In person, they baffled me even more. People without hope require direction, according to Dyson. But this wasn't what hopelessness looked like. I had seen hopelessness before, in messages from my clients: the women put into panics by ads, the women desperate to look completely unlike themselves, the women who sought admiration and love by amending their faces with hundreds of toxic creams and solutions: The Nuclear Options, I'd called them. These men didn't know desperation. They knew inconvenience, annoyance, frustration. They were not hopeless, and perhaps they didn't need to be. Even more than direction, hopelessness required convincing.
(What does desperation really look like?)
Dyson decides to establish The Atmosphere, vetting the initial twelve apostles to his saviour role, a pilot program to fix men, address their daddy issues and problems with women, make them contributing members of their communities.
When he calls up childhood friend Sasha, a social media influencer, she's eager to help. She is desperate to be uncancelled, and she fears the unpredictable man hordes.
Basically, they're proud to be setting up a cult. And they have no idea what they're doing. Dyson's approach is to tear the men down before building them back up. He lures the men by promising to give them job training and teach them life skills, and then forces them into physical labor, a strict diet, and weird rituals.
But Dyson has unresolved issues of his own, and even while he wanted Sasha's input (although, it's not her social media sway he respects so much as her ties to his past, her influence over his selfhood), he is jealous that the outside world perceives her as the leader and he is relegated to the shadows. (Maybe he simply felt she would bring a feminine touch to the proceedings.)
Things go wrong. People die. The cult grows.
See also The Embarrassing Whiteness of Being in "The Atmospherians" and "Bunny."
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