#DAYLIFE ARMY DAILYDOT TV#

He was a sophomore in college when he became Wiz-El's first recruit for his new religious movement, Tumple. The couple, who only wore white and also lived in Chicago at the time, encouraged Matthew to release music under the artistic pseudonym 'Buum,' which they later took to calling him. Matthew was flattered by their attention and struck up a relationship with them.

#DAYLIFE ARMY DAILYDOT TV#

Her one brother, Kyp Malone, was a member of the indie rock band TV on the Radio, while another was the Los Angeles DJ known as Total Freedom. KoA, a Black woman, also had musical ties. Wiz-El, a white man, gave Matthew advice and preyed on his desire to create his own 'multidimensional content brand.' The then 46-year-old claimed to have known grunge rock stars when he lived in Seattle in the '90s. Matthew was just 18 years old and nearing the end of his first semester of college at a school in Chicago when he first came in contact with the couple in 2013. He had just finished an album, and when he shared his first single on Twitter, KoA and Wiz-El started replying to his tweets. Leaders: He explained how KoA Malone (left) and Eben 'Wiz-EL' Carlson (right) went from being his mentors to controlling every aspect of his life

After leaving the cult, Matthew started attending meetings with other cult survivors and realized they all had similar stories.

When times were tight, they had to panhandle and spend nights on the street.

Members weren't allowed to work conventional jobs, and in order to make money, they had to ask family and friends for cash or get donations online.

Matthew recalled sleeping with a man under KoA's orders, despite identifying as straight, and being encouraged to drink orange juice mixed with Wiz-EL's semen.

While under their influence, he dropped out of college, gave them all of his money, got kicked out of his home, and relocated with them a number of times.

He explained how KoA Malone, a Black woman, and Eben 'Wiz-EL' Carlson, a white man, went from being his mentors to controlling every aspect of his life.

Matthew, who requested to use only his first name, opened up about the four years he spent in the 'cult' Tumple, which later evolved into the DayLife Army.

If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit who joined a social media CULT reveals how its founders lured him into the group online with promises of wealth and fame - then forced him to give up his belongings, have sex with a guy, and drink the leader's semen If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit /subscribe

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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