I don’t think I’d be wrong in saying that MMM’s core activists are people around thirty with business connections, or what you’d call “office plankton.” Many of them are probably even small bosses in their own fields. This crowd has learned a thing or two—and above all, how to distinguish between how things look on the surface and “reality,” as they see it. Their experience tells them you can’t acquire stone palaces through honest work, that career and wealth don’t depend on creativity, productivity, and the like, but on proximity to power, connections, and manipulation skills. So when Mavrodi says in his creed that the “Masters” profit from slaves—and in particular because they’ve appropriated the right to print money—these words fall on well-prepared soil. The internet, moreover, is simply bursting with conspiratorial stories, given the success of “exposing” films like Zeitgeist. Young people believe they have no prospects; what’s more, they see that they’re not alone, that this problem is relevant worldwide. So Mavrodi’s offer to “screw the masters” finds the liveliest response.