not literally Dracula Day, World Dracula Day is on May 26th. I'm talking about the day Dracula starts within the book itself. The events in the book start today and end in November. I like the read along as they happen and there are two ways to it:

Dracula Daily - an email newsletter that breaks up Dracula chronologically (every entry of this epistolary novel has a date) and sends it to you in 'real-time', as it happens to the characters

Re:Dracula - a dramatized podcast version that does the same thing, but posts the entries on its feed

I personally listen to the podcast.

I don't have a problem with paying people for their labor, but I do want to have books that I actually own. I'm done paying for things that are locked into a particular corporate app. How do I buy ebooks and audio books that I actually own? Is this even possible in 2025?

So I just finished Island in the Net and I’m not sure that I got the propos

I feel that there’s something behind the book, something I cannot put my finger on.

Is it a tale against globalization? Is Rizome was the bad guy all along? Am I not old enough to understand a 88 book ?

Have you read something that you really enjoyed and want to give others a reason to try it out because it fits a square? Want to solicit help finding things to read that fit squares? This is a great place to do that.

• Official Thread Link Here
• Questions, Complaints, Whines, General Commentary, Shitposting…

This thread will contain one top level comment for each Bingo square. In order to preserve the organization and readability of this post, please limit recommendations to only replies on those top-level comments. We will be removing comments that don't follow this rule for for this specific post.

Markdown Card

You can scroll through the thread or use the links above if your reader supports comment linking directly.

Reminder, Please DO NOT make comments that are not replies to a prepopulated top-level comment. Your comment will just be removed without any additional info.

Gutenberg text / YT audio book / Podcast review

Audio reading (2:06:18//hh:mm:ss):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW2q07Z8qeo

Podcast talk about the book by essentialsalts (01:38:34):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnooUKky7RY

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/389

Reupping to remind participants to get their cards in since this is the last day and the new bingo card comes out tomorrow. We look forward to having you all join us as we start fresh for 2025/2026.

Congratulations, and thank you for participating in the inaugural Book Bingo for c/[email protected]!

If the existence of this bingo is a surprise to you, or you want to revisit the guide, see this link.

If you would like to join us for 2025 bingo, we'll be posting information on the morning of May 1^st^, US Central Time (UTC -5)!

There are 2 official ways to submit your card and be recognized:

• Fill out the web form we made using Tally, which will organize the data for us. Completing the form will also give you a Markdown-friendly list to copy and post in this thread if you would like.
• Or, if you would prefer, comment in this thread with your list of completed squares, including the titles/authors you read. Here is a list of squares for reference/copypaste:

ADDITIONAL POINTS TO READ BEFORE TURNING IN YOUR CARDS!

Questions? Please ask!

Turn-in Guidance

• Please make an effort to spell titles and author names correctly! For titles with more than one author, please separate author names with a comma. This will help with data compilation for a bingo stats thread coming later!
• If you didn't do a square, don't list it. Please leave incomplete squares completely blank on the Tally form.
• You can substitute any square, but please remember: only one substitution per card. On the form, there's a substitution dropdown for each square. If you accidentally choose a substitution for the wrong square, please de-select the substitution to clear it.
• Please make a note if you did a square on hard mode. On the form, there is a hard mode checkbox for each square.
• Only turn in your card(s) once you have finished with bingo; do not submit a card still in progress. If you're using the Tally form, there is a review page before submission; please make sure that you click submit after double-checking your entries! You cannot edit your card once submitted, so if you realize you've made a mistake, please post in this thread to notify us.

More than one card?

If you did more than one card, and are submitting via Tally, please differentiate your username for each additional card. For example, I would list my first card under "[email protected]" and my second under "[email protected] - 2".

Timeline

Submit your finished card(s) by May 1st, 2025! This thread and the Tally submission form will remain open until 12 noon, US Central Time (UTC -5) on May 1^st^ as a courtesy, so please make sure your cards are turned in by then, so they can be counted.

Reward

Any five in a row is considered a win! Your only reward this year (as of the time of posting) is the warm glow of satisfaction and bragging rights. However, our ultimate plan is to recognize bingo participation with a flair-like system when supported by Lemmy in the future, so we plan to calculate completion retroactively whenever that's available.

In Closing

Again... HERE IS THE LINK TO THE TALLY FORM TO TURN IN YOUR CARD (or you can comment in this thread). The form goes live on April 17^th^, 2025, and both it and this thread close around noon on May 1^st^, US Central Time (UTC -5). Be sure to get your card(s) in before then!

Thanks to everyone that participated this year! This was a fun challenge to put together for us. If you are interested in helping to coordinate the bingo challenge or related resources, please reach out to the moderators of [email protected] and let us know!

What I am reading today.

I'm about half way through but I'm going to go for a walk and will finish when I return.

Another free download, check your local laws to verify. Enjoy!

"Set on an island off the Scottish coast, To the Lighthouse minutely examines the fleeting impressions of a large cast of family, friends, lovers, and hangers-on. Who can we be, Virginia Woolf invites us to ask, if no one can ever know our hearts—if they’re unknowable even to ourselves? To the Lighthouse remains one of the most important Modernist novels, exquisitely composed by one of the most gifted writers of the Modernist movement."

On World Book Day, I just have to remind you about the masterpiece of a series Black Books — the one they went and cancelled, even though the ratings were top-notch.

Still reading Streams of Silver by R. A. Salvatore.

Also reading some web novels.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

Book Bingo for this year has officially finished. If you participated in it, check out the Turn in post.

Our next book bingo will be starting soon. Both @[email protected] and @[email protected] are hard at work making it the best Book Bingo yet! Stay tuned!

Not as in Language but as in author

I’m in a run of reading oldish 80s cyberpunk stories. The Neuromancer (Sprawl) Series, Schismatrix+ and Island in the Net, (I’ve read a long time ago) the Budayeen Cycle.

And I was wondering if non-European/american/canadian author have written cool cyberpunk stories

I consider myself a writer. However, I fear writing, and I fear publishing more. For writing is agonising. And, I don't dare to publish until I really have a story to tell. My fear accumulated over time by reading more, by reading books just like this. And, I will tell my fellow writers this: If you are not really as serious as Danielewski, Borges, Tagore, Pessoa, or Jibanananda, stop writing.

The structure of this book is recursive, layered and of a madman. It is a book you should approach with an arsenal of bookmarks, much patience for multiple re-readings and the intention to read cover-to-cover, footnotes and appendix and all. While some of the references in this book are purely fictional, many are real. It is not necessary, but some familiarity with classic literature and existential philosophy (resources like Being and Time by Martin Heidegger) can be very rewarding. I will also recommend reading Walking by Thomas Bernhard, which deals with madness singularly, unlike this book, which deals with a lot of things. A knack for etymology and the exact meaning of words can be rewarding, too.

Now about the madness… It is everywhere, and it must be relished. It must be understood on its own terms, not from our couch of comfortable 'normality'. Madness is, in some sense, divine. Madness is motherly. Madness is a concentrated potion, too hard to gulp down, of the essence of our existence. This book talks about that madness,1 and love,2 and madness-inducing love,3 and love-inducing madness.4

Most readers of this book may find the preceding paragraph needs some qualifications. The book is considered to be of the horror genre, and rightly so. However, it is not a run-of-the-mill horror. I will put it in a sub-genre: philosophical horror. Because most horror content depends on unfamiliarity and not understanding of the situation, this book depends on understanding and examination. Instead of jump-scares and goosebumps, the author brings in elaborate discussion on meanings of words like 'uncanny', 'space', 'echo', etc., so that as the meanings sink in us in the most accurate and non-trivial manner, so does the horror of the situation.

But, in the end, it remains a story of love, seeking, remembering, hope, and redemption.

Don't throw away your Kindle, Jailbreak it and take back ownership. Make your Kindle even better with KoReader and other apps. If you wanna see whats possible i recomment this Yt video. If you wanna get started here are all instructions: https://kindlemodding.org/ Don't let it scare you it seems complicated but its just a lot of (easy) steps. So definitely possible in <2h.