> A membership community with secrets and opportunities reserved for members.
Yeah, but the exact type of "secrets and opportunities" matters. Sometimes (as mentioned in the article) the secret opportunity is a surprise nonconsensual sex with the group leader.
That can also be a guild.
"Cult" is a term from the study of religion (a particular field's jargon, if you will), and usually conveys intense devotion, a ritual or sacrificial dimension that goes beyond a master craftsman's level of devotion to a craft.
Also, a guild can't entertain fanciful ideas about their craft for too long, if the ideas don't work in practice.
The distinction is kind of like using Cobol to build a good solid system (guild), versus dropping some Lisp to reach enlightenment (cult), or using C to build a solid system (cult).
In which case, I'm voting cult all the way.
That might be the modern colloquial use, but I don't think it has much to do with the use of the word "cult" in the study of religion?
As I understand the word, you might talk about the cult associated with a particular temple (meaning just local practices, as opposed to more widespread general practices), or the cult associated with the worship of a particular god (meaning beliefs and practices pertaining to that god and his or her worship in specific, such beliefs might be very widespread or might be highly localized), or you might talk about a mystery cult, which is pretty much by definition a widespread phenomenon distinguished by the fact that it has secret teachings unknown to non-initiates.
But none of those senses convey any special devotion in comparison to ordinary worship; most of them are ordinary worship.
[1] Origin of the phrase "Drink the Kool-Aid". More than 900 people did, and died.
Point being cults are not just a club with a few secrets.
Cults are dangerous. They abuse people physically, sexually, psychologically, and financially, and the leaders reliably scam and exploit the followers. Not infrequently there are links to unusually horrific events such as mass murder and mass suicide.
Of course, part of the problem is that there are concentric rings, increasingly toxic as one goes higher/closer-in. The outer ring is full of gullible normies who do recruiting and PR, useful idiots who have no idea what's really going on.
[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/phew-costco-absolutely-pos...
The cult is real. The clique is the group within Google (as opposed to there being a cult within Google), I hope that distinction makes sense.
I've seen this before. At the BBC. Everyone closed ranks around Jimmy Savile and an organisation called PIE (paedophile information exchange). You were literally told you couldn't say anything about it. But AFAIK the rotten group was small, but powerful. Many, many more decent people work at the BBC. As I'm sure applies to Google.
Edit:
I say this because the headline "Cult within Google" is misleading. (I bloody hate Google and everything they stand for - but there's an important distinction to be made)
A membership community with secrets and opportunities reserved for members.
There are millions of these around us, and we’re all probably members of several. It seems to be pretty normal throughout history. We just don’t acknowledge it as such because the word was only fairly recently stigmatized.