I grew up in and was part of Scientologist for over three decades.
That doesn’t make me an “authority” who is here to tell anyone what to do or how to act, but it does let you know I was deeply into it. I spent all my childhood and most of my adult life inside that organization, and I’ve spent more than a decade since then talking to former members, studying coercive control, and trying to understand how groups like this maintain themselves over time.
One of the things you learn fairly quickly when you do that kind of work is that not all criticism, and not all opposition, has the same effect.
Some things that look like they should create pressure don’t. And occasionally, things that don’t look like much at all turn out to matter quite a bit.
That’s been on my mind watching the recent TikTok trend of people running into Scientology buildings and filming how far they can get before being stopped.
I was in the Sea Org’s RPF program when Anonymous happened in 2008, so my mind was very definitely in a dark and different place during those protests. I had to learn about what really went down later, after I got out of Scientology altogether. What I learned was a revelation years after the fact of it happening, because it wasn’t just a flash mob or “internet sensation.” It was a sustained campaign which truly did rise to the level of effective activism. Yet it didn’t start that way.
It started out as something that, frankly, didn’t look especially promising. Anonymous, which was never exactly known for discipline, reacted to the Church trying to remove that infamous Tom Cruise "turtleneck video" from the internet, and the early responses involved DDoS attacks and a lot of behavior that wasn’t going to accomplish much. It was attention seeking and it was trolling, but it wasn’t raising awareness or really leaning in on much of anything but “having fun.”
But that’s not where it stayed.
Very quickly the approach changed. Mark Bunker came on the scene within just a couple weeks of the opening salvos by Anonymous. He was quickly dubbed “Wise Beard Man” (“His words are wise, his face is beard”). His message encouraged a more civil, lawful approach to protest. He even suggested a "Ghandi-like" approach. For reasons that are still interesting to think about, a lot of people inside Anonymous listened. There was a shift toward something more sustainable. The first public protests began and they grew rapidly. Messaging started to take shape as placards and signs were put together with questions that Scientologists couldn’t ignore like “When were you last paid?” or “When did you last see your family?” There was at least some attempt to communicate to people outside the movement what the problem was supposed to be and major media picked it up around the world.
It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t always well organized. But it became something that other people could look at and understand, even if they didn’t agree with it.
I believe that matters more than it might seem, because once something can be understood outside of the group doing it, it stops being just an internal event. It starts becoming external pressure to effect change.
At its height, thousands of people were showing up in cities around the world, standing outside Scientology organizations, handing out information, and keeping the issue in front of the public for longer than a typical news cycle. That kind of persistence, combined with something resembling a message, is what gave Chanology whatever impact it had. Perhaps one could even say it had a moral foundation because it was based not on ego or pure attention-seeking behavior, but on confronting what people saw as an abusive system.
What’s happening now is structured very differently.
The current “speedrun” trend, as it’s being called, started with a viral TikTok video and spread quickly as other people tried to replicate it. The basic idea is simple enough: you go into a Scientology building, film yourself getting as far as you can before being stopped, and post the result.
It’s framed like a game, and in many ways it functions like one. People compare how far they got, how long they lasted, whether they found a new way in or managed to get further than someone else. The content is fast, chaotic, and very easy to consume, which is why it spreads. The language is gamer language.
There’s nothing particularly mysterious about why it’s popular.
But when you look at it from the standpoint of what it actually does, things get a little less clear.
There isn’t much in the way of a shared message. There isn’t a consistent explanation of what the goal is supposed to be. There’s no obvious endpoint beyond getting a better clip next time, meaning more views and more likes and more personal income.
Again, that doesn’t require anyone to be acting in bad faith. It’s simply what you tend to get when the activity is shaped by a system that rewards attention above all else. We live in an attention economy now, so this is the currency people want.
What’s also worth noticing is how closely this maps onto actual game behavior.
People aren’t just going in randomly. They’re comparing runs. They’re trying to get further than the last person. They’re talking about routes, figuring out layouts, even mapping interiors and sharing that information so the next person can improve on it.
That’s not really how activism tends to develop. It’s much closer to how games develop.
In a game, the objective is to push the boundary a little further each time. You learn the environment, you optimize your approach, and you try to beat whatever came before. The reward is progress, recognition, and, in this case, views.
And that’s more or less what’s happening here.
Again, that doesn’t make it malicious. It just means the activity is being structured like a game, and experienced like a game, even if it’s being talked about in more serious terms.
Activism, at least the kind that produces results, usually doesn’t feel like that from the inside. In the decade that I've been fighting Scientology and cults in general, I have never felt like I was playing a game. This has been a much more personal and moral conflict.
Attention, on its own, for its own sake, doesn’t necessarily lead anywhere. That’s why our attention economy often feels so hollow. After sitting and watching videos for hours, we often feel exhausted and empty. We aren’t really doing anything useful during that time. We’re just paying attention.
In the real world, meanwhile, when you look at how this has been playing out, you can already see some of the consequences. There have been incidents involving injuries, police involvement, and increasing security measures from the Church. Meanwhile, officials such as police and courts are hearing from Scientology that they are under attack. The Church claims that “religious bigots” are having a free-for-all in trying to “take out a religion.” In today's highly charged ideological environment, this is basically pouring gasoline on a pile of dynamite, hoping the police will light the match.
Internally, Scientologists are not seeing this as a game. They are seeing it as confirmation of what they have been told for years. That everyone outside the Church is hostile, irrational, and dangerous. Regular Scientologists who hold down jobs and have lives outside the organization can be driven into increased states of fear by this kind of activity. In my opinion, there is no good result possible from revving people up into states of terror. I've been in that environment and Scientology already does quite a good job of doing that all by itself. When the outside world helps, it makes things even worse for every person in that group. And leaving the group is not the direction they'll go, because they believe in their terror that the only safe space they have is a Church of Scientology.
That might sound counterintuitive at first, but it’s actually very consistent with how high-control groups operate.
These organizations don’t just resist criticism. They reinterpret it. They use it to confirm what members have already been told about the outside world. If the expectation is that critics are aggressive or unreasonable, then behavior that looks chaotic or confrontational can fit very neatly into that expectation.
From the outside, it can look like people are pushing boundaries or exposing something.
From the inside, it can look like proof that the warnings were justified all along, revving up Scientologists to higher and higher levels of fear and paranoia.
And that’s where the question of effectiveness comes in.
There’s a phrase that gets used a lot in situations like this, which is that “any attention is good attention.” I understand why people say it. In an environment where attention is measurable and visible, it can feel like a kind of progress. When you are literally being paid money to get attention, it becomes very easy to justify doing whatever is necessary to get more of it.
But attention doesn’t really work that way.
By itself, it doesn’t accumulate into anything. It has to be connected to a message, to some kind of coherent explanation of what the problem is and why it matters. Without that, it tends to move in cycles. Something spikes, people watch it, and then it fades as the next thing takes its place.
What made Project Chanology different is that the attention had somewhere to go. There were claims being made. There was information being shared. There was at least an attempt, however imperfect, to frame what was happening in a way that other people could evaluate.
That gave it a kind of staying power that most internet-driven trends don’t have. Without that underlying sense of purpose, Chanology likely would have faded very quickly.
What we’re seeing now doesn’t seem to be moving in that direction, at least not so far.
And that brings me to something else that I think is worth addressing.
There are creators and influencers, including some former Scientologists, who are encouraging this trend, or at least presenting it as something useful. I don’t think it’s necessary to question anyone’s motives to look at what that does in practice.
When something like this is framed as activism, it changes how people engage with it. It raises the stakes. It encourages people to go further, to take more risks, to try to outdo what came before.
Escalation is the only solution to keeping eyeballs on the screen. That’s just how the internet works, but it does create a kind of confusion about what is actually being accomplished.
There is a long history of people doing work around Scientology that is not particularly exciting to watch. Documenting abuses, helping former members, working with journalists, pursuing legal action where possible. None of that translates easily into short clips or viral moments.
It’s slower. It’s often frustrating. It doesn’t always look like much is happening.
But it produces something that is very difficult for an organization to dismiss, which is a record of what has been done and what has happened to people.
That’s a different kind of pressure than what comes from visibility alone.
And I think that distinction gets blurred when visibility is treated as if it automatically equals impact.
None of this is to say that the people making these videos couldn’t do something more meaningful if they wanted to. In fact, they already have a skill set that earlier movements didn’t. They understand how to capture attention, how to package something so people will watch it, and how to spread it quickly.
Those are not trivial abilities. I wish I was better at that sort of thing myself, to be honest.
The question is what those abilities are being used for.
The underlying issues with Scientology are still there. The control, the coercion, and the impact on families and individuals haven’t gone anywhere. They’re just not the kind of thing that fits neatly into a short video.
But that doesn’t mean they can’t be talked about. It just means it takes a different approach.
If even a small number of people who are currently engaging with this as a kind of game start looking more closely at what’s behind it, things could shift fairly quickly. Attention, when it’s paired with understanding, can become something much more difficult for any organization to deal with.
A game ends when people lose interest. A movement continues when people find a reason to stay.
I don’t think this comes down to a difference between generations, or platforms, or even styles of communication.
What it comes down to is something simpler.
There’s a difference between doing something that gets attention and doing something that creates pressure.
Those two things can overlap, but they obviously are not the same. If the goal is to actually challenge an organization like Scientology in a meaningful way, I think we should acknowledge that.
This essay is not a personal attack and I’m not trying to one-up anyone. Almost anything said publicly in this space is interpreted that way now and I think that’s a shame. I think if we could return to a more analytical and reasoned approach to fighting Scientology, we could accomplish great things. We have before and we could again. If there’s any point to this essay, it would simply be that. So thanks for reading!